Sonny Boy: A Memoir by Al Pacino review
Al Pacino, Sonny Boy, 370 pages, Penguin/Random House, $55.
Al Pacino is an actor we’re inclined to take for granted because his career is coterminous with some of the greatest popular films of the last half century, not least his Michael Corleone in in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy. The first of these, which set the seal of what was to come, was the one with Marlon Brando at the height of his later powers as the Don. Pacino, quite understandably, is in utter awe of the man who had played Stanley Kowalski and done the Wild One and changed forever the grammar of acting. And one of the things that is most striking about Al Pacino from the first touches of self-portraiture in this headlong recital of the incidents of a life is that he is a lovey, an actor’s actor, and a man of the stage before he is anything else.
And so it’s arranged that the coming man should have lunch with the old master and that the location is to be the hospital where they’re filming. Here is Al Pacino on the predicament of meeting the legend, and it captures his galloping style and the way he can throw down a world of impressions and apprehensions as well as the central perplexities of the situation with a candour, even a disingenuous innocence, which is in practice wildly charming because it treats the reader as a fellow innocent who will be complicit with the artless rehearsal of life as a thousand mysteries that ask to be whispered in the ear as so many weird and wonderful disclosures.
You mean I have to have lunch with him? Seriously, it f—g scared me. He was the greatest living actor of our time. I grew up on actors like him — larger than life — people like Clark Gable and Cary Grant. They were famous when fame meant something, before the bloom went off the rose. But Francis said you have to, and so I did.
I had my lunch with Marlon in a modest room in the hospital where we were filming on Fourteenth Street. He was sitting on one hospital bed, I was sitting on the other. He was asking me questions: Where am I from? How long have I been an actor? And he was eating a chicken cacciatore with his hands. His hands were full of red sauce. So was his