Her Again Page 15

  I’ve always taken care of you, Fredo.

  FREDO

  Taken care of me? You’re my kid brother and you take care of me? Did you ever think about that? Did you ever once think about that? Send Fredo off to do this, send Fredo off to do that. Let Fredo take care of some Mickey Mouse nightclub somewhere. Send Fredo to pick somebody up at the airport. I’m your older brother, Mike, and I was stepped over!

  Most actors would kill to play Sonny or Michael Corleone, the macho brothers who run the family racket. What young man doesn’t want to play brave or cocky or strong? But John was like the B-side of American masculinity. Without flinching or showboating, he could play weakness, cowardice, shame, or fear. John could make the runt of the litter the best part in the film—that is, if you were paying attention. Most people walked out of his movies talking about Al Pacino or Robert De Niro or Gene Hackman, the guys who played the troubled heroes. But if you cared to notice him, John Cazale could break your heart.

  IT STARTED WITH MUSIC. As children, John and his little brother idolized Toscanini. They spent hours listening to the wind-up Victrola: Bach’s Second and Third Brandenburg Concertos, Debussy’s Nocturnes, Wagner’s overtures to Meistersinger and Parsifal. They wore out their albums of Haydn’s Symphony No. 99—until Stephen, who was two years younger, sat on the fourth movement and broke it. “He was mad as hell,” Stephen said. “He used to slug me a lot. My arms would be black and blue sometimes from his slugs.”

  They inherited the music bug from their Aunt Kitty, who took them to concerts and museums in New York City. She got it from their grandmother, Nonna, who sang snatches of Italian opera around the house. In her youth, Nonna had worked in a textile factory producing jute, and she proudly re-created the arm motions she had repeated at the loom. Her grandsons imitated the gesture behind her back and snickered.

  Despite starring in the defining film saga of Italian-American immigration, John showed little interest in his heritage. Stephen would later unravel the family history, a real-life version of The Godfather: Part II, minus the mob. Their grandfather, Giovanni Casale, was born in Genoa and sailed to New York City on September 27, 1868—sixteen years old, dirt poor, and largely illiterate. Sixteen years later, for reasons lost to history, he signed his naturalization papers “Giovanni Cazale,” with a “z”—the name that his children and grandchildren would bear. By then, he was working as a fruit vendor and an itinerant knife sharpener. With his wife, Annie, he moved to Revere, a seaside city near Boston, and he and two partners opened its first hotel. As Revere became a bustling resort, Giovanni bought up more property. Like Vito Corleone, he had built a new life in a new land, running his own business. Only this one didn’t involve dumping bodies in the river.

  Giovanni and Annie had a daughter, Catherine, whom John and Stephen knew as Aunt Kitty. Another daughter, Elvira, died young. Then there were the twins, John and Charles, born premature. Annie covered them with olive oil and warmed them in the oven; they survived. The brothers both became coal salesmen, and they loved betting on horses at the Suffolk Downs racetrack. John, the elder twin, married an Irish Catholic girl, and they had three children. Born in 1935, John Cazale was their middle child, a shy kid who worshiped the Red Sox and Ted Williams.

  When John was five and Stephen was three, the family moved to Winchester. Their parents sent them to separate boarding schools: John to Buxton, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and Stephen to Woodstock Country School, in Vermont. John was quiet and withdrawn, and no one could foresee his announcement that he had joined the school’s drama club. “I was as surprised as anyone else when he realized he wanted to go into the theater,” Stephen said. “It was the most unlikely thing for him to do.”

  As a teenager, John worked as a messenger for Standard Oil. One of his fellow messengers was Al Pacino, five years his junior. John went on to study drama at Boston University, where he met Marvin Starkman and Walter McGinn. They all revered their acting teacher, Peter Kass, who pushed his students to mine their own darkness, not to shy away from pain but to locate it in a character. (It was the same lesson Meryl resisted her first year at Yale.) John stayed in Boston and acted at the Charles Playhouse, part-timing as a cabdriver. Again, the slowness. “He didn’t leave people off in the middle of the street,” Starkman said. “He came right to the curb. He would open the door for people, he would come out. He was the perfect guy to be a cabdriver.”

  He moved to New York and found a walkup apartment in the West Sixties. “His housekeeping was abominable,” Stephen recalled. The brothers spoke in nonsense Latin, and a pigpen was a “porcus pennus.” When John first showed Stephen his apartment, he proclaimed, “Welcome to the Porcus Hilton.” Part of the mess was from his makeshift darkroom; he made money shooting sculptures for gallery brochures and headshots for actor friends. Photography suited his compulsive nature: he would painstakingly adjust the lighting on the sculptures, making sure they looked fully three-dimensional instead of flat. Some of the photos were just for him: landscapes in the Berkshires, or studies of Aunt Kitty at her piano.

  Acting jobs were sparse. Starkman, who was producing commercials, tried to get him work, but the answer was always some version of “too ethnic.” The best he could do was a TV spot for New York Telephone, in which John played an Indian chief. So he and Marvin made their own movies. In 1962, they shot an antic short film called The American Way, in which John plays an anarchist who can’t manage to blow anything up. There were already glimmers of his contradictory screen presence: comedic but sorrowful, dangerous but feckless. Offscreen, the danger was absent, but his innocence was so genuine it could get him out of a jam. One Sunday morning, he was headed over to Starkman’s place to start the day’s shoot, carrying a fake TNT box under his arm. A policeman stopped him and said, “Hey, come here. Where are you going?”

  John looked at him blankly and replied, “I’m going to Marvin’s house.”

  “Oh, okay,” the cop said, and sent him on his way.

  His breakthrough came in the form of two plays by Israel Horovitz. While Horovitz was in drama school in England, he saw some hooligans harassing an Indian student in a turban. The incident inspired The Indian Wants the Bronx, which he staged back in New York. As the main hooligan, he cast Al Pacino, an unknown actor he had seen in a play in somebody’s living room. As his victim—now Gupta, a frightened father lost in New York, trying to reach his son on a pay phone—he cast an Indian actor. But the man didn’t have much acting experience and would inexplicably raise his hand whenever he had a line. “It became a play about this guy’s hand,” Horovitz recalled.

  Pacino, who was intensely Method-oriented, couldn’t focus. They had to replace the Indian, and Israel already knew John Cazale, having grown up in a neighboring town. Gupta’s dialogue was all in Hindi, and John and Israel wrestled with whether an Italian actor should play the role. In the end, John agreed. The play was going up in Provincetown, and when Pacino got to the house on Cape Cod where everyone was staying, his costar poked his head out of the bedroom. Pacino recognized the face from years earlier, when he was working for Standard Oil.

  “You again,” Pacino said. “I know you.”

  The play moved to New York, to the Astor Place Theatre, in January, 1968. It won instant acclaim, typifying the raw, live-wire, from-the-streets aggression that was electrifying the downtown theater scene. Horovitz, Pacino, and Cazale all won Obie Awards. That summer, they brought the play to the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Between shows, John would gather the company in the main piazza and lead them in six-part harmony. They didn’t know Italian, so they’d sing the words off the tourist maps: “Piazza del Duomo! Spoleto! Spoleto!”

  It was another Horovitz play that gave John the boost he was so anxious for. Line was the kind of late-sixties minimalist experiment that was upending received notions of what constituted a play. There was no set, and barely a plot. All you needed was five actors to stand in a line, four men and one woman. What they’re waiting for is never explained.
Over the course of the play, they fight, fornicate, and fool each other into losing their place in line: a Hobbesian state of nature for cultured New Yorkers, who never see a line without wondering if they should be on it.

  John played Dolan, a self-described “Mr. Nice Guy” who nonetheless almost chokes another character to death. At one point, Dolan describes his “Underdog philosophy,” which could double as John’s approach to acting, or at least his effect:

  “Everybody wants to be first, right? . . . Now you can be obvious about it. Just jump in like the kid and yell and brag about being first. Or about deserving to be first. What I mean is you got to stand back a little . . . The easiest way to kick a dog in the balls is to be underneath him. Let him walk on top of you for a while. Take good aim. And . . .”

  Line opened at the East Village theater La MaMa in the fall of 1967. Four years later, it was revived at the Theater de Lys, on Christopher Street, starring Cazale and Richard Dreyfuss, in his Off Broadway debut. One night, Dreyfuss invited Francis Ford Coppola and his casting director, Fred Roos, who were in preparation for The Godfather. When they saw Cazale onstage, Roos said instantly, “That’s Fredo.”

  “THE SECOND SON, Frederico, called Fred or Fredo, was a child every Italian prayed to the saints for,” Mario Puzo wrote in his novel The Godfather. “Dutiful, loyal, always at the service of his father, living with his parents at age thirty. He was short and burly, not handsome but with the same Cupid head of the family, the curly helmet of hair over the round face and sensual bow-shaped lips.”

  John Cazale wasn’t short or burly, and he certainly didn’t have a curly helmet of hair. But to Coppola and Roos, he had the look of someone who had always been passed over. Coppola, who had accomplished siblings (the author August Coppola and the actress Talia Shire, who played Connie Corleone), had a soft spot for Fredo. “In an Italian family, or at least in my family, there are always those brothers who are considered, you know, not as talented as the others,” the director said. “They are made fun of. Maybe I was in that category some of the time, I don’t know. I certainly had uncles that were put down. I think Italians that come from that little-town mentality are very hard on their own and very cruel unto those who don’t quite cut the mustard at the same level that the star brothers or the star uncles do.”

  John was reunited with Al Pacino, as Michael Corleone. But the real thrill was acting alongside Marlon Brando, as his father, Vito. Brando was the undisputed giant of American film acting, and the younger actors—Pacino, Cazale, James Caan, Robert Duvall—revered him just as the Corleone brothers do their capo father. “Brando was our hero,” Marvin Starkman said. “We would go to see On the Waterfront, Streetcar, all those early films, like you were going to a master class. We worshiped him. John gets to work with Brando, and it just lit him.”

  It came time to film the scene when Vito is shot in the street outside the fruit market, while Fredo fumbles with his gun as the would-be assassins get away. With the Godfather bleeding in the gutter, Fredo leans over him in hysterics, having failed his father in the worst way. Coppola filmed Brando playing near-dead on the curb, then turned the camera around for John’s reaction shot. “Brando thought enough of John to get back and lie down in the gutter, so that John could work off him,” Starkman said. “It was, like, the highest compliment.”

  The Godfather was released in March, 1972, while Meryl Streep was still performing in ski lodges in Vermont. It was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, and won Best Picture and Best Actor, for Marlon Brando, who sent the Native-American activist Sacheen Littlefeather to decline the prize. Al Pacino, James Caan, and Robert Duvall crowded the Best Supporting Actor category. John wasn’t nominated.

  Buoyed by the success of The Godfather, Coppola shot a drama about surveillance called The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman as “the best bugger on the West Coast.” John played his assistant, Stan, an inquisitive technician in headphones and thick glasses. Once again, John tapped into the character’s weaknesses—his immaturity, his nosiness—and infused them with childlike sweetness. The movie was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture. John wasn’t nominated.

  In The Godfather: Part II, Coppola brought Fredo’s self-loathing to a crescendo. In his plaid suit and pencil mustache, Fredo was gregarious and impotent, unable to control even his drunken wife on the dance floor. After Fredo colludes on a failed attempt against his brother’s life, guilt and fear devour him. In John’s most iconic film moment, Michael clutches Fredo on the cheeks and tells him: “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart.”

  Fredo’s betrayal of Michael, and Michael’s decision to murder him, are at the heart of the film, giving John more to do onscreen than he’d ever had. The Godfather: Part II was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, which it won. Al Pacino was nominated for Best Actor. Robert De Niro, Michael V. Gazzo, and Lee Strasberg competed for Best Supporting Actor, which De Niro won. John wasn’t nominated.

  Despite his Fredo-like knack for being passed over, John’s gift grew more complex with each film, his capacity for exposing a character’s psychic wounds more heartrending. At the same time, his appearance became increasingly sickly, his vitality receding along with his hairline. One summer, he was at Starkman’s house in the Catskills when he took ill at the county fair. “We gotta get back to the city,” he pleaded. Marvin and his wife drove him back, every bump and bang bringing John fresh agony.

  They rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, where John was diagnosed with chronic pancreatitis. When Marvin came back to visit him, he was hooked up to tubes and could barely talk. Against the wall was a glass jar filling up with watery green bile from his stomach. “It was just awful,” Starkman recalled. “I left there feeling, What can we do for this guy?” The doctors told John to quit drinking immediately, or else the alcohol would eat up his pancreas.

  Somehow, his pallor only added to his singular onscreen presence. “There is a kind of moral decay in Fredo that’s entirely borne out by the fact that, from the first picture to the second, Cazale has become more ghost-like,” the critic David Thomson has observed. “He’s thinner, his eyes are more exaggerated, his forehead is sticking out further.”

  By then, the filmmaking boom of the late sixties and seventies had opened the door for actors who were eccentric, ethnic, or just plain odd. Warren Beatty and Robert Redford aside, leading men were now olive-skinned like Al Pacino, or nebbishy like Dustin Hoffman, or black like Sidney Poitier, or devil-eyed like Jack Nicholson. Movie stars looked less and less like matinee idols and more and more like the people you might see on the street. Even Robert De Niro, the new standard-bearer of big-screen virility, was Italian. John’s ashen face and off-kilter energy, which had once precluded him from TV commercials, were now his currency.

  Not that he didn’t possess a strange kind of sex appeal. John exemplified the French notion of jolie laide, or “ugly-beautiful.” It was a concept that Hollywood was just beginning to grasp (at least when it came to men). As Horovitz liked to say, he looked like St. Francis of Assisi, but he never seemed to lack for beautiful dates, among them the actresses Verna Bloom and Ann Wedgeworth, his costar in Line. None of his friends knew how he did it. “He always had girlfriends,” Starkman said. “He had some of the most beautiful girlfriends to be found, and eventually many of them broke up [with him] because of his slow snail pace about things.”

  As his career took off, he began dating a redheaded actress from Texas named Patricia. Patricia was a chilly beauty who hadn’t had her big break. Some of John’s friends detected an opportunistic streak, but he was smitten. Perhaps at her urging, he left his cluttered Upper West Side apartment, which had scared away previous girlfriends, and put down a chunk of his Godfather money on a loft downtown on Franklin Street. It was in a former storage building, with a fire escape, an elevator, and a diamond-plate loading platform facing the street. The traditionally industrial neighborhood was just on the cusp of transformation, as art
ists and experimental theater troupes took over buildings formerly owned by ship chandlers. New Yorkers would soon know it as Tribeca. For now, it was No Man’s Land.

  When John first saw the place, stacked floor to ceiling with tomato cans, he couldn’t believe it. Those floors must be strong, he thought.

  “You know what a No. 10 can is?” he told Marvin. “You’ve seen those big tomato cans? I mean a real can, about this big—they’re heavy!”

  Once the cans were gone, it was all bare brick and open space. John brought in wood planks and hammers. He and Patricia would be pioneers, building a nest in a stockroom.

  But it didn’t last. Patricia took off for California, leaving John with the apartment to himself.

  Meanwhile, Pacino had signed on to Sidney Lumet’s new film, Dog Day Afternoon. It was based on a real incident, in which a hapless criminal had held up a Brooklyn bank to pay for his lover’s sex-change surgery. As the guy and his sidekick try to keep the hostages in line, cops and gawkers swarm outside, a kind of perverse street theater. Pacino begged Lumet to see John for the part of Sal, the sidekick, even though he looked nothing like the real guy. Reluctantly, Lumet agreed. John read about two sentences before the director said, “It’s yours.”

  John’s appearance as Sal was his most bizarre yet. With his oily hair now starting halfway up his cranium and slinking down to his shoulders, he looked like a beatnik vulture. Wielding his machine gun, he seemed, unlike Pacino’s Sonny, like someone who might actually resort to using it. And yet his performance was still shot through with sorrow, as if even Sal, the bank-robbing thug, was once a neglected little boy.

  Pacino marveled at how John would amp himself up, ad-libbing wildly until the cameras started rolling. At one point, they were shooting a scene in which the two crooks plan their escape. Everything’s going to hell fast: the hostages need to pee, the cops are outside, and the whole operation has become a three-ring circus. Sonny tells Sal that if they ever get out of this mess, they’ll have to leave town. Is there any special country he’d like to flee to?