Paul O’Connor recently listened to Al Pacino’s memoir. He encourages us to do the same.
Reviewed by Paul T. O’Connor
SONNY BOY: A MEMOIR. By Al Pacino. Penguin Audio. 12 hours, 28 minutes. $45. Read by Pacino. Also available in hardcover: Penguin Press. 384 pages. $35.
It sounds almost contradictory to say, but there are stars of stage and screen who prefer to stay out of the public eye. They might be introverts or simply private, but they avoid public events and media interviews.
Al Pacino has always been one of these reluctant public persons, avoiding award shows, television interviews and cover stories in People magazine. He’s neither shy nor a misanthrope; he’s just not comfortable making a spectacle of himself.
That changed late last year with publication of his memoir, Sonny Boy. For 12 and a half hours, Pacino sits with us – as if in our kitchen – and tells us his life story, everything from his boyhood days terrorizing the streets of the South Bronx to the sets of The Godfather, Serpico, Scarface and many others, and into his romantic relationships with some of Hollywood’s leading female actors.
If ever there were a “book” made for audio, this is it. And I suspect that Pacino composed this memoir at a recorder rather than a word processor. His stories, punctuated by laughs and always with the right dramatic emphases, flow openly and, seemingly, from the heart.
Born in 1940, Pacino has few memories of his parents together. His father left the family during the war and never really returned. His mother, a troubled soul, struggled to support him and for nearly a year surrendered him to her ex-husband’s parents to raise.
His mother does return, however, and they live with her parents. It is she who instills in him a deep appreciation of movies and who also gives him his nickname, Sonny Boy. She is a strong presence, and a life-saving one, he later understands, for him. All his closest friends, the boys with whom he ran his neighborhood streets, would die very young. But Pacino survived, and eventually thrived, he says, because his mother and grandparents kept him somewhat under control.
Pacino also had the good fortune to have a teacher who believed in him and his theatrical talent. She encouraged him to perform and to attend a special high school for the arts. But he lasted there only two years before heading out to work a variety of menial jobs to contribute to the family’s upkeep.
Although a dropout from high school, Pacino was not a dropout from self-education. He was an avid reader of Shakespeare and other great authors, and he attended a New York acting school where he befriended an experienced actor, Charlie Laughton – not the really famous actor with the same name, however. Slowly, bit part by bit part, he made enough of a name for himself to earn roles in several highly acclaimed stage productions in the city, but far from Broadway.
The Godfather, of course, is the movie that made him a star, but he almost lost the role of Michael Corleone early in the shooting. He and director Francis Ford Coppola had a vision for the role that differed greatly from that of the studio executives. They were ready to fire Pacino until Coppola accelerated the shooting schedule to film the restaurant scene, the one where Michael comes out of the men’s room and shoots a crooked police captain and the mob boss who had ordered the assassination attempt on Don Corleone. Once Pacino proved himself in that scene, the execs got off his case.
Pacino started as a stage actor, and it is clear that the stage is his first love. His memoir is also his discourse on Shakespeare. On stage, he rarely runs into trouble with his directors. But when shooting movies, he develops the reputation as being trouble. He’s opinionated and a perfectionist, so there is some very good inside dope about the off-camera disagreements that occurred in some of his movies.
For fans of film and stage, Sonny Boy is an exceptional memoir, especially the audio version.