Award-winning actor, director, producer
(1940– )
Remember the Dover movie house? My mother would take me to the movies there when I was about three or four. Movies were our entertainment. It was sort of like having a big television, only no one had TVs in those days. We had radios but no TVs. I remember going past a storefront and there was this little box on display, and in it was Milton Berle in black-and-white and it was fun to look at. You couldn’t hear anything, because the set was in the store. I have a very vivid memory of that—the first time I ever saw TV—in a store window.
The Dover theater is where I learned how to understand some of the more sophisticated movies. I’d have some vague memory of the movie, which I’d sort of repeat at home the next day. You know how kids have this memory? It gets imprinted when you see those pictures. So I’d act out all the characters that I saw and remembered. I was addicted to those stories. It was a lot of fun for me because most of the time I was home alone with my grandmother. My mother and grandfather were out working during the week.
I adored my grandfather. He originally came from Sicily but came to New York and lived in Harlem before he moved to the Bronx. He was a great storyteller. We’d both go up to the roof with chairs and newspapers. We’d put the newspapers under the chairs because otherwise they would sink into the soft tar that was the floor of the roof. Then he’d tell me stories about what life was like then, growing up. I relished those stories. He was a simple guy but very intelligent. You know how it is—intelligent but uneducated. Smart. I listened.
And you know—it was beautiful. I mean the world up on the roof. It was like our terrace. I wish I could describe it to you artfully. It was as close to poetry as I could get. It was spectacular. The sun would be going down. You could actually stand there and see the Empire State Building and the skyline from the South Bronx. And imagine—all these people who had come from different parts of the world would be up there. And at night—at night, there was this cacophony of voices, especially in the late spring to late summer. You would hear the different accents. We had them all. There were Italians, Jews, Irish, Polish, German. It was like a Eugene O’Neill play.
Summers were hot. We used to sleep on the fire escape of our apartment. Get the breeze out on the fire escape! My mother and I put blankets and pillows out there in the summer. That was a big thing. We had one bedroom, a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen. It was hot inside.
Sometimes there were seven or eight of us in that three-room place. My uncle came back from World War Two, and then sometimes there were cousins too. There were a lot of beds that would come out at night. At one point, I even slept between my grandmother and my grandfather.
In first grade at school, I was extremely obedient. In about the second grade, the teacher started putting me in school plays. And then she had me read for the assembly. The Bible! I was the guy who got up and read the Bible to start assembly.
There was this teacher, Blanche Rothstein, the drama teacher, who went to my apartment to talk to my grandmother and to tell her things about me. To this day I don’t know what they were, but I think they had to do with encouraging me to be an actor. She actually climbed those five flights of stairs to say that to my grandmother.
This is why to this day I say “It’s the teachers.” That’s why when anybody says “teacher” I light up. There it was, in this South Bronx public school, recognizing something I was doing that made her say that there was real hope there. I don’t know, because otherwise I think I was pretty hopeless.
The conduct thing started when I hung out with kids that sort of pulled you with them. You were influenced by them. They were influenced by you. It worked both ways.
After third grade, my mother had to come to school pretty much once a year to talk to the teachers. Their conclusion? That I needed a dad. My mother was adamant. She said it was because we were poor and, because of that, she had to work. And besides which, she said, I had a great relationship with my grandfather.
As I got older, I noticed that I would become close friends with males who became my father figures, like my grandfather had been to me—like Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio, for instance.
When I was a young teenager, three or four of us hung out together. We were extremely close. We played tag on the roofs, believe it or not. We’d hop from one roof to the next. One time I was running full out to leap over to the next roof when I saw this alley between the roofs. I pulled myself back just in time. I swiveled around and went back because I knew I was going to go down. We also scaled the roofs when we were about ten or eleven. Remember those TV aerials? We’d kind of hold on to them as a balancer—and we’d walk on the edge of the rooftops. Now I couldn’t even look down if I had to. Nobody ever fell, thank God.
Some of my closest friends, like my friend Cliffie, became drug addicts. They started taking drugs at ages fourteen, fifteen, but they had IQs that went through the roof. At the same time they were into drugs they had little pocket books of Dostoyevsky in the back of their pants. I was very fortunate. I wasn’t into drugs.
My mother kept me off the streets on school nights. My friends weren’t controlled that way. They had the kind of freedom and abandon that led to drugs and difficulty. I was so angry with my mother for keeping me home when I wanted to go out. It wasn’t until later in life that I fully realized what she had done for me. What can I say? I hope my kids don’t take that long.