The Place He Likes to Be

Al Pacino, dressed all in black but for a fraying white V-neck T-shirt, runs both hands over his forehead and back through his unruly hair. It is rehearsal time on a recent afternoon at the Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles, and the legendary movie star is, for the moment, not himself.

“Forgot you ain’t seen me before. Erie Smith’s the name,” he says, introducing the small-fry New York gambler and horse player who is the main character in Eugene O’Neill’s one-act play “Hughie,” which opens tonight. Pacino’s face is deadpan, his voice guarded and low. Even out of costume, without the benefit of a set or proper lighting, the 59-year-old actor embodies O’Neill’s hard-boiled huckster with a sentimental heart.

There’s just one thing out of place: Pacino himself, who is traipsing around the theater, shuffling up and down the aisles, watching the play even as he acts it out. Pacino is both starring in and directing “Hughie,” which marks his Los Angeles stage debut. It’s a big job, but he appears unrattled, at ease.

“This is how I do it, as a director,” he explains as his co-star, Paul Benedict, sits alone on the stage. “I’m out here in the audience now hearing the sound. I’m really supposed to be up there.”

Pacino has worn these two hats before. The Taper production reprises the O’Neill play that he and Benedict got raves for in New York in 1996, and he directed then, too. But his comfort with such dichotomy--indeed, his enthusiastic embrace of it--has roots that run far deeper. Pacino’s life has long been about “straddling,” as he puts it, the two worlds of theater and film (he has two big studio movies coming out this year, Michael Mann’s “The Insider” and Oliver Stone’s “Any Given Sunday”) and the two coasts--New York (“I have a world there”) and Los Angeles (“Most of my friends are here”).

Twenty-seven years after “The Godfather” transformed him from a stage actor with two previous films into a bona-fide superstar, Pacino still struggles with how to divide his energies, often wondering whether by doing both movies and stage work he has given neither its due. But in recent conversations with The Times--his first lengthy interviews in years--the famously obsessive perfectionist also appeared to be finding some peace, if only a little, by uniting the two loves of his working life: He is currently editing his third self-financed feature film about--what else?--a play.

“That seems to interest me for some reason: How can I get material that I feel has a certain vitality on stage to have the same thing on film?” he said when asked about “Chinese Coffee,” his film-in-progress (based on Ira Lewis’ play) about two middle-aged, impoverished bohemians whose friendship is tested when one of them writes a novel about the other. “It’s a hybrid--one of what I call my experiments. And when it works--when a play is on film and it has the kind of thing a play has when it’s clicking--I really enjoy it.”

This is not the brooding Pacino of old who paced too much (he once wore a groove in the carpet outside Francis Ford Coppola’s office), drank too much (he swore off alcohol in 1977) and was known to say bleak things like: “There’s no such thing as happiness, only concentration.” This is not the Pacino who, angered by critic Pauline Kael’s suggestion in 1973 that he was “indistinguishable from Dustin Hoffman,” remarked acidly: “Was that after she had the shot glass removed from her throat?”

This is also, notably, not the Pacino that fans may feel they know from his films. The actor has never revealed much about his personal life, arguing that overexposure would diminish an audience’s ability to connect to his work. But that has made him perhaps more vulnerable to confusion with his best-known roles--the war-hero-turned-mob-heir Michael Corleone of “The Godfather” trilogy (1972, 1974 and 1990), the idealistic New York cop of “Serpico” (1973), the pent-up bisexual bank robber of “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975) and the bombastic blind veteran of “Scent of a Woman,” for which he won an Oscar for best actor in 1992.

This Al Pacino, the one wearing the too-long black pants and untucked black button-down shirt, his hair standing nearly vertical atop his head, is mellower, more contemplative, than any of those characters. As Stone, who got to know Pacino on the set of “Scarface” (which Stone wrote) in 1982, puts it: “He’s cooled out. Al is sweetness and light. No--sweetness and dark. He’s intense and volatile. But very, very, very sensitive.”

The big brown orbs that one critic once called “the most famous eyes in movies” definitely sparkle in person, but they hold a surprising gentleness, a shyness, that makes it easier to forgive his tendency not to finish even the most promising-sounding sentences. Known for the explosiveness of his performances both on stage and screen, Pacino up close appears to be dangerous only in the abstract. Uncertain and elliptical, he threatens at times to analyze acting--and himself--to death.

“You know how it is. One doesn’t consciously think about all this stuff. But if I have to reflect on it, it does look to me like I’m a little more accepting of things,” he said, sounding like someone who is consciously reflective on a very regular basis. “You keep going, I guess, and pretty soon you just count whatever blessings you’ve got. I’ve found that happiness is cool. I like it. You enjoy it more when you can spot it.”

He laughed--something that, surprisingly, he does a lot. “I don’t think I’ve made as many mistakes in my life as I’ve made this year,” he said, politely refusing to be specific. “Take my word for it. And yet--and yet!--I feel I’m learning.”

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Pacino claims to be a slow learner, but what that really means is that he prefers to take his time, whether doing meticulous research about a character or editing and reediting a film. For example, “The Local Stigmatic,” his movie (still unreleased) of a Heathcote Williams one-act play that was Pacino’s first foray into filmmaking, runs less than an hour. But after he shot it in 1985, he spent several years doggedly tinkering. Some suspect he is still making adjustments.

“Looking for Richard,” his documentary-style movie that uses Shakespeare’s “Richard III” to discuss acting and its challenges in a wholly original and illuminating way, was one of the top art-house films of 1996. But it, too, was the result of years of near relentless toil. “Chinese Coffee” looks to be heading down the same road: Shot two years ago, with Pacino and Jerry Orbach in the leading roles, the current version is a talky picture, a bit like “My Dinner With Andre.” Pacino has already tried three different endings, but he is not done: After “Hughie” closes on July 25, he plans to spend a month (and a lot of his own money) in the editing room, and even then he’s not sure it will be complete.

“I need to find another idea, I don’t know quite what yet,” he said. “I have to figure out a way to get an audience inside [my character’s] head.”

This is a big thing with Pacino--inhabiting the brains of others. To portray a short-order cook who falls for Michelle Pfeiffer in “Frankie and Johnny” (1991), he hung out with the real thing, flipped cardboard eggs to get the wrist action just right and learned to chop vegetables Benihana-style. The next year, readying to play a blind ex-military man in “Scent of a Woman,” he taught himself to load and unload a .45, blindfolded, in 25 seconds flat.

For Stone’s upcoming drama about an aging football coach at war with the pressures of corporate management, Pacino shadowed NFL coaches Bill Parcells, Mike Shanahan and Steve Mariucci and watched scores of football documentaries. To do Mann’s next film, in which Pacino plays the “60 Minutes” producer who fought to bring a tobacco industry whistle-blower’s story to light, he not only met the real journalist but also did mock interviews with real FBI agents.

“What you hope for is that something you did in your research is going to pay off. And you’re going to find it got into your unconscious and now you’re living it and you don’t have to think it or work it or show it,” he said. “What you’re trying to do is say, ‘Can I play a coach and really be a coach?’ The goal is that it’s not me doing it.”

When he succeeds in leaving himself behind, Pacino--who has a stage actor’s belief in the importance of props and costumes--makes choices that embolden his characters. There’s the story, for example, of how he chose a formal camel’s-hair overcoat to wear in “The Godfather Part II.” Pacino wanted to wrap Michael Corleone in something elegant to sharpen the depiction of his increasingly cutthroat personality.

Similarly, after watching the first day’s dailies of “Dog Day Afternoon,” Pacino--who wore glasses in the early takes--told director Sidney Lumet that he needed to re-shoot the entire opening scene. The reason, Pacino explained: His character, Sonny, should be the kind of person who wears glasses but who, on the day he’s chosen to rob a bank, forgets them.

Lumet re-shot the scenes sans spectacles, giving Sonny a squinty cast to his nervous eyes. As writer Ron Rosenbaum put it in Vanity Fair, Pacino’s brainstorm endowed his character “with an aura not merely of incompetence but of Holy Fool innocence”--and brought him more poignantly to life.

Director Mike Newell recalls being worried that Pacino might chafe at the tacky, shiny attire of the low-level gangster he played in “Donnie Brasco” (1997).

“I didn’t know whether he was prepared to make himself absolutely absurd. After all, this was the guy who had played Corleone. But he was great, picking some terrible stuff,” Newell said. “It was like working with Alec Guinness, who says he starts building a character from the shoes up. All those famous old theater actors see that the externals are very important. And Pacino will always think of himself as a theater actor before he thinks of himself as anything else.”

Newell said he learned much from working with Pacino, particularly during one spat. The director had completed an establishing shot of Pacino and a group of other hoods sitting around a table when Pacino asked if Newell was shooting close-ups. When told no, Pacino walked off the set.

“I went to his trailer. He said, ‘You mistake my art. You don’t value me.’ And I was actually very moved by that,” Newell recalled. “Other actors might think all he was saying was, ‘What about me?’ And a lot of times, when you hear someone call themselves an artist, you say, ‘Piss right off.’ But I felt oddly affectionate toward him because he was very vulnerable and very frank and open about it. He had said to himself instinctively, ‘I’m being very good in this part, and has this bastard noticed?’ It wasn’t self-importance. It was all about the work.”

Mann, who previously directed Pacino in “Heat” (1995), calls him a genius.

“To me, as an artist Al is about 35. He has that youthful artistic ambition,” Mann said. “One gets wiser about how many hours you want to do it. The idea of working all night loses its romantic allure. But his sense of artistic endeavor and adventure is the same.”

And that, agreed Stone, is what makes Pacino’s best work so good.

“He really listens to the other actors. If you look at five takes of him looking over somebody’s shoulder, you will see different expressions each time. Especially on reactive close-ups, which some major stars phone in, he is really attentive,” Stone said. “Pacino is an explorer.”

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Pacino lives alone in a big, book-filled house in the New York suburb of Sneden’s Landing, on the Hudson River. He is a native New Yorker--born Alfredo James Pacino in Harlem and raised in the South Bronx. Moreover, he has long been defined, along with Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, as one of the quintessential New York actors--schooled in the Method and able to bring a gritty, ethnic reality to the screen. So it seems odd, at first, to learn that he has rented a little house in sun-kissed Santa Monica and made the Taper downtown his temporary artistic home.

“To me, it’s a plank and a passion. That’s all you need [to do theater]. The place doesn’t matter,” Pacino said, adding that he has been trying to do a play in Los Angeles for years, but the timing wasn’t right.

Pacino has never been far from the footlights. In 1968, his off-Broadway debut in “The Indian Wants the Bronx” won him an Obie. The next year, his debut on Broadway in “Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?” won him his first Tony, for best supporting actor. But more striking than his theatrical roots is how he has continued to appear on stage after becoming a star. In 1977, five years after “The Godfather,” he won a second Tony, for his starring role in “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel.” Since then, both off Broadway and on, he has played Teach in playwright David Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” Mark Antony in “Julius Caesar” and the lead in “Richard III,” among many other projects. Despite occasionally snide reviews, he has repeatedly returned to the theater like a pigeon to the roost.

“I’m at home there,” he said simply. “I never intended to be a movie star.”

As he walked into the Taper the other day for his first technical rehearsal, his eyes were alive--he was clearly excited to be getting back to “Hughie.” “Hello, son,” he said fondly to his co-star, Benedict, the veteran stage actor and director probably best known to American audiences as the bumbling Harry Bentley in TV’s “The Jeffersons.” Pacino was getting a bad cold, but that didn’t seem to diminish the energy with which he attacked the play.

“Wait till you hear it,” he said. “It endures. It could have been written yesterday.”

The rehearsal began and Pacino, sipping chamomile tea from a paper cup, was at once in the play and outside it. In one moment, Pacino the actor was in character, chiding Benedict, who plays a night clerk in a seedy hotel: “Born and raised in the sticks, wasn’t you?” A beat later, Pacino the director gently advised his co-star about the syncopated delivery of a particular line.

“Can we do it one more time, please?” Pacino asked. “Then I promise I’ll move on.”

“I hope I don’t have a fever,” Pacino murmured to no one in particular. He’d been in Los Angeles less than a week, it was sunny as hell outside, and he had the chills. “I’ve got this thing with planes lately. These 3,000-mile airplane trips are getting the Old-Timer.”

This is what Pacino tends to call himself these days: the Old-Timer. Often, he puts stories in context by saying things like, “That was when I was really young.” Then, hearing himself, he’s liable to add, “Everything I say is about when I was really young.” At a press conference to promote “Hughie” he said both those things and then, to show he wasn’t such an old fogy after all, he mugged with a microphone, sticking it into his eye.

“I’m trying to be reasonable,” he said goofily. “Sorry about that.”

Over the years, of course, Pacino has rarely been seen as reasonable. Passionate, yes. Brilliant, too. Eccentric. Difficult. But not reasonable. And on certain topics, like his love life, not forthcoming. Linked with a bevy of big-name actresses, including Kathleen Quinlan, Tuesday Weld, Jill Clayburgh, Marthe Keller and Diane Keaton, he has a 9-year-old daughter named Julie--the result of a brief romance with a friend who is not in the movie business--but he has never married.

“I don’t know why,” he says flatly, when asked to explain. “I don’t talk about this.”

Nevertheless, he looks amused by the attempt to draw him out. “I like to watch people try this,” he says. A name is suggested: actress Beverly D’Angelo, whom he is said to have been dating for more than a year. His face remains stubbornly blank.

“The name rings a bell,” he finally says, smiling in a way that says: “Enough, already.”

Pacino much prefers to talk about acting, which he often compares to tightrope walking. “When you walk the wire in a movie, it’s not easy to walk, but it’s painted on the floor,” he explained. “But when you walk it on the stage, it’s 100 feet high without a net. That does something to the chemicals in your body.”

“Movies are wonderful. I love seeing them. But they’re not as much fun to do for me,” he continued. “It’s a very fragmented existence. You may only shoot a minute a day. There’s a lot of waiting. But when you work on the stage, something can happen in your imagination that can affect the way you perform for the rest of your life. If you’ve had a steady diet of that, you miss it.”

Pacino was missing the stage earlier this year when playwright Athol Fugard, who had been scheduled to direct and act in “The Captain’s Tiger” as the fifth play of the Taper’s 1998-99 season, pulled out. Suddenly, the Taper needed a replacement play and Pacino, who had just completed leading roles in two back-to-back films, was ready to get back on the high wire. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when Benedict agreed to reprise his role.

“We’d always wanted to do it again,” Benedict said, recalling how sad he and Pacino were when their extended run at New York’s Circle in the Square ended (Pacino had to play Satan in the film “The Devil’s Advocate”).

Though only an hour in length, “Hughie” is a challenge. O’Neill wrote it as part of a series of one-acts titled “By Way of Obit,” each with a main character talking about a person who has died to a person who does little but listen. The play is loaded with italic asides, many that describe the unspoken thoughts of the night clerk. Writing to a friend in 1942, O’Neill confessed that “Hughie” was “written more to be read than staged.” He imagined perhaps “utilizing a filmed background and soundtrack” to help bring the rest of the play to life, but added, “It would require tremendous imagination. Let whoever does it figure it out. I wouldn’t want to be around to see it.”

The play wasn’t staged until 1964, with Jason Robards in the role of Erie Smith, the small-time hood who regales the new night clerk in a rundown flophouse with tales of the previous night clerk, a gullible fellow named Hughie. Later, Ben Gazzara starred in a revival, and Robards reprised his portrayal for television. But in these productions, the thoughts of the night clerk were left unspoken.

Pacino always regarded the play as a riddle that kept half its message hidden. When he hit upon a way to bring O’Neill’s asides to life, he became a passionate “Hughie” champion, staging it first at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater, then on Broadway. One reviewer who had seen--and liked--Gazzara and Robards in the play said that neither was as unpredictably touching as Pacino.

“Al’s vision was stunning,” Benedict said of the way Pacino chose to stage “Hughie,” using evocative sound effects and a jutting, angular set to give the play a timeless, surreal feel. “He said, ‘This incident between these two men in a hotel lobby at 4 o’clock in the morning happened in 1928. But we won’t bring it up to date, and we won’t go back then. The audience will sit in the present day and watch the echo of something that happened many years ago pass before them.’ ”

As Gordon Davidson, the Taper’s artistic director, put it, in “Hughie” Pacino is both “in the now and in the then. Not re-creating 1928, but letting the feeling of that time come to the audience. . . . You can only do that in the theater.”

*

When he thinks about his career, Pacino is reminded of a scene in the Jerry Lewis comedy “The Bellhop.”

“He goes into a banquet room and it’s empty and [his boss] says, ‘OK, put in the seats.’ So he takes the first chair and he doesn’t know where to put it,” he said. “Sometimes you feel that way because you have all these opportunities--you’re lucky enough to have that--and yet, you don’t know. There’s Strindberg. There’s a movie with Coppola. There’s ‘Hamlet.’ Too many things. I’ve tried to straddle movies and the theater my whole life. For me, I always felt I lost on both sides because of it.”

From very early on, Pacino saw how his movie celebrity altered his experience on stage.

“The live audiences changed. They’d talk to the stage. They’d talk to me,” he said. “One time, in the first row, there were several teenage girls with my picture on their sweaters.”

If Pacino was a heartthrob then, now he is an icon--but an oddly accessible one. Strangers walk up and shake his hand, like a wide-eyed young man did the other day outside the Taper. (“He made my day,” Pacino said afterward.) Pacino will forever be credited with fueling the world’s fascination with the Mafia, as HBO’s “The Sopranos” so cleverly mocks (the New Jersey mobsters are experts on the “Godfather” trilogy and often refer to Pacino by his first name). And his association with violence has rippled through the culture--the punk band Blink-182, for example, draws its name from the number of times Pacino used a certain expletive in “Scarface.”

Still, in person, Pacino inspires more warmth than awe.

“People will see him on the street and yell to him, ‘How you doing, Al?’ They feel he is one of them, and let me tell you something: He is,” said acting teacher Charlie Laughton, who has been Pacino’s best friend since the 19-year-old working-class kid enrolled in Laughton’s class 40 years ago. “He’s a very gentle person who actually doesn’t like the life of fame. He likes to play poker on Fridays. He likes to watch boxing. Coming from where he’s come from, he ordinarily would be an elevator man or a doorman. That this happened to him is really something.”

Pacino’s struggles with stardom are well documented. “It’s become an old story now, but for a guy like me it took me a while, maybe 10 years or so, to come around,” he says, summing up a period that included some very hard drinking followed by, at the insistence of friends, a stint attending Alcoholics Anonymous. “I was unable to organize myself in a way during that period--the 1970s. I don’t think I handled celebrity that well.”

Even after he got sober, the pressures affected his choices. Known for taking ages to make up his mind, he’s turned down far more film projects than he’s signed on to, many of them notable. He passed on Richard Gere’s role in “Pretty Woman,” for example, and has occasionally committed to projects and then backed out.

“Sometimes you just say yes--four or five times a decade,” he said self-mockingly. “Sometimes you turn down stuff that might be better for you. And you do it because you’re trying to cope with your own personal demons. You do crazy things, and you don’t know you’re doing them because you think, ‘Well, it’s just a movie.’ And it is just a movie. But it also isn’t.”

Which is part of the reason why, after a couple of flops (the comedy “Author! Author!” in 1982, for example, and the historical saga “Revolution” in 1985), he dropped out of movies altogether for four years. During that period, theater sustained him--first in readings on college campuses, then in more formal productions. But it was his attempt to make a film out of “The Local Stigmatic”--a play that, notably, contains this line of dialogue: “Fame is the first disgrace. Because God knows who you are”--that made it possible for him to return to movie acting.

“There was a division in my life, especially when I was younger, that films were there [he points left] and I was there [he points right]. I needed to understand and appreciate film as a form, not just something that I was in. I had to get more intimate with it, get my hands on it,” he said. “Making my own picture gave me that tactile sense. And I think that helped me go on.”

Since returning to studio movies in 1989 with the hit “Sea of Love,” Pacino says things are different--better, even. Partly that is because the break “cleared my head long enough to get back into the fray again and drive myself nuts again.” But another reason is that he is older and more sure, it seems, of what he wants.

Every once in a while he threatens to quit movies. He vowed, for example, that “Donnie Brasco” would be his last film. (He has made three more since.) Ask him what he likes about movie acting and he pauses for a full 15 seconds, finally saying, “At this point, it’s hard for me to answer.” He claims he’s quite happy that he has no upcoming movie jobs pending.

But waiting in the wings is “City by the Sea,” the story of a real-life homicide cop, the son of a murderer, who discovers his child may have a similar evil streak. Pacino is interested and awaits a rewrite from Warner Bros. He also dreams of making a bio-pic about Amedeo Modigliani, the Italian artist. He would not star--he wants a younger actor--but plans to direct.

“You have to have time to brood, I guess. I used to have time,” he said, smiling before heading into another rehearsal. “When I received a Tony in 1977, I said, ‘I’m very grateful to the theater for making movies possible for me and to movies for making theater possible for me.’ I think I’ve been able to make both of them work with each other. If I’ve been successful at anything, I think I’ve done that.”

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“Hughie,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. Today, 4 and 7:30 p.m. Regular schedule: Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2:30 p.m. Ends July 25. Sold out except for a limited number of $12 public rush tickets available by lottery before each performance, excluding today’s opening. Drawings at 12:30 p.m. for matinees, with lineups starting at noon; at 6 p.m. for evening shows, with 5:30 p.m. lineups. Maximum of two tickets per person, cash only. (213) 628-2772.