Al Pacino, 84, with three of his four children. Pacino has never been married and recently announced that he's fathered a baby boy, Roman Pacino with his former girlfriend, Noor Alfallah. |
Al Pacino was wise to wait before publishing his memoirs. By some accounts, he's had a messy life with dizzying highs and lows including a hardscrabble upbringing, bouts with drugs and alcohol, big time rags-to-riches moments and four children by three different women. There's a lot to tell. Not that he tells it all but it's a helluva story nonetheless.
The book is called Sonny Boy and the title itself is one of the most revealing parts of this 363-page testament to life in and out of the spotlight. Sonny Boy was Pacino's childhood moniker and these are the meanderings of a gritty, enigmatic, irrepressible, seasoned octogenarian.
In the book Pacino spends a lot of time recollecting his intrepid boyhood on the densely crowded streets of the South Bronx. Pacino was restless then and he's remained that way through most of his life -- restless, yes; but not rootless for the story always goes back to New York, to the Bronx and Manhattan.
This is a book filled with guttural street talk one moment and bits of Shakespeare and Strindberg the next. It's all over the place. But what it's really all about is an old man and his reminiscences. Because that's what old people do, they reminisce. And the simple truth is that it's hard for them not to reminisce because as you get older, the past comes back to you more and more vividly. The places, the characters and the moments all reappear. And the people of your past are once again vivid and almost as alive as if it all happened moments ago.
So, after a certain age you reminisce because you can't escape the past in the present. It's simply an everyday fact of life. And you reminisce not to relive or relieve but to document, in some small way, that you've actually been here; that you've made some sort of mark. That you are and were.
You don't necessarily expect anybody to learn anything from what you've been through -- certainly nothing momentous or profound. You're just setting down some markers, like pebbles on a rapidly diminishing road.
Pacino looks back and asks: Why did all this happen to me; why me and not someone else? He has no answer to the question other than dumb luck, or as the late Broadway star Carole Channing titled her memoirs, Just Lucky, I Guess.
But in Pacino's case we think that maybe it was more than luck. He took chances -- big chances. Again and again he risked a lot. He was daring and unconventional and brazen. Why? For one thing, he was never cosseted so he had to live by his wits. For another, it just seemed to become part of his disposition and his instinct. Still, was it simply necessity that made him a contrarian who doggedly charted his own path, or was it something else?
He was certainly blessed with incredible natural talent. And yet, he could just as easily have wound up in the gutter as did many of his childhood friends. In a sense, Sonny Boy's story is not unique. None of us know where we're headed. Or, as Pacino says: "My whole life was a moon shot."
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