James Caan: ‘The studio thought The Godfather was a piece of garbage’
In the end, it's always back to the tollbooth. Talk to Jimmy Caan - forget the James, everyone calls him Jimmy - for any length of time and the subject of his iconic (and Oscar-nominated) performance as the wired Sonny Corleone in The Godfather and, in particular, his glorious demise in a hail of bullets at the aforementioned Jones Beach toll facility in New Jersey is bound to rear its head.
Despite his theatrical grimace, when I mention it, Caan knows it's the role, and the moment, that will define his place in cinematic history. Then his face brightens. 'Do you know,' he says, in a classic Queens rasp undimmed by decades of domicile on the West Coast, 'that I wore 147 squibs in that scene?'
Squibs?
'Yeah, the little explosive charges they stick on you to simulate the hits. The ones they use today are little bitty pops, like caps, but back then they were mean fuckers, these coffin-shaped brass cases with gunpowder inside and a prophylactic full of blood sitting on top. When they went off, it felt like I was being punched all over. If my hand had got in front of one, it would have blown a hole clean through.' He grins lasciviously.
'I wouldn't have done it if there hadn't been so many girls around the set to impress.'
Does he still get wisecracks at tollbooths?
'I'll tell you one thing for certain,' he says. 'I always make sure I have correct change.'
The film's mixture of bravado and recklessness could be a paradigm for James Caan's life and career. He's played the unreconstructed action hero both onscreen and off, barnstorming his way through Seventies classics such as Freebie And The Bean, A Bridge Too Far and Rollerball ('The skating was great,' he says of his role in the latter epic, 'but the walking and talking wasn't too hot').
His leisure pursuits include rodeo-ing, boxing, skiing, gosoku-ryu (a variant of karate; he's a black belt) and marriage (four times). Caan legends are legion. He took a pop at his co-star, a certain Mr John Wayne, on the set of the 1966 Western Eldorado, after he caught The Duke cheating at chess ('He was so lame. He'd say, "Hey, Jimmy, what's that over there," and shove the rook around while I gazed yonder like a schmuck'). He moved into the Playboy Mansion for a spell to 'get over a broken heart' ('There were tons of girls over there and well, I'm sorry, but I liked 'em!').
Other stories were less savoury. He was arrested by the LAPD after an aspiring actor fell to his death from the fire escape of Caan's apartment building. He was interrogated for 10 hours and released after the death was deemed accidental. A woman named Leesa Anne Roland filed a physical battery suit against him, claiming he tried to throttle her in a Century City hotel. The case was dismissed without trial.
He was one of the first stars to be picked up when the Heidi Fleiss scandal broke. He claimed, somewhat disingenuously at the time, that he had a 'purely platonic' relationship with the Hollywood Madam and her charges. 'Hookers?' he says now. 'Well, I never paid for them, you know. I just gave them all the cocaine they wanted.'
The crash-and-burn following the meteoric rise was perhaps inevitable for a man who embraced volatility at work and play so fervently, but Jimmy blames his intense relationship with cocaine for his sudden and spectacular fall from grace in the early Eighties. 'I was on an extremely destructive kick. My sister had died of cancer and I was just angry, raging at the world. Getting high and partying seemed like the best option.'
He turned down starring roles in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Apocalypse Now, and Kramer Vs Kramer, and then found his brand of rugged authenticity surplus to requirements in the Hollywood of Star Wars and Close Encounters. 'I said, "Fuck it, I retire." I thought I had enough money to keep me going, and I did, until an accountant robbed me. It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been permanently stoned.'
F Scott Fitzgerald's dictum about there being no second acts in American life rang all too true to Caan, who found his attempts to break back into the business stymied by a studio system wary of his reputation and the attendant insurance costs. 'Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder,' he growls. 'It just makes them assume you're dangerous or dead or both.'
His old buddy Francis Ford Coppola had to fight to get him into Gardens Of Stone in 1987, as did Rob Reiner for Misery in 1990. In both, Caan gave uncharacteristically subdued, even - whisper it soft - sensitive performances (at least until Kathy Bates got medieval on his ankles in Misery), reminding people that a fine and versatile actor had always lurked beneath the tough-guy static. Buoyed by this reservoir of goodwill, and 'fed up with being a jerk', Caan checked into Marina Del Rey's Exodus Recovery Center in 1994. He's been clean, he says proudly, ever since.
Caan's ongoing rehabilitation is part of the reason that the world's media have descended on midtown Manhattan in the midst of a sweltering summer heatwave; a junket is in progress to promote his latest movie, Mickey Blue Eyes, in which he improbably plays Hugh Grant's prospective father-in-law, a small-time Mafioso. The film, a genial but rather lame variant on Grant's fish-out-of-water routine, stars the latter as a very English auctioneer in New York whose impending marriage entangles him with the Mob to sporadically comic effect. Caan enjoys himself hugely, gently sending up his own and his Godfather image in much the same way that Marlon Brando did a few years ago in The Freshman; the scene where he tries to teach Hugh to say 'fuhgeddabouddit' is particularly piquant.
I arrive at junket HQ at the appointed hour, to find assorted flunkies in a frightful flap. It seems that Mr Caan has been dispensing with journalists at breakneck speed, and is now running ahead of schedule. I'm whisked straight through to his suite, passing a quizzical-looking Hugh Grant on the way, and arrive to find a party in progress.
Sitting around Caan are: his agent, Frankie, who looks like an Elmore Leonard loan shark; a young-ish guy who seems to be some kind of personal assistant, but whose immediate function is to tell me how few minutes I have left remaining with Mr Caan; an enormously fat man who occasionally lumbers in from another room to tell me I have even fewer minutes remaining with Mr Caan than the PA guy's just told me I have; and a fresh-faced man and woman who could be something to do with the film company, but whose roles remain maddeningly obscure.
Jimmy shakes my hand (businesslike, not as bone-crushing as you might expect), motions me to one of the few unoccupied seats, and lays into Mr PA and Mr Large ('Quit looking at your clocks, the poor guy's flown from England, for Chrissake, give him all the fucking time he wants, poor schmuck'). None of the group makes any attempt to leave. It quickly becomes apparent that they're here to act as a kind of chorus, laughing dutifully at Jimmy's stories and quips. It's like wandering into the backroom of a wiseguy's club while he holds court.
I hear you called Hugh Grant 'Whippy' on the set, I begin. 'That's absolutely true, and I still call him that,' says Caan, who's clearly in expansive mood. His blond hair might be receding, but his face, while weatherbeaten, looks a good deal younger than his 60 years; his blue eyes are full of mischief, and his athlete's body strains against a Ralph Lauren denim shirt and faded jeans.
Occasionally, he springs out of his chair and prowls the room in his shiny Nikes like a zoo animal patrolling the perimeter of its cage. 'You know those whippets who have to wear a sweater to stop them shivering when they go out on the street because they're so chilly and nervous? That's what Hugh reminds me of. He's very neurotic, very soft and very British,' he chuckles, flashing his eyes in my direction. 'I think it did him good to rub up against me.'
The Mickey Blue Eyes role gave Caan a chance to return to the milieu in which he grew up; he was born in the Bronx but raised in Queens, the son of a kosher butcher. 'We didn't have a shop,' he says. 'My dad was a middleman, humping sides of meat from trucks to restaurants.' His neighbourhood, full of other Jews, Irish, Italians and mobsters, left an indelible impression on him: 'I learned about things like respect and loyalty.' (So much so that his career has been bedevilled by allegations of Mob links, fuelled by his appearances and expressions of support at the trials of senior Mafia men such as Carmine Persico, whose cheek he kissed in court in 1985.)
He says he wishes his sons could experience what he went through as a kid: 'Because it wasn't tough as such, but it could be scary getting your ass kicked out into the schoolyard with 100 other kids and learning how to win and lose, when to push and not to push, you know. It's the stuff of life, and my kids don't know shit about it because they're pampered to oblivion.'
It's a measure of Caan's success at the 'stuff of life' that he was known as 'Killer Caan' by the time he was 11; he still sports a home-made gang tattoo of three blue dots on his right hand. It would seem a bit of a quantum leap to go from this roustabout life into the rarefied world of acting. 'You know what?' he says. 'You're right. My neighbourhood was not conducive to the arts. But one thing I knew is that I wasn't going to be a butcher, and that's what was waiting for me at the end of the road. So I jumped ship. I think I always had the desire to act in me, but I wouldn't allow it to surface consciously until the time was right.'
He went to college at 16, 'but I kept changing my majors; I was too interested in girls, ball, beer, you know - the usual pursuits.' He ended up at acting school in New York, determined to emulate his hero, Brando ('Anyone of my generation who doesn't tell you Brando was the man, they're lying'). He supplemented his income from film and theatre bit-parts with pool winnings and Friday-night poker sessions. His big break came in 1971, when he appeared as pro-footballer Brian Piccolo in the TV movie Bryan's Song. The following year, The Godfather was released.
And here we are, back at the tollbooth again. Caan's eyes assume an opaque glaze when his Greatest Hit comes up, but it has to be addressed; for many, particularly men, it's gone beyond the status of a film and become a kind of sacred relic. Did the participants feel they were working on a Huge Cultural Milestone at the time?
'Did we fuck,' splutters Caan. 'The studio thought it was a piece of garbage. I did know I was surrounded by great actors, and Francis was at the top of his game. But it got stinking reviews when it came out, and they pulled it out of all the theatres. So it was hard to convince ourselves at that point that we were a bunch of geniuses.'
How much of him was there in Sonny? 'Look, I was acting,' he sighs. 'The character was more a reflection of where Francis's head was at than mine. I mean, if I'd played Kay, do you think I'd have behaved like that?' (This sanguine view is contradicted by Caan's eldest son Scott, also an actor: 'Basically, that was my dad up there. You know, he's got a temper and he thinks he's Italian.')
'To tell you the truth,' Caan continues, 'the first scene I did, I was really lost. I couldn't get a handle on Sonny at all. But I went home that night, and the next morning - people think I make this up - but I woke up and I'd become Don Rickles (old-style Jack Benny-type stand-up comedian, and the voice of Mr Potato Head in Toy Story). I copied his talk, his swagger, everything. So Don Rickles was basically Sonny's inspiration.' As to the mooted Godfather IV, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as the young Sonny, Caan says he called Francis, who knew nothing about it, 'so that's a good shot that it ain't gonna happen'.
But, no matter how tough his roles, Caan always seems to have had the nagging suspicion that acting wasn't a 'proper' profession for a grown man; hence his testosterone-heavy extracurricular activities. He didn't just weekend-rodeo, he spent nine years on the pro-circuit, shattering his shoulder along the way (it's now held together with steel clips. And, yes, he does set off the machines at airports.) He doesn't just bowl, he extreme-bowls, throwing 300 straight balls down one lane without a break. In short, he plays to win.
'Let me tell you something,' he drawls, grinning broadly. 'If I get involved in something, it's like I gotta beat the world champion. That's why you English don't win shit. You say playing the game is all, and I say bull. If I say, "Do you wanna play tennis," and you say, "I don't care," then fuck you, why would I wanna play with you? I wanna know that I beat you on your best day or at least you were trying. Actually,' he continues soberly, 'this has been a real problem with me. I realised that I've never really played anything and had fun at it because I hate being beat. That's not healthy.'
At this point, there's a mass outbreak of ostentatious clock-watching that I valiantly ignore. Do you think, I venture, that this attitude contributed to your descent into The Wilderness Years? If you couldn't be The Best, you weren't interested? 'No,' he says, his eyes assuming a faraway look. 'There was a lot more to it than that. I imploded. My biggest regret is I threw away my good fortune. I made dumb mistakes. Mea culpa. But you know what,' he says, brightening again, 'I'm still alive and I'm still healthy, and I may even be a movie star some day.'
Indeed, to coin a phrase, The Force is strong in this particular sexagenarian, perhaps because he's finally found domestic bliss with his fourth wife Linda, a beautiful blond, a whisker past half his age. 'I used to say marriages were like tornadoes,' he opines. 'There's all this blowing and sucking at the beginning; and at the end, you always lose your house. But, hey, I'm maturing. I've got two kids with this one and I only had one with each of the others, so that's kind of a breakthrough. Hey,' he shouts, 'get the photos! Show him my nine-month-old!'
'You've got a nine-month-old?' I say incredulously, as a picture of Jake, a beaming little tyke with his dad's snubby nose, is thrust in front of me. 'Blimey!'
'Blimey?' Caan hisses. 'Listen up, don't you write me off yet, you little shit.'
A tidal wave of hilarity ensues. I try one last lunge. You've done triumph. You've done disaster. Sounds like good autobiography material. 'Nah,' he shoots back. 'I haven't got the patience for that, and who'd believe it anyway? It's been a pretty full life, though. And I'll make sure I slap the fuck out of you before I'm done. What can I say? I'm happy, I'm here, and I ain't going back there.' And with that, he shoots out of his seat like he's been electrically charged, anxious to subdue the next steer or flatten the next pin, while I'm politely but firmly shown the door.
On the way to the airport, I pass through a tollbooth. Needless to say, I have the correct change.