Review of “Sonny Boy: A Memoir” by Al Pacino – from fish out of water to Hollywood star | Autobiography and memoirs

Al Pacino, whose nickname “Sonny Boy” comes from the Al Jolson song of the same name, begins this beautiful memoir in 1943, when he is three years old and his mother Rose, a pretty, sensitive factory worker, begins taking him to the local picture house to smuggle. Together they enjoy the stories unfolding on screen, which is doubly delicious since their own lives are so bleak. Rose's incredibly handsome husband has already thrown himself into another marriage, and Rose has taken little Alfredo back to the South Bronx to live with her parents. Sonny enjoys the role of provider and protector, buying his mother Kotex at the drugstore and yelling at construction workers who dare to leer.

Pacino's account of New York's poor streets after the war is stunningly cinematic. He introduces us to his band of little tough guys, kids called Cliffy, Bruce and Petey, who leave school to play in abandoned allotments or fish in open sewers for anything shiny that can be sold for a penny. They can't afford to join the Boy Scouts, so they beat up the kids who can – the lucky ones with two sober parents and a working dad. According to Pacino, it is only thanks to Rose's care and attention that he does not suffer the same fate as his friends, who all died from the needle at the age of 30. With her encouragement and his own penchant for reciting Ray Milland's speeches from “The Lost Weekend” at their rental apartment, Sonny gets a place at New York's High School of Performing Arts.

He's both a fish out of water and an absolute star. When someone says, “Hey boy, you're the next Marlon Brando,” after a particularly good performance, they don't know who they're talking about. So it's less important than you might think when he quits after a year because Rose needs him to get a job to pay for the electroshock treatments and barbiturates she needs for her shattered mental health. Now Sonny spends all his free time in public libraries, devouring Chekhov, Hemingway and Odets, feeling like he's known their worlds forever. He realizes that Rose, “fragile and uncontrollable,” could have walked right out of Tennessee Williams. Like Williams, she eventually died of an accidental overdose. It was 1962 and Sonny was just 22 years old.

It gets better, it gets worse. Sonny stays with Martin Sheen, another youth who clearly has the hand of God on him. He learns his craft off-off-off-Broadway and sometimes gets a positive mention, but just as often he's a bitch along the lines of “Avoid Al Pacino…he's the only one dragging this play down.” What the reader is waiting for, of course, is the moment in 1972 when Francis Ford Coppola plucks him from the ranks to star in The Godfather. The studio wanted Jack Nicholson, but when Pacino learns that his grandfather, Rose's father, was born in a Sicilian town called Corleone, the whole thing feels like fate.

You could say the rest is history, although in truth it's difficult to say exactly what that history is. Pacino spends more time on the films that didn't work than on the ones that did. While he doesn't regret turning down the role of Han Solo in Star Wars, he also wonders why he fought so hard to create turkeys like Bobby Deerfield and Hugh Hudson's Revolution, both of which damaged his career.

But career has never been of great importance to him, nor has money: at one point he loses $50 million without understanding how. Then there is the alcoholism, which he believes saved him from the long pain of losing his mother: without the alcohol, he would have followed her to the Bellevue psychiatric hospital. AA doesn't work because he can never remain anonymous, but therapy, the fancy kind that you go to five times a week for decades, helps.

It could also explain his surprisingly good selection of romantic partners. An almost marriage to Jill Clayburgh is followed by long affairs with Diane Keaton and Tuesday Weld. And then Pacino will become a father for the fourth time in 2023 with producer Noor Alfallah. Little Roman Pacino is still in diapers, but his 84-year-old father is already imagining the day when he will try to explain what it was like growing up in the Bronx in the 1940s. In his opinion it will sound as absurd as the London of Oliver Twist.