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DeVito!
Although He Has a Penchant for Dark Comedies, Actor-Director Danny
DeVito Is Serious About His Craft, His Family and His Cigars
by David Shaw
Monday is gardener's day on Danny DeVito's narrow
cul-de-sac high above Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. On this
particular Monday, the crowded street is, as usual, alive with the
sounds of more power mowers, leaf blowers, pickup trucks and foreign
accents than you can shake a rake at. Navigating the street to turn
into DeVito's driveway is like trying to maneuver among the
cheek-by-jowl stalls of some international open-air market.
But inside the DeVito compound--behind the large,
electronically controlled gate and the security system--all is
tranquil. The master of the house--52 years old, 5 feet tall, balding,
a little overweight--is strolling about in a long-sleeve blue shirt,
dark blue slacks and rubber shower sandals. His shirt is open at the
collar. Both shirt cuffs are also unbuttoned (but not rolled up),
and for some inexplicable reason, he's wearing the shower sandals over
socks. As he shuffles down the driveway, greeting a visitor and
various staff members with the same blend of warmth and wisecracks for
which his on-screen persona is best known, he seems like the world's
shortest--and most relaxed--pasha.
"Park here and give your car key to Penny," he says,
pointing to one of his assistants. Then, grinning, sotto voce to
Penny: "See how much you can get for the car." Penny laughs. We walk
inside.
"How about some coffee," he says, then--sotto voce to
Pam, another aide--"Try using the good stuff for a change, OK?"
Everyone laughs. Obviously and justifiably pleased
with himself, DeVito escorts his guest to the patio--one of two at the
house--and almost immediately, tranquility yields to what appears to
be pent-up frustration and anger. Unprompted, DeVito begins
complaining about studio and media treatment of his most recent movie,
Matilda, which he directed and starred in and which he has a
special feeling about because it was based on a Roald Dahl book that
was first brought to his attention by his then-10-year-old daughter,
Lucy.
Matilda, like many DeVito movies (and several
Dahl books), is a dark comedy, the story of a little girl who is a
budding genius but whose vulgar, dim-witted parents (played by DeVito
and his real-life wife, Rhea Perlman) are too self-absorbed to notice
or care. Matilda is sent to a school run by a principal whom one
critic called "the most disgusting, sadistic, terrifying principal
I've ever seen." But with the help of a sympathetic teacher and her
own telekinetic powers, Matilda ultimately prevails on both the
domestic and scholastic fronts.
Many critics praised DeVito's direction ("bravely
subversive dramatization"--The Washington Post) and his
acting ("DeVito can certainly be forgiven for stealing his own movie,
since he does it in such jaunty high style"--The New York
Times), and the trade paper Variety predicted upon its
release that Matilda had "definite sleeper potential and could
very well outgross many more highly publicized and star-studded summer
releases." But other critics found the movie too harsh, cruel and
scary for young children, and it wound up something of a domestic box
office disappointment in certain quarters, given what it cost to make.
The film took in more than $8 million in gross
receipts the weekend it opened, but audiences shriveled fairly quickly
thereafter, and in the eighth week of its release, it took in only
$108,000. Still, it grossed more than $30 million by summer's end, and
as DeVito points out, it wound up "the number one non-Disney family
film of the summer."
"With the foreign box office receipts and video,
it'll go through the roof," DeVito says. "It's not Independence
Day, but is that what the studios and the media are telling
us--'You either do ID4 numbers or you're a flop'? That's sick."
He pauses. "Besides, if the studio had really gotten behind
Matilda...." His voice trails off.
Didn't he urge the studio to support it vigorously?
Didn't he complain when it didn't?
"Sure. But if the studio is not behind your movie
totally, you can call and fax and complain about ads and do anything
else you want, and it's like pissing in the wind."
Complaining about "the studio"--in this case, Sony
Pictures and its TriStar subsidiary--is as common in Hollywood as
complaining about the White House in Washington, D.C., even for
someone as successful, respected and well-liked as DeVito, who has
acted in, directed and/or produced more than 50 films.
"Hollywood is a jungle," DeVito says. "It's full of
quicksand, vermin and flesh-eating beasts. Making a movie is not a
walk in the park. Every movie is like navigating treacherous
terrain.... There are a lot of good people in Hollywood, but every
once in a while, someone gets a top studio job who doesn't know
anything about filmmaking...doesn't know what the fuck it is to make a
movie."
DeVito is especially incensed, he says, that the
studio leaked word to the media that Matilda cost almost $50
million to make, rather than the $35 million acknowledged by DeVito's
production company, Jersey Films. DeVito insists the $35 million
figure is correct, and he worries that given the box office returns so
far, the $50 million figure "sends a message [to the investment
community] that non-Disney kid movies don't make money.
"Why would a studio want to do that?" he asks. "Is
that the way you want to go to sleep at night--thinking, 'Wow, I
really fucked that movie up!'?"
This is not the first time that DeVito has clashed
with Sony, which may account for the intensity of his anger today. But
on Matilda, he had to suffer an added indignity: "The studio
wouldn't let me smoke on the set." DeVito says he lit up a cigar once
and was told it was against fire department regulations, so he
promised not to do it again. "But they hired a full-time fireman to
keep an eye on me anyway--and they made us pay for it."
Fortunately, DeVito has always been enormously
popular with his crews, and the crew on Matilda quickly erected
a special "smoking tent" for him outside the sound stage, outfitting
it with chairs, a table, a telephone, plants and a large ashtray.
"I like to smoke when I'm working," DeVito
says. "Usually, I smoke one cigar a day, after lunch, but when I'm
working, I smoke more. It helps relax me."
DeVito says his father smoked DeNobilis, an
inexpensive, Italian-style, machine-made cigar that young Danny found
"a little rough" for his adolescent taste. In his early days as an
Off-Off-Broadway actor in New York, he occasionally bought some
DeNobilis himself, but he says cigars were "mostly on the back burner"
for him for a long time, and he came to appreciate them only
gradually.
In the late 1970s and early '80s, when he was
starring in the hit television series "Taxi," in which he played the
lovable louse Louie DePalma, he and the other key players in the show
got into the habit of coming together for various special
occasions--birthdays, weddings, the opening of a new season--to have a
nice meal, open a box of Cuban cigars and join in a celebratory smoke.
It wasn't until meeting Arnold Schwarzenegger
that DeVito began to smoke cigars regularly. While filming
Twins in 1987, Schwarzenegger gave him a box of
cigars. "I was on a major diet then," DeVito recalls, "so Arnold being
Arnold, he also gave me a dozen pastries."
DeVito didn't eat all the pastries. But he did smoke
all the cigars, and sometime after that, he began making them part of
his routine--first just on weekends and now, every day. His favorites
are all Cubans. He began with Cohibas, switched to Partagas Serie D
No. 4 after a few years and recently switched again, to
Diplomaticos. "Now I'm starting to have a big leaning toward
Bolivars," DeVito says. "It depends on my mood and where I am and what
I'm doing. When I'm not working on a movie, I like to get up in the
morning and take the kids to school, come home and read and work out
and have a good lunch and come outside and fire up. A Bolivar seems
nice then."
As DeVito speaks, his two dogs--Ocean and
Pepper--walk over, looking for a little attention. He pets them both
and, in his sternest director's voice, tells them to go away. They
ignore him and lie down. But all this cigar talk reminds him of his
favorite cigar story:
"I was flying to Europe right after we finished
The War of the Roses. It was an all-night flight. We had a
great meal and they were going to pour some Port and I had a stogie
with me and there were only a handful of people in first class. I had
had a couple of drinks and I was with friends and I was feeling
good. It was just the perfect time for a nice stogie. The flight
attendants had been real friendly, so I said, 'Boy, I would really
love to fire up now.' They said, 'You really can't.' I asked why
not. They said the passengers would be really upset. I said, 'What if
I asked every passenger on the plane--first class, coach, everyone--if
they minded?' One of the flight attendants said, 'Well, OK, if you get
everyone's permission.'
"I got up and walked the full length of the plane and
said hello to everyone who was awake and asked if I could
smoke. Everyone said OK. But there was one guy in the back of the
first-class cabin who said, 'There is no way you are going to light up
a cigar on this airplane' "--DeVito smiles his slyly malevolent movie
smile--"'unless you give me one.'"
DeVito fairly cackles with joy at the recollection.
"It was the most enjoyable transatlantic flight I
ever had."
Danny DeVito was born in 1944 in the shore town of
Neptune, New Jersey--hence the name of his production company--and
raised in neighboring Asbury Park, the youngest of five children (two
of whom died before he was born). His father owned a pool hall, and
Danny became adept with a cue at a young age; even now, he has a pool
table in his home. He was a streetwise teenager whose love of movies
and sense of the theatrical developed early. Once, while eating ice
cream with some friends--one of whom happened to have a starter's
pistol--he decided on a bit of impromptu street theater: he staged a
fight that involved a phony shootout between two of his friends, after
which he and his cohorts jumped into a car owned by the father of one
of the friends and raced off into the dark night, while bystanders
gaped in stunned silence. DeVito later restaged the event and filmed
it as A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening.
But he didn't go straight from the streets of Jersey
to the sound stages of Hollywood. There were several detours along the
way.
"I wasn't sure what I wanted to do when I got out of
high school," he says. College didn't seem a likely or desirable
option, "and I didn't want to go too far away [from home]. I was sort
of hanging out at the house, and one day, my sister Angela said, 'Why
don't you become a hairdresser and work for me at my salon?' I
figured, well, I'm not doing anything else, and I could meet a lot of
girls there."
Girls had not played an especially large role in
DeVito's adolescent life, in part because of his height. "When I was
young, I always wished I were taller," he says. "I was plagued; I
couldn't slow-dance with the girls I wanted to because my face would
be in a spot where I might be thought of as"--shy grin--"moving too
fast."
DeVito says his diminutive stature made him a bit
bashful as a youngster. It also made him a target for neighborhood
toughs. "I took a lot of lumps," he says, "but I had a lot of friends
who helped me and looked out for me."
DeVito didn't have any major romances in his sister's
beauty salon, and after 18 months, he realized he could probably make
more money as a cosmetician than as a hairdresser. He saw an ad and
tried to enroll in a makeup class at the American Academy of Dramatic
Arts in New York. To get into the school, DeVito had to do a
monologue. A longtime film buff-- "ever since I saw Battle of
Algiers" (the 1965 masterpiece by Gillo Pontecorvo)--he figured
that he might as well take some acting classes, too.
It didn't take long for him to see that acting was
his true calling. After two years at the American Academy, he got a
job in summer theater and went to the Eugene O'Neill Foundation in
Waterford, Connecticut, where he met Michael Douglas, later to become
a major figure in his life, both personally and professionally. About
that time, DeVito read the serialization of Truman Capote's In Cold
Blood in The New Yorker, and when he heard that the book
was being turned into a movie, he decided he just had to play one of
the killers, Perry Smith. He headed for Hollywood. Robert Blake had
already been cast for the part, but DeVito stuck around for a while
anyway.
"I worked as a car parker and I hung around the
Sunset Strip with all the flower children," he says. "I had long hair
and I wore a raincoat and sneakers and I fit right in. But I wanted to
act."
People told DeVito, "Nobody wants a five-foot
character actor," so he returned to New York, began making a few films
with his own 8mm camera and worked in a few Off-Broadway and
Off-Off-Broadway productions. At a performance of one of them, The
Shrinking Bride, an aspiring actress from Brooklyn named Rhea
Perlman was in the audience to see a friend, who was also in the
cast. The three of them went out afterward. Two weeks later, DeVito
and Perlman were living together in a Manhattan apartment that
they sublet from Douglas.
In 1970, DeVito landed a role in a stage revival of
Ken Kesey's classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and soon
thereafter, he was making frequent appearances in small films and
producing his own even smaller films. Then, in 1975, came DeVito's
first big break: Douglas produced the movie version of One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest and asked DeVito to reprise his
Off-Broadway role. Cuckoo became the first movie in 40 years to
sweep the top five Academy Awards--best picture, actor, actress,
director and screenplay--and even though DeVito himself didn't win an
Oscar, the movie gave him both the visibility he had previously lacked
and yet another powerful friend: Cuckoo star Jack Nicholson.
Ironically, Nicholson had grown up just a few towns
away from DeVito in New Jersey. (The two had never met,
although DeVito says that when Nicholson first went to Hollywood, he
heard quite a bit about the local boy who was trying to become a movie
star.) After working together on Cuckoo, "Jack started telling
every director he worked with that he should hire me," DeVito recalls,
the gratitude still evident in his tone of voice. Not too many
directors followed Nicholson's advice, but DeVito found enough roles
on his own to shed whatever residual insecurities he had about his
height.
"Once I started acting, I realized that my size made
me unique," he says. "That opened me up, made me deal with it in a
positive way and see the positive side of it. Hell, if I was one of
six guys auditioning for a role, I knew I'd be the one who was most
different from the others--and maybe that would be just what the
director was looking for."
DeVito teamed with Nicholson again in Goin'
South and that same year--1978--he began his five-year run as
Louie DePalma, the adorably tyrannical dispatcher in "Taxi" (a role
that won him a best supporting actor Emmy in 1981). He originally got
the role after flinging the script on a table during his audition and
saying, "One thing I want to know before we start: Who wrote this
shit?" That flip, smart-ass attitude became an integral part of
Louie's character--and of many, if not most of the characters that
DeVito has played since.
When ABC canceled "Taxi" after a four-year run,
DeVito was devastated. He thought the show had the creative energy and
audience popularity to last another five years. He later told
Playboy, "I don't think that the people at ABC gave a good
rat's ass about 'Taxi.' " NBC picked "Taxi" up for a year, which gave
the cast and crew a brief, bittersweet reprieve, but by then, DeVito
was A Star.
He teamed again with Jack Nicholson in Terms of
Endearment and with Douglas in Romancing the Stone and
The Jewel of the Nile, and he went on to perfect his
demonically comic, funny-but-sinister persona in a series of
high-visibility movies--Ruthless People, Wise Guys
(DeVito's first top billing), Throw Momma From the Train
(his directorial debut), Tin Men and The War of the
Roses.
Douglas calls DeVito the "Prince of Darkness;" but
perhaps because DeVito is so small, perhaps because his head is a bit
large for his body, perhaps because there is almost always at least an
undercurrent of humor in his behavior, DeVito seems vaguely cartoonish
on the screen, even when he's being nasty and brutish. As a result,
the audience never sees him as entirely villainous. He always arouses
a certain empathy, if not sympathy, from audiences.
"I love slapstick," he says. "I'm a big fan of Jerry
Lewis and the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. But my heart
belongs to dark comedy. I feel a kindred spirit to that kind of
humor. I like movies that point out the absurdities in life."
DeVito especially enjoys directing--"film is a
collaborative effort, but the director has the final say"--and having
acted in Twins and Junior with Schwarzenegger, he says
he'd really like to direct him in a movie. "He's a very good actor,
very spirited and dedicated to his work. I loved working with him. But
he has to take the next step now. He keeps doing the same movies over
and over again. He has to take some chances."
Has he told Schwarzenegger this?
"No." Big smile. "I'm telling you."
DeVito has taken some chances himself, most notably
with Hoffa, the 1992 dramatized biography of the former
Teamsters union boss that marked DeVito's first major producing
credit. Hoffa was DeVito's most ambitious--and most
controversial--project. He acted in it and directed it, and his work
generally drew high praise. "DeVito emerges here as a director of
impressive visual scope and flair," said Kenneth Turan in the Los
Angeles Times. Vincent Canby, writing in The New York
Times, called Hoffa "a remarkable movie, an original and vivid
cinematic work...conceived with imagination and a consistent point of
view."
But many critics objected to what they saw as
DeVito's (and screenwriter David Mamet's) overly sanitized view of
Hoffa, the labor leader turned convicted felon who disappeared and was
presumed murdered in 1975. When Hoffa was released, DeVito was
quoted as defending his version of Hoffa--portrayed brilliantly by
Jack Nicholson--as a man with the "biggest balls in the world,"
someone who, "in my opinion, from what I've learned about him...would
have made a great president...of the United States." Nevertheless many
denounced the film's glossing over of Hoffa's ties to the Mafia, the
plundering of the Teamsters Union treasury during his tenure and the
pervasive efforts to corrupt public officials. They also questioned
the one-sided portrayal of Attorney General Robert Kennedy as a
power-hungry egomaniac versus Hoffa, the crusading, working man's
hero. DeVito says, "Our research led us to believe we were right." But
the controversy still makes him a little uncomfortable. "I am sorry
about one thing with Hoffa," he says. "I understand the
Kennedys were hurt by it and I regret that....Would I make Hoffa
2? Probably not."
But Hoffa did not sour DeVito on
producing--far from it--and Jersey Films has since been responsible
for a string of unusual and highly respected movies, among them
Reality Bites, Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty and
Matilda. Unhappy at Sony/TriStar, where for four years
Jersey had what is known in Hollywood as "an overall deal" (in
which the studio finances and distributes the movie), DeVito
has recently moved his production company to Universal Studios. Sony
"didn't want to make...our movies," he says. "What's the matter, man?"
He feigns sniffing both his armpits. "I felt absolutely alone at
Sony."
DeVito becomes very passionate about, and totally
committed to, the movies he takes on. It's part of his charm, his
success and his popularity with his collaborators. At one point in the
negotiations with TriStar over Pulp Fiction, he stood on an
executive's desk and insisted the executive not leave the room until a
particular point of the deal was settled. The executive finally
agreed to give DeVito what he wanted on that point, but TriStar wound
up passing on Pulp Fiction, which was made for Miramax Films,
much as Reality Bites was made for Universal and Get
Shorty was made for MGM.
Several other prominent producers have also left Sony
recently, so DeVito is hardly alone in his disenchantment with the
company, which has been undergoing major upheavals for the past
couple of years. Now happily ensconced at Universal, he and his
Jersey colleagues Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher are looking forward
to the release next spring of Gattaca, a futuristic movie about
the dangers of genetic engineering. They are also awaiting a script on
Out of Sight, based on the latest novel by Elmore Leonard, who
also wrote Get Shorty.
In Get Shorty, a loan shark from Miami who
wants to make movies says, "I don't think the producer has to do much,
outside of maybe knowing a writer," and while DeVito got a big chuckle
out of that line, he says today what everyone who actually does make
movies knows: "Producing is hard work. You have to deal with
accountants and lawyers who have no idea what really goes into making
a movie. It's a constant fight. Like when I was growing up in Jersey,
you have to keep running away from the bad guys." He shakes his
head. "But fighting a battle and winning is fun. And this
business is fun. I love it. It's the greatest business in the world."
Part of what makes the movies fun for DeVito is the
variety--acting, directing, producing, promoting. Two days after our
interview, he joined the cast of Michael Douglas' newest production,
Rainmaker, to be directed by Francis Ford Coppola, based on
John Grisham's best-selling novel. He's also constantly on the lookout
for fresh directing and producing projects.
DeVito enjoys new challenges and--already a computer
buff, with a special, newly installed line at his house for connecting
at high speed to the World Wide Web--his newest interest is mastering
the Internet, for which Jersey Films is now developing its own Web
page.
"You can't beat it as a movie marketing tool, as an
information tool," he says. "I'd love to be able to go on-line when
we're making a movie and tell people what's going on behind the
scenes. What a way to build an audience."
DeVito has six computers at home--three belong to his
children, Lucy, now 13; Gracie, 11; and Jake, 9--and he says he spends
about an hour a day "surfing the Net." A devoted father, he
increasingly tries to avoid going out of town unless he can take the
family with him; when he is on location, he takes his laptop and
digital camera and sends photographs to his children by computer:
"Here's me. Here's my hotel room in Australia. This is the view from
my balcony at night."
He's very serious about, and very protective of, his
children. Always has been. "My dad told me that my baby sister died at
one month after she was exposed to someone who came to the house with
whooping cough," he recalls. "When I had my first baby, I wouldn't let
anyone but Rhea near her for two weeks. Our relatives were up in
arms. But I stuck to it and Rhea backed me up."
Are his children equally protective of him? How do
they feel about his cigars, for example? "They question me about
them. It's a real tough subject to talk about with your kids. They
don't want you to be hurt. They want to protect you. So I explain
about how you don't inhale cigars." He also tells them that cigars
aren't addictive and that he doesn't smoke that many of
them.
At home, DeVito says, he avoids smoking in or near
the children's bedrooms and tries to smoke only on the patios or his
screening room or smoking room, "although I sometimes fire up at the
dinner table after a dinner party when I just can't move."
He laughs and stands for only the second time in the
two hours he's been talking. We walk across the patio, into his
screening room and down a narrow, winding stairway to the smoking
room. It's paneled with dark wood and filled with overstuffed
furniture and more than a dozen ashtrays. He opens a medium-sized
humidor--"I have three of them, plus a couple of traveling
humidors"--and lights up an Hoyo de Monterrey robusto.
"What I really like," he says, "is to sit with a
bunch of guys and have a nice meal and smoke a few cigars." But his
rhapsodizing is interrupted by a phone call; it's his wife and
occasional co-star. Perlman, who won four Emmys for her portrayal of
Carla, the wisecracking waitress in "Cheers," is calling from the set
of "Pearl," the new CBS sitcom that she co-produces and stars in as a
middle-aged college student opposite Malcolm McDowell, who plays the
snooty Professor Pynchon. (Educating Rita comes to prime
time.) DeVito and Perlman swap reports on their day's
activities--"I'm a man of leisure this week," DeVito says--and he
laughs repeatedly at her account of life in episodic television. Then,
a man of leisure indeed, he strolls back to the sofa, takes a deep
drag on his cigar, smiles beatifically and says, "This is the life,
huh?"
David Shaw, the Pulitzer Prize-winning media
critic for the Los Angeles Times, is the author of The
Pleasure Police: How Bluenose Busybodies and Lily-Livered Alarmists
Are Taking All the Fun Out of Life (Doubleday, 1996).
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