It all started with a conversation between an old man and a bouncer outside the door of an exclusive club.
“This is my party you’re keeping me out of.”
“Really?”
“It’s obvious you don’t know who I am.”
“No. I don’t know who you are.”
This small, bald-headed 80-year old, his white skin speckled with liver spots behind large, Jackie Onassis inspired glasses, stood before the doorman’s six-foot frame and said, “I’m the man who’s going to have you fired in 15 minutes.”
In an instant, the doorman found himself stepping aside as the club owner ushered the old man into the party. And, just as suddenly he found himself on the wrong end of a Swifty Lazar negotiation.
The exchange was between Chazz Palminteri and Irving Lazar, as Palminteri recalls of the event that shaped his life nearly 30 years ago. Today, Palminteri has a long resume in both film and theater. But, in the mid-80s, Mr. Palminteri was only Chazz, a struggling actor with experience as a boxer, moonlighting as a doorman at a club.
Lazar’s career was on the opposite end of the spectrum.
He started out as a bankruptcy lawyer before he pioneered the way for brokering deals between actors and movie houses. In one day, Lazar put together three lucrative deals for Humphrey Bogart. Bogart would later call him “Swifty.” The name stuck. And, before Swifty died in 1993, his long list of clients included Hollywood icons like Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Cary Grant; legendary authors Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote and playwright Tennessee Williams; a U.S. President in Richard Nixon; and Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian novelist at the height of the Cold War.
“I was fired in 15 minutes,” said Palminteri.
The Academy Award nominated actor has told the story many times before, and did so again in the back room of Johnny’s Restaurant in Schenectady, recalling the catalyst that ignited his acting career. Going back to his car. Driving back to the apartment. Feeling the anxiety of running out of money and not knowing what to do next.
“If it wasn’t for my mother and father, I don’t know where I’d be,” said Palminteri. “I grew up on the streets of the Bronx. But, there was always that constant love there that they gave me. That constant: me, not wanting to hurt them; me, wanting to please them; me, wanting them to be proud of me.”
Palminteri said he had always carried a card with him, one in which his father wrote a note down for his son. “The saddest thing in life is wasted talent,” it said. After looking at the card, the young actor said to himself, “If they’re not going to give me a great part, then I’ll write one myself.”
So he wrote “A Bronx Tale.”
“A Bronx Tale” originated as an autobiographical, one-man production off-Broadway. Paminteri penned a coming-of-age story, based on his life in The Bronx. The story is focused on Calogero Anello, a young boy from a working-class family as they live in the 1960s. As the years pass, Young “C” struggles with the choice between following his father’s up-bringing or pursuing the life of organized crime as he’s influenced by a father-figure in Sonny, who is the local mob boss.
“It takes parents to raise a child,” said Palminteri. “I think what we have as a society, and this is a whole other topic, the most important thing in a child’s up-bringing is his parents. It’s really hard. If you look at the lot of people in prison, whether they be black or white, most of them come from broken homes.”
Palminteri brings the story back to the stage as he will perform for one night at Proctors on Sunday, March 22, at 3 p.m.
“It’s a beautiful theater, he said. “So, I’m looking forward to it.”
All the proceeds from the show are to be donated to The Child Reach Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to raise funds for increased research to cure pediatric blood diseases. It’s a charity founded by both Palminteri and his wife, Gianna Ranaudo, with whom they have raised two children.
Thirty years after his chance encounter with Swifty Lazar, Palminteri considers himself a lucky man. He has earned several credits as a performer, a director and a producer in film, television and stage. He even appeared as Salavatore DeLuca in the hit video game “Call of Duty: Black Ops II.”
“Look at my life, you know,” said Palminteri. “I do what I love to do. I get paid well for it. I have healthy children. A great wife. … I mean, I’m living with house money. You know what I mean?”
