Asylum
Hollywood Tales from My Great Depression: Brain
Dis-Ease, Recovery, and Being My Mother’s Son
by Joe Pantoliano
Weinstein Books
While rehearsing a one-act play called “Rats,” actor Joe Pantoliano — best known for his roles on “The Sopranos” and in films like “Risky Business” and “The Matrix” — was having trouble connecting to his character. So he reacted the only way he knew how — with a violent, self-destructive freak-out, as his director and castmates looked on.
“Kneeling onstage in a fetal position . . . I heard a knocking sound. It was me banging my head against the stage floor,” he writes in his new memoir, a chronicle of his dealings with mental illness. “Punishing myself . . . Punching and scratching my face, as if I were trying to escape my human bondage.”
The damage done — described as “raking my nails down my face, from the hairline straight to the bottom of my chin, drawing blood along the way” — was just one harrowing incident that Pantoliano credits to a series of long undiagnosed illnesses including dyslexia, ADHD, clinical depression and even post-tramautic stress disorder.
Pantoliano recounts how these illnesses, and the addictions they created, ran through his family.
Growing up in Hoboken, often living on welfare, his parents were “degenerate gamblers,” and his mother was a font of man-hating negativity who would tell him, “The best man in the world ain’t good enough for the worst whore!”
When he was young, his mother would take him to funerals and make him look at the corpses in their caskets. When she thought he was being bad, she would pretend to call the “asylum,” saying into the phone, “Is this the nuthouse? I need help with a crazy kid. Can you please send a car?” as he weepingly pleaded for her to stop.
As an adult, leaving home was equally traumatic, as his mother physically would not let him leave.
“She closed, then locked, the front door and used her body as a blockade,” he writes, “all the while screaming the lyrics to Connie Francis’ breakthrough song, ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ at the top of her lungs.”
Pantoliano took refuge in movie stars throughout his youth, but even his love of film manifested in sick ways. He fell in love with Maria from “West Side Story,” but his admiration went way beyond a simple schoolboy crush.
“I fell so deeply in love with Natalie Wood’s character that I made myself sick,” he writes. “I was overwhelmed with dread and fear, feeling like I was going to die. [My family] took up a vigil, lighting candles and chanting over the heart-wrenching screams. My great aunt repeated Napolitano prayers, trying to reel the devil from my soul, and I was screaming to high heaven. ‘I WANT MY MARIA! . . . I GOTTA HAVE MY MARIA!’”
(Ironically, Pantoliano later became good friends with Wood and her husband, Robert Wagner, and was invited — but did not go — on the boat trip that resulted in Wood’s death.)
Pantoliano’s disease led to a catalog of vices, and some memorable moments he would prefer to forget.
On Election Night 2000, he found himself watching results with the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Ben Affleck, Gwyneth Paltrow and the Clintons, whom he’d met before.
Already drunk, Pantoliano treated the president and first lady like buddies from the old neighborhood, throwing a too-familiar arm around their shoulders, hugging them and crying on their shoulders.
But his greatest indiscretion came as the president opined about how Al Gore would need to win Florida, and Pantoliano whispered a bit too loudly to a friend, “If he would have kept little Billy and the twins off a navy blue dress in the Lincoln Bedroom, Gore wouldn’t have had to worry about Florida.”
“The president shot me a look,” he writes. “With horrible clarity I realized our 42nd president must have heard me. My ears were ringing when I heard him say abruptly, ‘OK, got to go back to work. Thank you.’ And they left.”
(Pantoliano later met a Secret Service agent who had been there that night who told him that the president wound up laughing about the incident.)
He developed a Vicodin addiction at age 50, and as he worked on a film about mental illness called “Canvas” (tagline: “They’re not crazy. They’re a family”), co-star Marcia Gay Harden’s portrayal of a woman with schizophrenia made him realize for the first time that his own mother might have had mental issues.
The game-changer for him came soon after, when he was finally diagnosed with clinical depression, ADHD and the rest, solving what amounted to a lifelong mystery.
“As [the doctor] and I sat there in silence looking at each other,” he writes, “I realized, I’m 55 years old, and suddenly my life has an explanation.”