When Analyze This premiers in 1999, I swear I spot my cousin Richie next to Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal. WTF! I track down his sister, Cousin Carol, in Brooklyn, and she proclaims him “a star!” (The whole family exaggerates.) “Richie got me on the set! Robert De Niro kissed me on the cheek!”
As “Jimmy Boots,” De Niro’s "dese and dose" bodyguard, Richie croaks just 16 lines (“What are you, some kind of moron?” among the most memorable), but like a viral vector, the exposure is more than enough for him to infect an exponentially bigger—and much more naïve—population than a Park Slope bar or the streets along the Gowanus Canal.
I’d spent time in Hollywood—most journalists think about it—I’d seen the throngs of unemployed young actors clustered Sunday mornings in Studio City, futilely comparing notes and filching casting calls. You want Italian? I met dozens: New York-Italian, Chicago-Italian, San Francisco-Italian, blueblood Italians from Rome and Milan; artistic, handsome, beautiful, stupid, charming, effeminate, dangerous, talented Italians—Chazz Palminteri was parking cars!—none of them going anywhere. And here was Richie, strutting and fretting, giving advice and television interviews, fabricating madly: “….. I come from a big family with mob connections. When I was a kid I saw people killed... by the time I was 12 or 13 years old I was an alcoholic. That was the only life I ever knew, the only thing... So I was a street guy, a bank robber (N.B. gas station becomes bank; bank will become shoe store). And in order to survive, one of the skills you got to develop is acting. I been shot, beaten to a pulp with lead pipes, you name it, at various times in my past life—I’ve even been pronounced DOA one time when they took me to hospital. Altogether I survived ten contracts on my life – ten…” See(http://richardcastellano.tripod.com/interv.html). His claim about being dead might be true. What Richie didn’t say, what I recall, is that he overdosed, probably on Tuinals or Seconals, and his brother, Popeye Anthony, an ambulance driver, found him on President Street.
Richie now had an agent; he had a website; he was organizing a film festival. He had a French wife!
I didn’t. It was too much.
Richie was no longer a cousin, or a “colorful” Gowanus character. Richard Castellano, ne Castaldo, was a story. At Newsweek, my editor Terry McDonell had me spend a month with the Rolling Stones; at Men’s Journal he’d ordered me to Hanoi after I mentioned a popular disco named “Apocalypse Now.” (He made me eat snakes.) At Esquire, he’d sent me to the New Mexican desert to find Jimmy Baca, a mad Apache poet who’d taught himself to read in prison and held Wallace Stevens’s chair at Yale. (He made me eat mushrooms.) But Terry was no longer at Esquire—he’d temporarily been banished to a fishing magazine—and the new Esquire editor, a baldy suburbanite, didn’t know me or care about Richie. This was a shame, because Richie and his new wife, Jocelyne Castellano, aka Jocelyne Castaldo-Castellano, aka Maria Jocelyne Castellano, aka Marie-Helene Rousseau aka Marie Rousseau (the “aka's" are significant), had moved to bucolic Narrowsberg, N.Y., and were plotting to rip off the entire citizenry, a scam so outlandish it would wind up a few years later on NPR’s “This American Life.”
(To be continued)
As “Jimmy Boots,” De Niro’s "dese and dose" bodyguard, Richie croaks just 16 lines (“What are you, some kind of moron?” among the most memorable), but like a viral vector, the exposure is more than enough for him to infect an exponentially bigger—and much more naïve—population than a Park Slope bar or the streets along the Gowanus Canal.
I’d spent time in Hollywood—most journalists think about it—I’d seen the throngs of unemployed young actors clustered Sunday mornings in Studio City, futilely comparing notes and filching casting calls. You want Italian? I met dozens: New York-Italian, Chicago-Italian, San Francisco-Italian, blueblood Italians from Rome and Milan; artistic, handsome, beautiful, stupid, charming, effeminate, dangerous, talented Italians—Chazz Palminteri was parking cars!—none of them going anywhere. And here was Richie, strutting and fretting, giving advice and television interviews, fabricating madly: “….. I come from a big family with mob connections. When I was a kid I saw people killed... by the time I was 12 or 13 years old I was an alcoholic. That was the only life I ever knew, the only thing... So I was a street guy, a bank robber (N.B. gas station becomes bank; bank will become shoe store). And in order to survive, one of the skills you got to develop is acting. I been shot, beaten to a pulp with lead pipes, you name it, at various times in my past life—I’ve even been pronounced DOA one time when they took me to hospital. Altogether I survived ten contracts on my life – ten…” See(http://richardcastellano.tripod.com/interv.html). His claim about being dead might be true. What Richie didn’t say, what I recall, is that he overdosed, probably on Tuinals or Seconals, and his brother, Popeye Anthony, an ambulance driver, found him on President Street.
Richie now had an agent; he had a website; he was organizing a film festival. He had a French wife!
I didn’t. It was too much.
Richie was no longer a cousin, or a “colorful” Gowanus character. Richard Castellano, ne Castaldo, was a story. At Newsweek, my editor Terry McDonell had me spend a month with the Rolling Stones; at Men’s Journal he’d ordered me to Hanoi after I mentioned a popular disco named “Apocalypse Now.” (He made me eat snakes.) At Esquire, he’d sent me to the New Mexican desert to find Jimmy Baca, a mad Apache poet who’d taught himself to read in prison and held Wallace Stevens’s chair at Yale. (He made me eat mushrooms.) But Terry was no longer at Esquire—he’d temporarily been banished to a fishing magazine—and the new Esquire editor, a baldy suburbanite, didn’t know me or care about Richie. This was a shame, because Richie and his new wife, Jocelyne Castellano, aka Jocelyne Castaldo-Castellano, aka Maria Jocelyne Castellano, aka Marie-Helene Rousseau aka Marie Rousseau (the “aka's" are significant), had moved to bucolic Narrowsberg, N.Y., and were plotting to rip off the entire citizenry, a scam so outlandish it would wind up a few years later on NPR’s “This American Life.”
(To be continued)
