"Hookers? Well, I never paid for them, you know. I just gave them all the cocaine they wanted."
-- James Caan, 1999
Jimmy is the son of a kosher butcher.
His dad Arthur is born in a Rhineland spa town. He gets out of Germany when it becomes clear there is no future for the Jews there. In 1934, he meets Sophie, another German immigrant, in New York. They marry and settle in Sunnyside, Queens, in a neighborhood where Italian, Irish and Jewish families mixed--and mixed it up.
Jimmy--no one called him "James"--was born in 1940, the oldest Caan kid. Brother Ronnie and sister Barbara came later.
Arthur is a big guy, squat and thick--he lugs the beef hindquarters by himself and hooks them up. Sophie is an athlete. She golfs. Three holes in one. She will make it to 100 years old.
Little Jimmy is legitimately tough; that's how it has to be. It's a life skill, necessary for survival on the streets, where Jimmy fights. He boxes as a kid. When he's 11 years old his nom de ring is "Killer Caan." Years later, as an old man, he shows people the three blue dots on his right hand. He tells them it's a gang tattoo.
He's a troublemaker, thrown out of a couple of high schools before he's 14. But there's more to the story he doesn't tell. Check the records, you see he graduates from Rhodes School in Manhattan, a private college prep that attracts would-be Ivy Leaguers from all over the world. The school that J.D. Salinger used as a model for Holden Caufield's school in "Catcher in the Rye," a sort of last resort for affluent kids expelled from other private schools.
Jimmy's high school commencement is held in a Waldorf-Astoria ballroom.
Robert De Niro is a classmate. So is Ron Brown, who goes on to be commerce secretary under Bill Clinton.
They call him "Shoulders." He is, at 14, class president. Years later, he'll tell a reporter the administration didn't like that, but "he had his boys." He is "a clown" but he was also "capable."
Jimmy plays piano beautifully.
At 16, he goes off to Michigan State University, where he thinks he'd play football. But even in the '50s, he's undersized at 5'10," 195. He quits or gets cut, depending on who tells the story. (Years later, retired MSU football coach Duffy Daugherty, who'd moved to California to watch the ponies run at Santa Anita, runs into Jimmy. "Hey, you oughta pay me 10 percent of your earnings," Coach says. "I'm the one who told you you couldn't play football.")
Or maybe he just gets homesick. He's a New York Jew in Lansing, Mich.
He comes home and works for his dad, unloading sides of beef at 5 a.m. But not for long. He enrolls in Hofstra University on Long Island. He meets Francis Coppola there. Soon he applies to the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, located a few blocks east of his old high school. At 18, he is on stage, studying with Sanford Meisner. His first four auditions, he gets the part.
It's Jimmy's luck to be James Caan.
A few years later, he's playing chess with John Wayne. "Hey, what's that?" the Duke shouts, and when Jimmy whips his head around, Wayne's rook moves in mysterious ways. So he pops Amurrican Hero John Wayne in the kisser. Another story Jimmy tells.
But they are friendly. Wayne respects that he can't intimidate Jimmy, Jimmy says.
In 1969, Jimmy's back at Hofstra, shooting a movie with fellow alum Coppola. It's called "The Rain People" and Jimmy plays a football player.
A couple of years later, Jimmy is wearing 147 "squibs"--little brass plates cradling an explosive charge beneath a prophylactic filled with fake blood--under his suit at an abandoned Long Island airfield that's dressed up to look like "the Jones Causeway" as actors pretending to be assassins sent by Emilio Barzini pretend to machine-gun him to death.
For all that pretending, every one of those squibs going off was like being struck with a hammer, and Jimmy never would have done it except there were girls on the set and he didn't want to seem unmanly.
While he's shooting "The Godfather," Jimmy hangs out with Carmine 'The Snake" Persico, an underboss of the Colombo crime family (who cut a deal with Coppola to help out with the production so long as the words "Cosa Nostra" stayed out of the script). Undercover feds briefly flagged him as an aspiring mobster.
Now Jimmy's made it. He flies his parents to Beverly Hills. Little brother becomes a producer. Little sister works as Jimmy's assistant, then takes over running his production company. Marriages come and go. Jimmy moves into the Playboy Mansion to get over a broken heart.
He makes a movie called "The Gambler." He plays an English professor who runs up dangerous gambling debts. His bookie is a mobbed-up Paul Sorvino. "The Gambler" is why I don't play the lottery.
He makes another movie--well, he makes a lot of movies in the '70s; his adjusted domestic box office numbers aren't as a high as Robert Redford or Burt Reynolds because he takes chances, making movies like "Slither" with Peter Boyle and Sally Kellerman, or "Cinderella Liberty." He made "Rollerball," based on William Harrison's short story.
He makes "Thief" with Michael Mann.
His sister dies. He quit for a while, to coach his kid's baseball team.
He takes cocaine. He partakes of life.
Paul Schrader, the "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull" writer and director of "Blue Collar," "First Reformed" and "The Card Counter," only met Jimmy once, in 1978:
"I was in Vegas on a Sunday with [writer-director] Jim Toback playing the sports book. Last game of the day. There were six-eight of us in Caan's large MGM suite. We were all clothed except Caan, who was naked. Don't know why. He was in great shape. Maybe that was the reason.
"We'd bet opposite sides of the game ... My bet was smallish, Caan's largish. James Caan became increasingly upset with my increasingly vocal cheering. Words were exchanged. Next thing I know he has his hands on me. My reaction was to respond but at the last moment sanity intervened. 'I'm not going to get in a fight with a bulked-up naked actor in his suite surrounded by four of his thuggish buds', it occurred to me. So I split and headed for the airport and watched in the lounge as Caan's team beat the spread."
Jimmy won. But nobody wins forever.
His money doesn't last, he comes crawling back to the business. You might like the movie but I don't like to think of Jimmy in "Mickey Blue Eyes." Jimmy in "Elf" with Will Ferrell. Jimmy being bemused by Wes Anderson's homemade methods on "Bottle Rockets."
This guy I don't know. He's a pro, sure, he hits his marks, he shows up. But long careers don't suit everyone.
I think of him in that booth, across from Tuesday Weld in that all-night diner, with him holding that unlit cigarette and her asking him, "Where were you in prison; would you pass the cream please?"
I didn't know until last weekend it was Jimmy's favorite scene he'd ever done. Mine too.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].