Joe Dallesandro: Warhol Superstar, Underground Film Icon, Actor
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Joe Dallesandro: Warhol Superstar, Underground Film Icon, Actor
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Overview
The renowned photographer Francesco Scavullo has called Joe Dallesandro “one of the ten most photogenic men in the world.” Springing to fame at the beginning of the sexual revolution in films such as Flesh, Trash, and Heat, Dallesandro, with the help of his mentor, Paul Morrissey, and pop artist Andy Warhol, became a male sex symbol in the film world unlike any before him. His casual nakedness and characteristic cool in the Warhol Factory’s irreverent, now-classic films earned attention that crossed gender lines and liberated the male nude as an object of beauty in the cinema.
In this biofilmography, an update and revision of Little Joe, Superstar, Michael Ferguson explores not only Dallesandro’s Warhol years, but his troubled childhood on the streets of New York, in juvenile detention, as physique model, and on the run. Ferguson examines all of Dallesandro’s films: the eight made with Warhol and Morrissey, including the X-rated Frankenstein and Dracula, the post-Factory career in both art-world and low-budget films abroad, and his works as character actor upon his return to America.
Including new interviews with Dallesandro, photographs from the actor’s personal collection, and an extensive biographical section, Joe Dallesandro is the ultimate guide to an underground film icon who, according to Andy Warhol, “everyone was in love with.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504006545 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 02/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 401 |
| File size: | 20 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Joe Dallesandro
Warhol Superstar, Underground Film Icon, Actor
By Michael Ferguson
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2011 Michael FergusonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0654-5
CHAPTER 1
Little Joe, Superstar
"When people ask me how do I feel about being in the movies, about having my pictures in the movie ads every day, I don't like to say I don't feel anything, because sure, I do. But it's not like a lot of people probably think I should feel. I don't want to sound conceited. I mean—I'm just Little Joe—and I hope people like me." —Joe Dallesandro, age 20, July 1969 in Action World: An Entertainment Guide to New York.
"Whatever isn't in there, just make it up." That was Joe Dallesandro's catchy credo as expressed to journalists during the earliest days of his fame when he learned that any exposure was better than no exposure at all.
"One of the first interviews that I'd done really set me off," he explains. "It was with Rex Reed. He'd done this interview and he wrote this shit, picking up on some of the stuff I had said but then getting it confused. He elaborated on these little things I'd said, and I could really have cared less, but he was off on his facts and he wrote that my father had been married one more time than he was, or something similar, and it really upset my dad. That it upset my father, it upset me, and it made me really hate Rex for years. It also made me kind of shy about how I did my interviews because something could be read the wrong way, misconstrued—or if it was my fault and I didn't get the facts exactly right, people could get offended."
He takes the time to both name and count his father's wives. 1, 2, 3, uh, 4.
"That was four, not five—that's not bad. He gets mad if I get the facts wrong. Even if he's gone. [Joe's father passed away in 1993.] I'm sure he'd get pissed off if I said five and there were only four."
I expected Joe Dallesandro to be disquietingly quiet, perhaps so low-key that I'd have to affix my tape-recorder microphone to his chin just to register a reply when I first interviewed him in the summer of 1995.
So much for being smart enough not to confuse the movie image with the actor who provides it.
Joe, in fact, can be quite the lively conversationalist. True to his urban roots, he talks like the inner city kid he still harbors inside, casually dispersing his fucks throughout conversation and tending to lapse in and out of first-person present-tense dialogues when recalling conversations and events from his distant past.
"All this stuff is true," he reassured me. "Because when you make up shit about your life it's too hard to remember."
And yet, with almost Warholian counter-logic, he is still fond of telling the reporters to wing it. He rarely reads the finished product.
It's because, I think, he's the real thing.
In 1973, for the hell of it, Norman Mailer socked a silent Joe in the arm at a party and was happily and unexpectedly the recipient of a return blow to the stomach, causing the writer to proclaim loudly to the rest of the crowd that he'd found the only real man in the whole place.
Not schooled in the studio-bred refineries of giving good PR, his voice, his word choice, and his manner come directly from a life lived on hard streets and through hard times. He's just a kid from the neighborhood who has found himself in the creepy realm of celebrity where unnatural significance is assigned to every ordinary thing a guy does.
His earliest interviews capture a charming naiveté, an inability to be much other than himself—though perhaps with a tendency toward exaggerating the cocky, rough-and-tumble sort of scrapper he wanted others to see. This has caused some writers to comment on his simplicity and others to come away seriously mistaken about his intellect.
Viewing Joe through elitist eyes is a mistake, however. He's a good storyteller if you get him going and he holds nothing back when it comes to offering an opinion on person, place, or thing. He seems as largely devoid of ego when talking about his career and the famous people whom he's encountered as you'd hope a regular Joe like Joe would be. He's not a name-dropper. You have to ask him about the rich and famous he's rubbed up against.
So what happens when Joe Dallesandro speaks, when an appealingly enigmatic Superstar of the underground film movement of the sixties and seventies at long last decides to talk in detail about his life and his career?
For myself, there was the fear of demystifying a potent mystery. Maybe I don't want to know what Joe was thinking when he did that scene in Flesh (1968). Maybe it'll spoil it if I find out that he has a different attitude than him. Or just maybe I'll discover that even Joe doesn't know who that "other Joe" is or what he can possibly mean to his fans. After all, once committed to film, the actor no longer owns the image. In a sense, he belongs to us.
Joseph Angelo D'Alessandro III was born December 31, 1948, in Pensacola, Florida. His father was an 18-year old Italian-American sailor at the time, stationed at the naval base there, who had married 14-year old Thelma Testman. Joe Sr. had been trained as an electrical engineer. His occupation would often take him between New York City and his Florida home base. Joey had been born when Thelma was just 16. (The birth certificate spelling of the family name was "D'Allesandro," repeating a mistake from his father's military papers. After Joe became famous, his dad had his own name legally changed back and thus corrected to D'Alessandro.)
It was in New York, almost exactly one year later, on December 28, 1949, that Thelma gave birth to the couple's second son, Robert. There was trouble ahead for the D'Alessandro's, however, even beyond the challenge of having children when the mother was so young. Sandy, as Thelma was now nicknamed in an abbreviation of D'Alessandro, was arrested in Florida for interstate auto theft and subsequently convicted and sentenced to five years in a Federal penitentiary.
Joe Sr. maintained custody of their children in the separation and divorce that was to follow. He took the boys up to New York with him. But maintaining full responsibility over his sons was something he felt he couldn't do. Apparently it was a burden no one in the family felt capable of handling. Even with other relatives in the area, including a grandmother, the boys ended up at Angel Guardian Home awaiting foster care. They were housed separately, with Joe in Harlem and Bob at the Brooklyn branch, since the younger brother wasn't yet potty-trained.
The facility was very inner city and populated largely with minority children, according to Joe. The severance from family had to be devastating to the boys, but much of what Joe remembers about his time there is informed by what he was told years later. Being white was an advantage, for instance.
"I'd walk up to the glass window and say, 'Will you be my mommy?'" Joe recalls. "And, of course, a white person looking down at the only white person in this institution in Harlem wasn't going to say, 'No, I'll take the black boy over there.' So pretty much I had the choice of any white person who walked in there. It was just a matter of deciding which one I was going to say 'Will you be my mommy?' to, and it was hard. I didn't want to say it. So, you see, events in my life prepared me to be the kind of actor who could just come in off the streets and do it. I was taught to deliver lines when I was very young."
Not only did this impact the psyche of a little boy of three or four now suddenly surrounded by strangers and vaguely aware that he was being looked at by people who might want to take him away, but it also made him fearful that such a decision would mean he would go alone, leaving his little brother Bob behind, signifying its own kind of abandonment unavoidably understood as no one's fault but his own.
Fortunately, when a foster family did step forward and make the choice, they decided not to split up the brothers. Joey and Bobby D'Alessandro went out as a parcel to a couple who already had two kids and lived in Brooklyn. The boys began what would become a full decade of their formative years in the foster care setting.
Joe went to Catholic school in Brooklyn until the second grade, when the family moved to North Babylon, Long Island, where the curriculum wasn't as tough. The school had to shuffle him back and forth a grade or two to find out where he belonged.
Joe Sr. would come and visit approximately once a month.
The visits, as welcome as they were, also were double-edged. Joe says, "You know, when your father comes to visit you once a month, or at least tries to, he's the greatest dad in the world. For one day out of the fucking month it's easy to be the best person in the world. And so the people who kept us in foster care, they became the evil ones because they kept me from seeing my father all of the time. Every time I'd come back, I wouldn't want to come back. You want to stay with your real dad."
The dislocation and pervasive sense of not really belonging to anybody brewed restlessness and invited trouble, something Joe soon found. He claims that he was consistent, if not outstanding, in school up to the point where he hit puberty. The combination of hormones, rebellion, competition, and a growing sense of resentment over his family situation began to fester. Singing in the school choir and participating in extracurricular sports didn't help.
"I started getting bad around 12 or 13," he says. By the time he saw West Side Story (1961), he was positively set on his life as a tough guy. The movie musical sang to his pre-teen heart about belonging and brotherhood and all he wanted to do was join a gang.
Feeling quite like the outsider among his peers, he was also aware that his body wasn't developing in the same ways as many of his associates. He remained short while other boys shot up. He had no idea when or if he'd ever get that growth spurt, so his self-consciousness about his body image translated to self-defensiveness and often aggression. He might not be the biggest guy in school, but Joe D'Alessandro was sure as hell going to be the toughest and meanest little fucker you'd never want to mess with.
He was getting quite the nasty reputation both on and off school grounds. His foster folks started putting pressure on Joe Sr. to do something. "When my dad would take me home, I promised not to get in trouble," he says. The boy initiated a scheme of running away from his foster home to force his father's hand, though, to compel a decision. Animosity and pain were building and he was acting on them.
"All these people that were around never offered to take care of my father's two kids, me and my brother. My grandmother couldn't do it. My father couldn't do it. As wonderful as my grandparents would be, you know that one visit a month? I really was always kind of upset that they never brought my brother and me home to live with them. I mean, we'd be in school—not home—for eight hours a day, or however long kids go to school. And we could join extra things after school even. They'd only see us for a couple of hours before we'd go to bed. That really upset me that they didn't make more of an effort."
Help came when it was too little and too late. "The first time I saw a social worker to deal with my problems was when I was a teenager and had been running away from home. You've been ignoring this problem and now you're going to send help, I thought? It's a bit late. I needed help all along. Now you want to know what's wrong with me? Well, what's wrong with me was that there was nobody there to find out what was going on from day one. The social worker threatened to move me to another foster home and after spending over ten years with one family, you're not going to be able to successfully move a kid to another one."
Joe then showed me a photo of himself taken for his First Communion and laughs while noting that you "can see the Devil in those eyes." And he's right. Something lurks behind the smirk and the squint, something altogether missing from the photo of his brother taken at Bobby's own religious milestone. Tellingly, one of Joe's memories from that pre-adolescent period includes his foster folks segregating him and his brother at a kid's table for dinners while the parents and their two children ate together at a table that sure as hell looked like it could have fit two more little guys.
So Joe started his own family. His "gang" consisted of himself and a couple of friends named Joel and Eddie. Joel got arrested so many times that the cops wouldn't put him in prison, they'd put him in the "crazy house." He'd be in school during the week and on weekends he'd break out of the hospital and hit the town with his partners in crime.
The crimes Joe and his buddies perpetrated ran the gamut from petty to not so petty. Joe fed on the communal power of his adopted social circle. He'd found a sense of purpose and it was satisfying to have a specific role to play: the neighborhood bad-ass. He'd hang out at the candy store where he and his cohorts demonstrated their bravado by snubbing out cigarettes and lit cigars into their forearms, playing a version of "Chicken" in which you showed how long you could keep your arm still after having a fiery ember dropped on it. Too young to drink in bars, and too easily recognizable in his own neighborhood, he'd head over to Jersey and belt them down at black pubs where nobody carded you so long as you had the cash.
He remained a chronic runaway. Joe Sr. had to come get both his sons after they made an impromptu trip to Philadelphia. Social services placed Joe in yet another foster home. This second family Joe likens to the characters in Dickens's Oliver Twist, complete with a Fagin teaching his wards how to commit crimes. A new housing development was going up nearby and so Joe and company (the other foster urchins) were encouraged to rob the old buildings by pilfering them of their toilets or windows and bringing the stuff back for use in their own neighborhood.
Joe and his brother were separated for about a month's time during all this, but then Joe Sr. intervened and Bob joined his brother at the second foster home.
Things got bad enough that Joe finally insisted that his father "take me home or you put me into a military institution; not realizing, of course, that my dad couldn't afford military school. He had to take me home. He had little other choice, so he did.
"When I finally did go home, it was the same as the other house. It had all the rules and regulations. My father was not the most wonderful guy all the time. But to his credit, he was more insistent on me getting a great education than anyone because my father continued to go to school all the time. He'd be going to some kind of night classes for engineering because they'd always be updating and changing stuff. He was the oldest student I'd ever seen. As a kid, it never made sense to me. I used to ask him, 'Don't you ever get smart enough?'" (Up until his early twenties, Joe would tell interviewers that he had read only one complete book in his life, Andrew Carnegie and the Age of Steel, and that was only because a passing English grade depended on it.)
Home for the 14-year old was now in Queens, living with his dad at Joe's grandparents' house. His sense of self had been disrupted again. Surrounded by inner city kids and faced with a whole new round of having to establish his identity and stake out territory, he took it all in macho stride. "These were tough guys, these were little gangsters," he remembers thinking. "But I only saw them as kids who hadn't had a good meal. They weren't healthy. They were just skinny little guys. Out on Long Island, all we had was fresh air and everybody was on the fucking football team, so when I went to the inner city and these tough guys tried to get tough with me, well, I just got into a thing where I'd beat up people all the time. It made me the leader of the school for a short while. There was nobody tougher than me."
The natural impulse to rebel against your folks was intensified in a kid who was becoming increasingly aware of how things should have been, how they could have been. Joe's feelings of bitterness and restlessness grew. The timing of his move back in with his dad was neither good nor bad, it was just that Joe Jr. was now a teenager and a kid with a predilection for getting into mischief, like it or not. "It was as if I was standing in line when they were handing out cowboy clothes and I just happened to get the black hat," he says. "I wanted to play the good guy, but it never worked out that way for some reason."
One altercation clinched his entire educational career. Joe had a habit of walking around his school in Queens wearing a girl's kerchief tied around his neck—a long black kerchief perfect to wrap around the tender young throats of hall monitors.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Joe Dallesandro by Michael Ferguson. Copyright © 2011 Michael Ferguson. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction/ Acknowledgments
- Foreword by Joe Dallesandro
- Little Joe, Superstar
- An Undress Rehearsal
- The Loves of Ondine
- Lonesome Cowboys
- San Diego Surf
- Flesh
- Trash
- Heat
- The Gardener
- Flesh for Frankenstein
- Blood for Dracula
- Donna è bello
- Il Tempo degli assassini
- L’Ambizioso
- Black Moon
- Fango bollente
- Je t’aime moi non plus
- La Marge
- L’Ultima volta
- Un Cuore semplice
- 6000 km di paura
- Suor omicidi
- Merry-Go-Round
- Vacanze per un massacro
- Tapage nocturne
- Parano
- Queen Lear
- The Cotton Club
- Critical Condition
- Sunset
- Double Revenge
- Private War
- Cry-Baby
- Almost an Angel
- Guncrazy
- Bad Love
- Wild Orchid II: Blue Movie Blue
- Sugar Hill
- Theodore Rex
- L.A. Without a Map
- The Limey
- Citizens of Perpetual Indulgence
- Pacino is Missing
- Documentaries/Shorts/TV/Videos
- Selected Bibliography
- About the Author