Joey Pants, Movie Star

And a helluva class act.

He sat alone, at an outside table in front of Cafe La Haye, eating dinner under a slowly darkening sunset sky. We found the image slightly disconcerting because of a sense of mixed up realities. The current image was tangible enough, but our memories of Joey Pants included seeing him several times a week for years in the cafe where we breakfasted, and many brief conversations. But in the last decade we saw him only on television or movie screens, and since he'd become perhaps America's finest, most popular character actor, we saw him alot.

Within a matter of seconds we renewed our acquaintance with Joey, and he asked us to join him for a glass of wine as we talked old times. We knew each other from the Rose Cafe near Venice Beach in Southern California. It served as the community living room for hundreds of people over the years who took most of their meals at the place, as well as met their spouses, made their business deals, wrote their screen plays, read other peoples' palms. It was that kind of establishment.

Joey regularly joined other struggling actors for morning coffee at the Rose, most of whom seemed to be from the East Coast. Typically, they were an obnoxious bunch, but that may have been a mistaken impression fostered by the ones who hid their failures with a false bravado based on coming from New York City, or thereabouts. We lost track of the times we heard the construction, "...hey, man, I'm from New York City...," which was meant to impress listeners with their exquisite sense of sophistication and street wisdom. When delivered in yet another bad, outer-borough accent by a provincial poser who resembles thousands of others who ineffectually attempt to mask their shortcomings with the same, lame self-identification, well, one gets rather exasperated. Especially when such people use these pathetic lines to condescend to Californians of much greater substance.

Add to that the desperate attempts to sound successful in show business because of an audition with this or that heavyweight, and you have one unpleasant collection of people, generally speaking.

Joey Pantoliano was nothing at all like that, and that's why we developed a liking for him over the years through our superficial encounters. The Sonoma Valley Film Festival chose to honor him with an award granted by Imagery Winery, and as a result of these myriad factors, we were fortunate enough to be able to let him buy us a drink.

We traveled in different, slightly intersecting circles, and it was amusing to note that the people whose progress he told us of were the nice ones, indicating that he may have found some of those others as distasteful as we did.

Well, Joey, we said at one point, when we see you on television or in a movie, we're always telling somebody that we knew you back when, and you were one of the good ones. A real stand-up guy.

And we said that years before his memoir was released, called "Who's Sorry Now: The True Story of a Stand-Up Guy."

Joey is a real actor. We've encountered many well-known thespians in our time, and it's remarkable to note the numbers who do not really act at all; they just play themselves in roles that demand their particular character. We attended the last parties for the cast of Cheers in Boston when the show went off the air, and we discovered that the only one acting in that series seemed to be Rhea Perlman, who played the nasty-spirited Carla. Ted Danson revealed himself as the same self-obsessed airhead you see on TV, and Norm and Cliff acted just like Norm and Cliff, whatever their real names.

As we said, Joey is a real actor, and we didn't realize how much of one until that weekend at Sonoma's Cinema Epicuria.

During our own conversation, he revealed that he had moved to Fairfield County, Connecticut, where he lived with his wife and kids on a couple of acres on a lake. His wife is a real estate broker and they collect French provincial antique furniture.

But it was Jon Favreau, who hosts Dinner for Five on the Bravo Channel--on which he facilitates conversations with others in the film business--who provided the best insights into Joey Pants by virtue of his own similar experiences trying to make a living as an actor. He had Joey on stage at the Sebastiani Theater for an hour or so, and it was a great revelation of how much Joey really did act.

He plays tough guys, but he demonstrated a charming vulnerability with self-deprecating stories and a transparency that almost hurt.

Despite his apparent success, he made the point that he moved to Connecticut because he could afford to live nicely there--with his income and that of his wife--while the same life in California would be far from his reach. Favreau explained to the audience that the top billing actors in a film get the vast bulk of the acting salary budget. Tom Cruise gets his 20 million, Nicole Kidman her 10, and then there's a few hundred grand left for everyone else.

We had long known of the phenomenon, ever since getting to know a fairly successful character actor back in the '70s. We were stunned to note that he lived in a modest suburban home that could fit in a portion of our own family abode, and we were by no means wealthy. The truth is, any actor--or artist or writer--who manages to support himself in a middle class way through one of those careers is really pretty successful, relatively speaking.

What we found surprising was that even Joey, despite two decades of considerable success, still needs to hustle to maintain a modestly comfortable life.

And though we realized he wasn't the same smug wiseguy seen onscreen, we were touched to discover he grew up as the chubby kid pushed around by bullies, he spent years in therapy, that he had to start worrying about balding while a teenager, that he thought his nose was too big, and these things genuinely nagged at him through much of his career, in a field where self-confidence is everything.

He talked of being the third or fourth guy called in for a role, after others had turned it down; of being told he was perfect for the role, knowing full well that he was a last choice.

He told of how he often wears a hairpiece to audition for certain parts so the casting people can imagine him as other than that bald guy Joey Pants, which could be a distraction. He mentioned one audition where he worked with Robert Davi, with whom he'd appeared in the mini-series "From Here to Eternity." In the latter, Davi played a sadistic guard who abused Joey, who got the role of Maggio, first played by Frank Sinatra, another kid from Hoboken just like Joey.

In this audition, said Joey, Robert Davi kept trying to call attention to my hairpiece, to mess with my head. I just picked up on it and made fun of it too.

To negate the weakness highlighted by Davi, by turning it into a funny routine.

Joey told this as just another amusing story, and implied that he and Davi were nonetheless good friends.

This we found very interesting, and it endeared Joey to us even more. Because Robert Davi epitomzed the worst of those New York actors we so detested. He was a big man from back east. A big actor. And he treated everyone around him with disdain.

We'll never forget a Christmas Eve in Venice, at a store just down the street from the Rose Cafe. Davi swaggered in to buy a last minute gift, as we were doing. He wore a fine, dark woolen overcoat, and smoked a huge cigar.

I'm sorry, but there's no smoking allowed, said a clerk politely.

Davi disregarded the comment with a snarl, indicated what he wanted to buy and left the distinct impression that he would kill anybody who failed to comply or mentioned the cigar again. He seemed to expect that he would be helped immediately, despite the people who'd come before him, and he conducted himself just as a wannabe mafia punk might act. Contempt and menace oozed from every pore of his pock-marked face. We'd already seen enough of him to develop a dislike for the man, and this confirmed our every impression. We shared this little anecdote with some fellow Rose habitues, and heard many like it in return.

The man, it developed, was notorious in the neighborhood as an offensive lout. So when the local public radio station interviewed Davi one day soon after, and the theme turned out to be that the guy who played mean roles was really a sensitive soul who listened to opera, we were taken rather aback.

It was the act of a phony, who usually never acted at all. He was one of those actors who played himself, and the self in question was a malignant creep.

Joey Pantoliano, one of the kindest, most unaffected people we ever met, even plays a better thug than Robert Davi, the genuine article. But Joey Pants is a real actor.

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Copyright WineMerchant.com 2006