The year is 1945 and a future world-famous actor is honing his craft in a tiny sixth-story apartment in the South Bronx, where he lives with his grandparents and single mother. He is reenacting a scene from The Lost Weekend, a movie he recently saw with his mom. It’s the scene where the main character, a self-destructive alcoholic, is ransacking his apartment for the liquor he had hidden away when he was drunk but can’t remember where he hid it. 

The future star is Alfredo “Al” Pacino, known as “Sonny Boy” to his mother, who gave her only child the nickname after hearing the song in a movie. “I got so good at this little routine that I would do it on request for my relatives,” recalls Pacino in his new memoir. “I guess it struck them as funny to see a five-year-old pretending to scramble through an imaginary kitchen with a kind of life-or-death intensity. That was an energy within myself that I was already discovering I could channel.”

Pacino’s high energy proves to be as mesmerizing in print as it is onscreen. Sonny Boy is a page-turner that allows the reader to experience the struggles, inspirations, tragedies, and triumphs of an artist from humble beginnings who becomes infatuated with “the power of expression” at a very young age.

New York City has always been Pacino’s playground and stage. As a child, he ran the streets, getting into mischief with his three best friends, Petey, Cliffy, and Bruce. They’d scale the tops of the neighborhood tenements and jump from roof to roof, smoke cigarettes, and fish in the sewer gratings for lost coins. These formative years of “misadventures” would give way to Pacino discovering theater. He started out acting in junior high school plays and, at the urging of a devoted teacher, went on to attend Manhattan’s High School of Performing Arts. After dropping out at 16, Pacino worked a string of odd jobs as a busboy, theater usher, and newspaper deliveryman, just to name a few.

All the while, he performed onstage in what he called “off-off-off-off Broadway” shows with fellow students from the Herbert Berghof Studio, including Martin Sheen, who would become his friend and roommate. Pacino was able to attend classes at the studio with the help of a scholarship and by cleaning the hallways and rooms.

“Out of its beatnik, bohemian energy in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, off Broadway was becoming more formalized,” Pacino writes. By this time, Pacino had won an Obie Award (the equivalent of a Tony Award for off Broadway) for his role in the play The Indian Wants the Bronx, an experience he calls “the culmination of a life that began when my mother started taking me to the movies as a kid, because after that play, everything changed.” Sadly, in 1962, his mother would die at age 43 after choking on pills she had been taking presumably to ease her chronic depression.

Pacino’s book reads more like a history of his love affair with New York theater and less like a comprehensive compilation of autobiographical events. Some omissions from his private life left me wanting a bit more. For example, Pacino doesn’t mention the mothers of his four children, with the exception of Beverly D’Angelo, and we get only glimpses into some of his other romances. He admits that “romance and life [came] second” to him as a younger man, and he offers a few words on why he never married: “I’ve always shied away from marriage. … I just wanted to avoid what I thought, at the time, was the inevitable, an entrance to the pain train.”

Nevertheless, what the book lacks in detail surrounding his adult personal life it makes up for in its colorful description of his love for acting on New York City’s stages. It is a thrilling love affair that has continued to this day. Pacino writes that acting in movies never gave him the same adrenaline rush as stage work, a surprising revelation considering the iconic adrenaline-pumping roles he’s played, most notably Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy and Tony Montana in Scarface. As Pacino puts it, “I was a theater person. … The difference between movie acting and stage acting was like being on that high wire. In movie acting, the wire is on the floor—you can always come back and try something again. Stage acting is up thirty feet in the air. And if you don’t make it, you fall.”  

Shakespeare was a favorite of Pacino’s and playing Richard III in an old Gothic Cathedral in Boston, all while his career was taking off back in New York and he had just gotten an Oscar nomination (his first) for The Godfather, was a milestone. Six years later, he came to Broadway to perform in Richard III once more.

Whether onstage or onscreen, Pacino has a gift for fully immersing himself in the 100-plus characters he has played over the years. Richard III was no exception. Even after the three-hour play had ended, he’d be in his dressing room still mulling over the performance, unable to break character. After one such performance, Jackie Kennedy Onassis came backstage to meet him. Exhausted, Pacino extended his hand for her to kiss. He looks back on the moment with utter embarrassment. “God only knows what I was thinking. … Perhaps I was hallucinating that she was doing the play with me, so she was my queen — and as the queen, after all, she must now kiss the hand of the king. … When you’re coming back from the stage after performing one of the greatest plays of all time, you’re liable to do anything.”

Pacino is a contradiction in many respects. The machine gun-wielding Scarface you see onscreen claims to be quite shy in real life. For someone who was born to be an actor, he could be insecure, anxious, and disillusioned by fame. The more attention he received, the more isolated he felt. He dealt with those feelings with copious amounts of alcohol and drugs. He became sober in 1977 with the help of a psychiatrist.

If Pacino loved New York, he tolerated Los Angeles. He was “leery of the media glare that came with film roles” and didn’t attend the 1973 Academy Awards ceremony for his first Oscar nomination (best actor in a supporting role for The Godfather) because he was afraid of flying and felt “overwhelmed” by the attention and simply “reclusive” at the time.

“Someone recently told me that Jack Kerouac was really embarrassed by his fame,” Pacino writes. “Now that’s a complicated idea, but I’m thinking it could apply to me.” Pacino has been nominated for nine Oscars. He won his first and only in 1993 after his eighth nomination (best actor in a leading role for Scent of a Woman), 25 years after entering the film business.

The final two chapters of Sonny Boy are so touchingly reflective that they left me in tears. The author, at 84 years old, confronts his mortality and memories. Pacino puts it rather bluntly: “Okay, I’m a man who has limited time left, let’s face it.” The last few pages are a moving tribute to Pacino’s South Bronx neighborhood and Petey, Cliffy, and Bruce, all of whom died of heroin overdoses far too young. As for his mother, well, he already knows what Sonny Boy will say to her if he gets to heaven: “‘Hey, Ma, see what happened to me?’”

Erin Montgomery is a writer in Maryland.