Cathy Moriarty: Disappearing Act

On a summer evening, in 1978, the actor Joe Pesci walked into a disco called "Hoops" in Mount Vernon, New York and saw a picture of Cathy Moriarty in a bathing suit. The disco had a beauty contest every summer, and that year Cathy had won the first prize of $100. Pesci, already cast as Jake LaMotta's brother in Raging Bull, was struck by the resemblance between Cathy Moriarty and Vickie LaMotta, Jake's second wife. Pesci arranged a meeting between Scorsese, De Niro, and Moriarty, who, at the time, was four months out of high school and working as a receptionist in the garment district.

Moriarty tells me that she doesn't like the way this story has been told over the years, because it makes it sound like her getting the role was a fluke. "It ignores the fact that I had wanted to be an actress since the age of 14 when I saw Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday," and the fact that she had been going to open casting calls that were advertised in Backstage magazine. In other words, she was "not just a receptionist who looked great in a bathing suit." Moriarty gets defensive--and ruffled--as she continues to discuss it. It's one of the few times during the interview when real emotion ripples her placid, almost blissed out, facade.

"Joe Pesci... fine... a nice man... funny... but everyone knew, in town, I wanted to be an actress, and, uh, everyone knew these people were in town and were looking for someone. It's great Joe Pesci...yes, of course...said that, but I sent my picture to the casting director, and if I didn't have something, I never would have gotten to meet Mr. Scorsese and Mr. De Niro. I worked many long months rehearsing before I got the part. And I think I did a good enough job [in the film]. I backed it up." The critics agreed. Vincent Canby, in The New York Times, wrote, "Miss Moriarty comes across with the assurance of an Actors Studio veteran. Either she is one of the film finds of the decade or Mr. Scorsese is Svengali. Perhaps both."

Moriarty was 19. She hired an agent and moved to Los Angeles. She was quoted, at the time, as saying, "My second movie will really be important." Since her first film was so good it would be widely hailed ten years later as the very finest of the entire decade, Moriarty needed extraordinary luck to find another film half as good. Instead, she found Neighbors.

Neighbors started shooting just a week after she had attended the Academy Awards ceremony. The project teamed her with two of the hottest comedians in the business, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Her director was John Avildsen, who, a few years before, had taken a piece of proletarian swill, Rocky, and turned it into an Oscar winner. The package seemed created in CAA heaven. Choosing to do Neighbors instead of one of the other projects being offered was, Moriarty says now, "not the greatest idea." She would be the last actress to work with Belushi who was, by this time, bloated with drink, drugs and hubris. Moriarty claims she never saw Belushi snorting cocaine. When I ask if Belushi was out of control, Moriarty gets indignant and says she doesn't want to talk about someone who's passed on. Well, okay, this is obviously not an easy subject to discuss, but the air of huffy indignation seems to me a trifle disingenuous. It does have the desired effect however: it closes the door on the topic of drugs. Moriarty could have stopped there, but like any good actress, she senses that she hasn't milked the scene, and she leans forward to remind me in a hushed, sanctimonious tone that the anniversary of Belushi's death is in a week or two.

Neighbors was an attempt at black comedy starring two TV sketch artists and parodists who knew next to nothing about black comedy. John Avildsen had no idea how to pull Belushi and Aykroyd and Moriarty into a working ensemble. The movie is painful to watch. Moriarty says, "I took the role because I wanted to show my versatility and do a comedy. My thick accent in Raging Bull hurt me--people kept thinking that's all she could do." She? Moriarty immediately notices her use of the third person. "She. I keep referring to myself as some-body else. People kept thinking that's all I could do. Which is wrong."

Moriarty was desperate to prove that she had all the tools. But the truth was she didn't. She had had little formal training, her resume consisted of one film in which she played a character very much like herself, and apparently there was no one around to offer guidance during this critical period or to remind her of John Barrymore's famous line that dying is easier than doing com-edy. One can only wonder what could have happened to Moriarty if she had come along in the days of the stu-dio system, when studio ex-ecutives would have known that here--like the young Lauren Bacall or Kim Novak-- was a diamond in the rough. A voice coach would have been hired. She would have been groomed and brought along in roles written for her. But when Moriarty was the hottest property in town, in 1980, the studio system was long gone. The person she turned to for love and guidance was a man named Carmine D'Anna, whom she'd met at a hockey game. He became her husband and manager.

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