James Caan was a huge star in the '70s and then virtually disappeared until Misery and Honeymoon in Vegas resurrected him. Here he talks and talks about Coppola, gambling, Italian friends, Streisand, his new movies, Barry Diller and plenty more.
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Tripwired actor James Caan is stalking around his Hollywood manse spewing awesome energy. He's effortlessly throwing off the same explosive intensity--real intensity, not just actor tumult--that's made directors like Sam Peckinpah, Michael Mann and Francis Coppola want him in their movies. It is this last director, father of The Godfather, the film that put Caan at the top of marquees in the '70s, about whom Caan is just now telling a story that has him wearing out the carpet.
In 1987, Coppola was directing Caan in Gardens of Stone. The shoot was not going well. Then things turned catastrophic: Coppola's son was killed in a boating mishap. Stomping over to where I'm sitting, gripping my shoulder, hard, Caan whispers, "You have to understand what I went through with Francis, man. The history. He being the family-oriented Mediterranean he is, I can't conceive of anything more horrible than losing a child. He loves his whole family that way. Of anyone else around him on that set, I had the oldest relationship with him, so I knew what was coming. I told him straight: 'I don't care if you want to hit me with a bat.' Sure I took a beating from him. But it came from love.
These fucking guys around Francis who suck his--you know, who drain him. They were all going, 'Jimmy, what should we do?' They're talking about shutting down the movie, a $12 million loss, worrying about his drive, his mental capacity. I say, 'How stupid you gotta be? His son's dead and he's writing letters to him every day. You try going home like he does and staying alone all night looking at the fucking ceiling. He'll work 24-hour days so he doesn't have to think about it.' They're still going on about his mental drive, so I go, 'What happens when his physical drive can't match his fucking mental drive?' I say, 'You gotta outsmart him. Tell him, "Fuck, we blew the helicopter, we gotta wrap the fucking camera." Bang it. Do something. Make the man rest.'"
At this point there's a catch the size of a football in Caan's voice. "Sure as God made little apples, man, we're doing this barracks scene, and there's no air, and I hear boom! Francis. Out. Heart attack, whatever. Next thing I know, I'm knockin' people, and I jump in the ambulance.
I remember clear as a bell being in the ambulance with him and going into the hospital. Now he's really frightened, you know? He goes, 'Jimmy, you know, here's this gun...' and he's laying there and he's scared. I said, 'Francis, you got two beautiful kids. What about them? Fuck this film.' He just looked at me. And I said something that he later told me he remembers to this day--which is a big deal because I always felt beneath him, he's so bright. I said, 'You're watching, but you ain't seeing nothing, because it's hard to see through tears.'"
James Caan, who stars as a football coach opposite Craig Sheffer in the new film The Program, and co-stars with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan in the new Flesh & Bone (he plays Quaid's father), may not look like the same curly-haired star whose bad-boy smile and macho stance made knees buckle 20 years ago (he tells me laughingly how makeup men rigged up a string-and-paste contraption to pull back his features so he'd look forty-something for still portraits), but for sheer manic energy, few 25-year-olds could challenge him. Shortly after the crescendo of his Coppola tale, Caan's publicist and a production assistant proffer libations to help take the swelter out of the afternoon. Caan stares suspiciously into an amber-hued tumblerful of ice with a tropical-looking swizzle stick.
"What did you make me, darling?" he asks his assistant, mock seductively.
"Just try it," the publicist says.
"I know what you're thinking," says Caan, jumping at the chance to play this game. "You saw those new publicity pictures of me and went, Whoa, the minute Steve goes, we're hitting the sack, right?"
"It's all over my face, isn't it?" the publicist says, grinning. "Just like last night."
Caan looks stymied. Trying to keep the ball in spin.
"Like that other writer," the publicist prompts him, "once he left last night..."
Caan says, laughing with merry malice, "What? You got him?" He's slapping his knee, cracking up delightedly.
"No," she purrs, "I got you."
Caan screws shut an eye like a street corner Romeo. "Forgot," he says, "I was too drunk." Fiddling with the swizzle stick, he says, "These things always jab me in the eye. Why's that?"
"You're supposed to take them out," his production assistant offers, as she and the publicist sidle for the door.
"Need some air in here?" the publicist wonders.
"Only when you guys come in," Caan shoots back. Dismissed.
Well along into middle age, Caan still flusters women. Which he knows. He casually mentions how, back in the days when he used to visit the Playboy Mansion, he once "balled an astounding number of Playboy models, bam, bam, bam, in a row." Then, wincing, covering his eyes, he pleads, "Oh, don't mention that, okay? Sorry, Hef. I'll have Hef and my mother on me."
Women find Caan a powerful persuader. And not always, apparently, the joshing kind. Ex-wife Sheila Ryan launched a $2.5 million battery suit against him in 1980, accusing him of beating her after she told him she was considering remarrying; they had been divorced seven years earlier. Her attorney described Ryan at the time as looking like she'd "been in a bad car-train accident." The suit was dropped three days later. What's with this stuff? Caan fobs it off. He's a different guy now, he says. And, in fact, everyone I've spoken to who knows him tells me how devoted he has always been to his teenage son, Scott Andrew, a hip-hop rapper who just landed a record deal. But at least some corners of the Caan psyche remain unchastened.
Once, almost out of nowhere, he asks: "Do you know how many feminists it takes to screw in a light bulb?" Nah, I don't. He starts cracking up even before delivering the punch line, "One to screw in the light bulb and the other to suck my dick." This kills him.
Caan's frontal lobes seem to go happily on hiatus virtually at will. He loves, for instance, to prick the inflated egos of some of his directors and co-stars, and to democratically dis his box-office highs (Misery, Freebie and the Bean, Funny Lady), lows (Kiss Me Goodbye, The Dark Backward), disappointments (Rollerball, Chapter Two, For the Boys) and critical successes (Thief, The Gambler). He doesn't mince words about his two new movies either, the one from director Steve (The Fabulous Baker Boys) Kloves, Flesh & Bone, or the sports movie The Program from Disney. Actually, he seems in no hurry to talk about either of these efforts, and since he is so downright jovial and thoroughly outrageous on other topics, neither am I.
"Did I tell you about the guy who came here as an interviewer but I thought it might be some wise guy stuff, like, he might be wearing a wire?" he asks, fingering the Italian horn charm and Star of David that dangle from gold chains around his neck. No, actually, he hasn't. "I threw him in the fucking pool," he answers, chortling merrily. Caan notices that I've seen how he occasionally hobbles and jigsaws around the room like Grandpa Amos on "The Real McCoys." "Somebody said once that I've got so many sports injuries and stitches that I wasn't born, I was embroidered. For years, I thought my name was 'Bastard.' Every time I'd come home, every time I had an accident, my mother would say, 'Ya bastard! Ya bastard!'"
Actually, "bastard" has always been synonymous with Caan. He has always come on as a cocky, world-on-a-string, sad-eyed, jokey stud. Most people first noticed Caan as the dying Chicago Bears football player in Brian's Song on TV, or as the testosterone-powered Sonny in The Godfather. That was Caan in his "New Hollywood" days, when Time magazine called him (in 1975) "one of the five top box-office draws in the country."
But 10 years before The Godfather made him a superstar, he'd left New York to unleash himself on Hollywood and pay dues. Out of the shadow of the tenement, and bathed in California gold, the sinewy Caan was exactly the sort of hot boy lusted after by Hollywood of that day. He did stunt work, but he also got roles in four top TV shows in the first five weeks after he hit town. Universal dangled a seven-year deal, but he shined it on and went to work making movies with some greats of the Old Guard. Billy Wilder gave him a bit part in Irma la Douce. In Lady in a Cage opposite Olivia de Havilland, he played a sweaty punk who growls, "I am all animal." Little Caesar director Mervyn LeRoy thought he should star opposite Jean Seberg in Moment to Moment, but, on meeting Caan for the first time, the director eyed him and belched, "Do you always wear your hair like that?" "Then," Caan recounts, "LeRoy asks, 'What's the best thing you've ever done?' and I said, 'I once ran 90 yards for a touchdown.' See, compared to these other guys who came off a surfboard with their blue fucking phony lenses and who can't spell 'act,' I was part of the 'angry New York contingency.'"
Journey to Shiloh, says Caan, was a "rank piece of Civil War horseshit. I played a leader and all these guys, Harrison Ford, Michael Sarrazin, were riding behind me. It's a terrible thing to say, but, aside from having some talent, if I can attribute my success in the early years to anything, it was that I'd say no to the [bigwigs]. And they'd go, 'Who the fuck is this punk to say no to me? I'm God.' Angry? It was just that I don't care who they are. I was brought up to at least be able to say, 'How do you do?' when I met someone."
But Caan said more than "How do you do?" to action maestro Howard Hawks, maker of Red River and The Big Sleep, who starred him back to back in Red Line 7000 and El Dorado. "Hawks was 72, but, boy, he loved them girls," Caan recalls, with a hellion's gleam in his eye. "He'd invite me down to Palm Springs and there he was with one of his 20-year-olds. And they all looked like his wife, Slim. So, we're making this movie in Old Tucson. And I'm in my twenties with [Robert] Mitchum, who had basically retired to his ranch and was a fucking wild man, and [John] Wayne, who was like a 12-year-old and called me 'Jiminy Cricket,' and Hawks, who had millions from the studio to spend on this fucking movie.
Every day, Hawks would disappear in his trailer and wouldn't come out all day, then emerge with an eighth page of corny, horrible dialogue. Sometimes we wouldn't even shoot. And, meanwhile, we'd be fucking around all day. Who was going to tell Howard Hawks what to do?"
Caan claims he's never watched a foot of Red Line 7000. "Hawks liked me. I mean, hey, fuck--I was looking to pay the rent. The other day, I was with a young friend of mine, who's a writer and director and who feels kind of uncomfortable because he's from a wealthy family. I told him, 'Money can allow you to have integrity right from the beginning. You don't have to do shit.' But I had to do it and other actors had to. I hit Hollywood and was making $3,500 a year but I always owed the bookmaker $2,000 by Tuesday. It was impossible. On Monday night, I'd go buy myself a suit just to say, 'Fuck it.' I don't know how but, boom, a job always somehow happened."
Once he made The Godfather, Caan's booms came even faster. "I had the world by the nuts back then," he says, "as far as business goes. But that's not really having the world."
I ask Caan if it's true that bad blood brewed between him and Coppola at the time of Apocalypse Now, in which Caan had been expected to star. Caan shakes his head.
"Francis once said about some of us who were in The Godfather, 'Fuck, all you guys want is money.' I went, 'Hey, Francis, you made $11 million, we each made $35,000.' He starts walking down the street, going, 'I bought this, this, this. I do good things with my money.' I said, 'So do I. I drive nice cars, I go to nice restaurants.' So, he gives me the script for Apocalypse and says, 'Any part you want.' Now, he used to play poker with me, this fuck. He's my friend, right? I wanted to play Colonel Carnage [the original name of the Lt. Col. Kilgore character]; the guy is nuts, he's blowing things up, he's surfing. So, I go up to Francis's house in San Francisco, and he goes, 'I don't think I can give you that.' 'Asshole,' I say, 'didn't you say any part I want?' He says, 'I want you for another role.' But I didn't want to play that."
Caan turned down plenty of roles that could have been booms for him, and chose busts instead.
Love Story? He declares, justifiably, "Made a ton of money, right? Look at it today: worst actor, worst director, worst written."
M*A*S*H? "Bob Altman was a friend--I did one of his early films, Countdown. I didn't know that this schmuck would turn into...anyway, I did Rabbit, Run instead. Smart, huh?"
Caan also nixed a second Freebie and the Bean, the money-making buddy cop movie he starred in with Alan Arkin, which he called "The Odd Couple in a squad car." "They offered me a fortune to do, like, 15 of those. But where's the fun in it? I hate remakes. I'm not gonna be Sonny again, either."
Superman? "Mario Puzo wrote a hysterical script, with Superman doing loop-the-loops and shit. Marlon [Brando] called me and said, 'Come on, do it too, I need some laughs.' I said, 'Yeah, but you don't have to wear the cape with the red and blue suit.'"
Kramer vs. Kramer? "I was first, Dustin [Hoffman] was last on the list of five guys they wanted. The director [Robert Benton] kept it up with me for three months. I said, 'This is middle-class, bourgeois horseshit.' I mean, 'Cut to kid crying.' Oh, please. Fuck you!"
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? "Four or five different directors came to me with that at different times. I go, 'It's not a movie. Who wants to look at four institution walls?' Milos Forman made it great. Jack was great in it. I made a flat-out, fucking mistake."
Worse mistakes were some of the films he did make-- T.R. Baskin, Comes a Horseman, Chapter Two, Rollerball, The Killer Elite.
Caan launches into a hilarious binge of agent-bashing. "I thought agents were supposed to check out directors for me, you know? I forgot that they're slavers. Oh, by the way, you forgot to mention Harry and Walter Take a Dump." Caan is referring to Harry and Walter Go to New York, the hugely expensive, period comedy, inspired by The Sting, that co-starred Caan, Elliot Gould, Michael Caine and Diane Keaton.
And what about Funny Lady, in which he and Barbra Streisand sparred? "This was when I was a star. And I commanded big salaries. At the time, George Segal and Robert Redford, who had made movies with Barbra, said they had a horrible time. Anyway, I said yes to this, completely unaware that Barbra thought I didn't want to work with her. She'd been pitched as the co-star of a couple of movies that I didn't want to do. Not because of her, but because I didn't like the scripts. So, we're doing Funny Lady and she's tough, but she couldn't have been nicer. I got out of her probably the greatest fucking take she ever had."
How did that happen?
"The director, Herbert Ross, wasn't in his screaming stage yet. That came later. He had mapped out this scene that took hours and hours to set up and rehearse in Fanny Brice's dressing room. She's supposed to be in front of the make-up table and I lean down, kiss her, then she reaches behind her and hits me in the face with a whole box of powder. She goes, 'Oh, I'm sorry, Billy, da-da-da, whatever,' and I'm supposed to hit her in the face with the powder and while we're both standing there, I draw a smile on her face through the powder.
"Next day, I show up to do the scene and Barbra looks gorgeous in this sensational, emerald green, 80-pound dress--she must have, like, strong legs--and she goes, 'Herb, I'm sorry, he can't hit me in the face with the powder.' Herb looks like he's lost his mother, and he's going, 'Barbra, we rehearsed and rehearsed last night. The lighting took the whole night and . . .' She whispers, 'The powder. It's toxic.' She won't quit. I figure she just didn't want to spoil her makeup. So I go, 'Herb, she's right. I can do this without hitting her.' I could see Herb wanted to stab me. But she's listening now, she's got support, so I tell her that after she hits me, I'll pick up the box and go to hit her, but she should stand up to me, just like, 'Go ahead, shoot me,' so I back down. Herb is going cross-eyed, so I go, 'Just shoot the fucking thing.' And when he did, she didn't blink or flinch, and I scooped up that motherfucking box and hit her right between the eyes.
Her reaction was great. Just watch the movie and you'll see there's a little cut, because she screamed, 'You fuck! You lied!' and I went, 'What, I'm gonna sit here all day and listen to you two assholes argue?' And then, she laughed. I had a ball with her. She's like another 12-year-old."
Caan may have been laughing all the way, but by the time he, Sally Field and Jeff Bridges did Kiss Me Goodbye in 1982, the town had kissed him off as a box-office contender, and he would not fully reemerge until Misery came along in 1990, followed by the comedy Honeymoon In Vegas. While he stayed offscreen for five years, rumors flew that he was a cokehead. A sex junkie. A recluse. A pauper whose assets were to be attached. Worse. "I was dead broke," Caan recalls. "I owed the government $247,000. Absence makes the heart grow fonder? Bullshit. Absence makes 'em think you're dead. I lost my sister and I couldn't handle it. People say: drugs. They don't know, 'cause I'm not a go-outer. They'd have to be in my home to know what I was doing. I'm not stupid enough to go out and say, 'Here, let's snort some cocaine.' Maybe it's nothing to brag about, but in 30-plus movies I've never missed a day of work in my life. I've never been stoned or drunk a day on a set. It was a self-induced absence. I'm not a highly visible guy. I mean, I don't go to parties. My friends have always been friends not because of what they are, because of who they are. That doesn't put me in the [Hollywood] circles, you know?"
So what did he do in the years we weren't looking? "Spent time with my son, who's fantastic. Coached kids' team sports. Passion became very important in my life. The worst words in the world are 'I don't care.' It was like, 'You don't want to play basketball?' and you say, 'I don't care.' With me it's, 'You don't care, you don't play.' Or, you want to make love? If it's, 'Oh, I don't care,' then fuck you, I'll go jerk off. God, my mother will kill me if she hears that."
Does passion and its absence explain the rumor oft-told by Caan pals about how, during the years when no one would risk hiring him for a feature movie, he turned down huge offers for TV series? "Worse than that," Caan observes, laughing. "It started off as my integrity thing. You know, a guy told me he once looked that word up in the dictionary, and I surpassed the definition. Anyway, I didn't have a penny. The Japanese offered me like a million bucks so that they could come over and shoot my photo to be used on one billboard in one corner in Tokyo. It couldn't be duplicated anywhere else in the world. I said no. I didn't know the product. That's stupidity. Hey, come and ask me now, right? Anyhow, I remember one of those Tuesdays rolled around where I owed the bookmaker money. The miracle didn't happen. So, I go to the guy who was the head of my agency for awhile--a real fucking dick--to borrow $2,000. That same afternoon, they call me into the office: 'Jimmy, you've just been offered a series. Twenty-six weeks, solid, $50,000--maybe $100,000, whatever--a week to start.' 'Nah,' I said, 'can't do it.' They went nuts. 'Aren't you the guy who borrowed $2,000 this morning?' They still remember that to this day."
Integrity. Loyalty. Standing up for what he thinks is right. These themes weave in and out of Caan anecdotes. Last year, he made headlines for agreeing to be a character witness for alleged crime figure Ronald A. Lorenzo. He's my friend, Caan basically insisted to the press. But what's with Hollywood's attraction to the Mafia, anyway? "What Mafia?" Caan says, shooting me an "I-thought-you-were-hipper" look. "I don't want to get into this thing. My best friend comes from Mulberry Street. So, now my best friend is a murderer? What murder? They have an organized crime unit out here. So, they got to prove there's organized crime or they're gonna lose eleven hundred jobs. My friend is the boss of the Bonanno family? I'm loaning him one hundred dollars, two hundred dollars every day.
That's a boss? He's in jail. Am I connected with them in business? No, never in my life. I've never broken the law. And I just wanted people to back off, don't fuck with that guy."
As if on cue, the phone rings. Caan's wife is calling from a phone in another part of the house to say that Caan had just missed a phone call. From Lorenzo. Caan laughs into the receiver. "He's gonna call back? Well, he's in jail, you know. It's difficult." Caan lets out a whoop.
Whatever his drives and demons, Caan has proven to Hollywood that he cares again. And directors like Rob Reiner have fought to get him in big movies like Misery, for which Warren Beatty was originally paged.
"Misery was like a private joke Rob Reiner had," Caan asserts, grinning. "It was, 'Let's get Jimmy, the most hyper son of a bitch on the planet, and put him in bed for 15 weeks.' But it worked." Last year, in Honeymoon In Vegas, Caan played the prototypical sex-struck millionaire, a character Robert Redford would do another version of in Indecent Proposal.
"I haven't seen Redford in the part. Was he as cute as me? So," says Caan, summing up his situation, "I'm working for, like, one-fourth the money that I did when I left. I'm working." And working well, one might add, if not always happily. He's not in love with the movies Hollywood's making these days. "Truth is, today, if it doesn't have a ball in it, I don't watch it. You read the beginning of a script or watch a movie and you know what the end is. Spielberg is a really bad storyteller, terrible, but there's always a magnificent shot. Directors really don't want anything like characters or story to distract from their directorial prowess and special effects. And so many actors you work with are such pompous assholes. They take it so seriously. I'm a clown on the set for four months. I don't give a shit. Kathy Bates on Misery would always be studying her lines the night before. I read the script once, twice, never again. I mean, if you and I are talking and what's going on is that I have a bad stomachache, that's what's important. Actors who study their lines the night before are studying answers to questions they haven't heard yet. There's a lot of actresses, you know, they put a peg in the meter. I'm only going to that level,' so, if something great happens, like a lamp topples over in the middle of the take, that can make for those one or two moments in a movie that make it great. But, no, they go, 'What the fuck was that?'" Caan laughs uproariously, shaking his head.
And where does his For the Boys co-star Bette Midler put her peg? Caan is buddies with director Mark Rydell, for whom he earlier made Cinderella Liberty and the ruinous Harry and Walter Go to New York. He blames Midler and outgoing Fox chairman Barry Diller for the final, fatal outcome of Boys. "I tried to call Mark last night. He's one of those guys that, every time he gets serious, I'll just make a total ass of him. I mean, he's doing a movie with Sharon Stone and I just love to make fun of him--he's a punching bag. I'll go to my grave saying there was a great movie in For the Boys. We shot it and Mark, the editor and I know it. The pain Mark went through on that. It was Barry Diller. Mark was just overpowered every day. Literally every day. I'd say, 'Mark, you've got a contract. You've got plenty of clout. There's such a great movie there. Just play the fucking story. And tell him to get the fuck out of there.' It's not a Bette Midler fucking, motherfucking musical. It's not for the fucking fruits in the bathhouse and the old ladies in New York. It's a story about people. A great, great, great movie was destroyed."
Speaking of alleged demolition jobs, what's Caan's take on what happened with Hide in Plain Sight, a paranoid 1980 thriller with a witness relocation background, which he directed and starred in? Although the movie disappeared overnight, rumors flew that Francis Ford Coppola had edited the whole thing. "Never touched it," Caan swears, hand over his heart. "When he saw my movie, he said, 'This is one of the 10 best pictures I've ever seen in my life.' Conversely, when he showed me Apocalypse, I said, 'You've got two movies over here. The [one] I don't like has like 15 minutes of cerebral horseshit, with nobody giving a fuck about the lead guy. I said, 'You've got to attach him to a family or something.' So that whole thing with [Brando] writing the letter was done after the movie was cut.
"Now, my movie, I want to tell you: I was well satisfied. Vincent Canby wrote one of those columns about how every year, they over-look by far the best movie of the year. This is unsolicited. The truth of the matter is that the fucking asshole that took over UA at the time--what the fuck was his name? He used to buy office furniture for them, I swear to God. Anyway, this motherfucker, they show him the movie. There's no sharks. There's no spaceships going ape-shit. So, the movie comes out to these reviews and it's like, 'Holy fuck,' and meanwhile, there's no posters even made, no nothing. I got wonderful letters, reviews like you can't believe. But I felt bad for the kids in it because they didn't get their rewards; you know? What time you got? Just curious."
I tell him the time. Caan's getting restless but he agrees that there's time enough to talk about his two new movies. Why don't we start with The Program? "It's a Disney movie," Caan shrugs, dismissing the subject. Fine. And how about Flesh & Bone, directed by Steve Kloves and co-starring Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid? "I was a little disappointed with the cut," Caan admits, "because Steve, who is a real good guy, wants to be so anti-Hollywood. I've never done something like this. Not that it's beneath me, but I'm in a little more than a third of it. The movie's so, like, intricate. I really got into it. I don't think it's going to be a big moneymaker. But maybe it's one you can talk about in your living rooms for awhile."
Any anecdotes about his new Hollywood compatriots? Maybe Meg Ryan, say? Craig Sheffer? Dennis Quaid (perhaps a close second to Caan in his reputation for being a tear-ass)? Or some of the others? "I won't mention names, but in my career, the most talented people invariably are the easiest and nicest to get along with. The ones that are difficult try to camouflage the fact that they haven't got shit to offer. So they complain about frilly things that really don't mean a shit, like their dressing rooms, makeup."
And what gives these days between Caan and the guy who made him a star, the guy he talked down during that hallucinogenic ambulance ride to the hospital?
"I saw Francis just recently in Miami," Caan offers. "He looks great, sensational. I'm so happy Dracula hit, so that he doesn't have to worry about money. I didn't see it, though. I mean, I got pissed off enough seeing The Godfather, Part III. That wasn't Francis," he says of the third installment of Coppola's great American crime trilogy. "I mean, hiring George Hamilton because Bobby Duvall actually wanted some money? Francis was like, 'I'll show you how to make George Hamilton look good.' But Hamilton got one line, then boom, it's over." Aha. Friend or not, Caan is a straight shooter for life.
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Stephen Rebello wrote about Hollywood's premier hairstylists for the September Movieline.