mrgodfrey

I spent an hour with Sinéad O'Connor over lunch at her Kensington hotel in July 2014, to discuss her album I'm Not Bossy, I'm The Boss. I don't know if the record company had booked the restaurant out, but we were the only two there. Or so I recall. That's definitely what it felt like. We sat opposite each other, and I remember her smile and her blazer and her tattoos and her quietness - she was softly spoken - it all felt so intimate. Yet, reading back over it now, what power. Most of the interview was me pushing back - maybe a bit too much? - on her insistence that this new album wasn't autobiographical. I didn't believe it. And I'm pretty sure that a couple of years later she admitted elsewhere that it was really quite autobiographical after all, but she hadn't wanted to get into all of that with the press at the time. I think the truth came through in our interview regardless. She was everything I could have possibly wanted - open and honest and just really fucking funny. Not a bit of bullshit in sight. A dream. The dream.

I'm shellshocked, now, in July 2023, to know that that would be her final album. As a journalist, doing hundreds of these things over years and years, so many interviews just vanish from your mind. I never forgot this one. I'll never forget it. How lucky I was to spend the time with her. How lucky we all were to have her.

Sinéad in 2014. Photo by Donal Moloney

This album seems to me like part two after How About I Be Me (And You Be You). Were they recorded closely together?

No. Not at all. But… it’s not so much part two, but it definitely has links, yeah.

Musically it feels like it’s from the same place.

Yeah, it is.

And the same person.

Yeah. I seem to have changed – without necessarily meaning to – the platform from which I wrote songs. Starting with the last album. They became almost character songs that weren’t necessarily autobiographical. Which meant a certain freedom. When I was younger I was writing songs because I had to get shit off my chest. But once I got the shit off my chest and shut down a bit and then made the three records, the rasta record [Throw Down Your Arms] and the Irish traditional record [Sean-Nós Nua] and Theology, those records weren’t about my life and that was good, it meant I could shut down that part. So with the last record and this there’s a different platform. Is what I’m trying to say, basically. I’m saying it in a very long-winded way.

I took that last record to my heart. Some of the songs felt really cinematic. Lots of imagery.

Yeah, good. Because some of them were written on the basis of scripts I had read, some of them were inspired by movie scripts, so I’m glad that came across.

That’s how it came across to me, maybe because of them being less autobiographical-

Yeah, you kind of invent characters.

‘Take Off Your Shoes’ gives me the shivers, because it’s terrifying.

Yeah, good! That’s the whole idea, it’s supposed to be scary.

It really is, and it takes me to the place you’re singing about, it scares the shit out of me really.

Good, good, that’s what it’s supposed to do, I’m pleased! That’s good. Very happy with that. The character in that song is supposed to be the Holy Spirit talking to the Vatican, so the object of the game is to scare the shit out of them. The object of the character’s game, their motivation. I’m quite pleased if it comes across as quite scary.

Have you heard anything from the sort of people you wanted to hear that song?

No, because I don’t actually write them for other people, I’ve not written it in the hope that anybody will hear it. The only reason you should ever make a record is you’re gonna go mad if you don’t. If you’re starting to communicate with anybody outside of yourself or you’re doing it for any other reason you probably shouldn’t be doing it. I think the difference perhaps between entertainers and artists, not that one is better than the other, that’s not the case, but perhaps an artist is someone who’s more expressing themselves, perhaps even narcissistically, communicating with themselves the whole time. And that perhaps can seize upon a zeitgeist or whatever, other people can identify with it. But with a character like that [in ‘Take Off Your Shoes’], if you’re consciously thinking that the Vatican are gonna hear the record, you’re fucked. You’re playing the character because you’re gonna lose your mind if you don’t.

These two albums seem like they’re just you being you.

Yeah, it’s a different platform. It’s just somebody writing from a completely different platform and creating characters and perhaps not having a whole load of shit to get off their chest, perhaps a bit more freed up to be the type of writer and performer they would have been had there not been a whole load of shit to get off their chest.

You’ve said elsewhere that this isn’t an autobiographical album, but to me that sounds like a generalisation. Maybe they’re not about you per se, but it all comes from you, and surely still comes from your perspective and experiences.

Yeah, what I mean is they’re not about my life, I haven’t necessarily experienced the things that the characters are talking about. One of my favourite songs on there is ‘Voice Of My Doctor’, I love that character. No, I haven’t experienced what that character’s experienced, but something in me can still identify with the feeling of it enough to deliver it. But it’s not about anything particularly that happened to me. I suppose it’s like being an actor, where you couldn’t play a part if a part of you wasn’t in a character. It’s the Stanislavski method singing and songwriting basically, creating a character and playing it.

You’ve got to understand and empathise with the character enough to make it work.

Yeah, which you can. But if you take the word ‘autobiographical’ literally, which I am, ‘this happened to this person’... it’s just inventions or things you’ve seen or read or wish you’d seen or read.

Would you say most of what you’ve written in the past autobiographical?

I would say it’s completely autobiographical, yeah.

So why the sudden line drawn? Was there a conscious decision to stop writing songs like that, or do you just have less of yourself to put in now?

No, I think what it was was, the reason I was writing songs in the first place was, the way that I had grown up in ‘70s Ireland, and we all know what that was like, and I’d grown up in a very abusive set of circumstances, there was no such thing as therapy, music was my way out, and it was perhaps therapy. There was a whole load of shit to get off one’s chest. And I think literally what happened was I did that, and got it off my chest, so then all that was left to express was the stuff that I would have expressed had I not had all of the shit on top of me. Had I been born in The Little House On The Prairie I would have just started making records like the last record or this record. The object of your game when you go to get shit off your chest is that one day it will be off your chest. And I think that’s what happened, I reached the point where it was off my chest.

Maybe it took longer than expected.

No. It didn’t take very long really, in the great scheme of things.

25 years.

Yeah, but in the scheme of what it was I was recovering from, that’s not very long to be honest.

Yes.

I mean to get yourself free at all, creatively speaking, is quite miraculous. However long it takes.

‘Take Me To Church’ is a brilliant pop song, but what you’re singing about is a big statement, especially for a first single off an album, and it certainly sounds like you’re saying something about yourself. In fact in context of what we’ve been discussing, it sounds like you’re saying, “I’m not doing that anymore. This is who I am now and this is what I’m doing from now on.”

One could say that! One could say that, yeah. It’s funny, you might go to write a character and fucking can somehow accidentally echo your own thing. It’s really more when you listen to the album in sequence, in context... I’m from the ‘70s when records had a sequence and perhaps a story across an album, as opposed to separate tracks. There are approximately three or four female characters on this record. One of them appears more often than the others, and that character in particular is sort of the centrepiece of the record. It’s really a record about... illusions and not illusions, put it that way, romantically speaking, it’s a very romantic record, it’s a pop record basically. The character is maturing in a way when it comes to attitudes towards romantic shit. ‘Take Me To Church’ is the moment one’s illusions get shattered, except it’s a great thing. It’s more the character really talking about not necessarily wanting to be the silly type of romantic, which is a quite dangerous thing to be perhaps. But I don’t write songs about Sinéad O’Connor. That’d be really uncool. I really don’t.

But you’ve done it before and it wasn’t uncool.

Well no, because I never was writing about Sinéad O’Connor as such.

You mean the public concept of Sinéad O’Connor.

Yeah. It’s always a weird thing to talk about, music, because if you could talk about it you wouldn’t need it. So it’s always a very hard thing to describe. It’s a very hard thing to describe what a character means in one song when really that song is part of a whole journey in a way, it’s like taking a page out of a play and saying, “What are you saying with this one page?” It’s her pivotal moment, this particular character. It could equally be a male character, it just happens to be female.

The album sounds like it’s made by someone in love with life. Musically at least, it’s not a dark album, it feels very positive, and even though some of the lyrics are about longing or desperation or getting fucked over-

Well they’re not all about that, even the longing ones like ‘Your Green Jacket’, that’s very romantic, it’s very positive. I wouldn’t see it as a dark album at all, there are a couple of dark moments where one of the characters gets a fright, but it ends up being a good thing because that’s how she can make her mind up to love herself more than anything else. Yeah, I think it’s quite a positive record. It’s a very romantic record.

Yeah, and despite it not being autobiographical, it sounds very positive and comfortable. So in that way I would imagine it does represent what you’re up to.

Yeah, exactly. I’m comfortable and free to a point where I can enjoy playing these characters and writing these characters and just rocking the fuck out and having a laugh. Obviously they’re coming from me, it was my intention to make a romantic record, all of the feelings expressed are expressed the way I would express them. There are characters but I suppose it is a fine line, it’s just that the experiences they’re uttering are not my experiences, but they’re my feelings.

Right, exactly.

Yeah, it’s a hard thing to explain. In a way you’ve got to go out of your way to say that things are not autobiographical because you don’t want anyone else offended who might be implicated in matters! Sometimes you might have taken essences of situations and created something else with them. As songwriters we kind of milk life for songs. We have to be careful! ‘Faction’ is what my brother says, he’s a novel writer, he says what he writes is faction. And I guess that would probably describe what I do.

I was wondering if writing an album like this a sort of process of self-fulfilling prophecy, becoming what you want to be by writing and performing it.

Yeah, I mean... What’s the best way to put it... The only reason as I say for having expressed any of the other more painful stuff musically is because that’s what was going on. The only reason you bother doing that is because you believe that some day it’ll be over if you do. So when it’s over, yeah... I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh I must create a happy loving album,’ my life was happy and loving, and that’s where I was, I’ve been listening to Chicago blues for the last two years, which I love, funky happy blues, I had a great band around at the time, a great guitar player, there just happened to be some great musicians around and a whole lot of shit came together. And I was musically having the time of my life, that’s what was behind it I think. Because the whole tour that I did last year was the best musical fun I ever had. So I think what happened was I fell really madly in love with music, and I’d always quite liked it but I’d never fallen madly in love with it. So it didn’t need to be that I had to create a prophecy for myself, except... you’re not entirely out of the arena with a song like ‘Take Me To Church’, even though it’s a character to some extent, I was aware writing that song that what you write is what you create. So I deliberately wanted to create the type of life that perhaps I want the character to have, and that also somewhere in me I must want also. That was the only song I’ve ever written where I wrote that with that in mind, that this shit will come true in my life.

Ah, so I wasn’t completely off.

No, not at all, no. But obviously look, you can’t trust a fucking thing a musician will tell you as to what songs are about or not about. Bob Dylan had everyone believing he grew up in a circus for a while. We’re not at liberty to be 100% honest.

Well, why should you.

Also it fucks things up for the audience. If you hear what was in the mind of your favourite poet when he wrote your favourite poem he’d fuck it up for you forever, because next time you hear the poem you’ll be in his head and not yours. If you tell people what songs are about there are a whole load of dangers involved. The most important being you take away from the audience the right to project onto the song what they think it means to them. I don’t wanna know what Bob Dylan is talking about because I can’t imagine then what he’s talking about, I can’t imagine he’s talking to me. If he told me he was talking to that fat bird around the corner I can’t imagine he was talking to me.

Lines like, “I love to make music but my head got wrecked by the business” – it’s hard to hear that and accept that it’s not autobiographical.

Oh yeah, no, ‘Eight Good Reasons’ and ‘How About I Be Me’ are extremely autobiographical. The other songs not so much so, but there are glimpses obviously.

I took some solace in that line about being wrecked by the business being past tense. Is that right?

Yeah, definitely.

During those 25 years or so when you were getting everything out of your system with your music, did it feel like catharsis, did it work for you on a sort of physical level?

It actually did, very much so. That’s the way singers are and that’s the way we’re built, we need to vocalise shit, and certainly for abuse survivors the issue is voice, that you didn’t get to voice yourself. So it was very lucky to be in a situation where one could voice oneself, because so much of what goes on with abuse also it isn’t verbal, and sometimes it’s pre-verbal. There aren’t words, only sounds. And it you’re a person who responds to sound as a recovery method, which I did obviously because that’s the way I’m programmed, and I didn’t have any option because I was in ‘70s and early ‘80s Ireland where there was no therapy anyway. So yeah, it got it all out of my body, and the thing with abuse also is it’s the body that’s been wounded, so you can do all the therapy in your head but the last stage of recovery is getting it out of the body, so if you can be doing that as you’re going along... Sound is a very powerful way of getting shit out of your body. So there definitely did come a point where it was gone. And that was quite wonderful. I didn’t actually expect it to be gone so soon to be honest. You’re saying 25 years is a long time, that’s fuckin’ no time [laughs]. That’s fuckin’ no time. I thought it would take a very long time.

There’s also… You were very active on Twitter for a year or two, but it’s now an HQ promo account, it’s not personal. Is that choice, to not give people access to that part of you, connected to the less autobiographical musical approach? Does it all tie in?

Insofar as I’ve deliberately decided to go quiet on all fronts other than music while I’ve got an album coming out... I’m sensible enough I suppose to keep all distractions out the picture.

Was Twitter a distraction?

It becomes a distraction. Anything that you do outside of music becomes a distraction. Unfortunately you’re followed by every fuckin’ newspaper in town, or if you write something on your site or whatever, and that’s fine, it’s as it should be, I have no problem with it generally, but while I’m trying to focus on music I’d rather not have any distractions. So it’s best to avoid the Twitter. Anyway I like dipping in and out of Twitter, Twitter’s the type of thing you couldn’t spend your daily life on. Anything I wrote about anything anywhere else would be a distraction. I actually do write a tour diary most nights, there’s a section on my site called Tour Musings, but I don’t actually put it in there, I’ll save it and use it some other time. But even those things would be a distraction, somebody will be writing about the fact that you wrote about menstruating rather than writing about your album. There’s a lot about menstruating in my tour diaries.

Is there!

Yeah. It’s a big issue for women like me. That’s what I mean, that’s why I keep off Twitter, off everything while I’ve got a record coming out because otherwise everything will be about menstruation and not my great record.

Has that annoyed you over the years, that things non-related to your music have got the headlines.

Yeah but look, I’m 50% responsible for that. There are two of us in that relationship, me and the media, so we both have 50% responsibility. That’s the way it was and that’s the way it is. So now I really try to keep things separate. So if there’s extra-curricular stuff I wanna rant on about, I’ll do that on my site. I try as much as possible to avoid talking about that shit when I’m trying to flog records.

When you were on Twitter did you interact with people?

Oh yeah. I still have really good friends I met on Twitter that I’ve never actually met but we’re really good mates. Yeah yeah yeah. Then you get in rows with people. The best thing about Twitter is you can block people, which you can’t do in life, it’s fucking great, just press Block, it’s fucking the greatest feeling ever. It’s so good! I nearly go on there just to block people, it’s brilliant. The day that you’ve learnt not to respond to a troll and just block and move on, it’s better than therapy actually. You know that you genuinely stopped giving a flying fuck what anyone thinks.

I know exactly what you mean because a guy who was harassing me a lot on email, and I didn’t know you could do it but-

Divert his emails to Trash.

Yeah! I told him I was doing it.

Was it something you wrote that he didn’t like?

I wrote a really positive piece and he interpreted it all as negative. He’s clearly a troubled guy and he probably needs help.

Yeah but you don’t have to put up with this shit. It’s great when you can divert people. I do that as well. Because then you never know they wrote to you. And it’s brilliant because they think that you’re ignoring them. A big mistake is to tell them you’re diverting them, because then they set up fake email addresses and abuse you from that. But also if you just divert them to Trash but don’t tell them, they think that you’re stronger than you really are because you’ve ignored them.

I didn’t care how strong he thought I was, I just wanted him out of my life.

No I always got off on them thinking that I’ve been strong enough not to react. Which I would never be. But if I ever told anyone that I was diverting them they’d set up a fake email address.

Video directed by James Lees.

I loved the video for ‘Take Me To Church’, which my friend directed. He loved working with you. I saw the behind-the-scenes video yesterday.

I haven’t seen that, I’m afraid to watch it.

Really?

I’m afraid to watch any of it because I’d be mortified at the state of me in the wig and the dress. I’m afraid of it.

In terms of the wigs – you’re wearing wigs in the new promo shoots and the… is it PVC?

It’s latex. Just get that right because the woman who made the dress is rightly extremely upset that everyone has not noticed that it’s latex.

Okay. Not PVC.

No, PVC is cheap. Latex is very expensive.

Well connecting again to the lyrics and the non-Twitter activity, with these promo photos it’s almost like you’re wearing a disguise, or even a shield.

It could be the opposite though actually. To some extent. The thing is I’ve never really written love songs before, no one has actually clicked, perhaps including me, that I am actually a woman. That underneath this there is actually a woman.

What do you mean?! That’s not true.

No, do you know what I mean... I’ve always written and sang and performed and been the kind of warrior woman, and that’s great, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I never actually was the other woman. It wasn’t supposed to be the cover, it was just a few publicity shots, and I thought, ‘Let’s throw in some hair and some sexy dresses and we’ll get loads of publicity for the record, it wasn’t meant to be the cover. But in a way it sounds like the woman that made the record, and that’s me obviously, those are aspects of myself. So in a way it could be the opposite of a disguise, it could actually be more a revealing of something. And this [gestures to herself] is a disguise actually.

You think?

Yeah. Very much so, yeah.

In what way?

Because... what’s the best way to put it... for protective purposes, put it that way. Soft girls have to act a lot tougher than they really are.

You mean like wearing this suit jacket?

No, the shaved hair, everything, all of that. It’s been safer to wander the world as a female looking like this than it would have been to be a female looking like, whatever. So in one way you could argue that the shaved hair and all of that is in fact the disguise. That’s all I’m saying. I wouldn’t necessarily say that the latex woman is a disguise. The dresses are mine, put it that way. The hair is not mine, but I would wear those clothes.

Photo by Donal Moloney

Okay. What was the original plan for the cover art?

It was just a picture of my ugly mug in front of a picture of Vishnu. I don’t know quite what I mean... the record’s very romantic and there are all these different women, or different aspects of women in a very romantic womanist kind of way, so it’s not that it’s a vulnerable record, but it’s a record perhaps from a more... Nobody’s really seen I think that particularly feminine part of me, other than the warrior feminine. And I’ve never been particularly comfortable with displaying that I’m actually a female [laughs], particularly other than the warrior female. In a way yeah, it’s not a disguise, it’s the opposite.

That’s amazing. Okay. So the opening track, ‘How About I Be Me And You Be You’, you say is autobiographical, and-

Can we just clarify something about ‘Take Me To Church’, it’s not actually about church, everybody thinks it’s about church – I can’t imagine why. It’s not. It’s only referencing that song from My Fair Lady when the main character’s father’s going to get married and he sings “Get me to church on time.” It’s really about relationships, the song’s saying that it’s all very well being married and all, but love is a thing that hurts.

Okay. So ‘How About I Be Me And You Be You’, does that relate to what we’ve been talking about? Although I think, on reflection now, I’m confused about what that song’s about.

I’ll tell you what it is, it’s hard not to be confused. I wrote these three articles three or so years ago for an Irish newspaper and they were actually quite funny, they were funny articles, it started as one article, because I’d read this piece about a woman who married her truck.

Her truck?

Her truck. And I had no boyfriend at the time and I wrote this very funny article about was this gonna happen to me, I was gonna end up marrying my fuckin’ truck because there were no fellas around, then it ended up being, it was such a scandal in Ireland that a woman would talk about sex and talk about such things, that the child in me got more bold the more scandal there was, I wrote another one, and then another one, so there were these three articles that were actually very funny but got portrayed as if it was some lunatic, purely because women aren’t supposed to talk about shagging bananas or whatever. It did generate my favourite headline ever, which is ‘Sinéad Admits Sex With Popular Fruit,’ which I thought was fuckin’ hilarious. Apart from ‘Tweet Revenge.’ So yeah, there was all scandal and outrage and how awful it is that a woman would talk like that. So that’s what I wrote this song about, it was actually a response to the kind of sexually repressed Twatterati in Ireland.

Okay. I got that, and I was thinking that it was a comment on what happens when you are yourself and open to people and how it was received – it’s the first song on the album, so I thought it was you saying, “If this is what happens when I’m myself, then I’m now gonna close off,” and then the rest of the songs aren’t so personal.

Oh no, no... they’re factional. One can be extremely personal but not be writing about oneself.

Of course.

It’s a very hard thing to describe. Really it’s just a romantic song, it’s just saying, why would you be bothered writing about sex and love and giving out that you haven’t got a boyfriend and crying that you might have to shag bananas for the rest of your life. It’s more about saying, look, whatever anyone might say you should be at the end of the day, you’re just a little 5ft4 female the same as any other 5ft4 female. That’s what the whole record is really, it’s just love songs, just pop little love songs for some little tiny woman.

Do you think it’s bad for you to be sitting with someone like me prodding at everything and deconstructing it more than maybe you think it needs?

No I think it’s natural and to some extent that’s what we got taught to do at school, deconstruct things. I think it’s natural, especially if you’re an artist who has traditionally been very autobiographical and very open and perhaps a little too honest about what things are about or not about. No, there’s nothing wrong with it and I don’t find it difficult or a pain in the arse, the difficult bit is lying your way around it [laughs].

Given that you say there are three different female characters on the album, that seems to be a musing on the different parts of our personalities, and the fact that when you’re telling stories as you are, you can siphon off different parts of yourself and attribute them to different people for the purposes of saying different things. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it very much does, it very much does. Absolutely. I suppose it goes back that thing, a writer couldn’t create characters unless those characters were somehow part of themselves. Even if they’re not at the point that they’re created, they certainly stay in you once you’ve created you. The character becomes a part of you.

Okay one more question. You started off busking, is that right?

Yeah, well I did do a lot of busking.

So in terms of everything that’s happened since then, your career, life, media, being part of the music industry, when you’re singing are you still just that person busking, is it still just you getting joy out of the music? Or has it all been corrupted and jaded by all the baggage that comes with it.

No, it’s always the person that went busking, but it’s better than the person who went busking, because it’s the person that went busking and then fell in love with all these other musicians, the Chicago blues stuff or whatever. It’s a person who’s in love with performing live. I get real inspired by all the Chicago blues guys, I watch them performing live and it makes me wanna perform live. I think there’s something in me, I don’t know if it’s the same with other musicians, but I just love performing live, I couldn’t give a shit who or what the audience is, it could be a street with nobody in it or it could be a stage with a bunch of people. It’s getting off on making music, and the feeling you get, the adrenaline, the excitement, it’s all a bit of a drug. All the feelings you get when you’re making music.

And that’s never gone away.

No. Not at all. It’s obviously nicer in the studio than it is in the street in the winter, but otherwise it’s the same thing. In fact I definitely get more excited about making music as I’ve got older.

How come?

Well I don’t know that I appreciated the fun it could be when I was younger. Because I was real shy. And I still am, insofar as I have to close my eyes when I’m singing, I can’t look at the audience or I’m fucked. I used to be quite crippled with shyness whereas now I relax and just have fun and even tell inappropriate jokes in-between songs or whatever. Relax and get off on it. I used to be a deer in the headlights, but now I get off on it and think of how lucky I am to be making music. I like to watch Howlin’ Wolf before I go on, I watch a lot of his live stuff on YouTube, he’s just so fuckin’ funky that you think, “Oh my god, I’m getting to do a Howlin’ Wolf gig.” It just makes you excited.

‘And remember: Morrie’s wigs are tested against hurricane winds.’

Sight unseen, such a line doesn't sound like classic movie dialogue. But none of this is normal. This 18-second fake ad, 37 minutes into Goodfellas: what an absurdly quotable piece of footage, a joy for everything it is and everything it isn’t. What an introduction to Morrie, the loveable schmuck, who just seems so happy – if only we could all be as happy as Morrie – so utterly behind this endeavour, so brazenly into the hard sell. The clincher of course is the cheapness: it’s all so wonderfully unsophisticated.

I wrote about this before, briefly, in my investigation into all things Morrie and actor Chuck Low. But more has come to light. So down we go. Another rabbit hole. 

Goodfellas’ Morris Kessler was based on Marty Krugman, a 1970s bookmaker and owner of a hairdressers and wig salon, For Men Only, just up the street from Henry Hill’s Queens nightclub The Suite. As you can read here, the salon doubled as a collection point for betting slips and cash, and was also, in curtained off back rooms, a little den for a bit of gangster business. Henry and made man Paul Vario (Goodfellas’ Paul Cicero) bought hairpieces from Marty, whose wigs were known for their durability. Even underwater.

Much of the business’ reputation was due to Marty’s TV commercials, in which he himself hawked the hairpieces. They would broadcast late at night on Queens Public Television and featured Marty, according to Goodfellas’ source material, Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, ‘swimming vigorously across a pool wearing his wig while an announcer proclaimed that Krugman’s wigs always stayed put.’

While researching Morrie a couple of years ago I found, via some audio footnotes on GQ’s Goodfellas oral history, that Scorsese had an idea to include a recreation of Morrie/Marty’s ad in the film. One night, according to Joe Reidy, the first assistant director on Goodfellas, Scorsese saw a crude TV commercial for a windows company called Aalco, and wanted it to look exactly like that. He had his people track down the company’s boss, a man named Stephen Pacca who, they discovered, was also the guy on screen, selling his own product. They called him in for a meeting in view of having him consult on the Morrie ad, then asked him make it himself, just as he did his windows ad. Scorsese left him to it.

I’d looked for Pacca and found that he’d died in 1994. But recently I got a message from his son, Stephen Pacca Jr, who’d seen my blog, loved the bit on his dad, and wanted to give me the whole story. I spoke to him, and to Joe Reidy.

“My dad had gotten into the business in the 1970s, we sold vinyl replacement windows,” says Pacca Jr of his father’s company, Aalco. In the 1980s, Pacca Sr separated from his wife and the business was hit with dire financial problems, and one night after work he and his cousin, the company’s general manager, went for a drink. “After a few drinks sat at the bar, my dad was looped,” says Pacca Jr. “He didn’t drink, so he didn’t have any tolerance for alcohol. He looked at my cousin and he said, ‘Johnny, I’ve got the solution to not go bankrupt – we’re gonna go on television.’ My cousin was looking at him like this was absurd. But my dad said, ‘We’re gonna make a commercial, we’re gonna go on television.’ And that’s exactly what they did.”

His father was probably inspired, says Pacca Jr, by the TV ads for electronics chain Crazy Eddie’s, which ran over 7,500 commercials throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. The company was named after its Brooklyn owner Eddie Antar; many assumed he was the one screaming his lungs out in the ads, although the on-screen huckster was actually radio DJ Jerry Carroll. “His commercials were a lot more popular than ours,” says Pacca Jr. “The guy was screaming: ‘Our prices are insane!!’ His commercials were wild.” Yes:

Pacca had not previously made anything for television. He approached WNYW – New York’s Channel 5 – and got them to fund the commercial (for around $7,000, says Pacca Jr) in exchange for Pacca buying over $30,000 of airtime a week. But he wrote and made it himself. “He got the help of an advertising agency, but it was just a small guy and all he really did was print my dad’s storyboards,” says Pacca Jr.

“All people remember about our commercial was the money coming out of the window. They don’t remember my dad’s name, they don’t remember the company name. Somebody opens an old window and my dad says, ‘Homeowners, don’t worry about money,’ and then 5000 single dollar bills go through the window. We built a chute behind the window and we had five people just dumping the money in this chute, with big fans, so the money would all blow out the window.”

It worked. “The whole success of that business was the commercial,” says Pacca Jr. “Our business skyrocketed. We had six girls in the office just answering phones. In one year, we went from $1.7m in sales and a staff of five, to $15m in sales and a staff of 250.” And this is why. In all its breathless glory:

“They were so badly made,” says Joe Reidy, Scorsese’s first assistant director on Goodfellas, of Stephen Pacca’s commercials – after the success of the first one, he did a few more. That original one though, says Reidy, was “the one that got Marty’s attention.” Scorsese kept seeing it on TV and was fascinated by it. “The idea of making the wig commercial was just because of Steve Pacca’s ad,” says Reidy. “While we were in pre-production on Goodfellas, the content of the commercial didn’t exist. Then Marty had this idea that Morrie would have this commercial running and it would play in his shop as part of the scene. So that was incorporated in the script, he and [co-writer] Nick Pileggi must have spoken about it.”

You can see in the Goodfellas shooting script, dated January 1989, that it simply has Morrie swimming across a pool, just as Marty Krugman’s ad is described in Wiseguy, with the addition of some minimal Morrie voiceover.

“Marty wanted to make it like that,” says Reidy. “He wanted us to track down who directed the commercial that Steve Pacca was in – we didn’t know he had made it. I can’t remember who actually found him, it could have been me. But we basically called the company to find out who made the commercial, and the call got kicked upstairs quite quickly because it was not a very big company, it went to him. And he said, ‘We made it.’”

Then Scorsese got on the phone. Pacca Jr remembers it well. “I’m sitting in the office one day with the girls answering the phones, and the head girl, Diane, she says to me, ‘Stephen, I got a man on the phone who says he’s Martin Scorsese, and he wants to talk to your father.’ Oh my god, it was really him! And he told my dad he wanted to make a commercial exactly like our window commercial. He was very emphatic about that, he said ‘I want the exact same commercial, but I just want it to be about wigs.’”

Pacca was asked to go and meet Scorsese, “who got very very excited about it,” says Reidy. “It was not even a matter of, ‘Do you wanna meet him and see if it would work out,’ it was, ‘We’re gonna use this guy no matter what.’ And once Marty met him, it was over, it was decided Steve would do it.” After an initial meeting at Scorsese’s office was a follow-up, in which an excitable Pacca went full dog and pony.

“He made a presentation for Marty,” says Reidy. “The man came in with storyboards. They were primitive, but he had designed a commercial, how it would go, he had written a script. He had basically everything in line for shooting it. He drew the wig coming off. He drew off screen, off the edges of the storyboard, where the fan would be placed [to simulate the hurricane winds]. He drew the fishing tackle pulling the wig off, so that people would know how it would be done.”

Swimming pool aside, the ideas were Pacca’s. “Mr Scorsese didn’t tell him to have the guy jump in the swimming pool,” says Pacca Jr. “He didn’t tell him anything. My dad told him what he’d do, that he’d have the actor talking and then we’d print his name at the bottom and then he’ll jump in the pool and the wig’s gonna stay on. And Marty just said, ‘Okay, whatever you say.’ He gave him carte blanche to do what he wanted.”

“What we all agreed on,” says Reidy, “was that Steve would not only direct it, but he would put everything together. The only things we would provide would be the camera and our Director Of Photography, Michael Ballhaus, to shoot it, but he’d take direction from Steve Pacca. Michael had two assistants, and a sound mixer and boom operator, but again only under Steve’s direction. All of the special effects, all the prop work, all the make-up and wardrobe would be done by Steve Pacca’s group, which were really people who worked in his office or installed the windows. Someone operating a fan? His guy, with a fan that they brought. A normal house fan.”

Warner Bros, says Reidy, decided that it would be a kind of unofficial part of the production, giving Pacca freedom to do whatever he wanted. That caused some confusion, says Pacca Jr – his father didn’t realise that Scorsese’s team would give him whatever support he needed, so he just went ahead and took it all on, using his company staff. He rented the Lodi Boys Club in New Jersey, which had an indoor pool, for the interior shoot. It was all too much.

“My dad didn’t realise how time-consuming making this wig commercial was gonna be,” says Pacca Jr. The shoot was only a day or two, but with pre- and post-production, the project took a month. “I said, ‘Dad why don’t you ask the guy to help you?’ He said, ‘No no no, he asked me to make this commercial and I’m gonna deliver him the finished product.’ He wanted to be very proud of his work, you know?”

At some point, chiefly because he wasn’t able to do his day to day job while doing this, Pacca snapped. “He called Mr Scorsese up,” says Pacca Jr, “and he told him he quit! I wasn’t in the room when he had the conversation, he told me afterwards. Mr Scorsese said, ‘What?! You quit? Steve, you can’t quit! There’s too much involved here, we’ve got too much going on!’”

The Morrie ad was the first thing being shot for Goodfellas, which itself was now about a week and a half away from filming. “Mr Scorsese said, ‘Is it about money?’” says Pacca Jr. “And my father said, ‘No no no, I just don’t have time for this, it’s costing me too much money. It is about money, but it’s not the money you’re giving me!’ He was giving my dad $2,500. But my dad, I bet you he spent $10,000 of his own money making this commercial.”

On what? “Well I don’t think he asked for money to rent the boys club. I don’t know who he used for actors, but I know he paid people. This guy’s gonna jump in the pool and his wig’s gonna stay on, it looks like it’s not a big thing, but it is! And Martin Scorsese went crazy: ‘I’ll give you more money!’ And my dad says, ‘You don’t have enough money to give me, because this is costing me my business! It’s not about dollars, it’s costing me time.’ So Marty says, ‘Look, whether it’s about money or not, I’m gonna give you £5,000 instead of $2,500 – please finish this commercial for me.’ So my father finally agreed to finish it.”

And a rejuvenated Pacca did the shoot. He got satin baseball jackets made for his crew, imprinted with the film’s working title, Wiseguy. Scorsese stayed away, determined not to dilute the purity of the project. The Goodfellas hair and wardrobe department provided Morrie’s wig and outfit, and checked that Pacca’s supporting ‘actors’ were dressed accurately for the period. Other than that, Pacca was allowed to just “make the commercial the way he would have made it if he were the wig man,” says Reidy. “The guys who came to do this, they didn’t know anything about filmmaking. The other women in the background [of the commercial]: these were all people Steve Pacca knew. We didn’t interfere, we didn’t suggest any way to make it better.”

Michael Ballhaus, the Goodfellas cinematographer who had previously worked with Scorsese on After Hours, The Color Of Money and The Last Temptation Of Christ, didn’t bring lights. “Michael had seen plenty of bad commercials to know that he wasn’t going to light it,” says Reidy. “He wasn’t going to do anything except turn the lights on inside the pool. And it was just sort of drab as a result. Michael knew that and was very excited about it, he said, ‘It’s gonna be great!’ It was very surreal because he was taking direction from a man who didn’t know anything about directing. Excuse me, no: Steve Pacca knew what he needed to do, what he wanted to do. And Michael was in the spirit, he was very enthused about it.”

Martin Scorsese and Michael Ballhaus on Goodfellas. Photo taken from Alamy, can you tell

And Pacca got Chuck Low to those locations, and told him what to do, and how to do it. Pacca Jr was at the shoot for a bit but, 28 years on, doesn’t remember much. “I just remember him jumping in the pool,” he says. “That was a highlight.”

Pacca edited the ad and submitted it just as we see it in the film. “Marty was so, so pleased with it,” says Reidy. “So happy. He was laughing, he was thrilled, it really broke him up. He really loved it.” And that was that. Scorsese shot Goodfellas, and invited Pacca to the premiere.

Pacca set up another business, for second mortgages, and made an ad for that too. This time he had a horse. “He brought it up the elevator at the Channel 5 studio,” says Pacca Jr. “The horse had saddlebags, and in the saddlebags was money, which all came out somehow.”

Pacca Jr told me a lot about his dad’s highs and lows, about how he’d make millions then go broke, then make millions again, then go broke again. At one point he built a recording studio in his office, “with speakers that cost $15,000 a piece. I guess he always had wanted to be in showbusiness in some way. He would sing, he would record music, he made a couple of records with pictures of him on the front. But it never took off.” Having grown up poor, says Pacca Jr, his father deemed it important to always have a new car so bought a new Cadillac convertible every year, whether he could afford to or not. He would, says Pacca Jr, drive through Harlem and have people wave and call out his name, such was his fame from the TV commercials. He was known to pull over and give homeless people $200: “He just was very generous to strangers.”

I asked Pacca Jr how his father died. Around 1989, he says, Pacca had kidney failure, and was put on dialysis for two years. Pacca Jr pleaded with him to take one of his kidneys, but he refused right up to the last minute. Finally, after a third emergency visit to hospital in the space of a month, he insisted. “I looked at him that day in the hospital and said, ‘Look, if you don’t take my kidney, you’re gonna die. It’s as simple as that. You almost died tonight.” Pacca agreed, and the operation was scheduled for Christmas Eve morning: “It was a nice Christmas present for me to give to him.”

In 1994 though, Pacca had a heart attack. “He climbed up to the fifth floor of a building, surveying the building to do 500 windows for a guy, and he sat down in the guy’s kitchen, turned blue and dropped dead. But he got three or four good years when he wasn’t suffering. I was happy to be able to be a part of that.”

We’ve all got a lot of happiness from Stephen Pacca. So think of him when you watch that Morrie’s Wigs ad. Just a simple window salesman who made a piece of movie history. And please. Don’t throw money out of the window.

And that’s that.

Recently, for the release of his new film Eddie The Eagle, I spoke to Dexter Fletcher about everything that led him to this point: his experiences as a young actor, the wilderness years when he lost his way, his rehabilitation, and then, his road to becoming an accomplished director of resolutely feelgood films. The resulting Guardian feature is here.

One of the most touching parts of our conversation was a discussion of Alan Rickman, who I'd seen him reference before – I'd heard Alan had put Dexter in touch with director Dalia Ibelhauptaitė, who would become Dexter’s wife, and that Alan had subsequently been best man at their wedding. Readers – in the feature's comments section, and to me personally – were moved by what Dexter said about Alan, and there was more, which was great, so I've put it here, with permission from DF.

Can I ask you about Alan Rickman? You've briefly mentioned him once or twice in the past  – you did a play with him when you were 14, then years later he suggested you do the play where you met your wife, and then he was best man at your wedding. It seems he was an important mentor and supporter in your life.

Yeah. Even when I didn't know that was what was going on. When he did put me with my wife, all I knew was that I was getting these calls to go and see this woman to talk about being in a play. It was only when I did the first night and that he was there, and that she told me that Alan said that she should see me for the play, did I realise that he had anything to do with it.

Where did that come from?

There were a lot of people at his memorial who were the same as me, absolutely devastated and bereft. He was a champion of what he thought was talent. I'm not saying he thought I was greatly talented. Obviously he did, as I did him. But yes, he was always a great supporter of many people. I had a 35-year relationship with him. He was my best man.

So you were close to him that whole time.

Exactly, but I wouldn't see him for many years, and then seeing him again it would be exactly the same as it was. When I was 14 I worked with him every day in Sheffield, six weeks in rehearsal and six weeks in the show. The Summer Party, an early Stephen Poliakoff play. I played this precocious kid who was at this Glastonbury-like festival, and he played the guy who owned the land. Brian Cox was in it as well, and Hayley Mills. It was great. But then I didn't see him till 10, 12 years later, and I was out of my nut on drugs in the BBC bar, and I just remember him looking at me like this [head cocked, curiously]. And he was really thrilled to see me, and I was all wired. And he said, 'Are you all right?' 'Yeah, I'm fine.' I was paranoid, coked out of my head. Then I started getting the calls to meet this director. I think he felt what might save me, and get me on track, was getting back to doing some theatre. This is after nonsense like GamesMaster and other bad choices. I wasn't working, I couldn't get a job.

Did he say anything to you about the state you were in? Or was he more diplomatic?

No, he was more diplomatic. I think he just made an evaluation. And then I started getting invited to dinner with people who were adults and interesting and had lived life a bit more, rather than hanging around with the kind of people I was hanging around with. He helped me see that there was a wider world with these other people, who were his friends. He gave so much of his life to me. He always did that. And then he was my go-to guy for advice. He was a real friend in the true sense of the word.

Dexter and Alan with writer Joe Penhall.

That's amazing.

It was amazing. There were a lot of very upset people [when he died] because they knew a big support in their life was gone. Because he would do it in ways that you wouldn't even know. Until after. He was so deft at it. He never did it for accolade, reward or thanks, he just did it. When Dalia and I first got together we lived in a little sublet flat down in Harrow Road. It was a rental of a sublet of a Housing Association flat, it was tiny, it was very dingy, it was all we could afford, I'd just gone bankrupt, it was all we had, but we were there and it was great in its way. And he came and visited and went 'Oh yeah, right.' And three days later this guy came round and re-carpeted the whole place.

And he'd done that.

Yeah. Just did that. And never phoned up and went 'There's someone coming round to do it.' Somebody just knocked on the door and said 'I've got the carpets.' What? And he said 'Yeah, it's been paid for,' and he put them up on the stairs and in the living room. And it was Alan. He'd just done it.

So he was a guardian angel.

Yeah. The real deal.

When Alan died, Hugh Jackman posted a photo of himself and Taron Egerton and Alan and Christopher Walken. Had he come to visit the Eddie The Eagle set?

No, that was dinner at mine! When we were shooting I was talking to Walken and Alan's name came up, and I phoned Alan and said, 'Do you wanna come to dinner with Chris Walken?’ He said, 'Yeah I'd love to.' So it was just very lucky that they were both free, and I said to Hugh, 'Walken's coming to dinner with Rickman,' and he said 'I'm coming too!' Fantastic. It was quite a night. It was a great night.

Your three films as a director are very hopeful, optimistic stories of triumph. The good wins. I saw a little video interview with you and you said 'I am optimistic, I don't know if I do cynicism very well.' Is that a creative agenda, or does it just come through because of what you've gone through, and your instincts?

I think so. Alan was a mentor, when I was down on myself he could always be positive about me. And I didn't always immediately see it, but whenever I was saying 'This ain't right' or 'This ain't good enough' or 'I haven't done that' or 'I fucked up' or 'I can only do a cockney accent,' he would say 'You can do what you choose to do.' And what I brought away from that relationship with him, as opposed to other relationships I had in my life, was that you can be very positive to people. You can be very encouraging of people. It's as easy as sniping to go 'Yeah but you can.' And why would I not wanna do that? People have done that for me. And I would like to be that kind of person. If I can. I love Taron, I think he's really brilliant, and when I see him doing something I think is putting himself down, I'll try to do what I can do. The same with Jackman, if I hear him saying [during promotion] 'This film's all about Taron, he's brilliant,' I'm very quick to say, 'Yeah but you're also very brilliant as well. Let's not forget that.' Not that he's someone who wallows in any self-pity.

He's gracious.

I got flung into some sort of Morrie wormhole the other night. What can you do? I clicked on a link to this recent interview with Goodfellas co-writer Nicholas Pileggi, and heard that Chuck Low, who played Morrie, was not really an actor at all, but Robert De Niro’s landlord. And in I fell. I’ve strung my findings together here for no good reason; 20 years ago this would have been a Geocities Morrie’s Wigs fan page.

Morris Kessler, bookmaker and wig salon owner, doesn’t have much screentime in Goodfellas – maybe 10 mins tops. He moans about paying money, he moans about getting money, he gets whacked. Goodnight. It’s his first scene that does it though. In an ordinary film by an ordinary director, it could have been a straight sequence about a gangster going in to collect money and roughing someone up, but Scorsese makes it bountiful. The cheap-ass wig ad: “Morrie’s wigs don’t come off! Even underwater.” Morrie’s seething protests: “What am I, a schmuck on wheels? Fuck him in the ear! Fuck him in the other ear, that sonofabitch.” (So many quotes.) Liotta’s laugh, surely for real, as De Niro’s assault dislodges Low’s wig.

It’s got it all: absurd comedy, violence, a frisson of reality. And then, of course, the end of the scene rolls right into the next one: a strangled Morrie hands the phone to Henry, who runs off to pulp someone’s face with a gun (“Whadda you want, fucko, you want something?”). Classic after classic after classic. That’s why you can’t stop watching Goodfellas. The whole film feels like a montage. You can’t turn it off.

And so to Chuck Low. In that interview, Pileggi mentions how Scorsese wanted to cast real people in supporting roles – there are some genuine gangsters around that table when Liotta introduces us to the mob. Bemused Warner Bros accounting staff had to pay them cash in hand; no way around it. And then there was Chuck. “Morrie is Bob De Niro's landlord,” says Pileggi. “Morrie owned this building on Hudson Street across from Nobu, where Bob lived at the time, and he said ‘I wanna be in the movies, I wanna be in the movies,’ just like he did [in Goodfellas].”

A bit of digging finds that indeed, back in the ‘80s, De Niro rented the top three floors of a building Low owned; De Niro subsequently bought the penthouse apartment. The cameo pestering didn’t begin with Goodfellas though. Look at Low’s Imdb page – all of the films he’s been in (other than one in 2003) are De Niro films, starting in 1982 with The King Of Comedy, then taking in Once Upon A Time In America, The Mission, Goodfellas, Night And The City, Mistress (me neither) and Sleepers. (He also appeared in a 1993 TV series called Tribeca, co-produced by De Niro.) Here they are together in 1986’s The Mission (photo from here if you wanna buy it. It’s signed by both of them).

On screen, he was breaking De Niro’s balls from the start. He appears early in The King Of Comedy, in the restaurant scene, sitting alone behind De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin, who’s oblivious to the fact that he’s aping his gestures to get a laugh from Rita (Diahnne Abbott, De Niro's then wife).

In the original screenplay he's a more developed character, ‘a nice-looking young man’ whose piss-taking is a flirtfest; in the scene you do see Rita discreetly glancing at him a couple of times. After Rupert and Rita leave, she goes with the guy to his apartment, and Rupert watches as he closes his blinds. Rupert then rings the bell, and Rita legs it after the guy molests her. Not sure if any of that was filmed; in any case, what we’re left with is Morrie goofing off.

I haven’t been able to find many stories from the Goodfellas set regarding Morrie. In GQ’s 2010 oral history, Low made a brief appearance, saying that he came up with the “schmuck on wheels” line, as well as calling Jimmy “an unconscionable ball-breaker,” so top marks for that. 

Otherwise, on Brian Koppelman’s podcast The Moment in 2014, Liotta relayed how Low at one point misjudged him on camera, thinking he was going to hit him: “He took my momentum and threw me and I hit the wall,” said Liotta. “And I split my lip, and we had to stop, I had to go get stitched up and then come back. And if you watch the scene after that my lip is all fucked up.”

There's more historical accuracy to Morrie than you'd think. The person Morris Kessler was based on was not called Morris Kessler. Morris Kessler was a Brooklyn gangster from the 1930s who has nothing to do with Henry Hill or Goodfellas – maybe Scorsese stole his name, maybe he didn’t (many of the gangsters featured in Goodfellas had their names tweaked or changed completely), but Morrie was based on Marty Krugman, a bookmaker who really did own a male hair salon/wig shop called For Men Only, right next door to Henry Hill’s club The Suite in Queens. And he really did star in his own TV ad on New York TV channels in the 1970s, ‘swimming vigorously across a pool wearing his wig while an announcer proclaimed that Krugman's wigs always stayed put,’ as Pileggi writes in Wiseguy (Goodfellas’ source material). According to this site, Paul Vario’s (Goodfellas’ Paul Cicero) crew would hang out there, and Vario bought wigs from the place when he lost his hair.

Henry Hill liked Marty, and did indeed try his best to stop Jimmy Conway from whacking him. Jimmy wanted Henry to extort cash from Marty on a weekly basis, and hated not getting it. When he couldn’t sleep, Jimmy would get riled seeing Marty’s wig ad at 4am (“That fuck has the money to go on television,” Henry quotes him as saying in Wiseguy, “but no money for anybody else?”), and after getting Tommy DeSimone (Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito) to rough up one of Marty’s employees, Marty threatened to go to the DA. From thereon, Marty’s days were numbered, even after he gave Henry the Lufthansa tip that enabled the gang to rob millions from Kennedy Airport. After relentlessly hounding Jimmy for his $500,000 share of the heist, he disappeared; Hill later told the FBI he was buried behind the bar, although Krugman’s body was never found. 

In this Goodfellas shooting draft, Morrie is still called Marty. Here‘s an FBI surveillance photo of your actual Marty Krugman. He wore tinted sunglasses because he had hyperthyroidism, which gave him protruding eyeballs. You can read more about him here and here and here.

And now my favourite find. Scorsese wanted to include his version of Marty Krugman’s wig commercial in Goodfellas; we see De Niro watching it in anger, just as Jimmy Conway did. When GQ did that Goodfellas oral history in 2010, they also posted some audio snippets of unused interview. Joseph Reidy, the film’s first assistant director, told the story of the film’s wig ad. During Goodfellas' pre-production, Scorsese saw a TV ad for a local windows company. “It was all very crude, very elementary,” says Reidy. “The host was a little stiff, but he got the job done, showing his replacement windows. He said, ‘Don't throw money out the window,’ and he had this image of dollar bills blowing out this window.”

Scorsese found that the ad’s host was a man called Stephen R Pacca, the actual owner of the window company, Aalco – he’d directed and starred in it himself. Scorsese approached Pacca to consult on the Morrie ad for the film, then ended up giving him the whole job – Pacca wrote the script, drew storyboards, and got his own technicians involved, who were just Aalco staff. “He found the locations, everything, he even edited it, he put it together in his own rough way,” says Reidy. “The titles, ‘Morrie's Wigs’ and all that. Stephen did that.”

It was shot a week before cameras started rolling on Goodfellas itself. Scorsese prevented “the rest of our film crew from making it look professional,” says Reidy. “He wanted it just the way Mr Pacca would do it. He made sure that we weren't interfering.”

So Pacca has his one IMDB credit, for Goodfellas, as ‘Creator: Morrie’s wig commercial.’ I mean, if you're only gonna have one credit...

Here is Stephen Pacca’s original, breathless, shouty ad for Aalco Windows.

Pacca died in 1994, aged 61. He made windows. And he made the Morrie's Wigs ad in Goodfellas. God bless you, Stephen Pacca.

Chuck Low appeared in the third episode of The Sopranos, as Hasidic Jew hotel owner Shlomo Teittleman, who gets on the wrong side of Tony, and calls him a golem. (As we know, Sopranos supremo David Chase has a big boner for Goodfellas.) You can watch Chuck’s scenes here and here; here he is all dressed up. Tony calls him “ZZ Top” then knocks his hat off.

Chuck Low wasn’t interviewed on stage for the Goodfellas 25th anniversary reunion in Tribeca in April, but he was there in the cinema – Erik Davis took this great photo of him.

And Mike Benevento grabbed him afterwards.

Mike tells me Chuck was waiting for his car, joking about, taking people's cameras and then taking photos of them, then stood up to get in his car. Seems he is mobile, but needs a bit of chair help. Here you can see him posing for press photos on the red carpet, looking like he's about to bust someone's balls.

Goodfellas made Chuck Low a legend. “Every fucking guy on the street yells to me, ‘Hey, Morrie, did you get Belle her Danish?,’” he told GQ (in reference to one of his final lines). You’d never guess this was just a landlord making a cameo. He’s brilliant in that film; I’d always assumed he was just a great little character actor. It’s a shame he hasn’t done more. Here’s hoping he does.

JULY 2016 UPDATE: De Niro has been to visit his old friend in a New Jersey senior living facility, according to Page Six. Hey, news is news.

FEBRUARY 2017 UPDATE: Stephen Pacca’s son found this blog and got in touch to talk to me about his dad’s adventures making the Morrie ad. You can read that here, and my opus on the Goodfellas dog painting here. 

(I don’t use Tumblr anymore. This piece is now on Substack, with updates: https://alexgodfrey.substack.com/p/the-goodfellas-painting-a-life-uncovered) November 2013: I love falling down rabbit holes. 

Last week, for my friend Nick’s birthday, our artist pal Shehzad made this – a replica of the painting Martin Scorsese’s mother shows off in Goodfellas. Shehzad bashed it out in five hours before dinner.

We love that scene. It’s so absurd, so morbid, so funny – so lived-in. 

David Chase said The Sopranos “learned a lot” from that bit. Catherine Scorsese’s line “Did Tommy tell you about my painting?” was scripted, but much of the rest, including Joe Pesci’s “One dog goes one way and the other dog goes the other way” was improvised (watch Scorsese talking about it here).

The painting in the film was actually by Goodfellas co-writer Nicholas Pileggi’s mother, and was an interpretation of a photo from the November 1978 issue of National Geographic (as uncovered by this person, among others).

The man is real. The dogs are real. The photo was part of a 28-page feature titled Where The River Shannon Flows (‘Allan C. Fisher, Jr., and Adam Woolfitt follow Ireland’s longest stream from gentle lakes to wide Atlantic estuary’). Further Googling led me to Brian Leyden, an Irish writer from County Leitrim whose memoir The Home Place begins in 1978 with photographer Adam Woolfitt visiting Arigna to carry out that very assignment. Adam spent quite some time with Brian’s parents, and photographed them on their farm in Crosshill. “Don’t stay too long in this country or it will capture you,” Brian’s father Matt was quoted as saying in the article.

One afternoon at the turn of the century, Brian was a guest on RTE’s TV show Open House. He brought that issue along with him, and the producer recognised the photo of the man and the dogs, telling him there was a painting of it in Goodfellas. This inspired Brian to write The Home Place, as a way of preserving the stories and lives behind those National Geographic photos.

I called Brian, who told me the chap in the photo was called John Weaving. John had retired from a career in banking to become a river nomad, “a water rat” who lived on a 60ft houseboat on the Shannon. John, said Brian, was a navigational consultant and handyman on the river, and something of an eco-crusader, campaigning against the low bridges being built, pushing for proper clearances for family-sized barges. His dogs were called Brocky and Twiggy.

Much gratitude to Bobby Nardi for scanning the original National Geographic piece.

I found more info on John Weaving, including The King Of Lough Ree, a warm article [no longer online] about him by Bernard Loughlin, who was introduced to John while working on the Shannon in April 1974. ‘A tall, skinny, tousle-haired, wispy-white-bearded man emerged from the cabin’s low door and called to Twiggy and Brocky, as the dogs were named, to be quiet,’ he writes of his inaugural encounter. John tells Loughlin how the dogs that morning had killed a nest of rats, ‘breaking their necks one by one with a flick of their muzzles as they tossed the corpses back over their shoulders.’ Smoking Sweet Afton cigarettes, he invites Loughlin for tea on his 60ft barge, the Peter Farrell, which Bernard describes as an alchemist’s den full of tools, maps and books. ‘John Weaving had made a heroic choice,’ writes Loughlin of John’s retirement from banking and his bachelorhood on the Shannon, ‘and was even quite boastful of it, and showed it by how completely he lived as he lived, on the river, all year round.’

Loughlin describes how for 20 years John built harbours, laid buoys and repaired jetties, and in the summers helped tourists if their rented cruisers broke down or crashed. A big character in the community, he once received a letter from Germany addressed simply to Herr John Weaving, The Shannon, Ireland. Brocky and Twiggy, writes Loughlin, would position themselves either side of John ‘like fabulous, hieratic creatures guarding their lord and master from all harm.’ Just as Joe Pesci says: “One dog goes one way and the other dog goes the other way.” I found a photo of John on the Inland Waterways Association of Ireland website, taken in 1963 by naval architect and boat-builder George O’Brien Kennedy. His family were the original owners of the Peter Farrell, and eventually sold her to John after employing him to operate her. The caption for this photo reads: ‘The Kennedy field, just upstream of Jamestown Bridge, in 1963. In picture is the Peter Farrell and John Weaving (standing) in the foreground.’

John Weaving co-edited The Shell Guide To The River Shannon, which was subsequently dedicated to him: on 24 May 1987, before it was completed, he died. He had continued to work on it during his final months in hospital. ‘He became at one with the great river and now has become a permanent part of its legend,’ wrote co-editor Ruth Delany in her foreword. ‘I know that I speak for his many friends when I say that it was a great privilege to have known him.’ Colin Becker, editor of the Inland Waterways News, tells me John ‘was held in such high esteem in the IWAI that they put up a bronze bust of him beside the harbour in Terryglass a number of years ago’ (photo below courtesy of Sherwood Harrington).

After John’s death the Peter Farrell, says Colin, changed hands a few times and has now been extensively modified and refurbished as a family cruising boat. Here it is in Shannonbridge, October 2011, courtesy of Tina Klug, who tells me the barge today is "much more comfortable" than when it served as John's alchemist's den.

I called photographer Adam Woolfitt to talk about meeting John for that 1978 National Geographic assignment. Adam found the issue while we were talking, reminding himself of the photos as he remembered John. After running into John and arranging to photograph him, Adam told me, they spent a couple of hours together. “We went up and down a little bit on his boat until I found a nice background and made my pictures. I rather liked him, he was a very free spirit, quite independent. He was definitely cut out for nomadic life. He was very pragmatic and very down to earth. He was really a part of the river.” Adam didn’t get to visit the Peter Farrell, instead photographing John on the little rowing boat he used to whizz around on.

Adam hasn’t seen Goodfellas, so was unaware that his photo had been immortalised in paint and exhibited by Martin Scorsese’s mother. I sent him the clip. ‘Fame at last!’ he wrote. ‘I’ve starred in a Hollywood movie.’ (RIP Adam Woolfitt, who died in November 2023. There is a lovely tribute to him here.) Of course, having died three years before the release of the film, John Weaving was never to know that he too has been immortalised, in a scene in which Joe Pesci describes his nice head of white hair and Robert De Niro compares him to a dead gangster in their car boot. I’d hope John would have been entertained by his cinematic incarnation, and when I watch Goodfellas in the future and reach that scene I’ll think of him working on the Shannon, smoking his fags, sending Brocky and Twiggy off to kill rats. That painting is no longer just a prop, but a life.

I told Brian I had Adam’s details and was talking to him too; he asked me to remind Adam of his parents. Adam remembers them well. Brian hasn’t seen Adam since his 1978 visit, and asked me to put them in touch so that he can send him a copy of his book, which exists because of him. “When I came to write it I got very intrigued by those photographs and I realised that time had obliterated – more than just John Weaving and his boat and his dogs – it had obliterated nearly everything in the photographs,” Brian said to me. “That whole article, Where The River Flows, has had a curious afterlife, quite a life, and that and the book, it means a great deal to me. And now you’re another element to the story.” I’ve enjoyed learning about John. It’s nice to be a part of his own afterlife.

The real Henry Hill’s painting of the scene. From here.

2021 update Martin Scorsese has read this now. After I interviewed him, for The Irishman’s Criterion release, I asked him if I could tell him something. And the conversation went like this: MS: “What is it, young man?” AG: “The painting your mother produces at the table in Goodfellas. I heard Nicholas Pileggi’s mother painted it.” MS: “Yeah, she painted it.” AG: “But it’s painted from a photograph in a 1970s National Geographic magazine.” MS: “No, I didn’t know about that. My mother didn’t paint. The only thing that was written in that scene was the painting. Everything else was improvised by my mother and Joe and Bob. That was the only thing that was written, this painting that Nick’s mother did. I didn’t realise it was based on a photograph.” AG: “A guy who worked on the canals in Ireland. I found out about his life. I’d love to send it to you.” MS: “That's wonderful. Send it to me. That’s so great, what’s she doing painting a guy in Ireland?!” I emailed it over, and a couple of days later he sent me a very gracious, hugely touching email about it - about the painting, the scene, and his mother. Needless to say, I was overwhelmed. God bless Goodfellas.