Scent of a Man

In a new memoir, Al Pacino promises to reveal the person behind the actor. But is he holding something back?

- James Parker

The huge solemnity of his eyes, grave and sober as a child’s but with a spark of ancient, euphoric irony back in there somewhere. The gangster-ish heaviness of his hands, dynastic hands, Godfather hands. The too-big head. The carved, impassive face that suddenly droops, drags, goes baggy with the weight of being alive. The voice, New York nasal as a young man, roaring and combusted as he ages, the lungs working like bellows, the larynx shooting flames. The timing—the beat, the lag, the throb of the void— between stimulus and reaction. And the energy, Jesus, that barely-inside-the-body Dog Day Afternoon energy, as if 30 seconds ago he dis integrated utterly into tics and ravings, splinters of self, and then 10 seconds ago—via some act of Looney Tunes reversal— he was whooshingly put back together.

It’s 1973. Al Pacino and Frank Serpico are sitting on the deck of a rented seaside house in Montauk, two men staring at the ocean. Serpico is the whistleblower cop, refuser of bribes and kickbacks, whose testimony before the Knapp Commission helped expose systemic graft in the NYPD. He has paid a high price for his rectitude: Isolated and vilified by his fellow officers, he’d been shot in the face during a suspiciously botched arrest in 1971. Now Pacino is preparing to play him in Sidney Lumet’s grimy, funky biopic Serpico, and the actor has a question. “Frank,” he says, “why didn’t you take those payoffs? Just take that money and give your share away if you didn’t want to keep it?” “Al, if I did that,” Serpico answers, “who would I be when I listen to Beethoven?”