BIGGER THAN EVER
TV and film star Danny DeVito opens up about his B’way debut, his days as a beautician and hailing ‘Taxi’
BROADWAY loves an overnight sensation — a newcomer heralded by critics and adored by audiences.
The fresh face this season belongs to . . . Danny DeVito.
OK, so he’s not exactly an unknown, having made his mark on TV’s “Taxi” and in a slew of hit movies, including “Throw Momma From the Train,” “Ruthless People” and “The War of the Roses.”
But after almost 50 years in show business, DeVito is finally making his Broadway debut in Roundabout’s revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Price” at the American Airlines Theatre. And he can’t believe it. “It’s kind of crazy — I’m 72. But can you imagine? I’m on 42nd Street doing a play. Get outta here, baby!” he says, high-fiving me.
DeVito provides the comic relief in Miller’s 1968 drama about two estranged brothers scarred by the Great Depression. They’re selling off their parents’ old furniture, crammed in the attic of a brownstone. DeVito, as
an antiques dealer named Solomon, flits from knickknack to knickknack like a bumblebee in a sunflower patch. He delivers zingers —“you must have looked up my name in a very old telephone book” — with an ex-vaudevillian’s timing.
And he practically stops the show with a hard-boiled egg. Chowing down while yapping, he sprays bits of it all over co-star Mark Ruffalo.
“I was eating the whole egg for a while, until I almost choked on it,” DeVito says. “It was hysterical. Well, for the audience. I’m making my Broadway debut, and then I’m gonna croak onstage? That’s one way to make Broadway history!”
Audiences can’t get enough of his shtick. At one recent performance, after the actors took their bows together, Ruf- falo pointed down at DeVito (you can’t point up!), and the crowd roared.
DeVito comes to Broadway from New Jersey with a decades-long detour through Hollywood. He was raised in Asbury Park, and though Broadway was only a commuter-train ride away, it was movies that hooked him. He loved the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Jerry Lewis. He also loved film noir —“the dark side,” he calls it — and responded to actors such as Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney.
“You’re not lookin’ at Charles of the Ritz here,” he says. “I’m Danny from Asbury. I’m not Clark Gable or Cary Grant. I related to the snarky guys, the wisecracking newspaper guys with the hat and the cigarette hanging from the mouth.”
But he never thought about becoming an actor. He was going to become a beautician. His sister Angela owned a beauty parlor, and when he turned 19, she told him he had to get a job and it might as well be with her.
“She was the driving force behind everything in the family,” he says. “She was a real Jersey girl — tough, a smoker. At 5 o’clock the gin came out — well, actually a Dewar’s and soda. I loved her. And I worked for her like a slave for two years.”
When his sister decided she wanted to sell cosmetics at the salon, she sent DeVito to Manhattan to study makeup artistry at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He watched the student actors rehearsing and, curious, began reading the plays they were doing. He took some acting classes, got laughs “and I was hooked,” he says.
He moved to Manhattan and knocked about as an actor, landing roles in experimental off-Broadway plays. He met Michael Douglas, the son of Kirk Douglas but then a struggling actor as well, at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Festival. They wound up sharing an apartment on the Upper West Side.
“I remember when Michael got a part in ‘Summertree’ at Lincoln Center,” DeVito says. “We celebrated. And then something happened and he got bumped out. But his father bought the movie rights, so he got the movie. That’s a plus, you know what I’m saying?”
DeVito got his break in 1971 when he was cast in an offBroadway adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He played Martini, an inmate at the asylum. He worked on the role by spending time with patients on Wards Island.
“I was pulling bits from them,” he says, “stuff that wasn’t in the book. There was a guy who always said ‘hello’ to you a million times. And Martini was shot down into the sea during World War II, so I always pictured the water rising in the room. That’s why I always sat on my legs in the chair —’cause in his mind, the water’s rising.”
DeVito reprised the role in
the 1975 movie adaptation, produced by Douglas and starring another actor from New Jersey, Jack Nicholson, who would also become a lifelong friend.
“Cuckoo’s Nest” was shot in Oregon, and when filming was over, DeVito moved to Los Angeles to try his luck in TV and movies. Acasting director, whose picture hangs on DeVito’s dressing room wall, brought him in for a pilot of a new James L. Brooks series called “Taxi.”
DeVito was up for the part of Louie De Palma, the tyrannical dispatcher. At his audition, he walked in and, in character, barked, “One thing I want to know before we start. Who wrote this s-- t?”
Then he flung the script on the table.
“There was a nanosecond of silence, and I thought, ‘You just f-- ked yourself big time, baby.’ And then they were paralyzed with laughter. I couldn’t say ‘and’ without getting a laugh.
“And ‘Taxi,’” he adds, “well, that was a good thing for me.”
But in all the years he de- lighted audiences on TV and in the movies, nobody ever offered him a play. And then in 2012 a British producer invited him to appear in a West End production of Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys.” His co-star was Richard Griffiths, who starred in the “Harry Potter” films and won a Tony for Broadway’s “The History Boys.”
They became fast friends. Every night after the show, Griffiths, who died in 2013, would make him a special drink called a “zingo.”
DeVito gives me the recipe: “You take a bag of limes and juice ’em. Then you pour the juice and some Tanqueray — half and half — into a shaker with a lot of ice. Is my mouth watering? Shake it up and serve it ice cold. Gotta be ice cold.”
DeVito’s kept the tradition going in his dressing room at “The Price,” though he’s added his own twist — a cucumber — to the concoction.
“My fridge is full of Tanqueray,” he says. Pointing to a blender on top of the fridge he adds, “And that’s the Richard Griffiths Memorial Juicer.”