Danny DeVito: A Jersey Kid in Hollywood
DANNY DeVITO, the movie actor, director and producer, was born in Neptune City, New Jersey in 1944. He’s appeared in Hollywood movies like “Terms of Endearment” (1983), “Romancing the Stone” (1984), “Tin Men” (1987) and “Man on the Moon” (1999) and has his own successful film production company, Jersey Films.
DeVito was raised in Asbury Park, New Jersey in the 1950’s, the youngest of three, with two older sisters. He had Fairbanks Disease, a growth disorder, was always very small for his age, and ended up only 4'10", with no neck; his head sits directly on his torso.
Most young guys in Jersey would have been pissed to end up 4'10.” Not Danny. He found it interesting to see the world from a different angle than other kids did. He loved the Asbury Park of his boyhood. His family didn’t have money but they had love and humor, they spent time together and they were happy. Danny had lots of good friends in the neighborhood and there was a beach and a boardwalk right there.
His father worked a series of jobs: in a candy store, in a luncheonette, at a dry-cleaners. The family sold fresh eggs from local farms. Best of all, Danny’s father owned a pool hall: The Crown Billiard Academy, with five nice Brunswick pool tables. One winter day, Danny drove to New York State with his father to collect those five pool tables — and they got caught in a blizzard driving back to the shore. But they made it home in one piece, and it became a happy memory, a funny story.
When the DeVito’s extended family gathered, Danny noticed there was always one guy at the party who was different. A wild card, a guy who bent the rules, said things you’re not supposed to say. Strange things would happen where this guy was. It was a different guy each year, but there was always someone who changed the atmosphere. And what made it funnier was that the guy didn’t seem to know he was doing it.
In the summer, Asbury Park was packed with tourists from New York and Philadelphia. Danny would ride his bike up Second Avenue to New Street or First Avenue, ride around the Esso gas station at Asbury Avenue, maybe get a sandwich at the Asbury Diner, if he and his friends had the money. Or maybe they’d sneak on the local golf course with some clubs someone’s uncle had in a closet, and a few golf balls they’d found somewhere — until they got chased off the course.
The first time he ever acted in a play, the teachers in Catholic school gave Danny the lead role — Saint Francis of Assisi. Still, he mostly did the play just to get out of class. He wore a brown robe, and was told: ‘Look angelic.’ But how can you look angelic when you’re nervous as sin?
He got through the play and thought ‘That wasn’t so bad.’ Then a little later, he was watching a movie, looked at the actors and thought idly ‘I could do that.’ Danny and his friends loved going to movies at the local theaters: the Mayfair, the St. James, the Lyric, or the Paramount.
As Asbury Park grew scruffy and a little dangerous, Danny started reacting to this new edge to the city. When he felt theatrical, he might stage a fake assassination. Some of Danny’s childhood friends were dabbling in drug-dealing and petty crime. Danny asked to be sent away to school, and his parents sent him to Oratory Prep in Summit, New Jersey, where they thought he’d be safer and learn more.
He thought for a time he might like to be a priest — until puberty hit, and all the hormones. There was NO way, with women suddenly looking so sexy, that he could be a priest. No way at all.
DeVito never had any interest in going to college. He decided to just take life as it came. One of his older sisters had a beauty salon. She needed help in the salon, someone who could do hair, so Danny started helping out. She wanted him to take it seriously, to become a cosmetologist.
How do I do that? he asked.
She said, ‘Take a night class in how to apply make-up.’
So Danny DeVito figured ‘What the hell, I’ll take a class in applying make-up.’ He started going up to New York a few nights a week, studying make-up at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
But he found he was more interested in the theater productions, so he started taking drama classes.
Here, for the first time, it was an advantage to be 4'10.” Of course, he couldn’t play a leading man; those parts went to the handsome 6'2" guys. But being 4'10" was better than being 5'6.” It was distinctive; people remembered him. Plus, he was comfortable with himself, had a distinctive voice and delivered lines well.
DeVito started to get bit parts in professional plays, as a character actor. His parents had very little reaction. Whatever makes you happy, Danny. But he loved it. Being on stage, under the lights, looking out at the crowd, feeling their energy… He was hooked.
Get Andrew Szanton’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
While doing a play, DeVito met the actor Michael Douglas and they became good friends. Douglas was co-producing the film version of Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and Douglas helped DeVito get the part of the delusional young man “Martini” in the film.
Other small film parts followed but Danny DeVito was still an obscure actor in the late 1970’s when he auditioned for a minor role as Louie De Palma, the cab dispatcher, in an ABC-TV series called “Taxi.” The cab dispatcher was supposed to be a grumpy guy so DeVito took a chance. He walked into the audition room, rolled his eyes, threw the script on a coffee table and said: “One thing I wanna know before I start: ‘Who WROTE this shit?’”
After a long pause, everyone laughed. The casting people said to themselves: ‘This is him. This is Louie.’ DeVito could play selfish, cantankerous, wisecracking Louie — a jerk — and somehow give Louie humanity, make him appealing.
“Taxi” was lucky to get the time slot right after “Three’s Company” and pretty soon 60% of Americans watching television on Tuesday nights were watching “Taxi.” The audience loved Louie DePalma, so the writers gave Louie a much bigger role in the show. “Taxi” was on the air from 1978–1983, and made DeVito famous. He’d never been recognized in public before. Now, on the street, people would call out “Hey, Louie!”
Those were the happiest five years of his life. He could say almost anything — “Take your hat off!” or “Don’t put your hands there!” — and the audience would laugh. The “Taxi” cast felt like family. He made enduring friendships.
The oddest, most interesting friendship was with Andy Kaufman. The cast was full of actors trying to be comedians, and comedians trying to prove themselves as actors, but DeVito realized that Andy Kaufman was neither an actor nor a comedian; he was a performance artist.
Kaufman didn’t rehearse. He walked into the room and changed things, ignored pecking orders, scorned social rituals, made things go screwy. He was like one of those guys from Danny’s childhood, at the reunions of the extended family, except Kaufman did this deliberately — and very skillfully.
In 1984, Andy Kaufman suddenly died at 35, of a rare kind of lung cancer. DeVito was shocked that Kaufman was gone so soon. The rock group REM made a hit song about Andy Kaufman called “Man on the Moon.”
DeVito was often trying to tell his children about “Taxi” and about Andy Kaufman, and one day he found himself smoking a stogie and telling stories to the film director Milos Forman about Andy. After they’d both had a few drinks, Forman said, ‘We should make a movie about Andy.’
DeVito was a producer and Forman was an A-list director, and if REM would let them use the song, then DeVito already had the movie’s director and a title and a theme song — so how could he say no? He thought of Jim Carrey to play Andy, and found that Carrey was a huge Andy Kaufman fan. Five years later, they’d made “Man on the Moon.”
Since then, DeVito has done a little bit of everything, including starring in the modern noir classic “L.A. Confidential.”
“The Penguin” was a weird role for DeVito, and for those working with him. He decided to stay in character for the whole shoot, even between takes. And because he had enormous penguin flippers glued on, he needed people to feed him his meals, and he’d squawk at them, penguin-like, as they did so.
He became a powerful Hollywood figure without losing any of his quirks or simple attitudes toward life. DeVito likes a trampoline in his dressing room because of the “dynamic tension” it gives his muscles, and he’ll bounce on his trampoline shortly before he does a scene.
Asked if he has lawyers working for him, he says: “Of course, I’ve got lawyers. They’re like nuclear weapons. I’ve got’em ’cause everyone else has. But as soon as you use’em, they screw everything up.”
When DeVito first directed a film in 1987, (“Throw Momma From the Train”) it didn’t quite work. A satirical updating of the Alfred Hitchcock film “Strangers on a Train” starring DeVito and Billy Crystal, the movie had some funny moments and some sweet ones but the plotting was awkward. Still, DeVito enjoyed making it, and was able to get the movie premiere shown at the Paramount, the theater he’d loved as a kid.
DeVito feels three important parts of being a Jersey kid have stuck with him all through life. First, be very proud of where you come from, your town, your family, the whole atmosphere that shaped you. Second, don’t take yourself too seriously. And third, get a good sandwich to eat.
Ask him if he’s traveled abroad, he’ll say yeah, I’ve traveled: “I’ve been to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It’s a tower and it’s leaning. You look at it but nothing happens — so then you look for some place to get a sandwich.”
