By Alan Poul
Photography by Timothy White
From Egg Magazine, November 1990
Andres Arturo Garcia-Menendez was raised an exile from Cuba in a Jewish neighborhood in Miami Beach. He has never been called anything but Andy. He was born in Havana in 1956, and his family fled Castro’s revolution when he was five. His father, who had been a lawyer in Cuba, went into the catering business.
Andy began acting at Florida International University where he met his wife-to-be, Maravi. In 1978 he moved to Los Angeles, surviving as a banquet waiter until his first television job playing a street tough in the pilot episode of Hill Street Blues. After attracting attention with sharp, edgy supporting performances in The Mean Season (1985) and 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), Andy burst into the public eye with his impassioned portrayal of sharpshooter George Stone in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987).
It was my honor to work with Andy as associate producer on Ridley Scott’s Black Rain (1989), in which he played Charlie Vincent, the dapper detective who follows Michael Douglas to Osaka and comes back in a box. Onscreen, Andy is all sensation - constant motion, piercing intensity, eyes that promise a dangerous good time. In person he couldn’t be more different. Andy is one of the most serious, private artists I’ve ever met. He genuinely gets no rush from the spotlight, which is his profession, is as rare as it seems. His notorious publicity-shyness is not a game. His very specific moral principles preclude his appearing in any explicit sex scenes (his intimate moments with Nancy Travis in 1990’s Internal Affairs are considerably less revealing than originally planned). He lives for two things - work and family. Not necessarily in that order.
There’s a scene in Black Rain in which Andy’s character coaxes Ken Takakura, playing Japanese detective Matsumoto, onto the stage of a swank Japanese club, where they sing a duet of Ray Charles’ "What’d I Say." The scene represented a terrifying breakthrough for Takakura, who is Japan’s greatest film star and had previously made 198 movies without ever appearing silly. It literally took months of cajoling and rehearsing until Takakura was willing to do the scene. Throughout the process, Andy was there, building his confidence, working in his trailer between setups, squeezing in special rehearsals. Takakura was enabled to perform that scene by his relationship with Andy, just as Matsumoto was enabled by his affection for Charlie Vincent. It was a tremendously gratifying process to watch.
Now Andy is about to step forth as Vincent Mancini, the illegitimate Corleone who takes over the family in Francis Coppola’s The Godfather, Part III, set to open on November 21. Becoming a Corleone is the closest thing to canonization an American actor can wish for. Brando, De Niro, Pacino - the Corleone lineage is the Sacred Order of the Big Screen, making Vincent the year’s most coveted role, practically a free pass to the pantheon.
On Black Rain Andy became close to the brilliant Japanese actor Yusaku Matsuda, who played the villainous Sato and who died last November at the age of 39. Matsuda was in awe of the way Andy worked, but he used to say to me, "I’m worried for Andy. He is going to become very famous, and he won’t be able to maintain his family life the way it is now." So far, Matsuda needn’t have worried.
I recently had lunch with Andy at Maurice’s Snack ‘n’ Chat on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. He had agreed with Paramount to do two days’ publicity for Godfather III. This was the afternoon of the second day.
Alan: In Godfather III, are you Michael’s or Sonny’s son?
Andy: I play Michael’s son, who is really Sonny’s bastard son.
Alan: By somebody we know?
Andy: Yes. By Lucy Mancini, Connie’s bridesmaid from the wedding in the first film.
Alan: The woman he **cked.
Andy: Be careful how you refer to my mother.
Alan: I’m sorry. The women with whom Sonny had the vertical affair.
Andy: Yes, that was the scene of my conception.
Alan: So your character is actually in the first movie, sort of…
Andy: Real deep in there. You’ve got to look real hard.
Alan: Doesn’t Michael have another kid too?
Andy: That’s Anthony. Anthony’s an opera singer. If I could sing, I wouldn’t be a gangster.
Alan: So you come back and take over.
Andy: Well, I get taken in by Michael, and eventually he gives me the family. I don’t want to get too specific about the things that happen and how the family is given to me, the reasons why.
Alan: They say that Coppola is frustrating for actors to work with, because he hides behind a monitor.
Andy: I didn’t find that true. I had a very good relationship with him. Considering I was also in a delicate situation because his daughter, Sophia, was playing my lover, and we were basically all holding each other’s hand through that process.
Alan: She’s nice?
Andy: Sofia? She’s a doll.
Alan: This is your fourth picture in a row with Paramount. Is that more than coincidence?
Andy: I do like them over there, and I have a relationship there. They also happen to have had scripts I was attracted to. I mean, certainly The Godfather is their doing, but I did screen-test for the part, and the final decision was Francis’s, not Paramount’s. Paramount suggested me, they backed me, they said this is our guy, but Francis had to do his own exploration on who would play this person.
Alan: Did you test alone?
Andy: I tested with Madeleine Stowe, who was terrific. I think ultimately she was probably too old, because Francis wound up wanting a very young girl. I think that’s why he first cast Winona Ryder, but I was lucky to find her there. I had a call the night before saying, "Francis wants you to test tomorrow in Napa. Can you get on a plane?" And I didn’t know it was with Madeleine until I got on the plane - we took the same flight up. And she was sweet enough to say that they had asked her to test with someone else, and she had said no way. Then they said, "Will you test with Andy?" and I guess she said okay.
Alan: And had they given you a choice too?
Andy: No, they just told me to get on the plane. We had the material given to us that morning. And we had to have a deal in place by the end of the afternoon. Which was - I don’t even want to get into that one.
Alan: What about Pacino?
Andy: He’s more than just a great actor. He’s an artist. I know a lot of people who are great actors and great craftsmen. Still, I don’t necessarily consider them artists. I consider Al a great artist. And that goes for the approach to the work and the reasons he does it. He has a special gift.
Alan: Before Black Rain, you didn’t work for a while, right?
Andy: I wasn’t taking time off. I just didn’t read anything I liked.
Alan: And then you went on this marathon and did four pictures back-to-back.
Andy: Black Rain, Internal Affairs, The Godfather and the Barreto film.
Alan: Bruno Barreto, the Brazilian director?
Andy: Yeah, that was a short thing. I only shot 10 days.
Alan: Is that coming out?
Andy: It came and it went. It was called A Show of Force.
Alan: I must have been in Japan or something.
Andy: It didn’t last very long.
Alan: Nevertheless, you’ve been working steadily for the past two years, and you must have gone into it knowing you could get work and people would hire you, but you’ve come out of it in a totally different dimension. Doesn’t that affect your consciousness?
Andy: It’s a battle and you’ve got to fight it, but it’s a worthy battle. I can only approach things the same way I approached them before, with my own sense of values and morals about the type of work one should do. Acting puts me through the gauntlet - I get kind of possessed by things, so if I’m not really passionate about it, not only could I not act, I would be very bad in the part. So I’d rather not work if I don’t have that kind of emotional commitment to the part, if it doesn’t move me in a certain direction.
Alan: How old were you when you decided you wanted to act?
Andy: I was just out of high school. I took my first acting classes in college.
Alan: Was that in Florida?
Andy: Florida International University. FIU.
Alan: What made you decide?
Andy: It was in me, I guess.
Alan: When did you come out here?
Andy: 1978.
Alan: Did you do New York first?
Andy: No.
Alan: You didn’t do it. You came right out here.
Andy: I did New York when I was in school, for summer stock.
Alan: You did summer stock?
Andy: No, I never got hired.
Alan: After you came out here, did you wait tables?
Andy: Yep. At the Beverly Hilton. I was a banquet waiter.
Alan: Did you and Maravi get married out here?
Andy: No, that was in Florida.
Alan: So you brought her out here with you.
Andy: No, I lived here alone for four years before I got married, and then we got married and she came out here. We had met in college.
Alan: And she waited for you.
Andy: She wasn’t dressed in black, burning a candle or anything. She’s come out, or I’d go to see her - we were young at that time, and the last thing I wanted to do was to put her through the process I was going through. Even so, we were basically unemployed for a while.
Alan: You never did shit. You never did stuff you’re embarrassed of.
Andy: No. I stayed out of work for a year, for months and months and months, because I wouldn’t do a one-liner in a thing saying, "Can I get you some coffee?" There were movies that were offered to me before I even had the ability of choice. And I’d say, "I don’t want to be in this silly thing." My agent said, "You’re not in a position to turn anything down." And I said, "What do you mean I’m not in a position? I’m in a position right now. I’m standing on it." That phrase always gets me, you’re not in a position. What position do I have to be in to acquire some dignity? Do I have to lose my dignity in order to get in a position to have some? Because once you lose it, you lose it.
Alan: You looking to take some time off?
Andy: No, I’m looking to do something.
Alan: You must get sent a million scripts.
Andy: Yeah, but nothing interests me.
Alan: Paramount told me you have your own picture with them now.
Andy: It’s not a deal yet. I just have an idea there. It’s a story dealing with Havana at the turn of the revolution in 1958. We have our first draft already.
Alan: Did you write it?
Andy: No, it’s a Cuban writer named Guillermo Cabrera Infante. He is probably our greatest novelist, especially in dealing with the ‘40s and ‘50s in Havana. He’s living in London in exile.
Alan: Are you going to produce it?
Andy: Yeah.
Alan: You were five when you left Havana. How clear are your memories? Have they faded?
Andy: I think I’ve kind of reinvented the memories. My interest in the country and its culture and my love for it have created my own kind of memories. In reading about and researching and being involved musically with the culture I have created, this Havana that I have lived, even though I haven’t really lived it. And now I am creating a movie so I can live what I didn’t live. It’s a selfish thing. This whole movie is a selfish process.
Alan: So you’re not fazed by Sydney Pollack’s upcoming Havana?
Andy: No. Mine’s about a Cuban protagonist and his family, his brothers, his sisters. It’s a Cuban story, in English.
Alan: Do you think you could shoot in Havana?
Andy: Not now we cannot.
Alan: I think Pollack came close.
Andy: Yeah, but Pollack is not a Cuban living in exile who detests the Castro regime.
Alan: I remember you used to talk about wanting to do the Desi Arnaz story.
Andy: I always though it was a good story. But they’re making that story. They are also making The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. I haven’t read the book but I read the screenplay, and it’s good. They asked me to do it, and I regret not being able to, but that would pull energy away from my own movie. I can’t do a movie about mambo, and then another movie about mambo.
Alan: Your Havana movie has a lot of music.
Andy: Oh, a tremendous amount. My character runs a nightclub. It’s a different movie from The Mambo Kings, but at the same time it’s too similar. It’s not just about a bandleader, it’s about what happens to a culture.
Alan: So instead of the Desi Arnaz story, instead of the Mambo Kings, this is going to be your music story.
Andy: Well, Desi Arnaz is different...
Alan: Yes, but how many bandleaders can you play?
Andy: That’s just what I’m saying. This movie is going to set some records straight in terms of the experience of the Cuban exiles and the Cuban revolution and what happened to it.
Alan: Well, clearly your point of view toward the revolution can’t be very favorable.
Andy: No, but it’s not a polemic. It’s going to present what happened, why it happened, and what happened to the people after it happened. I mean, the gentleman who is writing it was there. And he lived very closely within the inner structure of the revolution, until 1965.
Alan: How will you shoot Havana?
Andy: I think maybe between Miami, San Juan, and the interior of Santo Domingo, because I have sequences that take place in the country side with the guerrillas. The third act of the movie takes place in New York, in exile. What I want to do is have a kind of guerrilla unit, a smaller unit, so we can bop around, so we’re not carrying 500 people everywhere we go. Have you even been to San Juan? The old part of San Juan has that Havana look, except it’s a small version of it. Plus they have castles there which are similar to the castles in Cuba.
Alan: I guess you couldn’t shoot 1958 Havana anyway, because it’s not there anymore.
Andy: Well, some of it’s there; it’s just decrepit. You’d have to go in with a freighter full of paint...
Alan: Sort of like beautiful old villas which now have eight families living in them.
Andy: Yeah. There’s a documentary called Havana by Jana Bokova, a Czech director. You should see it. It’ll give you a feel for what it’s like now.
Alan: When you were a kid you lived in the city, in Havana?
Andy: Yeah.
Alan: Do you have memories of physical things? Streets? Your house?
Andy: Not too much. Mainly emotional memories. I remember the day we left, that we were told we were going.
Alan: Did you want to go?
Andy: I thought we were just going to Miami. I didn’t know that we were going into exile. But I do remember being under my bed during the Bay of Pits invasion. There were attacks on Havana. They were shelling the streets at night. We’d go out the next morning and pick up the shells.
Alan: Like in Hope and Glory.
Andy: Yeah. Anti-aircraft.
Alan: When we were in Tokyo prepping Black Rain I remember there was some problem with your passport - you didn’t have one. We were afraid you wouldn’t be allowed into Japan.
Andy: I was technically a citizen, but I was still operating with a reentry permit. I had never gotten a passport, gone through the motions.
Alan: You had never been abroad?
Andy: I had, but with a reentry permit. I was a U.S. resident, and that’s enough in most places. But in Japan, when they see your nationality is Cuban, it’s a delicate issue for them.
Alan: So they wanted you to get a U.S. passport?
Andy: No, they didn’t want to let me into the country. When I went to finalize my citizenship, they said, "We need your birth certificate." I said, "I don’t have a birth certificate." They said, "Well, we need to get proof of baptism," and I said, "I don’t have that. It’s in Cuba." They said, "You have to write and get it." I said, "What are you thinking? You don’t write to Cuba and get anything!" Talk about bureaucracy! It turns out that my parents became citizens while I was still a minor, so technically I was a citizen, but I didn’t have a certificate of citizenship. It was a catch-22. In order to get a certificate you had to get a birth certificate, so we had to go through this affidavit that I was the son of these people, and then finally someone had to just say, "Okay, this guy is in fact who he says he is," and then I got my passport. It was incredible. But it worked out okay, and I went to Japan and got my head cut off.
(The waitress brings food and a side dish of salsa.)
Andy: Is this spicy sauce here?
Waitress: All it is just those little green peppers and little red peppers, chopped up, you know...
Andy: Spicy. Thank you.
Alan: What, you don’t eat spicy?
Andy: I can’t handle it.
Alan: Can’t handle spicy? You’re Cuban!
Andy: Cubans don’t cook spicy food.
Alan: Really?
Andy: Sweet, Creole. Not spicy.
Alan: You don’t eat salsa?
Andy: No. I mean, I do, but not when it looks like it’s red-hot.
(Later, in the car, Andy slips in some tapes and begins to play me some of the early mambo recordings he has collected for his Havana project. They are sublime, sparely arranged and effortless in their vocals.)
Andy: This is one of the first mambos ever recorded.
Alan: This is? What year?
Andy: 1939.
Alan: This is a ’39 recording? It’s so clear!
Andy: It’s an updated recording, but it’s the original arrangement.
Alan: Who’s it by?
Andy: Can’t tell you.
Alan: Because it’s a secret?
Andy: Because it’s a secret.
Alan: Because it’s somebody I would know?
Andy: Because there are 20 other movies out there.
Alan: Do you find you have to be possessive about this music?
Andy: Absolutely.
Alan: So if anyone wants to get their hands on mambo music...
Andy: There’s mambo and then there’s mambo.
Alan: I know, but it’s so strange what can become a secret property.
Andy: It won’t be secret once I put it down. It’s like, there’s rock ‘n’ roll and then there’s rock ‘n’ roll. There’s Elvis, and then there’s the guy Elvis stole from.
Alan: Elvis stole from someone? Who?
Andy: I don’t know, but maybe someone does, and if he wants to make a movie about it, I’m sure he’s protecting the material.
Alan: I see. Let’s talk about publicity. When you go out like this, some people recognize you, especially in L.A. But with Godfather III, you are about to become a household word.
Andy: I don’t know if that will be true.
Alan: If not as Andy Garcia, as Vincent Mancini.
Andy: I haven’t given too much thought to it.
Alan: It’s going to take away some privacy at home.
Andy: Yes, I’m perfectly aware of that, but I have other priorities in my life to worry about than something hypothetical.
Alan: It’s just, I know that you’re a private person, and the ability to live your life the way you always have is very important to you.
Andy: Well, as an actor, your work is to be an imaginative observer, so that you can then become the observed. So if you just want to show up somewhere and watch something, celebrity can put a damper on it. You can be in the corner in a dark room and somehow they find you. All it takes is one person to say, "Look who’s there in the corner, look who’s there in the corner," and before you know it, they’re all there and they want pictures. It’s flattering, but the reason you went to the place to begin with was to be an observer, not the focus. It’s uncomfortable, especially when you are watching another performer, say a band playing, and suddenly you become the focus of the people on the stage. It’s a price you pay, but on the other side, there are things you gain. There are some stories you have to develop on your own if you want to see them, and it affords you that. You can develop things that you feel passionate about. It is a healthy position for an artist to be in - to have creative choice. It is so hard to get any work as an actor, you know, that if on top of that you can have choice, can choose from the few well-written things every year, that is a fortunate position to be in. And if the price you pay is a lack of privacy, well...
Alan: But you hate doing publicity.
Andy: Yes. I believe films should speak for themselves, you know, but the people that collaborate with you on the financial end of a movie, they need your help. It’s a necessary evil. So I try to help out but at the same time keep it to a minimum. Not appear in anything I wouldn’t read myself.
Alan: Well, thank you for that.
Andy: I have only done two or three interviews so far.
Alan: You’re doing GQ.
Andy: I fought that one for a while.
Alan: I’m kind of surprised that you gave in. I mean, a GQ cover is a true compliment and it has class, but I thought that kind of photograph was just not your thing.
Andy: We haven’t taken it yet.
Alan: But you’re doing it today.
Andy: Yeah.
Alan: Looking forward to it?
Andy: No (laughs). But it’s Herb (Ritts), and he’s a friend, so it’ll be, I guess - He’s a good guy, really straightforward. He shot the Internal Affairs poster.
Alan: I didn’t know that.
Andy: And I’ve turned down GQ two or three times. The first time they called they wanted to know if I would do a spread for me now if they promised me a cover in September, and I said, "Ask them what makes them think I want to do a cover in September." It’s a very honorable magazine. It’s just that everyone in the world has been on the cover of GQ. It’s no big deal.
Alan: They can only choose 12 men in a year. It’s a kind of certification.
Andy: Who can say that it is? It’s a favor; that’s the bottom line. I told them to pick some conservative clothing, because I ain’t gonna sit up there in some...
Alan: Is it the posing and the process that you hate, the results, or just the idea of what it represents?
Andy: Everything. Everything. I’m running to the end of the wire with this stuff.
Alan: I’m sure you’ll be a good sport about it.
Andy: Well again, the reality is, it’s for people that I have a relationship with, that I’ve done four or five movies with, so they ask for help, you bite the bullet. It’s a fair price. There are tougher was of making a living.
