Cuban Andy Garcia talks about his acting career in Hollywood. Garcia played an important role in reviving the music career of 78-year-old Cachao, the creator of the mambo. Garcia is also a conga and harmonica player who composes and sings. In exile from his native Cuba, the usually reticent actor opens up to a fellow emigre, novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
By Guillermo Cabrera Infante
From Harper's Bazaar, January 1996
Andy Garcia is the first Cuban actor in Hollywood since Cesar Romero. Forget Desi Arnaz: He only loved Lucy on television, a Cuban interloper in an American household. But while Romero started out dancing in musicals and worked his way up from there (you may know him as the Joker in the original Batman TV series), Garcia started out in small, serious roles. He became known for playing uncompromising characters in compromising circumstances, often the good cop versus the corrupt ones. His career accelerated in the late '80s, and in 1991 he was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as Vincent Mancini in The Godfather, Part III.
Generally, I don't think it is polite to quote, but this is an interview. So I began my recent conversation with Andy Garcia - in the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I've had the pleasure of working with him on a forthcoming Cuban film project (more later) - by quoting from a poem by Longfellow: "Life is but an empty dream!" wrote the poet (because he didn't know about the movies, a dream that money can buy).
"Is life in the movies worth living for you?" I ask Andy.
"Definitely," he says.
"Even in exile, with no country?"
"My father was my country, and he died" - which is a deeply moving way of talking about your father and your fatherland.
To understand Andy Garcia, you must first know that he is above all his father's son. Their relationship has informed Andy's life as an actor, a family man, and a friend. He was extremely attached to his father, Rene, a well-liked lawyer and avocado farmer in the small town of Bejucal, near Havana. And though Rene was never actually elected to office, he was widely known as el alcalde, "the mayor" - a tribute to his charisma and charm.
In 1956, the year Andy was born, el alcalde moved his family to Havana, but they would live only a few more years in Cuba: Three years later Fidel Castro also moved to Havana, to the de facto presidential palace. One of Andy's earliest memories is of warplanes over the city; it was 1961 and the Bay of Pigs invasion had started.
Five months later, when Andy was five years old, the Garcias moved to Miami Beach, FL. There Rene built a fragrance business, a cottage industry that filled Andy and his older brother and sister with what they believed was the scent of exile. Andy grew up playing baseball and basketball; later he enrolled at Florida International University, where he took the first steps toward becoming an actor. Eventually he moved west, as any novice should, and worked many menial jobs, more often than not as a waiter.
Rene died in 1993, but not before he could enjoy his son's success. At his funeral (actually a wake, with music performed by the great Cuban bassist Israel Lopez, known as Cachao - who, in more than just a musical measure, has become a father figure to Andy), Andy bid his father a last farewell, giving a vibrant reading of a famous poem by Federico Garcia Lorca, "Son de Negros en Cuba," in homage to the dead alcalde.
"You know," says Andy, "were it not for my being in exile - if I had stayed in the old country - I would have been an avocado planter. Really. It's in my blood."
But so is acting. He describes the persistence with which he sought the part of a Colombian druglord in 8 Million Ways to Die, the 1986 film directed by Hal Ashby, who, like Cachao, would become his mentor. "I've always admired Hal, so I really went after that role," Andy says. "I even came to the interview smoking, as the character would, and the casting director said to me, 'I don't think you should smoke here.' Still in character, I said, 'I don't give a fuck what you think!' You could see how hungry I was for that part."
8 Million Ways to Die, as well as two minor movies, The Mean Season and American Roulette, prepared him for bigger things, namely The Untouchables and Black Rain, in which he had his two most important roles of the '80s. Both films find Andy on the right side of the law, in the former as a G-man hunting Al Capone, and in the latter as a cop who goes to Japan (and his death) in the line of duty. In both, the word simpatico seems to have been invented for him.
In his newest film, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, he plays Jimmy the Saint, a hoodlum with his heart in the right place but who keeps crooked company - here, Christopher Walken at his vilest. The story allows Andy to be his most simpatico, charming self. We meet his character, Jimmy, now contentedly retired from his life of crime, as he is being summoned by the Man with the Plan (Walken), his diabolical ex-boss, to pull one last job.
"I found I was very moved by the moral dilemma of the lead character, Andy says, "and I knew the film would attract a great cast, even though it was [director] Gary Fleder's first job." And it did: Walken, Gabrielle Anwar, Steve Buscemi.
I ask him how he is affected by - or measures, for that matter - a movie's success. In terms of box office, his latest success was When a Man Loves a Woman, which happened to come right after a box-office failure, Jennifer 8. "Commercial success, or the lack of it, means nothing to me," he explains. "The audience's enjoyment of a film does not affect me as an actor. Artistic mishandling does. They cut Jennifer 8 down to a linear police story - which it wasn't. I fought very hard with the powers that be, but they still cut sixteen minutes of that movie!"
"Obviously, they wanted a Jennifer 5," I tell him.
At this, Andy laughs. In fact, for such a serious actor, he laughs a lot. He is wonderful company, though he is notoriously reticent about his private life, going to extreme lengths to keep his wife of 15 years, Marivi, also a Cuban emigre, and their three daughters out of the press. (His eldest, Dominik, may soon have a film career of her own: She can be seen stealing little scenes from her father in his last movie, Steal Big, Steal Little.)
Many actors (we all know who they are) extend to real life their macho machinations. Not Andy. A recent article was even called "Andy Garcia Is a Macho Softy." Meg Ryan, his wife in When a Man Loves a Woman, says: "He's very good at loving women onscreen. It's amazing the way he looks at them." Even my wife, Miriam Gomez, claims that Andy walks with a style all his own, very virile but not too macho.
Despite his insistence on shunning the Hollywood spotlight, he enjoys the friendships he's formed with several of his fellow actors, most notably his Untouchables costars Kevin Costner and Sean Connery. "Kevin is a good friend and is great to work with, but Sean was one of the main reasons I wanted to be in the movie. He has been a model for me as an actor; he's somebody who managed to escape from the golden cage - in his case, the Bond films - to become his own man."
"And how do you escape Hollywood's golden cage?"
"Through music, my greatest passion," Andy explains. "Like many exiles, I find solace in Cuban music. It is very important to Cubans that we carry on our culture; music is a way for us to retain our identity."
A talented musician himself, Andy plays congas and harmonica, even composes and sings. But nowhere is his passion for music more evident than in the work he has done with Cachao, the creator of the mambo. Now 78, Cachao had a thriving career for 30 years in Havana, but fell into obscurity when he settled in Miami in the '60s. There, long forgotten, he was reduced to playing his bass at weddings and bar mitzvahs.
In 1989 Andy went to see Cachao at a concert in San Francisco and was so moved by what he heard that he proposed a collaboration. He gave Cachao back to the world by becoming not only his concert organizer, record producer, and publicist but also his greatest enthusiast. Cachao's first record with Andy as producer, Master Sessions Volume I, won a Grammy Award in 1995; the second volume was released last fall.
"Cachao was the original mambo king," Andy says, "but he had been terribly overlooked. I'm his biggest fan and am grateful that he has embraced me like a son. I've learned a lot from him, a lot about my life."
Perhaps it is Andy's upcoming project, based on The Lost City, a screenplay I wrote in 1990, that will draw together his greatest loves: music, family, his dreams of a free Cuba. It was through this project that Andy and I met, two exiles who found we shared many enthusiasms. He came to see me in London, where I have lived for most of the three decades since I left Cuba. At the time, he was just Andy Garcia to me; I had never seen any of his movies. But he had read two of my books, Three Trapped Tigers and Infante's Inferno. He wanted me to write a screenplay for him, a sort of Cuban Casablanca; I said I would write a story in which he would play the owner of the greatest cabaret in the world, the Tropicana, set at the beginning of 1958, in prerevolutionary Havana. Andy convinced Paramount to foot the bill, I wrote the screenplay, and we have been quite close friends ever since. His fervor is obvious when he talks about the project. "The Lost City is more than a movie," he says. "It's a culture - and I want to make the film out of nostalgia for my culture."
"No doubt it will also be a movie about the music of those times," I tell him, "because when there is music around, you seem happier."
"I am. Happiest. Cachao, of course, will do the soundtrack. This movie has really become my dream. I will always wonder what it would have been like to grow up in Havana. This film will give me the chance to imagine the childhood I never had."