After Salvatore left, Rose and Sonny (as Pacino was known throughout his childhood) moved in with her parents, James Gerardi, a plasterer who was an illegal immigrant from Corleone, Sicily, and his wife, Kate. In their cramped three-room apartment in the South Bronx, which sometimes housed as many as seven people, Pacino never had a space of his own. (“I remember years of sleeping between my grandmother and grandfather,” he said.) At the same time, he was an only child, often left to his own devices. “I was always sort of building stories, creating stories,” he said. “It was a way of filling up the loneliness.”

Storytelling ran in the family. In warm weather, Pacino’s grandfather, with whom Pacino had what he calls “one of the great relationships of my life,” would sit with him on the tar roof of their tenement and spin tales about his rough Dickensian youth in turn-of-the-century New York. “He got the shit kicked out of him by cops with helmets and big clubs—‘You little wop! Get over here, you stinking Guinea!’ ” Pacino said. “He’d talk about running away from home, living off the farms, how he would steal milk. He just loved talking to me, like we were on some little rowboat.” The roof, Pacino added, “was our terrace. There was this cacophony of sound—the Poles, the Jews, the Irish, the German, the Spanish. This definitive melting pot is what I came from. In some Eugene O’Neill plays, you hear the same thing.”

Among many odd jobs, Rose worked as a cinema usherette, and when Pacino was three or four she began to take him to the movies. “The next day, I would act out all the parts,” he said. “I think that’s how it started.” Pacino was often coaxed into performing scenes for his extended family, which included a deaf aunt. His party piece was an imitation of Ray Milland in “The Lost Weekend,” playing an alcoholic writer desperate for a drink. Pacino would open cupboards and doors, pretending to search for a hidden stash of booze. “I never understood why they were laughing, because I didn’t think it was funny,” he said. “But I knew it produced laughs.”

On Bryant Avenue in the forties and fifties, people escaped their small, hot apartments to sit on stoops or hang out under street lamps to roll dice or play poker. To disarm bullies and find friends, Pacino used the same strategy on the street that he’d used at home: he performed and enlisted others to perform with him, earning the nickname “the Actor.” “We’d act out parts from joke books and comic books,” he told me. “Kids make videos today, but it was kind of an unusual thing then to get street urchins to join you in acting out comics. Of course, it never got off the ground; there’s a comedy in there somewhere.” “He was always full of drama,” said his neighbor Ken Lipper, who would later become the deputy mayor of New York and a producer and screenwriter of “City Hall” (1996), in which Pacino starred. “He loved to take on different personae. He used to go to 174th Street and pretend he was a blind child.” Pacino’s bravado and good looks got him noticed. “The girls in the neighborhood would say, ‘Sonny Pacino, the lover bambino.’ The boys would say, ‘Sonny Pacino, the bastard bambino,’ ” Pacino told me. “It started early.”

Pacino was smoking at nine, chewing tobacco at ten, and drinking hard liquor at thirteen. He walked the edges of rooftops and jumped between tenement buildings. His favorite place was “the Dutchies,” a swampy labyrinth on the Bronx River, where truant kids hid in high marsh grasses. Pacino played third base for the Police Athletic League team, the Red Wings, which became a “quasi street gang,” with Al as its de-facto leader. In black wool jackets with a red stripe down the sleeve, the Red Wings patrolled their turf and protected it from roaming invaders, like the Young Sinners and the Fordham Baldies. Once, when they were twelve and sitting on the steps of a tenement after finishing a game of stickball, Lipper said, “some guy came over who was thirtyish and started menacing us. Al got up and whacked him with the stick.” Pacino’s wild crew, “tough kids with high I.Q.s and tragic endings,” became a template on which he modelled many of his memorable characters. “These people were a springboard for my profession,” he said. “They were part of what I consider the best time in my life.”

Pacino was less popular with the authority figures around him. “I wasn’t out of control, but I was close,” he said. “My mother had to come to school to talk to the teachers. Their conclusion? That I needed a dad.” When Pacino’s junior-high-school drama teacher, Blanche Rothstein, climbed the five flights of stairs to talk to his grandmother about his acting skills, it was, he said, “the first time I ever had encouragement.” He went on, “The world we came from, the encouragement just wasn’t there. We weren’t seen. Or we weren’t regarded. Do you think ever, once in my life, my mother or any adult ever said, ‘How was school today?’ Never! It was unheard of.” Nonetheless, Ms. Rothstein spotted a spark when Pacino read Bible passages in school assembly—“I didn’t know what I was talking about, but I felt it,” he said—and she cast him in school plays. Thanks to his talent, at the end of junior high Pacino was voted “most likely to succeed.”

Pacino was accepted into Manhattan’s High School of Performing Arts, which meant that his South Bronx street life was more or less a thing of the past. “All that remained was acting,” he said. His stay at the school, however, was a short one. “You gotta be kidding,” he told his Spanish teacher, when he discovered that the class was conducted entirely in Spanish. And he found the Stanislavsky method boring. “What does a kid who was thirteen, fourteen know about Stanislavsky?” he said. “All I knew was you sing, you dance, you have fun, you imitate. Now I was looking at my navel twenty-four-seven. It took me I don’t know how many years to get over that.” By his own admission, Pacino was a “dunderhead” at academic work, and by the time he dropped out of school, at sixteen, to support his mother, he was ready to go. Rose, who had at first approved of his ambition, now saw it as foolhardy. “Acting isn’t for our kind of people,” she told him. “Poor people don’t go into this.” Pacino said, “I didn’t know what she was talking about. On an unconscious level I did, but it didn’t mean anything to me. I’m a survivor. Survivors only hear what they want to hear.”

Between odd jobs, Pacino attended auditions, where he soon learned that, as an Italian-American of a certain class and demeanor, he didn’t “look right” for most parts. His instinct was to bide his time. “I knew, when the opportunity came, all I’d have to do is be there,” he said. But his mother’s death, when he was twenty-one, sent him into a tailspin. Within a year, his grandfather, too, was dead. Pacino had buried the two people to whom he was closest. “And I had no father,” he said. “I think that was my darkest period. I felt lost.”

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On Pacino’s living-room mantelpiece is a small moody photograph of him in profile in his early twenties, in an Off-Off Broadway production of August Strindberg’s play “Creditors.” The image marks the seminal moment, he said, “when I knew that nothing mattered except that I became at one with the play.” “Creditors,” a tragicomedy about a credulous young artist whose mind is poisoned against his wife by her bilious ex-husband, was directed by Charlie Laughton, an actor turned acting teacher at the Herbert Berghof Studio, whom Pacino first met in a Village bar when he was seventeen. Laughton, who’d also had a hardscrabble early life, recognized both Pacino’s talent and his difficult circumstances. Over time, he became Pacino’s mentor, his sidekick, his drinking buddy, his dramaturge, and, ultimately, his business partner. Laughton also introduced the teen-age Pacino to the works of Joyce and Rimbaud. “He would read them, and then I would read them myself,” Pacino told me. In those knockabout years, he added, “I dealt with whatever was bothering me through reading. You could not find me without a book.”