Joe Pesci's Life Is More Interesting Than You Would Think

Joe Pesci is an odd guy, not a freakish kind of odd. It's just that he goes completely against the grain of the public's perception of him. One day, he's a guitarist whose dream is to become an East Coast lounge singer. A couple of years later, he's playing opposite Robert DeNiro, and Scorsese fans are instantly all in on this 5 foot 3 ball of energy. Today, we are going to explore why Joe Pesci has led one of the most interesting lives of any actor. Joe Pesci was never supposed to become an actor. He dabbled with acting, but it wasn't his life's pursuit. Pesci really wanted to be a singer. Acting was something that just paid the bills and helped him stay visible in the entertainment industry. Funny enough, he sort of ended his career as a lounge singer. But we'll get to Vincent LaGuardia Gambini sings in a few minutes. The truth is that Joe Pesci's life has been anything but ordinary. Having grown up in some seedier neighborhoods of New York and New Jersey, the Four Seasons were formed in part by Joe Pesci. Frankie Valli, the Four Seasons singer, used to get his hair cut by Joe. According to Valli, the two were pretty close. They'd known each other for quite a while before the Four Seasons even formed. Valli even said that if Pesci didn't become an actor, he would have joined the mob on some level. So how did Pesci single-handedly make the Four Seasons happen? He also happened to be friends with Bob Gaudio, the 15-year-old keyboardist and wunderkind songwriter for the Royal Teens who co-wrote Short Shorts. Pesci introduced Gaudio to Valli, knowing that the keyboardist was looking for a new band. Gaudio joined the Four Seasons on a handshake with Valli, and a year later, Sherry was recorded. The band skyrocketed from there. The members of the Four Seasons considered Pesci such a valuable element to their success, they invited him up on stage when they accepted the 2006 Tony Award for Jersey Boys, the Broadway musical about their band. While it's hard to imagine Pesci standing in line for It's a Small World, Pesci got some of his greatest inspiration from Disneyland, a Disneyland employee to be exact. Pesci based his performance as police informant Leo Getz on various Disneyland employees he encountered over the years. The way Pesci explains it, he encountered a specific Disneyland employee's odd speech patterns one afternoon. Pesci asked a Disney cast member directions to Fantasyland. And to paraphrase him in an interview, they look at you and go, OK, Fantasyland. OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, I got it. They give you 6,000 OKs, Pesci said. This unusual but brilliant choice kept Pesci around for a total of three Lethal Weapon movies. As mentioned earlier, becoming an actor wasn't Pesci's main focus. He really had his eyes set on becoming a singer. He sang standards and scored gigs in small local pop bands covering novelty pop music like The Peppermint Twist and Run Around Sue. To further his career, Pesci started looking for acting jobs. In fact, he already had a little screen time. When he was 10, he was a non-speaking extra on a television variety show called Star Time Kids with Connie Francis. It wasn't until he was 37 that he got his first real feature role. The 1976 movie was called The Death Collector. It was low budget and didn't win any awards, but Robert De Niro happened to see it and was impressed with Pesci's performance. Although Pesci moved to Hollywood in hopes of more movie success after The Death Collector, the mobster movie didn't boost his career, so he went back east to manage Amici's, a popular Bronx restaurant. Three years later, Pesci got a phone call from Martin Scorsese and De Niro complimenting him on his work in The Death Collector and offering him a role in Raging Bull as Joey LaMotta, Jake's brother played by Robert De Niro. After that phone call, Pesci quit Amici's. Pesci's father, Angelo Pesci, was a forklift driver for General Motors with a part-time job as a bartender. Pesci's father was also insistent he did not lead a life of hard labor the way he did. Instead, Angelo pushed his kids into show business in hopes of forging a path out of poverty. Although it wasn't his first love, Joe began to get roles in plays at the age of five. Pesci then found himself on the Star Time kids variety show at 10. He looked back on the experience of getting nudged into acting with mixed feelings. I don't know if it's the right thing to do. Push your kids into something and then stay on them until they do it. He also remarked that if he had more freedom, he'd have found something more calming in a different area where I did not have to use my emotions. Sometime around the middle of his adventures in the entertainment business, Pesci formed a small nightclub act with the late Frank Vincent. Vincent, as you'll remember, was whacked by Pesci in Goodfellas, then whacked Pesci in Casino, and then was whacked by Tony Soprano's crew on The Sopranos. The duo called themselves Vincent and Pesci, and they based their act a little on Laurel and Hardy and Martin and Lewis, a little comedy, and a little music. They did get one chart-worthy hit with a novelty song in 1972 called Can You Fix the Way I Talk for Christmas. It's cringe-worthy, like most novelty songs eventually become, but they redeemed themselves with an instrumental single called Little People Blues. It's got a funky groove. Along with being a gifted singer, Pesci was also a skilled guitar player. Again, listen to Little People Blues and say he's not a funky guitarist. In the 60s, Pesci put a lot of guitar time in local New Jersey bands, most famously with Joey D and the Starlighters, a group known for their tune Peppermint Twist. Pesci was in and out of bands during this period in his life, so he didn't stay with the Starlighters for very long. When he left the band, Jimi Hendrix took over on lead guitar. While Hendrix's tenure was also short-lived, it's a strange connection you probably hadn't heard of until now. Eventually, Pesci scored a record contract for a solo album. His debut, Little Joe Sure Can Sing, was released in 1968 and got very minor attention. The record is something of a collectible now. It was never reissued after its first small pressing, but Little Joe's rendition of The Beatles' Got to Get You Into My Life is worth a minor amount of internet searching. Here's a weird one. Pesci had a small part in a pretty messy murder case. Pesci is notoriously tight-lipped about his past marriages. We know he was married at least twice, once to an unknown woman in 1964 when he was 21 years old. There are even unconfirmed reports that say Pesci had a daughter born around 1967 with a mystery woman. The other time we can confirm is when he was married to Claudia Harrow from 1988 to 1992. Not much is known about Pesci and Harrow other than they had one daughter, and he bailed Harrow out on a $1.25 million bond. In 2000, Harrow was convicted of hiring a hitman to whack the guy she married after she divorced Pesci, Hollywood stuntman Garrett Warren. Harrow allegedly hired a hitman to ambush and kill Warren in his apartment. But when Warren survived the attack, she allegedly hired another hitman to finish the job. The second attack never took place, and Haro was arrested in 2005. Pesci not only bailed Harrow out on a $1.25 million bond, but he even showed up to her murder trial. Should also be noted that during the preliminary hearing, a witness strongly implied that Pesci paid for the hits that Haro put out on Warren. Pesci always wanted to be a singer. And even though he took a few shots at the musician life, he never became known for his music. But that didn't stop him from trying. In 1998, six years after starring in My Cousin Vinny, Pesci leveraged his role as Vincent Gambini and recorded an album as the fictional personal injury lawyer. The album was titled Vincent LaGuardia Gambini Sings Just for You. The album wasn't well received, and Pesci took more than a few hits from critics. With Lethal Weapon 4 already filmed, he would announce his retirement from acting less than a year later. Following his publicly declared retirement in 1999 from acting, Pesci has remained elusive to the general population both on and off screen. He's only made a few appearances. A couple of movies done as a favor for his friend Scorsese, De Niro and Meryl Streep. That said, he seems to have caught the acting bug again, having appeared in an offbeat Snickers commercial and playing a key role in Scorsese's Netflix film, The Irishman. According to De Niro, both he and Scorsese needed to be extremely convincing to get Pesci back into the film. As you watch this, Joe Pesci could very well be entering the third phase of his acting career. There's no doubt Pesci lived the lives equivalent of 10 mere mortals like you and I.