Danny DeVito at 70: A National Treasure on Sex, Drugs and Family
Outside his Malibu beach house, all snuggly in the early-afternoon sun, belly protruding from a half-unbuttoned shirt, balding scalp protected by a ball cap, feet not even coming close to touching the end of the chaise longue upon which he rests, Danny DeVito is working his way through one cup of coffee, preparatory to having another one, and maybe even a third. This is the way he is. This is the way he’s always been. “I have appetites,” he says. Then he says, “Let’s juice it up, man,” and promptly slurps the top off of how he takes it, black and gut-twisting strong. After that, he lays back and talks. He likes to talk. About himself, mostly. But he knows this and is unapologetic, which is just one of his many charms and makes it all fine.
“I have such a good life,” he’s saying now. “I may be worried about, you know, are my feet dry? Should I put some more cream on my legs? This is, like, my big problem. So, yeah, I am self-centered. It’s like, ‘Here I am!’ Me, me, me, me, me, basically — bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I was coming down the street the other day and saw a possum. Who the fuck cares about it? I want to tell you what happened to me!”
He’s 70 years old. Fifty-one years ago, he left the family home in Asbury Park, New Jersey, to move to New York and become an actor, much to the amusement of his friends, who took one last look at their buddy — then, as now, he stands only five-foot-zero-zilch-bupkis tall — and said, “Fuck, Dan, who do you think you are, Gregory Peck, Clark Gable? Look at yourself. You stupid bastard, you fucking moron, you jerk-off!”
The way things worked out, his size turned out to be a blessing, not a curse. First as crabby, sleazy, foulmouthed butterball Louie De Palma, Sunshine Cab Co.’s gnomish dispatcher in the glorious sitcom Taxi (1978-1983); then as any number of truculent, bombastic, conniving and menace-minded characters in movies like Romancing the Stone (1984), Throw Momma From the Train (1987), Batman Returns (1992) and Get Shorty (1995); and most recently, since 2006, as nasty, duplicitous, daughter-waterboarding, tighty-whitie-displaying, totally depraved and amoral half-pint father figure Frank Reynolds, in FXX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, now in its 10th cult-favorite season, which correctly promotes the show as being like “Seinfeld on crack.”
In the process, he’s become something of a national treasure, beloved by all, frowned upon by none. Even when he showed up drunk on The View in 2006, calling George Bush a “numbnuts” and blabbing on about having sex with wife-of-33-years Rhea Perlman in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House, the ladies in charge couldn’t have been more tickled. And, in 2013, not even the hardcore gossip rags could bring themselves to delve too deeply into DeVito’s five-month separation from Perlman (herself a national treasure, for her role as Carla on Cheers).
The most important thing to know about DeVito is that as a kid growing up on the Jersey Shore in the 1950s, he was not bullied because of his height, he was not teased, he was not shunned. There was none of that. Then again, when it came to girls, he did have certain issues. For one, while slow-dancing at a mixer, his big fear was that his nose would end up pressed against his partner’s cleavage, causing certain levels of discomfort. Then there’s how he says the nuns at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel dealt with universal adolescent urges. “Masturbation? That doesn’t exist. We never heard the word ‘sperm,’ or about a clitoris or about ejaculation. It was all secret.” He went on his first date at nine years old, maybe eight, to a movie at the St. James Theatre in Asbury Park. Their moms dropped them off. They went inside, they held hands, and then he kissed her. “There was no tongue involved,” he says, “but it was a kiss.”
And how old was he when he lost the, you know, deal?
He leans forward. “See, here’s the thing about losing the deal. What it’s really about is having an ejaculation while you’re with somebody. That’s what you’re looking for. Coming in your pants, right? So the first time that happened? Ten, 11.”
Come on!
He nods that big head of his, very vigorously. “Eleven, around there. Like, I found out about it at nine, 10, and got to rub up against someone at 10, 11.”
But, see, that’s DeVito in a nutshell. He defies all expectations and has been doing so for a very long time.