Al Pacino is sparing no details in his new memoir, Sonny Boy.
In the book, which was excerpted in a story by People magazine on Thursday, the Oscar-winning actor writes about a traumatising childhood injury to his penis which he says still makes him “squeamish” to talk about.
Pacino recalls how he would “cheat death on a regular basis” when he was young but still came dangerously close to maiming himself at one point.
As he recounts, “I was walking on a thin, iron fence, doing my tightrope dance. It had been raining all morning, and sure enough, I slipped and fell, and the iron bar hit me directly between my legs.”
The star of The Godfather writes that after his fall he was “in such pain that I could hardly walk home.” Thankfully, Pacino was found “groaning in the street” by an older gentleman, who carried him back to his aunt’s apartment.
While waiting for doctors to arrive, he remembers laying in bed “with my pants completely down around my ankles as the three women in my life — my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother — poked and prodded at my penis in a semipanic.”
“I thought, God, please take me now, as I heard them whispering things to one another as they conducted their inspection,” the native New Yorker writes in “Sonny Boy.”
Pacino, now a father of four, goes on to tell readers that his anatomy “remained attached, along with the trauma,” but that he is still “haunted by the thought” of the accident to this day.
Pacino’s childhood injury is far from the only painful memory he shares in the 384-page tell-all, which was released on Tuesday via Penguin Press.
In Sonny Boy, the Scarface star looks back on his mother’s death from an accidental drug overdose in 1962, as well as the passing of his grandfather and father-figure Vincenzo Gerardi a year later, which Pacino describes as the “darkest period” of his life.