This article appeared in the December 1970 issue of After Noon TV.
It is accompanied by photos of Antony Ponzini (Vinnie Wolek) & Lee Patterson (Joe Riley)
This article wouldn't be here for your viewing without John. THANKS John!!!
Maybe somebody will find out... WHAT MAKES ANTONY RUN
by Jack Erwin
Dear Editor:
In self-defense, let me point out that I’m not the first writer who’s tried to do a calm, well-organized, formal interview with Antony Ponzini.
I’m not the first who failed either.
He first problem is, Antony Ponzini doesn’t like being “interviewed”. (No that’s putting it too mildly. Antony Ponzini hates being interviewed; he looks forward to talking about his life like most people look forward to brain surgery without anesthesia.)
What Antony Ponzini does like is just talking, just relaxing with a friend - or a half dozen friends – and passing the evening with whatever lunatic form of conversation may seem fitting at the moment.
The next problem is - just relaxing with Ponzini and shamelessly ignoring the duties of a proper journalist is so tempting that most of us can’t resist it, and it’s bye, bye formal interview. I plead guilty and throw myself on the mercy of the reader. Go do an “interview” with a windstorm.
I got caught in that windstorm one evening when I went to Tony’s (His friends call him Tony, but he hates to see it in print. The name is Antony – without an h – and that’s the way he likes it. He’s entitled.)
...Let’s start that again: I went to Antony one evening for dinner, notebook and pen (both doomed o be useless) in hand. For a while I actually made notes and asked a few proper, formal questions. And then I just gave up and enjoyed the evening, without caring in the least that I was having a ball on company time.
So with that confession out of the way, I shall make every honest effort to reconstruct as much of the meeting as possible… but don’t expect too much. You hadda be there.
First, there’s the apartment itself. It’s on a hidden tree-lined street in the Village that most New Yorkers don’t even know exists. The buildings are only three stories high; living there one can easily forget he’s in the middle of the city. The location seems right for Antony Ponzini, who got the apartment from Gary Pillar (then on Another World, now living in Hollywood as a star of Bright Promise).
Antony opened the door, introduced me to a soft, feminine girl with long blonde hair who was in the kitchen doing woman things in preparations for dinner, (her name is Marty Hammerstein, and, yes, she is related to both the late Oscar Hammerstein , and to Jimmy Hammerstein, husband of Millette Alexander). I began making notes on the apartment and Antony, neatly dodging the danger of being grilled began preparing an open fireplace fir grilling steaks instead.
The apartment is small and filled with things… framed pictures all over the wall (including one of Antony with Rosemary Prinz in a play, Antony costumed for a Japanese role, and a shot of a movie billboard for Humphrey Bogart’s Academy Award nomination in African Queen. I never got a chance to ask him why he had that one)… shelves in the kitchen filled with cooking things… books everywhere (in order to sit down I cleared away Every Thing You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex, Beyond Success and Failure and Understanding Human Nature. make what you will of that combination).
There is a long, low couch, small lamps mounted on barrels, a black metal chandelier holding candles hanging from a chain over the coffee table, and a large map of Canada spread over the red (yes red) floor. Antony was in the process of planning a Canadian vacation.
The host, looking somehow like Pan with the chest of an Olympic weightlifter, wore a sleeveless undershirt, jeans and shower shoes. (Let me note, in fairness, that I’ve known Antony Ponzini for a long time now; he’s probably more formal when he invites a stranger for dinner. On the other hand, knowing Antony Ponzini, he probably isn’t.)
The fireplace turned out to be particularly stubborn this evening (isn’t it always when you’re having guests?); Ponzini kept adding paper, the paper kept burning – and nothing else. He finally went out to the store (still without shirt or shoes; it was a warm night) to buy something or other that would solve the problem. When he came back the solution worked, the fire started, and I cornered him with a few minutes of interview-type conversation. As best I recall, I started it off with something profound like: “What’s new?”
“I’m getting into photography now,” he said. “This is the first camera I ever had; I got it last month. I just rely on blind instinct and read a little about the subject. … I try their techniques and then I apply what my instincts say and come up with something.” (What he comes up with is quite good; there are several of his photographs – including two of Marty – mounted and hung on the wall, and they are excellent.)
One of the reasons Antony is nervous about being interviewed for print is ,I think, the fact that he feels he has often been misquoted, and I asked him about that.
“It’s true, I find a lot of what’s written about me very annoying, and I have to pull myself together to avoid writing a letter to say ‘Who are you kidding?’ All that stuff about me ‘fighting my way out of the slums’, for instance – it just isn’t true. I didn’t have a background any tougher than anybody else; I grew up in an Italian ghetto in Brooklyn that wasn’t any different from any other.”
“I don’t like these sob-stories about how I ‘support my entire family’, either. I help them, if they need something I take care of it, but I don’t support them. That kind of stuff just makes for sensational headlines, but you don’t need that. Just tell the truth, there’s nothing boring about the truth.” (I hope not, since that’s all I’m trying to do here.)
Another pet peeve of Antony’s is “theatre politics”; “actors who butter up a producer to get ahead. Don’t do something for somebody because it makes your position secure, do it because you like the guy.”
One line he not only volunteered but requested: “Put in a quote for me: say how much I miss working with Lee Patterson.” (Lee, who played Joe Riley on One Life to Live, has left the show to return to his home in Hollywood; the team of Patterson & Ponzini kept things lively around the set before his departure.)
A discussion of the dinner ahead brought up the subject of Antony’s weight – it’s 140 – and he amazed me by saying that he once weighed 205 pounds. (“Now he might weigh 140 soaking wet,” Marty noted.)
“I started dropping weight when I was in the Navy,” he said, “I’ve weighed 160 since 1953, then I lost my appetite when I had my knee operation last year and dropped to 140. I don’t really care whether I put the 20 pounds back or not.”
Antony was deeply involved in sports when he was in high school; “I was a fast fullback at 205, and I was also into baseball, basketball and swimming… I used to have so many trophies, but I gave them all away.”
At 17 the young Ponzini was offered a minor league baseball contract with the New York Yankees, but he went into the Navy instead.
“I really don’t know why I did that,” he said, “I think I just wanted to get away and be left alone.”
That early need “to be left alone” was probably a foreshadowing of the nature that even today makes it very difficult for Ponzini to follow anybody’s rules too closely. His life seems to be one that demands spontaneity, that fights anything too orderly or restrictive to his own impulses.
“If you give me an instrument – like that camera – I can figure it out, but I do it by trial and error - I even used to have a big thing with picking locks. But I can’t crack a book anymore; reading is very relaxing, but learning that way is very hard.”
“That’s the reason I quit flying – I couldn’t take all the technicalities and the rules and regulations. But I’d have made a great pilot in WWI, when it was every man for himself.”
This kind of fierce independence makes problems for Antony: “When I see a sign that says ‘Don’t Walk’ I have to go through a reserve tank of discipline to prevent myself from doing it. It’s just something I have to work out in my life.”
“I don’t believe anybody should have to live by somebody else’s standards; most rules are too stringent. If a person knows what he’s doing, let him do it; if he wants to see a certain show, let him see it. And I’m not about to change my way of life to get invited to parties.”
Dinner was over by this time – the stubborn fire had come through, and Antony cooked the steaks splendidly – and the first group of friends dropped in (in Antony Ponzini’s house friends are always dropping in). He discouraged Marty from clearing the dishes too soon:
“I like dirty dishes on the table,” he explained. “I feel like I’m home. Nikki Flacks [she played Karen Martin on One Life to Live] once said ‘What does love mean? It means you feel like you’re going home.’ And this is my first home.”
At just about this point Antony Ponzini’s first home went totally dark, reminding us of the problems that can come with rustic living in the middle of the city. The fuses had blown for the whole private street, and continued to, from time to time, for the rest of the evening. (The first couple of times Antony went out himself to deal with the people who were causing the problem, finally he said to Marty “Hey, babe, go down and complain, will you? I can’t ‘cause I’ll punch him in the nose.” Then, to us “See how I assign her the dirty details?” Marty went, nobody’s nose got punched, and the lights came back on.)
After the fettuccini was cleaned up (it somehow wound up on the floor when the lights went out) Antony went to work making one of his Wondrous Blinker Things for one of the friends who had dropped in. This peculiar process, which I didn’t pretend to understand, involved sandwiching tiny light bulbs and some sort of electronic gizmo between two sheets of clear plastic, and then sealing the whole thing with a clear liquid that somehow turns blue. After that, you put a magnet on the outside and the lights blink on t\and off. Exactly how and why this works I do not know, and Antony probably doesn’t either. He probably worked it out through trial and error. At any rate, it’s a very effective bit of electronic art.
Another couple of friends came in, and note taking had become a long forgotten thing of the past. It was too much fun watching Antony Ponzini clean his plastic with alcohol, carefully timing each step of the operation to avoid running it, and looking at his mounting machine and other photographic equipment (someone said “He has all these wonderful things… he just doesn’t know what to do with them.”)
Later, after I’d gone out into the night to try clearing my well-spun head, I remembered something that Marty had said, which I think may well be the answer to the nervous energy that Makes Antony Run:
“Tony’s biggest problem,” she said, “is that he does so many things well.”
And, at another point in the evening, in response to something else altogether, Antony turned to her and said “I like it when you’re right, ‘cause that way I learn, too.”
Well, I don’t know if anybody has learned anything about Antony Ponzini from my visit, but hopefully you learned as much as he wants you to know.
And at least I spelled his name right.