License to trill: The reinvention of Robert Davi
Robert Davi in License to Kill.
7:09 am Jul. 14, 20101
Back in Los Angeles, Robert Davi had unpacked his white shirts to fit other clothes in his suitcase, and he had forgotten to repack them. He had no white shirts.
We stood in the lobby of the Long Island Marriott in Uniondale Friday morning, contemplating this problem. Davi was wearing black boots, baggy black slacks, and a loose, silky shirt—black—with three or four buttons unbuttoned. He is a tall, fleshy, slightly hulking man who, depending on whether you believe Wikipedia or IMDB, is either 57 or 59 years old.
Davi has played the bad guy in enough movies for his pockmarked face, if not his name, to be instantly recognizable. He was the drug lord of the Republic of Isthmus in the 1989 James Bond film License to Kill, a singing criminal in The Goonies, a strip club manager in Showgirls. He was an F.B.I. agent in both Die Hard and the NBC show “Profiler.” Two years ago, he branched into writing and directing, with a dull caper called The Dukes about a has-been (played by Robert Davi) trying to recapture a lost singing career.
“When I did The Dukes,” he told me over breakfast in the lobby restaurant, “I did the doo-wop. It’s benign, it's fun, it doesn't require a lot. And it was like, ‘Hey, I'm ready to communicate through song.’”
And that was that. Life imitated art imitating life, and Davi, who had, 40 years before, briefly pursued a vocal career, was now once again a singer.
His public debut is this weekend, when his new show, “Davi Sings Sinatra,” opens a quarter-mile down the road from the Marriott at his alma mater, Hofstra University. He was nervous—“scared shitless,” he said—and little things kept going wrong.
It irked him, for one thing, that he and his voice teacher, Gary Catona, had been given rooms on different floors. It was a difficult business getting relocated—“Not even an inch?” he asked doubtfully, when a hotel staff member denied there was any difference between his old and new rooms—but the job got done.
Davi was tired, yawning and occasionally confused. His flight from L.A. had been delayed and then canceled, and he and Catona hadn’t arrived in New York until one that morning. Davi hadn’t wanted to sleep in, though. “You gotta just go for it,” he said, speaking about breakfast. “You gotta just punish yourself.”
Much of Robert Davi’s life consists of surmounting obstacles. The shirts could be overnighted, for instance, or his rhythm section could bring them from Los Angeles on Monday.
DAVI ORDERED GREEN TEA, AND OATMEAL MADE with water, not milk, and an omelette. The waiter suggested that it would be cheaper to do the All-American Buffet, which led to a discussion of the waiter’s nationality. He was Haitian, but his family lives in an area unaffected by the earthquake. They’re fine; he had spoken to them two days before. Davi asked, “Does the All-American Buffet have berries?”
Davi was born in Astoria, but moved when he was five to Long Island, off exit 51 on the L.I.E. He went to high school at Seton Hall, in Patchogue, then to Hofstra on a drama scholarship. The university has an annual Shakespeare festival and a full-size replica of the Globe Theater. “That Globe Theater attracted the hell out of me,” he said, getting up for the buffet.
I was left at the table with Gary Catona, who has a floppy mass of hair dyed jet black and was wearing a weathered T-shirt and cuffed Capri-length jeans with embroidery around the pockets. He has a deep, hypnotic voice, and his sentences have the self-sufficiency of Zen koans.
“I’m his singing teacher,” he said. “I'm also his business partner. He has a remarkably resonant voice. He's got that lower register. It's a big voice. I build his voice. Part of what I do is my own process. I call it voice building. I actually build a person's voice. I build a very beautiful, resonant voice so he can sing opera or sing the pop stuff. The premise is that the voice is composed of musculature. I build the voice the way an athlete builds a body.”
“Gary went through the same journey I did,” Davi said when he returned with his oatmeal, “and he came out of it—like a mad scientist—with this technique.”
Davi spoke about leaving Hofstra his junior year, his studies with Stella Adler, his idolization of Marlon Brando. He had clearly told these stories a thousand times, and he didn’t have the energy to go too deep. Instead, he marked, like a singer in rehearsal doing an aria in half-voice. What was Adler like? “Amazing. She was like a mentor.” What about Brando? “Fun guy, great sense of humor. Always wanted to do things differently.”
He brightened and got more expansive when he talked about Sinatra, who he said brought Method acting to singing for the first time and had the same effect on music that Picasso had on art. And he was practically jovial recalling his early days attempting opera.
“I was a baritone with the heart of a tenor,” he said. “Who doesn’t want to sing ‘Nessun dorma’? But you're a fucking baritone.”
In the early ’70s, he wrote to the the great singer Tito Gobbi begging for an audition.
“I had hurt my voice at the time,” he said. “I sang the prologue from Pagliacci and from Tannhauser, the—I forget the name of it, some very lyrical German lieder song. And I sang, and finally, after suffering through, however it got there, my voice broke through, and him and his wife”—he mimicked them widening their eyes and straightening up—“said ‘Que voce, que bella voce.’”
It was a good story, and later in the day he told it again, almost word for word, about a different audition—the same arias, the inability to remember the name of the German one, the voice finally “breaking through.” Maybe both stories are true.
THE CONVERSATION TURNED TO POLITICS, AS IT INVARIABLY DOES with Davi, a well-known conservative who did several montage voiceovers for the 2008 Republican convention, and who has been seen as a panelist on the Greg Gutfeld talk show “Red Eye.” The two books that had the greatest impact on his life were None Dare Call It Treason, by John Stormer, and Masters of Deceit, by J. Edgar Hoover.
“I wrote Bill O'Reilly an email over 10 years ago saying we should have another Boston Tea Party,” Davi said.
“I don't wanna get crazy,” he went on, “but the idea of taking a moment of silence or prayer in school—by removing the moral conscience, the moral compass, of a nation, by having children in school at an early age not be accountable to a higher power, no matter what that power is, creates a chaotic experience right from the beginning, right from the get-go. It's a Maoist kind of thing. Who do you then pray to? The state. You pray to the free lunch, you pray to the state, you don't have a higher power. And children are the most impressionable. So now you’re breeding a young mind, or reinforcing a young mind, when it's usurped from its parents. The parental authority goes as well. So the whole substructure of a society starts to dissipate.”
He looked at me carefully.
“I like what Arizona did,” he said. “My thing on immigration is this: Close the borders. Put a freeze on immigration for the next year. Find out who the fuck is in our country.”
At this point, Catona excused himself. He tends to tune out when Davi starts talking about things other than singing; later, when an interview with the Hofstra radio station turned to Reverend Jeremiah Wright—all interactions with Robert Davi eventually wend their way to immigration or Wright or communism—he leaned down and put his head in his hands.
“The more you breastfeed the population,” Davi went on, speaking of entitlement programs, “the longer they’re going to stay breastfed. Now what happens is, if you’re giving them mother’s milk and they don’t do what Mommy wants, they don’t get to drink. So then you get control. That's the danger. The founding fathers understood that.”
He sneezed several times, loudly and in quick succession.
Yep. Sinatra's birthday is on the 12th and Wikipedia has the correct year for Davi's birth - 1953.