What has caused all the controversy? Why has fundamentalist minister Donald Wildmon branded NYPD Blue as "soft-core pornography?" Well, besides some raw language, much of the fuss is about Caruso's bare butt, aired in steamy showers and bedroom love scenes and, more innocently, in the police locker room. Admitting he thinks the partial nudity is okay—"you're never exposed in an embarrassing way"—Caruso then reflects, in his introspective, measured manner, "I think [network TV] is kind of moving forward, growing up. But any change is going to be painful to some people."
One viewer's pain may be another's guilty pleasure. It's those very scenes, capturing in the flesh Caruso's amorous screen doings with his cop girlfriend, Janice Licalsi (Amy Brenneman), and his attorney ex-wife, Laura (Sherry Stringfield), that have made NYPD notorious and Caruso a birthmarked man by adoring female fans (Mademoiselle tabbed the red-haired actor one of the Hunks of Autumn). All the sex-appeal madness has come out of the blue; the show's co-creator, Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues), says he hired Caruso to play opposite the formidable Dennis Franz, a Hill Street veteran, on the strength of pure acting talent. Bochco, who had given Caruso some of his earlier TV shots (including, in 1981, the part of the tough Irish gang leader in the first three episodes of Hill Street), says of Caruso: "He's a working-class guy, and I like offbeat characters. He's just a terrific package."
Up to this turning point in his career, Caruso has specialized in the offbeat. Kicking back in his Beverly-Glen canyon hideaway, which he shares (along with a Santa Monica apartment) with his girlfriend of four years, Paris Papiro, 30, Caruso observes, "Red hair stigmatizes you. "You're different. You end up getting the oddball role because you're not slottable." So Caruso got to play some meaty parts, such as Robert De Niro's caustic partner in Martin Scorsese's Mad Dog and Glory. But, he ruefully adds, "the downside of doing a good job with a bad guy, or a crazy guy, is that you're stuck with that kind of role."
Not anymore. Caruso has artfully twinned his sex appeal with the strength and solidity of an understanding police detective putting his heart and life on the line everyday. "John Kelly is really a guy I admire," says Caruso. "For John Kelly to come back and love and care about people and not be burned out by the poison he's absorbing in his job, well, that makes him the ultimate standup guy I aspire to be."
A sense of Kelly-esque pain is something Caruso learned early. When he was 2 and his sister Joyce (now 35 and a news producer at Fox Television in New York City), was just a baby, his parents divorced. His father, Charles, a newspaper editor, moved to Rockland County, N.Y., remarried and began another family. His mother, Joan, moved her family into her parents' home in the Forest Hills section of Queens—and let the grandparents do most of the nurturing while she enrolled in college and focused on a career in library science. He says he harbors no resentment toward his parents, but concedes, "I think that when you're a young male and separated from your father, it's profound. What it forces you to do is maybe overcompensate in trying to figure out your identity."
Caruso sought his in the characters of the tough-guy sweethearts he admired so, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. He especially identified with Cagney, another New York street kid with red hair. Says Caruso, who took a job as a theater usher in his teens to study films, "Cagney embodied a standup guy, even when he was a criminal." Caruso also found a place on the basketball court and was good enough to play guard at Archbishop Molloy High School. Instead of going on to college, though, Caruso opted for an education on the streets, in menial jobs: "I needed to gel into the mix," he says.
But he vividly remembers the night he decided to become an actor. It was a Friday evening in 1972, he was 16, and he and his best friend, Lou Mantis, had just seen The Godfather. "We stood under a lamppost in Forest Hills," Caruso recalls, "and I said, 'I'm going to California, Lou. This is what I want to do.' "
Still, it took Caruso six years to get there—and that was after making a liquor delivery in an agent's New-York neighborhood and double-parking his truck to audition for her. She liked what she saw and began sending Caruso out on casting calls. Here, his street smarts came into play: He faked a resume. "It was a total lie," Caruso says now. "I falsified all sorts of theater credits. I knew I could go into an audition and back it up. I liked going in under pressure. It's like in athletics. I always wanted the ball when we were in trouble."
In 1978, with one suitcase and $1,000 in his pocket, Caruso relocated to Hollywood. He landed small but vivid roles—including that of the cadet Richard Gere saves from drowning in 1982's An Officer and a Gentleman. He also appeared in 1982's First Blood with Sylvester Stallone and 1984's Thief of Hearts. By that time Caruso had been married to Sherry Maugans—and divorced (amicably, he says) after four years. "We both didn't know anybody else in California," he says, half in jest, of the union.
In 1983 he met actress Rachel Ticotin filming the pilot for the short-lived NBC series For Love and Honor (she was a regular, he a guest). That marriage lasted six years, produced Greta, and ended less amicably. One problem was Caruso's drinking. He says he didn't even realize its seriousness until he and Rachel visited a counselor, who zeroed in on alcohol as a possible trouble spot. By then it was too late to save the marriage—but not too late to deal with the drinking. Caruso enrolled in a 30-day program at a treatment center and emerged clean and sober. "Once I was able to get some understanding of the past," he says, "I was able to embrace a new light." One positive result: He and Rachel are now close and share the parental duties for Greta whom he calls, "my No. 1 priority."
Unlike her dad, Greta does not attend parochial school. "I'm no longer a Catholic," he says. "I was raised in that system. It's based on fear—and that's a counterproductive emotion."
His other personal priority is Papiro, a former masseuse who now devotes her time to Caruso: working as his assistant, going to the set daily, running the household. "She saves my life every day," he says. That life has become hectic: NYPD has brought 14-hour workdays and fame, with all of its cares and curiosities. Says his partner, Dennis Franz, "I think he's kind of in awe of the extreme popularity, and he's luxuriating in it right now." But Caruso isn't so sure that it's all luxury. "I would have to say it's harder for me to handle the good times than the bad times," he says. "The good times are unfamiliar territory to me." It's territory Caruso feels he needs to explore as he balances a life once lived on the streets of New York City and now performed on them. "I'm looking at where I'm silting right now," he reflects, "and thinking back to, 'Was this what I wanted back there?' But then you feel good because you can say to yourself, 'You know what? I was valuable. I wasn't totally wrong about myself.' "
MARK GOODMAN
JOYCE WAGNER in Los Angeles
- Contributors:
- Joyce Wagner.
