Joseph Angelo D'Allesandro III was born on December 31, 1948 in Pensacola, Florida.[2] His father, Joseph Sr., an 18-year-old Italian-American sailor in the U.S. Navy, married his mother, Thelma Testman, who was 14 years old.[3] She was 16 when she gave birth to him.[2] His surname was spelled "D'Allesandro" on his birth certificate, which was a recurrence of an error from his father's military documents. Following his rise to fame, his father's name was legally changed back to D'Alessandro.[2]
His parents separated soon after they moved to New Jersey when he was two years old.[4] His father maintained custody of him and his younger brother, Robert "Bobby" Dallesandro, but soon they ended up at Angel Guardian Home awaiting foster care.[2] They were placed in the foster care of Mr. and Mrs. Gary Silano where Dallesandro attended Catholic school in Brooklyn until the family moved to North Babylon, New York.[4][2] By the time he was five years old, his mother was serving five years in a U.S. federal penitentiary for interstate auto theft.[2] After she remarried, his mother, who went by Sandy Hoyt, and her husband unsuccessfully attempted to regain custody of Dallessandro and his brother.[3] Dallesandro was initially content living with his foster parents, but as he became a teenager, he reportedly began to resent them, thinking that they were preventing him from living with his father.[5] He became aggressive and repeatedly ran away from his foster home until his father finally relented and allowed Joe to live with him.[5]
At age 13, Dallesandro and his brother moved to Queens, New York, to live with their paternal grandparents and their father.[6] "I was very rebellious," he recalled.[4] "I hated the Queens school. They were so far behind the Long Island school that I just lost interest."[4] He was expelled from school for punching the school principal.[4] After this, he began hanging out with gangs and stealing cars. At age 15, Dallesandro drove a stolen car through the Holland Tunnel without paying the toll.[4] He was stopped by a police roadblock and was shot once in the leg by police who mistakenly thought he was armed. Dallessandro managed to escape being caught by police, but was later arrested when his father took him to the hospital for his gunshot wound. He was sentenced to Camp Cass Rehabilitation Center for Boys in the Catskills in 1964.[7] In 1965, he ran away from the camp, and went to live with his father in Florida.[4]
Career
Early modeling career
In 1965, Dallessandro made his way to the West Coast with a friend and briefly worked at a pizza shop.[4] When Dallesandro was looking for a job, someone recommended modeling.[8] He was unaware that they meant nude modeling, but at the age of 16, he ended up supporting himself by modeling for Bob Mizer's Athletic Model Guild and Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles).[9][8][10] Mizer later stated that Dallesandro gave his age as 19 when he posed for him.[11] In one sitting, Mizar took a short 8mm film and 86 photographs, some of which were published in Physique Pictorial's September 1967, January 1967, and July 1975 issues.[10] The photos Bellas took were published in The Male Figure.[10]
By 1967, Dallessandro had returned to New York. He was married at the age of eighteen, and he was hustling around Times Square to pay for his drug habit.[12]
He met pop artist Andy Warhol and film director Paul Morrissey while they were shooting Four Stars (1967) in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, and they cast him in the film on the spot.[13] His segment in Four Stars was later included in the film The Loves of Ondine (1968).[14] Dallesandro began doing odd jobs at the Factory as Warhol's bodyguard and sometime actor.[12][15]
Dallesandro starred in Lonesome Cowboys (1968), which was filmed in Arizona and then filmed San Diego Surf in California. While Warhol was recuperating from an assassination attempt in the summer of 1968, Dallesandro filmed Flesh (1968), a story of a male hustler—based on Dallesandro's experience—where he had several nude scenes. Appealing to male and female audience members, Dallesandro was the "first overtly sexualized male in the movies."[16]Flesh, directed by Paul Morrissey, became a crossover hit with mainstream audiences, and Dallesandro became the most popular of the Warhol stars. Warhol would later comment, "In my movies, everyone's in love with Joe Dallesandro."[17]
The Warhol and Morrissey films did not usually have a script so the actors improvised while the cameras were rolling.[15] In 1970, Dallesandro told After Dark: "Sometimes they yell at me and say, 'Joe, you're really messing it up. Stop trying to act,' and then I usually do a good job. But if you watch carefully you'll see that my best performing comes when I have my clothes off. When I'm dressed I really don't give very good performances, but when I am not I really do a great job."[15]
By 1970, Dallesandro earned a salary of $124 a week.[4] After starring in Trash (1970), his underground fame began to cross over into the popular culture and he was viewed as a sex symbol.[15]New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote of him: "His physique is so magnificently shaped that men as well as women become disconnected at the sight of him."[18]Newsday film critic Jerry Parker wrote that "Joe Dallesandro, who is a mere 21 is to Andy Warhol what Clark Gable once was to Louis B. Mayer."[4] Dallesandro appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in April 1971. He was also photographed by some of the top celebrity photographers of the time: Francesco Scavullo, Annie Leibovitz, Richard Avedon.[10]
According to Dallesandro, Francis Ford Coppola wanted him to screen test for the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972), however, the offer fell through.[12] Dallesandro believed that Warhol and Morrissey deterred Coppola's entourage by telling them that Dallesandro was a drug addict and couldn't handle the script, but Morrissey stated that isn't true.[12][19] Morrissey added that he and Warhol would have been thrilled if Dallesandro landed a role in a major film.[19]
Dallesandro also starred in the films Heat (1972), Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973), and Andy Warhol's Dracula (1974), directed by Morrissey. The latter two were filmed in Rome. Morrissey recommended that Dallesandro get an agent to find more work in Europe.[19] After filming was complete, Dallesandro remained in Europe and capitalized on his reputation as a cult figure in a series of exploitation films in France and Italy.[12][20] He appeared in Serge Gainsbourg's Je t'aime moi non plus (1976), which starred Gainsbourg's girlfriend, British actress Jane Birkin.
Dalessandro's career collapsed in the late 1970s as a result of his dependency on alcohol and drugs.[21] After his return to the U.S. in 1979, he resided in a trailer park close to Seattle with his estranged mother and indulged in excessive drinking.[12] He relocated to Los Angeles in 1981, checked himself into a detox center, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and worked as a limousine and taxi driver before returning to acting.[21][12]
Dallesandro also appeared in several television shows. In 1986, he co-starred in the ABC drama series Fortune Dane. The series lasted only five episodes. He was also a regular for the first season (1987-1988) of the CBS crime drama series Wiseguy, and he appeared in three episodes of NBC's Miami Vice, and a two-hour episode of ABC's Matlock in 1990.[22]
A biography, Little Joe: Superstar by Michael Ferguson was published in 1998, and a filmed documentary, Little Joe (2009), was released with Dallesandro serving as writer and producer. His adopted daughter, Vedra Mehagian, also served as a producer of the film.[citation needed]
In 2018, he starred as himself in Ulli Lommel's Factory Cowboys: Working with Warhol. The film was based on Lommel's own biography and partly on Dallesandro's memories of the period during which he worked with Andy Warhol.[25]
Personal life
Dallesandro is openly bisexual.[26] He has been married three times and has two children.[27]
At age 18, Dallesandro married his first wife, Leslie, the daughter of his father's girlfriend, in 1967. Their son, Michael, was born on December 19, 1968. The marriage was dissolved in 1969. His met his second wife Theresa ("Terry") in the East Village, and they married in 1970.[4] Their son, Joseph A. Dallesandro, Jr., was born November 14, 1970. They divorced in 1978.[12] In 1987, Dallesandro was married a third time, to Kimberly ("Kim").[citation needed] Dallesandro has a grandson and a granddaughter by his son Michael, as well as a grandson by his son Joseph.[28]
Dallesandro's younger brother Robert Dallesandro died in 1977.[12] He had worked for Warhol as a chauffeur, also appeared in the films Flesh and Trash.[15][29]
Semi-retired from acting as of 2009, Dallesandro managed a residential hotel building in Los Angeles.[30]
Dallesandro claimed to be the model in the Andy Warhol photograph of a man's crotch on the Grammy-nominated cover of the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers (1971).[33] He explained to biographer Michael Ferguson, "It was just out of a collection of junk photos that Andy pulled from. He didn't pull it out for the design or anything, it was just the first one he got that he felt was the right shape to fit what he wanted to use for the fly;" the first editions of that album cover physically incorporated a functional metal zipper fly into the photo.[34] However, Craig Braun, who designed the album, is sure it was not Dallesandro on the cover.[34] Makeup artist Corey Tippin claimed that he is the model on the cover, but it is generally believed to have been Warhol's lover Jed Johnson.[34][35][36]
The 1980s British band The Smiths used a still photograph of Dallesandro from the film Flesh as the cover of their eponymous debut album.[37]
Norwegian pop band Briskeby had a 2005 single called "Joe Dallesandro".[38]
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