Thomas Hanley was only 14 when he was cast as the kid on the roof with Marlon Brando and the pigeons in the classic “On the Waterfront,’’ released 60 years ago this month.
Hanley had no acting experience to speak of — but he was already intimately familiar with the waterfront violence and corruption the film so memorably shows.
“My father was murdered when I was 4 months old,’’ he told me in a 1994 interview. “We were living in Greenwich Village in 1939, and he just disappeared from the docks. They never found his body, but everybody knew he was killed.’’
Fourteen years later, Tommy was living a hardscrabble life with his widowed mother and brother in Hoboken.
“We were pretty destitute, living on welfare and eating a lot of onion soup,’’ he recalled. “Then we found out they were going to shoot this movie on the roof of our tenement.’’
Arthur “Brownie’’ Brown, a friend of his father’s and a union reformer, was working on the film as a technical advisor.
“Brownie hired me to feed the pigeons they put on the roof for the movie. One day he said to me, ‘I’m going to get you in the movie.’ I thought he was kidding.’’
Soon after, the ruggedly handsome young Tommy found himself at the Actors Studio in Manhattan, auditioning for Elia Kazan.
“They were looking for someone with a temper,’’ he said. “Kazan started teasing me about my father, maybe he got killed because he was a squealer. I became enraged, started throwing chairs — and I got the part.’’
Hanley has fond memories of the movie’s making during the bitter cold winter of 1953.
“Marlon Brando was a great guy, a lot of fun, just like a regular guy from the streets who took the PATH train instead of a limousine to the set. It was freezing, and they had these big parkas they passed around. I have pictures of me with those parkas, and a picture of me and Marlon Brando and my mother.
“I was a 14-year-old kid, and I was in awe of people who I had seen in the movies. Karl Malden was a real sweetheart of a guy. He would tutor me in what I should watch out for in people.’’
Suddenly life was better for the Hanleys, thanks to the $500 Tommy was paid for two weeks of shooting.
“We were able to pay our rent for a year or so and eat normally, buy some clothes. I later learned that if I had joined the actors’ union, I would have made more and received residuals for years. But it would have cost $70 we just didn’t have.’’
Although his name is spelled wrong — as Handley — in the movie’s credits, he got 21st billing, right behind another newcomer, Fred Gwynne.
But while Gwynne went on to become a well-known performer in “The Munsters’’ and on Broadway, Hanley’s acting career — encouraged by Brando and others — quickly proved a one-way ticket to Palookaville despite excellent reviews for his work in “On the Waterfront.’’
“My mother wasn’t very knowledgeable about show business,’’ he said. “She was snowed by a manager who promised to get me all kinds of roles. I appeared on Red Buttons’ TV show, and there was a mix-up about my getting paid. After that I never got any acting work at all.’’
So, at age 16, he quit school and went to work on the docks, as his father had done.
“Having to deal with the longshoremen after having been in that movie was not fun,’’ he said. “I had to put up with a lot of ridicule. They would call me ‘the movie star’ and people would remind me how I had blown my chance, how I could have gone to Hollywood. It was embarrassing. It made me very self-conscious.’’
During half a century working on the docks on Hoboken and mostly Bayonne, Hanley says he was almost killed a couple of times by “tough gangsters.’’ But when a series of federal corruption indictments dislodged the leadership of Local 1558 of the International Longshoremen’s Association, Hanley — now a reformer — won election, unopposed, as recording secretary.
The divorced father of three grown kids, Hanley retired in 2009 and divides his time between an apartment in Bayonne and the Jersey Shore. Though he declined to speak at a 40th anniversary screening of “On the Waterfront’’ that I organized in 1994, he became a regular at events commemorating the film after his retirement — and was interviewed on camera for its Blu-ray release by the Criterion Collection last year.
In an odd twist of fate, Hanley finally got a second acting gig — in 2010, at the age of 70 — after the director of an independent drama called “Hunting Season” tracked him down to play an elderly character named “Pops.’’
“I do not consider myself an actor, so part of me didn’t want to do it,’’ he told the Hudson Reporter in 2010. “I didn’t think I could do it well enough. But I try not to let fear hold me back. So I did it. Some say I did okay. I’m trying to believe that.’’
Second video courtesy of The Criterion Collection