Drugs, fans, Jackie O... 10 things we learned from Al Pacino's memoir

When Penguin bought the rights to Al Pacino's memoir in 2022 for $5m, it raised questions about the true Value of Hollywood celebrity autobiography at a time when most stars happily spill sanctioned life highlights for free on social media.

- Catherine Shoard

Yet it seems there remains a premium on the Value of stories from those actors who have kept themselves relatively private. Pacino's Sonny Boy, published last week, is boasting healthy hardback sales - it entered the UK charts at No 9 - and a strikingly good trade in newspaper syndication.

The book is at once candid and freewheeling, with his many romantic entanglements minimised and lyrical remembrances of a childhood in the Bronx in the 1940s given considerable space. Here are some of its highlights.

He is 'haunted' by a penis injury

Aged 10, Pacino was tap-dancing along a rainy fence when he slipped and an "iron bar hit me directly between the legs". He was in "such pain" that a passerby carried him to his aunt's house where he lay on his bed and female relatives "poked and prodded at my penis in a semipanic. Ithought, God, please take me now." However, he confirms that it ultimately "remained attached, along with the trauma".

He has taken less drugs than you might think

No cocaine, ever: "It may surprise you to know I've never touched the stuff." There was lots of Valium, and a little dabbling in harder stuff, but Pacino's relationship with drugs was coloured by the fact that his three closest childhood friends all died of heroin overdoses, and his mother died of an overdose when Pacino was 22.

He has long championed the LGBTQ-I- community