By Edwin Kiester, Jr.
Submitted by taxifan

It is 6:30 Thursday evening and the company of ABC's Tuesday night sitcom Who's the Boss? is wilting fast. As director Asaad Kelada calls a break in rehearsal, Judith Light (Angela) sinks limply onto a sofa and wearily nibbles an apple. Katherine Helmond, who plays her mother, Mona, flees to her dressing room. Even the younger members of the cast, Alyssa Milano, 14, and Danny Pintauro, 11, who play Samantha and Jonathan, plop down with whooshing sounds.

Not Tony Danza. After eight hours, the uninhibited, wisecracking star of the show is still going strong. Through the day, he has repeatedly shouldered his stand-in aside to step in himself. Between scenes, he has sparred with crew members while acting out his version of the then upcoming Hagler-Lernard fight; played an impromptu game of touch football; practiced his one-handed jump shot; roughhoused with both Pintauro and Light, and endlessly rehearsed a tap dance he was hoping to showcase on The Tonight Show. Oh, yes, he has also conducted an intermittent interview, which for the reporter has been a bit like questioning Superman on his was to rescue Lois Lane.

Now Danza takes a prop bugle off the stage-set fireplace, pits it to his lips, and tootles a discordant "Charge!" When he has the cast's attention, he rattles off a series of jokes, some of them printable. Then there's a story about his longtime pal and fellow actor Frank Pesce.

"We're drivin' out for a pizza and this girl pulls up beside us and yells across to Frank, 'Boy. I'm really lost. How do you get to UCLA?' Frank doesn't bat an eye. He yells back, 'You gotta graduate high school first!'" Danza doubles up with laughter, then breaks into his tap dance again.

Katherine Helmond shakes her head in amusement and admiration. "I'll bet Tony was a premature baby. No one could have kept him in one place for nine months."

At 36, 10 years off the Brooklyn sidewalks, Tony Danza is the original man in motion-not only in his whirligig antics on the set, but in his career and personal life as well. Start counting the milestones that have whizzed by Danza recently and you rapidly run out of fingers. In its third season, Who's the Boss?, in which Danza plays housekeeper Tony Micelli, has become a solid hit. He has also taken a bride, become and expectant father, assumed the upbringing of his 16-year-old son from his first marriage, made his debut (to favorable reviews) as a dramatic actor, taken a whack at directing, done a gig as a Tonight Show guest host, moved into a spread that would occupy most of the block back in his old neighborhood, and shaken hands with Nancy Reagan. That doesn't even count his weekend career as a pitcher for Lamonica's N.Y. Pizza softball team.

On the other hand, except for the happy occasion of his wedding, he has managed to stay off the front pages of tabloids lately. A one-time regular on the singles circuit both in New York and on Sunset Strip, Danza three years ago brawled with a security guard after a foot-throwing incident in a New York restaurant. The man sued for $16 million. The suit was later settled, but Danza was convicted of simple assault and sentenced to three years' probation plus 250 hours of community service, which he worked off at New York's Bellevue Hospital and The Jewish Home and Hospital for Aged. Danza testily dismisses the episode-in which he and his then girlfriend, actress Teri Copley, turned up on Page 1 of the New York Post- as "old news, really old news," then says: "There are three sides to every story-his, mine and the truth. That cost me not just financially, but emotionally. It's hard to look good, hard to feel good about yourself after something like that.

"OK, I got a reputation," he says, acknowledging that anyone who moves at his pace is bound to collide with other objects occasionally. "I'm always gonna be me, always gonna be a guy. I think I'm changin', but you see me, I'm up front. I say what I feel. Sometimes that's not the greatest thing in the world, but at least you know where a guy stands."

Plopped in his dressing room, wearing borrowed sweat pants and a T-shirt that fails to hide his "Keep on Truckin'" tattoo, Danza agrees that his life reads a bit like the script for "Golden Boy." Born in the tough Italian-Irish neighborhood of Brooklyn, the son of a garbage man, Danza says his boyhood ambition was to stay out of jail. Instead, he attended the University of Dubuque, in Iowa, on a wrestling scholarship ("Talk about culture shock!"), came back home to 'tend bar for a while, then, when some pals entered him in the Golden Gloves, he became a boxer. A crowd-pleasing puncher, he either won by knockout or lost by knockout. After turning pro, he had distant dreams of the middleweight championship when producer Stuart Sheslow discovered him in a New York gym and coaxed him to Hollywood for the pilot of a proposed boxing series, "Fast Lane Blues." The pilot didn't sell, but Taxi co-creator James Brooks spotted him and cast him as boxer-cabbie Tony Banta in the much-acclaimed series. After Taxi ended, executive producers Blake Hunter and Martin Cohan created Who's the Boss? just for him. The show survived a rocky start to climb steadily in the ratings, and has teamed with Growing Pains and Moonlighting to anchor ABC's Tuesday-night lineup.

As Tony Micelli, Danza plays a widowed Brooklyn father who signs on as live-in housekeeper for a female advertising executive and single parent (Light) in order to bring up his teen-age daughter in the Connecticut exurbs instead of the city streets. Tony is remarkably like Danza himself-athletic, wisecracking, street smart, a man who moves like a boxer while wielding a mop. He is also tremendously attractive to Angela, with whom he carries on a breezy, bantering, sexually electric relationship. Producer Hunter compares it to Tracy and Hepburn, Sam and Diane. Insiders predict the show will run five to seven years, in the course of which it will make the self-styled "boxer from Brooklyn" a rich man. Danza doesn't talk about his salary, except to say that he's "thrilled" with it. "That's not an ambiguous answer, is it?"

Drinking beer with Danza at an early lunch, the reporter has difficulty reconciling his tough-guy image with the domestic role he plays. Not so, he insists. His father passed on the secret of a good spaghetti sauce and his mother taught him to keep a clean house. Besides, in the past year, he has become a genuine homebody. He gestures toward a gallery of photographs of himself and a striking, smiling blonde. "She changed my life," he says.

Last summer, to the glee of the gossip columnists, one of Hollywood's leading playboys walked down the aisle with 27-year-old Tracy Robinson. Typically, on the day of the wedding, Danza pitched a softball game (winning 10-4), then quaffed a few beers with a houseful of uncles and cousins who had flown in for the wedding, before donning his tux for the 7 P.M. ceremony.

"She has made my life a hundred per cent better," Danza says. "Make that two hundred per cent." For one thing, there is the matter of impending fatherhood. The newlyweds' first child is expected this month. The couple has also moved from Danza's bachelor digs to a "grown-up" house in San Fernando Valley ("a nice, warm house, not a fortress"), complete with suana, pool and workout room. The bride, an interior designer, is supervising the decoration of the house.

"Tracy's got a job, a great job," Danza says indignantly, when asked if Tracy works. "She works for this great guy, Tony Danza. That's a job. Being a wife is a tough, full-time job." She also helps with Danza's 16-year-old son, Marc, who has been living with his father for the past three years. "Having her around has vastly improved my relationship with my son," he says. "For one thing, I'm home more."

Friends note with amusement that marriage has transformed Danza overnight. Blake Hunter reports wryly that "the new, improved Tony" now arrives in a dignified Jaguar sedan instead of his former flashy Corvette. "To his credit, he never missed a day's work, but some days he may have been a little worse for wear," Hunter says of his star's carefree days.

"Let me show you something," says Danza about his past, which Katherine Helmond describes as "enough for him and 15 other guys." "It would be terrible to get married and not feel you'd sowed your oats, so to speak. Every single guy-and some married guys-thinks there's something better around the corner. Well, I been around the corner. I know there's nothin' better."

The summer's other milestone was Danza's first dramatic role. In "Doing Life," an NBC TV-movie directed by Gene Reynolds (M*A*S*H, Lou Grant), Danza played the real-life role of Jerry Rosenberg. Convicted of murder, Rosenberg became the first prisoner to earn a law degree behind bars, and then lobbied for prison reform. The film received good reviews "all of which I happen to remember." Danza's favorite review, in the Dallas Times Herald, compared him to Paul Newman in "Cool Hand Luke."

"Taxi did it," Danza says of his transformation from boxer to actor. "Taxi was like playing in the big leagues right off the bat. It was sort of like I went to school. Some of my first shows, I was like, acting by the numbers."

In Who's the Boss?, Danza clearly is no longer the beginner. He appears in almost every scene, looks over every script, occasionally overrules director Kelada, isn't afraid to challenge the writers about his comic lines. He speaks his mind-often. "Why did they take that line out?" he demands of Kelada at one point. "Afraid it'd get a laugh? I want that line back in."

"When Tony doesn't like something, you hear it right away," Hunter admits. It's his Latin temperament, Helmond says. "When Tony's unhappy, you know it. When he's happy, everybody knows it."

"Tony isn't a boxer any more, he's an actor," Judith Light says. "It's frustrating to me sometimes that people see him like that." Blake Hunter says, "Tony is undersung in many ways. As a comedian, he has a very good sense of timing, but he keeps a strong emotional line going, too. He makes it look easy, so he doesn't get the recognition more trained actors get."

Danza himself adds with a little irritation: "People see Tony Banta and Tony Micelli and Tony Danza and they say, 'Is that really you? Are you just playin' yourself up there?' I say, 'Yeah, that's me. In a good mood. Now let me do me in a bad mod. Or a love mood. Then it would be interesting to see what I could do'."

And he has been a surprising success as a director. Danza has been at the helm of three episodes so far and is eager to do more next season. "I love it," he says. "It combines the two things I like to do best-act and tell other people what to do."

Directing brings out his street-smart side. In one episode, daughter Samantha takes a job in Angela's office, then, because the work is impinging on her social life, begins to foul up in an attempt to get fired. Others in the office complain. One salesman tells Angela, "Not only did she forget to mail my letters, she got my lunch order wrong. I asked for tune and sprouts, and she got liverwurst and onion. Here, smell." He breathes in Light's face, and she is supposed to step back and make a wry face.

"I can't get it right," Light complained to director Danza. "I told her not to worry, we'd get it. Then I went to the propman and told him to get the biggest onion he could find, and I made the actor eat it. Then he says the line and hits her with his breath, and she gets these two looks meshed into one-this horrible smell of smells and 'You got me!' But she didn't break, she didn't laugh. And I got the look that made the scene.