DAN'S PAPERS, March 7, 2008 Page 28 www.danshamptons.com
Breaking
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to 4-12 years in prison on February 28 for killing Thomas Heftler, a Southampton lawyer, in a hit and run accident that took place last June. Heftler, a prominent partner in the Southampton law firm, Stroock & Stroock &
Pintauro
Lavan Llp, and a Southampton Village resident, was riding his bicycle at 6 a.m. on the eastbound shoulder of Montauk Highway last June, when Cacace’s work van crossed the double yellow line and hit him. Heftler died from the impact, according to police.
Last month, Cacace pled guilty to seconddegree manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter, and driving while intoxicated. He admitted that the night before the alleged accident, he was drinking at a beach party in Mastic Beach.
went to New York and found myself sitting with Dustin and Robert Duvall. We were all quite young at the time. I found I really liked hanging around with these people,” he said. “Dustin directed the play and Bob was in it, and that was what started me off.” The play is about a man and a woman who have each lost their spouses and meet at a cemetery, where they get drunk together on brandy and ruminate on life and love. After finally getting permission to leave the priesthood from the Catholic Church, Pintauro joined the Young & Rubicam, Inc. advertising agency in New York, where he worked a day job as a copywriter while writing poetry and more plays in his spare time. After eight years, his outside writing got in the way of his copywriting duties. Fired from his job, Pintauro needed a place to begin making a living as a poet, playwright and author. Finding his way to Sag Harbor in the late ‘60s, Pintauro in 1969 invested in two things — a small Victorian house on John Street and a typewriter. In the ‘70s, he worked on two novels, Cold Hands, and State of Grace both published in the early ‘80s. The New York Times cited Cold
Hands, about a young boy’s coming of age, as a best novel of 1980. Though the typewriter has long since been traded for a computer, Pintauro still works from his house in Sag Harbor, when he isn’t spending part of the winter in Florida. “Lately, I’ve been working on two pieces of fiction. They are interconnected novellas that add up to one novel,” he said, and added he is also at work on an existing play that has been workshopped in London, Los Angeles and at the New Jersey Repertory Theater in Long Branch, N.J. He didn’t want to give the title of his new work, or provide details of the stories. But, once again, he is rewriting. “I’ve taken an ax to the play and restructured it so that now there is a very economical exchange of dialogue,” he said. “I’ve always thought of myself as a kind of spoiled dilettante writer in that I really do write for myself. I enjoy it so much. I don’t think of it as anything that belongs to someone else. It’s such a pleasurable addiction for me. And I never thing of something that has a beginning and an end since I’m always rewriting no matter how long a piece has been out there.”
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where he received a bachelor of arts degree. He also attended St. Jerome’s College, Ontario, where he received a B.A in Philosophy. He later completed studies for an M.A. in American Literature at Fordham University. Pintauro’s education took a decidedly different turn in the ‘50s, when, after questioning the meaning of God when his mother got a fatal diagnosis of breast cancer, he decided to study theology at Our Lady of Angels Seminary, Niagara University, in upstate New York. “I was at a stage when I was demanding all these answers to life, death and faith,” Pintauro said. “And I loved the seminary.” But his subsequent life as a parish priest for the following six to seven years was not altogether satisfying. “I think I was too much of an idealist for it. It sounds like a terrible judgment, but there was a spiritual element that was lacking in the priests around me and my own faith was flagging,” he said. Toward the end of his priesthood, Pintauro submitted his first play, A – My Name is Alice, to a contest at the Circle in the Square Theater in New York. He got a call from a then unknown young actor and director named Dustin Hoffman, who had selected his play to direct. “I
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