De Niro: A Biography

Cover

Title Page

1 The Last Actor Alive

2 New York

3 My Father’s Business

4 Stella

5 Sally, Candy, Andy and the Others

6 Shelley and the Boys

7 The Year of the Turkey

8 Boyz of the ’Hood

9 An Offer You Can’t Refuse

10 Sleepless

11 If You Can Make it There …

12 Going for a Soldier

13 Jake

14 A Harp with Class

15 The Epic that Never Was

16 The South American Picture

17 Falling Angel

18 The Man Upstairs

19 A Made Man

20 Rabbit in a Maze

21 In Cop Land

22 Ageing Bull

Filmography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE The Last Actor Alive

Player (lost): There we were – demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance – and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. (He rounds on them) Don’t you see?! We’re actors – we’re the opposite of people!

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1989.

From the offices along the Strip of Sunset Boulevard, there’s a classic LA view. No palms, no lawns, no art moderne architecture; leave those to the glitzier residential suburbs closer to the Pacific: Beverly Hills, Westwood, Santa Monica.

Here, in the DMZ between Beverly Hills and Hollywood, everything is commerce. The very light and air are for sale – perhaps the only things Hollywood has to sell.

Film interfaces with the record business. The monuments are all to bad taste and the hard sell. Tonight, in Bill Gazzarri’s Rock Club, with its self-aggrandising billboard portrait of its pouchy proprietor on the façade, and his boast of the groups launched here, the Hollywood porn-movie community is having its annual bash to present its Oscars, the Heart-Ons, with awards for Best Anal Love Scene and Best Blow Job.

But in Hollywood there’s always a gaudier image, a louder voice. Opposite, higher, brighter, more strident, a billboard has been erected for the personal junk-lit industry of Jackie Collins, author of Hollywood Husbands and Once is not Enough. Ten times larger than life, she glares out over her domain. Underneath her image is the rubric of her reign. More than a Hundred Million Sold.

At Hollywood’s smartest restaurants, Le Dôme and Spago, black stretch limos queue decorously to drop off their clients, then circle back into the dark. The drivers wait in empty parking lots, smoking and listening to the radio until the car phone burrs its summons.

One white chauffeured Cadillac limousine glides past Le Dôme, moving west on Sunset, heading for the 405 Freeway. LAX. The east.

In its air-conditioned hush, Robert De Niro takes a last look at Hollywood through smoky yellow glass. When he comes back, it will no longer be the same place.

It’s said that every performing artist has ten years in which to make his or her mark. By that standard, De Niro had succeeded better than most. From Taxi Driver and his Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for The Godfather II in 1975 to the acclaim for Awakenings in 1987, he’d taken twelve years to create the benchmarks against which every other screen actor of his generation needs to measure himself.

But now he is turning his back on all that, leaving the febrile society he has always affected to despise, but whose blandishments he can never quite resist.

He has already passed Tower Records’ gigantic Hollywood outlet, where anything that can be put on disc is for sale. He has passed On the Rox, the disco where he’d spent more than his share of white nights. He has passed below the Xanadu-like silhouette of the Château Marmont Hotel, in the grounds of which his friend John Belushi died.

As the sun sinks, Sunset comes alive with black leather, Spandex, studs. On Sunset Strip, the sidewalk is jammed with Harleys, and Porsches parked three-deep as, twittering like parakeets, the Valley Girls from Sherman Oaks and Encino, bums and tits compressed into tank tops and jeans tight and hard as lacquer, jostle for attention as they gather for a night of disco. Manes of moussed hair – male and female – shimmer in the streetlights, and down the gutters roll dusty skeins of tape from gutted cassettes. Sunset Tumbleweed.

Jackie’s billboard ignites, neon outlining the imperious Collins silhouette.

Showtime.

De Niro’s limo drives by, its passenger no longer noticing. He is forty-six, but feels ten years older. He has won the greatest honours his craft can bestow, but he believes himself without merit. He is returning to New York, where he thinks he belongs. But part of him knows he doesn’t really belong anywhere. Nobody is waiting for him in New York. Nothing is waiting for him – except work.

‘You travel a lot?’ the girl in the bookstore will ask.

‘Yeah,’ he’ll reply.

‘Does it make you lonely?’

‘I am alone,’ he will say mildly. ‘I’m not lonely.’

Sure, Bobby.

The big Cadillac undulates silkily as it rolls over a hump in the shifting surface of the slide area that is Hollywood, and glides into the warm and scented dark.

To talk about ‘performance’ in movies at the beginning of the twenty-first century is to discuss an art as fossilised as Egyptian wall painting. Jack Nicholson has rightly called himself a member of the last generation of film performers. Already, the ‘synthespians’ who will replace him are crowding on camera. Electronics routinely resuscitate actors who die in mid-production, and raise long-dead stars from the grave. Joe Dante’s threat in Gremlins II of an updated Casablanca, ‘in colour, and with a happier ending’, now sounds like next week’s Fox-TV programming. As for the science-fictional proposal that old films might be cleansed of politically incorrect activities like smoking, Steven Spielberg showed the way in 2002 with a sanitised E.T. in which agents’ guns became torches.

As he turns sixty, Robert De Niro, one of the most gifted screen performers of his generation, can be seen as also the last of a line in which he was already a throwback. Born a century too late, he belonged in the barnstorming theatre of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the world of John Barrymore, Emil Jannings, Werner Krauss, Fritz Kortner. No six degrees of separation divide De Niro from a theatre of putty noses and crêpe hair, of rhetoric and speeches from the scaffold. Erwin Piscator of Berlin’s pamphleteering Communist pre-war Volksbühne theatre was a childhood friend, and his teacher, Stella Adler, came from the Theater Guild of the thirties and the nineteenth-century Yiddish theatre.

Born to perform in a theatre that no longer existed, De Niro crammed the djinn of his skill into the constricted bottle of the movies. Watching him writhe and grimace through the glass, audiences imagined they were seeing great acting, when in fact they were watching great acting distorted.

‘These days,’ writes the British playwright and actor Alan Bennett, ‘what the public calls Great Acting is often not even good acting. It’s acting with a line around it, acting in inverted commas, acting which shows. The popular idea of Great Acting is a rhetorical performance (award-winning for choice) at the extremes, preferably the extremes of degradation and despair. Such a performance seems to the public to require all an actor has got. Actors know that this is a false assessment. The limit of an actor’s ability is a spacious and fairly comfortable place to be; such parts require energy rather than judgment. Anything goes.’

At the start by force of circumstances, but later out of a need for reassurance, De Niro became the last star in this ‘anything goes’ school of screen performing. He could have done better by doing less, and by doing less with what he did do. A character actor by birth, he allowed himself to be made a leading man, and, born to play villains, agreed to play the hero; and a hero, moreover, in a medium littered with heroes – which, any actor will tell you, are far easier to play.

Robert Towne, screenwriter of Chinatown and Shampoo, has written, ‘Gifted movie actors affect the most, I believe, not by talking, fighting, fucking, killing, cursing or cross-dressing. They do it by being photographed.

‘It is said of such actors that the camera loves them. Whatever that means, I’ve always felt their features are expressive in a unique way; they seem to register swift and dramatic mood changes with no discernible change of expression … Great movie actors have features that are ruthlessly efficient. Efficiency that’s been touched with a bit of lightning, perhaps. Certainly such actors have this in common with lightning; they can illuminate a moment with shock and scorching clarity. And virtually no dialogue.’

Robert De Niro is such an actor. To see him at his best is to be aware of a new capacity in the art of cinema. His gift is all the greater for the reticence with which it is exercised; like those Japanese painters who work with a heavily inked brush on wet paper, the slightest hesitation brings everything to naught. ‘Great feeling shows itself in silence,’ wrote the poet Marianne Moore – then corrected herself. ‘No, not in silence, but restraint.’

When he chooses to restrain himself, to rely on silence, Robert De Niro is among the finest performers of his generation. That he has chosen so infrequently to exercise that control is his tragedy.

CHAPTER TWO New York

I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, ‘There’s no place like New York. It’s the most exciting city in the world now. That’s the way it is. That’s it.’

Robert De Niro

Actors often come from homes that lack imaginative stimulus; the urge to dress up and play other characters is a form of flight from that environment. Yet De Niro’s parents were both artists, and he grew up surrounded by artists. In that, he resembles Bernardo Bertolucci, who directed him in Novecento. Both are artists over whom an affection-filled childhood with creative parents exercised an ambiguous influence, at once stimulating and stifling.

De Niro’s father, also Robert, was born in 1922 in Tipperary Hill, the predominantly Irish quarter of Syracuse in northern New York state. Robert Sr’s mother, Bobby’s grandmother, was Helen O’Reilly before she married Henry De Niro, a salesman and, later, a health inspector, but Robert Sr inherited the dark good looks and mystical temperament of his Italian father, which he passed on to his own son.

The De Niros came from Campobasso, near Naples, well south of the notional divide which separates the cooler northern Italians from the dark and fiery meridionali. A penchant for argument, depression and rage passed largely undiminished from the first of the De Niro name to arrive in the United States at the turn of the century to those members of the family born on American soil, as did an apparently genetic Italian rhythm of speech which became even more pronounced in adulthood.

Robert Sr started painting at five. ‘Why? I don’t know. I was very isolated,’ he said later. By the time he was eleven he was attending art classes at the Syracuse Museum, and showing such ability that the directors gave him a studio of his own. When adolescence brought the usual soul-searching, he shocked his family by embracing atheism, though, in the best traditions of the lapsed Catholic, religious iconography preoccupied him for most of his life, the Crucifixion and other elements of his discarded faith recurring in his work.

He spent the summer of 1938 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, studying with Ralph Pearson, an artist best known for his landscapes. Pearson held his classes on a coal barge in Gloucester Harbour, which is where De Niro first read the plays of Eugene O’Neill. The grim picture of the emigrant experience in O’Neill’s Anna Christie impressed him so much that he modelled a stage set for a possible production.

After Gloucester, De Niro gravitated to New York, studying by day and waiting tables at night. Much serious art discourse in New York at that time centred on Hans Hofmann, who had arrived from Munich via Paris, trailing an impressive record as a teacher and theoretician. Hofmann opened a school in 1933, and in the summer of 1935 started summer sessions in Provincetown, Rhode Island.

In the winter of 1938–39 Hofmann gave an influential series of six lectures in New York on new movements in European art. They were attended by the best emerging American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, and future critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, all of whom, recognising that Surrealism was waning, were alert for the next new thing, Abstract Expressionism. The following summer, Pollock and some others followed Hofmann to Provincetown. He only accepted twenty-five students for his summer school. Among them in 1939 was Robert De Niro.

At the end of 1939, De Niro won a place at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, where one of the greatest of contemporary artists, Josef Albers, taught. Set up in 1933 by a group of liberal academics, Black Mountain admitted only fifty students, and gave them superior teaching and maximum freedom. De Niro spent most of 1939 and 1940 there – a frustrating time, since Albers found his work ‘too emotional’. De Niro, then, as later, inclined to be argumentative, protested, ‘A painting can’t be too emotional. It can be controlled, but never too emotional.’ After a year of trying to satisfy Albers, he returned to New York early in 1941, with only $5 in his pocket. That summer, he once again attended Hofmann’s summer school.

A village of crackerbox cabins scattered among the dunes of the Atlantic coast, Provincetown had a reputation for bohemianism and political radicalism that went back to the turn of the century. The Provincetown Playhouse and Provincetown Players were co-founded by Communist ideologue John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World, who scandalised the community by running off with Louise Bryant, art-struck wife of a local dentist. In 1916, Eugene O’Neill had his first play performed there. After that, painters and writers from New York and Boston, called sarcastically by the locals ‘wash-ashores’, found it a useful summer hangout, particularly when, thanks to Hofmann, it became a centre for avant-garde artists too.

Young playwright Tennessee Williams also turned up in Provincetown in 1941, hoping to have a play accepted at the Playhouse. He and De Niro met at Captain Jack’s, a pier-end restaurant where both worked as waiters. It shared a building with a boarding house where two out-of-work dance students lived, one of whom, Kip Kiernan, also modelled for Hofmann. Tennessee Williams fell in love with Kiernan, the first man with whom he enjoyed a complete sexual relationship – celebrated in his long-suppressed play Sometimes Cloudy, Sometimes Bright. Williams, Kiernan and their friend Donald Windham made no secret of their activities, documenting them in nude photographs. Among Williams’ lovers that summer was Jackson Pollock, whose alcoholism inflamed a taste for being promiscuously sodomised.

With his movie-star good looks – he resembled the actor Robert Stack – De Niro was not short of admirers, male and female, and it was during this period at Provincetown that he acknowledged his own homosexuality, and probably had his first homosexual experience. Williams and Kiernan may have initiated him, but it’s equally possible that Pollock was among his first lovers.

Hofmann’s classes that year also included a lively young woman from Dalles, Oregon. Even in a community where women were accustomed to speaking out and being heard, Virginia Admiral’s voice was confident and committed. A Communist from her teens, she’d joined the Trotskyite Young People’s Socialist League on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, and led its clashes with the Stalinist Young Communist League.

Admiral’s closest friend on campus was Oakland-born poet Robert Duncan – ‘a strikingly beautiful boy,’ remembered the writer Anaïs Nin, ‘who looked about seventeen, with regular features, abundant hair, a faunish expression and a slight deviation in one eye, which made him seem to be looking always beyond and around you.’

Already an outsider by virtue of his homosexuality, Duncan joined Admiral’s radical circle, which also included Pauline Kael, future film critic of the New Yorker. At Admiral’s urging, he quit obligatory Reserve Officer Training Corps military training, and eventually left UCLA altogether for Black Mountain. Politically advanced for the time, Black Mountain’s faculty still wasn’t sufficiently so for Duncan, who, after an argument with the administration about the Spanish Civil War, quickly exited, accompanied by his new lover, one of the instructors.

In 1939, Admiral decided to abandon literature for art. Her mother, fearful that she would never be able to support herself, demanded she at least earn a teaching credential before plunging into bohemia. Virginia acquiesced, but only if she could study at Columbia in New York. Her mother agreed, provided she live at the college’s International House, in effect under supervision. Once in New York, Admiral did enrol in a teaching course of sorts, though it was a Masters programme in Art Education, which gave her plenty of opportunities to paint.

By then, Robert Duncan was living in Woodstock, New York, on ‘Cooney’s Farm’, a commune-cum-artists’ colony run by James Cooney and his wife Blanche. An enthusiast for D.H. Lawrence, Cooney published the Phoenix, a magazine dedicated to Lawrence’s work. The farm was a log cabin in the woods; guests bunked down in the old woodshed. Admiral spent time there in 1940, and, with Duncan, edited the first and only issue of the literary magazine Epitaph, which would evolve into Experimental Review.

Among Cooney’s visitors was Anaïs Nin. Eroticist, fabulist, lover and muse of Henry Miller, who dedicated Tropic of Cancer to her, the small, dark and seductive Nin had fled from Nazi-occupied Paris with banker husband Ian Hugo, and was now cutting a swathe through New York literary society.

Nin didn’t think Virginia sufficiently awed by her tales of wild times in Paris. ‘Virginia and her friends dress like schoolchildren,’ she wrote pettishly in her diary. ‘Baby shoes, little bows in their hair, little-girl dresses, little-boy clothes, orphan hats, schoolgirl short socks; they eat candy, sugar, ice cream. And some of the books they read are like schoolchildren’s books; how to win friends, how to make love, how to do this or that. They prefer the radio, the movies, recordings, to hearing experiences directly. They are not curious about people, only their voices over a machine and their faces on the screen.’

After the farm, Virginia taught for six weeks at a summer camp in Maine. By the time she returned to New York, the tuition money borrowed from her father had run out. Quitting college, she settled down to paint, supporting herself by waiting tables in Greenwich Village, and sharing a loft with two friends on 14th Street, above Union Square, for a rent of $30 a month.

Meant as factory spaces, lofts were zoned for commercial use only. The high-beamed ceilings rested on massive wooden pillars. Floors were of wide planks, uneven and splintered. Few lofts had bathrooms, kitchens or heating. But for artists unconcerned about creature comfort, they offered a peerless working environment. Robert Duncan wrote in his journal, ‘Virginia’s studio opens out. We stand in the shadows above the lights of 14th St. The paintings move back into the walls like mirrors of our dreams – the dark stage of gathering forces. This is our last nursery – this is today’s, 1941’s projection of a Berkeley paradise where we go over again drawings by Virginia, by Mary, by Lillian, by Cecily, by me from the golden age – where I sit reading to Virginia and her fellow students.’

Anaïs Nin was less impressed when she visited. ‘The first floor houses a shop, a hamburger bar, a shoe shop and a synthetic orange juice bar,’ she recalled. ‘I climb a bare wooden stairway painted a dusty gray. The place is cold, but the hallways and lofts are big and high-ceilinged and the only place possible and available to a painter. There is space for easels, canvases of any size. There is a lavatory outside, running water and washstand inside, and that is all. On weekends, the heat is turned off. The enormous windows which give on the deafening traffic noise of 14th St have to be kept closed. There are nails on the walls for clothes, a Sterno burner for making coffee. We drink sour wine out of paper cups. There Virginia and Janet paint, study acting and dancing, type when they need money.’ This was the environment in which the young Robert Jr would be raised.

Surprisingly to Nin, given their apparent naïveté, Virginia and her friends were all in psychoanalysis. As émigrés flooded into America from Austria and Germany, New York had become a centre of psychotherapy. Most creative people regarded analysis as essential to their intellectual growth, not to mention, in the cases of gays or bisexuals like Robert Duncan and Jackson Pollock, a quick route to military deferment. The fact that Nin kept a journal attracted instant interest, and everybody started one. Their analyst sent her a letter of thanks, saying it made his work much easier.

Admiral’s work impressed Hans Hofmann sufficiently for him to accept her as a student, and in the summer of 1941 she arrived in Provincetown, where she met the young Robert De Niro, back for his second year. Hofmann had appointed him class monitor, and she and the dramatically handsome young man instantly struck sparks.

Six years older than De Niro, Virginia was more sophisticated sexually, socially and politically. Though homosexuality would prove De Niro’s lifetime sexual choice, he remained, for the moment, bisexual. Telling her nothing of his homosexual inclinations, he became Admiral’s lover.

For a while, they enjoyed a bohemian existence, living in a shack on the dunes, picking blueberries for pocket money, painting by day and partying by night, often at an illegal bar run by legendary Berlin dancer, choreographer and actress Valeska Gert.

In 1925 Gert had appeared with Garbo in G.W. Pabst’s Joyless Street, and she acted in a number of other movies in the course of a sensational career. When the Nazis came to power, Gert, damned three times over as a lesbian, a Communist and a Jew, divorced her gay husband, married a young English admirer, also gay, in order to get a British passport, and, when the Germans threatened to invade Britain, fled to America. Washing ashore in Provincetown, she ran her bar, queened it over the local gays, and modelled nude for Hofmann’s classes, striking the eccentric poses from her Berlin cabaret act.

After summer school ended, De Niro and Admiral stayed on, Robert getting work in the local fish cannery. Robert Duncan and Anaïs Nin visited, Nin confessing that she was supporting herself by writing pornography for Oklahoma oil millionaire Roy M. Johnson, who paid $1 a page. She’d recruited Henry Miller and one-time Paris publisher Caresse Crosby to help, and De Niro too joined the round-robin of writers. ‘Everyone is writing of their sexual experiences,’ Nin wrote. ‘Invented, overheard, researched from Krafft-Ebing and medical books. We have comical conversations. We tell a story and the rest of us have to decide whether it is true or false. Or plausible. Robert [Duncan] would offer to experiment, to test our inventions, to confirm or negate our fantasies.’ De Niro didn’t have the stamina of Nin, Duncan or Miller, however, nor the imagination. ‘It was very hard work,’ he recalled, ‘so eventually I went back to the fishery.’