De Niro: A Biography
John Baxter
The life of Hollywood’s number one movie actor, the elusive Robert De Niro, who shuns the limelight and rarely gives interviews, written by the leading film critic and biographer of Spielberg, Kubrick, Woody Allen and George Lucas.Robert De Niro is the pre-eminent Hollywood character performer of our time: film portraits like the young Don Vito Corleone in THE GODFATHER II, Jake La Motta in RAGING BULL and Travis Bickle in TAXI DRIVER are some of the most vivid ever put on celluloid. De Niro cannot be cast to type, prefers to work for old friends like Martin Scorsese, and (apart from FRANKENSTEIN) has never played anything but 20th-century roles.John Baxter calls him ‘the archetypal empty bottle which only becomes visible when it’s filled by a role’: which makes him such a tempting subject for one of Hollywood’s finest historian/biographers.As well as his film roles, Baxter examines De Niro’s often controversial private life, his collaborations with directors like Martin Scorsese and performers like Harvey Keitel and Meryl Streep, and his increasingly ambitious off-screen activities.
De Niro
Contents
Cover (#ubc018c3d-1b2f-5719-9dde-3ddaf4ecb727)
Title Page (#u72c02a60-3936-5ebd-8c21-cead804d212c)
1 The Last Actor Alive (#u4aa21dd4-212d-5758-aeb1-1780ffd46b53)
2 New York (#u7771d9f1-0000-5ea1-8981-a326833c2da6)
3 My Father’s Business (#u79e79064-d358-5665-aedd-6c3da64644dd)
4 Stella (#u3809d283-d2a9-5c77-bd2f-d861e228fcc0)
5 Sally, Candy, Andy and the Others (#ua31a8249-9c38-568e-a7d1-d9167294cef6)
6 Shelley and the Boys (#u5762c200-d989-59ce-a381-91ec746a5f5d)
7 The Year of the Turkey (#u9cf382e3-5266-592b-b4f6-9b60f29ffd27)
8 Boyz of the ’Hood (#u5481e94e-d196-518b-b7b2-b4e33e5a9e7c)
9 An Offer You Can’t Refuse (#u4e3241ed-f944-5290-a580-bd0f81255c9d)
10 Sleepless (#u5df6f99f-a26a-548b-b94e-6eca0d8d191a)
11 If You Can Make it There … (#ubd616e3b-6454-5544-8afa-5c6f51cd97af)
12 Going for a Soldier (#ue222c8f6-9cb1-57ac-9f46-6bacf6eb507d)
13 Jake (#u1a61f4c8-2254-5306-9f9e-1c48c08a8e85)
14 A Harp with Class (#udf550be2-7758-559f-acac-3b54dc95229b)
15 The Epic that Never Was (#ub195bcee-8051-504d-813a-e06d8037f469)
16 The South American Picture (#ub9deea2d-dbd2-5041-b5b9-ff3e59865e7f)
17 Falling Angel (#u06552fcd-8078-58fd-89d3-0f8a3742f816)
18 The Man Upstairs (#u398e06e2-5478-5ea0-9bce-ddbd55cb429e)
19 A Made Man (#u42723816-1b0c-510b-99ff-c72e37bc0b59)
20 Rabbit in a Maze (#u08b33016-f4b8-59d0-a7f6-35f64b5dc051)
21 In Cop Land (#u88b70860-406c-535a-a95c-b12f4b8be9dc)
22 Ageing Bull (#u173dfb18-bbf4-51b8-a8cd-92ea3026de6f)
Filmography (#u339e32d1-b7cc-5603-a412-23445ff018ba)
Index (#u9f4afa03-5742-5932-bb2a-130220a6fb13)
Acknowledgments (#u8c7fb664-01d9-5fdb-aacc-0f358bd91c59)
About the Author (#u7c0cad8d-dfd1-5c80-a540-f2afcbcd7dea)
Also by the Author (#uce22491d-1be4-5e27-b64d-c742dbff32d4)
Copyright (#u533835e2-bfb6-53e1-b94a-b62753596c48)
About the Publisher (#u9643eff5-9594-5b03-875f-234cd1ff8016)
CHAPTER ONE The Last Actor Alive (#ulink_5d25d0c9-0ec0-51c3-862a-c198857e143f)
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 (#ulink_bea10998-13e9-5d3d-ac7e-09d1a22eebff)
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.’
By the summer of 1941, he and Virginia had returned to New York and were sharing the 14th Street loft. Robert Duncan was a frequent visitor. Disinherited by his adoptive father, architect Edwin Joseph Symmes, he’d become a homosexual hustler. As he explained to one friend, ‘the ideal evening was to find a Scarsdale or Westchester husband who wanted a quick, anonymous fling before returning home to the wife and kids, and who would rent a hotel room in which you could spend the remainder of the night’.
If he had no luck, Duncan would sometimes ‘crash’ at De Niro and Virginia’s loft. That he would seduce Robert was inevitable. They began having sex during one of Virginia’s brief absences and continued to do so secretly until Duncan was drafted at the end of 1941.
Once he’d left, De Niro confessed everything to Virginia. The double betrayal enraged and astonished her. They argued through the night, forgetting the thinness of the partitions dividing their space from others on that floor. Suddenly, in a pause, they heard a voice through the wall from a neighbouring studio. ‘I have been listening to you,’ it said. ‘I have been weighing all your arguments. I think that Virginia is absolutely fair and right, and the behaviour of Bob and Robert treacherous and ugly.’
Bob bolted out of the apartment and hammered on the nearest doors. There was no response from the three painters who lived there. For days, aghast that his secret was out, he ‘walked’, according to Anaïs Nin, ‘with shoulders bowed. He was silent. He looked haunted.’
Duncan endured only six weeks in boot camp in San Antonio before declaring his homosexuality and winning a discharge on psychological grounds. ‘I am an officially certified fag now,’ he announced proudly when he arrived back in New York. Unaware of Robert’s confession, he turned up at the 14th Street loft, only to be ordered out by a furious Virginia while a much-chastened De Niro looked on helplessly.
Like the rest of the ‘wash-ashores’, Valeska Gert also left Provincetown when the weather turned cold. In a basement at the corner of Morton and Bleecker Streets in Greenwich Village, she opened Beggars’ Bar, which, despite having no liquor licence, became a hangout for gays, radicals and the criminal fringe. Show people from uptown often turned up there to see Gert perform, or to watch visiting artists like dancer Kadidja Wedekind, whose father Frank wrote Lulu. Judy Garland, a regular, called Beggars’ Bar ‘the only cabaret in New York worth visiting’.
De Niro waited tables there. So did Tennessee Williams. Williams doesn’t refer to De Niro by name in his Memoirs, though one incident does offer glimpses of the lifestyle they shared.
‘Towards the end of 1941,’ writes Williams, ‘I was companion to an abstract painter in the warehouse district of the West Village. The friend was, nervously speaking, a basket case. I mean he was a real freak-out before it was fashionable to be one.’
One night Gert announced that, henceforth, the waiters would have to pool their tips, and share them with her. In the resulting fracas, the painter began hurling beer bottles. Gert went to hospital with a head wound, and Williams was out of a job. He moved in with the painter, who demanded that Williams cruise the streets for ‘carefully specified kinds of visitors’ as sex partners. Williams did so, helped by another friend, whom he identifies only as ‘the pilot fish’. The arrangement continued until some of the ‘visitors’ left with the painter’s valuables, and Williams was evicted.
Whatever his part in these events, De Niro was already committed to the gay lifestyle represented by Gert, Williams and their friends. He remained, however, attached to Virginia, even besotted by her.
Of the poems he wrote in this period, he chose to publish only six, all from ‘about 1941’. Floridly sensual, they’re reminiscent of Hart Crane (who committed suicide over his homosexuality) and Oscar Wilde.
Light powdered her eyelashes, gilded her teeth
lustered her hair
but she refused to enter
leaving in the doorway a pool from her milky body …
Two nuns brought incense to cover
the ends of her breasts
Strange peacocks bloomed upon her thighs
as only angels can …
The ‘her’ in De Niro’s verse is usually ambiguous. Later, in a series inspired by George Cukor’s Camille, he would write in the voice of Greta Garbo. But the sense of erotic fascination is palpable.
In December 1941, Robert and Virginia took the unexpected decision to marry. America’s entry into the war that month may have played a part, since De Niro was of draft age, but the decision was probably more quixotic. In their circle, marriages between sexually mismatched partners were almost the norm. Jackson Pollock entered a stormy marriage with fellow artist Lee Krasner, and even Robert Duncan took a wife – Marjorie McKee, the first, and probably only, woman with whom he had sex. They divorced a few months later, after an early pregnancy and abortion – a pattern not far from that which the De Niros would follow.
Three people effectively ran contemporary art in New York in 1942. They alone had the funds to buy and show new work. One was Alfred Barr, head of the Museum of Modern Art. The other two were an uncle and niece, who, far from enjoying any family feeling, were usually at each other’s throats.
Marguerite ‘Peggy’ Guggenheim had expected to inherit millions when her father died in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Instead the money went mostly to her uncles. She received only $450,000, which was held in trust. Although still a fortune, her comparatively meagre inheritance influenced Peggy to hoard every dime, and earned her, over the years, a reputation for cheapness. Her friend David Hare called her ‘avaricious to the point of comedy: the kind of person who goes from place to place, looking for the cheapest bottle of milk, and argues about who pays for the coffee’.
Drawn to the art world, Peggy moved to Europe and plunged into the bohemia of Paris and London. In London, at the urging of her friend Marcel Duchamp, she opened a gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, which showcased mostly Surrealist art. Few of its shows made money, but Peggy insisted artists sign a contract agreeing to let her buy any unsold pictures at $100 each – supposedly to encourage the artists but actually to build up a collection cheap.
In 1939 she fled to New York, towing the painter Max Ernst, whom she later married. Providently, she’d sent ahead her collection, part of which she put on show in 1942 at the gallery called Art of This Century which she’d had built on West 57th Street. Art of This Century had curved wooden walls, and lighting of startling originality. The paintings, unframed, hung on metal cantilever arms, each surmounted with a photograph of the eyes of the artist. Other canvases circulated on a conveyor belt, popping into sight for a few moments only.
Only a few blocks away, at 24 East 54th Street, Peggy’s uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim, had established the Guggenheim Foundation. It, and Guggenheim himself, were dominated by the Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwisen, his mistress.
Thirty years younger than he, Rebay relished the power conferred by her lover’s wealth. Dressed like a Hollywood columnist in amazing hats and outfits that were like theatrical costumes, Hilla Rebay queened it over the Foundation and its shows, which mostly exhibited her own work and that of her friends. It was also Rebay’s idea to christen their New York headquarters ‘The Museum of Non-Objective Painting’, a reproof to the Museum of Modern Art, which was just round the corner.
Shrewd artists played Barr, Rebay and Peggy Guggenheim against one another. Peggy could present shows, recommend artists to other gallery-owners, and even buy paintings – Jackson Pollock painted a mural for her Manhattan home – but she was notoriously slow to spend actual money. Rebay, on the other hand, had none of Peggy’s taste, but offered cash to anyone who pledged allegiance to the Guggenheim Foundation. She funded the school set up on 8th Street by Hans Hofmann, who made no secret of his scorn for Peggy’s speciality, Surrealism.
Rebay also disbursed monthly grants of $15 a head to Hofmann’s best students, including De Niro and Admiral, for canvas and paints. The sum seems derisory today, but few modern artists in New York then made any money at all. Max Ernst’s son Jim was considered lucky to be earning $25 a week in the Museum of Modern Art’s stock room. Clement Greenberg, the country’s most perceptive critic of emerging art, worked as a postal clerk, and wrote in his spare time. Jackson Pollock dressed department-store windows, silk-screened designs on scarves and umbrellas, and painted dials for aircraft instruments (with Elaine, the wife of Willem de Kooning, working next to him).
In 1942, Rebay offered both Pollock and De Niro full-time work at the Foundation, answering queries from the public. She even paid for the black suits the job required. The men sometimes had to sleep in the poorly-secured building overnight, but both were glad of the $35 a week.
Even aside from their sexual disparity, Robert and Virginia, each at the start of a career, and with little in common socially, politically or intellectually, were hardly credible as husband and wife, and even less likely parents. But towards the end of 1942 Virginia briefly took care of an infant cousin, and the experience, she explained later, stirred a maternal impulse she’d never suspected. Gripped briefly by this urge, she became pregnant, and on 17 August 1943 her first and only child, Robert Jr, was born. To avoid confusion with his father, he soon became ‘Bobby’, and carried that name all his life.
The 14th Street studio was no place to bring up a baby, so the De Niros found another loft at 220 Bleecker Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village, between McDougal Street and 6th Avenue. It occupied the entire top floor and, once a wall was knocked out to create two big studio spaces and a bedroom, made a comfortable, if draughty home. Scavenged radiators softened the chill. Baths were taken in a tin tub in the kitchen.
Young Bobby became used to being picked up, played with, but put down as the novelty palled. Family friends remember a child who was ‘never coddled’. He was already marking out his own territory. There was plenty for him to discover in the cavernous space, and, left to his own devices, he probed every cranny. Curiosity became his strongest motivation. It would make him, in adulthood, supremely inquisitive, ready to spend months probing, observing, imitating.
Bobby never lost his enthusiasm for his parents’ style of life, nor for the district where they raised him. He lives in a loft himself, and in 1997 boasted of his parents’ prescience. ‘They were aware of lofts, of industrial … whatever ya wanna call it; culture, blah blah … way before they became fashionable. SoHo was a lot different [then]. It was just a total industrial area that nobody thought of as a place to live. Warehouses, factories; stuff like that.’
Whatever the material drawbacks, the Village and its environs was the place to live if you were involved in the arts. ‘Except for the museums, theatres and opera,’ wrote the critic Lionel Abel, ‘all that was humanly essential to the city was bounded by Bleecker and 14th Streets, by 2nd Avenue and Greenwich Street. There was no other residential section in New York.’
Bobby absorbed the same belief. Accepting the 1997 Municipal Art Society’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Medal for his efforts to help revive TriBeCa, the downtown Manhattan neighbourhood where he’d opened a pair of restaurants and established a film centre, De Niro told the audience, ‘I just want to thank the Municipal Art Society for holding this downtown, because I really don’t like to go above 14th Street.’
It’s surprising that the marriage of the De Niros lasted as long as it did. On top of his sexual incompatibility with Virginia, Robert could be a trying companion. ‘“Affability” is not a word that applies to Bob,’ said his friend Barbara Guest, ‘nor is “social”.’ Art critic Thomas Hess remembers him as ‘tall, saturnine, given to black trenchcoats, his face sharp as a switchblade, with a temperament to match’. His moods swung between elation and black depression. ‘Since I was a child,’ he confessed later, ‘I have felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.’
Admiral, though equally intense, was more social. Friends, both artistic and political, thronged the apartment day and night, arguing, gossiping, flirting, plotting. She attracted men, in particular writers Manny Farber and Clement Greenberg. The most authoritative voice in American cinema criticism, Farber was always dropping in, since he was writing a screenplay with James Agee, who had a fourth-floor walk-up apartment at 172 Bleecker Street.
In 1942, Peggy Guggenheim included some of Admiral’s work in the Spring Salon for Young Artists at Art of This Century, and Alfred Barr bought one of her canvases, Composition, for the Museum of Modern Art. He only paid $100, but nobody else in her group had sold anything at all. Though Jackson Pollock was widely acknowledged as the brightest of the emerging New York School, it would be 1944 before Barr bought anything by him.
Virginia’s success, coming at a time when Robert had sold nothing himself, strained the marriage still more. He succumbed increasingly to depression. On the wall of his studio, he scribbled two lines from a poem by nineteenth-century poet and photographer Charles Cros, friend of Rimbaud and Verlaine: ‘Je suis un homme mort depuis plusiers années/Mes os sont recouvert par les roses fanées’ (‘I have been a dead man many years/My bones are clothed in faded roses’).
His resentment grew as it became clear that, despite her sale to MoMA, Virginia didn’t seriously contemplate a career in art. After the birth of Bobby, she concentrated on making a living. Robert had no such concerns. He lived for painting, unworried whether he sold his canvases or not. He wouldn’t achieve any kind of reputation until 1946, when Peggy Guggenheim gave him his first one-man show at Art of This Century, and another didn’t come along until 1950.
As if the social and sexual differences between Robert and Virginia were not enough, they also faced the classic artistic gulf between the figurative and the abstract. ‘For virtually his entire career,’ wrote critic Peter Frank, ‘Robert De Niro Sr painted recognisable images; still life objects, interiors, landscapes, the occasional religious subject, and, above all, figures.’ Composition and the rest of Admiral’s work was entirely abstract, and, given the prevailing movement away from Surrealism, more fashionable.
Being figurative placed De Niro, as one friend remarked, ‘on the wrong side of the commercial divide’. In 1949, Clement Greenberg would list De Niro, Pollock, de Kooning and Robert Motherwell as artists who ‘must still waste valuable energy in the effort to survive as working artists in the face of a public whose indifference consigns them to neglect and poverty’. By then, however, Robert’s finances were of less concern to Virginia, and to Bobby, because the De Niros were no longer living together.
CHAPTER THREE My Father’s Business (#ulink_63c94fc8-b113-54da-9f89-06a13411fa37)
They are not girls. They are not boys. They can’t help it. They was born that way. Something in de throat.
Two old ladies commenting on homosexuals in Joel Schumacher’s screenplay for his film Flawless (1999), in which De Niro starred
As tensions increased in their marriage, Robert and Virginia began seeing a Freudian therapist. ‘Many artists who knew Hans Hofmann,’ recalls Barbara Guest, ‘went to a particular shrink whose patients (eventually) had terrible crises and breakdowns. But he couldn’t help them. He was a frustrated man – a failed artist, who meddled.’
The therapist may have been Dr Lawrence Kubie, who claimed to ‘cure’ homosexuals, and whose patients included such showbiz figures as bisexual playwright and director Moss Hart. Following their ‘treatment’, the De Niros agreed to separate, though since adultery still represented the main grounds for divorce, they decided, rather than air their sexual incompatibility in the courts, to delay a formal dissolution of the marriage.
While his parents worked out new domestic arrangements, Bobby was sent to his father’s parents in Syracuse, where, despite Robert’s hostility towards Catholicism, Bobby’s grandparents had him baptised. Though Robert was furious, the gesture had little real effect, since Bobby was almost immediately returned to New York, and to his mother. Nevertheless, being ‘officially’ Catholic would cement him even more firmly into the Italo-American culture.
Robert moved into a Greenwich Village studio, and immersed himself in the principles of Abstract Expressionism. What those principles were depended on who taught them. Art historian Lee Hall calls Abstract Expressionism ‘an attitude, if not a proper philosophy, of art [which] pits the lonely and searching individual against the unknown (possibly unknowable) first forces of the universe, casting the painter in the role of voyager and seeker after truth. By courting accidents resulting from the manipulated collision of materials, by taking risks with the surprising imagery that results, and by exploring that imagery to discover new vision, the painter creates an order that embodies his or her quest. To the Abstract Expressionist, the process of painting is more valued than the product, the finished painting.’ As an actor, Bobby would also conceive himself as a ‘voyager and seeker after truth’ whose work embodied the ‘manipulated collision of materials’ to achieve ‘surprising imagery’.
Always a slow worker, Robert became slower still. For every canvas completed, he threw out a hundred, then reworked the survivors, often erasing the entire design before starting over. Despite this, his work changed little over the years. He shared Matisse’s enthusiasm for North African subjects, and, when a magazine photograph of Moorish women posed in an elaborate interior caught his eye, began painting his own versions of it – but, with characteristic obsessiveness, continued to do so for twenty years. A driven search for ‘perfect’ colours gradually made his pictures brighter, but his canvases of the late forties feature the same roughly painted figures as those he exhibited four decades later.
‘He had a few friends,’ says Barbara Guest, ‘but mostly was alone in the tremendously cluttered place in which he painted. Sometimes I saw him out walking, and a scene plays across the screen of my mind of the day I saw him, standing on the sidewalk, talking to a woman friend while he held his mongrel dog on a leash. It was a typical encounter, a repeated scene in his life. There was no social life of dinners etc. There were many parties he did not attend, or at which he showed up as if out walking the dog.’ When he did arrive at a party, he was seldom a social asset. ‘He was given to acid comments about the art scene,’ says Guest. ‘He preferred provocative conversations.’ If he found a subject uninteresting, half-finished sentences would tail off into silence.
Virginia and Bobby remained in the Bleecker Street apartment. As long as Bobby was too young for nursery school, she took paying work she could do at home. For a while, she framed pictures at $1.25 an hour – not enough to maintain the loft, which in any event was about to be taken over by The Little Red Schoolhouse, an elementary school launched to give the children of Greenwich Village the sort of education demanded by radical parents. Virginia moved to a smaller apartment, at 521 Hudson Street, a building mostly of studios, where many painter friends rented space. She stayed there until she found a better place at 219 West 14th Street. The rent was high, at $50 a month, but the two-room apartment with its parquet floors and central heating was too tempting. Bobby would grow up and live most of his young adult life here.
When he was old enough, Virginia placed Bobby in the nursery school attached to Greenwich House on Barrow Street. Set up to provide arts training and a social centre to the downtown area, Greenwich House included music and pottery schools, as well as its kindergarten, which charged working mothers only $1.25 a month.
Starting at the nursery brought De Niro into contact for the first time with the Ethical Culture Movement, which ran a free kindergarten and various humanitarian projects in and around New York. Founded by Felix Adler in 1876, Ethical Culture offered a substitute for organised religion, founded on ethics and morality rather than dogma. Adler spelled out its four principles: ‘1. Every person has inherent worth; each person is unique. 2. It is our responsibility to improve the quality of life for ourselves and others. 3. Ethics are derived from human experience. 4. Life is sacred, interrelated and interdependent.’ Though never particularly religious, De Niro, with Virginia’s encouragement, would grow away from his grandparents’ Catholicism towards the principles of Ethical Culture. When he married in 1976, it would be at the group’s New York headquarters, and he remains an enthusiastic supporter of its activities.
Able to get out of the house for the first time since her separation from Robert, Virginia applied for work through the welfare system. Since employment offices routinely directed out-of-work artists to any job which, under the loosest possible definition, involved painting, she found herself decorating fabrics and assembling jewellery. Before she was married she had made pin money typing, and now she started again, typing manuscripts for writers, and editing and typing theses for students at the New School for Social Research, just around the corner on 12th Street.
With its left-wing ideology and funding from wealthy liberals like the Rockefellers, the New School was a haven for European intellectuals fleeing Hitler. Its University in Exile, founded in 1934, accommodated four hundred of them, including German theatre director Erwin Piscator and his wife, the Viennese dancer Maria Ley.
In Berlin, Piscator had directed the Volksbühne theatre, supported by the labour unions. His productions of Meyerhold and Brecht, often using a bare stage, or a few sets in the Constructivist style pioneered in Soviet Russia, with the addition of film or projected images, attracted much attention, not least from the Nazis, who dubbed his work ‘degenerate’. (Piscator always claimed this charge, plus his Communism, led to his exile from Germany, though in fact the impetus was a paternity suit he looked certain to lose.)
Alvin Johnson, director of the New School, invited the couple to launch a programme of drama. Piscator immediately began hiring teachers, while his wife started dancing classes and a Saturday-morning theatre course for children.
Piscator was in his element at the New School. Dressed always in the most expensive silk and cashmere, white hair swept back to emphasise his leonine profile, he ruled the theatre department like a duke. Mel Brooks, later one of his students, parodied him in his film The Producers as the manic Nazi composer of the musical Springtime for Hitler.
Herbert Berghof, one of Max Reinhardt’s actors who’d arrived in America during the thirties and worked with the Theater Guild, managed the acting course. Other teachers included theatre historian John Gassner, editor of the Best Plays of the Year anthologies, Leo Kertz, Lisa Jalowitz, Theresa Helburn, James Light and, most notably, Stella Adler, who would become the most powerful influence on the young De Niro when he decided to become an actor.
When Piscator, under investigation in America for his Communist sympathies, returned to Germany in 1946, Maria Ley Piscator ran the New School’s drama workshop until 1949. Virginia typed her manuscripts and, through her, got similar work from other foreign writers, notably military historian Ladislas Farago. She also found time to paint, and, like Robert, had a solo show at Art of This Century in 1946. Peggy Guggenheim also included some of Virginia’s work at the 1947 Biennale in Venice, where she would shortly relocate permanently, along with her collection.
There was no money in art, however, and Virginia turned increasingly to writing. Her market was the most accessible one, the ‘true detective’ magazines. Lurid monthlies that filled the vacuum created by the demise of the old pulp crime magazines, they published accounts of real crimes, illustrated with original police photographs, augmented with gaudy art or posed photos, usually of terrified girls.
Detective World and Underworld Detective were edited by Lionel White, who wrote Clean Break, the novel on which Stanley Kubrick would base his first major success, The Killing, in 1956. (White’s pseudonymous contributors included hard-boiled crime novelist Jim Thompson, who scripted Kubrick’s film.) A typical Detective World article began: ‘It was Wednesday, October 2, and deep autumnal tints were already visible in the foliage surrounding Harrison’s aged courthouse.’ This line, in fact, comes from ‘Who Killed the 2 Sisters?’ in Detective World for April 1952, credited to one ‘Virgil E. La Marre’, a near-anagram for ‘Virginia Admiral’.
Robert’s first solo show in May 1946 at Art of This Century attracted critical attention, and he even sold some paintings, though insisting the proceeds go straight to Virginia. Not that there was much, since he refused to sell to people whom he felt wouldn’t appreciate his pictures. As late as 1989, when his son wanted to give Francis Coppola two canvases for his fiftieth birthday, Robert quizzed him at length about Coppola’s character. ‘You give it to someone, they put it in a closet,’ he grumbled before relinquishing the pictures, which Coppola hung in the hotel suite he maintained permanently at New York’s Plaza Hotel.
Virginia insisted that father and son spend as much time together as they wished. By osmosis, Bobby acquired many of his father’s traits, including the tendency to leave sentences dangling, or to descend into moody silence. Neither set much store by what he wore, where he lived or how he behaved. And watching his father discard version after version of a composition instilled Bobby’s conviction that ‘near enough’ was never good enough.
Years later, talking about her friendship with De Niro, Shelley Winters would create something of a furore by telling the New York Times, ‘Bobby will never talk about what made him the way he is, but I suspect he must have been a lonely kid, that somewhere along the line he was brutalised.’ If any psychological damage was inflicted on the young Bobby, his father’s sexuality and depression must have played a central part in it. Acting may well have been a form of self-therapy, as well as an attempt to come to terms with his ambivalent feelings towards Robert.
‘His father was important to him,’ says French actor and director Robert Cordier, who knew the young De Niro, ‘and his father was not recognised, and I think Bob got to thinking, “I owe him one.” I think becoming famous was very important to him to pay back his father. That has a lot to do with his drive. I think that has a lot to do with Bob’s will to succeed.’
Asked as an adult if he was close to his father, De Niro said, ‘Close? In some ways I was very close to him, but then …’ He was unable to go on, and his eyes filled with tears. When Robert died, Bobby preserved his studio as a shrine, in exactly the same disorder as when his father was working there. He still visits it from time to time. De Niro also dedicated his first film as director, A Bronx Tale, to his father, who died in 1993, the year it was released.
Uninterested in comfort, Robert moved frequently as space became vacant north and south of Houston Street, on Great Jones Street, West Broadway or Bleecker. ‘He had these dank lofts in NoHo and SoHo at a time when nobody wanted to live in those areas,’ says his son. ‘Often he was the only tenant who wanted to live in the building.’
Bobby got used to being sent out to Washington Square with a book if his father wanted to work. On occasion he’d take him along if he was teaching; his students were sometimes Wall Street brokers, and the class took place in a loft in the business district. On such occasions, he’d give Bobby paints and brushes. ‘He’d paint,’ said Robert shortly. ‘He had a good sense of colour.’ From time to time he’d ask him to pose – ‘but when you’re a kid,’ recalled Bobby, ‘the last thing you want to do is sit still for a long time.’ Rigorous even about pictures of his own son, Robert preserved only one image of Bobby, a superficially casual charcoal sketch.
When they did go out together, it was often to Washington Square, where they would rollerskate or play ball games. But Robert’s real enthusiasm emerged when the two went to the movies. First-run cinemas were too expensive, so they generally saw films at Variety Photoplay in the East Village, Loew’s Commodore at 6th Street and 2nd Avenue, or the Academy of Music on 14th Street – all second-run and revival houses offering two features for only fifty cents. Camille or Ninotchka was usually showing in at least one of them, and Bobby got to see these and other Garbo performances a number of times. Back home, he acted out his favourite scenes for his mother.
Camille fascinated Robert – not the first gay artist to find it inspirational: Jean Cocteau called it ‘a bad film raised to the heights by the extraordinary presence of Miss Greta Garbo’. To Robert, its impassive star embodied a spiritual purity. She was like a secular version of the Madonna he’d rejected with his abandonment of Catholicism. He made sculptures of Garbo, and devoted a series of canvases to her first sound film, Anna Christie, while lines from Camille inspired a dozen poems, and stills from the same film a decade of drawings.
Later, Bobby acknowledged that his idea of great acting derived from watching performers like Robert Mitchum and particularly Montgomery Clift, while his influences for comedy were knockabout ex-vaudeville comics Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. He admired Walter Huston, particularly as the half-crazy old prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, though he disliked Humphrey Bogart, in that film and almost everything else; always playing himself, Bogart seemed the antithesis of everything Bobby thought an actor should be.
Instead, De Niro followed the path of those protean Hollywood stars of the thirties who won their reputations, and their Oscars, by transforming themselves for each role, losing themselves behind heavy accents, crêpe whiskers, wigs, tattoos, scars, false noses, heavy glasses, a shuffle, a limp, a stoop.
Every generation throws up one or two of these performers. Lon Chaney fulfilled this role for Hollywood in the twenties. Christened ‘The Man of a Thousand Faces’, he created definitive versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, and a gallery of scarred pirates, grinning Asians, clowns, crooks and cripples. ‘Don’t tread on a spider!’ ran one Hollywood slogan. ‘It might be Lon Chaney.’
De Niro probably never saw Chaney. He did, however, see Muni Weisenfreund, alias Paul Muni, the graduate from New York’s Yiddish theatre who could play an Italian emigrant gangster in Scarface, a gaudy Chicano club-owner in Bordertown and a crusading miner in Black Legion, but just as easily transform himself into a French author for The Life of Emile Zola or Benito Juarez, the politician of Indian descent who founded the modern Mexican state, for Juarez.
Once De Niro became an actor, he scorned Muni, calling his performance in Howard Hawks’ 1932 Scarface ‘awful. He’s the biggest ham. It was so hammy. You could say he was possibly a great stage actor, but a lot of his movies were over the top. Like I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.’ Yet Muni remains the thirties screen actor whom De Niro resembles most.
Like Chaney and Muni, De Niro would always avoid period pictures or the great classical roles. To play Othello or Don Juan would be like putting on a costume thousands had worn before. But to transform yourself into someone entirely new – that was genius. Chaney’s insistence on strapping his calf to the back of a thigh to simulate amputation, on duplicating blindness by pressing the membrane of an egg to his eyeball, or screwing wire rings into his eye sockets to create the crazy glare of a burned face in The Phantom of the Opera, would all find resonances in De Niro’s work. His Jake La Motta in Raging Bull is a Chaney performance. And the comment a contemporary writer made of Chaney, ‘To endure pain for his art gave him a strange pleasure,’ applies equally well to De Niro.
‘He developed a thick-muscled neck and a fighter’s body,’ Pauline Kael wrote of De Niro in Raging Bull, ‘and for the scenes of the broken, drunken La Motta he put on so much weight that he seems to have sunk into the fat with hardly a trace of himself left. What De Niro does in this picture isn’t acting, exactly. I’m not sure what it is. Though it may at some level be awesome, it definitely isn’t pleasurable.’
Impressive as she found the effort, Kael felt it failed in what it set out to achieve. ‘De Niro seems to have emptied himself out to become the part he’s playing and then not got enough material to refill himself with: his La Motta is a swollen puppet with only bits and pieces of a character inside, and some semi-religious, semi-abstract concepts of guilt.’
Marcello Mastroianni dismissed De Niro’s performances as the opposite of true acting: ‘By nature, the actor is a kind of wonder who can allow himself to change personalities. If you don’t know how to do this, it’s better to change professions. I think it’s ridiculous to imagine that to play a taxi driver or a boxer you have to spend months and months “studying” the life of cabdrivers and the weight of fighters.’
But ‘Chaney’ roles appeal to shy actors, because the performer plays them effectively alone. And there was no doubting De Niro’s shyness. Speaking about his days as an acting student, he remarked, ‘An actor is sensitive as it is – shy – and the whole point of you doing this [acting] is that you want to express yourself. There’s a kind of thread there as to why people become actors.’ De Niro would become famous, or notorious, as an actor with whom there was little or no give-and-take. ‘I think playing opposite De Niro is a challenge for any actor,’ says Cybill Shepherd, ‘because he is a master of underplaying.’ Actors strain to make some contact with him in a scene, and usually fail. Without any way of knowing what goes on in his mind while the camera rolls, they emerge from the experience aware only that they have come off second-best.
De Niro never socialises with fellow actors between scenes, and they in turn avoid him, instinctively giving him the space justified by his huge investment in the created personality. Over the years, De Niro learned to encourage this reaction by only appearing on the set for his own scenes, and remaining aloof from the rest of the cast, who are instructed not to talk to him or even meet his eye. Paradoxically, he found anonymity in the least likely of all places – the spotlight.
In 1954, Jean-Paul Sartre published Kean, updating Alexandre Dumas’s play about the early-nineteenth-century actor of whom Coleridge had said that to see him act was ‘like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning’. Sartre’s Edmund Kean has become a victim of his virtuosity, and can no longer distinguish between real life and acting. Halfway through a performance as Othello, he scrapes off his make-up and roars his frustration to the audience in an outpouring of the anger that is never far below the surface of any actor’s performance.
Such rage was a crucial component of all the roles played by actors like Chaney and Muni. Adopting the character of another man gave one a licence to unleash one’s darker impulses. To play Quasimodo without swinging madly from the bells of Notre Dame, or to embody the phantom without burning down the Opera, was inconceivable. Though Muni would always be remembered for the machine-gun shootout that ended Scarface, even his roles as Zola, Juarez and Louis Pasteur demanded a final scene in which, occupying centre stage, the actor stormed, ranted or cajoled for ten bravura minutes.
Rage is Robert De Niro’s gift to the cinema. Without it, he would be little more than the proficient performer of The Last Tycoon, Falling in Love, We’re no Angels and his many other flops. But it is when he injects into such roles the fury unleashed in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull or The Deer Hunter that we see De Niro at his most effective.
‘He appears to have a tremendous potential for violence,’ says Kenneth Branagh. ‘He is one of the more frightening people I have met in my life, and you seriously wouldn’t want to cross him. It’s just that moment where perhaps you’ve said something and his eyes just “go”. It’s not so much the physical threat as the potential for him to be very, very free with whatever aggression he might feel. You wouldn’t want to get in the way of that. I’ve seen him in a couple of situations where the smile just drops, and you really don’t want to be there when that happens. You would imagine that you would basically just get thumped.’
Greenwich Village provided a rich environment for the maturing Bobby. Instead of grocers and butchers, the shops at street level were jazz clubs and cafés. In summer, music poured from open windows. Cultural diversity ruled. Émigrés and refugees from Germany and Austria mingled with Italians and Jews who were migrating from the old ghettos into the Village. None of this was lost on the young Bobby, who would develop an instinct for the styles of speech, clothing and movement that differentiated one class, race or calling from another.
For the summer holidays, he went upstate to Syracuse, to stay with his father’s family, acquiring the cadences of Italian English that he would employ in so many of his films. Coaching him for his role in Cape Fear, an expert in accents would label his natural way of speaking ‘Italian-American’, and his career would be hampered when, playing an Italian in his first major Hollywood film, he would be so convincing that people assumed he was imported from Italy for the role.
In Syracuse, he also brushed against organised crime – an Italian industry in the US. In 1950, Senator Estes Kefauver, enquiring into the rackets, made public the already widely-acknowledged existence of ‘a nationwide crime syndicate, a loosely organised but cohesive coalition of autonomous crime “locals” which work together for mutual profit. Behind the local mobs that make up the national crime syndicate is a shadowy criminal organisation known as the Mafia.’ None of this came as news to the large Italian communities of Syracuse and Rome, where Mafia caporegimes milked the construction and restaurant businesses in which so many Italians worked. When De Niro got round to playing the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather II, he didn’t need to look far for inspiration.
Back in New York, Bobby started in the public school system, at PS.41, just round the corner on West 11th Street. He stayed there until the fifth grade, when he was about eleven. Through her work for Maria Ley Piscator, Virginia got him into the Saturday-morning acting classes of what was now called the Erwin Piscator Workshop. It was here, aged ten, that he played his first dramatic role, the Cowardly Lion in a production of The Wizard of Oz. He also appeared in a version of Chekhov’s The Bear which toured some New York schools. But there was no overnight conversion to acting. ‘I stayed for a few years,’ De Niro says off-handedly of the Workshop. ‘I wasn’t interested.’
At eleven, he would normally have moved from PS.41 to IS.71. Instead, Virginia enrolled him in the Elizabeth Irwin High School on Charlton Street, the high school of the Little Red Schoolhouse. The ‘Red’ in Little Red Schoolhouse uncompromisingly indicated its political leanings. Many of its teachers were blacklisted. Firebrand folk-singer Woody Guthrie performed there. A typical school excursion was a week in a steel town. Parents and children marched in the May Day parade, sometimes with a red flag fluttering from the pram that carried their youngest child.
To counter accusations that its curriculum was too ‘liberal’, Elizabeth Irwin pushed to get its students into reputable colleges. For Bobby, this was bad news. School bored him. He disliked books, preferring comics, from which he learned to read. Virginia didn’t dissuade him. She felt children should develop at their own speed, finding naturally the things that interested them. From the age of ten, Bobby was allowed to choose his own clothes. Virginia also sent him briefly to Boy Scout camp, but he disliked the experience so much he never repeated it.
Virginia was busy with her work, her political activities – she continued to write, edit and produce left-wing propaganda – and her personal life. Though she never remarried, she had a succession of lovers, among them the film critic Manny Farber, who wrote for the Nation, the New Republic, the New Leader and other left-wing magazines. Both painter and writer, Farber, unlike Robert, was charismatic, politically savvy, and unashamedly heterosexual. Bobby deeply resented the relationship. Years later, when Farber approached him at a party and reminded him he’d once been his mother’s boyfriend, De Niro fled.
Bobby remained at Elizabeth Irwin through seventh and eighth grades, but never looked a likely candidate for college. Though he was not stupid, his perfectionist nature drove him to recopy his work over and over, as his father did his canvases, while the rest of the class moved on.
Virginia volunteered him as a model for an article she was writing for Glamour magazine on the differences between public and private schooling in New York – Bobby representing the ‘funky’ face of the public-school system. A photograph illustrating the article shows a slightly dumpy Bobby with tousled hair in a zippered leather jacket, crumpled trousers, shirt pulled outside the belt, hands shoved in the pockets. He regards the camera sideways with a gaze not so much belligerent as indifferent.
As he entered adolescence and shed his childish plumpness, other aspects of life in Greenwich Village attracted Bobby’s attention. The area was changing. In particular, Italians moving in from the West Side were squeezing the Anglo community of the downtown area, just as they, in turn, would be squeezed by the invading Chinese two decades later.
Despite a solitary nature, Bobby was drawn to the Italian and Sicilian youth gangs now appearing on the streets. Though his skin was pale, he could have been one of them. The gangs also radiated superiority and power. Being in the headlines made the street kids bolder. Knives and guns became more evident, the swagger more pronounced.
De Niro affected the gang members’ silk shirts, their slim-cut leather jackets, the hat tilted on the back of the head. His friends nicknamed him ‘Bobby Milk’ because of his pallor. At seventeen, he was recognisably a cadet version of Johnny Boy, the street punk he would play in Mean Streets.
Johnny Boy likes explosions. He blows up a mailbox, and throws dynamite from the rooftops. As a kid, Bobby acted as a ‘steerer’ for one of the Chinese firecracker vendors across Mott Street. Kids in the Village preyed on boys who turned up from the suburbs in search of the giant cherry bombs and other dangerously large fireworks employed by the Chinese at their festivals. In Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese would show two of these innocents being ripped off by a couple of streetwise Village guys.
On Christmas Day 1970, when Brian De Palma introduced De Niro to Scorsese, each would recognise the other from his teenage gang affiliations. But De Niro was never part of a gang, any more than was Scorsese, who only moved to the Lower East Side in 1949, when his garment-maker father went broke, and who, as a lifelong asthmatic, observed street life mainly from his bedroom window.
That said, both recognised and respected the reality of street crime. When he made Sleepers in 1996, De Niro still recalled Hell’s Kitchen, the tough area near the intersection of 42nd Street and Broadway: ‘It was Italian, Irish, Latin, Puerto Rican. When I was growing up downtown, it was a neighbourhood where you would get hassled, where you wouldn’t go.’ Both he and Scorsese were accustomed to being beaten up, and knew better than to complain to the law. Only by enduring punishment and saying nothing could they earn the respect of the tough guys who ran the streets.
As a kind of protective coloration, De Niro began going to Sunday mass with his new friends at the old St Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street. For the new generation of Italian-Americans, that church had a special significance, reflected in the way their film-makers would adopt it as a location. Scorsese, who served there as altar boy, used it for the climax of his first film, Who’s that Knocking at my Door?, as did Francis Coppola for the christening that closes The Godfather.
It incensed Robert to see his son embracing both the religion he’d abandoned and a lifestyle he thought dangerous. ‘When I was about thirteen,’ recalled Bobby, ‘we ran into each other in Washington Square Park. I was with a group of street kids, and he got fairly worked up, going on and on about bad influences.’
De Niro relived the moment years later when he made his debut as director with A Bronx Tale, about a man trying to prevent his young son idolising a career criminal. As Ray Vitti, the gang boss in Analyze This, he also cites a similar event from his own fictitious childhood.
As if to prove that her artistic ambitions had never been more than infatuation with Greenwich Village bohemia, Virginia thrived as a businesswoman. She started a small service, called Academy, which turned manuscripts into camera-ready copy for printers. Half of the 14th Street apartment became her office, where she installed a couple of typewriters and a Varitype machine. Before long, she had a staff of ten, most of whom, in defiance of the lease, worked in the apartment. Bobby became so angry with the noise of the machines that he threatened to throw them out the window. Virginia took the hint, and in 1957 moved everything into an office at 68 7th Street.
In 1953, the De Niros finally divorced. Bobby continued to spend time in Robert’s studio, but, inevitably, both recognised a growing gap. At this time they sometimes browsed Village bookshops, like Robert Wilson’s Phoenix Bookstore on Cornelia Street, which specialised in literary first editions. Wilson, a friend of W.H. Auden and the bibliographer of Gertrude Stein, was a congenial conversationalist, and De Niro Sr relaxed in his company, even drawing a cover for one of Wilson’s catalogues.
‘I saw him often,’ recalls Wilson. ‘He was shy more than antisocial. He came into the shop often, at least once with the teenage son. He was gay, and came in quite often, mainly, I think, because he had an obvious crush on my then-assistant Marshall Clements. He was not a collector of rare books, but was a reader of Gertrude Stein’s works, and often bought one of her books for reading purposes.’
Marshall Clements too remembers De Niro Sr well. ‘I first met Bob Sr and Virginia Admiral in 1960 or ‘61, along with others of their circle, through the painter, Nell Blaine, who often gave parties for her old friends, mostly fellow painters. So by the time I started working at the Phoenix Book Shop with Bob Wilson in 1968, Bob De Niro and I were old acquaintances. He lived nearby in the Village, and when he found out I was working at the shop, he frequently stopped by to visit.
‘Bob Wilson always thought this was because of some sexual interest in me, but I doubt this. What he was interested in, other than simply friendly chat, was using me as a model. I had been a dancer in the years 1950–1960 and was still in pretty good physical shape. I admired his work and found him a very pleasant, gentle and intelligent man, one completely focused on his painting. If he had any problems with his sexuality, they were never evident to me, and though we were both gay and obviously knew this about one another, the subject never came up in our conversations. He also had a wonderfully subtle wit and was childishly pleased when one “got” it and laughed. There was an air of sadness about him, and as far as I know, he was a lonely man, which I believe was also a reason for his frequent visits to the bookshop.’
Through the early fifties, Robert came to feel he’d reached an impasse in his work. Though the Charles Egan Gallery in New York City gave him one-man shows in 1952, 1953 and 1954, after which he switched to the Poindexter Gallery, which showed him in 1954, 1955 and 1956, he became convinced his career was marking time. He needed fresh inspiration, and friends like Tennessee Williams urged him to look for it in Europe.
Paris exercised a special attraction for De Niro. During his friendship with Anaïs Nin, he’d pumped her for information about the French capital and her meetings with artists like Picasso. In the spring of 1959, he arrived at the apartment of his friend Barbara Guest with a box of books, mostly French poetry. He was going to Paris, he explained, and wanted her to take care of them until he returned. Something final in his tone convinced her, however, that he believed the move to be permanent. Before his departure, friends threw a party on the boat that took him to France in April 1959, and Bobby attended – with what feelings one can imagine.
Bobby’s grades at Elizabeth Irwin weren’t good enough to keep him there, but since he showed some artistic talent, and had spent some months in the Piscator Workshop, the faculty suggested he apply for a scholarship to New York’s High School of Music and Art. Students were required to submit some example of their creativity, and De Niro got in on his acting ability, but stayed only one sparsely-attended semester in 1959. He claimed that the phoniness of his fellow students, ‘wearing sandals and playing guitars in Washington Square Park’, repelled him. But such people can hardly have been strange to a kid born and raised in Greenwich Village. Probably he disliked having to travel uptown to school when all his life he’d been able to walk. He would also have found it demanding to take classes both in academic subjects and one’s chosen creative area. After that, De Niro spent one semester at the Rhodes School on West 54th Street, but passed only three subjects then dropped out, his only explanation that ‘it was a bad scene’.
After the High School of Music and Art, Virginia resignedly put him into IS.71, where he had been intended to go in the first place. But he did no better there, responding to the discipline and rigour of public education with truancy, inattention and a threat to strike a teacher. ‘His idea of school,’ his mother later complained, ‘was just not to show up.’
She switched him to the fee-paying McBurney School on 23rd Street, attached, improbably, to the YMCA. Run like a British prep school, McBurney had an excellent reputation, but its curriculum and discipline didn’t suit everyone. (Among those who’d found it uncongenial was J.D. Salinger, who flunked out of McBurney just before World War II. His experience there would find its way into The Catcher in the Rye.)
Having lagged behind, De Niro found himself in a class of younger kids, which made him feel even more of an outsider. When summer arrived, and he was told to attend a catch-up school if he wanted to come back in 1960, he rebelled. Instead, he told his mother, he wanted to spend summer in Europe, visiting his father. On his return, he promised, he would tell her what he’d decided to do with his life. She would not, he assured her, be disappointed.
Before he left, Bobby set the pattern of his future life when he made a brief appearance in television drama, his first experience of the media that were to fill his adult life. The soap opera Search for Tomorrow was broadcast live from New York, and the sixteen-year-old De Niro became one of many kids who had bit parts and walk-ons that season.
De Niro spent four months hitching around Europe, starting in Paris. His father painted him a sign in English and Italian: ‘Student Wants Ride’. The sign, and his charm, took him to Venice, Rome and Capri, where he met French actress Michele Morgan. Bobby told her his father was a famous artist in Paris who was eager to paint her portrait, but De Niro Sr gruffly turned down the job: ‘I wasn’t interested in doing her portrait, or anyone else’s.’
Back in New York in March 1960, Bobby saw the Cole Porter/Frank Sinatra musical Can Can with a friend. As they left the cinema, De Niro surprised his companion by telling him, ‘I’m going to do that.’
‘What?’ his friend asked.
‘Act in the movies.’
The friend laughed, and thought nothing of it. But, months earlier, when Bobby returned from Europe, he’d surprised Virginia with the news that, rather than going to college or even graduating from high school, he had decided to train as an actor instead.
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