De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  When De Niro showed up in Provincetown, barely seventeen years old, he was introduced not only to Hofmann’s modern and liberal ideas and frame of mind but also to a variety of ways of life more unconventional than anything he had ever experienced. Provincetown was nearly as old as American history, the spot at the tippy-tip of Cape Cod where the Mayflower’s Pilgrims had alighted before moving on to Plymouth. Since then, its natural beauty and cheap housing—and, perhaps chief of all, its isolation from the workaday world and its norms—made it a celebrated enclave of bohemians (including Eugene O’Neill, whose Anna Christie, so beloved by the young painter Robert De Niro, was set there). Cut off geographically from the rest of the world, it was a perfect place to experiment with sexuality, drugs and alcohol, and virtually any lifestyle variation that could be imagined.

  Tennessee Williams, who lived in Provincetown during the summers as he cobbled together his playwriting career, would comment, “The whole lunatic fringe of Manhattan is already here.” Painter Larry Rivers remembered the scene, which he entered a few years after De Niro as a student of Hofmann’s: “Romping and bathing in the nude was a popular activity among the young … trying to get laid was the number one preoccupation. Number two on the list was getting happy, either with alcohol or pot. Number three was making art at Hofmann’s and at home, and looking forward to the weekly crit show of student painting.”

  In those crit shows, held on Friday afternoons, Hofmann assessed his pupils’ most recent output with often abstruse explanations and impulsive reactions that varied from the discouragingly dismissive to the enthusiastically complimentary. He would speak of the techniques and strategies of old masters and modern heroes, pronounce theoretical precepts, and cajole and wheedle and nurture in turn, all in a soft, highly accented voice that could confound students but nevertheless transfixed them. “We couldn’t understand what the fuck he was talking about,” recalled another student, Nick Carone, “but you felt your life was at stake with every word he uttered. The atmosphere worked on you; it was serious, you were serious, and therefore you were an artist.”

  De Niro made an immediate impression on his peers upon arriving in Provincetown. Albert Kresch, who first knew him as a fellow student of Hofmann’s and then throughout their parallel lives as New York painters, recalled, “He was handsome, very elegant. Better-looking than his son, a couple of inches taller and his hair was fairer. He was poetic in the Byronic sense.” In a picture taken during one of Hofmann’s celebrated Friday critiques, De Niro stands out prominently: tall and lean, with a wavy head of fair hair, a cocky posture, and a face that resembled, to a point nearing twinship, that of his son when the younger De Niro was a newcomer to the screen nearly thirty years later. He looks as if he’s paying attention; he also looks as if he already knows everything that’s being said and is contemplating something far more interesting. Despite his air of seeming detachment, though, he was an earnest pupil and something of a teacher’s pet, being named Hofmann’s best student of 1939—an honor that, cheesy as it sounds, was highly coveted. He was a star.

  At Hofmann’s suggestion, the seventeen-year-old De Niro took the next major step in his development as an artist, applying to study at Black Mountain College, the experimental arts school near Asheville, North Carolina, where a litany of significant artists in virtually every field were attempting to change American arts and education in a single revolutionary swoop. Inspired by the pedagogical theories of John Dewey and the Bauhaus school in Germany, Black Mountain was designed to stress the centrality of arts to a fully rounded education and to the larger society. It was founded in 1933 and didn’t survive a quarter century, but it had a huge impact on twentieth-century art. Buckminster Fuller built his first geodesic dome as a Black Mountain instructor, and Merce Cunningham, another faculty member, formed his first dance troupe there. Other teachers—often former students—included John Cage, Walter Gropius, Alfred Kazin, Willem de Kooning, and Charles Olson. Among the school’s many celebrated alumni would be the painters Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Elaine de Kooning; the poets Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, and Joel Oppenheimer; and the filmmaker Arthur Penn.

  Granted a full scholarship, De Niro arrived at Black Mountain in the fall of 1939 and, as in Provincetown, found himself in a miraculous kind of place. Decades later, he would still regard the physical setting of the school as a standard of visual beauty, and the atmosphere of study and work was an exhilarating boil of ideas, passions, and challenges. De Niro was studying with another German expatriate, the painter, sculptor, and theoretician Josef Albers, a key figure in the development of the Bauhaus who had emigrated to America after the Nazis shut the school down in 1933. Partly through the good offices of the young architect Philip Johnson, Albers had been named head of the art department at Black Mountain, where he and his wife, Anni, a famed textile artist, established one of the nation’s finest arts education programs.

  Though one of the youngest students at the school, De Niro was lauded by Albers, who compared his work to that of the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani and the medieval German master Matthias Grunewald. When Albers took a sabbatical partly through the academic year, leaving the school without a full-time art teacher, he was concerned that De Niro would leave, and he tried to mitigate the situation by giving his young pupil the keys to his personal studio.

  Despite this preferential treatment, De Niro bridled at Albers’s instruction. Contrasting with Hans Hofmann’s sensual aesthetic and fatherly tenor, Albers advocated a rigorous, cool, and precise approach to art, and he took issue with the young painter’s somewhat lurid color palette, which he claimed was “too emotional.” (As De Niro said years later, “A painting can’t be too emotional. It can be controlled, but never too emotional.”) “He found Albers to be too dogmatic and preferred Hans Hofmann,” wrote a Black Mountain historian, adding the proviso that “stories of his conflicts with Albers are exaggerated.” Indeed, De Niro himself declared that rather than quarrel with his teacher, he complied, at least in form, with his instruction: in school, he recalled, he “painted to please Albers, then went home and painted what I wanted.” But he wasn’t satisfied with the arrangement and determined to leave Black Mountain in the spring of 1939. “One day I just walked out,” he remembered, “with only five dollars on me.”

  He didn’t exactly wander the streets of North Carolina in penury. From Black Mountain he went to Hofmann’s school in New York, then to the summer session in Provincetown. For the next few years he would migrate seasonally to wherever Hofmann was teaching, Provincetown or New York, maintaining his meager art student existence by doing odd jobs, including working for Hofmann as a classroom monitor and school manager. He hadn’t yet celebrated his twentieth birthday, he was immersing himself not only in art but also in poetry (he was partial to the French Symbolists, a taste he would hold throughout his life), and he had a seemingly favorable future ahead of him, a star pupil who would no doubt become a well-known painter.

  He was emerging as a young man, as well. From its earliest days as an arts colony, Provincetown had been a community in which homosexuality was treated with far more acceptance than in the larger American society. In the ordinary course of studying painting, working on his art, and making a living, De Niro met any number of gay men, closeted and not, and somewhere along the way he began to explore his sexuality with them. Among his acquaintances was Tennessee Williams, with whom De Niro worked as a waiter at Captain Jack’s restaurant. Williams, older and far more daring than his young coworker, was gay, out, and unabashed, and De Niro surely noticed his fearlessness. Another acquaintance was Valeska Gert, an expatriate German dancer and actress who operated an illicit after-hours saloon and was, like Williams, unconcerned with hiding her sexuality.

  De Niro, a teenager from a traditional working-class Catholic home, may have had a mature confidence in his artistic abilities, but he was reserved and quiet by nature. Though he may have been drawn toward men, his sexual activities, whatever they
were, weren’t conducted nearly as brashly and publicly as those of his friends—a lifelong habit, as it happens. He may have experimented with men and women, but he formed no acknowledged romantic attachments.

  And then, like in the movies, he met a girl.

  IN POINT OF fact, Virginia Holton Admiral wasn’t a girl but a young woman of twenty-seven—a full seven years De Niro’s senior. She had been born on February 4, 1915, to Donald Admiral, a descendant of those noble lines of French courtiers and English colonialists (with some Dutch mixed in), who had been born in Danville, Illinois, in 1890, and Alice Groman, who was born to German immigrants in Odebolt, Iowa, in 1887. The couple wed in Danville in 1913 and would have two daughters, Eleanor following Virginia by almost two years. Virginia came into the world in The Dalles, Oregon, a port town along the Columbia River, because Donald was pursuing work there as a grain dealer. By 1917, when he registered for the military draft (he never served), he had relocated his family back to the Midwest. And by the time the Admiral girls were still in their midteens, Donald and Alice had divorced and were living in separate households in Berkeley, California, where Alice worked as a public school teacher with specialties in English and Latin.

  Virginia, blond, of smallish stature, and with a spunky personality, distinguished herself as a student and especially as an artist. As a teenager she was offered a chance to study painting in Paris but passed, preferring to attend the University of California near her Berkeley home. Even in the mid-1930s, Cal was noted as much for the radicalism of the campus culture as for the quality of education it offered, and Virginia embraced the former avidly, engaging herself in the Young People’s Socialist League, a Trotskyite group that was in regular conflict with the far larger Stalinist organization, the Young Communists League. Along with her political activities, she pursued an interest in avant-garde literature, which brought her into contact with a clique that included the poets Robert Duncan and Mary and Lili Fabilli, sisters who were as ardent about politics and sexual liberty as they were about modern verse. Along with Admiral, the four formed a makeshift bohemian family, sharing housing and fostering each other’s work. Various decisions that any of them made about work, art, love, and life were made in consultation with one another; for example, Duncan, an outlandish and openly gay young man, was apparently talked out of fulfilling his ROTC service by his housemates.*3

  After graduating with a degree in English, Admiral spent a short time studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, only to return to California and work on the Federal Art Project, with which Duncan was also involved, in Oakland. Together, they published a literary review, Epitaph, which existed under that name for but a single issue, then reemerged as Ritual and later, under different editorship, as The Experimental Review. The pair dreamed bigger for themselves and schemed about ways to get to New York and the lives of personal liberation and intellectual stimulation that they imagined awaited them there. In the summer of 1940, Admiral made her way back east, putatively to study for a master’s degree at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Before the term began, she visited Duncan in Woodstock, in upstate New York, where he was living on a communal farm dedicated to personal liberty and artistic experimentation. Then she moved on to Maine to teach art at a summer camp before finally settling in Manhattan in the fall to begin school.

  Or at least that was the idea. Admiral was living, in part, on money that her mother had borrowed from her grandfather, and she was supposed to find a room at International House, a dormitory on the Columbia campus that was considered a safe zone for unattached young women in the big, mean city. But her housing plans went the way of her academic career. Admiral began to live exactly the sort of bohemian existence that she, Duncan, the Fabillis, and their new friend Janet Thurman had dreamed of, renting a cold-water walk-up apartment facing Union Square on 14th Street, waiting tables in a Greenwich Village restaurant, visiting a psychotherapist (even among starving student artists, psychoanalysis was a fad), and focusing on her painting and writing. It was a fairy tale of the artistic life. Indeed, as Duncan would describe Admiral’s flat in his journal, “This is our last nursery—this is today’s, 1941’s projection of a Berkeley Paradise.”

  A mottled account of Admiral’s vie bohème would come courtesy of Anaïs Nin, the not-yet-famed writer who befriended Duncan in Woodstock and, in time, served as something of a mentor to him and his circle, calling them “les enfants terribles.” Like so many other European leftists and aesthetes, Nin had migrated to the United States to flee the burgeoning war, bringing with her sophisticated and even radical ideas about art and life. She was an intense draw for Admiral and her friends, who had never, of course, met anyone like her, and she introduced them to a variety of new experiences and faces to which they might otherwise never have had access.

  Nin taught Admiral, Duncan, and their set, particularly the young women, about writing, about nightlife, about sexual freedom, about behaving in empowered and assertive ways. But Nin was not entirely a beneficent presence in the lives of her new acolytes. For one thing, she felt wholly superior to Virginia and the other young women in her circle. As she wrote in her diary:

  Virginia and her friends dress like schoolchildren. 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.

  And when she described her visits to Admiral’s loft on 14th Street, she was again condescending:

  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 a lavatory outside, running water and a washstand inside, and that is all. On weekends the heat is turned off. The enormous windows which give on the deafening traffic noise of Fourteenth Street 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.… The setting is fit for Crime and Punishment, but the buoyancy of Virginia and Janet and their friends, lovers, is deceptive. It has the semblance of youth and gaiety. They are in their twenties. They joke, laugh, but this hides deep anxieties, deep fears, deep paralysis.

  For her part, Virginia would claim, years later, that she and her friends saw Nin as more of a sugar mama than an inspiration. Duncan was the only one among them truly smitten by Nin, both erotically and intellectually. But Admiral had other ideas. “My role,” she told Nin’s biographer Deirdre Bair, “was to string along with Anaïs as long as Robert felt as he did about her. We were just two kids from Berkeley, and as she took us to parties and fed us, well …”

  There was, in fact, a frankly financial aspect to the relationship of Nin and Admiral. One of Admiral’s moneymaking enterprises was working as a typist (among her clients was the poet Kenneth Patchen). As Nin was in the process of having her journals transcribed from longhand into typescript, it was natural the two should cut a deal. As Admiral remembered,

  When I first met Anaïs, she was having problems with the person typing her journals (at ten cents a page, sometimes margin-to-margin, on rice paper with a carbon in French, but not a bad price at the time). I said I would type some of them for nothing since I wanted to read them anyway. Later, when I ran out of money she paid me.… One night a week I would stay up and type one of the journals, making ten dollars, which was enough for me to live on.… The early journals were rather heartrending, but when she seduced John Erskine it seemed unduly unkind. At night, the journals that were not out being read or typed were locked in a huge safe.

  In total, Admiral would type a full sixty volumes of Nin’s diaries, the pages of which Nin then edited and returned to Admiral for retyping. After that they were again tucked away in a secure spot, awaiting their publication decades later.

  Admiral told one of Nin’s biographers that she found the material in these pages boring, but Nin claimed (in a later diary, which
, like the previously quoted passages, Admiral wouldn’t have seen until they appeared in a published volume),

  Virginia tells me she is enriched and liberated by my writing and our talks. There is an interesting interplay between Virginia and her analyst, and his comments on my work and our talks.… Virginia suddenly realized that she had never lived, loved, suffered or enjoyed.

  It was true, in fact, that Nin inspired Admiral’s circle to examine themselves in new ways, to submit to sessions of psychoanalysis and write about their inner lives. But it wasn’t the only thing they did, and hers wasn’t the only inspiration they heeded or sought. Admiral, for one, was still painting. In the fall of 1941 she enrolled in Hans Hofmann’s New York school. And there she met Robert De Niro.

  ON PAPER THEY had almost nothing in common: a blue-blooded, pre-Mayflower Presbyterian spitfire from California and a taciturn second-generation Irish-Italian American from Syracuse. He was considerably taller than her, and she, of course, was considerably older, especially given their relative youth. But in light of his sexual mercuriality and her comfort with a variety of lifestyles, there seemed to be an ease between them. Both were reckoned physically attractive by their peers. And they were among the most accomplished and praised of Hofmann’s students, which surely established a kinship or a kind of sibling rivalry—whether sexual or not. According to a fellow student, painter Nell Blaine, “Virginia and De Niro were considered among the most talented, the most gifted of Hofmann’s students. We talked about them with great respect. They left an aura.” That alone might have formed the basis of their bond. But a photo taken in the 1940s shows Admiral regarding De Niro with evident affection as they sit beside each other at a casual gathering. There was real love there.