by Shawn Levy
During the latter months of the academic year, De Niro moved in with Admiral, and when summer arrived, they made their way to Hofmann’s Provincetown school together. When Hofmann headed back to New York at season’s end, Admiral and De Niro chose to stay on for a time, and he went to work at a fishery to help keep their little household afloat. But there was another moneymaking scheme in the air: Nin had been in Provincetown as well, and she enlisted the help of her clutch of young bohemian friends in writing pornography that she sold to a private collector who paid her a buck a page, first for fully formed fictions, ultimately for juicy passages alone. Although she found the famously scandalous pages of Nin’s diaries “boring,” Admiral was game to try her hand at writing erotica. However, Nin deemed her initial effort “too satiric.” De Niro, with his love of Verlaine and Rimbaud (as Nin remembered, he “wanted to hear all about life in Paris”), had been doing some writing of his own at the time, and he was at least willing to try to earn a dollar with a pen, even if it was smut for hire. But it wasn’t his ideal medium. As he later remembered, “I was working in the fishery … and having a hard time with money. Anaïs Nin suggested I write some pornography at $1 a page. Thirty years ago that was a lot of money.… It was very hard work, so eventually I went back to the fishery.” Additionally, the couple threw parties to help cover household expenses. “Every Friday night Bob and Virginia had a rent party,” remembered Larry Rivers. “You danced, you drank, and you brought money.”
There was some trauma between the pair that summer. One night De Niro revealed to Admiral that he’d been sexually intimate with Duncan, instigating a row loud enough to be heard in an adjacent studio. According to Nin, during a lull in their quarrel the two suddenly heard one of their neighbors addressing them through the thin wall: “I have been listening to you. I have been weighing all your arguments. I think that Virginia is absolutely fair and right and the behavior of Bob and Robert treacherous and ugly.” (In another account, the unseen commentator declared that De Niro had behaved “like a real shit.”) For the circumspect De Niro, this was an utter humiliation, at least as Nin imagined it in a diary:
Bob was completely shocked that anyone should have heard his homosexual confession and passed judgment on him. He had to know who it was, who now knew so much about him and had judged him. He did not recognize the voice.… He rushed out into the town. He sat at bars. If anyone looked at him too intently, he felt it might be the one. He wanted to talk with him, explain himself, justify himself. Every face he saw now he imagined was the face of his accuser, of his judge.… The idea was unbearable to him. He walked with his shoulders bowed. He was silent. He looked haunted.
De Niro would struggle with depression and neurosis throughout his adult life, but this was the first time it became manifest to his friends.
Eventually the couple returned to New York for the winter. De Niro found work waiting tables alongside Tennessee Williams at the Beggar’s Bar, a celebrated Greenwich Village watering hole that their old Provincetown acquaintance, Valeska Gert, had opened. The jobs didn’t last long—Williams’s lover of the moment, another painter who was also working at the bar, apparently flipped out over the policy of pooling tips, leading Gert to rid herself of the troublesome lot of them.
Nin, too, was out of the picture, weary of dealing with Admiral’s provincialism. She was out one evening with Admiral and De Niro and talking about the various great artists she had encountered since arriving in New York. “Virginia stopped me with a prim tone of voice,” Nin wrote. “ ‘I’m not interested in the unfamiliar. I like the familiar.’ After this I kept away from them.”
Money for such necessities as food, rent, and art materials was still scarce, but a bigger challenge faced them all that December when the United States entered the global war and the likes of nineteen-year-old Robert De Niro and twenty-two-year-old Robert Duncan would have been prime candidates for service. Duncan, the ROTC dropout, was eventually drafted and spent several weeks in boot camp before wrangling a discharge on the basis of his homosexuality. De Niro, who had begun a furtive and sporadic sexual relationship with Duncan, had another means of avoiding the war: not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he and Admiral were married.
THE FOLLOWING YEAR provided plenty of excitement for the newlywed couple. For one thing, they began to experience some real—if modest—success in the world beyond Hofmann’s classroom. Admiral sold a canvas to the Museum of Modern Art for the princely sum of $100 (about $1,350 in 2013 dollars) and then another to Peggy Guggenheim, who had arrived in New York and begun to acquire and exhibit the work of new young artists at her 57th Street gallery, Art of This Century. De Niro would later acknowledge how impressive these sales were: the young Admiral, he recalled years later, was “a very good painter.” As he put it, “What she was doing then wasn’t fashionable,” he recalled, “and a woman painter had a harder time.” Nell Blaine, another painter in Hofmann’s classes, affirmed the rare stature that Admiral—and De Niro alongside her—had attained: “Virginia was the only student I knew at that time to sell a painting to the Museum of Modern Art.”
The couple had another important patron in Guggenheim’s uncle, Solomon Guggenheim, who had begun to amass the collection that formed the basis of the famed Fifth Avenue museum that would eventually bear his name. At the time, the nascent institution was known inelegantly as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, and as part of its mission it had begun to offer small stipends to promising young artists, including the cream of Hans Hofmann’s school. Admiral and De Niro were granted $15 per month each by a foundation run by Guggenheim’s mistress, Hilla Rebay (Baroness Hildegard Rebay von Ehrenwiesen), who further aided the young couple’s fortunes by hiring De Niro as an information desk clerk and night watchman at the museum, a position that found him working alongside his chum Jackson Pollock.
These windfalls allowed Admiral and De Niro to move from the 14th Street loft into a pair of adjacent studios on Bleecker Street. Likely they needed the space as much for personal as artistic reasons: before the year was over, Admiral found herself pregnant. And on August 17, 1943, the child, destined to be their only one, was born. They chose Hans Hofmann to be the baby’s godfather, a purely honorary title, as no baptism was intended. They named the boy Robert Anthony De Niro, but around the house they would always call him Bobby.
* * *
*1 The Holtons descended from the Woodson family of Virginia, among whose descendants are Dolley Madison and Jesse James.
*2 Now the Everson Museum of Art.
*3 Among the younger students who ran with the circle centered on Duncan was Pauline Kael, who looked with admiration upon Admiral and her friends. Decades later, Kael would experience a long, ambivalent relationship with Robert De Niro’s film performances.
IT’S INEVITABLE, PROBABLY, THAT WE THINK OF ROBERT DE NIRO as a product of the tumult and color of Manhattan’s Little Italy, as he first came to prominence in Mean Streets and The Godfather, Part II, both of which were set (and partly filmed) there.
But in fact his childhood was spent a few crucial blocks north on Bleecker Street and, later, 14th Street, and the milieu in which he was raised wasn’t the stereotype of an Italian American household, with hordes of relatives, massive pasta dinners, and the twin rule of the Catholic Church and the Mafia. Rather, he was a child of Greenwich Village bohemia, more familiar with the aroma of paint thinner than that of marinara sauce, usually the only kid at the party, a living emblem of bourgeois normalcy and adult responsibility in a world given over to aesthetic exploration and escape from social taboos.
“Our standards were so pure, we treated with scorn any humdrum references to the personal,” painter Nell Blaine remembered of the world she and the De Niros inhabited. “Concepts, ideas were exchanged. Anything less was a tasteless distraction.” A baby in a painter’s loft may not have been tasteless, but it certainly constituted a distraction. De Niro and Admiral were still scraping for money to pay for the basic things of life, an
d they were still doggedly pursuing their artistic ambitions. Additionally, the elder De Niro was himself only twenty-one years old when he became a father, a green age for a man struggling not only with his sexual identity but also with his commitment to a field of endeavor that was unlikely to afford him a family wage.
There was, however, the promise of the moment, a surge of activity in New York that would soon affirm the city as the capital of the international art world. The United States had joined the war, yes, but it was still thousands of miles from the battlefields, and the city had provided a safe haven for a great many of the artistic luminaries who had helped create the various strains of contemporary art in Europe during the previous decades. Combined with the energetic young American painters who had been raised on modern ideas and techniques invented in the Old World, it made for America’s first truly energetic art scene. If you were doomed, by fate or choice, to be a starving artist, New York in the 1940s was a pretty promising place to do it.
Admiral’s reputation continued to grow while Bobby was still in diapers. In 1944 she was among twenty-four painters and sculptors selected for Peggy Guggenheim’s Spring Salon for Young Artists, providing what the New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell called “a gay if rather scattered oil lyric.” The following year, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited the canvas it had previously bought from her (Jewell saw in it “abstract lyricism” but once again found her work “rather scattered”). And then in 1946 she was afforded a show of her own at Art of This Century, exhibiting six paintings alongside a selection of works by the jazz critic and artist Rudi Blesh (Jewell, again, offered as much praise as not, describing her as “a not too tidy lyricist with an often pleasing color sense”).
By then, though, De Niro had superseded Admiral in the general esteem of the art world. In late 1945 he had a canvas appear in the Fall Salon at Art of This Century. And in May 1946, at age twenty-four, he had a one-man show at the gallery, an astounding coup marking him as a true meteor. The show, billed as a “First Exhibition of Painting,” consisted of ten canvases that were priced for sale at $100 to $600. The titles give an idea of the young artist’s emerging aesthetic; three of the paintings bore allusive names (“Environs of Biskra,” “Ubu Roi,” “Abstraction”), but the rest were given representational titles that would have been familiar to a Renaissance master: “Portrait of a Young Man,” “Fruits and Flowers,” “Woman in Armchair,” “Still Life with Flowers,” and so forth. Combining a deep-seated respect for tradition with an urge toward modern expressivity, De Niro’s work of the time depicted real objects and people and places but used the techniques of abstract art. A vase, say, might be indicated by two distinct elements: an energetic area of color that suggested the physical gesture that created it and a similarly energetic but more controlled outline, often thick, black, and composed of a single stroke. The influence of Matisse and the Fauvists was clear in the color and shapes, but there were bits of Cézanne, Cubism, the not yet defined school of Action painting, and classical representational art in it as well.
De Niro’s maiden show was respectfully received and widely reviewed. In the New York Times, the omnipresent Edward Alden Jewell praised the painter’s “stimulating audacity” and noted the connection to Fauvism, concluding, “Color is savagely brilliant; the primaries, set off by black.” ARTnews described the work as consisting of “circular and oval shapes, warmly colored,” arranged into “handsome, vaguely sexual patterns.” And in a significant coup, the great and influential critic Clement Greenberg, writing in The Nation, declared De Niro an “important young artist” exhibiting “monumental effects rare in abstract art.” He offered powerful praise for De Niro’s technique: “The originality and force of his temperament demonstrate themselves under an iron control of the plastic elements.” But he had some reservations that ran counter to the impression his fellow critics took away from the show: “Where De Niro usually goes wrong is with his hot, violent color.… It is as if De Niro wished to compensate himself for his restraint as a draftsman by self-indulgence and bombast in his color.”
By any standard, this was a significant splash to make in the New York art world, especially at such a tender age. For a time, De Niro was spoken of alongside such peers as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline, few of whom had yet enjoyed a one-man show and all of whom were older than him, sometimes by decades.
AS THE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISTS—and the critics who favored them—rose to prominence in the years after World War II, De Niro slowly drifted from his exalted position. In part this was due to temperament: as the excitement grew around the new school of New York painters, De Niro remained doggedly adherent to the combination of classical subject matter and modern technique, of precise craft and expressive energy. Now and again he toyed with novelty, such as in his canvas “Venice at Night Is a Negress in Love,” in which he painted a passage of prose onto the canvas in a concession to contemporary fads. But such trendy gestures had little appeal for him. De Niro seemingly could partake of trendy practices only if they were contained inside a specific context—a single painting or a series executed to see through a single idea. Otherwise he showed no great enthusiasm for them, and they had no discernible echo in his larger aesthetic. As Abstract Expressionism grew in popularity and impact, he could even become antagonistic toward the movement, or at least to its looming presence over the practice of modern American art: “Contemporary abstract art is a heap of confusion, hatred, and paranoia, with a good dose of pretension,” he remarked a few years later. “Rembrandt could have drip-painted too, if he had wanted. I’d take Grandma Moses any day over this frenzied lot.… With all their theories and manifestos they sound like science fiction.”
But there were personal reasons that may have led to his inability to turn his Art of This Century show into the launching pad for a profitable career. By the time the show was presented, he and Virginia Admiral had separated, whether due to his ambivalent sexuality, to friction arising from their competing art careers, to disagreement about the financial exigencies of establishing a household suited for raising a child, or (and this is least likely, as their later lives would bear out) to simple personal incompatibility. After a brief initial period around 1945, when the separating couple quarreled over custody and the boy was sent to Syracuse to spend time with his father’s family, De Niro and Admiral continued to live near each other and to raise their only child more or less in harmony. She assumed the more active parenting role by far, effectively maintaining full custody of the boy, and her husband (they wouldn’t officially divorce for more than a decade) would continue on his singular, focused, iconoclastic path, taking only nominal financial responsibility for his child and, in fact, coming to depend on the largesse of his ex-wife to support him and his career.
A maniacal perfectionist and committed aesthete, De Niro so required freedom to pursue his work that he was willing to forgo ordinary standards of financial and physical comfort. “He is lean and brooding and he has frequently gone hungry for want of artistic compromising,” Newsweek said of him. He continued to work as a museum guard (he held the position, at least part-time, for five years), then sometimes as a picture framer, painting instructor, janitor, or dishwasher, or doing other sorts of odd, menial jobs. Very occasionally he worked on commissions. And as his son later remembered, he lived in uninviting and obscure parts of lower Manhattan: “He had these dank lofts in NoHo and SoHo at a time when nobody wanted to live in those areas. (Often he was the only tenant who wanted to live in the building.)” His preferred mode of life at the time, he confessed, was to turn everything upside down, perhaps in order to keep from falling into habits or routines, perhaps to escape the psychological depression that could occasionally trouble him.
His housing situation was often so tenuous that De Niro depended on Admiral to look after his finished canvases, a decision that had unfortunate consequences a few years into their separation, as his son remembered: “When I was about five
,” he recalled, “I went to visit Macy’s to see Santa Claus, and when I came home there was a huge fire in my mother’s apartment, so some artwork was lost,” the toll apparently including some of the canvases exhibited at Art of This Century and the companion piece to “Venice at Night.” And because he kept artist’s hours and lived in such bohemian circumstances, De Niro saw his son less and less regularly. The places in which he lived, in fact, seemed singularly unsuited environments for a child: “As a kid, I remember I’d visit him at his studio,” the boy recalled years later. “We weren’t living together. I was living with my mother, and it was nothing like his studio as you see it now. It was like a real studio, a total mess, and it stank of paint and turpentine.”
Given his professional and personal circumstances, it was perhaps no surprise that De Niro didn’t mount another solo show until 1951, when he had three exhibitions at the prestigious Charles Egan Gallery and acquired more admirers among the ranks of critics and cognoscenti. His work was especially well received in the prestigious pages of ARTnews, which dedicated dozens of reviews to him over the decades, almost all of them favorable. This was to some degree the doing of Thomas B. Hess, the influential critic for and, eventually, editor of the magazine, who began championing De Niro with that first Egan show: “He must now be ranked among the best of the younger artists to have emerged from anonymity.”
Over the years, De Niro’s work was celebrated by ARTnews critics such as Henry McBride and Frank O’Hara (“each show of his is an event”) almost without reservation, even when other publications, particularly the New York Times, took a more measured approach to their praise or offered none at all. But even with influential boosters, De Niro’s star was waning. The fashion of the moment—Action painting, Abstract Expressionism, the artist as bohemian hero expressing his inner angst on canvas and in daily life without regard to public norms or approval—was a far cry from the work that De Niro was doing and the type of life he preferred to live. As he matured, the elder De Niro expressed a variety of impulses and predilections, sometimes genuine eccentricity of the sort often associated with bohemians but just as often considered an affect or pose. He played tennis and chess, studied metapsychology, took singing lessons so as to be able to perform gospel music (albeit never in public), and taught himself French to the point at which he could not only read his beloved Symbolist poets but write verse in their language (he was fond of signing letters “Bob Verlaine De Niro”). He kept pets in his stream of studios and lofts: parrots, a Maltese named Napoleon, and even a rabbit. He ran regularly at a downtown YMCA, with “a kind of funny stride,” according to a friend. And he cut a startling figure, per his longtime advocate Thomas B. Hess: “tall, saturnine, given to black trench coats, his face as sharp as a switchblade.”