De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  His script for the shoot was marked up, in a fashion he would follow for the rest of his life, with all sorts of insights, reminders, questions, prompts, and instructions, much the way that Stella Adler’s script analysis class had taught him. “I have a disrespect for things like people’s clothes,” he wrote of his character, Cecil, “so I keep touching people all the time, and the same with any and all objects … Keep looking at all the nice broads that pass. Think which is good for a lay and which is not … Use napkin and don’t put it in lap but finish and throw it in plate on rest of food … I bought my suit for $25 at Smith’s Bargain Hall.” Tiny, seemingly inconsequential things, written in a crabbed hand, but they would be the sorts of pry bars he would use to open up the script and the role and climb inside.

  The film that resulted from all of this work was a sporadically charming, overlong pastiche about an uncertain bridegroom who must work out whether, in fact, he’ll go through with his wedding during a long weekend spent on an eastern seaboard island. Charlie (Charles Pfluger) arrives via ferry, accompanied by his groomsmen, Cecil (De Niro, billed as “Denero”) and Alistair (William Finley), and finds himself cowed by the blue-blooded milieu in which his intended, Josephine (Clayburgh), has been raised. His chums tempt him to ditch the whole thing, but he chooses to stay on, only to develop cold feet all on his own before the fateful ceremony. Finally he submits, and the film ends with the pealing of wedding bells.

  De Niro, his face still round with baby fat, his head crowned with a buzz cut, plays Cecil as an overassured jock, arriving at the island with gear for fishing, water skiing, hunting, and baseball, and speaking in the fusty, patrician manner of a man of far older years. There isn’t enough written for Cecil to be made into an actual character, and a few of De Niro’s scenes would be altered into incomprehensibility by the post-production decision to impart a vaguely druggy style to them, but he does convince in the role of a worldly and mature fellow, and there is nothing of the Greenwich Village bohemian boy or the Little Italy street kid in his performance. When the film was finally seen by critics, he was one of three actors cited by Variety as “making any impression.”*2

  THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD of his son’s nascent career, the elder Robert De Niro continued to live, however precariously, in France. His son wrote to him regularly, entreating him to return home, to no avail.

  As his friend Larry Woiwode suspected, the subject of his parents was an extremely sensitive one for Bobby, and it could release a startling and angry energy from him when he felt prodded. There was the incident of a watercolor painted by the elder De Niro entitled “The Actor.” Visiting De Niro’s apartment—a new one, larger, on 14th Street, closer yet to Admiral’s place—Woiwode had expressed admiration for the picture. Months later, when Woiwode and his wife moved into their own place in Brooklyn, De Niro and his sweetie of the moment (not the French girl, but a waitress from Max’s Kansas City) showed up with a housewarming gift: “The Actor.” Bashful and clumsy, Woiwode protested that it was too generous, saying, “Your dad gave it to you.” But Bobby assured him that wasn’t the case: “I kind of took it from stuff at Mom’s! He’s got hundreds. Oils! I like a lot of them better.” After a little while, and some drinks, Woiwode tried once again to beg off the gift, and this time De Niro exploded: “It’s not good enough for you? You’re too damn special or what?” He leapt up and, yanking his girlfriend by the arm, left the apartment.

  Woiwode grabbed the painting and gave chase, hoping to make amends. He caught up to them in the street and found De Niro in a fury:

  “You’re giving it back?” he yells, and grabs my shirt and spins me so hard buttons pop and the watercolor flies the length of my arm.… He bends me backward over the pickets until I’m sure its spear points of steel will puncture my spine. [His girlfriend] screams, “Bobby, stop that! Stop! You’re friends!” That does it; he lets go.… I accept the gift, I thank him, and it’s over.*3

  IN EARLY 1965, the elder De Niro returned to New York, finally persuaded by his son that it was the only place in which he could restart his career. “I eventually convinced him to get on a plane,” Bobby recalled. Having seen his father safely returned to Manhattan, the son made good on his promises to help him professionally. And there really were opportunities for the painter. Through his dealer, Virginia Zabriskie, he had sold forty-odd canvases from the past decade to Joseph Hirschhorn, and some of his newer works had sold as well. Zabriskie scheduled him for a one-man show in January 1965, his first exhibition since his return home, which would require him to produce a lot of work—just the thing to get him back into the swing of the city.

  The elder De Niro had shipped canvases, materials, and personal belongings back from France, and his son enlisted Woiwode, their quarrel behind them, to help move his dad’s effects from the shipping yard to his new studio. They stuffed everything they could into a rented truck and then found themselves with a few oversized canvases—erotic paintings of women—that wouldn’t fit. So they dropped the top of Woiwode’s Bonneville and rode into Soho with them, father and son balancing the paintings during the slow promenade.*4

  And there was another favor: would Woiwode permit his wife, Carole, then pregnant with their first child, to pose for the senior De Niro as he prepared work for the new show? At first Woiwode tried to stammer a demurral, but Bobby assured him that it was on the up-and-up—his own girlfriend would be posing, and she wouldn’t be nude or anything. The Woiwodes discussed the matter and Carole agreed. As ever, De Niro was a frantic presence in his studio, punishing himself with his perfectionism, trashing efforts that didn’t meet his high standards. “If they didn’t fall right in the first strokes,” Woiwode’s wife told him of the watercolors De Niro was attempting, “he not only tore the sheet off, he balled it up, then tossed it across the room.”

  On the night of opening, the Woiwodes accompanied the two Robert De Niros to the gallery and were greeted by the appearance of yet another De Niro—Henry, the father of the painter, in town from Syracuse to see how his son’s career was faring. Woiwode remembered him as “tall and heavyset, silver-haired, with a way of walking with his arms out from his sides, as if about to quick-draw on the louts he sees on the street, as he calls them.”

  After the show, they all went for dinner. Walking along the street, they came upon Bobby’s girl’s boss from Max’s, who she’d been complaining had been forward with her, pawing at her and making lewd chat. Told who the man was, Bobby pounced on him, grabbing him by the collar, shoving him against a building, hitting him in the head, and warning him of worse: “You touch my girl one more time and I’ll bust your ass, you fucking scumbag!” Eventually his father and grandfather pulled him off (“Bobby, you cannot do that in this city,” Henry told him), and the groper, terrified and chastened, fled into the night.

  * * *

  *1 Two decades later, no longer involved with the theater, Sklar would see De Niro in the only Broadway performance of his career, in Cuba and His Teddy Bear, and she came away with the same impression: “I was right. He was brilliant in front of the camera, but it didn’t come across the same way in the theater.”

  *2 De Palma wouldn’t finish editing The Wedding Party until 1966, and it wouldn’t be released until 1969, when he and De Niro had acquired a patina of indie film cred and someone saw some commercial possibilities in it. Over the years, it was released on video and DVD as a De Niro/Clayburgh film (in fact, they would almost never be on-screen together in a single shot), and one bottom-feeding distributor billed it, with almost larcenous disingenuousness, as “De Palma!! De Niro!! De Clayburgh!! De Lovely!!” (De trop.)

  *3 Decades later, Woiwode still owned the painting.

  *4 The 2012 film Being Flynn, in which De Niro played a wayward Manhattan father struggling with mental issues, included a version of this very scene, with De Niro enlisting the help of his son (played by Paul Dano) and his chums to fetch his belongings out of a storage unit.

  SUDDENLY HE WAS DRIVEN.

 
He would audition for almost anything—plays, movies, student projects, commercials. He’d show up, always prepared, distribute head shots and clippings, and mention his experience and schooling if he thought it would matter. He made a job of going out to look for jobs, on his own, without an agent, tireless. “If you don’t go, you never know” became his mantra, and he’d hold on to it for years, sharing it with other hustling wannabes, dispensing it as advice to newcomers once he’d ascended, passing it on to his own children as a family ethic.

  He wasn’t afraid to look for or ask about work anywhere. Tagging along to a literary party with Larry Woiwode, he peppered John Updike with questions about who owned the film rights to Rabbit, Run.*1 He showed up for auditions in empty storefronts where potential directors conducted business sitting on flattened cardboard boxes on the floor. He tried out for student productions.

  “I had an optimistic outlook,” he remembered. “I sent out my resume and went to open calls. I felt like a gambler. If I didn’t go, I would never know. I was never discouraged as long as I was acting. I read for a lot of things.”

  His resumes were a particular specialty. Because he had access to unlimited typesetting and printing through his mother’s business, he built a small library of head shots—single images and composites in the guises of various personae: cops, cabbies, beatniks, a hippie with a guitar, a Chekhovian man with glasses and suit, an Italian gangster with cape and goatee, even some with his hair apparently dyed blond, and beyond that a thick pile of photos of him in various suits, coats, and hats, with dark glasses, cigars, a pistol, and so on and so on, often two or four to a page, many, many pages’ worth. “He had a portfolio in which he appeared as an 80-year-old man and in costumes of all kinds,” recalled the famed casting director Marion Dougherty of his first appearances on her desk. “I had never in my life seen anything like that.”

  He was projecting an image of himself as a chameleonic sort of actor, not a leading man but somebody who could play a variety of offbeat types. And he had a healthy attitude toward the entire process. “I didn’t have a problem with rejection,” he said, “because when you go into an audition you’re rejected already. There are hundreds of other actors. You’re behind the eight ball when you go in.”

  He did, though, have a particular name he liked to drop when appearing at a casting session—not Stella Adler’s, but that of his dad. “I’m Bob De Niro,” he’d say, introducing himself. “I’m sure you’ve heard of my father.” (Sometimes he’d even bring clippings of his dad’s reviews or images of his work.) The New York arts world was relatively small, after all; one never could say for sure who might have heard of whom.

  AND SO HE WENT on auditions, some successful, some not. He also expanded his studies, attending Raphael Kelly’s speech class at the Shakespeare Studio and studying a bit with the acting teacher Luther James. In late 1964 he landed a walk-on part in a film called Three Rooms in Manhattan, directed by, of all people, the French master Marcel Carné, famed for Les Enfants du Paradis, Le Quai des Brumes, and other milestones of the pre–Nouvelle Vague French cinema. The story, about an older man obsessed to the point of criminality with a young woman, was adapted from a Georges Simenon novel; a few years earlier, René Clément had come close to filming it with Henry Fonda and Simone Signoret, and there had been previous rumors that Federico Fellini would make it with Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau. Carné, who had Maurice Ronet and Annie Girardot as his leads, was apparently quite the volcano on the set, excoriating the union crew for its slow pace and bridling against the efforts to give the film a slick American feel. (As it happened, the film never received a proper release in the United States, not even in New York.)

  None of that likely mattered to De Niro. Visible in two separate sequences set in restaurants in the first half hour of the film, he got a couple of days’ work and, in addition to the pay, some valuable insight into the business. “I remember a bunch of other young actors,” he said, “hanging around, moaning and bitching, all made up, with pieces of tissue in their collars; it was the kind of thing you always hear about actors—where they’re just silly or vain, complaining back and forth, walking around primping, not wanting to get the make-up on their shirts.… I didn’t want to be around those people at all. I just walked in and walked out. I was nervous, though, just to say the line ‘Gimme a drink.’ ”*2

  Without an American release, it was as if the film had never been made, but that would be a glorious fate compared to what happened to his next film. In 1965, attending an audition that was advertised at Stella Adler’s Conservatory, he was cast in one of the two lead roles in a movie written and directed by the Argentine playwright and filmmaker Norman C. Chaitin. Chaitin had enjoyed a little bit of critical and underworld success with The Small Hours, an independent film, made on a minuscule budget, about the life of a Manhattan ad executive who goes bohemian on a visit downtown (“The dolls and guys of Greenwich Village and the real gone pads where they get their kicks,” read the movie poster for the film when it was rereleased in 1969 as Flaming Desire).

  Chaitin’s new film was an adaptation of his own play Times Square Encounter, about the accidental meeting of a woman and the son she gave up for adoption. Once again the director was working with his own money, with a skeletal crew, on borrowed locations at the Mayflower Hotel near Lincoln Center and a nightclub on Central Park West; costumes and props were loaned by generous friends, and meals were provided by the director’s wife. It was pure indie filmmaking. “The actors weren’t paid,” Chaitin remembered. “Nobody was paid. I wasn’t paid. I did it with my own money.”

  De Niro, recommended for the job by Adler, got the lead role. Playing his mother—although almost the exact same age as him—was another Adler student, Dyanne Thorne,*3 who almost didn’t make it through the production alive. “They shot a scene of me in a shower,” she remembered, “through a frosted door. The lights fell into the shower, and there were sparks everywhere, but luckily I hadn’t stepped into it yet.”

  Even with the shadowy nudity of the shower scene, the film, according to Chaitin, was De Niro’s. “The son’s part is the most important,” he said. “The scenes between him and the mother were very emotional. I wouldn’t have finished the film if he wasn’t talented.”

  But, in fact, he didn’t quite finish it. After shooting and editing the film, which had been retitled Encounter, Chaitin was called back to Argentina because of an illness in his wife’s family. He left the film at a lab in New York so that they could finish the post-production work he’d begun, instructing them to hold on to the negative—the only copy of the film—until his return.

  That return, alas, was nearly a decade later, and when he finally made it back to New York, Chaitin found that the lab to which he’d entrusted his movie had gone out of business and nobody knew where its unclaimed contents were stored—if, in fact, they were stored anywhere at all. Nobody, in short, would ever see Encounter. “I think it would have been a fine film,” Thorne reckoned. “Everyone was excited about it at the time, and we were all full of energy.”

  Chaitin spent years trying to track the movie down, then noticed that a fellow who resembled his leading man had become a genuine movie star and acting phenomenon. He confirmed that it was the same guy by digging out a shooting script and finding the words “Close-up on De Niro” scribbled on a page in his own handwriting. “He was a star from the beginning,” the director said.

  In the years following the shoot, De Niro mentioned his work in Encounter on his resumes. But, like the director, he never saw it. Chaitin, who continued to write plays and whose son, Gregory, became a famed mathematician, never made another film. But he could always boast a singular achievement, even if he didn’t have the film footage to prove it. “I was smart enough to choose him for my movie,” he said. “What I saw in him is what everyone else saw afterward. I feel honored that I was the first one to give De Niro a leading role. I’m very proud of that.”

  FOR THE NEXT YEAR, De N
iro continued his litany of auditions, augmented by the occasional working (but almost never paying) gig: a role as The Sheriff in a production of Arthur Sanier’s God Wants What Man Wants at the Bridge Theatre on St. Mark’s Place; a part as The Poet, the narrator of a production of The World of Günter Grass that featured a similarly unknown Charles Durning (a New York Times review by Stanley Kauffmann praised Durning as “completely credible” and failed to single out De Niro from among a cast prone to “transparent staginess”). He was given the opportunity to read for the lead in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, one of only two unknowns to be offered that chance, but he was far too raw and didn’t really get anywhere near it.

  Keeping himself afloat financially could be a dicey thing, even with his mom supplementing his income. But, like his dad, he kept his overhead low (he rode a bike to save cab and subway fare), and he didn’t mind living a little rough. “I had years where I didn’t work,” he admitted. “Unemployment, stuff like that. Typical, usual stuff. I was lucky in that there was always something that I would wind up doing from here to there. It kept me moving just enough. I had down periods, but not where you would give up and say, ‘I’ve got to do something else.’ ”

  Surely thoughts of doing something else crossed his mind in the summer of 1967, when he left New York in April for a spell of work at the Barn Dinner Theatre in Greensboro, North Carolina—not exactly the sort of promising journey that his father had made when, as a teenager, he undertook a nearly identical trip to nearby Black Mountain College.

  The Barn was the second in what would become a small chain of regional theaters that specialized in bringing relatively recent big-town shows to smaller cities in the South. De Niro had been cast in a role originated on Broadway by Anthony Quinn in Sidney Michael’s Tchin-Tchin: Caesario Grimaldi, a construction worker who tries to seduce the wife of a surgeon out of revenge for the surgeon’s having seduced his wife after removing her appendix.