by Shawn Levy
It was a lukewarm domestic farce, but the folks in Greensboro loved it—or at least they loved De Niro. “Acting Is Good in Barn Play,” read the review in the Greensboro Daily News, which commented that “De Niro and [Faith] Stanfield are both exceptionally talented actors. They never once let the action falter.”
De Niro, who was becoming something of a pack rat of materials from his working career, kept a cutting of that notice, as well as several others. And he wrote a letter to the Daily Tarheel at the nearby University of North Carolina asking for a copy of its review (and enclosing a dollar to cover the cost of the newspaper and postage).
It wasn’t Broadway, but it did pay: $35 a week, plus $3 a day in expenses, and he was given a room to live in right on the premises of the Barn for the duration of his stay. It was actually a bit of fun, he recalled. The show was performed in a theater-in-the-round, with the novelty of the stage actually being lowered into the theater after dinner. “We’d serve the desserts,” De Niro remembered, “and then go upstairs to prepare for the play, and then the stage would drop and we’d perform. I liked it.”
A few months later he came back, this time to Charlotte and the brand-new Pineville Country Dinner Theater, which had opened to rival the Barn chain and advertised “Broadway plays with New York casts.” In William Goodhart’s Generation, De Niro, by all accounts, stole the show in the role of a kooky obstetrician helping a hippieish young couple navigate the wife’s first pregnancy (“Those laughs the playwright didn’t give him, he took anyway,” wrote the Orlando Evening Star). The play ran for two weeks in August, during which time he also found work acting on a pair of local television commercials, one for Duke Power, one for BankAmericard. Upon returning home, De Niro was greeted with a personal letter from the president of the theater, F. W. (Bill) Lorick, who thanked him for his “fine job” and assured him, “The patrons enjoyed your work of acting very, very much.”
In reflection, De Niro was fond of the gigs. “I got so many tips that I didn’t worry about having no job,” he joked later. He reckoned it was a better job than summer stock, at least in terms of his craft: “You rehearse next week’s show while you’re playing this week’s.… At least you do the same play every night and you can learn something from it.”
He was making distinctions, making sacrifices, taking pains, all for his work. He was serious. And, again, the example of his father’s willingness to forgo the ordinary comforts and niceties of life to pursue a career was a comfort to him. “I did not have a Plan B,” he remembered, adding, “I never got to the point of needing one. I did one thing, then the next. I was able to sustain myself.” (Sometimes that meant working odd jobs, such as waiting at catered affairs; years later he remembered that he’d served Dustin Hoffman—who, of course, had gotten the part in The Graduate for which De Niro had read—at a Eugene McCarthy fund-raiser in New York on the night in June 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was shot.)
He was becoming increasingly professional. He hired a telephone answering service (Orchard 5-4372, in case you needed to reach him), but he wasn’t yet comfortable with the expense and hassle of professional representation—or perhaps he wasn’t able to secure it. “I got my first jobs without an agent,” he said. “Sent out my resume and pictures and showed up at auditions. When you’re starting out, you really have to do it all by yourself. And you still end up having to make the decisions. I don’t like people to make decisions for me.”
In 1968 he was onstage in New York again in the National Theatre Company’s production of The Boor by Anton Chekhov. And then he got an unexpected bit of good fortune: the kid director for whom he’d worked on that film at Sarah Lawrence a few years earlier (which nobody had yet seen) was making a quickie independent film, mostly improvised, right in New York, with a budget of more than $40,000. Two weeks of work, and better-paid. Plus this time, instead of a professor and another student sharing in all the filmmaking duties with him, the kid, Brian De Palma, would direct the film on his own and have as a producer and co-writer Charles Hirsch, a young talent scout for Universal Pictures who’d been sent to New York to find youth-oriented projects and fresh faces.
Hirsch understood the emerging American market for exploitation films with an arty edge. In the course of his talent search, he encountered De Palma, who was just finishing up a groovy little thriller entitled Murder à la Mod (which would be his first release, as The Wedding Party remained unfinished). They discussed making a film about American youth alienation with a Gallic twist, a Truffaut-inspired tale of a young man flailing at the world and his obsessions, which happened to mirror those of his creators: voyeurism, filmmaking, the Vietnam War, the John F. Kennedy assassination, and computer dating. A little sex, a little politics, a little slapstick, a little social satire—they could sell just the novelty of it, they thought.
In time, the pair realized they might be asking too much of an actor (and an audience) to bundle all of that up into one character’s head, so they split their hero into three heroes, a comic troika like that in The Wedding Party. Hirsch approached his bosses at Universal with the script, but they passed. He and De Palma raised the money by soliciting friends and relatives, and they planned to shoot the film in a breakneck two weeks while Hirsch was on (paid) vacation from the studio. De Palma knew how to do things cheap: “The most expensive thing in Greetings,” he later noted, “was the stock, and getting it processed.” He telephoned Columbia University, which he’d attended as an undergrad, and asked if he could use the rehearsal space and costumes of the student troupe, the Columbia Players, and maybe audition a few of them for roles.
He wound up finding one of his leads there: Gerrit Graham, a French major from New York. As Graham remembered, he learned that “there was a scenario but no screenplay” and that he’d have to improvise his audition with the other aspirants, including De Niro. After they’d both been cast, they found themselves working in what for all of them was essentially an experimental fashion. “We just plunged in,” said Hirsch, “because the only way to find out about making a film is to make a film.” The movie was basically a series of episodes, each based on a scenario that was presented to the actors to flesh out with dialogue and action of their own invention, with De Palma and Hirsch serving as guides and ringmasters. “We improvised a situation, then we filmed the scene, looked at it, and learned again,” De Niro remembered. “Then finally we shot the scene.”
“It was all ad-lib,” according to Graham, “and what struck me was that De Niro worked so incredibly hard on everything. Bob was analytical of every scene in a Method way—he had to know why this scene had to have this material, where we were going with that scene.… He was a real actor. He’d already committed himself to it, devoted his life to it.” De Palma, too, noted De Niro’s work ethic and intensity, but he saw something else as well: the actor’s chameleonic power was evident in a way it hadn’t been a few years earlier. “He showed up to shoot a scene,” he remembered, “and I didn’t recognize him. We had to hang a title card on him to remind the audience that they’d seen him earlier in the film. It was make-up and clothes, but it was more than that—he just inhabits a character and becomes different physically.”
HE HAD MADE four movies, and he still had yet to see himself on-screen in anything. But he kept at it, and in the summer another indie filmmaker looking to break into the biz hired him. Jordan Leondopoulos had written and would direct a picture entitled Sam’s Song, a European-influenced movie about a young filmmaker invited by some well-to-do old friends to spend a weekend on their Long Island estate, where he meets a mysterious girl and is drawn unwillingly into mind games, bed-hopping, and other pursuits of the idle and indifferent rich.
Like The Wedding Party, Sam’s Song was a debut film shot on spec with a tiny budget, but it was more accomplished as a narrative and a portrait of human beings than The Wedding Party or even Greetings. The mustachioed De Niro plays Sam, an aspiring director working as an editor of TV documentaries, reading André Bazin’s Wha
t Is Cinema?, living on a diet of Yoo-hoo and cheese slices, drifting through Manhattan in search of inspiration and opportunity. His college friends Andrew (Jered Mickey) and Erica (Jennifer Warren) are in a long-term relationship that’s prospering, and they appreciate his artistic purity and his quirks. The atmosphere is staid and even bucolic—a weekend-at-a-country-house movie, complete with cocktail parties, gambols on the beach, and a cruise.
The plotting, though, is threadbare. On the drive to the Hamptons (which, strangely, takes them from Manhattan through Staten Island) Andrew notices Carol, a leggy blonde (Terrayne Crawford), driving in the same direction in her Porsche; when she turns up at a luncheon party, she and Sam cavort together, and Andrew becomes frankly and obviously jealous. The next day, aboard a friend’s yacht, Andrew moves in on her (he literally takes Sam’s place in her bed within minutes of Sam’s vacating it), leading Erica to a drastic response.
It all moves stolidly and glumly, with a fair amount of pretense and opacity: for instance, when Sam and Carol discover a windmill on their promenade, he charges at it with a large log. “You cast yourself very well,” she tells him. “You think I’m a dreamer?,” he responds, as though wounded. Influences of the French New Wave and especially Michelangelo Antonioni permeate the film, but none of it feels digested.
De Niro, though, is given lots to do and plenty of chances to shine. In one set piece, he plays cops and robbers and acts out getting shot in a series of amusing slow-motion takes. Later on, Sam and Carol turn the lights of a bedroom on and off quickly and pull faces at each other, and De Niro displays rubbery comic energy. Now and again Sam is given to spouting movie quotes and clichés, a task that De Niro clearly relishes (He also displays his nude body twice, albeit never from the front.) If anybody had seen Sam’s Song at the time or in the form in which Leondopoulos made it, De Niro surely would have been noticed. But that was not to be the film’s fate. In fact, no one would see it for more than a decade: in 1980, with De Niro one of the biggest stars in movies, the film played a very brief run in New York. A few years later, Cannon Films, which then owned the rights, shot segments of a thriller about a tough guy looking for his brother and cut Leondopoulos’s movie into their new footage, using it as, in effect, the backstory. The original was utterly bastardized (for instance, the United Farm Workers documentary that Sam is editing on a Moviola in the original is replaced in the Cannon film, almost comically, with soft-core porn); retitled The Swap (and later Line of Fire), the recut film briefly played a single theater in New York.
IF HE WAS DOOMED to make movies that nobody would see, at least he still had the theater. Like the burgeoning indie film movement, the experimental theater scene in New York meant that there was ample work for somebody who was more interested in gaining experience than in working for fame or wealth or even mere pay. De Niro may have felt like an onlooker in the political and cultural events of the 1960s, but he was willing to throw himself in with any number of avant-garde artists who were pursuing radical new directions in film and theater.
One of them was Ron Link, a celebrated off-Broadway director who was preparing a revival of a campy show he’d had a minor hit with the previous year: Glamour, Glory and Gold: The Life and Legend of Nola Noonan, Goddess and Star. The play was a pastiche of the life of a tragic actress of old Hollywood (Jean Harlow’s name was often mentioned in reviews), cobbled together as a series of sketches and blackouts rather than as a sustained drama. The makeshift structure of the script may have been the result of its having been the work of a first-time playwright, a twenty-year-old drag queen named Jackie Curtis who was a rising star in the firmament of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene. The original production in the fall of 1967 became a cult smash on the strength of the casting of Curtis and another of Warhol’s superstars, the famed drag queen Candy Darling, in support of Melba La Rose Jr.—an actual woman—who tackled the lead. (Warhol came to the show and gave it a word-of-mouth review that was, coming from him, a rave: “For the first time, I wasn’t bored.”)
The Playwrites (sic) Workshop Club, which had produced the first version of the show, would do the show again, at the tiny Bastiano’s Cellar Studio theater on Waverly Place where it had played before. This time, Link would go with a less gender-bending cast, with the actress Paula Shaw in the lead role and, as in the original, a small cast of male actors playing multiple roles. De Niro certainly didn’t run with a Warholian crowd, but he heard about the play and auditioned, trying to sweeten his chances of being hired by offering to have the posters and programs for the show printed for free by his mom.
He got the part, or rather the parts, ten in all: Duke, Lefty, Vinny, Peter Billings, Leading Man, Irvin, Harold Minsky, G.I. Joe, Baby Leroy, and Grady Eagles, per his resume. It was the biggest thing he’d ever done and the greatest proof yet of the versatility and malleability that he hinted at in those composite shots he passed out along with his resumes. The play opened in August, providing De Niro with the first reviews of his fledgling career. They were very, very positive: “Robert DeNiro [sic] appears in no less than ten cameo characterizations and is a standout comic actor,” said Show Business. “He’s a master of the art of underplaying.” The Village Voice concurred: “DeNiro [sic] made clean, distinct character statements in a series of parts which many actors would have fused into a general mush. DeNiro is new on the scene and deserves to be welcomed.”
The run of the play was brief, but it was crucial in a number of ways. With it, De Niro had gotten his foot well in the door of experimental theater in New York, he had acquired his first significant positive press, and he had grabbed the attention of a young woman who would become a booster of his work and his career as well as briefly a romantic partner.
Sally Kirkland was a big-eyed, statuesque twenty-year-old blonde from Pennsylvania who had been born to a life completely different from De Niro’s. Named after her mother, also Sally Kirkland, a Vassar grad who had been an influential fashion editor for Vogue and held the same position at Life for decades, the younger Sally had been raised on Philadelphia’s Main Line and the Upper East Side of Manhattan as a debutante and society girl (Ted Koppel took her to his prom and stole a kiss). But she had chucked it all for an acting career and an offstage role as a scene-sweller in the Manhattan of the 1960s.
In the summer of 1968 she was preparing for a daring new role in Terrence McNally’s Sweet Eros, a one-act play that called for extended nudity (“My mother was showing people what to put on,” she liked to joke, “and I was showing them how to take it off”). Along with her roommate, another aspiring actress named Susan Tyrell, she took in De Niro’s performance in Glamour, Glory and Gold, and, like the critics, was deeply impressed. “He was electrifying,” she remembered, “totally different in each part. I went backstage and told him, ‘You are the greatest actor since Brando, and you are going to be a huge star.’ And after, Bobby would phone me and ask over and over again, ‘Do you really think I’m any good? Do you really think I’m any good?’ ”
There was a romance between them, but there was also an acting partnership. Kirkland was a member of the Actors Studio, the holy temple of Method acting in which Lee Strasberg practiced the Stanislavski system as he understood it. She wanted De Niro to seek admission to the Studio, but he demurred: there was a rigorous vetting process consisting of two auditions, and he was wary of Strasberg after having listened to Adler rail against her rival’s theories in her classes. Instead, they created a little Actors Studio of their own, working on scenes in De Niro’s apartment, giving real vent to their theatrical passions, as Kirkland remembered, without any fear of exposure or critique. “We had so much rage and energy in us,” she said. “We would go at each other, have knockdown fights—kitchen-sink-drama-style.”
He showed her his cache of wardrobe pieces and props. “It was like going into a costume room backstage of a theater,” she remembered. “He had every conceivable kind of getup imaginable—and the hats! Derbies, straw hats, caps, homburgs.” And in exchange fo
r her insight and connections, he offered some advice of his own. When she told him she’d been rejected for a part for which she was sure she had auditioned well, he counseled her, “You are giving away too much. Hold something back. Be mysterious. It’s more seductive.”
During their time together, De Niro was granted entrée to a slightly tonier crowd than he had known on his own, and while very few of his new acquaintances became friends or colleagues, one in particular became both, and a tremendous boon to him. Among those to whom Kirkland introduced him, during one of many actors’ nights out at Jimmy Ray’s, the saloon on Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan that served for decades as a clubhouse for young performers, was Shelley Winters, who would become his first truly powerful advocate.
Winters was acting royalty, with two Oscars on her mantle (famously, she once brought them along when asked by a director to audition for a film part, pulling them slowly out of her bag one at a time to make the case that she didn’t need to read for him to prove herself). She’d been born Shirley Schrift in St. Louis in 1920 and raised from age three in Brooklyn. She’d pursued a theatrical career throughout her teens, and she became a starlet in the blond-bombshell mode in her early twenties, with a little work on Broadway and in Hollywood. She finally found a niche in a string of films in which she played fallen women and/or the discarded victims of awful men: A Double Life, Winchester 73, A Place in the Sun, The Night of the Hunter, Lolita. Throughout that period she remained a serious student of acting, working principally with Lee Strasberg and her Actors Studio peers. And in time her dedication to the craft resulted in those Academy Awards, for her supporting roles in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and A Patch of Blue (1965).
With her brassy manner, zaftig figure, and penchant for blunt honesty, Winters had a lot of Brooklyn and more than a little bit of Stella Adler in her, and she was well known for a private life as colorful as the figure she cut in the world. She’d been married and divorced three times by 1960 (her husbands had included the actors Vittorio Gassman and Anthony Franciosa), and among the men with whom she’d shared romances, however fleeting, were Errol Flynn, William Holden, Clark Gable, Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, and Sean Connery. In her forties she had let her sexpot veneer fade, a decision that seemed to free her from all sorts of formalities, and she became the flamboyant den mother and Auntie Mame of the young New York Method acting scene, holding court in bars and restaurants, anointing tiny productions by arriving (often loudly) to take them in, encouraging study and work, and pulling strings to help further careers when she could.