De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  Kirkland, who was an unofficial goddaughter of Winters’s, insisted that she see De Niro perform, and so Winters made her way down to Waverly Place and Glamour, Glory and Gold. Right away she knew she was seeing something special. “When he moved across the stage it was like lightning,” she remembered. “Gave me tingles. I haven’t felt or seen anything like that since the ’40s, when I saw Brando in a four-performance flop.”

  Winters immediately welcomed De Niro into her graces, honoring the raw talent she saw but recognizing, too, his boyish combination of frailty, earnestness, and energy. Just a few years after meeting him, when he was beginning to merit attention in the newspapers for his film work, she gushed about him in a telephone interview with the New York Times:

  I’m Bobby’s Italian mama. Well … maybe I am his Jewish mama, but if I am, he’s my Jewish son. Bobby needs somebody to watch over him; he doesn’t even wear a coat in the wintertime.… Of course, he will never borrow, so you have to find ways of giving him money without letting him know you’re giving it to him.… 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 brutalized.

  By the time those words were printed, De Niro was already accruing a reputation for reticence in his dealings with the press, so it would be easy to imagine him being cross with his stage mama for her effusion. But amid the embarrassing kvelling, Winters offered some astounding insight into De Niro’s craft, something that she had noticed almost immediately upon meeting him and seeing him perform:

  Sometimes Bobby gives the impression that he’s dumb, that his mind is wiped out, because he doesn’t say anything. But behind those slit eyes he’s watching everything … He scares me. The things that he does with his body are truly frightening. He can blush or get white as a sheet in a second, and he could force his hair to curl on command if he wanted to.

  IN LATE 1968 Virginia Admiral hosted a private screening of Greetings at her loft on 14th Street, and soon movie audiences around the country would get a chance to see what it was that had so captivated Kirkland and Winters—or, rather, some of them would. Greetings, De Niro’s second film with Brian De Palma, was released on a single screen in midtown Manhattan with an X rating attached—only the fifth ever imposed by the Motion Picture Association of America in the two years of its ratings system (and, in turn, the first film to have its rating appealed and the first to have its appeal fail).

  Decades later it would be hard to imagine anyone being scandalized by the picture. It follows three young New Yorkers—Paul (Warden), Lloyd (Graham), and Jon Rubin (De Niro)—as they strive to avoid the draft*4 and to follow their peculiar muses: Paul’s forays into computer dating, Lloyd’s obsession with the death of John Kennedy, and Jon’s fascination with pornography and especially voyeurism, which he combines into a new medium he calls “peep art.” In a series of disjointed episodes that don’t remotely amount to a plot, they cavort around Manhattan—the Central Park Zoo, a Bleecker Street coffeehouse, an Upper East Side bookshop, the Staten Island ferry—encountering kindred and hostile souls, preying on women, scheming up ways to trick the Selective Service into classifying them as unfit for the military. Among the curiosities is a conversation between Graham and the famed English artist Richard Hamilton, widely credited with the first Pop Art painting, about making abstract art out of ordinary photographs. And there are many bits shot on the streets of the city clearly without permits or production assistants to keep out the passersby: guerilla moments that impart a strong sense of time and place.

  De Niro wears donnish little spectacles and, again, a mustache, and he speaks in a high-toned, nearly stilted diction, as if striving to rid his voice of any trace of a Noo Yawk upbringing (he doesn’t always succeed). He chases a few women, first a shoplifter (Ruth Alda) whom he directs in one of his little voyeuristic fantasies, then a leggy beauty whom he follows through Central Park to the Whitney Museum, where he is accosted by Alan Garfield, who chats him up and sells him a pornographic 8 mm film (and, in a very long take, causes De Niro to collapse with genuine laughter). As the film isn’t really a narrative but rather a series of vignettes, it’s difficult to speak about an actual characterization, but De Niro reveals a droll comic sense, an easy loquaciousness, and a genuine versatility. He’s called on to read aloud from a sex manual, to chat up girls, to behave like a right-wing fanatic (his draft board ruse is to make himself seem too eager to serve), to playact a scene in Vietnam. But his best moments are in the scene with Garfield as he continually tries to edge away from his interlocutor, dragging the newspaper he’s resting his elbows on with each sideways move as though using it to keep himself clean. Graham’s Dealey Plaza–obsessed bookstore clerk is perhaps more vividly rendered, but De Niro does many more things and does them well.

  BILLED AS “an over-ground sex protest film,” Greetings wasn’t widely reviewed. The New York Times sent Howard Thompson, who called it “tired, tawdry and tattered” and said of the cast, “Of [Graham’s] pals, Robert De Niro and Jonathan Warden, the latter gives at least some evidence of a little talent.” Briefly, Greetings became a cause célèbre. New York documentarian William Bayer wrote a letter to the Times protesting Thompson’s notice (and at least three times as long). And then it became truly celebrated, playing at the Berlin Film Festival that winter and sharing, with two other films, the prestigious Silver Bear prize.

  On the strength of the profit their tiny film had generated, Hirsch and De Palma began thinking about a follow-up, another pastiche of provocative scenes combining a little sex, a little comedy, a touch of the avant-garde, a splash of social satire. The success of Greetings meant that the budget available to them had more than doubled, to upward of $100,000. (As a lark, during the dreaming-up phase, they referred to the new film as Son of Greetings.) And this time they would be more focused in their approach. Rather than scatter the hijinks among three actors, they would have one character provide the spine of the film. Perhaps out of sheer habit’s sake, they referred to him by the name of one of the fellows from Greetings: Jon Rubin. And they wanted De Niro, the original Jon, to take on the role, the starring part in a feature film.

  Once again they would be working from a script that was more a bunch of discrete scenarios than a classically structured drama. This time, though, they began working with De Niro on his scenes well before the production or even the rehearsals. He went over the various episodes with a typewriter, scissors, and adhesive tape, stitching together specific scenes sometimes down to the level of dialogue, so that it looked like a cross between a traditional script and a ransom note. He made notes to himself—lists of props and costumes he wanted to acquire, the names of secondhand stores where some of the stuff might be found, things to do with his hair, bits of physical business. He wrote about Jon Rubin’s motivation, state of mind, and intent, and he encouraged himself in certain behaviors: “When walking always looking at girls in street.” Most of all, he roused himself to the challenge of the role: “Do whole thing with complete conviction and confidence.” De Palma and Hirsch felt the same way: they shot the picture in early 1969 and worked determinedly to release it before the end of the year.

  DE NIRO, MEANWHILE, pressed forward however he could. He was onstage in April, back at Bastiano’s Cellar Studio, in a Café Mama production of playwright Julie Bovasso’s Gloria and Esperanza. In the summer he shot a commercial for American Motors. As Joey, a neighborhood kid all grown up and making good money as a CPA, he drives a new Ambassador to his mom and pop’s shop and offers them a ride while his little brother and the others in the street all coo over the car’s air-conditioning, which comes standard. It was recognizably him in every syllable and gesture—grand arm gestures, a second-generation Italian American accent, the soon-to-be-famous crinkle-faced smile. It wasn’t a full part, of course, but he was charming, and he clearly relished the broadly drawn texture of it. It would vanish—like the Ambassador—until he became famous, when it would resurface on
the Internet, the first performance in which the actor who would soon become known everywhere was wholly visible.*5

  But if you wanted to see him actually at work that summer, you’d have to go to Arkansas, of all places, where he was joining Shelley Winters on a new film project. On August 1, Variety reported that “Bob Deniro [sic] has been cast by American International Pictures as one of Ma Barker’s notorious sons in ‘Bloody Mama.’ ” He had finally broken out of the arty New York scene and was stepping into some old-fashioned Hollywood trash. No one could say if it would be a good movie, but it would definitely get seen.

  * * *

  *1 A few years later, he would write a letter to the novelist Paul Tyner, a collegiate acquaintance of Woiwode’s, asking if he would recommend him to the prospective director of the screen adaptation of Tyner’s novel Shoot It. The film wasn’t made until 1974, as Shoot It Black, Shoot It White, with De Niro’s onetime co-star Michael Moriarty in the lead role De Niro coveted.

  *2 Department of small worlds: another walk-on role in the film, that of a waiter, was filled by Abe Vigoda, who, like De Niro, would later play a role in the Godfather saga.

  *3 Thorne would go on to later fame in exploitation films such as Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS and Wanda, the Wicked Warden.

  *4 De Palma himself was passed over in the draft because of his asthma.

  *5 The same ad campaign featured Richard Dreyfuss and Herb Edelman hawking different AMC models.

  THAT TINY ANNOUNCEMENT IN VARIETY WAS PROOF THAT HIS career had begun to take shape. Here was an actor who had appeared on-screen only once, who hadn’t been on Broadway or a TV show, and who was known just barely to aficionados of New York avant-garde theater, and yet his name was being dropped in a Hollywood trade paper as an addition to a film cast as if that were a fact worth noting.

  This small but quite meaningful step was no doubt thanks to De Niro’s having acquired his first agent, Richard Bauman, a former actor who ran a small New York office and would come to make a specialty of finding talent in the nooks of the city and helping launch it toward bigger things (he’d soon do the same for Bette Midler). Bauman not only would have negotiated De Niro’s contract (still peanuts, causing Shelley Winters to make a stink when she found out about it) but also would have seeded the trade papers with the casting news. And he would’ve been a help in getting De Niro into the Screen Actors Guild and Actors’ Equity, both of which he joined after shooting Son of Greetings (the title had changed to Blue Manhattan and then to Confessions of a Peeping John), which was still being edited. De Niro was unknown to the public, but he was becoming a commodity in the business.

  For Bloody Mama, he would demonstrate to the greatest degree yet the extent to which he took his art, his career, and himself seriously. The film, about the famed Depression-era bandit Kate “Ma” Barker and her feral brood of sons, was built to capitalize on the excitement around Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 film that had begun to bring some of the energies of exploitation movies and youthful rebellion into the Hollywood mainstream. American International Pictures, the font of much of that grindhouse fare, had already hopped on the gangster bandwagon with an Al Capone film, The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which actually beat Bonnie and Clyde into theaters. A script for a Ma Barker film was written that year, but it seemed overly violent in the wake of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy slayings. In the spring of 1969, though, AIP still saw opportunity in the project, and director and co-producer Roger Corman, the wild, kindly uncle of American exploitation cinema, went off to Arkansas to direct. The cast would include Shelley Winters in the center, Corman regular Bruce Dern as a member of the gang, Diane Varsi as the gal of one of the Barker boys, and Don Stroud, Clint Kimbrough, and Robert Walden as three of Barker’s sons; the fourth, the drug-and-candy-bar addict, Lloyd, would be played by De Niro.

  He went out to Arkansas by car, though it’s not clear that he drove (AMC commercial or no, there was some dispute about whether, as a Manhattan native, he knew how to at the time). He spent a few weeks poking around the Ozarks before the shoot getting to know the regional accents, asking locals to read his lines into a tape recorder, and learning the speech patterns so well that he served as an unofficial dialogue coach for the rest of the cast. He also helped Winters when she struggled with a scene in which she gave her four grown-up sons a bath. “I don’t even know all of you,” she told him when he asked why she was so nervous. “But Shelley, we’re you’re babies,” he reminded her.

  Before arriving in Arkansas, De Niro learned all he could about the physical reality of being an addict: hygiene, teeth, habits, diet (he became a Baby Ruth fiend during the shoot). He may have had eighth billing in the promotional materials that were being printed as the film was in production, but he worked on his part as if it were the key to the picture: going to the New York Public Library to read up on the Barkers and Alvin Karpis and to absorb photographs and music of the Ozarks in the 1930s, learning to roll his own cigarettes, filling the margins of his script with handwritten notes that dealt sometimes with minutiae (“blow nose with finger, wipe nose on sleeve”) and sometimes with profundities (“The satisfaction I have when stoned is so much better than the life around us. That’s a key for me”). His chief transformation was physical: always thin, he dropped twenty or thirty pounds to play Lloyd, even staying up all night before some of his scenes to achieve a hollow aspect, acquiring without the help of makeup a pallor over his skin and even some sores on his body. His Jewish mama was, naturally, alarmed: “I thought he was concentrating too much on externals—I mean, the things he did to his body!” But as De Niro reminded himself in a note in his script, Lloyd was not wholly of this earth: “I’m closer to God. Always alienated.”

  For all the pains he took, he nevertheless had bouts of self-doubt along the way. One night in Arkansas he confessed his anxiety to Winters, and she wrote him a note the next morning, telling him, “You have a marvelous mind, instinct and talent. Leave yourself alone and GO.” When he finally got himself together, he did so in a way that actually frightened her. Lloyd was the first of Ma Barker’s boys to die, collapsing of an overdose by a lakeside, and De Niro chose to play the scene of his corpse being discovered even though he wouldn’t be photographed in it. He crawled down into the shallow grave that Lloyd’s brothers had dug for him and lay there to, he said, “help the actors … once they saw me like that, they were forced to deal with it.” He stayed in character in the makeshift grave throughout lunch, he recalled, even though technically his character no longer existed. And he nearly got Winters to join him in his make-believe afterlife … in real life. “I walked over to the open grave,” she remembered, “and got the shock of my life. ‘Bobby,’ I screamed, ‘I don’t believe this! You come out of that grave this minute!’ ”

  The pace that Corman kept pleased him, and he was given additional bits of business as the film progressed, such as driving an old car down to a ferry landing, something that, he wrote in his script pages, was “fun to do.” In fact, he noted many of his impressions of the production, writing on the very first day of shooting, August 12, that “Roger is brief, gets what he wants and goes on to the next take without much excessive shooting on each set-up.” They were done in Arkansas, after twenty-six days of work, before the end of September.

  The shoot didn’t delight everyone. An Arkansas College professor and three of his students who’d been hired on as interns quit midway through to protest the explicit violence, nudity, and drug use. That sort of news would only help such a film, of course; if Brian De Palma was piquing the movie ratings board with satire and titillation, Corman and AIP were blasting at them with blood and bosoms. Before the film was released, it was advertised on the Sunset Strip with a billboard reading, “The family that slays together, stays together.” Though it was a tremendously tone-deaf gesture just weeks after the arrest of Charles Manson and his “family” for the Tate-LaBianca murders and garnered much protest, AIP kept using the slogan to promote the film. />
  THE MARKETING OF Bloody Mama would be a typically splashy AIP affair, and De Niro would take part, traveling to a few select locations, including North Carolina, to promote the film with personal appearances, complete with replica tommy gun. But there was yet more work ahead of him: the film had barely wrapped when he was off to another job, appearing with the Theatre Company of Boston in December 1969 in a repertory presentation of three short plays: The Basement by Harold Pinter, Captain Smith in His Glory by David Freeman, and Come and Go by Samuel Beckett. It was only a five-night stand and only a regional theater, but it was an important gig: such talents as Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, and Robert Duvall, all of whom were emerging ahead of him, had been through the company in recent seasons, and artistic director David Wheeler would soon offer work to the likes of Al Pacino, Stockard Channing, and Blythe Danner. But De Niro felt that he was on the cusp of bigger things, with two films due in the spring, and he returned to New York after the run ended.