De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  The battles Coppola would wage in the coming months to get his preferred cast would become legendary. There was the war over Marlon Brando, who seemed happy to burn every useful bridge he had to Hollywood but who perked up at the thought of playing Mafia boss Vito Corleone. One of the biggest names in movies, Brando was forced to do several screen tests, some in full makeup, before he finally won the approval of the studio. An even bigger struggle was over Coppola’s desire to cast Al Pacino in the role of Michael, Vito’s son and reluctant successor. The studio saw no upside to having this unknown, broody actor in such a key role, and they demanded that Coppola test virtually every actor under forty in the business. Coppola’s notes for the process would list a number of names for every key role in the film—joining De Niro and Pacino in the list were Dustin Hoffman, Martin Sheen, and Michael Parks—and many of these shot screen tests for the role. De Niro’s was strong enough that Coppola tested him further for the role of Michael’s hot-headed older brother, Sonny.

  It was an impressive effort. Dressed in a dark sports coat and a pork-pie hat, with his shirt buttoned to the neck but not wearing a tie, his hair, worn fashionably long, held in place by bobby pins, he adopted a preening, sneering humor to read Sonny’s warning to Michael about what it was like to shoot a man, spinning around and gesturing with crackles of energy, interjecting self-amused notes of disbelief (“Madonna mi!”), smiling with genuine menace as he tells his brother that he’ll get “brains all over your nice new Ivy League suit,” holding that last syllable with a musical hint of mockery. Coppola was dazzled—“spectacular,” he called it, “Sonny as killer”—but he was realistic, too: “It was nothing you could ever sell.”

  Besides, James Caan, who’d also tested for Michael, was being cast by the studio as Sonny. So De Niro was penciled in as Connie Corleone’s traitorous husband, Carlo Rizzi, only to see the role go to Gianni Russo, a Las Vegas TV show host who’d never acted but spent $2,000 on a screen test of himself and sent it the producers. Finally, he was offered the part of Paulie Gatto, errand boy and chauffeur to the capo Pete Clemenza (the guy who would utter the famous line “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”). A tiny part, but a big step. Naturally, he was excited.

  And then he had his hopes dashed. Coppola finally won the Battle of Michael, getting his bosses to agree that Pacino was the right choice for the role. But Pacino was under contract to MGM—in fact, he was about to shoot a different Mafia picture for them. The two studios worked out a deal with a curious wrinkle. In exchange for letting Pacino go, MGM wanted Paramount to give an actor to replace him in their mob movie. Paramount agreed … and gave them De Niro.

  THE GANG THAT COULDN’T SHOOT STRAIGHT was a 1969 novel by New York newspaperman Jimmy Breslin, who turned the recent Mafia wars within the Colombo family into a garish, ghoulish, and truly hilarious satire. The focus was the outcast crew of Crazy Joe Gallo, transformed in Breslin’s hand to Kid Sally Palumbo, a chic and daring but not too clever mobster with aspirations to take over a crime family from the aged and wily gang boss Baccala. The novel lampooned mob rituals, mob families, the operatic religiosity of gangsters, the rococo aesthetics of Italian Americans, even the great Italian love of bicycle racing. The book was so clearly going to be a smash hit that Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, talent agents who’d gotten into the producing biz and had such pictures as Point Blank, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, and The Strawberry Statement to their credit, optioned it in February 1969, before its actual publication. They had big plans for the film, talking about hiring Marcello Mastroianni to play Kid Sally and Al Pacino to play the role of Mario, an Italian bicycle racer and petty thief visiting America as part of one of Kid Sally’s moneymaking schemes. But Mastroianni still considered himself unprepared to appear in American movies, and Pacino, off to play Michael Corleone, was out. So the lead went to Jerry Orbach, a recent Tony Award winner for the musical Promises, Promises. And De Niro stepped in as Mario.

  The film was set to shoot in and around New York in the spring of 1971, at exactly the same time that The Godfather was in front of the cameras in the same city, which had to sting. But De Niro dove into the work of his part with what would become famously characteristic commitment. His character was an Italian thief and con artist who comes to New York as a competitor in a multiday bicycle race but spends his time glomming everything he can—clothes, food, consumer goods, and, when wearing a stolen priest’s suit, cash donations from sentimental Italian Americans who intended their money to benefit his (completely fictional) tiny parish back home.

  Mario’s part was written largely in broken English, and De Niro thought it sufficiently important to get the character’s accent right that he asked the producers if they’d send him to Italy to study the language. They balked at the cost, but he went anyway, at his own expense, for a quick linguistic immersion. He spent his own money on some pieces of wardrobe as well, adding to the store of costumes in his 14th Street apartment. And, as ever, he made fastidious character notes in his script, describing Mario’s shoplifting technique as a form of studied nonchalance: “I make believe I don’t see where to pay or how. It’s like something that doesn’t concern me.”

  Among the things that Mario steals is the heart of Angela, the young sister of Kid Sally and the white sheep of her family, a college girl with no part in the Palumbos’ life of crime. The role went to Leigh Taylor-Young, who had become famous when she had an affair with and then married her Peyton Place co-star Ryan O’Neal (who was married when they met) and had been in a number of flashy films, including I Love You, Alice B. Toklas and, with O’Neal, The Big Bounce. Like Orbach—and, indeed, like director James Goldstone and most of the key members of a cast that included Lionel Stander, Jo Van Fleet, and Herve Villechaize—Taylor-Young had no ethnic connection to the material, and she was a bit intimidated when De Niro showed up at rehearsals with an impeccable accent and a seemingly absolute connection to his character.

  But she was put at ease when he suggested that they spend a day or two traveling around New York City in character, with her taking the lead as the local showing the sights to the out-of-towner. They visited a few famous spots, took the bus, and then, at De Niro’s suggestion, tried their hand at a little shoplifting at Macy’s in Herald Square, where they were promptly collared and turned over to the police. Explaining their actual intent, they urged the cops to phone the production office, where somebody vouched for them and secured their release. It was, finally, a comical incident, but one that drew the actors close; they had, Taylor-Young later revealed, a brief affair that ended with the production.

  HE HAD THREE films coming out virtually simultaneously at the end of the year, but he kept working. In November, he took a role in one of a pair of one-act plays being staged by the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, which had just launched a series of workshop productions under the rubric “Explorations in the Forum.” Kool Aid, as it was called, was composed of two works by Merle Molofsky, a former Miss Beatnik of 1959 who was studying playwriting at NYU with Jack Gelber, noted author of the famed drug world play The Connection, who would be directing.

  As Molofsky remembered, Gelber was very excited that De Niro was going to be in one of the two short plays, Three Zen Koans. “He told me, ‘I’m casting someone that no one has ever heard of yet,’ ” she said. “ ‘He just finished shooting a film, and when it premieres he’ll be one of the biggest stars in the world.’ ” Such was Gelber’s certainty that the role in which he cast the gaunt, gangly De Niro was a character called Fat Boy. That surprised the playwright, who, Molofsky recalled, “always envisioned a fat actor. But it didn’t matter. [De Niro] was rock-steady. He gave a beautiful performance, and he was hardworking, scrupulous, and attentive.”

  Also in the cast was Verna Bloom, a stage and television actress who had just appeared in the films Medium Cool and The Hired Hand and who was married to Time magazine film critic Jay Cocks. Bloom didn’t care for the play, in particular for a plot line involving the junkie
s having gotten a noisy child high to keep her quiet. “I had a real problem with that,” she remembered. And she wasn’t overly impressed with her co-star. “He was just this guy at the time,” she said. “He wasn’t near showing us he was gonna be an icon. But he was fun.” They stayed in touch after the show’s five-performance run.

  WHILE DE NIRO was in rehearsals for Kool Aid at Lincoln Center, Born to Win had its premiere in the very same location, during the New York Film Festival of October 1971. It made its way to commercial theaters at the end of the year, almost simultaneous with the short release of Jennifer on My Mind. In fact, neither film was very much noted at the time: the vogue for gritty tales of urban junkies was short-lived, and these films came near the end of it. De Niro, however, made a favorable impression in at least one. For Jennifer, his gypsy cab driver was virtually the only aspect of the film critics found worthy of praise: he was commended in Time and Boxoffice, and the Hollywood Reporter positively raved about him: “There is one memorable, original character in ‘Jennifer on My Mind’: Mardigan, or ‘the gypsy cab driver,’ ” declared Craig Fisher, adding, “Apart from De Niro, there’s not much that’s memorable.… Watching it is like mainlining taffy.”

  There’s little to say about his work in Born to Win, which has points of interest as a low-key film of its moment and milieu; De Niro’s few scenes seem to have been shot in just a few days (three of his four appearances find him wearing the same costume), and aside from his habit of calling the sorry junkie he’s roughing up “Baby,” he leaves as little impression as any run-of-the-mill TV cop of the time.

  He was more memorable in the far more forgettable Jennifer on My Mind, blasting into his single scene in a psychedelically painted purple taxi and greeting his fare with, “I think I should warn you, Mac: I’m pretty high.” Sporting a goatee and wearing a silky bandana on his head (because, as he explains, “it’s a gypsy cab”), he speaks in a nasal, stoned tenor that recalls Dennis Hopper, trying to get his passenger to drop his plans for a ride to Oyster Bay in favor of going back to the cabbie’s house, getting even higher, and maybe having sex with his sister. No dice, comes the reply, provoking De Niro to sigh, “The gypsies lose again.” (As, alas, did anyone who paid money to see the wan and insipid movie.)

  Far splashier in all ways proved the release of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Even before the release of the film of The Godfather, Mafia stories were in vogue, Breslin’s book was well liked, and this was an MGM picture, with a guaranteed big release. Unfortunately, it’s truly tone-deaf as a comedy. Goldstone handles the material cartoonishly, a choice driven home by the movie’s posters and advertising, which were drawn by Mad magazine illustrator Jack Davis. The physical humor is leaden and repetitious, the tenor and staging are grotesque, the ethnic touches are offensively broad, the nods toward the hip far too square. Everyone overacts out of his or her shoes: Orbach with his idiotic Kid Sally, Stander with his guttural madman Baccala, the oversized Pierre Cardin executive turned actor Irving Selbst (who also appeared in Born to Win, oddly enough), and the dwarfish Villechaize, whose voice is dubbed so deep that if it were a hole he would have vanished in it. It’s cacophonous and wearying. Only Jo Van Fleet, turning Kid Sally’s bloodthirsty grandmother into a Grand Guignol Italian mammarella, affords any entertainment, and then chiefly because she’s so insanely distinct from the shambles of a reality around her that she actually seems plausible.

  But interspersed through the film is De Niro’s Mario, a vivid, fresh, and thoroughly appealing character—larcenous, insincere, and crooked to the bone, but open-faced, wide-eyed, handsome, and amazingly gallant toward the girl he fancies. Mario steals everything he lays an eye or a finger upon, but he offers to pay for Angela’s meals and taxi rides, he treats her with gentlemanly courtesy, and at the film’s climax he makes a choice that proves ruinous for him but saves her from injustice at the hands of a desperate district attorney. He comes from poverty, explaining that he eats chipmunks and dandelions back home, and devours what he calls “American food”—pizza and Italian ices—with gusto. With his olive complexion enhanced by a tan, his hair grown out in a Prince Valiant bob, his body slender and springy, and an appreciation of the wonders of America crackling from his eyes, he’s immensely appealing.

  And, unlike almost anyone else in the film, he’s comical without being cartoonish. He steals scenes by slipping around the set and literally stealing: ashtrays, peanuts, hotel towels, canapés, a priest’s vestments, statues of saints, and so on. He makes such a lark of larceny that you forget that it’s wrong. He kisses money. He hides things in his pockets that are actually meant to be taken gratis, as if thinking only stolen things have value. And when he poses as a priest and starts seeking donations for a nonexistent church back home, his mockery of sacraments and blessings and clerical manners is impeccable, at once a mirror image and a slight, knowing distortion. His broken English is good, his Neapolitan-accented Italian is fluent, his physicality is lively: he’s easily the highlight of the film. Beside him, Taylor-Young, attempting to sound New Yorkish and feisty, is hapless. The film is De Niro’s, stolen just as surely as Mario steals everything in the coldwater flat he rents.

  The critical consensus was the same. The New York Times called the film a “tasteless mess”; Newsweek moaned about its “lamentable goings-on”; the genteel Films and Filming complained about “offensive gags that choke on themselves”; and in Time, De Niro’s friend Jay Cocks wrote, “You don’t have to be Italian to hate ‘The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.’ ” But to a one the reviews cited De Niro as a—if not the—saving grace of the enterprise: the Los Angeles Times praised his “raffish charm,” Variety called him “particularly good,” and various other outlets, perhaps taken by De Niro’s impression of being taken with Taylor-Young, praised the young lovers as the film’s highlight. It didn’t matter, though. Even with the success of Breslin’s novel behind it, the film sank at the box office.

  AT THE END of the year, De Niro hovered in a strange place professionally and personally. He had made seven films, including one produced by and three released by major studios, receiving good reviews regularly. He had made an impact on the stage in experimental works of increasing visibility and reputation. He continued to network and audition and pitch himself relentlessly, augmenting the efforts of his agent with his own determined careerism. At age twenty-eight, he was supporting himself: living on his own in his childhood home on 14th Street, which had been passed to him by his mother, and finding steady work, no longer thinking of waiting tables, putting in stints at his mom’s print shop, or enduring stretches on unemployment insurance. He had been involved in romances with a number of women, and he had done some traveling.

  But he was far from set in his path or his ways, and his acting career in particular still seemed a tenuous thing. He had no reason to think things wouldn’t continue to open up for him—but to date they hadn’t opened up all that wide. Among his peers, he was proving something of a late bloomer.

  If this all nagged at him, he didn’t show it. The aspect he wore, particularly professionally, was quiet, focused, pointed. If he ever brooded about his situation, it was camouflaged by his characteristic reticence, so observers saw him chiefly as quiet and shy and not self-absorbed or moody. Besides, he was gradually, genuinely getting somewhere. He may not have been riding the same rocket as Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino, but he was being sought after for work and commanding a little more money each time.

  In December, though, he had nothing lined up as he made his way to a Christmas Eve party at the home of his Kool Aid co-star Verna Bloom and her husband, Jay Cocks. It was an annual event, with a crowd of film and theater folk always on hand.

  Despite the holiday air, De Niro was in no mood to celebrate. He had been dating another member of the Kool Aid cast for a little while, and the two of them arrived at the party under a cloud. “They must’ve had a fight before getting to our place,” Bloom said, “because he spent the evening not utter
ing one word—not to her, not to us.”

  De Niro knew a good number of folks at the party, none so well as Brian De Palma, who despite his friend’s mood was very keen to introduce him to another guy at the party—another independent filmmaker, another young Turk looking to bust into the business, another native New Yorker, another misfit Italian American, a chum of Jay Cocks’s.

  His name was Martin Scorsese.

  I said to him, “Hey! Didn’t you use to hang around Hester Street?” Bobby didn’t answer, just stared at me—he does not look at you, he considers you—so I stared back. Then I remembered: “It was Kenmare Street—the Kenmare gang.” And Bobby goes, “Heh heh.” I hadn’t seen him in fourteen years.