De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  Bertolucci, too, knew he had a problem on his hands. “The first few days were a nightmare,” he admitted. “But I told myself that what I had felt about Bob when I met him was so strong I couldn’t have been wrong. I began to try to help him build confidence, and slowly a fantastic actor emerged. The fact is that with Bob you mustn’t judge by the first few days. He’s a very sensitive and probably neurotic person, so a director can be fooled. But if one has patience, well, it’s worth it.”

  The conflict, though, was deeper than they could ever work out. Bertolucci came from the Italian school in which the director was absolutely the autonomous power on a film; De Niro thrived on partnerly collaboration with his directors. As a result, rather than give his star the room and time to find his way into the role, Bertolucci instructed him outright how to behave, a tactic that completely rankled De Niro. “Bertolucci … would tell me what to do,” he complained later. “As a person I liked him very much, but as a director he has another style that for me wasn’t as good as it could have been.”

  As the months dragged on, the career that De Niro should have been enjoying in American films was left to idle. Martin Scorsese still wanted him for that cab driver project that he had sharpened together with screenwriter Paul Schrader, but De Niro’s absence caused delays that threatened the financing. (Scorsese, to his credit, wouldn’t budge when it was suggested he go with another actor: “I can’t do it without Bobby. I gotta have him,” he said.) And Harry Ufland, who should have been casting his hot young star in lucrative and high-profile works, kept deferring offers from studios and filmmakers until finally, in a sense, he threw up his hands and let De Niro carve his own path. “Bob will never be a movie star,” the agent sighed. “He is just not seduced by glamour.”

  Then in December, while De Niro was still living in hotels in Italy, The Godfather, Part II arrived fully finished into the world, and the stardom that was rumbling in the background of his life became, inescapably, its dominant theme.

  * * *

  *1 The makeover of the setting was so complete that the outdoor pay telephones were removed, and everyone on the set, De Niro included, had to use the handful of phones that were available inside stores along the block. Patient Old World Sicilian that he had become, at least temporarily, De Niro waited quietly in line along with extras and crew members for his turn to make a call.

  *2 Just a few years later, Toback would make his directorial debut with Fingers, by which time De Niro was too much of a heavyweight to headline a small film; the part went to Harvey Keitel.

  *3 It’s worth noting here that De Niro only partly pulls off the masquerade of being a baseball player. He has the moves down when behind the plate and runs the bases with a professional (or at least semipro) vigor and intelligence. But he’s utterly unconvincing at bat, swinging from the elbows with his laughably skinny arms.

  *4 A detail of some interest here: Pearson is apparently a Vietnam veteran, extremely rare for a major-league player of the time. As this detail couldn’t have been in the source novel, which was written fifteen years before the film was made, the question of whether Harris, John Hancock, or De Niro himself added it to Pearson’s biography remains beguilingly open.

  *5 The arts complex closed in 1974 when the building suffered a collapse, but one part of it, a renovated kitchen, would live on for decades as The Kitchen, a famed New York performance space.

  *6 The poet Marianne Moore had lived in the downstairs apartment with her mother at that address (which was sometimes listed as 71 Leroy Street) for more than a decade in the days before De Niro was born.

  FRANCIS COPPOLA’S SECOND GODFATHER FILM IN LESS THAN three years opened in five Manhattan theaters on December 14, 1974, and the reception was absolutely rapturous, maybe better than that accorded the first film. And as for De Niro, whatever reservations the critics had (and they were few) about praising him for the double-barreled debut of Bang the Drum Slowly and Mean Streets were utterly obliterated. His performance was hailed instantly as a work of mastery, and overnight he went from being an actor’s actor to being a star—in, of course, his tenth screen appearance (thirteenth, technically, if you counted walk-ons and unreleased films).

  In a rapturous review in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael said that De Niro “amply convinces one that he had it in him to become the old man that Brando was.… It is much like seeing a photograph of one’s own dead father when he was a strapping young man; the burning spirit we see in his face spooks us, because of our knowledge of what he was at the end … suggesting Brando not from the outside but from the inside.” Similarly, Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times noted that “De Niro, hoarse-voiced and imperiously handsome as he grows in assurance, does an amazing job of preparing us for the Brando we remember.”

  To be fair, the New York Times actually panned The Godfather, Part II, Vincent Canby saying, “The only remarkable thing about [it] is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better [the first] was.… It’s a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from leftover parts.… The plot defies any rational synopsis.” Accusing Coppola’s film of “self-parody,” Canby didn’t spare the stars: “De Niro, one of our best young actors, is interesting as the young Vito until, toward the end of his section of the film, he starts giving a nightclub imitation of Mr. Brando’s elderly Vito.” But this was decidedly the minority view of what would come to be hailed as a classic performance.

  MARLON BRANDO’S Vito Corleone was a lion: courtly, patient, slow-moving, wise, judicious, deadly. He made speeches, coined catch-phrases, cracked sly jokes, spoke in judiciously weighed words, flashed anger only when absolutely necessary, and did everything in cautious proportion. He was solid and authoritative, a man who lived his creed (however crooked it might be) and demanded a similar integrity of those around him. He treasured his family, stood resolutely by his word, and treated friends and enemies with just fairness.

  The young Vito Corleone, whom De Niro would play, would effectively fill in the background of this titanic figure. He would embody a bridge connecting Sicily to New York, 1891 to 1955, the Old World to the New. He would be an immigrant without resources who fashioned himself into a man of respect: part hoodlum, part businessman, part king. He would kill with guns, knives, words, patrimony—whatever it took. He would demonstrate in nascent form the unforgettable qualities of the elder man who was still fresh in the minds of movie audiences. And he would do it all in minuscule portions, with very little dialogue.

  De Niro would appear in less than 47 minutes of the 202-minute theatrical cut of The Godfather, Part II. He would speak a mere 122 sentences, many of them fragmentary, and most of them in the demotic Sicilian that De Niro had mastered, often paring away at his lines to achieve a more credible semblance of the silence and cunning of the mature character. Brando spoke in fluent, flowery English, but De Niro’s Vito Corleone has but seven lines in his adopted language, forty-two words in all, many of them muttered, all of them heavily accented. The powerful impact he imparts comes not from his tongue but, indeed, from his entire being.

  De Niro’s Vito is a watcher, staring in silence at his children, at his wife, at a stage show, at a parcel of guns, at a looming threat. He absorbs everything around him and rarely projects any emotion whatever, and yet his thought process is somehow always apparent. Partly this is the effect of the audience’s knowledge that he will become the character played by Brando. But partly it is because of De Niro’s amazing ability to become, in effect, translucent, to allow himself to be inhabited by the character’s inner life and use his body and especially his eyes to convey it. He creates intimacy or draws lines of enmity with a gesture, a posture, a gaze.

  As a measure of De Niro’s strength in the role, consider Vito’s relationship with his wife, Carmella, played by Francesca De Sapio. By the time De Niro enters the film, in 1917, he is married with a son, and he relies on his wife to run their meager little household in a traditional, responsible, respectful manner. Returning home with so
me bad news, he places a pear, carefully unwrapped from its paper packaging, on the dinner table; as he watches, she expresses delight with the surprise, and he breaks into a smile. As they sit to eat, he puts his hand over hers and stretches across the table to kiss her cheek. Several times in the ensuing scenes Vito communes similarly with her: watching as she tends to the ailing Fredo, helping her serve dinner to his (literal) partners in crime, listening patiently as her friend complains about ill treatment at the hands of a slumlord. Now and again Vito communicates his feelings to his wife with a gaze, but never in words. It’s astounding. The two actors (and Coppola) create an impression of a complete marriage, a loving partnership, an intimate understanding, and yet De Niro’s Vito speaks not one word aloud to De Sapio’s Carmella. It’s uncanny.

  Vito is almost equally taciturn with his enemy Don Fanucci (Gaston Moschin), a Black Hand big shot. Vito’s friends Abbandando, Clemenza, and Tessio are all cowed by the gangster, but Vito regards him as someone to be tested for strength of character. The two have three encounters, and in each Fanucci does the majority of the talking and Vito is the observer, heeding each word and probing beneath it to feel whether it is supported by steel or air.

  De Niro’s Vito has three conversations that account for the majority of his dialogue in the film:*1 a brief talk when he loses his position in the grocery, a strategy session in which he convinces Clemenza and Tessio to trust him to handle Don Fanucci, and a meeting with a slumlord in which he tries to convince the man to change his mind about evicting Carmella’s friend. Tellingly, all of these have to do with money and with relationships of power. Vito expresses or promises gratitude and loyalty in each case, assuring the others of his steadiness and attempting to convince them to go along with his wishes. In each case, along with his escalating power, his words carry real weight. Buying oranges at a fruit stand, he finds that the peddler won’t accept his money. “If there’s something I can do for you, you come, we talk,” he tells the man. It’s his longest line in English in the entire film, and it is the foundation of the life and career of Vito Corleone.

  In the absence of words, De Niro creates his character out of gestures, poses, and gazes. The first three times the film fades from the tale of Michael Corleone in the late 1950s to Vito in the 1910s and ’20s, De Niro is captured staring silently: at the playful Sonny, the ailing Fredo, the fruit seller’s wares. The second is the most characteristic: in his undershirt and suspenders, standing outside the bedroom where the baby is being treated for pneumonia, he’s as thin and edgy as a jackknife, unable to offer any assistance, beset by real anxiety, silent but revealing his fear in the way he shields his body and face from the scene. His empathy and helplessness are palpable.

  In action, he is a man of calculation, resolve, and purpose. He kills Fanucci with three bullets, the last of which he delivers with cool calculation directly into his victim’s mouth. He rifles the man’s pockets for money, then moves swiftly but collectedly to the roof, smashing the murder weapon and scattering the pieces of it into various chimneys. Afterward, he walks determinedly against the flow of a crowd to the stoop where his family waits. He puts the toddler Michael on his lap and waves a tiny American flag with him, having, in a sense, arrived anew in the New World by eliminating an emblem of the old.

  De Niro has also, in a sense, usurped Brando’s place. He only slightly resembles the older man, but he has the rasp in the voice (which becomes more pronounced as the character ages) and much of the body language: the stiff-backed formality, the habit of stroking his face with his fingers when engaged in deep thought, the impeccable wardrobe, the slicked-back hair. He has hints of Brando’s jowliness and one of Brando’s most famous lines—“I make an offer he don’t refuse”—but more than that he has Brando’s bearing. In barely forty-five minutes of screen time, De Niro has suggested how one of the most memorable characters in film history rose from grocery clerk to Mafia lord, and he does it less by projecting forward than by finding the seeds of the older man in the younger and letting them germinate in a way the audience can see. When you recollect that this is the first that critics or moviegoers had seen of him since the stunning one-two of Bang the Drum Slowly and Mean Streets, there is little wonder that he was being hailed as potentially the most gifted actor the screen had ever seen.

  WHEN THE OSCAR nominations came around, The Godfather, Part II was overwhelmingly acclaimed, with eleven nominations in all, including three for Best Supporting Actor: Michael V. Gazzo, Lee Strasberg, and De Niro.*2 Francis Coppola, nominated as director and screenwriter for Godfather II, as he had been for the first film, was also cited as the sequel’s producer. In combination with the nominations of his other film The Conversation for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, it was a stupefying achievement. The other players in the Best Picture race were Chinatown, Lenny, and The Towering Inferno, but, esteemed as at least the first two may have been, Godfather II was easily the strongest candidate.

  The nominations for Gazzo and Strasberg were particularly revealing, both of how well acted the Godfather films were and of how the array of performances in them was related directly to the Stanislavskian system that Strasberg (and, of course, his rival Stella Adler) had so long promulgated. The dean of the Actors Studio hadn’t been seen on-screen for more than twenty years, yet the first Godfather film was built on the performances of two of his most celebrated students, Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. The sequel would add both Strasberg and Gazzo, the author of the play A Hatful of Rain, which had been performed by Actors Studio students consistently for decades.*3 Either of them could have been selected as a sentimental choice by the Academy, as could have Fred Astaire for his role in The Towering Inferno. Although Inferno was a ludicrous nominee for Best Picture, it had eight nominations altogether, and the producers of the Oscars telecast were planning a tribute to the great dancer to be performed by one of the evening’s co-hosts, Sammy Davis Jr. It seemed entirely possible that the three Godfather II actors could split the ballot for Best Supporting Actor between them and allow Astaire to waltz off with his first Oscar.

  De Niro was working on 1900 in Italy when the nominations were announced, and he was still there on April 8, 1975, when the Oscar ceremony was held on a rainy night in Los Angeles. It would turn out to be a tumultuous evening, going down in history for the remarks about the Vietnam War that Bert Schneider, producer of Best Documentary winner Hearts and Minds, made during his acceptance speech and for the angry rebuttal penned backstage by co-hosts Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra and read aloud on the broadcast by the latter. By the time those fireworks had exploded, the Best Supporting Actor prize had already been announced by the father-daughter team of Ryan and Tatum O’Neal: Robert De Niro for Godfather II.

  In the absence of his star, Coppola accepted the prize, as he would three Oscars of his own that night for Godfather II, which took six prizes altogether, including Best Picture. He declared, “Well, I’m happy that one of my boys made it. I think this is a very richly deserved award. I think Robert De Niro is an extraordinary actor, and he is going to enrich the films that are made for years to come, and I thank you on his behalf.”

  De Niro didn’t offer a statement immediately, but he was interviewed about the Oscar later that spring and tried delicately to dance around his feelings about a competitive prize that had been publicly shunned or denigrated in recent years by the likes of Brando, George C. Scott, and Dustin Hoffman. “Lots of people who win the award don’t deserve it,” he told W magazine, “so it makes you a little cynical about how much it means. Did it mean that much to me? Well, I don’t know. It changes your life like anything like that will change your life. People react to it. I mean, it’s not bad winning it.” This ambivalence may have been at the heart of things a year or so later, when Coppola, interviewed for a profile of De Niro, opined, “I like him, but I don’t know if he likes himself.”*4

  AS RECOGNITION FOR his impressive achievement of the past few years mounted, both inside and outside the business,
De Niro felt something new: a pressure to choose roles well, rather than the automatic drive to go after every possible opportunity that presented itself, no matter how ill-suited or beyond his grasp. “I’ve got to decide what I want to do,” he fretted to a reporter. “People now tell me if I will consent to a project, they can get the deal going. But what should I commit myself to? ‘Godfather’ took a year of my life. This one (‘1900’) will take another year. The years go by and what will be left?”

  But, in fact, he knew what he was going to do. While making 1900 he would be granted regular hiatuses, and he usually used them to return to New York (though, in fact, he dallied in Italy at times, often with female companions). On September 11, 1974, in a municipal building on Beaver Street in lower Manhattan, he applied for a hack driver’s license at the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission. And now and then over the coming months he would arrange to drive a taxi through the streets of the city, hacking through the city at night and never refusing to go to the most dangerous neighborhoods, preparing to make that movie about a cab driver that so captivated Martin Scorsese.

  He seems to have wandered in from a land where it is always cold, a country where the inhabitants seldom speak. The head moves, the expression changes, but the eyes remain ever-fixed, unblinking, piercing empty space … Travis is now drifting in and out of the New York City night life, a dark shadow among darker shadows. Not noticed, no reason to be noticed.… Then one looks closer and sees the inevitable. The clock spring cannot be wound continually tighter. As the earth moves toward the sun, Travis Bickle moves toward violence.