De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  Kazan, for his part, was deeply impressed by De Niro’s exactitude and commitment, noting, “He’s very precise. He figures everything out both inside and outside.… Everything he does he calculates. In a good way, but he calculates, just how he sits, what his suits are, what ring is where.… Everything is very exact.” And he was nearly overwhelmed by his star’s work ethic: “He’s the only actor I’ve ever known who called me on Friday night after we finished shooting and said, ‘Let’s work tomorrow and Sunday together.’ ” He did, however, notice that De Niro was prone to overdoing things: “He’s getting thinner and thinner. I’m worried about him. Thalberg … had a rheumatic heart and was very frail. Bobby went to the greatest lengths to get that. I admire him for it.” (At least one member of the cast thought it was an uncanny transformation. Ray Milland, who knew the real man, said, “De Niro is very much like Thalberg: very meek, very quiet, very thin.”)

  But not everyone involved with the production was similarly enamored. Spiegel, one of those old-school producers who worked independently of a studio and reckoned that every cent spent on a film was coming right out of his pocket, tried, according to De Niro, to shortchange him on his salary. “Sam pulled one on me,” the actor remembered. “He tried to finagle paying me what he said he would. It was very simple. I don’t understand why people do that. He was famous for it. And yet he had good taste and he was funny.… I still walked away from him, though. In the make-up trailer one night when we were shooting, Sam came over and said, ‘Bobby …,’ and I said, ‘Sam, you didn’t do what you were supposed to do.’ ‘Well …,’ he said, and I just walked away from him. But I liked him.”

  The feeling wasn’t necessarily mutual. Kazan had lobbied Spiegel to give De Niro the part—he had literally taken the actor by the arm and dragged him to a hotel suite, where he made the introduction—and Spiegel fought the casting even after the film was under way. Spiegel complained that De Niro brought “no nobility” to the role and that he insulted Spiegel behind his back around the studio. He denigrated De Niro’s work while watching the daily rushes. He tried to scrimp on the wardrobe, complaining to Kazan that De Niro had asked for fourteen tailor-made suits. Once, as De Niro and Kazan ate lunch with him at the Paramount executive dining room, Spiegel excused himself and walked over to where Robert Evans, the young production executive who’d green-lit Love Story, Chinatown, and the two Godfather films, was eating. “Look at Irving Thalberg over there,” Spiegel said quietly to Evans, indicating De Niro. “He doesn’t even know how to pick up a knife and fork.”

  But De Niro stayed aboard, and Kazan finished the film, which would be his last. Compared to the protracted post-production De Niro’s other recent films had been put through (1900, which wrapped before shooting began on Taxi Driver, was still being edited), The Last Tycoon made it from the sound stage to the screen in very quick order, and reactions were mixed to sour.

  DE NIRO, if it’s possible, is almost too true to the material and the character of Monroe Stahr. He captures the character’s caution, reserve, reticence, prudence, and emotional stillness in such a way as to seem almost as if he’s not in the film at all but rather a ghostly presence, as the dying Thalberg may well have been, pouring all his energy into the one thing he’s incontestably best at—making movies. Excessively formal, perennially under wraps, pallid, with a flat affect and the hoping-to-please tenor of a boy being allowed to sit at the grown-ups’ table, he sips water cautiously, gives orders in a soft voice, and floats elegantly but almost mistily through the film. It all feels played exactly as Kazan and De Niro had wished—and it’s all lifeless and remote and tepid, as if De Niro were reading the part to himself rather than inhabiting it for an audience.

  Stahr’s milkiness is part of the story—his physical frailty, the incongruity of his talent and his manner, the longing of a young widower, the dreaminess of a man who can make up a beguiling film premise out of thin air or pinpoint the exact problem with someone else’s story, the earthly disinterest of a man who works all day and leaves his beach house half finished partly because he’s mournful and partly because he’s other than (more than? less than?) human. Toward the end of the film he acquires a physical solidity, engaging in sex and boozing and even a fistfight (he doesn’t get a single punch in and gets knocked on his ass with the first blow).

  It’s tough to fault De Niro’s performance, as he appears to be doing exactly what was asked of him. He is meant to be vaporous, evanescent, vague, a ghost in the making. And that’s precisely what he is. You’re never magnetized by, compelled by, or even terribly interested in Stahr; the film’s only red-blooded character, in fact, is the labor organizer, played by Jack Nicholson, who quarrels with Stahr and puts him down with that lone punch. De Niro manages to hint at an inner life, but that, too, is cloudy, couched, obscure. It’s the imitative fallacy in action: an embodiment of wanness suggesting a wan character. It’s no wonder at all that the picture and his role in it had so little impact.

  If Tycoon was a setback, it was only a minor one. Taxi Driver was still dominating conversation about American movies when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival—and, in the great tradition of the event, was booed not just once but twice: once upon screening, once again upon winning the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. And it was part of the mix on Oscar night 1977, when it was up for a mere four awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress (Jodie Foster), and Best Original Score. (It would win nothing, as Rocky and Network dominated the evening.) Schrader and Scorsese may have been ignored by their peers in the Academy, but their film was clearly resonant in the culture. On Oscar night, Scorsese was under the cloud of a threat from an enraged fan of Jodie Foster, who said that if the actress won a prize for the things Scorsese had made her say and do, he’d pay for it with his life. The director was surrounded by FBI agents and was, not surprisingly, relieved when Beatrice Straight took home the Best Supporting Actress prize for Network. (Also swept aside in the evening’s surge of recognition for Network was De Niro’s performance; along with Giancarlo Giannini for Seven Beauties, William Holden for Network, and Sylvester Stallone for Rocky, he lost the Best Actor prize to Peter Finch, who had died that January of a sudden heart attack and was, with Bernard Herrmann, one of two prominent figures nominated posthumously that night.)

  But his real trouble, Scorsese later confessed, was internal. “I was crazier when I finished Taxi Driver than when I began,” he told Schrader. He was spiraling downward into a nightmare of drug use, adultery, hubris, paranoia, and anxiety. He was doing it all daily on the set of the most costly film he’d ever made. And De Niro was along for the ride.

  SCORSESE FIRST ENCOUNTERED New York, New York, Earl Mac Rauch’s screenplay about a love affair between a big-band singer and a saxophonist, in 1974 and thought it would be exciting to try an old-fashioned movie with a new-fashioned sensibility, to film a picture about New York on Hollywood sound stages, just as so many pictures he loved as a boy had been made, to infuse a film about the 1940s with the psychological depth that movies were permitting themselves in the 1970s. It was an ambitious project, entailing elaborate production numbers crammed with extras and filmed on huge sets filled with antique props and such. To do it properly would involve more time and money than Scorsese had ever spent on a film: twenty-two weeks (compared to the nine in which Taxi Driver was made) and at least $8 million, four times the biggest budget he’d ever worked with. It would star De Niro, who at that time had never played a truly romantic role, and Liza Minnelli, who had made only one movie in Hollywood—the expensive flop Lucky Lady—since winning an Oscar three years earlier for Cabaret.

  And all of those obstacles, considerable as they were, paled in comparison to the real trouble the film was facing. Scorsese and De Niro decided that the film needed to be dark, lifelike, and probing, qualities they felt the script was lacking. And so they chose to rewrite it on the fly, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid leaping from a cliff into the unknown. “After winn
ing the Cannes Golden Palm for Taxi Driver,” Scorsese confessed, “we got big heads and felt that no script was good enough.”

  Scorsese hired his old friend Mardik Martin to rewrite the original script, first with Mac Rauch and later with his own wife, Julia Cameron, working alongside them. It was a combination guaranteed to result in conflict: the director’s old friend and collaborator having to quarrel with his new wife, an aspiring screenwriter, over every passage in the script while the original writer shrank further and further back from the process. Cameron, pregnant with a honeymoon baby, clearly had the upper hand, but Martin had access to Scorsese and a shared history, and he risked their collaboration by warning his old friend that his wife was out of control and hurting the picture. Eventually, Mac Rauch just walked away and let the two of them have at it.

  And have at it they did. As Cameron recalled, “We had a hard time agreeing on anything. ‘I don’t think she would do that, Mardik,’ I would complain. ‘Well, she certainly wouldn’t do what you’re having her do,’ ” he would reply. (As Martin recalled, it was even uglier: “She was insanely jealous of anybody who came next to Marty, very possessive. Marty was easily fooled by women.”)

  It would turn out that both of them were right to protect their points of view stubbornly, to be cynical about the viability of the work they were doing, and most of all to be afraid of where it was leading.

  For starters, Scorsese somehow got it in his head that he could let his actors improvise, as they’d done so fruitfully on intimate, low-budget films such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, despite the fact that the scale of the production before him was massive. At first it worked. He began by shooting an intricate production number, “Happy Endings,” which was meant to be the climax of the film. It was a ten-day job filled with color, music, elaborate camera movements, and artful cutting, and it so impressed studio executives when it was screened for them that they threw a party to celebrate the success of the film before they were even halfway through the shooting schedule. No less than Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor were among those invited to observe a day’s filming, to watch the “Happy Endings” footage, and to toast Scorsese’s achievement. For the movie-mad director, it was yet another crowning moment.

  But there were few such golden days during the production. Right after shooting “Happy Endings,” they spent seven or eight days on the beginning of the film, the encounter of up-and-coming saxophonist Jimmy Doyle and aspiring singer Francine Evans during the riotous celebration of VJ Day in Times Square and inside a jumpin’ New York nightclub. As opposed to the carefully choreographed “Happy Endings” number, this crucial scene of the film was largely improvised by De Niro and Minnelli, who wasn’t trained the way he was. “He would throw something at her,” Scorsese said, “and she’d keep coming back. There was no stopping her.” It was a risk, but it was one of those fortunate risks that proved successful in a way that doomed them: they made what everybody agreed was a great sequence: “That’s when everything sort of fell to pieces and came together at the same time,” Scorsese reflected. “It was beautiful.”

  In the wake of that lucky break, they began to believe that they could do the whole film as improv, despite the hugely expensive apparatus of the production. “We started to get cocky,” Scorsese recalled. (“They went crazy,” remembered Mardik Martin. “Everything got out of hand. Everyone was trying to improve it by improvisation.”) Even De Niro, who loved to improvise within the confines of a character and a script, knew they were in trouble: “We’d all be trying to rectify things that just were not working,” he remembered. “We were trying to shape it, but because of the improvisation we were always trying to build on what had been shot before or to fit a scene in if we shot out of sequence.” In effect, each improvised scene had an impact on the scenes that surrounded it, and the problems that they initially saw in the script were multiplied, not lessened, by each change they made. The script ballooned into a crayon box of color-coded pages written and rewritten virtually the night before each day’s shoot and then altered once again on the set. “It was a nightmare,” said Mardik Martin. “I was writing up till the final frame. You don’t make movies like that.”

  Later, wiser, Scorsese knew the truth of it: “It was a mess,” he admitted. But at the time he couldn’t see it, in part—in large part—because he was fueling himself on a combination of adrenaline, daring, hubris, and, by his own confession, drugs. Even though it’s set in the big-band era, New York, New York was made under the influence of Hollywood’s drug of choice circa 1976, cocaine. “I started taking drugs to explore,” Scorsese admitted, “and got sidetracked.” He had always used medication for his asthma and for some of his neurotic conditions—as a boy, he was known around Elizabeth Street as “Marty Pills.” But now he was living the high life of success and hedonism, and little by little he became more lost in it.

  He also wandered in another way, beginning an affair with Minnelli, who was at the time not only married (to Jack Haley Jr., whose father had played the Tin Man to Liza’s mother’s Dorothy) but already caught up in a dalliance with Mikhail Baryshnikov. What’s more, not only were the star and her director engaged in an overwhelming movie production and a romantic liaison, but they began working on a stage musical entitled Shine It On (later renamed The Act) based on Minnelli’s Francine Evans character.

  And why not burn the candle in the middle as well as at both ends? So Scorsese agreed to make another film, a documentary about the final concert of the legendary rock group The Band, as soon as shooting on New York, New York was done. Jean-Luc Godard, one of Scorsese’s heroes, famously declared, “I am cinema.” Scorsese was pushing himself very near to a point where he could say truthfully, “Cinema killed me.”

  YET THROUGH IT ALL, while the cameras rolled for nearly six months, while the director strayed from his pregnant wife, while the female lead’s private life fed the gossip columns, while the script metastasized into something its original writer no longer recognized and produced a film that not even three editors could make clear or smooth, De Niro bore an aspect of almost holy calm, dedicating himself to the details of the character and, in particular, losing himself in the study of the saxophone. Because it wouldn’t be enough, of course, for Robert De Niro to play a musician; he was intent on becoming one—or, at least, on becoming indistinguishable from one.

  Most actors who played musicians would be content to learn the postures and movements associated with an instrument, to do a dumb show of being an able player. But De Niro insisted that he actually be able to make music on the thing. He wouldn’t ultimately be heard in the film—veteran big-band saxophonist Georgie Auld played the parts used in the soundtrack—but he was absolutely determined that nobody could tell that it wasn’t him. “I wanted it to look like my horn,” he explained, “that it belonged to me. I didn’t want to look like some schmuck up there. You can do that, you can get away with that. But what’s the point?”

  De Niro started taking lessons from Auld, a tenor player who had been a member of orchestras led by Bunny Berrigan, Artie Shaw, and Benny Goodman during the big-band era and even had a group of his own in the 1940s, through which such future stars as Sarah Vaughan, Erroll Garner, and Dizzy Gillespie had passed. Auld, an old-time character who oozed jazz charisma, was cast as a big-band leader in the film and alternately marveled and bridled at his tutee’s skill and dedication.

  “It’s incredible the way he learned,” Auld said just before production began. “I’ll teach him something on a Friday—a difficult passage—and by Monday morning, that son of a gun has learned it, he’s got it down cold. He’s got a little hideaway, and he practices until midnight. The kid plays a good tenor sax, and I mean it, and he learned it in three months.” (In fact, De Niro practiced on an alto horn: “It’s easier to carry around,” he admitted.) Before long, though, De Niro’s obsessive dedication found its way under Auld’s skin. “He asked me ten million questions a day,” Auld griped. “It got to be a pain in the ass.”
And: “He’s about as much fun as the clap.” Even Auld’s wife, Diane, was overwhelmed: “We thought he was going to climb into bed with us with the horn.”

  Of course, De Niro had other things to do in order to create his character. “I thought of Jimmy Doyle as a fly stuck on flypaper,” he explained, “trying to get himself free.” In his copious annotations to the script and his research materials, he identified with the jazz musicians who were barred from improvising freely in the confines of the big-band sound and who had to join a union and obey a hierarchy of authority. He continually reminded himself to appear agitated and hyped up, to follow a beat or a melody that only he could hear, to tap his fingers on his knees or a table, to approach dialogue with musical rhythm. He fastened on such props of the jazz saxophonist’s trade as reeds, tubes of ChapStick, handkerchiefs, and of course his horn. He made sure to remember that Doyle always had an eye peeled for the ladies, even when in the company of his wife. He devised a method of creating a drunken appearance by downing a shot of bourbon and spinning himself around in circles right before the camera rolled. And he repeatedly reminded himself that he wanted to convey in Doyle a combination of blunt directness and overweening ambition, whether it be for women, for music, or for money, regardless of whom else it affected or how. “I don’t mind being a bastard,” he told Minnelli, “as long as I’m an interesting bastard.”

  More than in any of his previous films, De Niro developed a aura of detachment and aloofness during the production of New York, New York. He had been installed, aptly enough, in Greta Garbo’s former dressing room on the MGM lot, and he was extremely particular about the behavior around him on the set. At one point, he asked his lighting double, Jon Cutler, to replace another actor, who wasn’t on camera, in a close-up shot of Doyle getting angry. “I can’t get anything off that guy,” he complained.