De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  For all these stellar notices, De Niro could be thin-skinned with anyone who didn’t fully embrace the film. He annotated his copy of Pauline Kael’s review, scribbling defensively in the margins, “That’s the idea, that’s right,” and “So? That’s right. That’s him.” And when he was told that the film was “a brutal portrait,” he insisted otherwise: “Raging Bull is like a little domestic spat compared to what people can really do to one another.”

  DE NIRO RECEIVED an astounding array of letters from his peers congratulating him on his work in Raging Bull. Al Pacino joked that it was a bad precedent to write in admiration because he’d create the impression that he wasn’t impressed henceforth if he didn’t send a note. Jane Fonda described De Niro’s work as “beyond any acting I’ve known about.” Paul Newman wrote, “Dear Robert, I can’t remember being humbled by an American actor for many a year. Well, you did that in spades. Can’t add much to that.”

  But the public failed to respond, frankly staggering Scorsese, who was coming off a series of commercial disappointments. As was the practice at the time, the film received a slow rollout, starting with an exclusive run of several weeks in only four theaters and escalating gradually to a wider audience. While word of De Niro’s performance clearly compelled some viewers to buy tickets, more people seemed to have been turned away by what they heard of the film’s grim tone, foul language, open-eyed violence, and dark moral core. In a year in which such relatively breezy films as The Empire Strikes Back, 9 to 5, and Stir Crazy dominated the box office, Raging Bull was a poor earner, grossing barely $23 million, placing it in twenty-seventh place among the year’s releases, behind films such as Popeye and The Jazz Singer, which were widely seen as flops.

  Money was never really the thing, of course. Raging Bull would surely find its redemption in the form of awards. Yet there, too, the film ran into rough seas. When the critics started polling themselves at year’s end, De Niro walked away with almost every possible prize, being named Best Actor by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the National Board of Review, and the Golden Globes (his only loss was in the polling of the National Society of Film Critics, which went instead for Peter O’Toole in The Stunt Man). Joe Pesci and cinematographer Michael Chapman also collected nice hauls of prizes. But Scorsese’s sole accolade, for a film that in retrospect would be among the great masterpieces of a great director, received only the National Society of Film Critics award for Best Director; elsewhere, he lost out to the likes of Jonathan Demme for Melvin and Howard, Roman Polanski for Tess, and Robert Redford, who had made his directorial debut with Ordinary People.

  And the Oscars turned out to be a mixed blessing for the Raging Bull team as well. In all, the film was in the running for eight Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and Best Sound, tying The Elephant Man for the most nominations that year. De Niro was the prohibitive favorite to win, in competition against O’Toole, Robert Duvall (The Great Santini), John Hurt (The Elephant Man), and Jack Lemmon (Tribute). But after the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild selected Robert Redford as Best Director of the year, Scorsese’s chances looked dimmer and dimmer.

  The Oscars were scheduled for March 30, 1981, but early that day a psychopathic loner named John Warnock Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan and three other men outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. There was no protocol for handling an awards show in the shadow of such a situation, and rather than risk celebrating themselves while the president fought for his life, Academy officials decided to postpone the telecast for twenty-four hours. Reagan, quite fortunately, would recover from his wounds. But the pall that the assassination attempt cast over the Academy Awards would only deepen the following day, when America would learn that Hinckley, in the sort of coincidence that wouldn’t pass muster with anyone reviewing a script for a thriller, had been inspired to shoot the president by his obsession with Taxi Driver and, more specifically, his wish to impress Jodie Foster with a holocaust of violence like that depicted at the end of the 1976 film. As Scorsese, De Niro, and Schrader were waiting to hear if they’d been rewarded for the exceedingly bitter Raging Bull, it appeared as though their earlier collaboration had inspired someone to a wild act of real-world violence.

  At the start of the telecast, though, almost nobody at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion knew about the connection between Hinckley and Taxi Driver. In fact, when De Niro arrived, his attention was grabbed by a reminder of another sensational crime. Emerging from his limo, he noticed an ABC-TV page named Thomas Rogers wearing a green ribbon on the lapel of his suit. Curious as to the meaning of the symbol, De Niro learned that it was part of a nationwide effort to show solidarity with the citizens of Atlanta, Georgia, where a serial killer was preying on young black men. De Niro asked if Rogers had one that he could wear during the evening, and Rogers gave the star his own ribbon. Thus did De Niro inadvertently become the first celebrity to be seen sporting what became known as an “awards show ribbon” in support of some humanitarian cause.

  Inside, as word of the Hinckley/Taxi Driver connection started to spread, the evening slowly slipped away from Raging Bull. Editor Thelma Schoonmaker and cinematographer Michael Chapman were awarded Oscars, but Pesci and Scorsese were overlooked. With only three awards left to be distributed, Sally Field, who’d won Best Actress the previous year for Norma Rae, came out to present the Best Actor award. To no one’s surprise, the name in the envelope was De Niro’s.

  Six years earlier, his director, Francis Coppola, had accepted his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for him. But now De Niro was present to speak for himself, and he did so rather fumblingly, reaching into his tuxedo jacket for a slip of paper and joking, “I forgot my lines, so the director wrote them down for me.”

  “I want to thank everyone,” he declared, and he more or less did, acknowledging the film’s costumer, casting director, sound man, makeup artists, writers, and producers. He mentioned Pete Savage: “If Pete wasn’t involved in the film he wouldn’t have gotten it started … I’m a little nervous, excuse me … the film never would have gotten started.” He thanked “Vicki LaMotta and all the other wives, and Joey LaMotta, even though he’s suing us. I hope that settles soon enough so I can go over to his house and eat once in a while.” After the audience laughed, he continued to a list of even more important thank-yous: “And of course, Jake LaMotta, whose life it’s all about. And Marty Scorsese, who gave me and all the other actors and everyone on the film all the love and trust that anyone could give anyone and is just wonderful as a director. And I want to thank my mother and father for having me. And my grandmother and grandfather, for having them. And everyone else involved in the film. And I hope that I can share this with anyone that it means anything to and the rest of the world, and especially all the terrible things that are happening. I love everyone.”

  In the backstage press room, reporters tried to get De Niro to comment on the Hinckley business, but he was predictably reluctant. “I don’t know about the story,” he said. “I don’t want to discuss the matter now.” When the questions persisted, he put his foot down: “Look, I said what I wanted to say out there. You’re all very nice, but that’s it.” He then left to pass the better part of the evening with the Raging Bull team at a Beverly Hills restaurant, where they had repaired to make sense of the day’s events in privacy. He had been compelled by the law to answer the questions put to him by Joey LaMotta’s attorneys. Hollywood reporters, as he well knew, had no such power over him.

  * * *

  *1 Joseph Carter, who was not part of any phase of the movie deal, would later sue LaMotta and Savage for a percentage of the film rights. And decades later, Savage’s daughter would sue MGM, which would eventually own the film, for her late father’s portion of its total earnings, claiming copyright infringement on Savage’s original work. In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed t
o adjudicate the matter.

  *2 Her name would also be spelled “Vickie” and “Vikki” over the years in various publications and documents.

  *3 Given the raw scenes he was filming, this choice nicely mirrored that of Alfred Hitchcock, who shot Psycho in black and white during the greatest period of color photography in his career so as not to alienate audiences with garish displays of bloodshed.

  *4 This scene was one of the reasons Joey LaMotta sued the production; in reality, it was Pete Savage who’d put the fellow represented by the Salvy character in a hospital.

  *5 It was another echo, perhaps inadvertent, of Alfred Hitchcock, who had learned over time to put his famous surprise cameos near the beginning of his films so that audiences would stop looking for him and pay attention to the actual movie.

  *6 Even more vertiginous: for the second time in a half dozen years, De Niro will literally repeat dialogue first spoken by Brando in an Oscar-winning role in an Oscar-winning role of his own.

  WHEN HE AWOKE ON APRIL 1, 1981, IN POSSESSION OF HIS second Oscar and a pile of congratulatory telegrams from, among many others, Jack Nicholson, Mickey Rooney, California governor Edmund G. Brown, and Israeli politician Moshe Dayan, Robert De Niro was by almost anyone’s reckoning the greatest screen actor on earth.

  Just eight or nine years prior, he had been almost completely unknown, doggedly chasing small parts in independent films and appearing in off-off-Broadway plays, just as likely to be skipped over for work as to have his name misspelled in the credits or be ignored in reviews when he got a role.

  Then came the remarkable one-two punch of Bang the Drum Slowly and Mean Streets, followed by the revelation of The Godfather, Part II (and the anointment of an Oscar) and the unimaginable explosion of Taxi Driver. In five years, he’d claimed a significant spot in the upper tier of his profession. There followed three expensive and visible flops (The Last Tycoon, 1900, New York, New York), the blame for none of which was hung on him. Rather, he was for the most part admired for stretching his range and for choosing intriguing projects and, always, the best collaborators; if anything, his reputation was enhanced. And then came another pair of back-to-back thunderbolts, The Deer Hunter and Raging Bull.

  His triumph was undeniable and complete. Nine films, including several outright masterworks, and nine completely distinct performances. He had learned to speak in dialects and even in a foreign language; he had learned to drive a taxi, to play the saxophone, to box; he had literally rebuilt his physique twice; he had become other people again and again, and almost none of them resembled Bobby De Niro of Greenwich Village, whoever he was. He had taken the venerated standard of the actor as chameleon, as embodied by the likes of Marlon Brando during his first flush of glory and Laurence Olivier through his long and varied career, and infused it with a modern energy and freedom. There was no direct line, not of thought or gesture or intent or execution, that connected Bruce Pearson, Johnny Boy Civello, Vito Corleone, Travis Bickle, Monroe Stahr, Alfredo Berlinghieri, Jimmy Doyle, Michael Vronsky, and Jake LaMotta, only the tirelessness, selflessness, talent, dedication, imagination, application, and will to power of the performer who had created them. He had been nominated for an Oscar four times and won twice; he’d gotten four Golden Globe nominations, winning once; and he had a trove of prizes from critics’ groups, including three from the New York Film Critics Circle, two each from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics, and one each from the Boston Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. He had peers, yes—Hoffman, Pacino, Nicholson, Keitel, Voight, Hackman, movie stars and fine actors all—but he had no equals, not at that very moment, and everybody knew it.

  His collaborators, even those with their own estimable accomplishments, spoke of him in terms of awe and respect. “Bobby De Niro’s a perfectionist,” Donald Sutherland said, “but he knows what’s perfect; I don’t.” His technique left other actors agog: “De Niro once figured out what the guy he was playing would have had in his wallet,” said Ryan O’Neal, admitting he didn’t have the same tools. As Chris Hodenfield, virtually the last journalist De Niro had spoken to at any length at the time, put it: “A Dr. Jekyll who shifts into an endless number of Mr. Hydes, he doesn’t imitate people, he stages an inquisition.” His excellence was a given; his process was a legend. He had gone, in perhaps fifteen years’ time, from sniffing inquisitively around the edge of the acting profession to, at age thirty-seven, standing indisputably on top of it.

  But that remarkable rise—the struggle to get a foot in the door, to get those plum roles, to create those indelible performances, to maintain focus on the work, to avoid the distractions of the limelight, to keep from being bled by the press and the accoutrements of showbiz—came at a personal cost.

  When he woke that morning, he was a man living apart from his wife and children. In 1979, with the hard work and travel of The Deer Hunter barely past and the Raging Bull preparation consuming him more than ever, he and Diahnne Abbott separated. She, Drena, and Raphael split their time between the home De Niro had leased in Brentwood and the townhouse he owned in lower Manhattan; he spent time between the New York building and a rented suite at the famed Chateau Marmont in Hollywood.

  Their troubles were, per rumormongers, the result of their differing tastes and priorities. Their early days in California had been idyllic, Shelley Winters recalled. “We spent wonderful weekends together. I remember we used to lug big bags of cracked crab and iced white wine out to this funky beach—we called it Doggy Beach.” But their differences had become vexations. De Niro had grown frustrated with the hassles and expense of maintaining the menagerie that Abbott insisted on living with. At first her cats had been the cause of problems when they were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I’ve heard they have hookers running all around the pool,” De Niro remembered, “and yet when you have cats … I was told not to have cats, but I did and they locked us out. They put a padlock on the door and put the cats outside. I was furious. The manager threatened to call the police in front of me.… This was at night, we got home at midnight, and they had locked us out. I wanted to sue—he was a pig. It looked like he enjoyed being a son of a bitch.” Then, after they vacated their first Los Angeles rental home, in Bel Air, they were sued by the owners for the extensive damage done by their “great number of cats” to the rugs, draperies, and furniture; the suit sought $10,000 in reparations. For a fellow as meticulous, parsimonious, and particular as De Niro, it was becoming an ongoing provocation.

  But it went deeper than run-ins with obnoxious hoteliers or cats peeing on rugs. De Niro really was as quiet, self-contained, and sphinx-like in his private life as the press liked to depict him, while Abbott had more of a taste for partying and gadding about in a crowd. He had a handful of haunts he preferred—low-key spots limited only to A-list clientele, such as the ultra-private On the Rox nightclub on the Sunset Strip. She preferred to be in larger throngs, more visible and more varied: parties, premieres, awards shows.

  De Niro told the press that their estrangement was simply “a cooling-off period” and that it was the fault of his celebrity, without which he “would have gone on being an ordinary guy, living a simple life, and nothing would have changed my marriage.” But, of course, he had sought the life he now lived with single-minded purpose, and it was virtually inevitable that success would mean the sacrifice of “ordinary” and “simple.” The marriage was still a work in progress; they were together more than they were apart during this period of difficulty, and Abbott continued to be presented and to give interviews as the wife of Robert De Niro. But he was rumored around Hollywood to be involved with several well-known women (gossips linked him to Bette Midler and Barbara Carrera), and there were many reports of him being on the town, in his furtive fashion, with female companionship. He could be obsessively secretive even in these liaisons, not acknowledging his actual identity and even asking dates to leave their own bedrooms so he could hide his wallet during trys
ts, but he was known to be comporting himself as if genuinely single.

  In Italy on a publicity tour for Raging Bull, he reunited with Stefania Sandrelli, one of his co-stars from 1900, who followed him after a while to New York, where they behaved affectionately toward each other in public. And in Los Angeles, he chased down—literally, while driving along in his convertible on San Vicente Blvd.—a beautiful young African American woman who turned out to be a singer named Helena Springs. Springs, who was approximately twenty-two at the time they met, remembered feeling frustrated by the behavior of the driver who seemed to be focused on her. “This guy is cutting me off,” she said. “I’d go fast, he’d go fast. I’d slow down, he’d slow down. This asshole kept following me. I didn’t even know him. Finally he put his hands in a prayer position and said, ‘Pull over.’ So I stopped and he said, ‘Can we have lunch?’ ”

  Springs, who had been a background singer for, among others, Bob Dylan, Bette Midler, and Elton John, finally realized who her pursuer was, and she agreed to go to dinner with him, leading to their spending the night together. Over the span of a few years, they maintained a non-exclusive relationship, during which, Springs later said, she became pregnant twice. She aborted the first pregnancy, she claimed, without telling De Niro about it. But she said that when she found herself pregnant again, in late 1981, she determined that she would have the baby, and she told De Niro, setting him off on what she described as a series of ugly and intimidating conversations and encounters aimed at getting her to terminate the pregnancy. “It was mental abuse,” she concluded, but she held firm to her choice.

  On July 1, 1982, she gave birth to a baby girl who was named—by De Niro, Springs said—Nina. De Niro, Springs claimed, gave her $50,000 to help with the care of the baby and even pitched in on setting up a room for her. But he drew the line at providing her with his medical history or a blood sample, fearing that she didn’t merely want to be able to fill in the gaps in the baby’s medical records, as she said, but rather that she was after more money. Springs dropped the matter, she later explained, partly because of her own low self-esteem: “Black women aren’t used to being courted by handsome, famous, rich white guys. So they don’t say no to whatever the man wants.” It would be more than three years before De Niro would see Springs, or baby Nina, again.