De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  WHEN IT WAS all over, when distributors had crippled and buried the film, De Niro felt sick for his director. “They tried to make it a linear picture, which never worked,” he said. “I understand why Sergio didn’t come back to the U.S. and deal with it, confront them, fight for it, say, ‘Listen, this is the way it has to be. I’ll give you this, but I want to take that.’ That’s really what you have to do. It’s like having a child: you don’t want somebody to come in and fool with it.”

  Leone was crushed, and he tried to rally himself to something positive, something forward-looking. He had been working on a new idea, a movie about the siege of Leningrad in World War II, and he tried to interest De Niro in taking a role. But the film was not to be. The director’s health, never truly robust, declined after the catastrophic failure of Once Upon a Time in America, and he died in 1989, at the age of sixty, without directing another film.

  Over the ensuing decades, various cuts of the film that were closer to Leone’s vision would be released, and its reputation would grow substantially, until it was genuinely regarded as one of the best gangster films ever made and one of the best films of the 1980s. And it would be in support of the release of one of those restored versions that De Niro would, at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, climb the stairs of the Grand Palais to the strains of Ennio Morricone’s score and mist up at the thought of so much time, so much loss, more similar, in that moment, to the aged Noodles than ever before.

  * * *

  *1 Bizarrely, some of the first press reports about the incident to reach the United States claimed that De Niro’s companion in the taxicab was Keith Carradine.

  *2 And good thing: “I wouldn’t want to touch a Western,” De Niro said in 1980. “They’ve been done so often, and who wants to be out in the middle of the desert for three months?”

  *3 Leone auditioned scores of actors for the film, among them Val Kilmer, Sean Penn, Mandy Patinkin, Tom Beringer, Patrick Swayze, Michael Ontkean, Alex Rocco, Steve Guttenberg, David Paymer, and Peter Coyote, and, for the women’s roles, Theresa Russell, Amanda Plummer, Joan Hackett, Sean Young, Candy Clark, Connie Sellecca, Stockard Channing, and Helen Hunt.

  *4 Once Upon a Time in America would mark the start of a remarkable, if accidental, collaboration between De Niro and Morricone in the 1980s, followed by The Mission and The Untouchables.

  BEFORE SERGIO LEONE COULD BRING ONCE UPON A TIME IN America to the screen, in any form or at any length, De Niro appeared in yet another film that had undergone a protracted genesis. The King of Comedy first came to De Niro’s attention in 1974, when he was sent the manuscript of an unpublished novel by Paul Zimmerman, formerly a film critic at Newsweek. The book, which began with an epigraph from Alexander Pope (“How quick Ambition hastes to Ridicule!”) and another from baseball great Lefty O’Doul (“What’s the use of doing something when nobody’s looking?”), was a dark comedy about the age of celebrity, a frighteningly prescient vision of a world in which the cachet of fame trumped morality and the quest to place oneself in the center of the media spotlight drained people of their humanity.

  Zimmerman had been inspired by an episode of David Susskind’s talk show on which a group of autograph hounds explained themselves. “I was struck by the personal way they related to the stars,” he recalled. “One said, ‘Barbra is hard to work with.’ Barbra Streisand had asked this guy not to bother her, but he turned that into ‘Barbra is hard to work with.’ ” There was another fellow he learned of who kept a daily diary of his impressions of the Johnny Carson show. Finally, and perhaps inevitably given the times, he came to see a correlation between the celebrity stalker and the assassin: both, he said, “rise out of the crowd to make contact for an instant.”

  He combined the two notions to create Rupert Pupkin, an autograph hound and aspiring stand-up comedian who seeks the approval—and, indeed, the career—of Jerry Langford, a late-night TV show host in the Johnny Carson mold. Pupkin insinuates himself into Langford’s life and tries to get booked onto the star’s show, but his unpolished material doesn’t impress. He resorts to crime: with another autograph hound, the psychotic rich girl Masha, who has developed a sexual fantasy life around Langford, he kidnaps the star, ransoming him for a chance to perform on the show. At the same time, Pupkin courts Rita, a girl who ignored him in high school and who is trapped in a disappointing life from which he promises to rescue her.

  His novel unpublished, Zimmerman adapted it into a screenplay and got it to Martin Scorsese, who passed it along to De Niro even before the production of Taxi Driver. It looked destined for the ever-growing pile of De Niro’s maybe/what-if/not-in-this-form/no screenplays. But something in the story spoke to De Niro. “He understood the bravery of Rupert Pupkin,” Zimmerman recalled, “his chutzpah, the simplicity of his motives. Bobby said he liked the single-minded sense of purpose.… I think Bobby understood Rupert because he’s an obsessive person himself.… Bobby could see Rupert as someone who would rather die than live anonymously.”

  Another version of the script appeared in 1976, adapted from Zimmerman’s still-unpublished book by screenwriter Buck Henry, who intended it as a project for Milos Forman. That project came back to De Niro, who mulled it over for a while and then told Forman and Henry flat out, “I really like the original. Do you mind if I take it and go to Marty with it?”

  Of course, working with Scorsese would take a while, as the personal and professional ordeals and crises of 1976 through 1980 took their toll. What was more, Scorsese explained to De Niro that he really didn’t have a feel for the material; he was more interested in another project he had in mind to make with De Niro, Night Life, a film about two brothers, one a cop, the other a comedian. But on the heels of Raging Bull and True Confessions, the theme of warring/loving brothers didn’t appeal to De Niro very much. Brushing off Night Life, he kept pushing The King of Comedy on Scorsese.

  In part it was because he was fascinated with Rupert Pupkin. De Niro had become a big enough star in the past half decade to acquire his own real-life cadre of Rupert Pupkins, hero-worshippers and semi-stalkers drawn to his aura of fame. As King of Comedy percolated in his head, he took the opportunity to accost his accosters, picking the brains of autograph hounds who approached him and scaring them by asking for their contact information; he wasn’t trying to prosecute them, but rather to use them as research sources and even as extras. “Bobby developed a technique,” Scorsese remembered. “Role reversal! He would set about chasing autograph-hunters, stalking them, terrifying them by asking them tons of questions.” And, true to his word, De Niro threw some work at a few of them. “Some of the people I used to run into,” he said, “I used in the film.”

  According to Scorsese, one semi-stalker in particular proved a font of insight. For years he had pestered De Niro to meet and talk with him, and with the new film in mind, De Niro finally agreed. As Scorsese said: “The guy was waiting for him with his wife, a shy suburban woman who was rather embarrassed by the situation. He wanted to take him to dinner at their house, a two-hour drive from New York. After he had persuaded him to stay in Manhattan, Bobby asked him, ‘Why are you stalking me? What do you want?’ He replied, ‘To have dinner with you, have a drink, chat. My mom asked me to say hi.’ ” For De Niro, such an unaffected obsessive was pure gold.

  Finally, not very long before Raging Bull premiered, Scorsese agreed to pursue King of Comedy with De Niro. He had been reluctant, he later explained, because “it was more Bob’s project than mine.… The motives for making a film are very important for me. They have to be good motives. Mine weren’t very clear when I started out on this picture.”*1

  De Niro and Scorsese went out to Long Island with Zimmerman’s still-unpublished novel and the two screenplays and worked out a new take on the material. The author later admitted to uncertainty about what the result might be, but when he saw the new version of the script he was delighted: “I literally jumped up and down.… They had synthesized the script and the book.” (And, as with Raging Bull,
they would neither take nor seek credit for their rewrite.)

  Like Raging Bull, King of Comedy was a three-hander, meaning that the casting of the other two lead roles, Jerry Langford and Masha, would be vital. For the former, Zimmerman’s original inspiration had been Dick Cavett, who didn’t seem to have the proper gravitas to play the role (nor, six years after inspiring it, the career profile to qualify as a movie star). Johnny Carson was the obvious first choice, but he considered himself strictly a TV guy and told Scorsese he wouldn’t enjoy the rigors of long days with multiple reshoots of scenes: “One take is good enough for me,” he said. The next choice was Frank Sinatra, who was nearing the end of his screen acting days and demurred. Scorsese and casting director Cis Corman thought of Orson Welles, but they decided he “wasn’t ‘showbiz’ enough.” Then they circled back to the idea of, if not Sinatra, perhaps other members of his Rat Pack: Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and especially Dean Martin, who was also virtually done with acting. And the thought of Dean Martin led them to consider his onetime partner, Jerry Lewis.

  During his years with Martin (roughly 1946–56) and the decade thereafter, Jerry Lewis was one of the biggest stars in showbiz, with a sizable film audience, considerable drawing power as a live act in Vegas and elsewhere, and tremendous success on television with his annual muscular dystrophy telethon.*2 He hadn’t enjoyed a favorable critical reputation in the United States since the 1950s, but he was celebrated in France and other foreign markets for his clowning; he had taught at the University of Southern California, where the likes of Steven Spielberg vouched for the quality of his instruction; and he had a cultish following among a new generation of comedians who had grown up with TV viewings of The Nutty Professor, The Errand Boy, The Ladies’ Man, and other comedy hits that Lewis had written, produced, directed, and starred in decades earlier.

  By 1980, Lewis had fallen on hard times: he hadn’t made a film between 1972, when he was forced to abandon the star-crossed movie The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown held by the Nazis at Auschwitz, and 1979, when he made the ultra-low-budget Hardly Working in Florida, which wouldn’t get released for two years and then proved a surprise hit. In his mid-fifties, Lewis was possessed of a darkness, a thin skin, and a quick temper that worked against him enjoying a late-life career, and he had only recently overcome an addiction to painkillers he’d developed after injuring himself in a pratfall on The Andy Williams Show in 1965. He was, in short, a risk in any number of ways.

  But Scorsese was drawn to casting him as Langford almost because of all that. The telethon, in particular, fascinated him. As he explained, “With its combination of money pouring in for charity and its Vegas sensibility, [it] seems at times to verge on nervous breakdown. Also the thin line between reality and drama seems to be shattered constantly.… Anyone who could conjure up and sustain this atmosphere is quite extraordinary.” He and Lewis took a couple of meetings, and Scorsese recalled, “I could see the man was ripe for it.”

  But the final call on the casting would belong to De Niro, who required that Lewis meet with him several times so that he could get a sense of Lewis as a collaborator—and, presumably, as a target for Rupert Pupkin’s mania. “What we went through before we decided that we were gonna do it,” Lewis recalled. “Bobby and I have five meetings, five separate meetings in six months.” As he explained, “Bobby has to know the people that he’s gonna work with. What he needs from them, I can’t tell you—whether he has to know that they’re genuine, whether he has to know that they’re just goddamn good actors, that they’ll commit—I’m not too sure, but he needs to know some stuff.”

  De Niro expressed his reservations about the casting choice in a note to Scorsese: “It’s harder to imagine Jerry Lewis doing this as opposed to Johnny Carson. He (JL) has to do it straighter than he’s ever done anything in his whole life.” In conversation with Lewis, De Niro quizzed the comedian extensively about his years with Dean Martin, his ideas about filmmaking, the details of his personal life, even his relationship with his parents—things that had no immediate bearing on anything in the scripted role of Jerry Langford. Finally De Niro agreed to cast Lewis and the contracts were struck, whereupon he phoned Lewis and said, as Lewis remembered it, “ ‘Jer—I need you to know that I really want to kill you on this picture. We can’t socialize, we can’t have dinner, we can’t go out.’ I said, ‘Whatever turns you on, sweetheart.… Are there any ground rules about saying “Good morning”?’ ”

  Scorsese and De Niro enlisted Lewis to sharpen Langford’s character by bringing his longtime experience of oversized fame and celebrity to bear. “They don’t know celebrity,” Lewis said years later. “They only know anonymity. You could walk by Bobby De Niro today, you wouldn’t know him. It’s just the way he is. And for many of the films—Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Bang the Drum Slowly, Raging Bull, The Deer Hunter: who the fuck knows who that is? They needed me to tell them about celebrity. And we wrote together—Paul Zimmerman and Marty and myself—we wrote the things that they had never heard about.”

  Among Lewis’s contributions was an encounter on the streets of New York in which a passerby recognizes Langford and asks for an autograph. When Langford demurs, the woman turns hostile: “You should get cancer!” It was, Lewis claimed, something that had actually happened to him at a Las Vegas hotel. Further, following De Niro’s practice, Scorsese encouraged Lewis to bring as much of his personal life to the character as possible. Lewis wound up wearing his own clothes in many scenes, Langford’s apartment was decorated with some of Lewis’s personal knickknacks, and the part of Langford’s dog was played by Lewis’s shih-tzu, Angel.

  The casting of Masha proved another laborious process. It was a highly coveted role—the last young woman selected by De Niro and Scorsese for a big part, Cathy Moriarty, had been nominated for an Oscar, after all. The part called for a wild, almost psychotic energy, for comic chops, for someone who would play every scene with De Niro except for a long, excruciating one in which Masha would attempt to seduce the bound and gagged Langford.

  De Niro promoted his Deer Hunter co-star and good friend Meryl Streep for the part. “I asked Meryl to come in and meet Marty and talk about it, because I thought she’d be terrific,” he remembered. “She’s very, very funny. She’s a great comedienne. She came in, but I don’t think she wanted to do it, obviously, for what reason I never really knew. But I knew that she could do it.”*3

  Other young actresses met with Scorsese and De Niro, Ellen Barkin and Debra Winger among them. And then Cis Corman, who was combing through the ranks of stand-up comedians, got wind of a gangly young woman from Arizona named Sandra Bernhard. Bernhard was staying at the Chateau Marmont when she was summoned to meet Corman and read from the script for her. “She looked stunned,” Bernhard said. “Maybe she was frightened. And she said, ‘I think. You need. To meet Marty.’ ”

  Bernhard auditioned for Scorsese and De Niro, and they came to see her act at the Comedy Store, just down the hill from the Chateau. After that she was flown to New York to meet Lewis, who was, she said later, “the most intimidating factor in the whole situation. Jerry Lewis was a large, looming figure. So I was scared to meet him, and he lived up to his reputation. He’s one of the only showbiz people I’ve met who really has an aura.” Her anxiety at meeting the grand star was exactly what the part of Masha called for; she was hired.

  During this process, De Niro went about building Pupkin inside and out. Along with Scorsese and costumer Dick Bruno, he shopped in the sorts of old-school Times Square stores where magicians and other performers got their wardrobe: “There was one of these Broadway showbiz type stores, near the Stage Deli,” De Niro remembered, “that had all these flashy clothes that you’d find in Vegas now. This little store with a mannequin, and the mannequin had the suit on and the hair and everything. We went in, took the clothes, I took the hairstyle, the mannequin hairstyle, I said it’s all perfect. Marty said, great, let’s just do that.”

  De Niro borrowed the swayin
g-while-standing-in-place behavior and the rat-a-tat speech pattern of Paul Zimmerman, who spoke even faster than the famously fast-talking Scorsese, and he mimicked the gait of a chicken. “Gawky. A bird whose neck goes out as he walks,” as he recalled. He reminded himself to allow nervousness to show through, to add a whine to his voice, to hunch a little like an acquaintance who struggled with multiple sclerosis, to infuse his dialogue with what he called a “Jewish lilt.” (In fact, Pupkin’s ethnicity isn’t made explicit in the film.) He picked the brain of a New York paparazzo named Barry Talesnick, looked up old gags in joke books, and bombarded Zimmerman with questions, prompting a frustrated letter from the screenwriter in which he declared, “I HAVE NOTHING LEFT. THIS IS IT.… This is all I know about Rupert. This is all you need to know about what I know about Rupert. Shit, you know more about him by now than I do, and I invented him.”

  And what did De Niro know about Pupkin? As he noted to himself, he was “very determined, no nonsense,” but “basically ineffectual.” He wanted to be careful, he told Scorsese, not to be “weird or creepy … there has to be something funny about me.” He was a very keen observer of his prey, Jerry Langford: “I watch him closely always! Just to see what makes him great.” He knew that Pupkin ironed his own clothes, kept an organized room (it would never be filmed or shown), had been an English major, was fast with a lighter with someone else’s cigarette, stared without meaning to, and was polite to almost everyone he met for fear of being disliked if he wasn’t. He knew that Pupkin would keep his comedy routine short so as not to overstay his welcome and that he would remain at all times “a gentleman … A little desperate perhaps but still a gentleman.” Even when Pupkin turns dangerous, De Niro noted, he was “still so respectful. But a little tougher, a little harder. I learned.”