De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  The other woman in Rupert’s life, Masha, is played by Sandra Bernhard with an almost punk rock intensity, screaming and sneering and bedeviling and amping up to fury in her frustrated attempts to get close to Langford. She knows how to get almost immediately under Rupert’s skin, and she uses that skill as surely as she does her parents’ money (she dresses in a private-school blazer, throws cash around freely, and drives a Mercedes with her name on the license plate). With Langford she adopts a more balanced, even deferential air, appreciatively sizing up a sweater she’s knitting for him like a doting aunt. And then, in a truly bizarre, stream-of-consciousness seduction scene, she reveals aspects of herself to him that, it would seem, only some well-paid therapists had ever seen before. It’s a terrific performance, and also a dead end: see Bernhard in this role and you can’t imagine her in anything else.

  Jerry Lewis is superb as Langford, bringing his own celebrity aura to bear, as no one merely acting the role could, but also getting inside the character. He has the real Langford to play, the man whose limo is invaded, who must endure Rupert’s desperate backseat pitch, whose dinner is interrupted by invasive phone calls, whose walk through Manhattan ends with a stranger wishing him cancer and Masha chasing him into his office, who becomes righteously furious when his home is beset by strangers, who is kidnapped and threatened with death. All of that is played with almost transparent naturalness: this isn’t the Jerry Lewis from the movies or even from the TV telethon and talk shows, but it’s something very like Jerry Lewis the flesh-and-blood man. But there’s the imaginary Langford as well, the one who befriends Rupert and helps his career and even arranges a secret wedding for him. That kind of glad-handing showbiz Jerry is familiar from talk shows, including his own briefly lived ones, but it’s nothing that Scorsese or even De Niro could have brought to the film. Perhaps another celebrity could have brought the right energy, power, and vibe to the part, but Lewis is perfect in it.

  The film climaxes on Rupert’s monologue, a long, painful litany of self-hate, familial dysfunction, and almost masochistic confession—much of it truly funny, all done in a single excruciating take with De Niro mastering the body language, timing, and vocal inflections of a not-ready-for-prime-time-or-even-late-night stand-up. It’s the big payoff we’ve been anticipating for more than an hour (Scorsese fades into Rupert’s reverie the first time he performs the act, for a tape recorder). The dark, dark inside joke of the whole enterprise is that there really is a germ of talent in the guy—with the emphasis, of course, on germ.

  There are other inside jokes throughout the film: the casting of De Niro’s wife and Scorsese’s parents (his dad, Charlie, is watching TV at Rita’s bar when Rupert changes channels on him); Margo Winkler, the wife of Raging Bull producer Irwin Winkler, as Langford’s cheerful receptionist; various punk rock stars of the day (including most of the Clash) milling about on the streets of Times Square; De Niro’s agent, Harry Ufland, playing Langford’s agent; Shelley Winters announced as a guest on the Langford show the night of Rupert’s appearance; and Scorsese himself playing the director of the Langford show (Tony Randall even tells him, “You’re the director,” in case anyone didn’t recognize him). It’s a regular old-home week.

  But it’s also chillingly new and prophetic and unsettled and unsettling. Rupert Pupkin is a clown, but how far removed is he from the likes of John W. Hinckley or Mark David Chapman, other disturbed loners whose guns were as real as their obsessions and who killed, or tried to, partly as a means of making their name? Like them, Rupert becomes famous (or, if you prefer, infamous), and he’s rewarded for his audacity and psychosis with a real career. (Or is he? The final scene, in which Rupert presides over his own TV show, is so stylized and attenuated as to perhaps be another fantasy—much like the coda to Taxi Driver.) Throughout the film the subject of Rupert’s name continually arises: how to pronounce it, whether it’s real, how widely it will soon be known. In the end, even though the film wasn’t a hit, it has become a synecdoche for a kind of undeserved celebrity, a figure for the power of the media to draw attention to freaks and outcasts and turn them into pop heroes. Rupert is more than famous and for more than fifteen minutes. He may not be a king, but he wears a crown of some kind, and he is finally impossible to ignore.

  Reviewers didn’t know what to think. Once again, Scorsese and De Niro polarized their critics. Some—like Pauline Kael, at great length—found the whole enterprise abhorrent and flawed. Some had mixed feelings but were willing to praise De Niro individually. A very few, such as Vincent Canby in the New York Times, appreciated it more or less without qualm (“It’s not an absolute joy by a long shot,” he wrote, “but, in the way of a film that uses all of its talents to their fullest, it’s exhilarating”).

  The double edge of the film, and of De Niro’s performance, made even experienced film watchers uneasy. “De Niro’s Rupert has a cheerfully deranged imperviousness … that makes you laugh even as it makes you cringe,” noted Richard Schickel in Time. “De Niro doesn’t provide the key to the inner Pupkin,” lamented Michael Sragow in Rolling Stone. “There’s no fanatical gleam in his eye. His grin is shiftless.” “He’s not just mediocre,” observed David Denby in New York, “he’s demonically mediocre—a De Niro character after all.”

  Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic, who had a long and troubled history with De Niro’s work, found moments of brilliance in the performance, and in a notable turn called De Niro “one of our best film actors.” But Kael was particularly enraged by the film and its star:

  If De Niro, disfigured again here, has removed himself from comparison with other handsome young actors, it’s not because what he does now is more than acting. It’s less; it’s anti-acting.… De Niro in disguise denies his characters a soul … he makes them hollow … and merges with the character’s emptiness.… In most of De Niro’s early performances … there was bravura in his acting. You could feel the actor’s excitement shining through the character, and it made him exciting to watch.… And then he started turning himself into repugnant, flesh effigies.… De Niro cunningly puts in all the stupid little things that actors customarily leave out. It’s a studied performance. De Niro has learned to be a total fool. Big accomplishment!

  King of Comedy appeared in competition at the Cannes Film Festival that May, and De Niro, Abbott, Scorsese, Bernhard, and Lewis attended the premiere, De Niro honoring his host country by sporting a beret. As back home, it was shut out of prizes (the screenplay, credited to Zimmerman, did win a BAFTA award the following winter). But its legend grew considerably over the years, particularly as the idea of a media generating celebrities out of sheer self-reflection became less a matter of fictional hypothesis and increasingly the stuff of daily life. It was embraced by, among others, Marlon Brando, who had never met De Niro or Scorsese but invited them to his South Pacific island home after seeing the film; they finally made the trip in 1987, spending a couple of weeks lolling, reading, and talking—not so much about acting or the movie business as about life.

  And, having done five films together in a decade, De Niro and Scorsese decided, after King of Comedy, to take a little break from working together. “We needed to go our separate ways,” Scorsese said. “We needed to work with other people. We had worked so intensively for so many years.” It wasn’t, he insisted, a vote of no confidence in the film. “I think it’s De Niro’s best performance,” he explained. It was just that “we couldn’t go any further at that time.”

  In fact, despite the hundreds of offers fielded by De Niro’s agents weekly, despite the director’s intention to make a few films he’d already identified, Scorsese already had another collaboration in mind. He intended to follow King of Comedy with an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s theologically challenging novel The Last Temptation of Christ, and he wanted De Niro for the role of Jesus.

  SINCE BEING INTRODUCED to the novel by the actress Barbara Hershey on the set of Boxcar Bertha, Scorsese had harbored an ambition to film Last Temptation, a remark
able novel by the Greek novelist and philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis. Written in a kind of cerebral, abstract style that recalled Kafka more than it did Kazantzakis’s worldwide bestseller Zorba the Greek, it tells the story of an adult Jesus who is trying to come to terms with the idea—which seems to emerge from inside his head like a demonic hallucination—that he is both mortal and divine, that he is the messiah, that he is God. It follows all the traditional episodes of the life of Christ, but it does so through the lens of his human side, imagining what it would be like to be an ordinary man of thirty-three years of age who embraced the call to leave home, evangelize, and die. Published in 1953 (and translated into English seven years later), it was such volatile material that it nearly got the writer excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox Church. And it would carry an air of controversy ever after.

  Scorsese imagined a film that would reconcile the great biblical screen epics that had galvanized him as a boy—The Robe, King of Kings, Ben-Hur—with a vision of a world in which people behaved as they do in ours. It would depict the events of the gospels as real, but occurring on a recognizable earth and not in some golden Bible-story tableau. He got Paul Schrader—for whom the novel’s themes and texture were beguiling, too—to begin adapting a screenplay, and he got Irwin Winkler interested in producing it. Together they constituted a sufficiently formidable force to convince Paramount Pictures to make it. Scorsese went off to Israel to scout locations. And in the spring of 1983, as he traveled between that work and the publicity duties attendant on the global release of The King of Comedy, he stopped in Paris, where De Niro was spending some time during a lull in production in Once Upon a Time in America, to ask him if he would be willing to play Jesus in the film—which, if he agreed, would have marked their sixth collaboration in a span of eleven years.

  De Niro felt immediately that he was wrong for the part. He could never adequately immerse himself in the role using the methods he preferred. There was too much baggage associated with playing Jesus (he repeatedly compared it to playing Hamlet). And he felt that he was entirely ill-suited to a biblical drama. He repeatedly reminded Scorsese of The Silver Chalice, a film about early Christianity that was so badly received that it almost killed the career of its debuting leading man, Paul Newman, before it started.

  He made light of it at that first discussion: “I had my head shaved because I was doing ‘Once Upon a Time in America,’ and I took my hat off, and I said to Marty, ‘Do I look like I can play Jesus?’ ” But he knew that the subject matter was very close to Scorsese’s heart: “He’s very much into that,” he said of the strong religious themes of the film. “I got my own problems. I had it, though, through some members of my family—like my grandmother—but not the way Marty must have had it.” The gulf between their visions of the character was, he felt, impossible to cross: “Marty wanted to make him a person and all that, but I still saw him as a guy with long hair and a beard.”

  Finally he told Scorsese that he would do it only if he had to do it—that is, only if the film would not get made unless he was cast in the role: “If you really have a problem, if you really want to do it, and you need me, I’ll do it. If you’re up against the wall and you have no other way, I’ll do it as a friend.” As it happened, the timing was not right for the film with anyone in the lead: Paramount had gone through a change of management, and the new team was not terribly excited about making a film that could elicit backlash from the Christian right, the Catholic Church, and who knew who else. When Scorsese finally did make the film, half a decade later, De Niro wasn’t considered for the role of Christ (which went to Willem Dafoe after a long period during which Aidan Quinn was Scorsese’s first choice for the part). By then, De Niro had made The Mission, the Christlike themes of which satisfied his modest interest in religious storytelling (“It’s different,” he explained when asked why he was comfortable in that role, “it’s not Jesus”). And when he was asked soon after The Last Temptation of Christ was released, to mixed reviews and over-the-top controversy, if he had any regrets about not making it, he answered succinctly, “No.”

  * * *

  *1 His motives may not have been clear when he initially joined the project, but surely Scorsese was struck by the similarities, revealed during the weeks leading up to the shoot, between Rupert Pupkin and John Hinckley Jr., who had become so confused by filmed media that he shot the president to impress a fictional character. Scorsese had agreed to make The King of Comedy months before Hinckley’s attempt on the life of Ronald Reagan, but by the first day of production the delusional would-be assassin’s fascination with Taxi Driver was known, and Scorsese could choose from a number of terrifying but relevant themes in the film—and in real life—as pry-holes for his creative process.

  *2 Television had proved a hobgoblin for Lewis ever since the days when he and Martin regularly had the top-rated show as one of the rotating set of hosts of The Colgate Comedy Hour. In 1963, he received what was then the most lucrative television contract in history, for a live variety show on ABC that proved a jaw-droppingly large critical and commercial failure and was canceled by the network barely two months into its intended five-year run.

  *3 To date, Streep has never acted for Scorsese.

  *4 Actually, only 1,330, but the point stands.

  *5 Up to now, Abbott had performed only once in a non-Scorsese film, Alan Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A. (1976). But she’d soon work with John Cassavetes on Love Streams, take on a recurring role on TV’s Crime Story, and continue pursuing other acting and singing opportunities.

  IN JANUARY 1984 DE NIRO STAYED AT THE DISCREETLY LUXURIOUS Blakes Hotel in the Kensington district of London, where he had gone to do something he’d never done before: play a cameo role in a feature film.

  The picture in question was Brazil, a mammoth, darkly comic fantasy by Terry Gilliam, the American-born member of the Monty Python troupe who’d gone from animating surreal short pieces for the group’s famed TV series to directing features, starting with the beloved Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Since then, in such films as Jabberwocky and Time Bandits, Gilliam’s cinematic vision had become grander, more baroque, more mordant. He was making dazzling pictures as big as Steven Spielberg’s, with special effects and massive sets and costumes, but with not one trace of Spielberg’s sentiment or warmth. They were funny, they were eye-popping, they were singular, but they were cool and dark and strange and very expensive to make.

  Brazil would be his most ambitious film yet. Based on a script co-written by Gilliam with, among others, Tom Stoppard, it was a dystopian tale of a totalitarian bureaucracy run amok, with a lovelorn functionary named Sam Lowry questioning his role as a cog in the machinery and coming into contact with a group of subversive revolutionaries, one of whom is (literally, in fact) his dream girl. Among the producers of the film (which was first known as 1984-and-a-Half, in homage to George Orwell and Federico Fellini, both of whose influences can be felt everywhere in it) was Arnon Milchan, who seemed to be everywhere in De Niro’s working life of late. With Gilliam’s blessing, Milchan sent the script to De Niro with a note saying, “Pick your part.”

  De Niro loved what he read—“That will be remembered in years to come,” he said later of the film, “no matter what you think of it.” He responded to Gilliam and Milchan saying that he was interested in appearing in the film, specifically in the significant supporting role of Jack Lint, Lowry’s old friend, fellow bureaucrat, and, though Lowry doesn’t know it, a torturer for the regime. But that part had already been set aside for Gilliam’s fellow Python Michael Palin, so Gilliam and Milchan steered De Niro the other way entirely, focusing his attention instead on the character of Harry Tuttle, the rogue state operative who leads the resistance and whose name is misspelled on an arrest order, setting off the plot. Tuttle would appear in only two scenes, but he constituted a crucial figure in the story line and in the psyche of Lowry, who sees him as a renegade hero and a father surrogate, a man’s man whose determination to take action sharpl
y contrasts with Lowry’s milquetoast mien. Gilliam was somewhat surprised that De Niro agreed to such a small part: “He had to take what he could get,” he joked. But he soon realized that De Niro “liked the idea of not having the burden of carrying the starring role in a film for a change.”

  In fact, it was the smallest role he’d played on-screen in nearly fifteen years, not that he saw it that way. The part of Tuttle called for just a week of shooting, but that didn’t stop De Niro from preparing for it in his usual thorough fashion. He supplied his own prop tool belt and tools (Tuttle’s rebellion takes the shape, in part, of a willingness to make repairs to the omnipresent government-owned heating ducts without following the protocols of paperwork). He toyed with adopting a British accent (and with constructing it so that it was clear it was a put-on). He determined to give his Tuttle a John Wayne–ish air of confidence, whistling and humming while he worked, even as he entered each encounter with prudent caution. He saw it, in short, as an acting job.

  On the set, he drove Gilliam daft. Gilliam had been dealing in caricature, grotesquerie, and cartoonishness since before his Python days; there was to be humanity and pathos in Brazil, but it would be centered in Lowry (who was being played by Jonathan Pryce, for whom Gilliam had conceived the role). De Niro, however, prodded his director, as was his wont, for insight into his character, for take after take after take until, as Gilliam later said, he “wanted to strangle him.” The week that had been blocked out for De Niro’s work became two, adding to the film’s overlong production schedule and helping to push it over its $15 million budget (contrary to its later reputation, Brazil wasn’t nearly as costly as it looked).