De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  As it happened, David Puttnam had been right to be anxious about De Niro at the box office. Although the film had a certain middlebrow cachet and was widely admired for its epic craft, it grossed barely $17 million at the North American box office, not close to earning back its budget. (It did earn seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, though it won just one prize, for cinematography.)

  BY THE 1980S, his marriage to Diahnne Abbott seemed less solid than ever, and De Niro’s cat-on-the-town reputation grew. He was regularly seen in the company of attractive African American women, often in their twenties, always beautiful, always slender, and rarely with him more than once or twice. In New York and Los Angeles, restaurateurs and club-goers would often spot him in the company of these women, whom he met however he could: chasing them down in his car, approaching them in public places or at events, even spotting them on TV and in newspapers and contacting them through third parties. While he was making Brazil in London he got an eyeful of one of the Sun’s Page Three girls, a gorgeous South Londoner of Caribbean heritage named Gillian de Terville. Getting her phone number through the agency of one of his showbiz contacts, he rang her at her parents’ house and began a now-and-then relationship that lasted longer than a year, seeing her whenever he was in the United Kingdom and inviting her occasionally to see him in New York.*2

  But of all the girls who drifted through his life when he was still legally married to Abbott, none would have the impact of Toukie Smith, a buoyant woman whom Esquire once called “a cyclone of dizzy charm.” Smith was a well-known figure in the New York fashion and dance worlds, in the city’s night life and charitable circles—in connection, it often seemed, with anything and everything to do with glamour, sparkle, and joie de vivre.

  She was born in 1953 in Philadelphia, the youngest of three children of a butcher and a factory worker. Her parents split when she was four, and she and her older brothers, Willi and Norman, were raised by the combined energies of her mother’s family. In that female-dominated household, Willi, the eldest, born five years before his sister, liked to joke that there was more clothing than food. He became interested in fashion and clothing design from a young age, winning a scholarship to the Parsons School of Design in New York. Soon after graduating, he entered the world of women’s fashion with great energy, flair, and—for his age—success.

  By the time he was twenty-five, Smith was one of the stars of a boom in African American fashion designers, with his clothing—mainly sports and evening wear for women of ordinary means—regularly featured in layouts in Vogue, Glamour, and the New York Times. And he had a favorite model, who sometimes gave him inspirations for specific designs: his sister, Doris, aka Toukie, thus dubbed for the way she pronounced the “toot-toot” of a choo-choo train in a favorite childhood song. “Toukie is my total inspiration,” Willi once said. “She has enough energy to light up the World Trade Center.” The fun that Toukie radiated in her modeling perfectly suited her brother’s work; she smiled on the catwalk and actually seemed to mean it, which was just the sort of attitude that Willi’s playful, trendy work embodied: “I don’t design clothes for the Queen,” as he put it, “but for the people who wave at her as she goes by.”

  At just twenty years old, Toukie hit New York like a ball of fire. She studied dance with the Alvin Ailey troupe, appeared in almost all of her brother’s fashion shows, designed shoes, attended parties, got a contract to model for Issey Miyake, was named “Bloomingdale’s Favorite Model” of 1978, and signed on with the powerful Wilhelmina modeling agency. She and Willi formed a clothing company that didn’t last long, but he rebounded with a more stable firm, Williwear, that within a decade would grow to serve more than five hundred department stores and gross $25 million per year. And he was a critical as well as financial success. In 1983 he was awarded the Winnie, the top prize for women’s fashion, at the annual Coty American Fashion Critics’ Awards; two years later, he took the top prize at the Cutty Sark Menswear Awards.

  Toukie met De Niro at a party after Williwear had become a thriving concern and her star had risen alongside her brother’s. Physically, she was De Niro’s type: bosomy, slender-waisted, very pretty. But she had more energy for socializing, party-going, and scene-making even than Abbott, which seemed to make it unlikely that she and De Niro could sustain a relationship. Yet somehow, because she doggedly maintained her independence from him—“I tell people, ‘You deal with me as Toukie Smith,’ ” she insisted to a reporter—they kept seeing each other and formed a genuine bond that lasted for years. She would appear at premieres with him, at the public events that he rarely (and begrudgingly) attended, at private occasions such as dinner parties and birthdays and the like. But she maintained her own homes in New York and Paris; from his point of view, it was ideal.

  As in all of his relationships, including his marriage, which would officially end with what his soon-to-be ex-wife Diahnne Abbott called a “reasonable … pleasant and friendly” divorce in 1989, De Niro was extremely circumspect and private. He had his pleasures, he had his preferences, he had his needs, he had his comforts, and he had his freedom, but he also managed to form genuine connections with formidable women. Soon after the divorce, the open secret of his relationship with Toukie was made public knowledge, and newspapers and such were referring to her as his “companion.”

  At the same time as her connection with De Niro was reaching this public level, Toukie began to suffer a series of personal losses. In 1986 her mother, June Harllee, died in New York of cirrhosis of the liver. In April of the following year came an even more devastating blow: Willi, age thirty-nine, died suddenly—“He went into the hospital on Wednesday and died on Friday,” recalled a business partner—of what was at first reported to be pneumonia and was later acknowledged to be AIDS, which turned lethal very quickly when he contracted a parasite on a trip to India. He had always been frail and secretive, and apparently nobody around him knew how sick he was until it was too late for any of them to be of help or comfort. Toukie was still feeling those losses in June 1988 when she suffered more heartbreak, miscarrying De Niro’s child. Characteristically, she rebounded from these losses with aplomb and vigor. She had been working on AIDS awareness programs and charity through the Smith Family Foundation, which she formed after Willi’s death (De Niro joined her in hosting a Willi Smith Day fund-raiser in April 1990). She did some acting on television, danced and sang in benefits, and continued to make the scene not only on red carpets but, in effect, behind them, building a party-planning business, which grew to include catering, and yet another business as a beauty and fashion consultant, and continuing to model for fashion shows, charitable events, and catalogues. And even as she did all that, the losses continued to pile up. Patrick Kelly, another African American fashion designer close to both Willi and Toukie, died of AIDS in 1990, and Williwear spiraled financially, declaring bankruptcy in 1991, barely four years after its founder’s demise.

  DE NIRO HADN’T appeared onstage in any sort of dramatic production since the early 1970s, but his apparently total metamorphosis into a screen actor did not dissuade the indefatigable New York theatrical impresario Joe Papp from trying to coax him back to the stage. In early 1980, Papp, who ran the Public Theater in Greenwich Village and the New York Shakespeare Festival, famed for its summertime productions in Central Park, announced plans to mount a series of repertory plays with big stars, including Meryl Streep, Jill Clayburgh, Raul Julia, and De Niro. De Niro and Streep were said to be cast in three of them, one being a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the other two, unannounced, to be directed by Wilford Leach and Ulu Grosbard. De Niro didn’t really seem serious about the project at the time—“I told them they can use my name,” he explained to Drama-Logue—and by the springtime Papp, millions of dollars shy of the funds the venture would require, dropped it.*3

  But in February 1986 the news broke that Papp had finally landed the big fish he’d had so long on his line: De Niro would be appeari
ng onstage at the Public in April in Cuba and His Teddy Bear, the world premiere of the first full-length work by a twenty-six-year-old playwright named Reinaldo Povod. Povod’s play had been developed in playwriting workshops at the Public, but Papp didn’t at first think that it would become one of the star vehicles for which the theater was noted. As he told a reporter: “I had no intention of casting it with stars, but after I read it, I thought, I wonder if De Niro would be interested in this? I had been after him for years to get back to the theater. So I sent him the script.” De Niro, Papp said, “was interested in it, but he kept saying, ‘I don’t know. Well, maybe all right, but I still have these movies to do.’ ”

  The play concerned an illiterate Hispanic drug dealer, Cuba, raising his son Teddy in an unpromising and sometimes dangerous environment on the Lower East Side. The boy has aspirations to be a writer, but he has chosen to emulate Che, a famed “playwright junkie” celebrated in the New York media, and his father’s concerns with the protocols and particulars of his own chosen profession blind him to the danger toward which his son is tending.*4 The pressures under which the two men live build in the play’s second act to an explosive climax between father and son.

  De Niro was vague when asked what drew him to the material: “I always wanted to do a play, but I wanted to do a new play,” he said. “New plays are more interesting; you don’t have all the stigma, the baggage you have with old plays. I just felt this one was very well written and very strong.” He wouldn’t commit, but he continued to respond to Papp’s entreaties. “I introduced him to the playwright and his father,” the producer remembered, “and we had two workshop readings with most of the same people who are in the cast with him now. But there was no commitment still, just wait and see. Finally I grabbed De Niro and asked, ‘Are we going to do it?’ and he said, ‘We’ll have to work it out.’ ”

  The deal was struck: with a cast that included Burt Young and Ralph Macchio, who had taken part in the workshop readings, De Niro was scheduled to appear in Cuba from May 18 through June 14, with preview performances beginning in mid-April. The announcement proved to be lightning at the box office: the entire run of the show was sold out in three hours (impressive, but to be fair, the theater in which the show would be performed seated just over a hundred). Ever innovative, Papp found a way to sell even more tickets: petitioning Actors’ Equity for a waiver of their policies against broadcasts of live plays, he was given permission to air closed-circuit television streams of the performances into another auditorium at the Public’s complex; those seats went for $7 a pop.

  The mounting of the play was the sort of work De Niro loved: real roll-up-the-sleeves acting, with lots of conversation about the characters and scenes. As Povod noted, “He trusted us entirely. He was willing to accept anything we would submit to him and give it a trial. He knew that a lot of the writing had to be examined or tested in rehearsal.” The creators understood they had a rare opportunity at hand, and they were careful not to ask too much of their star; indeed, they gave him the latitude to perform the role as his instincts guided him. As Bill Hart, who was given Cuba as his directorial debut, noted, “With Bob De Niro, you’d just better be very careful about insisting on anything. Because you may insist on something that will be a lot less interesting than something he’s going to come up with himself two weeks from now.”

  Young, who’d already appeared in three films with De Niro while sharing virtually no scenes with him, found him an engaged and accessible co-star. “After rehearsals,” he recalled, “we’d rehearse some more in his loft. He had a floor plan laid out in his living room and everything. He was meticulous. And very patient with Ralph Macchio, who was his son in the show and had never been onstage before. I thought of Bob as our leader.” In fact, De Niro fostered a variety of bonding efforts with the cast, going so far as to initiate the ritual of a football-team-style huddle before the opening curtain.

  The show went through a month of previews before opening on May 18. De Niro was greeted with almost universally positive reviews. De Niro, per Mel Gussow of the New York Times, “amasses character detail, and … gives Cuba stage life … he reveals an earthy naturalness and an ability to extinguish his own star charisma. Artfully, he subordinates himself within a company of actors.” In the Village Voice, Michael Feingold declared, “Robert De Niro’s an actor, a real actor, and a good one.… He has a lead actor’s authority, which in the theater is a better asset than a star’s mythical magic.” The New Yorker declared the performance “stunning” and added that De Niro “couldn’t be better.” Jack Kroll of Newsweek, who’d written appreciatively of De Niro’s last stage performance, in Shelley Winters’s One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger, said that the star gave his character “a riveting reality.” And the hard-to-please John Simon of New York simply said: “As Cuba, Robert De Niro is every bit as effective and affecting as in his best movie roles—more than which I needn’t say.”

  The reviews of the actual play were mixed, but commercially Cuba was review-proof. That month of previews had sold out in a snap, as had the four weeks of the official run, as had a $250-a-pop benefit performance, which included dinner. Tickets were nearly impossible to come by, even for stars: Tom Cruise, then dominating the movie screen in Top Gun, had to sit apart from his date on the night he caught the show, because neither Papp nor De Niro could get him a pair of seats together at the last minute. Powered by De Niro’s presence, if not necessarily his work, the show was a massive hit for the always-underfunded Public Theater. It surprised exactly no one in New York, then, when Joe Papp announced, just as the production was winding down, that he was moving Cuba and His Teddy Bear to Broadway.

  De Niro had committed to appear in fifty-five performances at the Longacre Theatre—a Broadway house with a capacity more than ten times that of the original Public Theater auditorium in which the play debuted. Tickets, with prices ranging from $10 to $37.50, went on sale on June 30, and by the end of business on July 1, more than $500,000 worth had been sold—more than 30 percent of the total potential gross. Considering that De Niro, Young, and Macchio, the stars of Raging Bull, Rocky, and The Karate Kid, were working for the Broadway minimum of $700, Papp and the Public were set to make a killing.

  The Broadway production of Cuba opened on July 16. That night, De Niro received flowers from Diahnne Abbott and the kids, as well as from Sally Kirkland and Liza Minnelli, telegrams and letters from Harvey Keitel, Twyla Tharp, Michael Cristofer, Christopher Walken, and Tommy Lee Jones, and thank-you notes from Joe Papp and Ralph Macchio. The opening-night party was star-studded, but, as Mardirosian remembered, De Niro was more interested in family than celebrities. “Because I was an understudy,” he said, “I was able to get to the party early. There were a lot of tables, and at one of them I saw Robert De Niro Sr., and I thought, ‘I’ll go sit with Bob,’ and he beckoned me over, and I sat across from him. And we’re chatting, mostly about tennis, and then the people start coming in from the theater. And when Bob, the actor, walks in, everybody’s wondering where he’s gonna sit, because that’s gonna be the center of attention. And where does he sit? He sits next to his father! I had frankly had been hoping to stay in the background. Nobody had seen me in the show, nobody knew who I was, but as soon as Bob comes in, suddenly it was as if all the headlights in the room were pointing at us.”

  The engagement ran until late September, and once again it was a celebrity carnival; on one memorable night, the audience included Robin Williams, Richard Chamberlain, and Sylvester Stallone with his wife of the moment, Brigitte Nielsen. An even more intriguing crowd was treated to the play on August 18, when the cast performed it on Rikers Island before seven hundred inmates.

  As Tom Mardirosian remembered, De Niro was always inclusive of his collaborators. Even though he was but an understudy in the show, Mardirosian was invited to De Niro’s birthday party. “All these big celebrities were there,” he said. “And I sat near Robert De Niro Sr., and he had a dog that he was petting. And when they
brought out the cake and all these big celebrities were singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Bobby, the dad said to me, ‘Look at this: I remember when nobody came to his birthday party.’ ”

  Onstage De Niro proved, once again, a willing collaborator. Mardirosian, among many others in the cast, was a more experienced stage actor than De Niro, and on the night that he understudied Young, he realized that De Niro didn’t know how to, as theatrical actors call it, “hold for the laugh”—that is, wait for the audience to finish laughing at a funny line before resuming the dialogue. As Mardirosian recalled,

  There was this one scene in the play that I always thought was funny and should have gotten laughs, but it never did, and I always thought that was odd. So when I went on for my one night, I was determined to have a good time … By the time the scene came on, I was real comfortable, and he says his line, and I say my line, and the audience laughs where they had never laughed before, and he talked over the laugh, because he’s not used to them laughing there. And he stopped, and he kind of looked at me funny, like, “I don’t understand that.” And he said the next line, and I said the next line, and they laughed again. And again they topped him. So now he’s thinking, “Hmmm … something’s going on here.” And by the time the scene was over, he had learned to hold for the laugh. I literally taught him how to do that onstage while we were performing in a Broadway house. At the end of the show, he came to my dressing room and knocked on the door and said, “You know, you’re a funny guy.” And I said, “Well, thank you …” And he said, “No: you’re a funny guy.” And I said, “No, really …” And he said, “No. I’m telling you: you’re a funny guy.” So I finally said, “Thanks, Bobby.”

  Cuba, sans De Niro, would be performed in London and Buenos Aires in the coming years, and a movie script, which De Niro didn’t care for, appeared on his desk in 1988. There was talk in the fall, just after Cuba closed, of De Niro staying on Broadway to direct and star in a production of Bertolt Brecht’s Arturo Ui, which came to naught, and the following year Joe Papp announced plans to mount a series consisting of every play by William Shakespeare featuring prominent stars, De Niro among them. But though he didn’t specifically say no, it was clear soon afterward that De Niro had no plans to return to the stage anytime soon, and certainly not in a classical role. “I don’t know that my way would be that special or interesting that I would want to put all that time in, to put myself on the line,” he said. “There are other people with much better qualifications for doing it. I mean, Shakespeare is great, but I’d rather have the same problems in a contemporary situation where people can relate to it more directly.”