De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  * * *

  *1 Beatified in 1934, he would be canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1988.

  *2 De Terville would go on to minor fame as a softcore porn model and actress.

  *3 A few years later, Dustin Hoffman actually proposed to his producers that De Niro play the role of Biff opposite his own Willy Loman in a Broadway production of Death of a Salesman. Word got to De Niro. “You want me to be your son onstage?” De Niro asked Hoffman incredulously. The role went to John Malkovich.

  *4 Povod was an acolyte of the playwright and drug-and-booze addict Miguel Piñero.

  WHILE HE WAS BUILDING AND PERFORMING HIS ROLE IN Cuba, De Niro was playing a different sort of heavy in a brief but crucial performance in Angel Heart, an atmospheric thriller that director Alan Parker was adapting from William Hjortsberg’s novel Falling Angel. Parker, a onetime client of David Puttnam’s when the producer was still an agent, had broken into feature directing with the very strange kids-as-gangsters picture Bugsy Malone and gone on to critical, commercial, and cult success with Midnight Express, Fame, Pink Floyd—The Wall, and, least seen but best, the domestic drama Shoot the Moon.

  His new film was a mystery about a private detective, Harold Angel, hired by a shadowy client, named Louis Cyphre, to find a fellow named Johnny Favourite, with whom Cyphre has some sort of contract; Favourite, claiming amnesia, has reneged on his portion of the deal and disappeared, and Cyphre wants him found and brought to account. It was a lurid, sexy, overheated story steeped in blood and sex and the occult, set in the 1950s and moving between Harlem and New Orleans. Parker, a lush visualist and iconoclast, planned to push the material to a provocative edge, preparing to include an explicit sex scene between Angel and a voodoo priestess.* It was a picture designed to make waves.

  At first Parker courted De Niro for the role of Angel. But De Niro had problems with the script. “I told Alan Parker that there were a lot of things wrong,” he remembered. After a series of communications in which De Niro explained his reservations, Parker made him a different offer: what if he were to play Cyphre, who only had a handful of scenes? De Niro still objected to the structure of the screenplay, but he found himself engaged by the opportunity to build a memorable character without carrying a script. “It was what you’d call a cameo,” he said. “But then it took me a lot of time to agree to that, too.”

  As Parker recalled, “He was lovely, only he wasn’t definite. It took a lot of talking.” But he understood the actor’s trepidation. “De Niro has made very few errors in any of his choices. That burden weighs heavily on him each time he has to decide what to do. Certainly he’s extremely careful with someone like Roland Joffé or myself, directors he hasn’t worked with before.” In the meantime, Parker had cast Mickey Rourke, then rising to the top tier of American screen acting, in the part of Harold Angel. De Niro, satisfied that the bulk of the heavy lifting would fall to someone else, agreed to play Cyphre. As he put it, “I thought it would be fun to do, not having to worry about doing the whole movie, you know, concentrating on four scenes, and that’s it. It worked out schedulewise.”

  The film shot in Louisiana and New York through the spring of 1986, and De Niro was, as ever, punctilious about the appearance, emotional state, and background of his character. He had Polaroids taken of himself wearing dozens of different shades of contact lenses; he worked on specific looks for his eyebrows, hairline, facial hair, and fingernails; he practiced working with a cane and peeling a hard-boiled egg (this bit of business particularly absorbed and vexed him and wound up taking seven separate takes when it was finally shot); he sought out Hjortsberg to ask questions about Cyphre; and he read extensively in the background of the occult elements of the script, paying particular attention to historic illustrations of demons. (Ironically, he had a model close at hand for the eventual look of his character, perhaps without even knowing it. As he admitted in an interview, “You know, one morning I was looking at myself in the mirror, and I said to myself, ‘Gee, you know, this looks a lot like Marty …’ ”)

  The connection between Scorsese and Cyphre ran deeper than the dark goatee and the provocative demeanor. As Angel Heart unfolds, it becomes clear that Louis Cyphre is not only an evil man but evil incarnate—Lucifer, in fact—and that Harold Angel is being led by the Prince of Darkness toward a revelation about himself in a fashion not unlike the process by which a film director might coax hidden truths out of a Method actor. But that subtlety was lost in the storm about the ratings board that preceded the film into theaters when it finally opened in March 1987.

  DE NIRO APPEARS in only four scenes in Angel Heart, and they form little archipelagoes in the film, pauses for conversations that are somehow weighted and coded and only become entirely coherent in retrospect. Of course, Louis Cyphre (or, as Harold Angel pronounces it, “Sigh-fee-aire”) knows exactly what he’s up to, whom he’s dealing with, and how it will all play out: it’s his nature. But the audience, at least at the outset, is as clueless as the private eye.

  De Niro playfully engages the macabre qualities of the script and the role: the long fingernails, the delicate fingering of his cane, the deliberately wispy, almost singsong voice, the dainty way in which he waggles his fingers when he describes something as a “fuss.” He is at once cagily testing Angel to see if he really is ignorant of the truth of his situation and teasing him with all the clues he’d need to figure it out. Chief among these is the hard-boiled egg, which Cyphre says is believed to be a symbol of the soul; he cracks it open meticulously, salts it liberally, and bites the top off it purposefully, staring at Angel with unguarded intent as he does so.

  Now and again De Niro flashes his eyes in response to something Angel says—particularly when he seems to implicate himself in someone’s death—and the game is almost given away. Finally, when he reveals himself in their last meeting, he is resplendent: fingernails longer than ever, hair unfastened, eyes transformed with contact lenses into fiery amber lasers. He seems thicker of body, regal, a true demon king. It’s not really a performance; it’s more like a playful bit of hokum in the service of a punning riddle. But De Niro’s pleasure in being the side dish and not the main course seems real. As a first real step in breaking away from having to bear the burden of an entire film, it shows promise.

  WHILE STILL ON Broadway with Cuba, De Niro agreed to yet another smallish film appearance, with a completely different pedigree from Angel Heart. The new film was the brainchild of Art Linson, a Chicago native who’d amassed a track record of hits (Car Wash, Fast Times at Ridgemont High), critical successes (Melvin and Howard), and outright flops (Where the Buffalo Roam) as an independent Hollywood producer. Linson, like so many of his age, had grown up watching the adventures of federal lawman Eliot Ness in his battles against the bootleggers and mobsters led by Al Capone in TV’s The Untouchables. In 1985, he learned that Paramount Pictures owned the rights to the series, and he was gladdened to discover that Ned Tanen, who was running the studio’s film department, was also an Untouchables fan and had at one time tried to launch a film version of the story.

  Encouraged at the possibility of bringing Ness and Capone to the big screen, Linson found himself dining one night in New York with yet another Chicago guy, David Mamet, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross. Linson rather audaciously proposed to the newly minted laureate that he consider adapting the story of The Untouchables as a screenplay, and to his surprise, Mamet answered almost immediately, “I’m in.”

  That agreement turned into a long process of script drafting. Mamet quickly realized that he had to throw away not only the fondly remembered Untouchables of his youth but the historical record as well. The story he crafted, over a series of first three and then ultimately seven drafts of the script, was a mythical tale of a white knight and a dark-hearted villain, with Chicago as a kind of fairy kingdom over which they struggled for control. Mamet envisioned Ness as a puritanical Treasury agent who has none of the street smarts needed for the battle. He acquires a
mentor in Jimmy Malone, a weary veteran patrolman who is sick of corruption and relishes the chance to go head-to-head with Capone on something like equal terms. Mamet’s Capone wasn’t the drooling psychopath of some other film versions (in particular the Capone-inspired character played by Al Pacino in 1983’s Scarface); rather, he was a man of slick words, political savvy, and even a kind of charm, utterly and irredeemably ruthless when he needed to be, but able to consort with journalists, celebrities, and elected officials on something like their own terms.

  Linson brought the script to Brian De Palma, who had directed that recent hit version of Scarface but had become best known as a director of stylish gore with strong influences of Alfred Hitchcock and other masters, whose works he often cheekily quoted in films such as Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Obsession. De Palma was in something of a low moment—he had just flopped with a goofball mob comedy, Wise Guys—when Linson approached him. He saw the potential for an Untouchables that combined elements of myth and even comic book morality with a traditional gangster picture and a stylish look and feel. He, too, was in.

  But without a star, they would get nowhere in their quest for a $15–$20 million budget from Paramount. For the almost-too-good-to-be-true Ness, they were steered by the studio toward box office heavyweights Harrison Ford, William Hurt, and Mel Gibson, and they were grateful, Linson said, to learn that they were all unavailable. Mamet’s Ness wasn’t as heavy a presence as those fellows, at least not at first. They needed someone whom the audience could see grow from a naive out-of-towner to a figure equivalent to the titanic Capone.

  They found their man in Kevin Costner, a lean and handsome thirty-one-year-old actor from Southern California who’d broken into showbiz as a tour guide at Disneyland and who’d had only sporadic luck in movies thus far. He’d been offered the lead in the computer-themed adventure movie War Games and turned it down for a role in the ensemble film The Big Chill, only to have his part cut entirely out of the picture save for a shot of his wrist at the very outset. He appeared in a bicycling movie called Fandango and had a splashy role in the western Silverado (a makeup call, as it were, from Big Chill writer-director Lawrence Kasdan). But despite his good looks and all-American bearing, he hadn’t really entered into the awareness of most moviegoers or, indeed, moviemakers. He was, however, fresh-faced and clean-seeming and carried a natural combination of grace and dignity that felt of a piece with the personae of Gary Cooper and James Stewart. He fit Mamet’s vision of Ness perfectly.

  As Ness’s mentor, the streetwise Malone, they cast Sean Connery, whose raffish worldliness and thick brogue (Scottish, not Irish, yes, but still …) were ideal for the contours of Mamet’s character. And as the slick, ferocious Capone they hit on the stocky, menacing English actor Bob Hoskins, who’d come to worldwide attention playing a gangster in 1980’s The Long Good Friday and had recently played an American mobster in Francis Ford Coppola’s ill-fated 1984 period crime-and-music film The Cotton Club. Not only was Hoskins happy to play the small but powerful part, he was willing to do it for the producers’ budget line for the role: $200,000.

  But Hoskins, Linson admitted later, wasn’t their first choice. That was De Niro. When De Palma and De Niro first talked about Capone, the actor seemed loath to add a significant film role to his workload so soon after the arduous process of appearing live onstage. It was true that Capone made only a handful of appearances in Mamet’s script. But it was a role that De Niro, who’d been playing a lean and hungry drug dealer onstage, would have to undergo another of his famed transformations to fill. “I didn’t want to have to carry a movie,” he said yet again when asked about his motives for taking on a relatively small role. “But doing The Untouchables was a lot like being a principal in the movie because of the preparation I had to do.”

  There would be a weight gain, and another episode of applied indulgence in rich foods. His hair, too, was all wrong: Cuba the gangster wore his long hair slicked back into a ponytail, while Capone had a thinning pate, and so De Niro would have wanted to alter his own hairline to play the part. And there was a long history of, in his view, bad screen Capones: he didn’t like Paul Muni in the original Scarface, for instance, or Rod Steiger in 1959’s Capone. What with the heavy lifting the role would entail, the hard work he’d just finished, and the relatively small fee the production would be able to offer him, it was easiest to tell De Palma thanks but no thanks.

  Still, he was genuinely interested in the part. At the same time, Linson and De Palma were getting anxious about the actors they’d already signed. “Brian and I both worried,” the producer recalled, “that with Connery being a Scot and Hoskins English, it was beginning to feel like a foreign cast. We needed De Niro.” They knew the studio would balk at the additional expense of De Niro’s salary, so they devised a plan that would allow them, in effect, to force the studio to hire him. They put off the Capone scenes until the end of the shoot, taking the chance that they would soon be able to demonstrate to Paramount executives the point of enhancing the film through the hiring of a real movie star.

  In the fall, just as production began in Chicago, Paramount’s Ned Tanen flew in to see how things were going. He was impressed by the preparation and the footage that had already been shot—the bombing of a speakeasy. Then Linson and De Palma sat him down and De Palma laid out his case to pursue De Niro: “We have the opportunity to get De Niro to play Capone. I believe if we stay with the cast we have, shorten the schedule [as the studio was hoping], and reduce the scale of the picture, that you will end up with a movie that at best will be suited for ‘Masterpiece Theatre.’ It is not the movie I want to direct. It will not work, and I cannot afford to make a movie that will not work.” Linson added, “Ned, think of it, when Bob De Niro kills somebody with a baseball bat, with Brian directing, it will never be forgotten.”

  Tanen was hesitant, but he was mollified by word that De Niro would be willing to drop his fee by $1 million, taking $1.5 million and a piece of the gross of the film as his salary. He begrudgingly agreed to replace Hoskins, paying the actor his entire fee as a parting gift. Hoskins, for his part, had absolutely nothing bad to say. Asked if he was upset at being let go, he told a reporter, “Are you kidding? I got $200,000 for doing nothing and went on to my next project. De Niro has shown me only kindness. He’s a real friend. He’s helped me shop for my wife’s and my kids’ Christmas presents. He’s invited me around to meet his granny, and he’s come to my house for a pot-luck dinner. That really knocked my wife out. I think she was finally impressed with me. You can’t do better than that for a friend.”

  Working with De Niro had been smooth thus far. His only demand had been that all his scenes be shot on continuous workdays, which actually made things easier for the production. But when he showed up in Chicago for rehearsals, some weeks before he was scheduled to begin shooting, Linson was alarmed. The producer went with De Palma to visit De Niro in a hotel suite and couldn’t believe that the thin, sheepish fellow before him was the man he’d just hired to play Al Capone. “He was thin; his face was gaunt. He was quiet and he looked young. His hair was thick and low on his forehead and he wore a ponytail.” As he later recalled, “If De Palma’s introduction had not confirmed that this was Robert De Niro, I would’ve asked for some verification.” When they left after their chat with the actor, Linson put his fears bluntly to De Palma: “If I didn’t know that was Robert De Niro, I’d say we were doomed. Tell me we haven’t made fools of ourselves.”

  Determined to go forward, De Niro told Linson about some problems he was having with the script. To De Niro’s surprise, the producer indicated that Mamet had turned hostile toward the production and might not even be willing to answer any of his questions; he gave De Niro Mamet’s phone number and wished him luck. Then he accompanied him to the wardrobe department, where De Niro looked at the costumes that had been prepared for him and declared them “great … good … nice … interesting …” Linson knew that what he was hearing was, in fact, the o
pposite of what the words said. “You have come to the conclusion that you hate the wardrobe,” he said. “You would like me to start over and have it completely redesigned … under your supervision.” De Niro smiled. Linson calculated another $50,000 had just been added to his budget, but he had passed the point at which he could say no.

  De Niro took off for Italy, where he spent five or six weeks eating an obscenely rich diet like the one he’d indulged in during the production of Raging Bull. Linson, meanwhile, put in orders for ten bespoke suits, at $3,000 each, from a tailor whom De Niro recommended in lower Manhattan who’d actually made clothes for Al Capone. He also splurged on underwear: silk, from the famed Sulka haberdashery, which again was where the real Capone had shopped. Per De Niro’s instructions, specific items of jewelry, hats, even cigars (Havanas, illegal, at $25 a pop) were obtained. Now all they needed was their Capone.