De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  So: a first-time director, a first-time screenwriter, an absolutely untested lead actor, a cast full of nonprofessionals, shooting a period film set in the 1960s on streets in Queens and Brooklyn that people lived and worked and shopped on every day (the actual Bronx locations were too busy to shut down and, moreover, had lost their vintage appearance). What could possibly go wrong?

  A lot, as it happened.

  Just before shooting began, De Niro stumbled on the stairs and broke a bone in his foot, delaying production for a week. Then there was a long rainy spell that played havoc with the shooting schedule. Then Francis Capra, the young actor cast as the eight-year-old Calogero, lost a front tooth, delaying his scenes while he was fitted for a prosthesis. There was constant mechanical trouble with the two vintage buses being used as Lorenzo’s work vehicles. (De Niro actually learned how to drive them, and had to take the DMV exam for the bus driver’s license twice because his first effort was erroneously marked as failing.)

  Too, De Niro’s habitual meticulousness could be crippling to the schedule. A fair bit of the activity of the film was to be focused on the stoop outside Calogero’s house, and De Niro and his crew dithered over the location for what seemed like ages. “We used to joke about it all the time with the production designer,” De Niro explained. “Because he was waiting to know where to put the stoop. And we’d say, ‘No, we changed our mind. We’ll put the stoop back here.’ Two weeks later, we said, ‘Put it over here.’ ”

  It may have made for amusing anecdotes, but it added up to money. After five days of shooting, the film was already two days behind schedule. By the time De Niro wrapped production in December, he had shot more than 200,000 feet—some twenty-nine to thirty hours of footage, fifteen times the length of the final film, a long but not excessively indulgent ratio for a major studio production, an absurdity for a small indie drama. The delays and slow pace meant that shooting ran several weeks late, and the budget had risen from $21 to $24 million; despite his earlier reluctance, De Niro covered the overage out of his own pocket. (The prolonged production also delayed the wrap party, which would have fallen in the middle of the holiday season; it was held in January instead.)

  Post-production didn’t go much faster. De Niro sought the advice of Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese, going so far as to send two potential cuts of the entire film to the latter to get his opinion. (“It was almost like an exam,” Scorsese said. “He knew the answer and he wanted to see if I had the same answer.”) Finally, nearly a full year after he began shooting, A Bronx Tale was finished in time for a premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it was received warmly. From there, De Niro brought the film to the Toronto Film Festival, pausing briefly in New York to do some press. In late September, a premiere was held in New York followed by a party at the Tribeca Grill, with a whole panoply of famous faces on hand: Uma Thurman, Dennis Leary, Steve Buscemi, Donovan Leitch, Claudia Schiffer, and the odd couple of the moment, Patricia Hearst and John Waters, with Waters saying of the film, “It’s my favorite interracial romance movie since ‘West Side Story.’ It makes it look so appealing!”

  GIVEN WHAT A huge, ungainly, mechanized, labor-intensive, rule-bound, thankless, and unforgiving enterprise a feature film can be for the person charged with making it, there’s rich humor in the fact that De Niro plays a bus driver in the movie that marks his first effort as a director. It would be another year before Jan de Bont’s Speed truly delved into the metaphor of a racing bus as an action movie, but De Niro surely tasted the irony of learning how to navigate a rolling behemoth while finally being granted the power to start and stop the cameras on a film set.

  A Bronx Tale, with its focus on father-son bonding and Italian American community life, is splendidly chosen as a debut script. Even though the material is autobiographically Palminteri’s, it could have been written by De Niro—or, more aptly, by several of the characters he played over the years. And while De Niro could have appeared as either of the central character’s mentors—Lorenzo, the bus-driving father, or Sonny, the neighborhood kingpin—he made absolutely the right choice in taking the role of the dogged, principled, watchful, earnest workingman.

  Lorenzo has his passions: jazz, steak, the Yankees, the Friday night fights. And those, along with his meticulous manner behind the wheel, mark the man he is. De Niro loves characters of this sort: men of ethics, habits, tastes, and routines. His Lorenzo is a loving dad, a bit saucy, proud, mindful of danger, and, when threatened, man enough to stand up to those who he feels will do harm to his family. He’s got a terrific scene in which he rouses to anger with Sonny when he learns of the gangster’s interest in his son; heedless of peril, he reminds the mobster that he himself has always been a standup guy, insisting, “This time you’re wrong.” And he has other nicely drawn little moments with his son, imparting life lessons and explaining away the frightening mysteries of the adult worlds of violence, criminality, hard work, even sex. (It’s always impressive to see how tender De Niro is with young actors, especially children.) It’s not a major performance by any stretch, but it’s solid and commendable.

  As a director, De Niro shows an actor’s affection for a variety of human types in working with so many unsung and, indeed, nonprofessional players. The kids Francis Capra and Lillo Brancato (as Calogero at ages nine and seventeen, respectively) and Taral Hicks (as the older Calogero’s sweetie) are always at the heart of the film; we experience the story through Calogero’s eyes and words, after all. And whether it’s down to casting (in which De Niro took intense interest) or direction, there’s not a misstruck note in any of their work. Brancato, especially, has a difficult part to play, and he does it with lightness, grace, and energy (and also looks the spitting image of a young De Niro, complete with a mole on his face, and especially when he frowns in a bathroom mirror when feeling the sting of aftershave). Many of the adults are also brand-new to film, if not to acting, and they play with more or less credible textures, even the famous Eddie Mush, who sticks out a little bit but in a fashion that actually serves the singular perversity of his character.

  Still, even though it is well performed, A Bronx Tale can feel a bit leaden, in part because the staging, pacing, photography, and editing—the directorial film craft, in short—are so pedestrian. The film moves slowly, whether it’s depicting intimate conversations, scenes of gang violence, moments of teen romance, a craps game, or a firebombing. It can feel like it has taken a particularly long route to get to someplace simple. It wants to bounce, but it feels like it’s being kept under wraps. Even the soundtrack of pop hits tends to take you out of the picture when it ought to compel you.

  Part of the issue is that so much of what De Niro is trying as a director in A Bronx Tale is taken from the Scorsese hornbook, and inevitably the film begs comparison to Goodfellas, which brings to mind the baseball career of Tommy Aaron, brother of Hank, or the music of Mike McGear, whose real name was McCartney and whose brother was, well … Making a movie set on the mean Italian American streets of 1960s New York, with colorful gangsters, a neighborhood boy who admires the bad guys, and a pop music score is like volunteering for a suicide mission. Given that, A Bronx Tale is surprisingly good, actually, with genuine heart, a brain, taste, some laughs, some drama, and solid acting.

  If it’s better than mere sawed-off Scorsese, that might be largely due to Palminteri, whose story and writing truly were worthy of a bidding war and whose screen presence is a disarming blend of dapper and ugly, genial and vicious. Give him the appropriate credit for auteurship of A Bronx Tale if you like, but give De Niro credit, then, as the producer and facilitator of the enterprise, the driver of the bus, as it were. He may not have been born a director, but the film reveals an eye for material and a talent for selecting collaborators, especially actors. To this day the history of Hollywood is choked with directors who have built lengthy careers out of far fewer skills and far less earnestness. If directing was truly to be a new phase of De Niro’s life and career, this was a thoroughly
persuasive first go. And, of course, it ends on the most tender and personal note that it can: a title card reading, “Dedicated to the memory of Robert De Niro Sr.” It is an absolutely unquestionable sign that the maker of this film takes it as something truly and deeply near to his heart.

  The critics were largely appreciative of the film, especially with De Niro’s way with actors as a director, the self-effacing tenor of his own performance, and his ability to conjure the setting. “The first test of any film in which a star directs himself is whether the viewer can ever forget who is at the helm,” wrote Janet Maslin in a positive notice in the New York Times. “Mr. De Niro’s direction is generous and thoughtful enough to let that happen.” “De Niro doesn’t let arty camera angles sub for good storytelling,” said Susan Wloszczyna in USA Today, “and he draws memorable performances from two amazing young, new actors.” In Variety, Todd McCarthy adjudged it “a ‘Goodfellas’ with heart … a wonderfully vivid snapshot of a colorful place and time.” Similarly, David Ansen of Newsweek deemed the film “wonderfully acted by a seamless mix of pros and amateurs …[It] lets us taste the flavors of a warm and dangerous place and time.” And in the New Yorker, David Denby declared, “As a director, De Niro may not be a demon like his friend Scorsese, but he has humor and warmth of feeling, and that already puts him ahead of most of the competition.”

  Despite this largely warm reception, A Bronx Tale did little to reassure the world that Tribeca Productions was a bona fide moneymaking enterprise. The film opened in seventh place at the nation’s box office, with $3.7 million in ticket sales, behind Malice and Cool Runnings, among other new releases, and such holdovers as Martin Scorsese’s period drama The Age of Innocence. That was the best it ever placed, en route to a final box office take of $17.3 million—well under what it needed to recoup its budget.*2 Its lackluster commercial performance aside, A Bronx Tale always had a good reputation, and Palminteri revived the stage production on Broadway in 2007; it was well received, and that success helped fuel talk a few years later that a musical version of the story would be written for the stage and that De Niro would, of all things, direct it.*3

  DE NIRO HAD enjoyed a modest success, but as the closing moments of A Bronx Tale indicate, he had a greater sorrow to deal with. While he was at work on the film that would mark his directorial debut, De Niro suffered the loss of his father, who died of cancer in New York on May 3, 1993, his seventy-first birthday.

  It was a season of passings. In December 1992 Stella Adler, De Niro’s most important teacher, had died, and De Niro was among the many luminaries who spoke of her influence on his process of and respect for acting, issuing a statement citing, as he often did, her dogma that “Your talent lies in your choices.”

  At that moment, the elder De Niro was already beset by the sickness that would take his life. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a decade before and had been hospitalized at various times for treatment of the disease. He’d always been physically fit, but he’d been indifferent to certain aspects of his health care, as a bohemian artist of his era, age, and circumstances might have been expected to be, and by the time the disease was identified, it had already compromised his system. He continued to live on his own throughout most of the decade, painting, of course, and teaching and writing. He had solo shows throughout the 1980s in New York, Charleston, London, and New Hampshire, as well as a touring exhibition that was curated in Montana and traveled throughout the West. In 1991, he received an honorary degree from Briarwood College in Southington, Connecticut. He was, as ever, busy, playful, eccentric, elusive—that is, he was himself.

  During the following year, though, his cancer progressed, and he weakened. Toward the end of 1992, he was forced to move out of the West Broadway studio that Virginia Admiral, his onetime wife and lifelong friend and advocate, had more or less given him permanently; he stayed instead in her Soho home, which was where he died. In addition to his ex-wife and only son, De Niro was survived by his mother, Helen (who would outlive him by six years, dying within sight of her hundredth birthday), his brother, Jack, and his sister Joan. In marking his passing, the New York Times noted, “Mr. De Niro’s art was defined by an arresting physical confidence and a quality of natural talent that was widely acknowledged, even by critics who felt that his efforts could sometimes have an unfinished or impatient quality.” Be that as it may, the work he left behind held real cultural and even monetary worth. Aside from works owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, and museums in Little Rock, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Youngstown, Denver, Syracuse, Charlotte, Helena, Oakland, Provincetown, New Haven, Tempe, and Billings, he left behind a collection that was valued initially at more than $2.5 million, all of it bequeathed to Admiral and De Niro.

  Not long after his passing, a public memorial was held at the Fulcrum Gallery in SoHo, with a panel of artists remembering the man and his work. In the fall, the family held a private memorial, where De Niro himself spoke of his father in a rare display of personal emotion. “When De Niro finished reading this speech,” said one witness, “he started to cry. After that, there was no holding back. Every woman in the place was in tears, too.”

  Approximately another year passed before De Niro made a more measured public statement about his father, in the form of an article signed with his name—but almost certainly not composed by him—in Vogue. “I look very much like him,” it said, “and I have his name. To him I was Bobby; he was Dad. I also have his temper, his eccentricity, and his passion. And a strong connection to the smell of oil paints and cigarettes and musty old sweaters.”

  Those scents, and the atmosphere of his father’s working and living space so associated with them, meant enough to him that, despite the high price that real estate in lower Manhattan was fetching, he kept his father’s studio almost exactly as it had been at the time of the man’s death, scattered about with the tools of his trade, his books and magazines, his clothes and household items, and even his bicycle. It was a time capsule of his father’s days and deeds, and De Niro would maintain it for decades, visiting it as a kind of shrine and bringing his children to see it and get a sense of what their grandfather’s life and work had been like. “For a long time,” he told Vogue, “I didn’t want to touch it, except to have it cleaned occasionally. I wanted to photograph it (I’ve done that) and videotape it (ditto), and now sometimes I just go there and sit. Everything is still the way he left it: the old chairs, the sketches tacked up, the big wire birdcage. There used to be a parakeet named Dimitrios, who’s gone. Now there’s a fake bird in his place.”

  In the coming years, De Niro would very carefully oversee the maintenance and promulgation of his father’s legacy, working with Lawrence Salander, the artist’s last dealer, to mount exhibitions throughout the United States and the world that burnished the senior De Niro’s reputation—and, incidentally, increased the value of his estate. In a turn of fate that he likely would have appreciated, Robert Henry De Niro of Syracuse would ultimately become one of those legendary artists more appreciated in death than in life. And for the rest of his days his son would be the foremost champion of his father’s memory and art.

  * * *

  *1 This became a standard for reporting on De Niro. In 1997, Esquire’s Mike Sager got a half hour with the actor, found himself facing an iceberg, and left after twenty-five minutes of listening to De Niro harangue him on the subject of celebrity culture, gossip journalism, the paparazzi, and the like. Sager fleshed out the story with conversations from Tribeca shopkeepers and neighbors, who alternately plied him with misinformation about De Niro and cast aspersions on what they regarded as his prurient journalistic tactics. The apotheosis of this sort of grandstanding I-didn’t-get-the-story story came, again in GQ, in 2007, when Chris Heath reported on his four conversations with De Niro, held over the span of three weeks, totaling two hours and twenty minutes, and resulting in 972 on-the-record words from the actor. It ended with a frank dismissal, De Niro telling Heat
h what the source of his difficulty in speaking with him was: “It’s not me, it’s you.”

  *2 Those mediocre earnings didn’t stop Mark Travis, who directed and, by his claim, helped develop Palminteri’s original stage production, from threatening a lawsuit against the production, seeking both credit and remuneration. The suit never materialized.

  *3 There was tragedy attached to A Bronx Tale as well. In December 2005, on Arnow Place in the Bronx, Daniel Enchautegui, an off-duty New York police officer, was shot to death by one of a pair of burglars breaking into the house next door to his. One of the perpetrators—though not the gunman—turned out to be Lillo Brancato, whose acting career had briefly bloomed in the 1990s before collapsing into a series of increasingly minor film and TV roles (including one on The Sopranos) and frequent trouble with drugs. It turned out that he knew the street well: Officer Enchautegui was living in the basement apartment of the former home of Francis Capra, the youngster who played Brancato’s Bronx Tale character as a child and whose older sister Brancato had dated during the production. Contacted by the press when news of the arrest broke, casting director Ellen Chenoweth, whose staff had discovered Brancato playing in the surf at Jones Beach, said, “I’m quite shocked. I’m just devastated.” Three years after the crime, Brancato was convicted of the burglary but not the murder and was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, finally being paroled in late 2013.