De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  De Niro was brought in relatively late in the process, and his salary, a reported $14 million, was more than 20 percent of the whole budget. But his name gave the picture a global reach that the otherwise distinguished but low-wattage cast lacked. And he was a willing collaborator, boning up on his French and probing deeply into the logic and practice of espionage behind the script’s details (Milt Bearden, a former CIA agent whom Frankenheimer had brought in as a consultant on what he hoped to be his next project, a history of the spying agency called The Good Shepherd, was De Niro’s go-to source for questions about spies and their tradecraft). He even took some lessons in race car driving—although he would be filmed behind a dummy wheel, with a real auto racer driving from the right side of the cars.

  He liked Frankenheimer—he gave him a custom-made chair for Christmas and a video camera to mark the end of shooting along with a note declaring “What a guy!… What a cineaste!” And he liked France—or at least he did until the morning of February 10, 1998, when, with a month still to go in the production, he was taken from his suite at the Hotel Bristol by as many as eight Parisian police officers and brought to the offices of judge Frédéric N’Guyen, where he was held for most of the day and questioned for more than three hours about his possible involvement in a high-end prostitution ring.

  At issue was the case of Jean-Pierre Bourgeois, a soft-core porn photographer who was in custody pending trial as the operator of a high-class call girl ring. The charges against Bourgeois were sensational, involving the use of underage girls, $8,000-a-night escorts, Middle Eastern oil billionaires, shady middlemen, briefcases full of cash, and even an epic tryst involving an Arab prince, $1 million, and a well-known entertainment personality. De Niro’s name was found in Bourgeois’s address book, and there were at least three women involved in the prostitution ring who claimed to have met De Niro, one of whom, the English porn star Charmaine Sinclair, had told investigators that he had been her lover. Sinclair—shapely and dark-skinned, like almost all of the women in his life in the past twenty years—said she’d met De Niro in the early 1990s and would see him, on and off, until 1995. “He was attentive, very gentle and passionate,” she told a London tabloid. “He left me totally satisfied.… I know I’ll never make love like that again.”

  Confronted with Sinclair’s story, De Niro didn’t deny it, laying out the entire chain of events for N’Guyen. As he testified, he’d met Bourgeois through the Polish tennis star Wojtek Fibak, who

  told me that Bourgeois was a fashion photographer and that he knew lots of beautiful girls. The first time Bourgeois showed me photos of girls, they were taken from mags like “Lui” and “Playboy.” He said he could introduce me to them, in a friendly way, without any notion of money. It is possible that I chose one of these girls. And it seems that Charmaine Sinclair was the one. I said to [Bourgeois] that I was interested if he could introduce me to her. A few weeks later [he] contacted me and said that Charmaine was with him in St. Tropez.

  De Niro said he flew to Nice from Paris, took a helicopter to St. Tropez, and met Bourgeois and Sinclair in a villa. “I had sex with Charmaine in the villa. I left in the afternoon by helicopter, then took the plane to Paris. There had been no money transaction.” Another girl who was on the scene said she’d seen Fibak and Bourgeois handling a bag full of cash while De Niro was at the villa, but the actor insisted, “I never had any attaché case full of dollars the day I met Charmaine in St. Tropez.” As for any of the other girls involved in the prostitution ring who named him, he would say only that it was possible that he had “shaken hands” with them, and he insisted that nothing more had happened. He wasn’t arrested, charged, or even given reason to believe that he would be, and he was let go at around 9:00 p.m.

  The story of De Niro’s testimony broke all over the world overnight, and he had paparazzi camped outside his hotel constantly (he received regular messages from the front desk about whether or not it was safe to emerge, and he generally did so through a back entrance). It was so bad that he actually called the New York Daily News gossip columnists George Rush and Joanna Molloy to deny any wrongdoing point-blank: “No matter how violent and defamatory the attacks on me are, it will all come out at the trial that I acted properly,” he said, adding cryptically, “I have 20 years of experience. I am doing everything according to the law. I know what I am doing.”

  Privately, he fumed. The previous year he’d been named to the French Légion d’Honneur, a distinction that named him, in effect, an asset to the culture of France. He declared angrily that he’d send the medal back, and he also said that once Ronin was finished filming, he’d never work in or visit France again. With its treatment of him, he said, France had “betrayed its own motto of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity.’ ”

  Among the things he did was hire a prominent attorney, former French justice minister Georges Kiejman, who held a press conference to defend De Niro and denounce the investigator’s tactics: “I was shocked and upset by the way in which [De Niro] was treated in a case in which his name came up only incidentally.” He described his client as a ripe target for the attention of women: “He’s a charming man. Young women are introduced to him all the time.… If you knew the number of women who are pretty and ravishing who have his phone number … He has a right to a private life.” More specifically, Kiejman denounced the sensational tactics of N’Guyen, whom he called “another Kenneth Starr” and accused of seeking to create a “media circus” for his own glory.*2 “The name of Robert De Niro is like a jewel for a judge,” he said. “He submitted voluntarily to be questioned on a matter that did not directly concern him. He in no way, shape or form is a subject of any investigation.…[But] they never let him free. He could phone me, he was not under formal arrest, but without freedom all day … He kept repeating the same answers to the same questions.” After his angry conversation with reporters, Kiejman filed a complaint accusing the judge of “violation of secrecy in an investigation.”

  De Niro was guilty, prosecutors determined, of nothing more than having sex with a woman who, at other times, sold her favors for (lots of) money, but the whole ugly episode cost him at least one potential job: he had been among the actors invited to read English-language translations of the poetry of Pope John Paul II for a CD project that had been successful all over the world in the previous months. When news of this scandal broke, the invitation was rescinded. “De Niro’s participation no longer seems such a good idea,” said Father Giuseppe Moscati, who was coordinating the recording project. “It appears that the image we had of De Niro when we made the proposal is far from the truth.” For his part, De Niro sued the Parisian tabloid France Soir for defamation and violation of privacy for their coverage of his brush with the law, and he was eventually awarded more than $13,000 in damages by a court.

  The whole matter had vanished from newspapers by the fall, when Ronin was released.*3 Producers might have worried that news of their big star in a sex scandal would hurt the film, but the star of Ronin, really, is the film Ronin: the construct of it, the execution of the driving sequences, the shootouts, the cat-and-mouse sequences, and especially the interplay between the very well-cast performers. De Niro’s Sam is from the get-go presented as cagy, untrusting, and demanding, but he’s also undoubtedly professional, possessed of a dab hand’s tricks and insights and a sixth sense for danger, duplicity, and the likelihood of a scenario playing out a certain way. He forms bonds within the little cadre of players, principally a friendship with Reno’s Vincent and a not-quite-romance with McElhone’s Deirdre. But he’s quick to smell a rat, to suss out a hopeless situation, and to deflect inquiries into his own past and motivation with black humor. “You worried about saving your skin?” he’s asked, and he responds, almost without a glance, “Yeah, I am. It covers my whole body.”

  Sam is relentless in trying to get Deirdre to introduce him to her bosses, to get a heftier payment for his work, and, when the time for action comes, to see that he holds up his end and then s
ome. He shoots, he drives, he fights, he connives, and in one of the film’s most remarkable scenes, he even performs surgery on himself to remove a bullet. If he seemed at first a reluctant warrior, he proves himself a valuable one. And he has a code: “Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt.” Stuff like that, played to low-key, hard-boiled perfection, is clearly what drew De Niro to the role, and he plays it just as he did Neil McCauley in Heat, giving himself over willingly to the larger enterprise, playing a part in a big, engaging cinematic machine. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a damn good genre film, and De Niro elevates it with the weight of his presence and his lack of showiness and vanity. (He didn’t elevate it into a hit, though; the film grossed less than $42 million against a budget of around $55 million.)

  EVEN BEFORE HE left for France and Ronin, De Niro was looking ahead to yet another film and another new direction: a script called Analyze This, about the relationship of a mob boss and the psychotherapist whom he starts to visit when he loses his confidence in himself. Billy Crystal had been attached to produce the picture and star as the shrink, and there was a director on board, Richard Loncraine, an Englishman with a resume that included period comedy (The Missionary) and Shakespeare (an updated Richard III with Ian McKellen).

  De Niro had been courted for roles as a comic gangster since Midnight Run, but as Jane Rosenthal explained, “We weren’t willing at the time to have Bob parody the one franchiseable character he has.” In early 1997, though, he was willing to reconsider, and so he was game when he got a gander at the script, which had originally been written by playwright Kenneth Lonergan and had been put into the churning cycle of rewrites that so often plagued Hollywood comedies. During the next year and a half, writers Peter Tolan, George Gallo, and Phoef Sutton would all take cracks at the material, along with Crystal himself; in May 1997 Loncraine would be replaced by Caddyshack and Groundhog Day director Harold Ramis, who worked on yet another set of script revisions, along with colleagues Mort Nathan and Barry Fanaro.

  Ramis was walking a tightrope of sorts: mixing genres, casting well-known actors against type, and having both of his stars as producers. “Bob was afraid Billy would turn it into a sentimental farce, a sitcom,” Ramis said. “He was afraid it would be too pat, too unrealistic. And Billy was afraid it would turn into ‘Goodfellas’: too violent, too mean-spirited. I came in sort of to reconcile these points of view. I reassured Billy the film would be funny. And I told Bob this wouldn’t be a send-up of ‘The Godfather.’ I said, ‘Imagine you’re watching ‘Goodfellas,’ and Woody Allen enters.’ ”

  The script was finally shaped to everyone’s satisfaction in the late spring of 1998, by which time De Niro had agreed to help produce the film and to join a cast that would include Lisa Kudrow, Chazz Palminteri, and the very credible Joe Viterelli, a shady character off the streets of Little Italy who liked to keep his background mysterious and had appeared memorably in Woody Allen’s mob-and-theater comedy Bullets over Broadway. De Niro didn’t dig very deep for his character; principally he made a detailed study of how contemporary mob bosses—particularly the famed “Dapper Don,” John Gotti—dressed and wore their hair. But he did make the acquaintance of at least one bona fide made man, Anthony (Fat Andy) Ruggiano, a soldier in the Gambino crime family; another Gambino associate, Anthony Corozzo, had been cast in the film as an extra (he was a member of the Screen Actors Guild), and he brought Ruggiano to the set one day and made introductions, during which time a photo, which surfaced during a 2009 mob trial, was taken showing De Niro with his arm around Ruggiano. (Asked a few years earlier about running into mobsters, De Niro explained, “You know perfectly well who they are, but if I find them in front of me and they say, ‘Hello,’ I can’t really turn away, can I?”)

  The film was shot quickly from May through July in New York and Florida, and Ramis turned it around in time for a March 1999 release. By then, though, they had competition. In January, HBO had premiered The Sopranos, an elaborate series about a mobster who begins to visit a psychotherapist, secretly, when he suffers a series of panic attacks. As it happened, Warner Bros., the studio that had produced Analyze This, was owned by the same conglomerate that owned HBO. There was some real concern that the immensely popular cable TV series was going to outshine the $30 million theatrical film. That turned out not to matter.

  IT MUST BE made clear in any consideration of his performing career up to this point that De Niro was always funny. He was funny in Hi, Mom! and in that AMC car commercial, in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight and Bang the Drum Slowly and Mean Streets, in Raging Bull and Brazil and The King of Comedy and The Untouchables and Midnight Run (obviously) and We’re No Angels and (yes) Cape Fear and Mad Dog and Glory and, most recently, in Wag the Dog and Jackie Brown. He has always been thought of as an actor’s actor, a thespian most adept at playing heavies. But far more often than is commonly recollected, he had a breezy, winking lilt to him, a born comic’s way with jokey dialogue, a killer grin that could sell you a pained laugh even in a picture like Taxi Driver. He never seemed exactly a joker, but he was, as Jerry Lewis used to say of Dean Martin, “funny in his bones.” As Ramis, a comedian’s comedian, said of De Niro, “It’s not as if he has a shtick he does or some routine that he’s worked up in clubs. He’s funny because he’ll grab on to a reality and just shake it and just milk it for everything. And he knows that excesses of behavior can be very funny. That’s why we laugh sometimes at things that are excessively violent. It’s part discomfort and part irony. But he knows that.”

  It’s no surprise, then, that De Niro is so adept in Analyze This—far more so, indeed, than Billy Crystal, whose character, Dr. Ben Sobel, is essentially the straight man or interlocutor to De Niro’s comically skewed mob boss, Paul Vitti. De Niro’s Vitti always carries an air of menace—at any second he is apt to take a firm, even threatening, tone with his henchmen, his rivals, his psychoanalyst. But whether discussing his sex life, his family, his anxiety, his history of violence, or the ins and outs of his work, he’s genuinely funny. “You don’t hear the word no too much, do you,” Sobel says to him, and Vitti insists that isn’t true: “I hear it all the time, only it’s more like, ‘No! Please! No! No!’ ” Right there is the genius of the film: the shocking and straight-faced blend of mob movie and buddy comedy.

  It works best in the early going, and better still when De Niro is on-screen and we’re not caught up in any of the limp plotting having to do with Sobel’s wedding or his inferiority complex vis-à-vis his own father. Vitti is cautious when entering Sobel’s office for the first time, but he immediately comes to dominate it and to congratulate the doctor for having cured him even though they’ve only had a single vague conversation of a few minutes’ duration. “The load? Gone,” he says blithely about his troubles. “Where is it? Don’t know.” He insists that he’s had a breakthrough, telling Sobel, “You got a gift, my friend.” When the doctor demurs, Vitti is adamant: “Yes, you do” and then “Yes, you do.” But even in a happy fettle, he serves Sobel with a warning: “I go fag, you die.”

  He has a grand comic moment while trying to make love with a mistress whose chatter distracts him into impotence—“I’m trying to do this here!” he scolds her—and another when Sobel starts asking about his father and suggests he might have an Oedipal complex:

  VITTI: “English! English!”

  SOBEL: “Oedipus was a Greek king who killed his father and married his mother.”

  VITTI: “Fucking Greeks.”

  SOBEL: “It’s an instinctual developmental drive. The young boy wants to replace his father so that he can totally possess his mother.”

  VITTI: “What are you saying? That I wanted to fuck my mother?”

  SOBEL: “It’s a primal fantasy.…”

  VITTI: “Have you ever seen my mother? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  SOBEL: “It’s Freud.”

  VITTI: “Well, then Freud’s a sick fuck, and you are, too, for bringing it up.”

  (Later
, when Sobel mentions Freud again, Vitti complains, “I can’t even call my mother on the phone after that thing you told me.”)

  At its best, the film rolls like that again and again, with De Niro effortlessly crafting a sleek, crude, ruthless mob boss aura and then digging into the rich dialogue with real gusto. Unfortunately, Ramis and company determined that they had to balance the Vitti story with a Sobel story, and the last act, in which Sobel becomes engaged in mob business, becomes increasingly inane, a tendency that became chronic and ultimately fatal in the awful sequel. But during that opening hour or so, when De Niro is diving into the chance to make light of his own tough-cookie persona, Analyze This is a genuine treat, and it truly deserved its success.

  It was received well in the press. By now, critics had seen De Niro trying virtually everything that an actor could do, including—as far back as Midnight Run—straight comedy. But by and large they were impressed with his full-on comic turn in Analyze This. “Without betraying the genre that has handed him such choice opportunities,” said Janet Maslin in the New York Times of the very notion of De Niro sending up a mob movie, “Mr. De Niro gives a performance that amounts to one long wink at the viewer.” In the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle wrote, “De Niro has figured out that his best strategy for playing comedy is to play it as he would a drama. He plays it straight and lets the situation determine whether it’s funny.” But there were some negative notices mixed in: “Playing tough is what made De Niro a star, and his reluctance—or inability—to send up his own clichés is understandable. Which is why he’s especially awkward when he tries to be funny,” said Manohla Dargis in the LA Weekly. “De Niro doesn’t just seem uneasy—he seems lost.”