De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  In fact, it was a global smash, earning nearly $107 million at home and another $70 million or so abroad, spending two weeks at the very top of the North American box office and ten weeks altogether in the top ten. De Niro didn’t get paid as much up front as he had on Ronin: his paycheck on Analyze This was a relatively modest $8 million. But Tribeca Productions owned a piece of the film, which provided the company with its first bona fide megahit. The success gave De Niro some ideas about what else he could be doing, ideas that would change his career, his life, even his legacy in ways nobody could have foreseen.

  * * *

  *1 It would finally go into production in 2014 with Liam Neeson in the role De Niro had once considered.

  *2 Starr, of course, was the special prosecutor who was, at the time, investigating President Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky, among other things.

  *3 Indeed, De Niro himself more or less forgot it, returning to Paris in May 1999 for the opening of an exhibition of Robert De Niro Sr.’s paintings at the Gerald Pitzer Gallery on the rue Matignon. Pointedly, perhaps, no figures of the French political establishment were present at the big party, though the paparazzi and mobs of star-gazers were camped outside to catch a glimpse of him.

  ELIA KAZAN WON ACADEMY AWARDS AS BEST DIRECTOR IN 1948 and 1955, for Gentlemen’s Agreement and On the Waterfront, respectively, and he amassed five other Oscar nominations throughout his career for directing such films as A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden, as well as three Tony awards as best director. But his life’s work had been mitigated, in the eyes of more than a few in the Hollywood community, by his 1952 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, when he had been a friendly witness, providing the committee with names of people whom they had already identified as Communists or Communist sympathizers. Not only had Kazan never apologized for his decision, he staunchly defended himself in a full-page ad in the New York Times and in interviews and writings throughout his life. To many eyes, in fact, On the Waterfront, which was written by Budd Schulberg, another friendly HUAC witness, was an attempt to show how informing on one’s former peers could be a sign of honor rather than a badge of shame.

  In some circles, Kazan’s cooperation with HUAC was overlooked; in 1983, he was named a Kennedy Center honoree, one of the highest civilian honors that can be bestowed in the United States, and in 1987 he was feted at a benefit for the American Museum of the Moving Image. But he was still considered a self-serving rat by others in Hollywood, a man who helped fuel the ruinous Hollywood blacklist of the McCarthy era, a cruelty that was still acutely felt decades later.

  It was thus headline news when in early 1999 the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences announced that it would give the eighty-nine-year-old Kazan an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. Karl Malden, who’d worked with Kazan before and after his testimony and who was a past president of the Academy, had proposed the award, and the thirty-nine-member board had voted its approval unanimously. The award would be presented during the Oscar telecast in late March by two of the contemporary cinema’s most prominent heirs to Kazan’s artistic legacy: Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.

  In Hollywood, where various victims of the blacklist still lived and the business of sorting out which screenwriters should properly be credited for films they wrote pseudonymously while under the shadow of the blacklist was still being debated (witness the many feature stories about the era that had greeted the release of Guilty by Suspicion), the news of Kazan’s honor was received with powerful emotions. A full-page ad in Daily Variety signed by, among others, Sean Penn and Ed Asner accused Kazan of having “validated the blacklisting of thousands” and doing “enormous damage to the motion picture industry.” Survivors of the blacklist spoke out in the media and organized a demonstration for Oscar night. The award was meant to be a sentimental gesture, but it was shaping up to be a scrap.

  De Niro had grown up enraptured by Kazan’s work and had starred in the director’s final film, The Last Tycoon, more than twenty years prior. The two had maintained contact and friendship over the years. Kazan had sent De Niro a letter after seeing him onstage in Cuba and His Teddy Bear, offering a few suggestions for the performance, and had written him again after having seen A Bronx Tale, declaring, “I don’t know anyone who could have done it as you did.” De Niro was among the five hundred people who turned out to honor the director at the American Museum of the Moving Image gala. So for De Niro the Oscar was a matter not only of artistic just deserts—Kazan’s work clearly merited the recognition—but also of personal loyalty. Of course he would present it.

  On the night of the awards, a frail Kazan entered the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion through a side entrance, meaning that he didn’t have to walk past the couple of hundred people who were protesting his appearance peacefully across the street from the red carpet, where they were opposed, also peacefully, by a smaller group carrying placards in favor of Kazan. When the moment for his award came, highlights of Kazan’s impressive career were shown and Scorsese and De Niro spoke from the podium, De Niro describing the honoree as “the master of a new kind of psychological and behavioral truth in acting.”

  Then, accompanied by his wife, Frances, Kazan came out from the wings to a mixed response. As TV cameras showed, some in the crowd stood immediately to applaud him, including Malden, Warren Beatty (who made his film debut in Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass), Meryl Streep, Helen Hunt, and Kathy Bates; some, including Steven Spielberg, applauded but stayed in their seats; and some, including Nick Nolte, Ed Harris, and Amy Madigan, stayed seated and unresponsive, their hands still, their gazes accusatory.

  Kazan did not make too much of the moment. “I want to thank the Academy for its courage, generosity,” he said, noting his long and not always harmonious relationship to the institution. He looked around for Scorsese and De Niro and thanked and hugged them both. Then he declared, “I think I can just slip away,” and Frances led him back off the stage.

  THAT SUMMER, De Niro surprised Grace Hightower—and delighted gossip columnists—with the news that he wanted a divorce. The couple had always had lifestyle issues, according to whispers, and they were struggling as parents to Elliot, who was exhibiting some developmental difficulties. De Niro was happy to have nannies see to the boy, but Hightower wasn’t, and he was said to be frustrated with having forfeited her, in effect, to the child. As per contingencies they’d ironed out before the marriage, they separated, and De Niro bought Hightower a twenty-fifth-floor condo at the Trump Palace on East 69th Street: three bedrooms, a living room with a balcony, a marble Jacuzzi in the master suite, custom built-ins everywhere, plus a set of four storage rooms in the basement. Elliot would live with his mother, and De Niro would be allowed to see him three times a week in the company of Hightower or a nanny.

  They hadn’t officially divorced, but they seemed to have reached a perfectly civilized entente, traveling and attending events together and seeing each other during holidays; Hightower and Elliot even visited the Montreal set of The Score in the summer of 2000. As he had during his separation from Diahnne Abbott, De Niro dated openly; tabloids connected him to Sharon Webb, a Philadelphia TV host, among others.

  The following summer, however, the De Niros hit a truly acrimonious patch and made ugly headlines. De Niro filed suit in New York Supreme Court to have his visitation rights amended so that he could see Elliot on his own, including overnight visits at his Tribeca home; what was more, he wanted a legal guardian appointed for the boy. Hightower, he claimed, was unstable and had struck him during a violent outburst on a Florida cruise, fracturing a rib. Hightower’s attorneys countered that De Niro had exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated, the attack and his injuries and that he was the unstable one, with a lifestyle that included indulgence in alcohol, drugs, and women; he should not be allowed to have Elliot without supervision under any circumstances, they argued.

  The conflict spun out of events that occurred in June in Miami on a yacht own
ed by the actor/singer Marc Anthony and his wife, Dayanara Torres. According to both parties, De Niro and Hightower had brought along Elliot and his twin brothers and everyone was enjoying the day. At some point during the cruise, De Niro went belowdecks and was followed after a time by Hightower, who discovered her husband with the vessel’s cook, who was also the wife of the captain. According to De Niro, she was showing him how to close and lock the bathroom door; according to Hightower, she was closing not a door but her blouse, and De Niro had “a frozen look on his face.” Hightower stormed back up to the deck, announcing loudly what she’d seen and demanding to be taken back to shore; De Niro followed her, trying to talk to her, and she turned around and struck him, more than once.

  In court in July, the pair and their lawyers were strongly encouraged by Judge Judith Gische to iron out their problems as best they could, and they managed to make some progress. But they were unable to reach an agreement on the visitation issues, and Gische ordered them all—De Niro, Hightower, and Elliot—to be evaluated by a court-approved psychologist. It was a situation that only a gossip columnist could enjoy.

  WITH Analyze This reaping rewards for him and his production company, De Niro could afford to take a job close to home that gave him a chance to noodle, and that turned out to be Flawless, an offbeat story about a retired cop who suffers a stroke and is nursed back to health by his Lower East Side neighbor, a drag queen whose very existence is anathema to the cop’s way of thinking. The script was written by Joel Schumacher, the onetime Bloomingdale’s window dresser who had directed such hits as The Lost Boys, Falling Down, and The Client. Philip Seymour Hoffman, rising to recognition on the back of his well-regarded stage work and such films as Scent of a Woman, Boogie Nights, and Happiness, was cast as the drag queen. Despite the boldface names, the film would be made on the down-low and cheap, with a budget under $15 million.

  De Niro hadn’t truly researched a role in years, and the challenge of playing a stroke victim excited him. He brought the script to neurologists at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in Manhattan to have them vet it for accuracy in depicting post-stroke recovery. He observed patients at various stages of recuperation and read up on dysarthria, aphasia, physical therapy, and other post-stroke phenomena. And, as with Awakenings, he visited his old friend Ed Weinberg to remind himself of how a body frozen by disease functioned.

  He worked hard at the details of the role. “He designed weights for his arm so it would hang right,” Schumacher said. “He designed four different prostheses for his mouth so it would show his progress over time. He had a therapist on the set, and if he didn’t feel that what we were doing was … absolutely, totally correct, we did it over.” His script was filled with notes about physical business such as “Let lips get rubbery” and “Bannister: cross over to right with left hand.” He had specific instructions for himself about how to hold cards in a poker game, how to struggle with making a knot in a tie with one hand, and what to do with his cane.

  But Flawless would be one of those films in which he would have been better served putting work in on the script, or at least supervising revisions. Schumacher hadn’t written a movie since 1985’s St. Elmo’s Fire, and his work on the page in Flawless was hammered when the film was released.

  ON A WEEKEND night in late April 1999, in a chair at Gracie Mansion, the traditional home of New York City’s mayors, De Niro sat patiently while the city’s current chief executive, Rudolph Giuliani, the onetime United States attorney who famously had busted up the traditional Mafia in the 1980s, did impressions of Vito Corleone and Paul Vitti, the gangsters De Niro played in The Godfather, Part II and Analyze This.

  De Niro hadn’t come to the stately manor to be entertained. The mayor’s sketch was a light moment in the context of a business conversation. De Niro was accompanied by Harvey Weinstein of Miramax Films and was discussing with Giuliani and his top aides a plan to invest $150 million in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an industrial ghost town of fifteen acres between the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, and build a 700,000-square-foot movie studio—twelve state-of-the-art soundstages just across the river from Manhattan.

  De Niro and Weinstein, among many other New York–based filmmakers, had long lamented the dearth of adequate production space in the city. The two most prominent studios, in Astoria, Queens, and on the Chelsea Piers, were almost always being used for such TV series as Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and Law & Order, and even when empty they weren’t quite large enough for big-money movies, which were inevitably filmed in Los Angeles, London, Toronto, or Vancouver. Although New York was becoming a popular filming location, there really wasn’t a proper place to make movies there. The historic Navy Yard—built in 1801, birthplace of the USS Maine and many other ships, swollen at the height of World War II with seventy-one thousand workers, abandoned in 1966, and in 1970 acquired by the city, which had no pressing use for it—was in many ways a perfect site.

  With the Tribeca Film Center an uncontested success a decade into its existence, De Niro was ready to think bigger, and Weinstein, always eager to build more and high off his recent Oscar victory for Shakespeare in Love, was if anything even more ambitious. The two had no intention of building a film studio, however, when in the early months of 1999 they were approached by a pair of real estate entrepreneurs, Cary Dean Hart and Louis Madigan, who just the previous year had signed a contract with the city to develop a film studio on the Navy Yard site and were seeking investors. De Niro and Weinstein discussed the possibility at dinner and ran with it. By April, they were able to propose a deal to the city that had almost half of the $150 million attached and would likely prove sexy enough to lure the rest without much effort.

  On May 3, in a hastily assembled news conference, Giuliani, De Niro, Weinstein, Hart, Madigan, and others shared the contents of a press release snappily entitled “Mayor Giuliani Announces Major Film and Television Production Facility to Be Built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—Facility to Serve as Pre-eminent East Coast Film and Television Production Studio and Create Thousands of Film, Television and Construction Jobs.” It was a glitzy moment and a wonderful bit of news; De Niro muttered a few carefully noncommittal words to the press, and Giuliani refrained from his gangster movie impersonations. But in the background, Hart and Madigan were unhappy. They had birthed the idea and brought it to De Niro and Weinstein, and they felt that the small percentage they were being offered for their participation didn’t reflect their importance to the deal. What’s more, they had an ally in Giuliani’s office: a deputy mayor who believed that there was a way to finance the deal without the $25 million from the city that the De Niro/Weinstein plan called for—and, perhaps, without De Niro and Weinstein at all.

  By midsummer, the rifts between the various parties had widened, and word began leaking into the press that the film studio wouldn’t be built as had been advertised on that hopeful May morning. The scale seemed out of whack, for one thing: there were perpetually empty soundstages in Los Angeles, and Miramax and Tribeca didn’t generate enough production activity between them to fill a dozen such facilities in New York. Further, the way to make real money in the film biz wasn’t to own the factory but to own the product—that is, the movies themselves. A huge investment in infrastructure would pay off only if it resulted in hit films, which nobody could promise would be the case. And lastly, the two factions in City Hall continued to vie against each other, and Giuliani was privately fuming that he hadn’t been sufficiently warned about the lack of cohesion among the principals behind the De Niro/Weinstein proposal.

  It all came undone in October. Giuliani made another announcement: there would be a film studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but the De Niro/Weinstein faction would not be part of it. Rather, Hart and Madigan would be backed by David S. Steiner, a New Jersey financier who so happened to be a strong supporter of Giuliani’s bid to be a United States senator—in a race against Hillary Clinton, whom De Niro and Weinstein happened to endorse. True, the Steiner-backed bi
d was more favorable financially to the city, but no one who knew Giuliani could believe for a second that political one-upmanship wasn’t involved in the calculations.

  De Niro, Weinstein, and Jane Rosenthal issued a statement declaring themselves “shocked and perplexed” by the turn of events. Describing the conversations of the spring, they said, “The mayor told us we had a deal, all that remained to do was dot the I’s and cross the T’s.” But a counsel for the city declared, “They had nothing. They had a press conference.” And Giuliani, urged by reporters to explain what had happened, reminded them that he was a lawyer and that the announcement they’d seen back in May “says ‘explore’ at least three times, so it was explored. That’s what the word means. It doesn’t mean ‘agreement.’ It doesn’t mean ‘deal.’ ”

  And it didn’t mean “film studio.” By the following spring, the Hart/Madigan/Steiner bid had collapsed, in part because Steiner was caught breaking into a judge’s chambers to look into the contents of his wife’s laptop computer during a divorce action. De Niro and Weinstein moved on to consider sites in New Jersey and Yonkers, neither of which seemed suitable or affordable, though they would have loved to have built outside of the city, according to one participant in their conversations, just to “stick it up Rudy’s knickers.” It may well have been true, as De Niro and Weinstein said when they were edged out of the deal, that “there is no question that our proposal, from the leading film producers on the East Coast, is better for Brooklyn and the needs of the city,” but by 2014 there was still no new film studio in New York.

  WHEN HE STOOD beside Elia Kazan on the stage that controversial night of the Oscars, De Niro gave the world at least one thing to think about beyond the morality of Kazan’s HUAC testimony: his haircut. Throughout his life, just like his dad, De Niro maintained a full, flowing head of hair, which he could wear flopping into his eyes or back in a ponytail or in a leonine mane. For an actor so possessed by the external details of his characters, it was an immense asset. But that night in March 1999 he had it buzzed down to military length from the sideburns to near the top of his skull, where a thatch of full-grown hair stood untrimmed, neatly parted, like the green tops of a root vegetable. For those who watch the Academy Awards with an eye on fashion rather than film or politics, it was a puzzlement. Clearly he had cut his hair for a role, but was he playing an SS officer? A 1930s chain gang convict? A death row inmate facing the electric chair? No, none of those, but in retrospect, any of them would’ve been better than the truth.