De Niro: A Biography

Virginia and Bobby remained in the Bleecker Street apartment. As long as Bobby was too young for nursery school, she took paying work she could do at home. For a while, she framed pictures at $1.25 an hour – not enough to maintain the loft, which in any event was about to be taken over by The Little Red Schoolhouse, an elementary school launched to give the children of Greenwich Village the sort of education demanded by radical parents. Virginia moved to a smaller apartment, at 521 Hudson Street, a building mostly of studios, where many painter friends rented space. She stayed there until she found a better place at 219 West 14th Street. The rent was high, at $50 a month, but the two-room apartment with its parquet floors and central heating was too tempting. Bobby would grow up and live most of his young adult life here.

When he was old enough, Virginia placed Bobby in the nursery school attached to Greenwich House on Barrow Street. Set up to provide arts training and a social centre to the downtown area, Greenwich House included music and pottery schools, as well as its kindergarten, which charged working mothers only $1.25 a month.

Starting at the nursery brought De Niro into contact for the first time with the Ethical Culture Movement, which ran a free kindergarten and various humanitarian projects in and around New York. Founded by Felix Adler in 1876, Ethical Culture offered a substitute for organised religion, founded on ethics and morality rather than dogma. Adler spelled out its four principles: ‘1. Every person has inherent worth; each person is unique. 2. It is our responsibility to improve the quality of life for ourselves and others. 3. Ethics are derived from human experience. 4. Life is sacred, interrelated and interdependent.’ Though never particularly religious, De Niro, with Virginia’s encouragement, would grow away from his grandparents’ Catholicism towards the principles of Ethical Culture. When he married in 1976, it would be at the group’s New York headquarters, and he remains an enthusiastic supporter of its activities.

Able to get out of the house for the first time since her separation from Robert, Virginia applied for work through the welfare system. Since employment offices routinely directed out-of-work artists to any job which, under the loosest possible definition, involved painting, she found herself decorating fabrics and assembling jewellery. Before she was married she had made pin money typing, and now she started again, typing manuscripts for writers, and editing and typing theses for students at the New School for Social Research, just around the corner on 12th Street.

With its left-wing ideology and funding from wealthy liberals like the Rockefellers, the New School was a haven for European intellectuals fleeing Hitler. Its University in Exile, founded in 1934, accommodated four hundred of them, including German theatre director Erwin Piscator and his wife, the Viennese dancer Maria Ley.

In Berlin, Piscator had directed the Volksbühne theatre, supported by the labour unions. His productions of Meyerhold and Brecht, often using a bare stage, or a few sets in the Constructivist style pioneered in Soviet Russia, with the addition of film or projected images, attracted much attention, not least from the Nazis, who dubbed his work ‘degenerate’. (Piscator always claimed this charge, plus his Communism, led to his exile from Germany, though in fact the impetus was a paternity suit he looked certain to lose.)

Alvin Johnson, director of the New School, invited the couple to launch a programme of drama. Piscator immediately began hiring teachers, while his wife started dancing classes and a Saturday-morning theatre course for children.

Piscator was in his element at the New School. Dressed always in the most expensive silk and cashmere, white hair swept back to emphasise his leonine profile, he ruled the theatre department like a duke. Mel Brooks, later one of his students, parodied him in his film The Producers as the manic Nazi composer of the musical Springtime for Hitler.

Herbert Berghof, one of Max Reinhardt’s actors who’d arrived in America during the thirties and worked with the Theater Guild, managed the acting course. Other teachers included theatre historian John Gassner, editor of the Best Plays of the Year anthologies, Leo Kertz, Lisa Jalowitz, Theresa Helburn, James Light and, most notably, Stella Adler, who would become the most powerful influence on the young De Niro when he decided to become an actor.

When Piscator, under investigation in America for his Communist sympathies, returned to Germany in 1946, Maria Ley Piscator ran the New School’s drama workshop until 1949. Virginia typed her manuscripts and, through her, got similar work from other foreign writers, notably military historian Ladislas Farago. She also found time to paint, and, like Robert, had a solo show at Art of This Century in 1946. Peggy Guggenheim also included some of Virginia’s work at the 1947 Biennale in Venice, where she would shortly relocate permanently, along with her collection.

There was no money in art, however, and Virginia turned increasingly to writing. Her market was the most accessible one, the ‘true detective’ magazines. Lurid monthlies that filled the vacuum created by the demise of the old pulp crime magazines, they published accounts of real crimes, illustrated with original police photographs, augmented with gaudy art or posed photos, usually of terrified girls.

Detective World and Underworld Detective were edited by Lionel White, who wrote Clean Break, the novel on which Stanley Kubrick would base his first major success, The Killing, in 1956. (White’s pseudonymous contributors included hard-boiled crime novelist Jim Thompson, who scripted Kubrick’s film.) A typical Detective World article began: ‘It was Wednesday, October 2, and deep autumnal tints were already visible in the foliage surrounding Harrison’s aged courthouse.’ This line, in fact, comes from ‘Who Killed the 2 Sisters?’ in Detective World for April 1952, credited to one ‘Virgil E. La Marre’, a near-anagram for ‘Virginia Admiral’.

Robert’s first solo show in May 1946 at Art of This Century attracted critical attention, and he even sold some paintings, though insisting the proceeds go straight to Virginia. Not that there was much, since he refused to sell to people whom he felt wouldn’t appreciate his pictures. As late as 1989, when his son wanted to give Francis Coppola two canvases for his fiftieth birthday, Robert quizzed him at length about Coppola’s character. ‘You give it to someone, they put it in a closet,’ he grumbled before relinquishing the pictures, which Coppola hung in the hotel suite he maintained permanently at New York’s Plaza Hotel.

Virginia insisted that father and son spend as much time together as they wished. By osmosis, Bobby acquired many of his father’s traits, including the tendency to leave sentences dangling, or to descend into moody silence. Neither set much store by what he wore, where he lived or how he behaved. And watching his father discard version after version of a composition instilled Bobby’s conviction that ‘near enough’ was never good enough.

Years later, talking about her friendship with De Niro, Shelley Winters would create something of a furore by telling the New York Times, ‘Bobby will never talk about what made him the way he is, but I suspect he must have been a lonely kid, that somewhere along the line he was brutalised.’ If any psychological damage was inflicted on the young Bobby, his father’s sexuality and depression must have played a central part in it. Acting may well have been a form of self-therapy, as well as an attempt to come to terms with his ambivalent feelings towards Robert.

‘His father was important to him,’ says French actor and director Robert Cordier, who knew the young De Niro, ‘and his father was not recognised, and I think Bob got to thinking, “I owe him one.” I think becoming famous was very important to him to pay back his father. That has a lot to do with his drive. I think that has a lot to do with Bob’s will to succeed.’

Asked as an adult if he was close to his father, De Niro said, ‘Close? In some ways I was very close to him, but then …’ He was unable to go on, and his eyes filled with tears. When Robert died, Bobby preserved his studio as a shrine, in exactly the same disorder as when his father was working there. He still visits it from time to time. De Niro also dedicated his first film as director, A Bronx Tale, to his father, who died in 1993, the year it was released.

Uninterested in comfort, Robert moved frequently as space became vacant north and south of Houston Street, on Great Jones Street, West Broadway or Bleecker. ‘He had these dank lofts in NoHo and SoHo at a time when nobody wanted to live in those areas,’ says his son. ‘Often he was the only tenant who wanted to live in the building.’

Bobby got used to being sent out to Washington Square with a book if his father wanted to work. On occasion he’d take him along if he was teaching; his students were sometimes Wall Street brokers, and the class took place in a loft in the business district. On such occasions, he’d give Bobby paints and brushes. ‘He’d paint,’ said Robert shortly. ‘He had a good sense of colour.’ From time to time he’d ask him to pose – ‘but when you’re a kid,’ recalled Bobby, ‘the last thing you want to do is sit still for a long time.’ Rigorous even about pictures of his own son, Robert preserved only one image of Bobby, a superficially casual charcoal sketch.

When they did go out together, it was often to Washington Square, where they would rollerskate or play ball games. But Robert’s real enthusiasm emerged when the two went to the movies. First-run cinemas were too expensive, so they generally saw films at Variety Photoplay in the East Village, Loew’s Commodore at 6th Street and 2nd Avenue, or the Academy of Music on 14th Street – all second-run and revival houses offering two features for only fifty cents. Camille or Ninotchka was usually showing in at least one of them, and Bobby got to see these and other Garbo performances a number of times. Back home, he acted out his favourite scenes for his mother.

Camille fascinated Robert – not the first gay artist to find it inspirational: Jean Cocteau called it ‘a bad film raised to the heights by the extraordinary presence of Miss Greta Garbo’. To Robert, its impassive star embodied a spiritual purity. She was like a secular version of the Madonna he’d rejected with his abandonment of Catholicism. He made sculptures of Garbo, and devoted a series of canvases to her first sound film, Anna Christie, while lines from Camille inspired a dozen poems, and stills from the same film a decade of drawings.

Later, Bobby acknowledged that his idea of great acting derived from watching performers like Robert Mitchum and particularly Montgomery Clift, while his influences for comedy were knockabout ex-vaudeville comics Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. He admired Walter Huston, particularly as the half-crazy old prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, though he disliked Humphrey Bogart, in that film and almost everything else; always playing himself, Bogart seemed the antithesis of everything Bobby thought an actor should be.

Instead, De Niro followed the path of those protean Hollywood stars of the thirties who won their reputations, and their Oscars, by transforming themselves for each role, losing themselves behind heavy accents, crêpe whiskers, wigs, tattoos, scars, false noses, heavy glasses, a shuffle, a limp, a stoop.

Every generation throws up one or two of these performers. Lon Chaney fulfilled this role for Hollywood in the twenties. Christened ‘The Man of a Thousand Faces’, he created definitive versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, and a gallery of scarred pirates, grinning Asians, clowns, crooks and cripples. ‘Don’t tread on a spider!’ ran one Hollywood slogan. ‘It might be Lon Chaney.’

De Niro probably never saw Chaney. He did, however, see Muni Weisenfreund, alias Paul Muni, the graduate from New York’s Yiddish theatre who could play an Italian emigrant gangster in Scarface, a gaudy Chicano club-owner in Bordertown and a crusading miner in Black Legion, but just as easily transform himself into a French author for The Life of Emile Zola or Benito Juarez, the politician of Indian descent who founded the modern Mexican state, for Juarez.

Once De Niro became an actor, he scorned Muni, calling his performance in Howard Hawks’ 1932 Scarface ‘awful. He’s the biggest ham. It was so hammy. You could say he was possibly a great stage actor, but a lot of his movies were over the top. Like I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.’ Yet Muni remains the thirties screen actor whom De Niro resembles most.

Like Chaney and Muni, De Niro would always avoid period pictures or the great classical roles. To play Othello or Don Juan would be like putting on a costume thousands had worn before. But to transform yourself into someone entirely new – that was genius. Chaney’s insistence on strapping his calf to the back of a thigh to simulate amputation, on duplicating blindness by pressing the membrane of an egg to his eyeball, or screwing wire rings into his eye sockets to create the crazy glare of a burned face in The Phantom of the Opera, would all find resonances in De Niro’s work. His Jake La Motta in Raging Bull is a Chaney performance. And the comment a contemporary writer made of Chaney, ‘To endure pain for his art gave him a strange pleasure,’ applies equally well to De Niro.

‘He developed a thick-muscled neck and a fighter’s body,’ Pauline Kael wrote of De Niro in Raging Bull, ‘and for the scenes of the broken, drunken La Motta he put on so much weight that he seems to have sunk into the fat with hardly a trace of himself left. What De Niro does in this picture isn’t acting, exactly. I’m not sure what it is. Though it may at some level be awesome, it definitely isn’t pleasurable.’

Impressive as she found the effort, Kael felt it failed in what it set out to achieve. ‘De Niro seems to have emptied himself out to become the part he’s playing and then not got enough material to refill himself with: his La Motta is a swollen puppet with only bits and pieces of a character inside, and some semi-religious, semi-abstract concepts of guilt.’

Marcello Mastroianni dismissed De Niro’s performances as the opposite of true acting: ‘By nature, the actor is a kind of wonder who can allow himself to change personalities. If you don’t know how to do this, it’s better to change professions. I think it’s ridiculous to imagine that to play a taxi driver or a boxer you have to spend months and months “studying” the life of cabdrivers and the weight of fighters.’

But ‘Chaney’ roles appeal to shy actors, because the performer plays them effectively alone. And there was no doubting De Niro’s shyness. Speaking about his days as an acting student, he remarked, ‘An actor is sensitive as it is – shy – and the whole point of you doing this [acting] is that you want to express yourself. There’s a kind of thread there as to why people become actors.’ De Niro would become famous, or notorious, as an actor with whom there was little or no give-and-take. ‘I think playing opposite De Niro is a challenge for any actor,’ says Cybill Shepherd, ‘because he is a master of underplaying.’ Actors strain to make some contact with him in a scene, and usually fail. Without any way of knowing what goes on in his mind while the camera rolls, they emerge from the experience aware only that they have come off second-best.

De Niro never socialises with fellow actors between scenes, and they in turn avoid him, instinctively giving him the space justified by his huge investment in the created personality. Over the years, De Niro learned to encourage this reaction by only appearing on the set for his own scenes, and remaining aloof from the rest of the cast, who are instructed not to talk to him or even meet his eye. Paradoxically, he found anonymity in the least likely of all places – the spotlight.

In 1954, Jean-Paul Sartre published Kean, updating Alexandre Dumas’s play about the early-nineteenth-century actor of whom Coleridge had said that to see him act was ‘like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning’. Sartre’s Edmund Kean has become a victim of his virtuosity, and can no longer distinguish between real life and acting. Halfway through a performance as Othello, he scrapes off his make-up and roars his frustration to the audience in an outpouring of the anger that is never far below the surface of any actor’s performance.

Such rage was a crucial component of all the roles played by actors like Chaney and Muni. Adopting the character of another man gave one a licence to unleash one’s darker impulses. To play Quasimodo without swinging madly from the bells of Notre Dame, or to embody the phantom without burning down the Opera, was inconceivable. Though Muni would always be remembered for the machine-gun shootout that ended Scarface, even his roles as Zola, Juarez and Louis Pasteur demanded a final scene in which, occupying centre stage, the actor stormed, ranted or cajoled for ten bravura minutes.

Rage is Robert De Niro’s gift to the cinema. Without it, he would be little more than the proficient performer of The Last Tycoon, Falling in Love, We’re no Angels and his many other flops. But it is when he injects into such roles the fury unleashed in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull or The Deer Hunter that we see De Niro at his most effective.

‘He appears to have a tremendous potential for violence,’ says Kenneth Branagh. ‘He is one of the more frightening people I have met in my life, and you seriously wouldn’t want to cross him. It’s just that moment where perhaps you’ve said something and his eyes just “go”. It’s not so much the physical threat as the potential for him to be very, very free with whatever aggression he might feel. You wouldn’t want to get in the way of that. I’ve seen him in a couple of situations where the smile just drops, and you really don’t want to be there when that happens. You would imagine that you would basically just get thumped.’

Greenwich Village provided a rich environment for the maturing Bobby. Instead of grocers and butchers, the shops at street level were jazz clubs and cafés. In summer, music poured from open windows. Cultural diversity ruled. Émigrés and refugees from Germany and Austria mingled with Italians and Jews who were migrating from the old ghettos into the Village. None of this was lost on the young Bobby, who would develop an instinct for the styles of speech, clothing and movement that differentiated one class, race or calling from another.

For the summer holidays, he went upstate to Syracuse, to stay with his father’s family, acquiring the cadences of Italian English that he would employ in so many of his films. Coaching him for his role in Cape Fear, an expert in accents would label his natural way of speaking ‘Italian-American’, and his career would be hampered when, playing an Italian in his first major Hollywood film, he would be so convincing that people assumed he was imported from Italy for the role.

In Syracuse, he also brushed against organised crime – an Italian industry in the US. In 1950, Senator Estes Kefauver, enquiring into the rackets, made public the already widely-acknowledged existence of ‘a nationwide crime syndicate, a loosely organised but cohesive coalition of autonomous crime “locals” which work together for mutual profit. Behind the local mobs that make up the national crime syndicate is a shadowy criminal organisation known as the Mafia.’ None of this came as news to the large Italian communities of Syracuse and Rome, where Mafia caporegimes milked the construction and restaurant businesses in which so many Italians worked. When De Niro got round to playing the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather II, he didn’t need to look far for inspiration.

Back in New York, Bobby started in the public school system, at PS.41, just round the corner on West 11th Street. He stayed there until the fifth grade, when he was about eleven. Through her work for Maria Ley Piscator, Virginia got him into the Saturday-morning acting classes of what was now called the Erwin Piscator Workshop. It was here, aged ten, that he played his first dramatic role, the Cowardly Lion in a production of The Wizard of Oz. He also appeared in a version of Chekhov’s The Bear which toured some New York schools. But there was no overnight conversion to acting. ‘I stayed for a few years,’ De Niro says off-handedly of the Workshop. ‘I wasn’t interested.’

At eleven, he would normally have moved from PS.41 to IS.71. Instead, Virginia enrolled him in the Elizabeth Irwin High School on Charlton Street, the high school of the Little Red Schoolhouse. The ‘Red’ in Little Red Schoolhouse uncompromisingly indicated its political leanings. Many of its teachers were blacklisted. Firebrand folk-singer Woody Guthrie performed there. A typical school excursion was a week in a steel town. Parents and children marched in the May Day parade, sometimes with a red flag fluttering from the pram that carried their youngest child.

To counter accusations that its curriculum was too ‘liberal’, Elizabeth Irwin pushed to get its students into reputable colleges. For Bobby, this was bad news. School bored him. He disliked books, preferring comics, from which he learned to read. Virginia didn’t dissuade him. She felt children should develop at their own speed, finding naturally the things that interested them. From the age of ten, Bobby was allowed to choose his own clothes. Virginia also sent him briefly to Boy Scout camp, but he disliked the experience so much he never repeated it.

Virginia was busy with her work, her political activities – she continued to write, edit and produce left-wing propaganda – and her personal life. Though she never remarried, she had a succession of lovers, among them the film critic Manny Farber, who wrote for the Nation, the New Republic, the New Leader and other left-wing magazines. Both painter and writer, Farber, unlike Robert, was charismatic, politically savvy, and unashamedly heterosexual. Bobby deeply resented the relationship. Years later, when Farber approached him at a party and reminded him he’d once been his mother’s boyfriend, De Niro fled.

Bobby remained at Elizabeth Irwin through seventh and eighth grades, but never looked a likely candidate for college. Though he was not stupid, his perfectionist nature drove him to recopy his work over and over, as his father did his canvases, while the rest of the class moved on.

Virginia volunteered him as a model for an article she was writing for Glamour magazine on the differences between public and private schooling in New York – Bobby representing the ‘funky’ face of the public-school system. A photograph illustrating the article shows a slightly dumpy Bobby with tousled hair in a zippered leather jacket, crumpled trousers, shirt pulled outside the belt, hands shoved in the pockets. He regards the camera sideways with a gaze not so much belligerent as indifferent.

As he entered adolescence and shed his childish plumpness, other aspects of life in Greenwich Village attracted Bobby’s attention. The area was changing. In particular, Italians moving in from the West Side were squeezing the Anglo community of the downtown area, just as they, in turn, would be squeezed by the invading Chinese two decades later.

Despite a solitary nature, Bobby was drawn to the Italian and Sicilian youth gangs now appearing on the streets. Though his skin was pale, he could have been one of them. The gangs also radiated superiority and power. Being in the headlines made the street kids bolder. Knives and guns became more evident, the swagger more pronounced.

De Niro affected the gang members’ silk shirts, their slim-cut leather jackets, the hat tilted on the back of the head. His friends nicknamed him ‘Bobby Milk’ because of his pallor. At seventeen, he was recognisably a cadet version of Johnny Boy, the street punk he would play in Mean Streets.

Johnny Boy likes explosions. He blows up a mailbox, and throws dynamite from the rooftops. As a kid, Bobby acted as a ‘steerer’ for one of the Chinese firecracker vendors across Mott Street. Kids in the Village preyed on boys who turned up from the suburbs in search of the giant cherry bombs and other dangerously large fireworks employed by the Chinese at their festivals. In Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese would show two of these innocents being ripped off by a couple of streetwise Village guys.

On Christmas Day 1970, when Brian De Palma introduced De Niro to Scorsese, each would recognise the other from his teenage gang affiliations. But De Niro was never part of a gang, any more than was Scorsese, who only moved to the Lower East Side in 1949, when his garment-maker father went broke, and who, as a lifelong asthmatic, observed street life mainly from his bedroom window.