De Niro: A Biography

That said, both recognised and respected the reality of street crime. When he made Sleepers in 1996, De Niro still recalled Hell’s Kitchen, the tough area near the intersection of 42nd Street and Broadway: ‘It was Italian, Irish, Latin, Puerto Rican. When I was growing up downtown, it was a neighbourhood where you would get hassled, where you wouldn’t go.’ Both he and Scorsese were accustomed to being beaten up, and knew better than to complain to the law. Only by enduring punishment and saying nothing could they earn the respect of the tough guys who ran the streets.

As a kind of protective coloration, De Niro began going to Sunday mass with his new friends at the old St Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street. For the new generation of Italian-Americans, that church had a special significance, reflected in the way their film-makers would adopt it as a location. Scorsese, who served there as altar boy, used it for the climax of his first film, Who’s that Knocking at my Door?, as did Francis Coppola for the christening that closes The Godfather.

It incensed Robert to see his son embracing both the religion he’d abandoned and a lifestyle he thought dangerous. ‘When I was about thirteen,’ recalled Bobby, ‘we ran into each other in Washington Square Park. I was with a group of street kids, and he got fairly worked up, going on and on about bad influences.’

De Niro relived the moment years later when he made his debut as director with A Bronx Tale, about a man trying to prevent his young son idolising a career criminal. As Ray Vitti, the gang boss in Analyze This, he also cites a similar event from his own fictitious childhood.

As if to prove that her artistic ambitions had never been more than infatuation with Greenwich Village bohemia, Virginia thrived as a businesswoman. She started a small service, called Academy, which turned manuscripts into camera-ready copy for printers. Half of the 14th Street apartment became her office, where she installed a couple of typewriters and a Varitype machine. Before long, she had a staff of ten, most of whom, in defiance of the lease, worked in the apartment. Bobby became so angry with the noise of the machines that he threatened to throw them out the window. Virginia took the hint, and in 1957 moved everything into an office at 68 7th Street.

In 1953, the De Niros finally divorced. Bobby continued to spend time in Robert’s studio, but, inevitably, both recognised a growing gap. At this time they sometimes browsed Village bookshops, like Robert Wilson’s Phoenix Bookstore on Cornelia Street, which specialised in literary first editions. Wilson, a friend of W.H. Auden and the bibliographer of Gertrude Stein, was a congenial conversationalist, and De Niro Sr relaxed in his company, even drawing a cover for one of Wilson’s catalogues.

‘I saw him often,’ recalls Wilson. ‘He was shy more than antisocial. He came into the shop often, at least once with the teenage son. He was gay, and came in quite often, mainly, I think, because he had an obvious crush on my then-assistant Marshall Clements. He was not a collector of rare books, but was a reader of Gertrude Stein’s works, and often bought one of her books for reading purposes.’

Marshall Clements too remembers De Niro Sr well. ‘I first met Bob Sr and Virginia Admiral in 1960 or ‘61, along with others of their circle, through the painter, Nell Blaine, who often gave parties for her old friends, mostly fellow painters. So by the time I started working at the Phoenix Book Shop with Bob Wilson in 1968, Bob De Niro and I were old acquaintances. He lived nearby in the Village, and when he found out I was working at the shop, he frequently stopped by to visit.

‘Bob Wilson always thought this was because of some sexual interest in me, but I doubt this. What he was interested in, other than simply friendly chat, was using me as a model. I had been a dancer in the years 1950–1960 and was still in pretty good physical shape. I admired his work and found him a very pleasant, gentle and intelligent man, one completely focused on his painting. If he had any problems with his sexuality, they were never evident to me, and though we were both gay and obviously knew this about one another, the subject never came up in our conversations. He also had a wonderfully subtle wit and was childishly pleased when one “got” it and laughed. There was an air of sadness about him, and as far as I know, he was a lonely man, which I believe was also a reason for his frequent visits to the bookshop.’

Through the early fifties, Robert came to feel he’d reached an impasse in his work. Though the Charles Egan Gallery in New York City gave him one-man shows in 1952, 1953 and 1954, after which he switched to the Poindexter Gallery, which showed him in 1954, 1955 and 1956, he became convinced his career was marking time. He needed fresh inspiration, and friends like Tennessee Williams urged him to look for it in Europe.

Paris exercised a special attraction for De Niro. During his friendship with Anaïs Nin, he’d pumped her for information about the French capital and her meetings with artists like Picasso. In the spring of 1959, he arrived at the apartment of his friend Barbara Guest with a box of books, mostly French poetry. He was going to Paris, he explained, and wanted her to take care of them until he returned. Something final in his tone convinced her, however, that he believed the move to be permanent. Before his departure, friends threw a party on the boat that took him to France in April 1959, and Bobby attended – with what feelings one can imagine.

Bobby’s grades at Elizabeth Irwin weren’t good enough to keep him there, but since he showed some artistic talent, and had spent some months in the Piscator Workshop, the faculty suggested he apply for a scholarship to New York’s High School of Music and Art. Students were required to submit some example of their creativity, and De Niro got in on his acting ability, but stayed only one sparsely-attended semester in 1959. He claimed that the phoniness of his fellow students, ‘wearing sandals and playing guitars in Washington Square Park’, repelled him. But such people can hardly have been strange to a kid born and raised in Greenwich Village. Probably he disliked having to travel uptown to school when all his life he’d been able to walk. He would also have found it demanding to take classes both in academic subjects and one’s chosen creative area. After that, De Niro spent one semester at the Rhodes School on West 54th Street, but passed only three subjects then dropped out, his only explanation that ‘it was a bad scene’.

After the High School of Music and Art, Virginia resignedly put him into IS.71, where he had been intended to go in the first place. But he did no better there, responding to the discipline and rigour of public education with truancy, inattention and a threat to strike a teacher. ‘His idea of school,’ his mother later complained, ‘was just not to show up.’

She switched him to the fee-paying McBurney School on 23rd Street, attached, improbably, to the YMCA. Run like a British prep school, McBurney had an excellent reputation, but its curriculum and discipline didn’t suit everyone. (Among those who’d found it uncongenial was J.D. Salinger, who flunked out of McBurney just before World War II. His experience there would find its way into The Catcher in the Rye.)

Having lagged behind, De Niro found himself in a class of younger kids, which made him feel even more of an outsider. When summer arrived, and he was told to attend a catch-up school if he wanted to come back in 1960, he rebelled. Instead, he told his mother, he wanted to spend summer in Europe, visiting his father. On his return, he promised, he would tell her what he’d decided to do with his life. She would not, he assured her, be disappointed.

Before he left, Bobby set the pattern of his future life when he made a brief appearance in television drama, his first experience of the media that were to fill his adult life. The soap opera Search for Tomorrow was broadcast live from New York, and the sixteen-year-old De Niro became one of many kids who had bit parts and walk-ons that season.

De Niro spent four months hitching around Europe, starting in Paris. His father painted him a sign in English and Italian: ‘Student Wants Ride’. The sign, and his charm, took him to Venice, Rome and Capri, where he met French actress Michele Morgan. Bobby told her his father was a famous artist in Paris who was eager to paint her portrait, but De Niro Sr gruffly turned down the job: ‘I wasn’t interested in doing her portrait, or anyone else’s.’

Back in New York in March 1960, Bobby saw the Cole Porter/Frank Sinatra musical Can Can with a friend. As they left the cinema, De Niro surprised his companion by telling him, ‘I’m going to do that.’

‘What?’ his friend asked.

‘Act in the movies.’

The friend laughed, and thought nothing of it. But, months earlier, when Bobby returned from Europe, he’d surprised Virginia with the news that, rather than going to college or even graduating from high school, he had decided to train as an actor instead.

CHAPTER FOUR Stella (#ulink_72930586-1b0b-5e17-bc34-755581391168)

I’ve never been one of those actors who has touted myself as a fascinating human being. I had to decide early on whether I was to be an actor or a personality.

Robert De Niro

Why did De Niro decide at the age of seventeen to become an actor?

Withdrawn, ill-educated, physically unremarkable, he was nobody’s idea of a stage or screen star. And it’s perhaps there that the answer lies. How does a timid person express himself except by taking on another personality? Lon Chaney’s parents were deaf-mutes, with whom he could communicate only via sign language – a situation analogous to De Niro’s upbringing by two people preoccupied with their own agendas.

Theatre was undergoing drastic redefinition when De Niro entered it. Acting and writing, regarded as professions before World War II, with formal structures, standards and requirements, were being invaded by people stronger on feeling than technique. The new writers, in the words of Jack Kerouac to Truman Capote, ‘didn’t want to get it right; just get it written’. Capote’s scornful response, ‘That’s not writing, Jack. That’s type writing,’ summed up the horror of classical stylists at such ad hoc creativity; but they were in the minority. By the early fifties, anyone who felt they’d like to try acting, singing or writing could usually find a platform.

Performance in particular became a magnet to the maladjusted. The actor was no longer the rock-jawed hero of Victorian melodrama, but a human being, weak and fallible. Producers and writers began to speak of ‘American’ and ‘European’ acting. American acting stressed flair and feeling, European acting text and technique. ‘The big difference is that in England we have a great tradition of theatre,’ says Kenneth Branagh, who in 1993 directed, produced and acted with De Niro in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. ‘Most actors work through many different styles, from Shakespeare to Noël Coward to Harold Pinter, so you learn technique. The Americans are wonderful at being ordinary, at being real and gritty, and yet they have difficulty when technique is required. You ask an American actor to immediately turn on the tears and play a very emotional scene, and he will find it difficult.’

Working at the Moscow Art Theatre through the 1920s, Konstantin Stanislavski developed a system of mental exercises and games for actors to help them access the feelings that paralleled the emotions of the characters they played. Books like Building a Character elaborated his system. It never had a formal name, but came to be called in theatre circles just ‘the Method’.

Until 1949, while the Piscators remained in charge at the New School, two of his teachers were edgy, vivacious Stella Adler, daughter of a distinguished family in the Yiddish theatre, and an irascible and opinionated little man named Lee Strasberg. Adler and Strasberg shared a rivalry that went back to 1931, when three producer/directors, Strasberg, Howard Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, broke away from New York’s conservative Theater Guild to launch the Group Theater. The Group Theater presented plays in repertory, like European companies, playing them in rotation with the same company of actors who, as in Europe, worked to achieve a unified style of performance. Stella Adler, who married its co-founder Howard Clurman, became a star with the Group, of which Lee Strasberg was the acting ideologue.

In Strasberg’s version of the Method, the performer built up a role by ‘affective memory’, tapping deep emotions and ‘sense memories’, which he or she used to create the character. To play comedy, one accessed happy memories; for tragedy, childhood traumas. Not everyone in the Group cared for this self-analysis. An actor in the grip of a primal Oedipal conflict, they argued, could hardly be expected to give a sensitive portrayal of Hamlet.

Convinced that Strasberg had got it wrong, Adler went to Paris in 1934 to study under Stanislavski. Her description of Strasberg’s system surprised him. This was a version of the Method he’d long since abandoned. ‘Affective memory’, he explained, endangered both the mental health of the actor and the validity of the performance. Adler returned to New York in triumph with the news, but Strasberg shrugged. ‘I don’t teach the Stanislavski Method,’ he said. ‘I teach the Strasberg Method.’

In 1947, Cheryl Crawford, with director Elia Kazan and producer Robert Lewis, bought a converted Orthodox church on West 44th Street and opened the Actors Studio, where performers could practise ‘American acting’. Here, with an audience of professional colleagues, they could try new things, and, probably, fail. But in the process of failure they would learn and grow. It was exactly the milieu Strasberg needed, and he jumped at the chance to become the Actors Studio’s director.

From the start, Strasberg imposed a strict regime. Only performers could attend. It would be years before producers and directors were allowed in as guests. Doors were ritually locked before each session. All applicants had to audition, and most didn’t make it. In 1955, out of the two thousand who tried, only two were admitted: Martin Landau and Steve McQueen. Once in, however, membership was for life, and the eight hundred ‘anointed’ members were regarded as a theatrical elite.

Adler set up in opposition at the New School, where she taught her version of the Method. Tennessee Williams was a student. So were Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Ben Gazzara and Marlon Brando, who became Adler’s lover, as he had been the lover of almost every other woman in the school.

While Piscator remained, he preached Expressionism: exaggerated gestures, symbolic poses, movements that externalised emotion – ‘Be big!’. Meanwhile, Stella in the basement was screaming at her students, ‘Don’t act! Stop acting!’ But once Piscator returned to East Germany, Adler inherited undisputed control, pointedly renaming the school ‘The Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting’. Her pronouncements became more dogmatic. ‘You act with your soul,’ she said. ‘That’s why you all want to be actors, because your souls are not used up by life.’ At times, she approached folie de grandeur. Asked during a May Day parade if she could imagine living in a Communist state, she said she’d be happy to, providing it would crown her its queen.

Bobby drifted into classes with Luther James, an African-American director – hardly an obvious choice, given the racial tensions still persisting even in Manhattan. His mother didn’t try to dissuade him from his decision. ‘They were both supportive,’ he says of his parents. ‘They would never tell me, “No.”’

De Niro’s choice of a teacher clearly resonates with his subsequent preference for African-American wives and girlfriends. He’d been impressed by a 1960 Broadway stage version of Kyle Onstott’s trashy sex-and-slavery novel Mandingo. Franchot Tone played opposite the young Dennis Hopper, whom De Niro had seen in Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean. Bobby went backstage to meet him. As the two were introduced for the first time, a beautiful girl came up to Hopper and asked a question about acting. Acting as a way of meeting girls? De Niro had never thought of that.

Bobby returned to the New School in 1960, where Stella Adler was totally in charge. By then, her bête noire was the Actors Studio, where Strasberg was expounding his version of the Method to an increasingly mesmerised acting community. ‘She was always putting down the Actors Studio,’ says De Niro. ‘The Method thing – as opposed to the Conservatory of Acting.’

Unlike the Actors Studio, where people dressed as they liked, Adler’s male students were required to wear white shirts, black trousers and black shoes, while the girls wore skirts, blouses with high collars, shoes with heels, and hair pulled back from their faces. When she entered each day, usually late, dressed in black, made up as if for a stage appearance, and flanked by two assistants, the students stood and recited, ‘Good morning, Miss Adler. We are pleased to meet you and look forward to embarking with you on our journey to discover our art.’ This ritual over, Adler took her place in a leather chair at the centre of the stage, with her assistants on either side, and the class began.

‘She would be inspirational as a teacher for me,’ De Niro said. ‘There was a lot of pomp and splendour with her, but … she was a good teacher. Very good. I always give her credit for having a big effect on me. [She talked a lot about] Stanislavski. Building a Character. I think that that was really very important. I thought it was important for any actor. I couldn’t see how you wouldn’t be made aware of that. [Acting] is not about neurosis; playing on your neuroses. It’s about the character, and about doing that first: the tasks of the character. Not going on about it as if it was all about you and how you would do it. It was more about the character, being faithful to the text, the script.’

Adler cleansed the Method of psychoanalysis. ‘Affective memory’ was used sparingly, and only when the actor could find the character in no other way. Above all, the ‘given circumstances’ of a play, its plot and character, were the actor’s fundamental concerns. Real acting, she stressed, lay in making choices – not in imposing your psychology on the character but finding the character and choosing the way you explored and illuminated that character. ‘The talent is in the choices’ became not only her catchphrase but that of the generations of students she trained.

Between 1960 and 1963, the Conservatory of Acting totally occupied De Niro. He had no right to be there, since he hadn’t graduated from high school, but, subdued and diffident, he was conveniently invisible in the Conservatory’s large classes. Charles Carshon, who taught ‘Sight Reading’, a class in audition techniques which De Niro later singled out as particularly useful, says, ‘While I am very gratified that Robert De Niro remembered me, it is true that he was so self-effacing in those days that I had to confirm with a student with whom I am still in contact that he had indeed studied with me.’ The most memorable thing about De Niro to most people was his habit of getting around town on a bicycle.

‘Stella Adler had a very good script-breakdown-and-analysis class that nobody else was teaching,’ De Niro recalled. ‘It was just a way of making people aware of character, style, period, and so on.’ It appealed particularly to De Niro because it didn’t involve getting up and performing in front of the class, as at the Actors Studio. ‘People could sit down in a classroom as opposed to having to get up and demonstrate it,’ he said.

De Niro loathed being forced to perform in public until he’d totally grasped a character, and reserved a particular distaste for a feature of the Actors Studio curriculum called ‘Private Moment’, when a student was asked to perform some trivial task as if doing so in the privacy of his home and not in front of a critical audience. At its worst, a ‘Private Moment’ could involve removing all one’s clothes. Even at best, it usually made one look foolish.

‘It was hard to get up,’ De Niro said. ‘You had to try to overcome that.’ Teachers like Carshon helped him do so. ‘At the end of the day, you’ve got to get up and do it. And the sooner you get to knowing you’ve got to get up and do it, the quicker you’ll do it. I had this problem, where I was afraid to make a move. “You have to feel it,” and all that. Carshon would say, “You’ve got to, sometimes, just … jump in,” and that was true. If I just jumped in, took the leap, I’d arrive at the place where you thought you’d have to go.’

Echoes of Stella Adler’s teaching ring through De Niro’s work. Writer David Scott Milton, who went through the Conservatory about the same time, recalls, ‘When we were at Stella Adler’s, she had an acting exercise that went like this: she would call on each student and the student would have this line: “Are you talking to me?” She would have each student do it with several different adjustments: “Are you talking to me?” “Are you talking to me?” Not line readings, but adjustments; that is, character attitudes that determined the line reading. When I saw Taxi Driver, the De Niro in the mirror scene, it appeared to me that he was doing a reprise of the Stella Adler exercise, “Are you talking to me?”’

Among the people for whom De Niro auditioned in his last year at the Conservatory was a film student from Sarah Lawrence College casting his first feature. A film with New York actors, not Hollywood imports, was sufficiently novel to attract attention, even if, as was the case with The Wedding Party, both project and film-makers were erratic.

Though Sarah Lawrence was a women’s college, the director was the dark, glowering Brian De Palma. De Palma, whose shark-like smile and aggressive manner telegraphed his inner torments – ‘His sense of outrage is limitless,’ said his mentor, Wilford Leach – came to film late. His first love was physics, but in 1958 he saw Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which transformed his life.

As a student at Columbia, De Palma was accosted on campus by a courteous Southerner who asked if he’d ever thought of acting. Wilford Leach taught drama at Sarah Lawrence, and had come to Columbia looking for males to balance his all-female casts. Leach offered to let De Palma make films to use in his plays if he agreed to come, and De Palma signed up to do an MA at Sarah Lawrence after graduating from Columbia in 1962.