De Niro: A Biography

De Palma’s Byronic character and taste for film violence drew many of the college’s students to him, and he used some of them in his films. They included Jennifer Salt, daughter of blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Waldo Salt; a wealthy young woman named Cynthia Munroe; and leggy, neurotic Jill Clayburgh. The product of a wealthy but dysfunctional family, Clayburgh was in psychoanalysis from the age of nine. De Palma also roped in his Columbia roommates Jared Martin and William Finley, and a handsome young blond actor named Gerrit Graham, who would figure in his career for many years.

In 1963, America’s student film-makers were besotted with the nouvelle vague. De Palma suggested making a film à sketches, as some young French directors had done, each contributing a segment. De Palma planned a fantasy called Fairy Tale, while Munroe’s contribution would be a story based on the riotous wedding of De Palma’s friend Jared Martin. ‘Then the whole thing fell apart,’ recalls De Palma. ‘Cynthia’s story was basically the best, and we decided to do that one as a movie all by itself.’ They called it The Wedding Party.

De Palma, Munroe and Leach boosted the screenplay to feature length, though most of it would be improvised. Munroe raised the money – often quoted as $100,000, though, from the look of the film, shot on black-and-white 16mm with a hand-held camera, a small cast and almost no crew, the real figure was probably a tenth of that.

The budget didn’t allow for the best actors, so De Palma advertised in Billboard and Variety. Among those who turned up to audition was De Niro.

‘He was very mild, very shy and very self-effacing,’ De Palma recalls. ‘Nobody knew him, he was only a kid of about nineteen. [He] came in about nine or ten at night. We gave him some material to read. He did it well and then we asked him to improvise, and he was extraordinary. Then he said he had something else he wanted to show us, something he was working on. He left the room and was gone about twenty minutes. We thought he’d changed his mind and gone home. Then the door flies open and he bursts in from nowhere and he does a scene from a play by Clifford Odets. It was like watching Lee J. Cobb. Personally De Niro may be shy and soft-spoken, but in character he could be anybody.’

The Odets monologue came from Waiting for Lefty. As cabbies at a union meeting argue and wait for their leader, Lefty, news comes that he’s been murdered by management goons. Periodically, the narrative flashes away to examples of class oppression, including one manifestation of it that Odets knew well from his days on Broadway – a young actor auditioning for an indifferent producer. De Niro knew the play, since Stella Adler insisted her students study it. She’d starred in the Group Theater’s production, of which Harold Clurman said ecstatically, ‘It was the birth cry of the thirties. Our youth had found its voice.’ De Niro too found his voice in Odets’ words. De Palma was instantly convinced, and offered him the part for $50 – not, as De Niro assumed, $50 a week, but, as his mother confirmed when she read the contract, $50 for the entire role. The contract also promised a percentage of the profits, but as usual there were none.

The Wedding Party started shooting in the spring of 1963, on an estate on Shelter Island, at the eastern end of Long Island. The plot resembles Meet the Parents, in which De Niro was to have a hit almost forty years later. Charlie (Charles Pfluger), a Harvard student about to marry his rich fiancée Josephine Fish (Jill Clayburgh), arrives at her estate by ferry with his two friends, Cecil (De Niro) and Baker (John Quinn), who will act as ushers at the wedding.

Neither can understand why the tomcatting Charlie wants to get married, and one look at his prospective in-laws, a horde of elderly ladies in unfortunate hats, has Charlie doubting too. Invading Josephine’s bedroom on the first night, he discovers her in neck-to-ankle flannel. When he suggests she slip into something lacy, she tells him, ‘If you want lace, I’ll give you a hankie.’ Interruptions by an aged nanny also ruin the mood.

Half-convinced now that his friends are right, Charlie tries to sneak off the island, and when one of Josephine’s old lovers, a wealthy Indian with a penchant for sail-planing, turns up, coaxes him to take her off his hands, even at the cost of going gliding with him. When this fails, he makes a drunken pass at a pretty cousin, but gets cold feet when she responds with enthusiasm. Finally, after being chased all over the island by his friends, he gives up and says yes.

As Munroe finished writing each scene, she and De Palma recorded it on tape. The actors used the tapes as the basis for improvisation, then passed back their versions for her to rewrite. When she wasn’t writing, Munroe cooked the team’s meals. De Palma doubled as runner, calling up people in his capacity as producer, then putting on a cap and mounting a motorbike to collect the item he’d demanded. The cast were asked to supply their own clothing, and even props. Neither Clayburgh nor Salt minded, but De Niro felt exploited, particularly when one such prop, a new suitcase, fell off the top of a car as it pulled into the mansion, and was damaged.

Leach and De Palma directed, with Leach having the deciding vote, usually after argument from the combative De Palma. Leach, later highly successful on Broadway with an updated version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance and his productions of Shakespeare, strove for high production values, which the amateur crew and inexperienced cast could seldom achieve. De Palma felt Pfluger played Charlie in a superficial manner. For his part, Leach disliked the occasional references to movies, from Singin’ in the Rain to Psycho, and the decision to introduce each segment with a silent-movie-style title card quoting from an imaginary marriage guide, ‘The Compleat Bridegroom’. He also disliked De Palma’s decision to undercrank the camera in the chase and driving scenes, giving the movie a Keystone Kops jerkiness.

As Cecil, comic relief of the trio of friends, De Niro had little to do. Arriving on the island struggling with a pile of sporting equipment, he bumbles about in the background, periodically taking part in rambling improvised conversations in which he and Baker first try to talk Charlie out of marriage, then into it. A drunken speech at the pre-wedding banquet that might have been his chance to shine is so badly post-synched that his words are mostly inaudible.

Periodically, production stopped as Leach returned to teaching. In one such break, in the summer of 1964, De Niro made another trip to Europe to see his father. De Niro Sr hadn’t lingered in Paris, but had moved to Gravigny, west of the city, then to Saint-Just-en-Chevalet, in the centre of France, near Clermont-Ferrand, and finally to Baren, above the resort of Luchon, near the Spanish border, his base for excursions into Spain and to North Africa. But France hadn’t proved the stimulant he’d hoped for, and Virginia could tell from his infrequent letters that her ex-husband was in trouble. She financed Bobby’s trip, with the idea that he would bring him back.

Bobby spent an enjoyable few weeks in Paris, where he could lose himself in the small hotels of the Left Bank around the Odeon and the Quartier Latin. He took language classes at the Alliance Française and met his share of local expatriates, but had little success with the French, whose reserve almost equalled his own.

Convincing his father to return to New York was an uphill task. Though Robert had been shipping his canvases back to American galleries, sales were meagre. Bobby urged him to look for a gallery in Paris, but his father refused; the market for his work, he insisted, was in New York.

After that, Bobby took off on an extended search for his roots. He hitchhiked around Ireland for a fortnight, looking for his mother’s family, but the country was thick with O’Reillys and he had no luck. Italy proved more fruitful, and he found cousins in Campobasso, sixty miles north-east of Naples. He also penetrated the Iron Curtain to visit Erwin and Marie Ley Piscator in East Berlin. When he returned to New York, it was with his father reluctantly in tow. Of that aspect of the trip, Bobby later told a friend, ‘It was an absolute nightmare.’

CHAPTER FIVE Sally, Candy, Andy and the Others (#ulink_a4369bfe-ab27-5a36-a3fc-b5e8127a9bd6)

He can’t do Shakespeare and he can’t do comedy. How can you even begin to compare him with Brando?

Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, on De Niro’s acting ability

Editing The Wedding Party took years. Cynthia Munroe died, bequeathing the uncompleted film to Wilford Leach. Despite the delay, De Palma and De Niro remained friendly, even though De Niro was reticent, withdrawn, while De Palma, loud, sarcastic, with a genius for undiplomatic remarks, was the opposite.

Both came from Italian Catholic families but were raised in another faith, in De Palma’s case Presbyterian. Both fell under the influence of charismatic fathers, in De Palma’s case an orthopaedic surgeon. Just as De Niro had spent many hours watching his father work, De Palma sat in on his father’s operations, establishing a lifelong preoccupation with blood and flesh. In both cases, the marriage of their parents collapsed, though De Palma’s reaction to the break-up was characteristically extreme. He stalked his father, observing and recording his assignations with his mistress – an episode that appeared in his 1980 film Dressed to Kill.

In 1965 De Niro scored a role in a film which, though he is barely visible in his one scene, and the film was shown almost entirely in France, would reach the screen quickly, giving him his first official movie appearance.

Marcel Carné’s great days had been in the thirties and during World War II, near the end of which he had made Les Enfants du Paradis. In 1965, with his career running down, he was happy to take on an adaptation of Georges Simenon’s 1946 novel Trois chambres à Manhattan, which Jean Renoir had just abandoned after working at it, on and off, for a decade. Its hero, François, an actor, goes to New York to work on a television film after breaking up with his wife. In a bar he meets Kay, another lost soul whose flatmate has just left her. François and Kay start an affair. Maurice Ronet played François and Annie Girardot Kay.

Carné was given a week in New York to film some exteriors and ‘atmosphere’, including a scene in a Greenwich Village bar. Among the extras hired for a day was De Niro. It was not a particularly agreeable experience. ‘I remember a bunch of other young actors hanging around,’ he said, ‘moaning and bitching, all made-up, with pieces of tissue in their collars; it was the kind of thing you always hear about actors – where they’re just silly or vain, complaining back and forth, walking around primping, not wanting to get the make-up on their suits.’

But something about De Niro caught Girardot’s eye. ‘We chatted a little,’ says the actress. ‘And later, someone else on the film told me he had said I was “a good little guy”. Years later, I was surprised when I met him at a party in Paris, and he reminded me that we knew each other already, from Trois chambres.’

In 1963, seventeen-year-old Jimmy Slattery from Massapequa Park, Long Island, began a course of hormone shots that would turn him into a woman. Taking the name Hope Slattery, he began haunting Manhattan’s gay bars, and fell for Jackie Curtis, who, despite his cross-dressing, insisted truculently, ‘I got balls under my ballgown and I don’t care who knows it.’ Curtis completed Jimmy’s make-over with a new name, Candy Darling.

In 1968 Candy played a bit part in Andy Warhol’s Flesh, then starred in Women in Revolt, contributing the unforgettable line, ‘I’m young, I’m rich, I’m beautiful. Why shouldn’t I sleep with my brother?’

Lou Reed immortalised Candy in his anthem of the Warhol years, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, and Jackie, recognising star quality, volunteered to create a vehicle for her. Working day and night for a week, high on amphetamines, and inspired by the Hollywood stars of the forties whom Candy revered, in particular Lana Turner, he wrote a high-camp musical satire called Glory, Glamour and Gold, subtitled ‘The Life and Legend of Nola Noonan, Goddess and Star’. Candy would play Nola, enduring every indignity men could inflict, including rape. Curtis also wrote parts for prominent drag queens like Holly Woodlawn, another graduate of the Andy Warhol atelier.

Ten men contributed to Nola’s rise and fall, but nobody thought all of them could be played by the same actor until Bobby De Niro volunteered. Curtis claimed he ‘begged’ to be cast. ‘He came over to the director’s apartment where Candy, Holly Woodlawn and I were sitting around, and you would have thought he was crazy – we did.

“‘I gotta be in the play! I gotta be in the play! Please! I’ll do anything!’” he kept pleading.

‘I said to him, “Ten roles?”

‘He said, “Yes. And I’ll do the posters too – my mother has a printing press.’”

The play perfectly suited a chameleon like De Niro. Curtis and Candy persuaded Warhol and his entourage to attend the opening at the tiny Bastiano’s Cellar Studio in Greenwich Village on 7 August 1968. Andy called De Niro’s performance ‘a tour de force’. The Village Voice would write, ‘De Niro made clean, distinct character statements in a series of parts which many actors would have fused into a general mush. De Niro is new on the scene and deserves to be welcomed.’

Actress Sally Kirkland was in Warhol’s group at the opening, and went backstage to compliment De Niro. ‘Do you know that you are going to be the most incredible star?’ she told him.

To De Niro, Kirkland, tall, busty and blonde, seemed to live in the headlines. She’d just become the first actress to appear totally nude in a ‘legitimate’ play, the off-Broadway production of Sweet Eros by Terrence McNally. With ‘Yippies’ Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, she’d invaded the New York Stock Exchange and showered incredulous brokers with dollar bills. She also appeared naked on the cover of Screw magazine, riding a pig. Later, she moved to California, was ordained as a minister of the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, and started teaching acting and relaxation technique, as well as playing occasional small roles in movies.

‘He was unbelievably shy,’ Kirkland says of De Niro. ‘I thought perhaps I was embarrassing him. But I could tell that, more than anything, he wanted to believe it.’ De Niro was still reticent with women. Traditionally, 85 per cent of theatre students are female, a fact which his most distinguished predecessor at the Conservatory, Marlon Brando, had exploited without scruple, but De Niro felt uncomfortable around his fellow students, and had no regular girlfriends. All his energy was directed towards performance. As one friend of the time, Diane Ladd, remarked, ‘Bobby was hell-bent on being a success but not just a movie star. He didn’t want to be a star. He wanted to be an actor.’

But Kirkland’s compliments fell on fertile ground. Thereafter, De Niro would ring up and ask her, ‘Do you really think I’m any good? Do you really?’ His naked need for reassurance shocked some friends. A few years later, when his mentor Shelley Winters confessed she hadn’t seen a preview of his film Bang the Drum Slowly, De Niro hung up on her.

The acquaintance with Kirkland ripened into a friendship that would influence De Niro’s career. ‘We were very, very close friends then in that whole time frame,’ Kirkland says. ‘I think he liked me because I had always been very social and he was always shy. I really thought he was a genius and I told everyone. I was always telling people, “Hire Robert De Niro.” He was always very intense. If you pushed his buttons, you’d know it. He’s Italian. He has that caution. He seemed to know that because of my work with Strasberg and Shelley Winters, I could match his intensity, and I was forgiving of it.’

Both ambitious, they spent hours in the De Niros’ 14th Street apartment rehearsing, mostly in the kitchen. Kirkland’s eccentricity resonated with the fury on which De Niro drew for his best work. ‘We had so much rage and energy in us,’ she says. ‘We would go at each other, have knockdown fights – kitchen-sink-drama-style.’

Already De Niro had formulated his theory that one had to ‘earn the right’ to play a role, either by detailed research or by transforming one’s appearance. When a scene demanded a costume, he had plenty to choose from. ‘Bobby had this walk-in closet,’ says Kirkland. ‘It was like going into a costume room backstage of a theatre. He had every conceivable kind of get-up imaginable – and the hats! Derbies, straw hats, caps, homburgs.’

Well into the eighties, De Niro browsed the flea markets and thrift shops of the Lower East Side, collecting all sorts of clothing – because ‘costumes can look too created’. It was to pay off -notably on Raging Bull, where a cheap two-toned jacket gave him the clue to the character of Jake La Motta.

De Niro got interested in photography, and offered to make a photographic record of his father’s canvases. He also took a professional interest in his own portraits. ‘Bobby had this composite [photograph] he’d carry around with him to auditions,’ recalls Sally Kirkland. ‘Twenty-five pictures of himself in various disguises. In one, he was like this IBM executive, in another, a professor with glasses and a goatee, in another a cab driver – to prove to casting directors he wasn’t an exotic. And he’d always have a stack of paperback novels with him too – ideas for characters he might play, might turn into screenplays for himself. He was totally focused on his work.’

Casting director Marion Dougherty, a friend of many years, also remembers De Niro’s portfolio of pictures. ‘One of them, I remember, was particularly striking. He was made-up as an eighty-year-old man. In other shots, he was wearing costumes of all kinds. I had never seen anything like that in any of the portfolios young actors carry around, which are for the most part glamour shots.’

De Niro’s degree of preparation went well beyond simply putting on costume and make-up to have his portrait taken. David Scott Milton, who created the original material for the 1971 film Born to Win, in which De Niro had a small part, remembered how he turned up for his first interview with a thick ‘character’ book, an album of pictures showing him in various make-ups and outfits.

‘Now, it was common practice for actors in those days – as it’s done even today – to work up a series of character photos. But Bobby had done more than that: he had actually worked on the characters. He told me he had done this for Stella Adler’s classes, worked up fully-drawn characters, not just character photos: dozens of them.’

Just how much costume and make-up meant to De Niro emerged more than thirty years later, when he revealed that he’d hoarded every major item of wardrobe from all his films, a collection that, in the year 2000, comprised 2600 costumes and five hundred items of make-up and props.

To find inspiration in a costume isn’t in itself odd, but to hoard them distinguishes De Niro from the majority of movie actors, who attempt to remove barriers between themselves and the audience rather than erecting them. Once again, it’s behaviour one would expect from actors of an earlier tradition, like Chaney, Muni and such character comics as Bert Lahr. John Lahr wrote of his father, ‘Our small, sunless 5th Avenue apartment was full of Dad’s disguises, which he’d first used onstage and in which he now occasionally appeared on TV. The closet contained a woodsman’s props (axe, jodhpurs, and boots); a policeman’s suit and baton; a New York Giants baseball outfit, with cap and cleats. The drawers of an apothecary’s cabinet, which served as a wall-length bedroom bureau, held his toupees, starting pistol, monocle, putty noses, and make-up.’ In an odd coincidence, De Niro’s first acting role was also the one that made Lahr famous – the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

De Niro’s interest in costumes and transformation, as well as demonstrating again his roots in nineteenth-century theatre and the Hollywood of the thirties, shows how much, despite his many friends at the Actors Studio, his sympathy lay with Adler’s theory, not Strasberg’s. Strasberg performers shunned costumes. Nor did his Method stress physical transformation. Marlon Brando, whether playing the Emperor Napoleon or a beat-up-boxer-turned-dockworker, was always recognisably Brando.

Actors Studio performers spoke of their body as their ‘instrument’ – a device which, though capable of many tunes, remained physically untransformed. De Niro, by contrast, thrived on transformation. None of his outfits, however, were costumes that might be used in classical roles: no doublets, no cloaks, no togas. Except for the reformed eighteenth-century slaver Mendoza in The Mission, De Niro has never played a period role. Even Martin Scorsese couldn’t persuade him to play Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, De Niro explaining that he would always feel uncomfortable in robes.

In his early twenties, De Niro spent some time in psychoanalysis, the better to understand his conflicted attitude to his parents and his need to hide himself in invented characters. He was also helped by Kirkland to deal with his anger. ‘I taught him yoga,’ she said, ‘even though I have no idea if he ever practised it again. We had a group of actors, sort of an actors’ co-op group, with him, Raul Julia, James Keach, myself; we all hung out at Raul’s house with his wife in the late sixties.’ Many years later, when Kirkland joined the West Coast branch of the Actors Studio in Los Angeles as a teacher, De Niro appeared as a guest speaker. A student asked, ‘Mr De Niro, how do you relax?’, and De Niro pointed to Kirkland and said, ‘Talk to her.’ But Bobby was seldom relaxed. When Kirkland asked Virginia what drove her son, she was in no doubt. ‘Will,’ she said shortly. ‘Force of will.’