De Niro: A Biography

Despite his success in Glory, Glamour and Gold, De Niro didn’t find it any easier to get parts. He went on the road through the Southern states in ‘dinner theatre’, where the audience sat at tables and ate a meal before the show, with the performers acting as waiters and, also like waiters, dividing up their tips. De Niro always passed this off as ‘good experience’, but it must have galled him, as it galled most actors.

French actor/director/writer Robert Cordier met De Niro through Barry Primus, another New York actor, a few years older than De Niro, who became, and has remained, one of Bobby’s closest friends. Cordier was casting an off-Broadway play. ‘I had a friend called Steve McQueen,’ he says, ‘who had been unknown in Greenwich Village, and I thought he would be great to play the lead. I went to parties with Steve. He wangled himself into the Actors Studio. Then somebody said, “There’s this kid. He’s wonderful. He takes classes with Stella Adler. He’s the son of this painter Bob De Niro, and he’s quite a comer.” I was seeing actors, and Barry Primus took an audition. Then he said, “I have this friend, Bob De Niro, do you want to see him too?”’

Cordier didn’t audition De Niro on that occasion. ‘I had done the play,’ he says. ‘It had gotten good reviews and Barry had been noticed and signed up for the lead in The Changeling at Lincoln Center. I was at Max’s Kansas City and this guy came and tapped on my shoulder and said, “You never called me for the play that Barry was in.” It was Bob De Niro, and he said, “I’m gonna give you my phone number and I want you to call me the next time there’s something.”’

Well-known Living Theater actor Warren Finidy initially played the lead in Cordier’s play, but Cordier fired him for drinking, despite the fact that he’d appeared in Jack Gelber’s The Connection, to considerable acclaim. ‘Bob thought it was funny that I had fired the actor of the year, a year after his award,’ says Cordier. ‘Then Warren walked up and said, “Hey Bob, Robert!”, and Bob said, “Well, you guys are still on very good terms.” I think he was impressed, and he said “Let’s work together sometime.”’

De Niro cultivated Cordier, as he did anybody who might push his career. ‘He used to call me to ask what was up. We went to parties; you know, kicking around at parties, but the main social life was going to cafés, bars and restaurants. We all went practically every night either to the Cedar Bar, to Bradley or to Max’s Kansas City, or Elaine’s uptown, you know, we went to these few places.’

Meanwhile, De Niro won another film role in a New York independent production, but Sam’s Song was to haunt him for the next twenty years, and provide, through no fault of his, one of his least distinguished credits. Directed by editor and underground film-maker Jordan Leondopoulos, it was shot, very professionally and in colour, by Alex Phillips Jr, who would go on to light Sam Peckinpah’s Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. The film was meant as a ‘calling card’, intended, like Steven Spielberg’s Amblin’, to win the director a job in features, though, by scattering fashionable hommages to the nouvelle vague, Leondopoulos also hoped for an art-house release.

Most of the action takes place in the grounds of a Long Island mansion like the one in The Wedding Party, with a further sequence at sea on a cabin cruiser. Young film-maker Sam (De Niro) is invited to join a house party thrown by friends of the wealthy Erica (Jennifer Warren) and Andrew (Jarred Mickey). The three drive up in the couple’s convertible, Sam reading Andre Bazin’s film criticism and Erica quoting from the book by Louis Ferdinand Céline which she’s translating.

When they arrive, they find their hosts have invited some people to an impromptu birthday party. They include the glamorous and very available Carol (Terrayne Crawford), who, to the chagrin of Erica and the envy of Andrew, sneaks off with Sam to have sex. When the party transfers to a boat, Carol disappears into a cabin, this time with Andrew, and a furious Erica asks to be taken back to shore on a conveniently passing launch. Sam joins her. Back on the beach, they act out their own version of a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, an imaginary gunfight using pointed fingers, with Sam improvising a series of facetious slow-motion death scenes.

De Niro, behind a heavy moustache, makes a believable New York movie-maker, and Jennifer Warren, who later had a solid career in films (Night Moves), TV and, more recently, as a director (Partners in Crime), is equally convincing, if dressed unflatteringly and forced to deliver some ridiculous lines. At the time, however, nobody saw either of them, since the film had almost no release, and would languish in a New York warehouse for more than a decade.

In 1969, De Palma’s The Wedding Party finally screened in a single small cinema downtown, drawing little attention. To De Niro’s irritation, the credits mis-spelled his name ‘DeNero’. Small as his role was, however, it admitted him to the select group of young New York actors with feature-film experience.

Another of these was a short, intense Actors Studio alumnus named Al Pacino. ‘I had seen Robert in The Wedding Party,’ Pacino said later, ‘and was very impressed by him.’ In Pacino’s version of their first meeting, he stopped De Niro on 14th Street and introduced himself. It’s more likely, however, that they met at Jimmy Ray’s, a bar on 8th Avenue where young out-of-work performers could drink on credit. Another hang-out where they would almost certainly have run into one another was the Bear Garden, an all-night restaurant on the Upper East Side run by playwright David Scott Milton.

De Niro became a regular at the Bear Garden, an establishment which, Milton recalls with some pride, ‘attracted a number of strong-arm men, gangsters, whores, junkies. Our luncheon waitress was Jill Clayburgh, dinner waiter Frederick Forrest. Peter Boyle worked for us for a short while. Louise Lasser, who was married to Woody Allen at the time, was our late-night waitress. Waldo Salt, who later wrote Midnight Cowboy, was a regular; his daughter, Jennifer, worked there occasionally. Norman Wexler, screenwriter of Joe and Saturday Night Fever, was also a regular. William Saroyan’s son, Aram, a writer and a poet, also mis-spent much of his youth there.’

Films were so rarely shot in New York that the same actors, including Christopher Walken, Ralph Waite, Allen Garfield and Charles Durning, as well as De Niro and Pacino, often found themselves competing for roles. De Niro auditioned for Jerry Schatzberg’s 1971 Panic in Needle Park, but Pacino won the part, and made his movie debut.

Pacino, devoted to Lee Strasberg both personally and professionally, pressed De Niro to audition for the Actors Studio, about which De Niro had begun to change his mind. Pacino’s experience showed that Studio members got first shot at the best roles. Robert Cordier, then in the Studio’s Directors’ Unit, recalls, ‘Bob was not at the Actors Studio then, but he was trying to get in. He called me a few times and said, “What’s up, what’s going on? I’m trying to get into the Actors Studio.”’

His chance came, indirectly, though Sally Kirkland, who one afternoon at Jimmy Ray’s introduced him to her godmother, Shelley Winters. Winters had passed through Stella Adler’s Conservatory en route to a Hollywood career that culminated in her 1951 Academy Award nomination for A Place in the Sun. She’d hoped for better things after this success, but her subsequent films were largely routine, and following some roles in Britain, she returned to New York, determined to relaunch herself as a stage actress and playwright. In 1955, she found a niche at the Actors Studio.

Strasberg, as part of an infatuation with Hollywood which many Studio members viewed with alarm, now admitted ‘observers’, who could watch but not participate. Paul Newman and Marilyn Monroe attended regularly, as did Charles Laughton, who had a particularly close relationship with Al Pacino. Winters, by virtue of her movie career, was appointed one of the ‘Moderators’ who guided discussions when Strasberg wasn’t present. At the same time, resigning herself to the onset of middle age, she began taking character roles, and even won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 1959 for The Diary of Anne Frank.

De Niro impressed Winters instantly. ‘He was skinny and very gentle, with dark watchful eyes,’ she recalled. ‘He didn’t say much. He had very little money at that point and he used to ride around town on a rickety old bike.’ She later implied a romance between them – almost certainly wishful thinking. Despite his involvements with Kirkland and the actress Susan Tyrrell, De Niro was immature, still living at home and very much under the thumb of the assertive Virginia.

Winters did, however, have an ulterior motive for wanting to meet him. In 1959, in the throes of redefining herself, she had written a play, Gestations of a Weather Man. Not surprisingly, it portrayed three incidents in the life of an Oscar-winning actress. The third section called for a charismatic young actor, and from what Kirkland had told her, De Niro seemed ideal. Pulling strings, she got him into the Studio. ‘She got permission for he and I to work on scenes as working observers,’ recalls Kirkland. ‘She had just made me a member; talked Lee Strasberg into allowing my audition to get me in. Bobby was very good and we worked almost every week for a period of time.’

Though Strasberg would retrospectively claim De Niro as a product of the Studio, and display among his trophies a photograph of the two embracing, Bobby never auditioned for the Studio, and though he spent seven years as occasional observer and performer, remains circumspect about the worth of Strasberg’s teaching, which he calls ‘another thing’ from Stella Adler’s system. Many actors, Pacino among them, accepted the professional value of membership of the Actors Studio without necessarily embracing its ideas, and De Niro, like Pacino, may well have ‘blocked his ears’ to the discussions that followed each student performance; Pacino admitted he would count numbers mentally rather than listen.

‘It was beneficial and helpful,’ De Niro said of his Strasberg experience, choosing his words carefully. ‘What I thought was better was when a director would come up and have a session. Because a director had a mixture of experience and practical doing. A director would get up and say, “We’ll do this and do that.” 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.’

Once her two protégés were established at the Studio, Winters tried to persuade her agency, ICM, to represent them, but it was a bridge too far. Kirkland says, ‘The higher-ups at ICM said, “Who are they?” We both got turned down by ICM in 1968.’ But shortly after, De Niro acquired an agent, in Richard Bauman, who would represent him through the first part of a fast-accelerating career.

CHAPTER SIX Shelley and the Boys (#ulink_2c4a2464-c80b-575c-ba8e-24c2a3e24a54)

I met a man in filmland, a patron of the arts, He bought my scheme to turn my dream into a peeping art.

From tide song of the film Hi, Mom!

As he approached twenty-five, De Niro felt that his working life hadn’t really begun. He had little commitment to acting as a career. ‘I didn’t want to act for a while,’ he later told Chris Hodenfield of Rolling Stone magazine. ‘I was afraid that I would get wrapped up in it so much that I wouldn’t have time to do what I wanted.’ He still thought he might return to Europe, and spend more time in Paris, where he’d enjoyed the sense of anonymity. For the moment, he did the next best thing, playing in occasional off-Broadway plays, just another obscure fringe performer.

But 1968 marked his definitive decision to take acting seriously. ‘When I was about twenty-four or twenty-five,’ he said, ‘I committed; started to look for stuff, go out on auditions, sent out résumés. The whole thing.’

The change had much to do with Brian De Palma, who, having graduated from Sarah Lawrence, continued to make short films. Their voyeuristic undertone was increasingly obvious, particularly in the 1966 Murder à la Mod, a three-part fantasy with a middle section much influenced by Hitchcock. The film attracted interest, but no distributor, so De Palma used his earnings from working in a Village restaurant to hire the Gate Cinema in the East Village and show it himself.

One person who saw it was Charles Hirsch, who had a vague job scouting new talent for Universal, which was toying with the idea of investing in some low-budget features to cash in on the student audience and the art-house boom. Through Hirsch, De Palma got a small development grant from Universal’s parent company, MCA, but they rejected all his ideas as too radical.

De Palma and Hirsch became friends, however, and sat around Universal’s New York office for days on end, talking movies. ‘Out of that frustration,’ says De Palma, ‘smoking cigarettes and waiting for someone to return our calls, we came up with the idea for Greetings.’

The inspiration was Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine Feminine, a film in fifteen fragments during which Jean-Pierre Léaud moves in with a girl he meets in a café, then spends the rest of the film wandering Paris, quizzing her and her friends about politics and their way of life.

Writing their screenplay, De Palma and Hirsch addressed a similar ragbag of topical issues: marijuana, pornography and censorship, computer dating, the underground press, the new climate of tolerance for homosexuality, the Kennedy assassination; but particularly Vietnam and its manifestations on TV. The three lead characters, Paul, Jon and Lloyd, are all preoccupied with avoiding the draft: the title comes from the preamble of the draft notice – ‘From the President of the United States, Greetings.’

Nobody in Hollywood found the script very funny, so Hirsch offered to produce it, finding the $43,000 budget himself. De Palma rounded up a cast, mostly of old friends prepared to work for little or nothing. Gerrit Graham played Lloyd, the conspiracy theorist, and De Niro, with nothing particular on the horizon, agreed to be the voyeur and De Palma alter ego Jon Rubin. Not yet confident enough to leave his day job, Hirsch waited until his paid vacation, during the thirteen days of which he and De Palma shot the film.

Greetings announced its topicality from the first scene. Audiences accustomed to the kneejerk patriotism of films like The Green Berets hooted as Paul, hoping to be so badly beaten up the army won’t accept him, walks into a tough bar and demands, ‘Which one of you niggers wants to take me on?’ He escapes with only a few cuts and bruises, however, and Lloyd and Jon urge him to think more imaginatively – pretending, for instance, to be homosexual, or part of the fascist underground.

In any event, they decide he should arrive at the recruitment office exhausted, to which end they keep him awake for two nights, dragging him around New York city and involving him in their own obsessions, in Lloyd’s case the Kennedy killing and in Jon’s sex, in particular voyeurism. Lloyd chats with an artist about the way in which photographs, enlarged, can reveal unexpected truths, and even uses the nude body of a girl to mark Kennedy’s wounds and argue that a single bullet couldn’t have caused them. Another conspiracy freak contacts him in the bookshop where he and Jon work, warning him that shadowy forces threaten any who discover The Truth. In the end, a sniper’s bullet makes Lloyd the eighteenth victim of the Kennedy conspiracy.

Meanwhile, Paul tries dating by computer, which matches him with a series of unsatisfactory partners. Jon follows women around New York, filming them. Trailing one to the Whitney Museum, he’s sold a 16mm porn film by a man in the forecourt, who assures him it’s a work of art. He also picks up a shoplifter and persuades her to undress while he films her through a window – supposedly for an art piece. All this ends when he’s drafted, though the last scene shows him as a sniper in Vietnam, less interested in the TV reporter trying to interview him than in the pretty Viet Cong girl glimpsed through his telescopic sight.

While Greetings did imitate the apparent randomness of the nouvelle vague, large sections were as contrived as any Hollywood film. As the three friends, hanging round a clothing shop, discuss ways of ducking the draft, their hats and scarves change arbitrarily from shot to shot, and the client in the foreground suddenly switches places with the seller on the other side of the counter. Gerrit Graham and English pop artist Richard Hamilton sit in a New York park as Hamilton explains how he used photo enlargement in one of his recent works to create an ambiguous image of reality – music to the ears of someone who spends most of his time staring at the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s death.

De Palma shuns stylistic consistency. The three men cavort around Manhattan as if in a New York version of A Hard Day’s Night, and De Palma drops in a speeded-up sex scene which may have inspired Stanley Kubrick to insert a similar sequence into A Clockwork Orange. As in The Wedding Party, titles introduce sub-sections. In one, titled ‘Two Views of Vietnam’, the maker of a Vietnam documentary describes how it was shot, and a man at a party explains in lubricious details the sex and drugs available in Saigon.

But the film’s naïveté is deceptive. Shot by shot, De Palma transforms the audience into voyeurs, luring us, as does Hitchcock in Rear Window, from casual curiosity to an obsessive interest in what’s happening through the window opposite. He opens the film with a TV speech by Lyndon Johnson to the American labour organisation AFL/CIO, urging America to fight in Vietnam to protect the American Way. It’s shot from a TV screen, and in a domestic interior, as if we’re watching over someone’s shoulder (a copy of the book Six Seconds in Dallas sits prominently next to the set). De Palma filmed some scenes with a hidden camera, including the long conversation between De Niro and the pornographer, and others, the framing slightly off-centre, with people wandering in and out of the background, as if the actors weren’t aware of the camera.

De Niro worked on the role of Jon with the zeal that became his trademark. ‘It was make-up and clothes that changed his look,’ said De Palma, ‘but it was more than that. He had inhabited the character, and become different physically.’ Picking up on De Niro’s enthusiasm, Alan Goorwitz, a friend from the Village who’d joined the Actors Studio and changed his name to Allen Garfield, agreed to come up to the Whitney Museum and improvise the scene as the pornographer. De Niro also improvised most of his scenes with Rutanya Aida as the shoplifter who strips on film for him. As she peels, he keeps up a running commentary that is also a parody of Strasberg’s Method, explaining that this is a ‘private moment’ and that she should behave naturally, as if unaware of an audience.

Unexpectedly, Greetings was a commercial success, in part because its nudity won it an X certificate, which brought people flocking. Its sarcastic view of Vietnam also harmonised with the prevailing cynicism. The film opened on 16 December 1968. Four days earlier, the embarrassed incoming administration of Richard Nixon, who’d squeaked to a narrow election win in November, announced that American fatalities in Vietnam, now the longest war in American history, numbered 30,007, almost ten thousand of them killed in the first six months of that year.

To De Niro, Greetings didn’t look like the kind of film likely to launch him in movies, even if that had been his ambition. Like Pacino and his other friends and competitors, he thought of himself as pre-eminently a stage performer. The best theatre on the east coast was being done by regional repertory companies like the Long Wharf and the Boston Theater Company, and in 1969 De Niro signed up to work with the latter under its innovative producer David Wheeler – only, paradoxically, to receive almost immediately an invitation to make his first Hollywood film.

1967 had been the year of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and half of Hollywood seemed intent on trying to repeat its enormous success. Among the first out of the gate was Roger Corman at American-International Pictures, the king of exploitation movies, who announced Bloody Mama, based on the exploits of 1930s gangster ‘Ma’ Barker and her four homicidal sons. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway had re-invented Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow as star-crossed lovers driven by sexual passion and a lust for fame. In case anyone missed the point, the poster copy read, ‘They’re Young. They’re in Love. They Rob Banks. They Kill People.’ The teenage drive-in cinema audience that was AIP’s biggest market lapped it up. James Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, AIP’s owners, instantly understood the lesson of Bonnie and Clyde – that some Hollywood stars would now appear in what had formerly been ghetto genres. Known until then almost entirely for biker pictures and cheap science-fiction and horror films, particularly a series of Edgar Allan Poe fantasies directed by Corman, the company branched out into crime films. In 1967, Jason Robards Jr, then reviving his career between bouts of alcoholism, let himself be miscast as Al Capone in Corman’s The St Valentine’s Day Massacre. The following year, someone at the company saw Shelley Winters playing in two episodes of the spoof Batman TV series as ‘Ma Parker’, a twenties-style gang boss. AIP made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

With Don Peters, Oscar-nominated for his screenplay for Cornel Wilde’s 1966 The Naked Prey, Robert Thorn, an AIP regular, wrote a treatment based on the Barkers’ career, but Corman found ‘some of the sequences … simply crazy’.

The writers erred by sticking too closely to the unglamorous facts. Notwithstanding the notice at the start of the film that ‘Any similarity to Kate Barker and her sons is intentional’, Thorn’s revised screenplay had little to do with reality. The real Arizona Clark Barker was anything but a criminal mastermind. ‘The old woman couldn’t plan breakfast,’ complained one gang member. ‘When we’d sit down to plan a bank job, she’d go in the other room and listen to Amos and Andy or hillbilly music on the radio.’

Nor was her family the tight criminal unit shown in the film. Her eldest son, Herman, killed himself in 1927 after being wounded by police. Both Lloyd and Arthur, alias ‘Dock’, drew long jail sentences in the late twenties. Lloyd, the character De Niro played in the film, stayed in jail until 1938, after which he managed a bar and grill in Denver, Colorado, until 1949, when his wife murdered him. He wasn’t anywhere near Lake Weir, Florida, where Freddie, Ma, Arthur Dunlop and Alvin ‘Creepy’ Karpis died in a furious machine-gun battle in January 1935.

Determined to outdo Bonnie and Clyde, Corman ladled on violence, with a sixties spicing of incest, nudity and drugs. Kate, now younger, more intelligent and attractive than the real Ma Barker, dominates the story, living and stealing with all her boys, three of whom survive to die with her at Lake Weir. Freddie and Herman do get sent to jail, but Ma robs enough banks to hire a good lawyer and have them released. Lloyd isn’t present at the shootout, but not because he’s in jail. The film turns him into a drug addict, a glue-sniffer who graduates to heroin and dies of an overdose.

Corman assembled the usual AIP cast of wannabes and has-beens, anchored by a few pros. This produced a family oddly mismatched in height, build and hair colour. Don Stroud, 190cm tall, an ex-surfer and nightclub bouncer, towered over Clint Kimbrough and Robert Walden, who played Arthur and Fred. In 1968 Stroud had been the heavy in Coogan’s Bluff opposite Clint Eastwood, but Kimbrough and Warden had almost no film experience, though Walden would later become familiar in TV series like Lou Grant.

To back them up, AIP veteran Bruce Dern played an invented character, Kevin Dirkman, while the part of Herman’s girlfriend Mona went unexpectedly to a classic Hollywood casualty, Diane Varsi. After an Oscar nomination in 1958 for her role as Lana Turner’s daughter in Peyton Place, Varsi’s career nose-dived when she broke her contract in 1959 and fled Hollywood, supposedly to ‘retire’ but actually to keep the illegitimate child she wasn’t prepared to abort or adopt. In 1969, she’d just returned to films and was taking any roles she could get.

Into this mix, Winters introduced her protégé, Bobby De Niro. Corman says he’d watched at least some of De Niro’s work before casting him, but it would hardly have mattered if he hadn’t. On paper, Winters and Stroud dominated the film. The remaining meat of the script went to Robert Walden’s Fred and his masochistic relationship with the bisexual sadist Dirkman, whom he meets in prison and brings home to join the gang, and to oust Herman as Ma’s lover. De Niro as Lloyd looked to be just along for the ride.

Having Shelley Winters in the cast inspired AIP to spend more money than usual. Most of the performers, including Winters, had Los Angeles homes and so didn’t need hotels, but De Niro was put up at the Beverly Hilton, a luxury he didn’t expect or demand; he’d have been just as happy in a tent. By then, however, Winters doted on her protégé no less than did Ma on her boys. ‘Bobby needs someone to watch over him,’ she announced. ‘He doesn’t even know enough to wear a coat in the winter time. When we did Bloody Mama, he didn’t even know how much they were paying him. I found out how little it was and insisted they at least give him some expense money. He was broke all the time, but wouldn’t take money from anybody. So I figured out ways of giving him money without him even knowing about it.’