De Niro: A Biography

‘Location shooting’ for AIP normally meant driving up to Vasquez Rocks with a box lunch, but Bloody Mama would be shot in Arkansas, and on a generous schedule, at least by AIP standards. ‘It was a four-week picture,’ Corman says, ‘and that was long for me. I don’t think I’d ever done one before that ever required more than a three-week shoot. But I had looked at the script and I said, “This is going to be very tough. We’re filming all over the state. We’re going to be in the Ozarks in northern Arkansas, then we’re going to be filming around Little Rock and various other places. I really need four weeks.” And they gave them to me.’

In deference to the Method-trained Winters, Walden and De Niro, Corman agreed to rehearse some scenes and even accept a little improvisation – a novelty for a film-maker who once shot an entire feature in one weekend. Mostly, however, Bloody Mama proceeded on the well-worn grooves of the gangster genre. Undeterred, De Niro researched his part with dedication. Arriving a few days early in Arkansas, he loitered round the locals until he learned their speech rhythms – learned them so well, in fact, that Corman suggested he coach the rest of the cast. That was a waste of time, since those who bothered with any accent chose the standard Southern drawl.

In response, and to make his character more memorable, De Niro adopted the most distinctive voice in the film, a murmured sing-song, shot through with echoes of a giggle that harmonised with the snatches of hymns he quotes. This, and an infantile innocence, would characterise his performance, as Shelley Winters discovered when she started the first scene, in which she has to give her boys a bath.

Seeing her hesitation, De Niro came over to her. ‘What’s the matter, Shelley?’

‘I’m upset because I have to bathe five grown men in this scene, and I don’t even know all of you.’

‘But Shelley,’ De Niro said dreamily, ‘we’re all your babies.’

Lloyd’s gentleness makes him unquestionably the most sinister of the Barker boys. Mona, Herman’s mistress, is ready to pleasure his brothers if that’s what he wants, but she draws the line at Lloyd. Watching her through a screen door as she strolls naked around the room, smoking a cigarette, an aggrieved Lloyd whines, ‘Everyone knows what she can do. She can do it even better than Ma.’

Piqued, Mona taunts, ‘You should try my pie crust, little boy. It would melt in your mouth.’

In the end, however, Lloyd prefers dope. Corman, who the year before directed The Trip, an apologia for LSD, not surprisingly drew Lloyd as a holy fool on a permanent high. There’s a goofy domesticity in the way he sniffs glue in the parlour, watched by an uncomprehending Ma (‘When you’re working on those model airplanes, you get to acting awful silly’). The first time we see him shooting up, he’s in the depths of shrubbery, Corman pulling back to show him framed by flowers. When he dies, it’s curled up, smiling and apparently asleep, in the plants at the edge of a lake – ‘Like Moses,’ says his brother.

Such religious references pepper Lloyd’s lines. When Rembrandt (Pamela Dunlap) swims up to him while he’s enjoying a high at the end of a pier, his feet with their two-toned shoes immersed in the water, he murmurs, ‘Jesus, lover of my soul!’ in surprise.

Even though it copies Clyde Barrow’s meditation on his sexual dysfunction from Bonnie and Clyde, the subsequent scene is one of De Niro’s best in the film. ‘Sometimes I can make it. Sometimes I can’t,’ Lloyd muses as he sprawls on top of the complaisant Rembrandt. ‘You can’t hit the jackpot every time.’ He confesses that ‘everything frightens me’, and shows her his needle-marked arms. Spooked, she tries to escape, but the rest of the family drag her inside, tie her to the bed and rape her, after which Herman and Ma drown her in the bath.

De Niro’s involvement in Bloody Mama has gathered an extensive mythology, with Winters the largest contributor. ‘I thought he was concentrating too much on externals,’ she has said. ‘I mean, the things he did to his body! He was a wizard, though. He can blush or turn white just like that! But he broke out in sores. He refused to eat, and drank only water. He must’ve lost thirty pounds. Just to look like an addict.’

Corman denies most of this. De Niro did diet, but not to excess, and indeed doesn’t look any thinner on film than Walden, Kimbrough or Dern. However, Corman confirms that, on location, De Niro, as he would do habitually for the rest of his career, remained in character as the perennially stoned Lloyd even after hours, and stayed largely aloof from the rest of the cast.

In particular, Winters’ description of filming Lloyd’s burial is cemented into the De Niro legend. ‘On the day we were to shoot the burial scene,’ she’s said, ‘I walked over to the open grave, looked down and got the shock of my life. “Bobby!” I screamed. “I don’t believe this! You get out of that grave this minute!” To see the character through to the end, he had actually got down into the pit and half covered himself with dirt so that his fellow actors would look down and get an honest reaction.’

This would not have been out of character for De Niro, but, unfortunately for Winters’ story, there is no burial in Bloody Mama, and no grave. De Niro agreed he did ‘play dead’ in one scene, but it was the one in which he’s found curled up in the grass.

‘I was just lying in that state, without getting up,’ he explained later. ‘It seemed like an easy thing to do and I wanted to help the actors, because once they saw me like that, they were forced to deal with it.’ Which they do, staring down at him, apparently asleep, then gradually coming to the understanding that Lloyd is dead – followed by the thought, ‘How do we tell Ma?’

This was Winters’ cue to enter. The day before, she’d announced that she would find inspiration for the scene by spending the morning in a Little Rock funeral parlour, fully made-up and costumed as Ma. Corman was not to bring her to the location until they needed her.

When she arrived on the set, it was in the grip of a creative jag verging on hysteria. Finding that Herman and Kevin aren’t even there, but out in a boat machine-gunning a famous local alligator (a true incident), she stands at the edge of the water and bellows for them to come and mourn their brother. There follows some desultory grave-digging by Fred and Arthur, watched by Mona, then a hysterical outburst from Ma. Corman tried to rein Winters back, but Robert Walden dissuaded him. ‘Be very careful,’ he warned. ‘She’s in the part. Don’t do anything that might take her out.’ Deferring to someone who knew the needs of the Method, Corman went along. The result was high-adrenalin emoting on the Strasberg model, and hilariously false.

Whatever its limitations, De Niro’s performance is one of the few in the film that aspires to go beyond cliché. Only Diane Varsi as Mona creates anything like the same sense of personality. Her anachronistically curly hair and small breasts with their tweaked nipples, her puzzled confessions of love for Herman and her sense of ‘How did I get into this?’ breathe the perfume of regret that also permeates the films of James Dean. Under a different director and in a better project, she and De Niro could have made beautiful music together, but, one on his way up, the other on her way down, they were destined never to do so.

If Bloody Mama did nothing else, it opened De Niro’s eyes to the possibilities of film acting. Since there was no ‘real’ Lloyd Barker, it had been necessary to invent one, and in doing so he found that Stella Adler’s training prepared him well. Once he had visualised the character completely and understood his motivations, he could make informed choices about Lloyd’s tone of voice, his way of dressing and moving. The technique operated creakily in Bloody Mama, but Lloyd is as recognisable a De Niro character as Vito Corleone in The Godfather II and Max Cady in Cape Fear.

Like the great impersonating actors of the twenties and thirties whom he increasingly resembled, De Niro came to believe that creating a convincing character demanded detailed research and physical effort, even suffering. One had to ‘earn the right’ to play that person. The theory would cause him considerable discomfort, but would produce his best work.

De Niro and Winters returned to New York, Bobby scuffling for the same jobs with Pacino, who was increasingly regarded, with some judicious promotion from his friends at the Actors Studio, as the coming young actor. He had even gone to the Boston Theater Company and scored the success that might have been De Niro’s.

Pacino was then living with Jill Clayburgh, whom he’d met in Boston. They shared a hard-drinking lifestyle. Pacino and De Niro shared something too, since both had been involved with Susan Tyrrell, a minor actress and major party animal who’d appeared in films like Andy Warhol’s Bad, and at the time was Sally Kirkland’s flatmate. Tyrrell, shortly to earn an Academy Award nomination in John Huston’s Fat City, radiated a sensuality that was echoed in her activities off-screen, which she made the subject of a sour one-woman show in 1990 called My Rotten Life. Shelley Winters has described an incident from the period that almost certainly refers to De Niro’s relationship with Tyrrell and its conclusion. ‘I gave a Thanksgiving party. Invited all my theatrical waifs, my babies. Bobby was there, waiting for his date, a young actress he had a crush on. She didn’t show up until dessert. She sort of floated in. “Oh, hi, Bobby …” He went into the bedroom and pounded on the headboard with his fist. He was crying. He never talked to her again.’

Editing on Bloody Mama finished at the end of 1969 but the film didn’t open until March 1970. To reinforce the thirties look, not very well realised, Corman inserted old newsreels, with a voice-over from Winters to remind people when the story was set. By the time it was ready, the Actors Playhouse on 7th Avenue in the Village had accepted Winters’ play for production, and De Niro was headed for another stage role that might, he hoped, launch him into the same orbit as Brando.

Much rewritten, with the injection of more sex and profanity, the piece, originally called ‘Gestations of a Weather Man’, had become One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger. The three one-act plays, each with a different cast, depicted stages in the life of an actress not a million miles from the author. In the first, Sally Kirkland was the actress and Richard Lynch the man who arouses her latent leftist tendencies. Joanna Miles played her in the second segment, located in Paris, against the background of the Korean War and the anti-Communist blacklist. The third and longest section, called Last Stand, took place in the present. The actress was played by Diane Ladd, married to Bruce Dern and even then pregnant with the young Laura Dern.

In the play, Ladd’s character has just won her Academy Award, and meets an arrogant young actor at the celebratory party. He spikes her drink with LSD, and after a dazed candle-lit seduction during which the actor is revealed as a karate fanatic and bisexual, they end up in bed.

Winters pleased De Niro by offering him this role. He learned to splinter planks with his bare hand, and worked diligently with Ladd on developing his character, despite the interference of Winters, who doubled as director, and insisted on De Niro appearing mostly in a pair of abbreviated floral briefs. But the opening on 17 November 1970 became a debacle when Actors’ Equity walked out of seventeen off-Broadway theatres, the Actors Playhouse among them, in a dispute over wages. Winters wept as those few actors in the piece who weren’t old friends refused to appear. The curtain didn’t rise, and stayed down until 30 December, by which time Joanna Miles had taken another job.

The few people who saw the play when it did finally open felt De Niro succeeded in his melodramatic role, though Winters, with her usual hyperbole, said it was ‘like watching sexual lightning on stage. Every night was a different performance.’ Some were more different than others. On one occasion, De Niro, without alerting Ladd, placed additional lighted candles on stage for their love scene. As Ladd got out of bed and began to dress, a sleeve caught fire. An anguished Winters rushed down the aisle, but Ladd had enough presence of mind to snuff the flames out and carry on.

The following morning Ladd abused both De Niro and Winters for their lack of professionalism, but by then catastrophic reviews had condemned the piece to death. One critic found it a ‘foolish and vulgar affair’. Another compared it to ‘an evening of audition material’. To a third, it was ‘a trio of tawdry peepshows’ which ‘makes sex so ugly and dull that even the most ardent voyeur would be turned off’. The Village Voice, in an otherwise negative review, rated De Niro ‘stunning’, but that wasn’t enough to save the play, which closed after seven performances. Winters was in tears. ‘I’ve been clobbered, and I’m in a daze,’ she sobbed. ‘Nobody understands my plays.’

De Niro quickly put the failure of One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger behind him. He continued to make brief stage appearances, mostly off-Broadway or in short repertory seasons, but the action was moving to Hollywood as the best young directors, writers and performers in live TV drama and the stage followed their audience to the movies. In 1967, one film, The Graduate, earned more money than the whole Broadway season combined.

With the New York pond smaller, those actors who remained there had to struggle harder for work. The atmosphere drove De Niro’s already furious ambition. Roy Scheider remembers going up against him for a part on Broadway. ‘I got it,’ he recalled. ‘And a couple of days later I was in Joe Allan’s, and De Niro was at another table. He stared across at me, and I thought, “Wow, this guy really means it.”’

Unable to shake off the characters of Greetings, De Niro started writing a screenplay about a man based on an amalgam of Jon and Lloyd – a young drifter in New York, fascinated with assassinations. He found writing was harder than it looked. Non-verbal, he was non-literate too. Years later, he would admit, ‘I couldn’t sit down and write – I had ideas, I’d always be making notes about things, but I just couldn’t have the discipline to sit down and write. It’s another type of discipline, that’s hard. I could co-write something, collaborate in a certain way, but not really the way you have to in order to come up with a screenplay.’

He would later show what he’d written of this screenplay to Paul Schrader, the eventual screenwriter of Taxi Driver. Schrader remembers the incident well. ‘I said to him, “Do you know what the gun in your script represents?” I said it was obvious to me that it was his talent, which was like a loaded gun hidden in him that nobody would let him shoot, and that if somebody would just let him fire once, the whole world would see the enormous impact his talent would have.’

CHAPTER SEVEN The Year of the Turkey (#ulink_d099b081-deb1-5920-bb47-3ca334852f5d)

Miracle Pictures. If it’s a good movie, it’s a Miracle

Traditional Hollywood studio sign

Greetings made almost $1 million, though De Niro saw nothing but his salary. For Hirsch and De Palma, it was the breakthrough. Filmways, the company of ex-TV producer Martin Ransohoff, guilty of creating The Beverly Hillbillies, The Addams Family and Mr Ed, commissioned another film from them, this time with a budget of $100,000. As a title, Ransohoff suggested -no surprise – Son of Greetings, but De Palma, as much out of stubbornness as invention, preferred Hi, Mom!, a title that meant nothing to audiences until the last shot of the film, and not much even then.

History remembers 1969 as the year of Easy Rider, but Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s film hadn’t broken when Filmways bought Greetings. Ransohoff saw De Palma as the first American nouvelle vague film-maker, a saleable mating of Jean-Luc Godard and Alfred Hitchcock. To ensure the film’s counter-cultural credentials, he preferred, even insisted, that Hi, Mom! be shot in New York, and with a non-union crew.

Unacknowledged but implicit was the assumption that Greetings had succeeded not because of its anti-war stance or its cinematically playful discourse, but its sex, of which Ransohoff wanted a lot more in the sequel. De Palma, characteristically, couldn’t wait to bite the Hollywood hand that fed him. Hi, Mom! would have some nudity, but also a core of violence and social comment, and an apocalyptic conclusion. ‘The message of Hi, Mom!,’ said the director cheerfully, ‘was that you can’t beat them so you have to annihilate them.’

Between Greetings and Hi, Mom!, De Palma filmed a play in which the performers left the stage and mingled with the audience. The idea went back to early stagings of Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, and even Max Reinhardt toyed with it in the twenties in Vienna, but De Palma added a new wrinkle by filming the play with split screen, half showing the audience, the other half the cast. The logical extension of this idea – that cast and audience become interchangeable – would inspire the last half of Hi, Mom!

For Hi, Mom!, De Palma encouraged De Niro to both widen and deepen the character of Jon Rubin, back from Vietnam but no less the Peeping Tom than before. In the opening shot, the camera prowls with his point of view through a ruined Lower East Side tenement, finally discovering the janitor, who shows him truculently through filthy rooms filled with collapsing furniture. The place has nothing to recommend it until Jon, pulling back a curtain, sees the picture windows of the block opposite, all invitingly open to his gaze, and that of his camera. ‘I’ll take it,’ he says impulsively.

One of the gang from Jimmy Ray’s, an almost unrecognisably thin Charles Durning (mis-credited as ‘Durnham’), played the janitor. Another old friend of De Niro’s, Allen Garfield, reprised his Greetings role as pornographer Joe Banner, who hires Rubin to record the activities of his neighbours for a film. The improvised dialogue with Garfield and also the stratagem Rubin uses to meet Judy Bishop, most attractive of the girls opposite – he arrives at her door claiming to have been sent by a computer dating agency – both recall Greetings. And, like Rutanya Alda in Greetings, who herself has a small role in Hi, Mom!, Judy, played by yet another De Palma alumna, Jennifer Salt, becomes a willing, or at least complaisant, subject for his camera.

After a long and contrived farcical sequence where Jon tries to film his seduction of Judy, only to be frustrated by the weakness of the tripod head, which causes the camera to droop at the crucial moment, he swaps his equipment for a TV set. Its arrival sets up the last part of the film, which De Palma casts as a fake ‘National Intellectual TV’ documentary about black power, featuring a radical theatrical piece called Be Black, Baby, performed by a group led by another neighbour from the building opposite, Gerrit Graham.

De Palma, framing the image in a fake TV fascia, shot the ‘documentary’ with a hand-held camera in black and white, only reverting to colour when Jon auditions for the role of a policeman in the play. The group, all black except for Graham, are sceptical; he doesn’t look like a cop. De Palma then cuts abruptly to a shot of De Niro, dressed now in New York police ‘blues’, pounding with his baton on the door of a men’s room, and yelling about perversions going on inside. He kicks a garbage can down a flight of stairs, then, still clutching his baton and standing in a narrow corridor, addresses an aluminium ladder and a mop leaning against the wall as if they are a tall suspect and his shorter female companion. A demand to see their street-demonstration permit builds in seconds, through a succession of belligerent questions – ‘You got a permit? … What are you lookin’ at? … You touch my baton? … Make love, not war?’ – into a litany of fury until, overcome with rage, he lashes the ladder with his baton, then turns on the mop and strangles it.

The scene is a sketch for De Niro’s famous ‘You talkin’ to me?’ conversation with the mirror in Taxi Driver. For the first time, he tapped into the rage that would power his best work. The effect wasn’t lost on either actor or director. De Palma drew on the same sense of barely-suppressed violence in the extraordinary sequence that follows, as middle-class theatregoers, mostly white, attend a ‘performance’ of Be Black, Baby.

In murky monochrome, they’re hustled onto a tenement staircase, forced to feel up their black hosts, choke down ‘soul food’, and submit to having their faces blacked up, then threatened at gunpoint with robbery and rape. The ‘audience’ seem genuinely terrified, up to the point where De Niro appears in cop uniform to ‘rescue’ them. After that, they spill into the street, praising the show and promising to send their friends.

Like Greetings, Hi, Mom! doesn’t so much conclude as run out of steam. Married to a now-pregnant Judy, Jon, weary of her demands, reads up on terrorism in a copy of The Urban Guerrilla, plants dynamite in the laundry room of the apartment block, and flees. When the building collapses, he’s one of the crowd which gathers around the TV crews. After delivering a profane tirade against the dangers of New York, he asks to send a message to his mother. ‘Hi, Mom!’ he grins into the camera.

Once he had finished Hi, Mom!, De Niro felt alarmed by what it revealed of himself. Years later, asked by a London journalist how he felt about a retrospective screening, he confessed he’d avoided watching again a film he found ‘a little scary. I didn’t want to look at it because it would remind me of things – like the first time you ever hear your own voice or the first time I ever saw myself in a film … I don’t need to see it.’ And, in a real sense, Hi, Mom! is the film where we see the real De Niro for the first time.

Ransohoff’s hopes for Hi, Mom! were never realised. Before it could be released, Easy Rider’s cocktail of civil disobedience and recreational pharmaceuticals jolted independent American cinema onto a new path, away from the nouvelle vague and back towards the Hollywood genre movie – albeit with new and updated concerns: now the cowboys had psychological problems, and the gangsters grappled with questions of national identity. Overnight, the mischievous bohemians of Greetings and Hi, Mom! were out of fashion.

After Easy Rider, which justified dealing drugs as a means of purchasing freedom, film-makers were suddenly interested in New York all over again, as a stage for drug stories. Hollywood crews flooded into the city, alarming the Californian movie unions, who saw work slipping away to the east coast as it had during the sixties to Europe. They began to enforce the regulation that a production working on location in New York, even with its own technicians, had to hire an additional local crew who would do nothing, but be paid full wages.