De Niro: A Biography

Actors had no such clout, however, and, while New York’s few grips and gaffers were never out of work, local performers like De Niro became accustomed to outsiders getting all the major acting roles. ‘I was taking pretty much anything that came along,’ De Niro said of those days. ‘There wasn’t that much.’ But he remained optimistic. ‘I never became disillusioned,’ he said later. ‘I knew that, if I kept at it, I would at least make a decent living. If you are halfway decent at what you do, by the law of averages in five or ten years you will make enough money to do what you want to.’

For evidence of this, he had only to look to his parents. Virginia’s company was flourishing, while Robert had won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968 and now spent summers teaching at colleges all over New York state and in San Francisco, which became a second home.

But Bobby still lived in the $75 a week fourth-floor walk-up apartment on 14th Street, now turned over to him by Virginia, and arrived at auditions by bicycle. Socially, he rivalled his father in elusiveness, avoiding parties, and even when he did turn up, maintaining a reserve that chilled anyone who tried to get close. As one friend put it, ‘He was the only man I ever knew who seemed as if he had to think before he smiled, as if he was saying to himself, “Is that funny? Shall I laugh or what?” His laughter never seemed spontaneous.’

The musical Hair was still causing a sensation on Broadway when Bernard Schwartz, president of Joseph M. Schenck Enterprises, called a press conference to announce he’d just paid $50,000 for the film rights to Heir – not the Ragni and Rado show, he hastened to explain, but a novel by the unknown Roger Simon about two rich and beautiful kids on drugs, one of whom dies young. (Ragni and Rado, on the advice of their guru, refused to sell the film rights to Hair for another decade.) United Artists put up $2 million to make the film, which Schwartz, having milked the coincidence of titles of all possible publicity, rushed into production as Jennifer on my Mind, with director Noel Black.

To script it, he recruited Erich Segal, author of the seminal weepie Love Story – also about two young and beautiful people, one of whom dies young. For Jennifer, Segal made it the story of Marcus (Michael Brandon), rich heir of a Jewish gangster, who meets and falls for the appealing and equally wealthy but oddly disconnected Jenny (Tippy Walker) in Venice, California, and follows her to New Jersey, only to find she’s heavily into drugs. Marijuana gives way to hashish and then heroin, on which she overdoses, with Marcus’s connivance, and dies. A fortuitous car accident disposes of her body, leaving Marcus, sadder and wiser, free to return to California. Jennifer was, in fact, Love Story on heroin. As Kevin Thomas wrote sarcastically in the Los Angeles Times, the film ‘could just as easily have been called Drug Story and been hyped with the slogan, “Love Means Never Having to Ask for a Fix”’.

Black cast De Niro as Madrigian, the driver of an unlicensed ‘gypsy’ cab painted with the truculent message ‘We Are Not Yellow. We Go Anywhere’. Inspired by the character’s Middle Eastern name, Bobby grew a moustache and small pointed beard, and affected vaguely Middle Eastern hand-woven clothing, including a head scarf. He looked good as a cab driver. That wisecracking lawlessness suited his style: you felt he might do and say almost anything. Picking up Brandon, he tells him as he pulls out, ‘Hey man, I think I should warn you – I’m very high.’ Startled, Brandon blurts, ‘I am too.’

Some magazines, including the Hollywood Reporter, singled De Niro out for praise. The camera liked him, and, increasingly, he liked the camera. But the film was panned by its preview audience, and United Artists hastily demanded cuts to remove the dead wood, which included some of De Niro’s scenes. He ended up nineteenth in the acting credits, as lost as the film itself, which was dumped into the desert of double-bills, never to be seen again.

Despite this, the drug cycle still had some time to run, and De Niro was now on the list of young performers who looked convincing in that world. Or so Ivan Passer thought when he gave him the script for what would become Born to Win.

In Czechoslovakia in the early sixties, Passer and Milos Forman had collaborated on the screenplays of Forman’s most successful films, while in 1966 Passer had directed the highly-regarded Intimate Lighting. When the Russians invaded in 1968, both fled to America. Forman joined the queue of people who wanted to film Hair, but, like the rest, floundered in the swamp of hippie mysticism surrounding its creators. Shelving the project for a decade, he made Taking Off, the kind of social comedy with which he’d built his reputation back in the Old Country.

Re-enter David Scott Milton, proprietor of the Bear Garden, who had developed a play, ‘Scraping Bottom’, based on characters he knew from the restaurant. Ivan Passer liked it, and persuaded United Artists to fund Milton’s sourly comic story of J – for Jerome – a once-successful hairdresser now feeding a $100-a-day heroin habit on the streets of New York.

Just back from eighteen months in jail, J finds that his wife has become a prostitute, and mistress of a smooth dealer, the Geek, for whom J runs errands. Despite everything, he still fosters the optimism symbolised by the tattoo on his arm, ‘Born to Win’. Things look up when he meets Parm, a romantic innocent, but two cops target him to entrap the Geek, and, when he fails, plant drugs on Parm and arrest her. Falling foul of a dealer he’s tried to rob, J is given the choice of being thrown off a building or committing suicide by ‘hot shot’ – an injection of battery acid. Handing him the poisoned dope, the Geek offers him the dubious consolation that it will the best high he’ll ever experience, as well as the last. The film ends with J sitting in a wintry park, knowing that, sooner or later, he’ll use it.

Abandoning ‘Scraping Bottom’ as a title, Passer called the film Born to Win. In a style more common in Europe than America, the film would cynically alternate tragedy with farce. J covers the theft of a safe from a restaurant by engaging the cashier in a long comic conversation about enemas, meets his new girlfriend when he tries to steal her car, escapes from his enemies dressed only in a frilly pink negligée, and, fleeing from a cop and his partner, hides in a clothes drier; amused, the cop puts a coin in the slot and watches J revolve.

Alerted by Milton, De Niro auditioned for Passer, who liked to work improvisationally. ‘He paired Bobby up [as the cop] with Ed Madsen, a former Mafia enforcer turned actor, and the combination worked,’ says Milton.

Once he’d finished casting, Passer began shooting on the streets and in the clubs and restaurants of New York – and almost immediately ran into problems with De Niro. ‘Ivan and George Segal [who was playing J] began to have second thoughts,’ says Milton. ‘Bobby was inventive and imaginative, and because of that a pain in the ass. George and Ivan felt he was trying to make more out of his part than the part called for. They began to talk of replacing him. The fact that he and I had both studied with Stella gave us a common background and vocabulary. I defended him; his passion for what he was doing – he was a real Stella Adler actor, relentlessly pursuing his craft. If he seemed to be making more of his part than they thought was right for the film, it was out of passion, of caring, a real actor’s love of his calling.

‘There was a scene in the film where Bobby and Ed Madsen are interrogating George in their unmarked detective car. They were putting pressure on George’s character to set up a drug dealer, the Geek, played by Hector Elizondo. Bobby had a toothpick in his mouth. Ivan asked him not to move the toothpick from side to side during the scene because it would be impossible to cut away: the toothpick would seem to leap from cut to cut when he went back to Bobby. Bobby agreed with Ivan, but then ignored him, and it became a problem in the editing room. I’m not sure if Bobby did it on purpose or he just couldn’t comply with what Ivan wanted because he was so involved in the scene.

‘At the time, I had the sense that Bobby was very shrewd. He would nod and nod and “Yes, Ivan,” and act as though he knew exactly what Ivan (or George) wanted, but ultimately he would do what he had intended doing from the beginning. Ivan would call him on this and he would play dumb. “Oh, is that what you wanted! Ah. OK. I can do that …” And, again, he would do exactly what he wanted to do.’

De Niro also clashed with Passer on another scene, in which his character has persuaded J to introduce him to the Geek as a potential buyer of a large quantity of heroin. They shot it in the Horn and Hardart Automat restaurant on 57th Street.

‘De Niro arrived dressed like a high-rolling Mafia hood,’ says Milton. ‘Flashy suit, slicked-down hair, fancy shoes. Ivan didn’t like it. It may have had something to do with Bobby bringing undue attention to what was essentially a secondary character.’

Milton defended De Niro’s choice, but the film’s technical advisor, a former narcotics officer, sided with Passer. De Niro changed his clothes for something less flamboyant. ‘I thought Bobby’s approach was right, logically and theatrically,’ says Milton. ‘Ivan’s concern was that this subsidiary part not become so interesting that it overshadowed the main thrust of the film. Bobby couldn’t think this way. To him every part was a lead part.’

In time, Born to Win, re-released first as Born to Lose and later as The Addict, would earn grudging respect, though, ironically, the factor that put it back into circulation was the growing reputation of De Niro, whose role could have been played by anyone. As J, George Segal gave a career-best performance. The film also launched Karen Black, who played Parm, to the eventual Hollywood heights of Airplane. De Niro, long-haired and looking too young for the role, had four scenes as one of the cops. Even had the part been bigger, it would have done him little good, since an appalled United Artists first recut Born to Win to emphasise its comic elements, then barely released it. ‘They didn’t open it,’ said Pauline Kael. ‘They just let it out.’

Of fifty-six Broadway shows that opened in the 1970–71 season, only four – Home, Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, Oh! Calcutta! and Sleuth – earned back their costs. Off-Broadway fared little better. Theatregoers, facing the prospect of being mugged, having their car stolen and being accosted by drug dealers or whores, preferred staying home in front of the television, which was booming with the launching of series like All in the Family and Columbo. Hollywood didn’t help. The three major movies with New York settings, The French Connection, Klute and Shaft, showed the city as a sewer of drugs and crime, while a fourth, The Hospital, suggested that, if you survived a mugging or shooting, you might not live through the medical treatment.

With growing alarm, De Niro watched other New York actors, only a few years older than him, like Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, make their reputations and go on to major careers in movies. What was worse, actors of his own age like Christopher Walken were edging into the limelight. He sensed a real risk that he would be left behind. The lesson was driven home when his major competitor, Al Pacino, won a big role in the film of Mario Puzo’s Mafia epic The Godfather.

In retrospect, The Godfather was the film De Niro had been waiting for. A crime story with an Italian-American background, it invited the sort of operatic performance of which he was uniquely capable. When the project passed to Francis Ford Coppola to direct, it looked even more promising. An Italian-American himself, with New York roots, Coppola announced early that he would shoot the film in and around the city, and with local performers, ideally Italian-American.

Behind the scenes, however, the project was already in trouble. A dozen directors, including Arthur Penn, Fred Zinnemann, Sidney Furie, Peter Yates, Richard Brooks and Constantin Costa Gavras, turned it down before it arrived on the desk of Coppola, a director with a couple of flops on his record who had, however, just scripted Patton, already $9 million into profit after nine months. Paramount were desperate enough to send executive Peter Bart to San Francisco to beg Coppola to both write and direct The Godfather, but he did so reluctantly, seeing it as just another potboiler, cashing in on a best-selling novel.

Almost immediately, Coppola clashed with Paramount over locations and casting. The studio preferred that he shoot in Hollywood, not New York, and with well-known actors, not the unknowns he auditioned in Manhattan through the spring and summer of 1971.

Ethnicity became a big issue in The Godfather’s casting. ‘What about Robert Redford for the character of Michael Corleone?’ the studio suggested. Coppola responded that, among other things, Redford was blond. ‘He could be from northern Italy,’ they coaxed.

Both Coppola and producer Al Ruddy wanted the glowering Al Pacino to play Michael Corleone, but Paramount’s head of production Robert Evans vetoed him. Anyone, drawled the WASP executive, would be better than this short, muttering, impassive, ethnic unknown. Wearily, Coppola filmed tests for Michael with Martin Sheen and his old friend James Caan, already pencilled in to play Michael’s quick-tempered elder brother Sonny. With black wigs and dark Sicilian make-up, both looked ridiculous. Marcia Lucas, wife of George Lucas, was cutting the tests. ‘Use Pacino,’ she urged Coppola. ‘He’s the only one whose eyes address the camera.’

Coppola agreed, but he still had to kowtow to Evans. Thinking two moves ahead, he started testing other actors for the role of Sonny, just in case Caan had to take over from Pacino. Among them was De Niro.

Sally Kirkland takes credit for suggesting Bobby, though he was far from the only person up for the part. ‘I was one of the four hundred … well, more like four thousand, who tested,’ said De Niro. ‘They were all over the place, sitting on the cement floor … Foreigners, amateurs, guys who spoke like “deez and doze” …’

As an audition piece, Coppola asked everyone to do the scene where Sonny mocks Michael for offering to assassinate a crooked cop and his gangster confederate. The war hero who didn’t want any part in the family business now proposes to kill two men at point-blank range. ‘It isn’t like the war,’ sneers Sonny. ‘You don’t shoot people from a hundred yards away. You put the gun against their head and get brains on your nice new suit.’

For his test, De Niro tucked back his long hair with a woman’s hairclip and selected a hat from his collection, narrow-brimmed and faintly comic. He looked, in fact, like Gene Hackman’s ‘Popeye’ Doyle in The French Connection. His reading of Sonny was equally eccentric – mocking but manic. Coppola called the test ‘electric’, but De Niro’s concept didn’t fit the part. ‘This was Sonny as a killer,’ said Coppola. ‘It wasn’t anything you could sell. But I never forgot it, and when I did Godfather II, I thought he could play the young Brando.’

Reluctantly, Evans accepted Pacino. ‘$400,000 spent on tests,’ says Caan sarcastically, ‘and Paramount ends up with four corned-beef sandwiches.’ To complicate matters, Pacino, assured by Al Ruddy that he had no chance of being in The Godfather, had signed to appear in MGM’s The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight, about to begin filming across the river in the Redhook district of Brooklyn. Even worse for Paramount, MGM refused to cancel Pacino’s contract. Evans claims he had to pull strings with his criminal contacts inside the construction unions to get MGM to release Pacino, and even then had to hand over the screen rights to one of Harold Robbins’ novels as well.

Coppola, meanwhile, hoping to hang onto De Niro, signed him for a small role. Coppola remembers it as that of Carlo Rizzi, the handsome turncoat whose marriage to Connie, the only Corleone daughter, opens the film. Others claim it was Paulie Gatto, the young driver who also betrays the family and ends up dead on the New Jersey flatlands, a bullet in the back of his head. Neither character had more than a few minutes on screen, though one of Rizzi’s scenes looks like a refined version of De Niro’s cop audition in Hi, Mom! To lure Sonny out of his hideout, Carlo thrashes the pregnant Connie around their apartment with his belt, leaving a trail of broken china and smashed furniture.

Whichever role he was offered, De Niro took it, even though each had only two or three brief scenes, but kept his eye out for something better. He found it, paradoxically, in The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight, which Pacino had abandoned to make Godfather. Director James Goldstone needed a convincing Italian-American actor to take over, and De Niro was ready and willing.

Based on a novel by the columnist and humorist Jimmy Breslin, the story was latter-day Damon Runyon, with comic mobsters in bad suits and worse accents squabbling over territory. Breslin simply fictionalised the shenanigans of ‘Crazy’ Joey Gallo, the not-very-bright capo of a Brooklyn family which hoped to take over the territory of the much more powerful Colombo family.

Breslin’s gangsters, including ‘Kid Sally’ Palumbo, the Gallo character, are small-time businessmen with the brains of turtles. To make some quick money, one gang stages a lottery based on the outcome of a six-day bicycle race, for which they import a group of Italian riders. These include Mario Trantino (De Niro), a handsome but kleptomaniac young Calabrian more interested in staying in the United States than in competing; but so strong is his urge to steal that, even at the reception held in the riders’ honour, he’s emptying bowls of peanuts into his pockets. In the battles that follow as rival gangs try to hijack the project, Mario meets and falls in love with Angela, Kid Sally’s sister.

An early project of Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, later the producers of the Rocky series, The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight had all the hallmarks of a quick money-maker: Breslin’s laconic newspaper pieces had won him a national following; New York crime was hot; Waldo Salt, the screenwriter, had just had a hit with his adaptation of Midnight Cowboy; and MGM had an option on the services of Italian star Marcello Mastroianni to make his first American film.

The film hit its first snag when Pacino left. Then Mastroianni, pencilled in to play Kid Sally, confessed he couldn’t speak English and was too busy to learn. He was replaced by little-known New York actor Jerry Orbach. Veteran Jo Van Fleet played Sally’s black-clad mother, full of Sicilian imprecations, and Lionel Stander rival gang boss Baccala. All were grossly miscast, though not so spectacularly as Hervé Villechaize, the 119cm French midget who was revoiced in Brooklyn-ese throughout. The only performer with anything like star quality was the lion which Kid Sally keeps in his cellar as a pet. Its occasional eruptions into the action are handled with considerable flair, which may have inspired Martin Scorsese to introduce two tiger cubs into his movie Mean Streets a few years later.

De Niro’s agent Richard Bauman cut a reasonable deal for De Niro, though he had to give MGM and Chartoff/Winkler an option to make two more films with him over the next two years. They did, however, persuade the Screen Actors’ Guild to waive its usual restrictions on non-members. With memories of the starvation conditions under which he’d made Bloody Mama, De Niro also had them agree in writing to provide him with reasonable accommodation while he was working away from home.

De Niro was enough of a newcomer to be impressed by big-time studio film-making. Years later, he was still calling The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight ‘my first big-deal movie’. For the first time, he was lit in Hollywood style: to director of photography Owen Roizman went the honour of shooting the first real close-ups of De Niro, who didn’t protest when Goldstone suggested he grow his hair long, and let it hang in a fringe over his forehead. The look transformed him into something closer to the standard Hollywood jeune premier – a near-clone of eighties leading man James Spader.

Leigh Taylor-Young, once a star in the TV soap Peyton Place, had abandoned showbiz entirely after the collapse of her marriage to Ryan O’Neal, and was living in New Mexico when her agent offered her the role of Angela. Busty, tall and red-headed, she was hardly obvious casting for a Sicilian teenager. ‘I took the job on faith, to keep myself busy,’ she says.

Goldstone, like many directors, rehearsed the film at New York’s Stanhope Hotel. ‘They asked me to gain fifteen pounds, dye my hair black, and learn the accent “fluently”,’ says Taylor-Young. ‘This panicked me. I had a good ear for sound, but no confidence with accents.’ It was worse when she met De Niro. ‘Bobby’s Italian accent was impeccable almost immediately.’ No wonder, since between auditioning for The Godfather and taking the role of Mario, he’d made a quick trip to Sicily. The visit was supposedly to polish up his accent for Gang, but since Mario is Calabrian, not Sicilian, and anyway speaks broken English throughout the film, it’s more likely that De Niro was preparing for a possible Godfather call-back.

‘He came into rehearsal seemingly very ordinary,’ recalls Taylor-Young, ‘quiet and “mumbly” and with a very endearing sweet, shy way about him. His eyes didn’t make direct contact for very long.’

After a week of grappling with the accent, Goldstone sent them on an excursion. They were to spend the day, in character, exploring New York, during which Taylor-Young, pretending to be Angela and speaking in a Brooklyn accent, would introduce De Niro to New York as if he were the newly arrived Mario. ‘We were to be spontaneous,’ says Taylor-Young, ‘take the bus, and go wherever, as long as we never stepped out of character. I was a bit horrified, because I was now aware I was working with a great talent who had a perfect accent, and I felt I didn’t have a clue yet about my character, let alone a proper Brooklyn accent.

‘Off we went on the 5th Avenue bus. We got off near the Empire State Building. I was stone silent for almost the whole ride, for fear of demonstrating my ineptitude. Slowly as we walked west toward Macy’s I plunged into behaviour that began to feed my sense of this girl, and my terror eased.’ Not for long. As they left the department store, Young felt a hand on her arm. A large man had grabbed her with one hand and De Niro with the other. De Niro’s jacket fell open and two shirts fell out; taking Goldstone’s directions literally, he’d given in to Mario’s kleptomania.

‘We were pushed back into Macy’s,’ says Taylor-Young, ‘up the elevator to a floor that was nothing but a jail! [The detective] was not at all interested in the fact that we were actors rehearsing a film. As far as he was concerned we were partners in crime and he arrested us. I was amazed to see Bobby’s response to all of this, with him being a true New Yorker. He was scared.’

Finally a cop recognised Taylor-Young from Peyton Place and accepted that she and De Niro were just creating characters. The experience broke the ice between the two, and during the film they enjoyed, in Taylor-Young’s words, ‘a tempestuous love affair’.

With her showgirl body and long legs, Taylor-Young was the sort of trophy companion De Niro would increasingly prefer. Statuesque, even stately, with heels higher than their IQs, these women held his interest until the pursuit ended, after which the relationship descended into public bickering, then indifference.

If De Niro or Goldstone hoped the affair would improve Taylor-Young’s performance, they were disappointed. She never did manage a Brooklyn accent, or any accent at all, and her newly-assumed fifteen pounds, accentuated by unflatteringly short skirts, merely made her look dumpy. Every critic trashed the film, though one person at least liked it. Just stupid enough to take Jerry Orbach’s characterisation as a compliment, ‘Crazy’ Joey Gallo befriended the actor, who was partying with him at Umberto’s Clam House in Greenwich Village in 1972 when an anonymous assassin shot the gangster dead.

CHAPTER EIGHT Boyz of the ’Hood (#ulink_9719e802-24d2-55a6-9b19-3c974dcff36d)