De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  AND WHO WAS he, this inscrutable, talented, and elusive man? What did he bring to the screen, and what did audiences take from him?

  Start with the looks. He was always handsome, with the aspect of a slightly more rugged Alain Delon. But with just a little tweak of lighting he could be either appealing or ugly.

  There was that mole, perched on the corner of his right cheekbone like an asterisk, a mark of jauntiness or irony, or even, when he was roused to anger, the sight on the end of a rifle barrel: unblinking, accusatory, immutable. When his face was lean, as it was generally, the mole was accentuated and defined, almost like a third eye; when he was heavy, it could seem like a scrap left on his cheek after a messy meal. It was so clearly visible that it almost threatened his handsomeness, which bordered on prettiness when he was young and developed into ruggedness as he aged. But he carried it so unconsciously that you felt as guilty noting it as if you were staring at someone’s lazy eye.

  A lot of actresses sported such moles—beauty marks—almost as if defying the audience to see them as faults: Marilyn Monroe, Marion Cotillard, Angelina Jolie, Madonna. And, too, there might have been a time, perhaps when he was a young actor, when De Niro was tempted to have the thing removed. (Actors have done far more to themselves in their struggles toward careers.) Fortunately, he never succumbed to such a vain impulse, and the mole became as much a part of his persona as his smile, in which his whole face seems to pucker in delight (he can grin and grimace at once, show delight and menace at the same time, offer a smile that’s a threat or a scowl that embraces), or his enviable, ever-changing hair, always thick and pliant and wavy even as it turned gray, often long enough to make him look like a rocker, sometimes cut short for the sake of accuracy or even to shock.

  His body, too, was a malleable thing, at times chiseled and fit, at times soft and homey, now and then genuinely rotund. Lots of actors changed their looks for parts with makeup, hairpieces, prosthetics; De Niro, more than once, changed his entire shape, his commitment to his roles so thoroughgoing as to make his journey beneath the skin immediately apparent, like a tattoo, upon the skin.

  And that’s just what could be seen of his actorly craft. His work, from his earliest days as a student actor to very near the present, was actually far deeper, more technical, and more immersive than was generally acknowledged or understood. For the first forty years of his acting career, De Niro dove into almost every role he took with fervent research on the page and, when possible, in person: brutally paring away at dialogue (his preference was always for showing rather than telling), having long colloquies with screenwriters, directors, and fellow actors, and being meticulous in the preparation of props and costumes.

  From his earliest days, he was prone to keeping lists of questions to ask, items to acquire, skills to master—always with an eye toward presenting a character as realistically as possible. He learned to speak Neapolitan and Sicilian dialects, drive a cab, play the saxophone, box, customize a military uniform like an Army Ranger in Vietnam, toss a catcher’s mask aside like a major league ballplayer, and speak like a native of the American South, Northeast, and Northwest.

  He could drive directors and acting colleagues crazy with his obsessive focus on detail, but he learned to build a character from the outside in, to allow the inner life of the men he played to emerge through a firmly established air of external realism. Even very late in his career, when critics and audiences often accused him of taking any part for a paycheck or phoning in his performances, you could see him building real men out of specifically chosen items of clothing, props, habits, turns of speech, and mannerisms. In a very real sense he saw acting as work and playing a character as a moral act, and he would almost always make an effort to live up to his own professional and ethical standards and do right by the men he portrayed.

  That discipline of building from the outside in made him an actor with whom directors had to exhibit patience. Very rarely was he fully ready to play a scene at its best in the first or second take. He had to steep himself in the emotion of the story, feel the energy of his fellow actors, mine himself for psychological and physical nuances. When he and his colleagues had sufficient bonds of trust to allow him to explore, he could create remarkable moments—real and convincing and seemingly unrehearsed. In the first decades of his movie career, working in lead roles on large films with powerful directors and the luxury of time, he was able to produce one remarkable performance after another in just this fashion. Later, when the scripts weren’t as precise and the directors not so patient or capable, his performances could come to feel generic; you get the very strong sense that he was given fewer chances to play each scene in, say, Meet the Parents than he was in Taxi Driver. But by then, like so many actors with scores of memorable films behind them, he could rely on an audience’s accrued trust and memory and affection to add the depth that maybe he himself couldn’t bring to a character. Lots of actors, for instance, could have played the neurotic mobster in Analyze This; De Niro, arguably, was the only leading man in Hollywood who could bring decades of resonant performances as a hard man to the film’s seriocomic psychodrama.

  HE HAS LONG been a figure of great contradiction in the movie business, reticent with the press but willing to go on late-night talk shows and do sketch comedy—and particularly agreeable about taking part in things that made fun of his own legend and persona. He would mock himself on Saturday Night Live and on TV commercials, but he was unwilling to share even with an innocent anecdote in conversation with, say, David Letterman or Jay Leno; sometimes he would speak in monosyllables or—defiantly, comically—not at all. You might wonder why he bothered, and then you realized that his show of taciturn stubbornness was in some ways more real and true and memorable than any palaver he might’ve offered up. It couldn’t have pleased the movie studios whose pictures he was supposed to be publicizing, but it stuck with you, and when he finally did at least appear to be opening up, such as in the Oscar campaign for 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook, he was all the more impressive for finally revealing himself.

  And if he never truly opened up as a private man, there would still be so much of him to savor: Johnny Boy Civello riffing on various neighborhood characters in Mean Streets; Vito Corleone blending the ways of the Old World and the New in The Godfather, Part II; Travis Bickle ticking like a human time bomb in Taxi Driver; Michael Vronsky surviving hell and burying it within himself in The Deer Hunter; Jake LaMotta visiting righteous punishment on boxing foes, family members, and chiefly himself in Raging Bull; Rupert Pupkin wheedling his way into showbiz, legally or otherwise, in The King of Comedy; the gangsters and killers and bad guys of The Untouchables, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, Heat, and Analyze This; the complex but decent heroes of Bang the Drum Slowly, Midnight Run, Awakenings, A Bronx Tale, Wag the Dog, Ronin, Being Flynn, and Silver Linings Playbook.

  Though movie actors may never say a single thing about themselves, may never once willingly open the door to the truth of their hearts and minds, nevertheless—if they are good enough and last long enough—they eventually spill everything about themselves out into the world.

  De Niro may have tried assiduously to keep from revealing who he is, providing only hints and allusions in response to personal questions. Yet, every time he appears before us, no matter the costume, the voice, the name, the story, there he is, stark and plain before the world: a working man, a man of principle, a man of ideals—in short, a man in full, as clearly defined by the work he has done as by the life he has lived.

  WE SOMETIMES THINK OF THE LIVES OF CELEBRITIES IN terms of how their work and their fame intersect with the chronologies of our own lives. We know, rationally, that famous people are born and grow up, find their craft and work at it just as the rest of us do. But somehow we still think of them as having begun to exist only when we first encountered them in a star-making film role, hit record, or athletic feat. In the thrall of a new star, we don’t necessarily care about his or her parentage or upbringing or educat
ion. In our minds and hearts, and in the mind and heart of the larger culture, stars arrive fully formed.

  But Robert De Niro’s story, strictly speaking, begins well before he was introduced to the art of acting or performed his breakthrough movie roles, before his parents met or made their professional marks in the world. Indeed, it begins so far back that it seems almost impossible to connect the history of it with the familiar figure of the actor.

  Only three times in his career did Robert De Niro portray a character from earlier than the twentieth century; nearly as rarely did he take on the role of a soldier, and just once that of a full-blooded nobleman. But the genealogy of this characteristically modern figure runs back through the centuries to, of all times and places, medieval France, where one of his ancestors, a cavalry officer, took part in the Roman conquests of Languedoc and Dauphine with sufficient valor to be named governor of those regions by the Roman emperor Conrad II.

  Raphael del Poggio was born in Lucca, Italy, in 1011 and died, his surname recast into French as DuPuy, a general of the Roman cavalry and grand chamberlain of the Roman Empire, in 1062. He would be entombed on a marble table with his sword, spurs, and helmet, along with a copper plaque celebrating his deeds and honor.

  The DuPuy family maintained noble status through centuries of governors and generals until the sixteenth century, when it turned to Protestantism, creating a Huguenot line that would, in time, bring the family out of favor with both secular and sacred authorities. In the late seventeenth century, French persecution of Protestants climaxed with the Edict of Fontainebleau, which virtually outlawed the DuPuys’ religion and forced them to flee, first to Germany and then to Virginia, to which King William III had invited Protestant settlers.

  The DuPuy line thrived in the New World, merging in 1829 with the Holton family, also of old colonial stock.*1 Fifty years later, one of the daughters of that union, Virginia Moseby Holton, would marry the Dutch immigrant Nicholas Admiraal, and their son, Donald, born in 1890, would be the maternal grandfather of the actor Robert De Niro.

  IF THE IDEA of Robert De Niro descending from French courtiers and Crusaders and English colonists who fought off Native Americans sounds incongruous, perhaps it’s because the other lines of his family, though less marked with incident, would shine so strongly in him, particularly the Irish-Italian blend. That nearly stereotypical alloy of immigrant stocks was produced in Syracuse, New York, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, after De Niro’s paternal ancestors fled hunger and poverty in Ireland or Italy to make a new start in America.

  Luigi and Rosanna Mercurio of Campobasso, in southeastern Italy, arrived in New York Harbor in 1886 with their daughter Angiolina, whose future husband, Giovanni Di Niro (as it was spelled in some documents), arrived in America the following year. Giovanni, known by the Americanized name John, was, like his father-in-law, a stonemason, and he and his bride set up their home in the Italian section of Syracuse. There they raised two boys and a girl; the middle of the three, Henry (or Enrico, as he was sometimes called on official documents), born in 1897, would be the paternal grandfather of Robert De Niro.

  Henry may have been born to a lineage of stonemasons, but he found softer work as a clerk at Weeks and Anderson, a Syracuse haberdashery. He put in a spell of military service near the end of World War I, but by 1920 he was living back in his father’s house in Syracuse. Not long after, he married Helen O’Reilly, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of Dennis, a bookkeeper, and Mary O’Reilly.

  Like the De Niros and Mercurios, the O’Reillys were descended from immigrants who left only vaporous traces in official records. Dennis and Mary (née Burns) were both born in upstate New York, but their parents—Edward and Margaret O’Reilly and John and Mary Burns, respectively—were born in Ireland and arrived in America amid a flood of immigrants with similar names and similarly ordinary backgrounds, virtually unnoted by history or officialdom. In 1964, the young Robert De Niro himself, a twenty-year-old high school dropout, would travel to Ireland on a backpacking tour partly intended as a search for his roots, only to find out just how obscure they were. As his father would later recollect, “He asked about his background. He’d hitchhiked around Ireland for two weeks, trying to find relatives, and couldn’t. I said, ‘My father’s people come from a place called Campobasso, halfway between Naples and Rome,’ so Bobby went there and met them.”

  THAT TRIP TO Europe wasn’t merely a young man’s lark or a genealogical quest. De Niro was inspired to go overseas in large part because his father had been living in France since the previous year, having gone there to, in a sense, reverse the trail of his immigrant grandparents and seek a new way of life and new avenues of work.

  Robert Henry De Niro, to give him his full name, was the oldest of Henry and Helen’s four children, born on May 3, 1922, barely a year after his parents wed. The household in which he was raised was slightly more genteel than those in which his parents lived as children: a freestanding house on Tipperary Hill, in the Irish enclave of Syracuse, valued at $9,000 and owned by Dennis O’Reilly, who lived there with them. To help pay their way, Henry and Helen both worked outside the home. After his return from military service, Henry took what might be called soft white-collar jobs as a salesman, a wholesale grocer, a general-store keeper, and eventually a government health inspector. Helen, too, brought in an income, at least in 1930, when she identified herself for the federal census as a “traveling salesman”—likely of the door-to-door sort. In the way of such things, their children (John, Joan, and Elizabeth followed Robert at two-year intervals) would have been expected to progress even further along the path of Americanization and upward mobility.

  But Robert Henry wasn’t the sort who did what was expected. In fact, he lived in pursuit of impulses and dreams that his father couldn’t quite fathom. From a very young age—five, according to family legend—the eldest of the De Niro children displayed remarkable gifts for drawing and painting. Years later, he was unable to explain his incongruous absorption in making art—“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug, “I was very isolated.” But his enthusiasm was encouraged by his parents and teachers, and he was allowed to take art classes at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts,*2 where he demonstrated such talent that he was quickly promoted from the children’s program to the adult classes and then, at age twelve, granted use of a studio space of his own, a lair to which he would repair regularly after school to draw and paint in solitude. His teachers took sufficient interest in the boy and his gifts that he was encouraged to seek more rigorous and more modern schooling in art. In 1938, he was awarded a scholarship to study with the noted etcher, critic, and teacher Ralph Pearson in Gloucester, Massachusetts. For any number of reasons his parents didn’t want him to go, and quarrels resulted, but—with their blessing or without—he made his way to Gloucester.

  There the teenage artist was able to immerse himself in whatever passions and interests caught his fancy. Instructed by Pearson on an anchored coal barge that served as a floating classroom, he learned of contemporary painting theories and techniques and had his eyes opened to a wider world of culture than he had experienced in Syracuse. Decades later, asked about a long-standing fascination with Greta Garbo, whose image he painted frequently over the years, he explained, “I was at an art school on a coal barge in Gloucester Harbor when I was 16, and after I read [Anna Christie] I made a model of the stage set.”

  When the summer session ended, De Niro returned to his father’s house determined to go back out into the world to study, learn, experience, and, chief of all, paint. He was in Massachusetts the following summer to work with a new teacher, and it would mark the beginning of several key relationships in his young life.

  His new master was Hans Hofmann, an expatriate artist and teacher from Germany who had thrived until the Nazis rose to power. He came to the States in 1932 and found work as an instructor at the famed Art Students League. Soon thereafter he opened his own school, or, rather, a pair of programs, one held during
the traditional academic year in a space on 8th Street in Manhattan, the other, run in the summers, in Provincetown, the bohemian village on the tip of Cape Cod. In these two fabled settings, Hofmann’s modernist ideas were introduced to a burgeoning generation of young American artists eager for something beyond the pictorialism that still ruled their own schools and museums.

  In Hofmann, Robert De Niro found a truly fatherly artistic mentor, a widely respected artist who was as renowned for his teaching as for his actual work. Hofmann preached a blend of European modernist theory with an untamed American energy. He had strong ideas, but he wasn’t doctrinaire, and he was open to free and expressive work of all sorts. He emphasized the spiritual element of art making, and he favored a dynamic color palette so long as there was what he called a “push-pull” between the elements of an abstract composition. Partly because of his choice of Manhattan as a home base and partly because of his catholic tastes and ideas, he was extremely influential, with such famed painters as Helen Frankenthaler, Red Grooms, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Larry Rivers among his pupils. (Indeed, his influence as a teacher would come to outshine his own work so completely that it would later be noted in a review of a show of his works alongside some by his students, “Sometimes he seems major despite his painting.”)