by Shawn Levy
He was, said another acquaintance, “a lonely soul” with “an elegant mind,” and he was almost pathologically private. If he had lovers—male or female—he rarely let the outside world see or know about them. (“I didn’t know much about his social life other than what my mother would say,” his son would later reveal. “I was never exposed to his sexuality, but my mother told me about it later. That was part of his ‘thing,’ and he kept it very quiet.”) He held the highest aesthetic standards and could be caustic in dismissing the work—or way of life—of those he felt were not worthy, though this disdain could cost him professionally. As painter Al Kresch, who’d known him since their student days, put it, “Anyone he knew he had a falling-out with.”
As his son confirmed, “He had a temper, but he was witty and caustic. Very sarcastic about certain things, especially other artists who he didn’t respect. He also used to make fun of people who would put on false airs and speak with an affected accent.… He was self-centered and concerned about what he wanted to do, but I think when you’re an artist you have to have that selfishness to be alone and create great things to your satisfaction.” The poet Barbara Guest, who remembered him as “fiercely engaged with his work,” depicted him as “alone in the tremendously cluttered place in which he painted … erratic, gloomy, untidy.… There was no social life of dinners.… There were many parties he did not attend.…‘Affability’ is not a word that applied to Bob, nor is ‘social.’ He was given to acid comments about the art scene, with which I might add, he was thoroughly familiar.” He apparently struggled with depression on and off throughout his life, and there are hints in some accounts that he was diagnosed with what would later be known as bipolar disorder.
But he was well liked in the small world he frequented. His longtime friend Dick Brewer described him as the “loneliest person I ever knew” but also “the funniest person I ever knew.” “He had the air of someone with a long and complicated history,” recalled Larry Rivers. “He was a kinetic dandy, he was Baudelaire in New York.” De Niro would sometimes sport large rings and a gold bracelet on his right—that is, his painting—hand. The artist Jane Freilicher recollected him with fondness as a kind of art world ghost, “a lonely soul, turning up places … whistling ‘La Vie en Rose’ through his teeth,” but also remembered a far lighter side to him: “Bob was a great dancer. He would whirl around and around until his movements had no relation to the music or anything. Squeamish women sort of pressed against the wall trying to hide from him.”
Still, he was always deeply respected for his work, albeit within smaller and smaller circles: as a magazine article said of him in the mid-1970s, when his son’s ascending fame brought him new attention, “De Niro did not spend much time at the Cedar Bar, but according to at least one informal survey taken there, his name was the name most often mentioned in answer to the question, ‘Who, besides you, is good?’ ”
That respect surely derived in large part from De Niro’s relentless, neurotic perfectionism. In 1958, as part of a series of profiles of painters at work, ARTnews sent Eleanor Munro to his studio to watch him fashion a series of paintings. These weren’t his already well-known studies of Greta Garbo, based on movie stills but designed to recall classical paintings (told, in 1956, that an avant-garde artist in Manhattan had an obsession with her image, the reclusive star replied, “How nice”). Rather, the paintings Munro observed De Niro working on were scenes of the Crucifixion, a strange subject for a man who had abandoned Catholicism as a teen, poked around in Eastern religion and even Christian Science, and quarreled with his parents after they baptized little Bobby against his wishes. The cross at Calvary was a completely unfashionable subject, but one that persistently haunted De Niro throughout his career: one of his biggest sales to that point had been a Crucifixion purchased for $1,000 by Gloria Vanderbilt (then Mrs. Leopold Stokowski) and selected for her by art historian Meyer Schapiro; it would eventually hang in a Rosicrucian museum in California.
Munro’s portrait of the artist at work, full of details about his technique, his influences (Bonnard, Ingres, Rousseau—but no contemporaries), and his self-critical dedication, gave a vivid impression of De Niro as his own most severe critic, chasing after an aesthetic vision that often only he could comprehend. “Book after book of these quick studies pile up,” Munro wrote. “Most end up in the wastebasket. Perhaps ten out of a hundred, De Niro keeps on exhibition and for his own use.”
Other observers confirmed the artist’s unusual technique: “He liked to work a long time on a painting to get a composition,” reported his friend Dick Brewer, “then wipe it out and paint it again in an hour.” And his niece Jean De Niro provided the most vivid depiction of the artist at work, describing a modeling session from the 1960s:
He was becoming somebody I didn’t know.… Suddenly I wasn’t his relative, only a model.… His face changed, he seemed to get a little angry … it was like a seizure.… He’d draw a sketch, he’d rip it up, draw another, rip it up … it wasn’t an attack on me but on making the picture.… [He was] painting almost right on my body … yet everything on the canvas was controlled—composition, shading, moods, nuances—contained.
STILL, FOR ALL his eccentricity, doggedness, and idiosyncrasy, for all his absences and the uncomfortable circumstances that were his preferred mode of living, De Niro was by all reports a caring father. He was, his son would remember, “affectionate … always touching and hugging,” and he enjoyed taking young Bobby to museums, gallery openings, and especially movie theaters. “He did take me to the movies,” Bobby recalled, “like King Kong and other black-and-white films at the arthouses on 42nd Street.” He took him as well to sit in occasionally on his teaching sessions, letting the youngster experiment alongside paying students. “He had a good sense of color,” the elder De Niro fondly remembered. But the relationship between father and son was intermittent—“I would see him every few weeks,” the son recalled—and it didn’t extend very deeply into the making of real art: “He even tried to paint me many times when I was younger, but I wouldn’t sit still.”
The preponderance of the responsibility—emotional, financial, practical—for raising the boy fell on Virginia Admiral, who found herself a single mother thousands of miles from her family and living in a neighborhood filled with countercultural types for whom the postwar baby boom and rise of suburbia were things to be read about in magazines and mocked in taverns and cafés. Almost inevitably, she withdrew from her very promising painting career to focus on the realities of motherhood.
At first, like her estranged husband, she tried to earn money on the fringes of the art world—framing pictures, doing decorative work such as jewelry making, and so on. Before very long, she turned her full energies to a pair of fields in which she had enjoyed some commercial success in the past: writing and, even more lucrative, typing. As she had for Anaïs Nin, Admiral wrote sensational prose for a steady per-page rate, always under pseudonyms, for a variety of pulpish true-crime magazines—tales of sex, violence, aberrant psychology, and karmic doom. More reliably, she began soliciting work as a typist for manuscripts, a common service in an era before there was a computer in every writer’s home. She had clients among her various literary acquaintances, and she expanded to include students at nearby New York University and the New School. It was a business she would run for decades, eventually expanding to include a small pool of typists (including her son) and her own printing machinery.
Always an extremely private person, particularly as her son gained fame—“I want to keep my life my life,” she once told a reporter—she perhaps offered insight into herself and her values when she was asked about her son’s secret for success and answered bluntly: “Will. Force of will.” The steadying of her income stream allowed Admiral to seek out a more suitable home in which to raise her son. After leaving the twin studios on Bleecker Street (which were soon incorporated into the expanding Little Red School House, the first institution in New York City to fully embrace John Dew
ey’s progressive pedagogical theories), Admiral found a place on Hudson Street and then, finally, a large two-bedroom apartment at 219 West 14th Street, a central location between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, just a few blocks from her first Manhattan loft. She grew her business over the years in that space (eventually it became so big that she moved it around the corner) and raised her son there; he was so attached to it, in fact, that he would eventually live there on his own and hold on to the place after moving out, using it for storage or giving friends a place to crash when they were between situations.
With a working mother and a father who was, for the purposes of day-to-day life, largely absent, the young De Niro was put in school as soon as possible, first at a nursery school at Greenwich House, then in the Little Red School House itself (housed in the very building in which, quite possibly, he had been conceived), then finally into the public school system, starting with P.S. 41 on West 11th Street.
School wasn’t the only social outlet the young boy had, but it was the most significant. Given the offbeat nature of his household and his parents’ immersion in work that demanded long hours in exchange for relatively little pay, he was left largely to his own devices. “He was never coddled,” a family friend remembered years later, while another acquaintance recalled, “Bobby was out in the street a lot as a child. He wasn’t being rebellious—that’s just the way the cookie crumbled.” During his elementary and middle school years, his mother tried a variety of ways to socialize him: he was sent to Syracuse to visit Henry and Helen De Niro during the summers, and he was once even shipped off to Boy Scout camp (“Don’t picture me,” he cautioned a journalist who was trying to imagine him in that environment. “I wasn’t in it too long”). He was an avid reader, which only added to the air of isolation surrounding him, the only child of divorced parents living in bohemian lower Manhattan in the middle of the baby boom.
And then his mom found something that captured his imagination. Among Admiral’s New School clients was Maria Ley-Piscator, yet another artist who had escaped Europe before the war and become an influential teacher in America. She was a Viennese dancer who in 1937 married the German theater director Erwin Piscator (Bertolt Brecht was a groomsman) and fled the Nazis two years later. In 1940, the Piscators were invited to establish a theatrical program at the New School, and they ran it together until Erwin was once again exiled by politics, having to return to Europe as a result of the McCarthyist crackdown on leftists. Maria kept the school afloat, and by 1953, when Admiral was doing typing and proofreading work for her, their Dramatic Workshop counted among its alumni Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Rod Steiger, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur, Elaine Stritch, and even Tennessee Williams, among many, many others.
Years later, the grown-up De Niro would remember that it was his idea to attend acting classes: his mother, he said, “knew that I wanted to go to acting school, so in exchange for [her] work, I began going on Saturdays. It was the biggest acting school in the city at that time.” In fact, Admiral did work out a deal, trading tuition for typing and printing, and so in his tenth year, the young Robert De Niro was first exposed to the study of acting and took the stage in his very first role: the Cowardly Lion in a production of The Wizard of Oz.
“I was very nervous,” De Niro remembered of that debut years later. “It was very exciting. I was a kid.” But at that tender age, the urge to perform didn’t stick. In the coming years, in fact, young De Niro was attracted less by life on the stage than by life on the streets. He wasn’t a juvenile delinquent, exactly, but he had his moments. Some of it was just the usual reckless boyhood thrills: “We used to roller-skate,” he remembered. “Not like these souped-up Rollerblades they have today. Roller skates with ball bearings. We’d hang on to the back of a truck and go for a ride for a couple of blocks until the streetlight turned red and the truck stopped. Then one day they changed the lights to a stagger system. Only we didn’t know. All the lights changed up an avenue at intervals so you could go twenty or thirty blocks without stopping. Suddenly, I’m stuck on the back of one of these trucks, and after four blocks I’m realizing that the next light isn’t going to turn red. The driver doesn’t know you’re on the back. You have no choice but to keep hanging on till he stops.”
There were other, less dangerous kicks, like comic books and illicit cigarettes. And very rarely there were the sorts of things that could genuinely get you in hot water with the law, such as the time he was pinched for scrawling graffiti on a subway car at age fifteen. He would claim later on that he was only experimenting: “It wasn’t anything serious with me. If I had continued in a certain way, it might have been, but that’s not what I intended to do with my life.”
Still, there was a certain comfort to be taken, surely, in belonging to some kind of group. With the benefit of his Italian surname, De Niro was able to blend in with a group of schoolmates from Little Italy—Kenmare Street, specifically—who promptly dubbed him “Bobby Milk” because of his pale complexion. He affected the clothing and behavior that his new pals favored, even starting to attend church with them, despite his parents’ admonitions. These kids weren’t actual criminals, but they liked to present themselves as such, and De Niro grew so familiar with their ways that a friend of Admiral’s asked him to pose as a street thug for a Glamour magazine photo spread about wild youth; chubby, disheveled, and self-conscious, he wore jeans and a leather jacket and looked for all the world like a tiny Marlon Brando manqué.
One day, hanging around with his throng of wannabe tough guys in Washington Square Park, De Niro was surprised by the sudden appearance of his father, who assessed his son’s peers and then declared out loud, “Get away from these hoods”—a cringe-inducing encounter in innumerable ways, not least of which was fear, as some of his pals were genuinely hard cases. (At the dawn of his fame, De Niro was extremely reticent about the company he kept as a young teen: “You better not say anything about that because those guys are still around and I wouldn’t want to embarrass them,” he told the New York Times; years later, he elaborated, “Some of them are no longer around. Some of them were killed. Some of them went into legitimate stuff: policeman, fireman. Just living their lives, y’know?”)
To that point, father and son had enjoyed a comfortable if slightly remote relationship. “I would see him every few weeks,” De Niro remembered, “or sometimes I’d run into him in the street and we’d talk. We had a connection, but it was not one of going out and playing baseball together.” (As he put it another time, “We had what I suppose people would call an understanding; we were close in some ways but not in others.”) But with typical teenage discomfort at the very existence of his parents, De Niro felt a kind of shame at the image his father cut with his wild hair, shabby artist’s wardrobe, and erratic schedule: “Most people I knew didn’t have ‘creative’ parents who lived in kind of grungy places and did odd jobs when they had to.”
Life with Mom wasn’t necessarily easier. In addition to running a makeshift business out of their home, Admiral continued to engage in artistic and, increasingly, political activities, and she had a private life of her own, dating and even living with men over the years during which she was raising her son. “Among the many who courted her favors,” remembered Larry Rivers, “were [artist and critic] Manny Farber and [critic] Clement Greenberg, causing the first of many one-rounders between these two.” Farber and Admiral had a relationship of several years’ duration, not long after which Farber started writing about movies for ARTnews and eventually emerged as one of the most influential film critics in the latter half of the century.* As uncomfortable as he may have been with his father’s unorthodox behavior, De Niro was rendered truly squeamish by his mother’s grown-up life, even if it was comparatively ordinary. Years later, as a famous actor, he was approached by Farber at a Hollywood gathering; the writer said hello and then asked, “Do you remember me? I used to go out with your mother. You have unbelievable eyes. Just like your father. You’re much more like your father than your
mother.” De Niro, visibly appalled, said nothing and soon fled the party.
Not surprisingly, the lack of an intact home and the lure of the streets took a toll on De Niro’s academic performance. He had struggled through elementary school, so Admiral sent him to Elisabeth Irwin High School, an adjunct of the Little Red School House that included an intermediate school. As it was a private school and the young De Niro wasn’t particularly keen on succeeding in it, his mother decided to forgo paying tuition and enrolled him at New York’s famed (and public) High School of Music and Art, up in Harlem (where among his fellow students at the time would have been such diverse talents as Steven Bochco, Lola Falana, Billy Cobham, Carole Bayer Sager, Erica Jong, and the upperclassman Al Pacino). When that didn’t work out, it was back to private education at the Rhodes School (where James Caan was then enrolled). “I had a bad high school scene,” De Niro admitted later, particularly regretting his failure to hang on at Music and Art: “It was a good school. I should have stayed there.” His mother, though, knew exactly what the problem was: “His idea of high school was just not to show up,” she declared flatly.
