De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  HE WASN’T A troubled kid, exactly, but he was rudderless, and then an old urge resurfaced. He decided he would like to return to the Dramatic Workshop and resume his exploration of acting and the theater. Relieved to find her son interested in something positive—and, even more than that, something creative—Admiral once again made arrangements for him to attend classes.

  This time he wouldn’t be the Cowardly Lion. As he was attending classes in lieu of regular schooling, he was thrown in with the adults and was expected to study and learn not only the nuts and bolts of the acting profession but the theory behind it. Plus there was an emphasis on self-exploration and self-revelation that wasn’t part of the children’s classes. On the very first day, he encountered, albeit somewhat comically, the sort of thing he’d be facing—and fearing—in the months and years ahead. “I went in,” he remembered, “and the director said to me, ‘Vy do you vant to be an acteh?’ I didn’t know how to answer, so I didn’t say anything. And he said, ‘To express yourself!’ And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it. That’s right.’ ”

  He stayed at the school for a year, more or less. He picked up some very good habits there, such as a taste for reading, particularly books that might have some potential acting roles in them, whether in the form of monologues he might learn or actual parts he dreamed about one day playing. And he began a lifelong habit of acquiring pieces of wardrobe—hats, coats, props—that he would hold on to, in some cases, for decades, turning the 14th Street apartment he shared with his mother into a makeshift theatrical costume house. Having observed his father’s affection for the tools of his trade and his mother’s careful accumulation and operation of typewriters and printing presses in her business, he naturally appreciated the place of such objects as props and pieces of wardrobe in the acting trade.

  But he still wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of being an actor, of getting up in the morning, putting on makeup and a costume, and pretending to be someone else, often someone radically different—emotional, vulnerable, complex. At the Dramatic Workshop, there was an emphasis on performance that left him, one of the youngest members of the class, feeling particularly uneasy: “They had so many students in the class,” he reflected later, “it was hard to get up; you had to try to overcome that.” He was especially intimidated by the public performance aspect of acting. His Bobby Milk days weren’t that far behind him, and the idea that some of the gang he’d briefly run with would perhaps see him onstage was mortifying. “You figured the kids would make fun if they came to a play that you were in,” he confessed years later, “so I would never even think of having them come.”

  In time, his devotion to his classes waned, and he stopped attending the Dramatic Workshop altogether. But then he had an epiphany, or at least a bug landed in his ear, and he began to develop a new attitude toward acting. “When I was around 18,” he remembered, “I was looking at a TV show—a soap opera or some weekly western—and I said if these actors are making a living at it, and they’re not really that good, I can’t do any worse than them. I wasn’t thinking of getting a job on a western or any of that. When I got into it more seriously, I saw how far I could go, what you could do. That it wasn’t what I thought it was when I was younger. But I remember saying that to myself, watching those black-and-white TV shows.”

  Somehow it clicked: acting was work, like painting or typing, and you could do it and make it pay and maybe even learn how to be good at it. The question that remained unanswered in his mind—and maybe even unasked—was how to get there from where he was.

  * * *

  * That Robert De Niro should be raised by a woman who was a kind of inspiration to the young Pauline Kael and have, for a time, Manny Farber as a principal male figure in his household is a truly astounding realization, especially given the significant praise with which each writer would greet the actor’s early work. De Niro may have formed ambivalent relations with film critics later on, but two of the most famous and influential people ever to have that job figured, if only obliquely, in his family history and his youth.

  IN APRIL 1961 SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOBBY DE NIRO MADE HIS way to Manhattan’s Pier 90, at West 50th Street, where the fabled Queen Mary was docked and preparing to sail for Cherbourg and Southampton. In a cabin aboard the ship, friends were throwing a going-away party for his father. Bobby “Verlaine” De Niro, the Fauvist boulevardier from Syracuse, New York, the wunderkind of Provincetown and Black Mountain, was finally going to visit the land of Matisse and Rimbaud, heading to France with only a one-way ticket.

  The mid-to-late 1950s had been relatively prosperous for the painter. His work wasn’t selling for anything like the prices that the more famous Abstract Expressionists commanded—the Pollocks and Rothkos and De Koonings and Klines, who had superseded him commercially but still respected him and regarded him as a peer. But he was making a mark. Throughout the latter part of the decade, De Niro exhibited and sold his work regularly on 57th Street, then the heart of Manhattan’s high-end gallery scene, and his paintings were shown at the Whitney Museum, the Jewish Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. He received a handful of foundation grants and prizes, he regularly enjoyed positive reviews in the serious art press (and occasionally, and somewhat less enthusiastically, in the New York Times), and he had started to draw a following among private collectors, including Joseph Hirschhorn, who would eventually acquire some forty of his pieces. He wasn’t rich, but since he still chose to live like “the poorest of the poor,” as fellow artist Paul Resika put it, he didn’t need much, and he added to his income by teaching, framing pictures, and taking other jobs, sometimes menial ones. What’s more, with his son doing exactly what he himself had done a few decades earlier—namely, dropping out of school to pursue an interest in the arts—he felt comfortable leaving New York and living, as he always wanted to, in the land that had produced his favorite poets and painters.

  Before leaving, he carefully divested himself of the physical aspects of his New York life, entrusting his paintings to Admiral and offering other belongings to friends in the manner of bequests. “He showed up at my Village cold-water flat,” writer Barbara Guest remembered, “with a box containing his volumes of French poetry. He was going to Paris, he said, and asked me to take care of his books.”

  De Niro had maintained a good relationship with his son throughout the boy’s teens. They still went to the movies together, and with Bobby attending acting school, their cinematic diet had acquired a new dimension. They took in Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift and James Dean movies whenever they could—Bobby shared teachers with each of them, after all—and they also liked the new wave of kitchen-sink dramas coming out of England, such as A Taste of Honey and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. (They were partial, too, to the Three Stooges and to silent Laurel and Hardy films.) The son may never have felt entirely connected to his father—“there was a certain wall between me and him that I wish had been broken”—but he knew he would miss him.

  Too, as the younger De Niro still hadn’t yet fully committed himself to his studies, he was frankly jealous of his father’s ability to pick up and leave town. “I loved traveling and wanted to go to Europe,” he remembered. “I tried to get a job in the Merchant Marine. But I had no clout, so I was fourth class. I couldn’t move up the ladder.” He finally saved up money and resorted to more mundane means: “I just wound up taking Icelandic Airlines.” He began in Ireland, with an ultimately fruitless search for his roots. “I hitchhiked from Dublin to Galway,” he remembered later, “and took the ferry out to the Aran Islands, and then I went down through the south. Slept in some fields, and people gave me blankets for sleeping outside—the caretakers of an estate. I had breakfast with them in the morning. They were very friendly.”

  He hitchhiked around a bit—it was the heyday of beatnik-style vagabonding throughout the Old World, which was still cheap and exotic by American standards—and he was keen on it. He made his way to Paris, where he caught up with h
is father, and then, encouraged by the idea that his relations in Campobasso would be easier to find, headed for Italy.

  “I made him a sign in English and Italian: ‘Student wants ride,’ ” his father remembered. “On Capri he met [actress] Michele Morgan and told her I was interested in doing her portrait. Trying to drum up business for me. But I wasn’t interested in doing her portrait or anyone else’s.” In Venice, Bobby had a surprise when he visited Peggy Guggenheim’s art collection at her Palazzo Venier dei Leoni and found a picture by Virginia Admiral hanging in the permanent collection. As his father recalled, “He was particularly proud that his mother made a breakthrough for recognition that eludes so many women in art.” Eventually his money ran out, but not his taste for spur-of-the-moment travel and adventure. Before he settled on a way of life, he would feel the urge of the road again.

  BACK HOME, Bobby locked in on acting in a more profound way than he had before, chiefly by entrusting himself to the famed teacher Stella Adler, who professed her craft at the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting.

  And professing is exactly what Adler did. A grand dame of the theater, she dressed, spoke, and bore herself with a regal air, and her speech, whether recounting performances she’d seen onstage or critiquing student efforts in her classroom, could veer almost violently from poetic exaltation to lacerating dismissal. She insisted that her class greet her each day by calling out “Good morning, Miss Adler” in unison, and in later years she would end class by asking them if they loved her. “When you stand on stage you must have a sense that you are addressing the whole world,” she wrote, “and that what you say is so important that the whole world must listen”—and by all accounts she comported herself as if she were always onstage.

  If that seemed a bit much, Adler could back it up. The daughter of Jacob Adler, a titan of the Yiddish theater, she was one of the pivotal figures in the rise of Method acting as an American style, virtually from the day it began. Along with other fevered young New York theater people, she had been wowed by the Moscow Art Theatre when the company visited New York in the 1920s, and she had fallen under the influence of two of its members: Richard Boleslawski, who stayed on in the States to operate a school and repertory company called the American Laboratory Theatre, and Maria Ouspenskaya, who also stayed, mainly to perform but also to teach. Through them, like so many others in the New York theater, Adler had taken as her master the great actor, theoretician, and impresario Constantin Stanislavski, whose performances, lectures, and writings would become the core of the Method revolution in American acting.

  Library shelves would one day groan with Stanislavski’s works and myriad books about his “system,” which was a rigorous and thorough approach to the problems and craft of acting. He hoped to rationalize the art by prescribing a litany of skills that actors should acquire and goals for which they should strive. Most radically, he proposed that acting was a psychological undertaking, rather than, as previous generations’ performances indicated, a representational one. In opposition to old-style actors who adopted stances, attitudes, and inflections that revealed emotions in a kind of exaggerated dummy show, Stanislavski argued that actors should experience the emotions indicated by the playwright and express those emotions onstage as they would in real life. To enable actors to do this, he spoke of something he called “emotion memory,” a practice of finding a correlation between the character’s situation and the actor’s own inner life and history. Stanislavski wasn’t dogmatic about the practice of mining one’s actual psyche or past—in fact, he feared it might evoke hysteria. And he acknowledged that there were outstanding actors who achieved similar effects without following his ideas. But taken as a whole, his theories amounted to a revolutionary reconsideration of the craft and intent of acting.

  Adler, a voracious creature of the theater, was thoroughly taken with Stanislavski’s system, both its theory and as it was practiced by the Moscow Art Theatre and American Laboratory Theatre. She relocated to Paris for a time in the 1930s, becoming the only American actor ever to study with Stanislavski himself. Upon her return, she was among the ardent modernists who created the Group Theatre, which was dedicated to translating the Russian director’s theories of stagecraft, dramaturgy, and acting, into an American idiom; the remarkable roster of founders included Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford, Sanford Meisner, John Garfield, and Franchot Tone, and above all Harold Clurman, the architect of this acting revolution (and incidentally, Adler’s second husband). In time, the likes of Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, and Lee J. Cobb would become involved in the Group Theatre, helping to form a pantheon of talents whose stage, film, and classroom work would give rise to a half century and more of American masterpieces.

  In the 1940s, Adler taught occasionally at Erwin Piscator and Maria Ley-Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop, but by the end of that decade she had all but retired from acting and opened a school of her own, where she espoused a philosophy of acting that was distinct from the Piscators’ and from that of her Group Theatre colleague and pedagogical rival Lee Strasberg—and maybe even from that of Stanislavski himself.

  For Strasberg, whose Actors Studio became the high temple of the Method, Stanislavski’s “emotion memory” meant that actors must explicitly find a reality within themselves to express the situations presented by the script; focusing on the actual emotions of the men and women who were acting the roles of fictional people, he encouraged the use of what he called “sense memory,” an ability to recall, on command, an emotional sensation in an actor’s own life that corresponded to the one demanded by a scene.

  For Adler, Stanislavski’s words and deeds meant something quite different—and she loved citing the fact that she’d personally studied with the man as proof that she was correct. She understood the principal task of Stanislavskian acting to be an imaginative commingling of the actor with the text and with the human situations contained in it—not a mining of the self to fill the emotions of the scene with traces of one’s own life, but an effort to picture oneself in the shoes of one’s character and then behaving as one’s character would.

  “The play is not in the words,” Adler declared in one of her most famous precepts, “it is in you.” She stressed using the imagination to deepen and expand the meaning of a scene; focusing on action and interaction as a means of communicating; cultivating the actor’s psyche, spirit, and personality beyond mere stagecraft; and, especially, interpreting the script—a sometimes technical means of inhabiting and absorbing the material to be performed. “Your talent is in your choice” was her other most famous dictum (and Robert De Niro’s favorite). She taught actors to use the script and the world around them to create a performance, and not, as she thought Strasberg did, to psychoanalyze themselves and use what they’d found to make the script their own.

  When Method actors Montgomery Clift and, more explosively, Marlon Brando broke into the Hollywood mainstream, Adler was lifted along with them. Brando was her most famous student (he surely relished the in-joke in his famous bellow “Stella!”), and she was immediately recognized as among the most important teachers of the newly dominant American acting style. At the time De Niro entered her class, Adler could count among her past and present students the likes of Warren Beatty, Anthony Quinn, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, and Elaine Stritch. By the dawn of the 1960s, her class was the largest in New York, and students would come from literally all over the world, sometimes to be launched into stardom or at least a career, sometimes to suffer withering dismissal. (A sign posted outside the classroom cautioned, “Stella wants everyone to know that criticism in the theatre is not personal. Nothing in the theatre is personal.”)

  The young De Niro entered this emotional and artistic minefield possessed of a personal bent toward silence, observation, and nose-to-the-grindstone work that happened to mesh with Adler’s ideas. If watching his mother and father at work had taught him anything, it was the value of application, self-scrutiny, doggedness. Art could, at least in part, result from elbow grea
se. He studied the modern classics with Adler: Chekhov, Odets, and of course his dad’s old chum Tennessee Williams. He appreciated the nuts-and-bolts aspect of Adler’s approach: “It was just a way of making people aware of character, style, period, and so on. People could sit down in a classroom as opposed to having to get up and demonstrate it.… In fact, that’s a class I’d want to take again. It taught me that if you have a very balanced script, you can take from the script without putting anything into something that isn’t there. That’s what she would call fictionalizing—which is not real, there’s no substance to it, it’s not concrete.” She made something elusive seem, to his way of thinking, rational.

  The idea that acting was built of observation and imagination must have been particularly resonant for De Niro. After a childhood spent among adults, left alone with his books, permitted to go out by himself to play in the street, the only kid at the table or at the party, he was constantly observing the world. He was an outsider: as an only child, as a student, as a kid from Greenwich Village at a time when being from the Village was truly a remarkable thing. Somewhere along the way, his silence and watchfulness became a form of alchemy. He knew how to look at people and read them, and converting his research, as it were, into art by pretending to climb inside their skins must have seemed a challenge, yes, but also something like a game. “To totally submerge into another character,” he explained, “and experience life through him, without having to risk the real-life consequences—well, it’s a cheap way to do things you would never dare to do yourself.”