by Shawn Levy
Given his tendency to watch and emulate, one of the strangest things about De Niro is how little he seemed to partake of the counterculture that was so vital in his community during his early twenties. He had grown up in one of the most bohemian and cosmopolitan neighborhoods on earth, with parents who were artists, and with aspirations toward a career of his own in the arts. He was twenty when the Beatles arrived, and he turned twenty-four during the Summer of Love; he managed to avoid military service in the Vietnam era, but he never really, by his own confession, seemed to have a hippie or even countercultural moment. Not once, he would tell Playboy, did he take LSD, nor was he an active antiwar protester. If anything, his bearing in his first films would reveal a kind of old-fashioned straightness and normalcy: he wanted to be thought of, at some level, as an ordinary fellow—or at least that was one of the guises he wore most comfortably. (The mini-Mafioso act he could easily slip into was also tinged with manners and echoes of a cultural past.)
Reflecting on his early acting days in the heart of the 1960s, he confessed that there had been a gap between him and the momentous goings-on of the time. “It was an exciting time to grow up,” he admitted. “Kind of bohemian. Things were happening. There were big changes. I wasn’t really a part of it, though. I was more on the outside. But by virtue of being an actor I was a good observer of it.”
Silence, stillness, observation, imitation, performance: the keys to his art were already inside him, had been since childhood, and Adler’s methodology, with its emphasis on imagination, choices, and the text helped him unlock it and put it powerfully to use.
More specifically, especially given the nature of his work in the decades after he studied with Adler, De Niro explained that he learned how to do the most chaotic form of acting—that is, improvisation—by employing the hard, detail-oriented techniques on which Adler focused:
I think disciplined studying is good because you learn how to be aware of what improvising is. That you’re somewhere, you have to head someplace. And I think I got that from acting school because of what they tell you about action and tension and what’s the meaning and reason for a scene, also character things, and not drawing on your personal experience directly but more on creating that situation that the play calls for and then, in turn, personalizing it, and, in turn, making it work for you.
If De Niro shone in Adler’s class, he didn’t exactly blind people. Thurman Scott, among those who would eventually inherit Adler’s mantle as a New York teacher-actor-director, recalled, “I was the star at Stella’s; Bobby was about eighth in the class.” (Scott noted as well, without knowing many details of his classmate’s upbringing, his suspicion that “Bobby had abandonment issues. I know the pain of being connected on a journey with someone and then have them say, ‘You can’t come.’ ”)
There were aspects of studying with Adler that weren’t appealing to De Niro. “How she behaved, her affectation, that whole side of her, I never cared for personally,” he admitted. “But she made a lot of sense as a teacher. She had a very healthy approach toward acting and technique.” He was aware that there were other ideas about acting, such as those Lee Strasberg was promulgating at the Actors Studio. But he knew that Adler was a great resource—and, as he remembered, “she had a great actor, Brando, with her.” He would always credit her with his foundations as an actor, and he would talk far more willingly about her influence on his thinking and practice than he would about almost anything else in his professional history.
IN MANY WAYS, he was just where he should have been. Still not twenty, with little to no performing experience since before he was a teen, he was far better-off in the classroom setting of Adler’s Conservatory than at the Actors Studio, which focused on praxis and critique of a sort more suited to working actors. Besides, he wasn’t yet convinced that he wanted to be a working actor. He briefly enrolled in the Delehanty Institute, a technical school that specialized in preparing students for civil service careers, with an eye toward possibly attending the Police Academy. And he still wanted to satisfy the urge to see the world that had been sparked by the visit to his father a few years earlier. That most of all was what prevented him from immersing himself fully in the business of acting.
“I was afraid that I could get wrapped up in it so much that I wouldn’t have time to do what I wanted, like travel,” he later confessed. He had put together enough money to return to Europe for an extended hitchhiking jaunt, months longer than the previous had lasted. He “hitched all over Europe,” as he recalled—Scotland, Yugoslavia, Greece—and spent several weeks living in Paris. “I lived in hotels near the Odéon on the Left Bank,” he said. “I finally found a hotel in Montmartre. I went to Alliance Française, met a lot of expatriates. The French are hard to meet.”
A principal attraction of France was, of course, visiting his father, who had left Paris and had taken to living in a string of what he referred to as “places I could afford”: farmhouses, barns, cottages, and airy flats in such pastoral settings as Baren (in the Midi-Pyrénées), Gravigny (in Upper Normandy), and, finally, Saint-Just-en-Chevalet (in the Rhône-Alpes), where Bobby caught up with him: “I hitchhiked to where he was living in Central France in the Loire Valley, and I stayed with him for a week.”
At first the elder De Niro’s accounts of life in the countryside had been positive. In a 1962 letter to his friend Dick Brewer he said: “I never expected such beauty when I came here. It’s dazzling.” By the time Bobby reached him, though, there was a different tenor to the man, and the son was troubled by what he found. His father hadn’t fared well in isolation. There was some suggestion of a genuine mental crisis: a scholar of his work would claim that “his ‘erratic’ behavior, culminating in a nervous breakdown in Paris, was diagnosed as bipolar disorder, and he was one of the first people treated with lithium.” Decades later, the son disputed that diagnosis: “He didn’t have a breakdown, but something happened to him there in France.”
He tried to help his father by encouraging him in his work. “I felt that he had lost some of his career momentum,” he recalled. “At one point I was on the Left Bank and took his paintings with me to show to gallery owners to push for him and try to get his work seen. But nothing came of it.” De Niro’s name was unknown in Europe, and he had no champions in the French art press. He knew all that, but his son did not. “Bobby was very impressed with France,” the painter recalled years later in New York, “and urged me to take my paintings to the Parisian galleries. But the market was here.”
Initially the younger De Niro continued hitchhiking around the Continent. But he was disturbed by what he’d seen in his dad—perhaps especially by the widening gap between his mother’s relatively stable life and the professionally and emotionally troubled penury of his father. He returned to France and took a firmer tone with his father: life abroad wasn’t working out for him, and he needed to be in familiar surroundings and near people who could help support him, financially and otherwise. They struggled with each other, the son urging the father to return home, to no avail. (Recollecting the experience at separate times, both men would refer to it as a “nightmare.”) He came back alone to his studies with Stella Adler, to his slow acclimation to the acting profession.
PRACTICAL SON OF practical folks, De Niro determined that if he was going to pursue acting, he was going to make money at it, and he set about becoming a professional in the disciplined way in which he’d seen his parents go about their work. He kept a keen eye on the bulletin boards at the Adler school, where small productions posted advertisements for auditions and other casting opportunities; he became a habitual reader of theatrical trade magazines—Drama-Logue, Backstage, Show Business, and such. More and more he seemed to have turned a corner and committed himself to a path.
Through a friend of a friend he learned about a role that had become available in a play being put on at Hunter College, a German Expressionist drama by Rolf Lauckner entitled Cry in the Street that involved three blind men accosting a woman
on a New Year’s Eve. An actor playing one of the blind men had dropped out—unlike the play, his gig driving a taxi paid actual money, and he couldn’t afford to give it up—and De Niro presented himself to the show’s director, Roberta Sklar, as a replacement.
Sklar was then a graduate student in theater at Hunter, and she had the good fortune to be able to draw on the pool of young New York actors in her casting. Her other key actors were Sylvester Ciraulo, who would have a long career as a soap opera actor under the name Michael Durrell, and a collegiate actor and aspiring novelist from North Dakota named Larry Woiwode. “Larry was serious about acting,” remembered Sklar, “but De Niro was serious.” All three actors, she said, treated the production with respect, doing research and thinking along with her about how to play a pack of three. “They spent time watching monkeys at the Central Park Zoo,” she recalled, “and came back with bodily expressions they got from the animals.” But De Niro, she said, went even further. “I knew he was sitting somewhere watching some old guys,” she said. “He didn’t mention it, but you knew from watching him that what he was doing had come from real observation of real life.” (De Niro did mention to Woiwode that he’d spent some time watching blind men get around New York.)
De Niro’s reticence about discussing his technique was, Sklar remembered, exactly who he was. “He was very polite,” she said.
It almost felt old-fashioned, without feeling silly or false or posed. He was serious about doing things studiously. He was extremely genuine. I don’t know what his goals were at the time, but what came through was his focus on the work he was doing. No distractions, no hurry. Very respectful even though it was just a college production. His goal didn’t seem to be “I’m gonna be a star,” but “I’m gonna be an actor and do this work.” At the time, you had a lot of young Method actors in New York who put on a show, all the time, of their intention to act. But he wasn’t a caricature of an actor. He was very real and very sincere.
Woiwode, too, found in the young De Niro a stage presence of evident power but one that could be dangerously raw as well. He wrote later, “He seems oblivious to an unwritten rule of the stage, which is never, no, never manhandle a fellow actor, especially his or her body, but do only what you must for things to look good out front.… Bob grabs hold so hard in our blind grapples he is, according to Syl, out of control, wholly internal, with no sense of ensemble work.… He seems eager to please but is a lightning rod attracting the emotions of any observers … a presence to work with or to back from, not a performer of mere skills.”
Offstage, De Niro would present another aspect entirely, and it drew Woiwode in. De Niro liked to mention, casually but seeking to create an effect, that he was studying with Stella Adler, and he was especially proud of his father’s name and work. He carried around novels in a battered leather briefcase he’d picked up overseas—he was taking a speed-reading class (“the same one JFK took”)—and he was keen to seek out new books. Woiwode was halfheartedly committed to pursuing acting; he was far more serious about writing fiction and had the legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell as a mentor. But he was sufficiently engaged by De Niro’s personality and energy to stay connected to him, at least for a time.
“He’s out to please, with an easy, unselfconscious smile,” he later wrote of his new friend, “which can shift into one of such abandon it draws his hairline back—the grin of a young man secure in his new maturity.… Caught off guard, he looks entirely like himself yet different each time.… It’s difficult talking to him, because any question moves him to another quadrant of character, if not a new character altogether—the chameleon nature.”
When they met, De Niro was living in a small apartment on Irving Place, a few blocks from his mom’s place, which was still the headquarters of her typing and printing business. Admiral supported her son with gifts of cash—Woiwode saw multiple $20 bills change hands—and seemed unconcerned with his lack of financial independence or his pursuit of an acting career. There was a young lady on the scene, whom De Niro referred to as “my French girlfriend.” And there was an undercurrent of anxiety. Woiwode noted that Bobby would bring up his parents whenever he felt blue and would speak as if he felt personally responsible for their separation and owed it to them to keep them connected.
There were larks as well. De Niro and Woiwode would sit in bars and practice communicating only with facial gestures (“He can focus one eye directly on you,” Woiwode recalled, “while the other goes blank”), or they would lure a friend into a fake séance in one of their apartments, moving the table surreptitiously and startling their unsuspecting chum. When Woiwode and his wife acquired a large car, a Bonneville convertible, De Niro donned some of his costumes and pretended to be their chauffeur, driving them from one of their regular haunts to another and clearing the crowd as if for visiting celebrities. They would go on auditions together, talk about acting and even writing (De Niro hinted that he was trying to compose a novel that would feature a starring role for himself), and drink in their apartments or at Jimmy Ray’s bar, a showbiz haunt on Eighth Avenue in the theater district. They became real pals.
WITH A “diamond in the rough” such as De Niro in her cast, Rebecca Sklar had hopes for Cry in the Street, but she saw something remarkable during the show’s brief run: the young actor who’d been so galvanizing in the rehearsal space shrank away onstage. “He was intensely engaging in rehearsal,” she remembered. “Every word and move. But it didn’t translate to the stage in a larger arena. I knew he was an extraordinary actor, and I expected a spectacular public performance. But it wasn’t anything like the explosive energy of the smaller venue.” Strangely, Sklar wasn’t as disappointed as might be expected. Instead, she had an epiphany about acting. “I didn’t think, ‘Oh my God, he’s letting me down,’ ” she said. “I thought, ‘This guy belongs in movies.’ He was the same, but it didn’t come across on a stage.”*1
De Niro kept pursuing auditions and other opportunities advertised in the showbiz trades. He quickly found something else worth pursuing: a microbudget film being planned by a professor and two graduate students at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, just a few miles north of Manhattan. “I had seen an advertisement in Show Business,” he remembered years later. “I went into De Palma’s studio for the audition and after that he called me.”
But there was more to it than that. The De Palma in question was, of course, Brian De Palma, a twenty-three-year-old doctor’s son and science prodigy from Philadelphia who had graduated from Columbia College in 1962 and enrolled, as one of Sarah Lawrence’s first male students, in the graduate theater program with the intention of becoming a filmmaker. Along with his professor Wilford Leach (who would go on to win Tony Awards for directing The Pirates of Penzance and The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1981 and 1986, respectively) and another theater student, Cynthia Munroe, De Palma shared writing, directing, editing, and producing credits on a film, a comedy set during a wedding weekend. And they had so few resources that they would consider almost anyone for a role.
This audition would be the start of De Niro’s first important working relationship with a director—as well as a memorable moment for those there to witness it. De Palma would tell the story in a number of ways, but they boiled down to the same initial impression that Woiwode had: a quiet kid who could somehow amp himself up into a release of explosive power. “He was very mild, shy, self-effacing,” De Palma said a decade or so later. “He asked if he could do a scene from acting class. He disappeared for fifteen minutes and returned doing a heavy Lee J. Cobb number.” (In another account, De Palma changed actors but created a similar impression: “It was amazing. Suddenly, from this shy 19-year-old kid, came this Broderick Crawford–like character of such power and force it blasted us out of the room.”)
Naturally, De Palma and company wanted a dynamo like this in their movie. But there was the matter of money—or, more precisely, the lack of it. When they called him back and offered De Niro the part, he was so excited
that he misheard what he would be paid. “I thought I was getting $50 a week,” he remembered. “But my mother, who signed the contract because I was underage, told me, ‘You get $50 for the complete movie.’ ” Chicken feed, yes, but, for the first time, he would be paid for acting. He took the job.
Virtually every face on-screen in the film, eventually entitled The Wedding Party, would be a new one, and most of them would only be seen this one time. But there were others beside De Niro with significant futures in acting. William Finley, who would become a staple figure in De Palma films, made his feature debut, and the film also introduced two Sarah Lawrence students: Jill Clayburgh, who had a large role as the bride, and Jennifer Salt, daughter of the famed screenwriter Waldo Salt and a girl who would have been at the High School of Music and Art when De Niro breezed through the place, as a member of the wedding party.
IN ADDITION TO his scanty fee, De Niro took some tutelage from the experience of making the film. He appeared in a workshop production of La Ronde at the college, and the professor overseeing it offered him some advice that he held on to. “There was a teacher who taught at Sarah Lawrence,” he remembered, “and he said, ‘Just go on instinct.’ And it kind of frees you because you get distracted with ‘What’s my character? What’s my motivation?’… You forget in life people don’t behave that way. They just do what they’re doing; there’s no thought behind it.”
He learned as well to keep an eye on shifty independent producers, who were just as likely to seek perks for themselves as the starving actors who nourished themselves at the crafts service table. In the prop list he composed for himself, De Niro noted a few items from his own costume collection that he wanted to use for the production, then added a note of caution: “Have certain things like rifle and fishing that would like to use; what’s this about producer keeping stuff?”
