De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  He was still looking for his next gig when Bloody Mama opened in March to a surprisingly serious reception. Normally a picture from AIP wouldn’t get much attention, but the strange critical history of Bonnie and Clyde seemed to hover over the film. Bonnie had been panned in the New York Times and Newsweek, though Newsweek published a reevaluatory mea culpa by its lead movie critic, Joe Morgenstern, a mere week after he had slammed the film, and not long afterward the Times removed its lead movie critic, Bosley Crowther, from his beat. Then, just months before Bloody Mama’s release, Easy Rider took the Cannes Film Festival, Hollywood, and the rest of the world by storm. The film press knew there was something happening, something to do with youth and violence and drugs and cheap moviemaking and young stars, and—whether through chariness about their own positions or genuine enthusiasm for the work—they were increasingly willing to give a movie such as Bloody Mama a serious look.

  In fact, they were kind to it. Howard Thompson of the New York Times specifically noted that he preferred it to Bonnie and Clyde, calling it “more honest and less pretentious” and deeming Winters “plain wonderful.” (De Niro was cited among a number of cast members as “fine.”) A few weeks later, in the same paper, Peter Schjeldahl compared Bloody Mama favorably to Corman’s horror films, suggesting that Winters was in the role usually played by Vincent Price and her sons took the place of the monsters; he particularly praised the performances, naming Winters and De Niro among a few others and declaring that “Academy Awards have been given for far lesser efforts.” But he argued, against the film’s admirers, that its bloodshed was prurient rather than cathartic: “What’s so honest about a violent film that doesn’t leave one feeling uneasy?” he asked, echoing the sentiments of the censors who would briefly ban the film from release in France the following year.

  De Niro, whose role was billed in the publicity materials as “the way-out pothead of Ma Barker’s belligerent brood,” was singled out for attention in Film Quarterly, where Joseph McBride referred to him as “the most interesting character” in the film, “compulsively pulling on Baby Ruth bars and emitting defenselessness.” And the Hollywood Reporter declared him “rather good, given the limited dimensions of his junkie role.” Not every critic went for the film—Life and especially the Los Angeles Times were hard on it—but De Niro was commended in every review that mentioned him.

  The film is deeply lurid, with more occasions of incest, gang rape, sadism, jailhouse sex, and other outré behaviors than there are of bank robbery. Amid it all, De Niro truly stands out as Lloyd. At first he’s just another of the unformed mob of brothers, talking in a childlike drawl and exciting himself to the point of glee over gunplay, fast driving, and his mother’s brazenness. But before long he reveals himself as a glue-sniffer, twitching and singing hymns in a zonked-out stupor, and he finally becomes a flat-out junkie, shooting up in secret and bumping his way through the gang’s hideout as though he can’t see where he’s going.

  His most startling episode comes about midway through the film, when he meets a girl named Rembrandt (Pamela Dunlap) who swims up to him and shows herself off flirtatiously. At first Lloyd seems like a moron, his feet dangling in the water while still in socks and shoes. But soon he starts revealing things—“I take lots of dope.… Everything frightens me”—and forces himself upon her, explaining, “Sometimes I can make it, sometimes I can’t.” Her cries of protest draw the attention of Lloyd’s brothers, and she winds up tied to a bed, gang-raped, killed, and dropped in the lake, Lloyd showing no more concern than if he’d been deprived of one of his Baby Ruth bars.

  Lloyd’s narcoleptic gaze, his skittishness, his seeming lack of a sense of self-preservation, his habit of falling into distracted singsong, and such deft little touches of character as wearing a fedora with the brim turned up (he’d do the same a few years later in Mean Streets, of course) and hiding his face behind a fan with a picture of Jesus on it when he thinks the kidnap victim can see him: it all makes for the first full-blooded and fully memorable role of De Niro’s screen career. He may not have received top billing, but he was the most haunting thing in a surprisingly haunting bit of grindhouse.

  WHILE Bloody Mama was still making its way incrementally around the country, the Brian De Palma movie that he’d filmed the previous year had made its debut. Hi, Mom!, as it was finally called, caused an even greater splash than Greetings, with which, not by accident, it shared the fate of having been slapped with an X rating by the MPAA—and then recut to get an R.

  In many ways, it’s a reprise of Greetings: episodic, concerned with sex and voyeurism and Vietnam, peppered with glimpses of unrehearsed New York street life, spiced with gratuitous nudity (male and female this time), alternately daring and jejune. Several bits of it are near remakes of sequences from the earlier film: an encounter with a pornographer (Alan Garfield once again, and once again memorable), a sequence near the Staten Island ferry (making, oddly, for a ferry scene in each De Palma/De Niro film), a (feigned) computer dating snafu, a travelogue of the sorts of places a squarish young New Yorker of the moment might frequent. (In one scene, De Niro is shown a porn film that actually consists of footage right out of Greetings.)

  But there is an evolution, too. For one thing, the Jon Rubin of the earlier film has changed—and we are given to believe that the transformation has to do with his time in Vietnam, which was presented so crudely in Greetings that it almost seemed unreal. This fellow, who stares into the lens in freeze-frame during the title sequence, is clean-shaven and free of eyeglasses; De Niro’s face has acquired a physical sharpness and confident openness that bespeak maturity. And he’s more direct in his actions, agreeing in an early scene to rent a horrifyingly uninhabitable apartment at an exorbitant price (his old stage colleague Charles Durning is the slovenly landlord) simply because it affords him an optimal platform from which to make his “peep art” porn films.

  Much of this opening portion of Hi, Mom! is given over to Rubin’s seduction of a girl (Jennifer Salt) with whom he plans to film himself having sex, and De Niro once again dons meek peepers and adopts a slightly affected, class- and geography-neutral style of diction to play a likely beau for the lonely lass. There’s a droll tenor to all of this, with De Niro playing at playing the nerd, the cuckold, and the neurotic, subtly gauging the girl’s responses.

  And then the movie changes rapidly. Rubin watches a TV segment about a new experimental play, Be Black, Baby, and auditions to perform in it, frightening the other actors with his full-blooded embodiment of a sadistic cop, barking epithets and wielding his baton with frightening vigor. Presently he abandons the theater of revolution for life as an urban guerilla, marrying the girl he had previously seduced, pretending to work at an insurance company, and all the while harboring plans to bring down an apartment tower (one he’d once spied upon) with a load of dynamite set off in the basement laundry room.

  The sheer cheek and energy of the thing sold it. Two New York Times writers praised the film (though not, oddly, its star). Elsewhere, though, critics were particularly taken with De Niro’s work: the Los Angeles Herald Examiner praised De Niro and Jennifer Salt as “splendid natural actors,” the Los Angeles Times’s Kevin Thomas singled De Niro out as “a handsome, likeable and very gifted improviser,” Variety noted that “De Niro’s character is really a series of separate acts, and he is very capable at each of them,” and the Hollywood Reporter, referring to him as “Nero,” compared him, in a way meant as praise, to Alan Alda. Only Stanley Kauffmann (who hadn’t cared for him a few years earlier in The World of Günter Grass) demurred, saying in the New Republic that De Niro “was very good as part of a troika in the first picture but lacks the range and appeal to sustain a film more or less by himself.”

  He was, in fact, terrific. Bloody Mama showcased him in a single, deep characterization that brought out some of his chameleonic ability to adopt the affect of someone utterly unlike himself. But in Hi, Mom! he was virtuosic, playing at a series of variations on Jon Rubin: t
he calculating voyeur, the (mock) button-down insurance man, the (mock) menacing cop, the (mock) southern war veteran. It’s a complete acting resume, as varied and committed as those composite head shots he used to carry around, with a buffet of character types on display. Traces of some of these characters would surface in many of his later roles: the doofusness, the ironic propriety, the temper. But those traits are fully available to him here.

  WITH Bloody Mama and Hi, Mom! in theaters at the exact same time, De Niro appeared onstage in New York in a project that, though small, was a plum. After the assassinations of 1968, Shelley Winters had written a series of three one-act plays about societal unease in wartime, each featuring two actors, a man and a woman, with one playlet set during World War II, one during the Korean War, and one in the here and now of the Vietnam War. She presented it in a ten-performance benefit for the Actors Studio in April under the title “The Noisy Passenger.” In that production, De Niro performed the final act, set in Laurel Canyon in the pre-Manson-family innocence of April 1969, about an actress (Diane Ladd) who has just won an Oscar and is rewarding herself with a druggy, sexy night with a cynically hippieish younger actor (rumormongers held that the situation closely echoed a relationship between Winters and her Wild in the Streets co-star Christopher Jones).

  Winters spent the summer rewriting the script and presented it anew in the fall at off-off-Broadway’s famed Actors Playhouse, with her entire original cast set to reprise their roles. This time the play, retitled One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger, wasn’t a benefit performance but a bona fide show, which would have to succeed at the box office as well as with critics. But on November 16, the very night the show was to open, off-Broadway actors and stage managers went on strike against the League of Off-Broadway Theaters and Producers. “As an actress,” Winters told the New York Times, “I feel that certainly working conditions and salaries off Broadway should be improved. As a playwright, I feel helpless. I’m sort of in shock.”

  The opening was pushed back into late December, and half the cast had to drop out because of scheduling conflicts. Indeed, Winters herself wasn’t in town for the opening: “How can a baby be born without its mother?” she wailed in the Times. It may not have mattered, though. The play was neither widely seen nor favorably reviewed. Most of the notices blamed the writing for the failings (Richard Watts Jr. of the New York Post called her a “simply dreadful dramatist”), although Clive Barnes of the New York Times gave the script a pass as “mildly convincing in a hysteric fashion.”

  De Niro, though, caused a small sensation. Wearing only boxer shorts and a kimono, with his hair long and shaggy, and revealing a (real) tattoo on his right bicep—a panther or puma in an angry crouch—he was, as Winters put it, “like watching sexual lightning on stage.” She marveled that “every night was a different performance,” which meant that Ladd had to be alert for such stunts as De Niro deciding one night, without warning, to light some candles on the set, inadvertently catching his leading lady’s sleeve on fire. The Village Voice hailed his “stunning performance,” and Newsweek called him “brilliant.” The show, however, never ignited, and it ran a mere seven performances before closing.

  For Winters, the experience was traumatic. “I’ve been clobbered and I’m in a daze,” was her initial response. Years later, she remembered it only slightly more fondly: “Bobby was acclaimed in every magazine and review,” she said. “The play did pretty well, too. But it was undercapitalized, and it didn’t have time to find its audience. I was so bitter … that I have not written another play, even though the theater critics gave me great encouragement.”

  “Undercapitalized” is a nice way to put it; Winters herself invested $2,250 in the play and was supported by a pack of angels that included her attorney Jay Julien. De Niro may have been acclaimed, but he earned a mere $100—a week’s wages for the sole week of the production. In fact, despite everything he was doing, money was still tight for him. In September he did a stint on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow, playing a junkie being grilled by a commission investigating police corruption; it was but a day’s work, yet he took it seriously enough to ask the director to change his character from a Korean War veteran to a Vietnam veteran and to make a note on his script reminding himself to play the scene as if the whole thing was a gas: “You’re talking to the commission and really getting your rocks off.” And in December, just before the brief run of Noisy Passenger, he did another day’s work providing the voice-over for a radio ad for Vitalis Dry Control hair treatment (“The supernatural … for natural hair!”), earning a cool $102.

  It was a measure of his combination of ambition, workaholism, and genuine need that he took jobs in a soap opera and on a radio commercial. Again, following the example of his father, he kept himself afloat financially, banging at the business doggedly, seeking edges and advantages over other actors. He took to writing scripts for himself, hoping to turn his ideas and his ever-growing store of experience into a vehicle that would well and truly launch his career as a going enterprise. But he was still reliant on the world of young independent filmmakers for work. And, fortunately, Richard Bauman was able to drum it up for him.

  THROUGH 1970 AND 1971, De Niro worked on three films, each slightly larger in budget, each bringing him a step or two closer to the imprimatur of a proper movie studio, each capable of getting him seen by a larger audience both within the business and out in the moviegoing world. After nearly a decade of banging on the door, he was finally edging it open.

  He was far from having established himself, though; he was still very near the bottom of a very tall ladder. Many icons of old Hollywood—including Marlon Brando, William Holden, and John Wayne, for Pete’s sake—were still defining the business, while reigning superstars such as Paul Newman, Jack Lemmon, Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood, and Steve McQueen showed no signs of losing their appeal to audiences. A new generation was emerging: Robert Redford was already a star, Ryan O’Neal was almost there, and Elliott Gould seemed to have hit the zeitgeist just so. Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight had turned serious acting study into movie careers that were blossoming after the stunning success of Midnight Cowboy; further ahead, Jack Nicholson had become an overnight star in Easy Rider a full decade after first breaking into the business. Other actors such as Gene Hackman, James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Donald Sutherland were turning long tenures as young journeymen into something like bona fide star careers. Even Al Pacino—who, with Hoffman, seemed the nearest thing to De Niro—was getting serious about film work.

  De Niro, though quiet about it, had a competitive streak that impelled him to try to keep up. And so, between the Vitalis ads and the off-off-Broadway shows, Richard Bauman kept him busy on film sets. The parts weren’t big, but the payoffs in exposure and subsequent new opportunities were real and rich. He appeared in a couple of movies that dealt with the hot-topic issue of drug abuse: Jennifer on My Mind, based on the novel Heir by Roger L. Simon, and Born to Win, screenwriter David Milton Scott’s adaptation of his own off-Broadway one-act play, Scraping Bottom. The films were low-budget efforts, but they were within the studio system, sort of: United Artists, which backed them both, didn’t have a physical plant in Los Angeles like other big-name distributors, but rather had a business plan based on collaborating with producers on independently made films. They had some huge hits (in the 1960s alone, they’d released the Oscar-winners The Apartment, West Side Story, Tom Jones, and In the Heat of the Night), but as they didn’t have to maintain an actual production studio, they were flexible enough to finance and release smaller films and give new talent a try.

  Such was the case with both of these films. Jennifer was directed by Noel Black, who’d had a small, cultish success a few years earlier with the thriller Pretty Poison; its screenwriter, Erich Segal, was just breaking huge with his hit novel and film Love Story, which hit theaters while Jennifer was still being made. Born to Win director Ivan Passer was the latest of a group of young East European directors (including Roman Pola
nski and Milos Forman) who were making headway in American movies. Jennifer starred the relatively unknown Michael Brandon and Tippy Walker as young lovers whose lives are controlled by their drug use; Born may have had an unproven writer and director, but it centered on the stalwart George Segal, already something of an au courant, if offbeat, screen star, as a hepcat turned junkie whose habit had forced him into a life of street crime.

  Whatever promise the films had, they offered only limited opportunities for De Niro, whose roles were peripheral. In Jennifer he played, of all things, a cab driver, blasting around New York on a cocktail of drugs and rock music; in Born, he had a slightly larger role as a cop who gets pleasure from roughing up Segal’s character. Living up to his reputation as a serious and hardworking actor, he put as much as he could into his roles, giving Jennifer a terrific jolt of comic energy in his brief appearance and delving deeply into the business of playing a cop in Born, annotating his script with notes about how to frisk suspects and how to bear himself with a properly steely mien: “Attitude: always cocky … act as if voice made of steel … I never trust anyone … doesn’t matter how I look but that I am a cop.”

  But, serious and hardworking as he was, he was also a creature of the insular world of New York theater and movie actors, and he had to have noticed that Al Pacino, like him a recent alumnus of the Theatre Company of Boston, was also making a drug film—Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park—and he had to have noticed that Pacino was the lead. Yes, De Niro’s career was starting to blossom, but he was getting second-shelf stuff compared to his peers.

  THAT STATUS MUST have been abundantly clear to him when his next film opportunity arose. Along with half of Hollywood and every wannabe actor with an Italian American surname, he auditioned for a role—a number of roles, actually—in Paramount Pictures’ upcoming adaptation of Mario Puzo’s smash-hit novel, The Godfather. The studio had considered a number of accomplished directors for the job of helping Puzo get his epic novel to fit into the small vessel of a movie, including Hollywood veterans Richard Brooks, Fred Zinnemann, and Otto Preminger and foreign talents Sergio Leone and Costa-Gavras. They all turned the job down. And then production executives met with a thirty-year-old director who had made some nudie movies, a few indie films (including a horror picture, Dementia 13, for Roger Corman), and a flop Hollywood musical (Finian’s Rainbow). He’d moved from LA to San Francisco and set up his own studio there, which made him an extreme long shot for the gig, but he’d also written the script for Patton, which had premiered in April 1970 and was doing fabulous box office (on its way to winning a haul of Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay). It was a gamble to give this kid such a hot property, but Robert Evans, the head of production at the studio, was a gambler, and he liked the fact that the guy was an Italian American. And so in September 1970 he hired Francis Ford Coppola to co-write and direct The Godfather.