De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  The strain of the shoot was evident on the director’s hands: as production wore on, Scorsese took to wearing white cloth gloves to prevent himself from nibbling his fingernails down to bloody stubs. But he managed to get the film wrapped on schedule less than two weeks before Christmas. Editing took up the rest of the winter and much of the spring, after which he started to show a rough cut to such trusted friends as Brian De Palma and John Cassavetes. De Palma didn’t care for the improvised moments, which didn’t sway Scorsese to cut them, but he did make a successful case for the removal of material relating to Charlie’s dabbling in academia by taking a class at NYU: “Literary reference—cut it out!” he shouted at a screening. Cassavetes didn’t care for the bedroom scenes and the brief nudity, but Scorsese was unmoved. A final hurdle was presented by, of all people, John Wayne, who wouldn’t let Scorsese use a clip from his film Donovan’s Reef because Mean Streets would be released with an R rating; Scorsese settled instead for a sequence from The Searchers that didn’t include Wayne.*4 By summer, Jonathan Taplin had had a chance to show the completed film to potential distributors and submit it to film festivals for a fall debut.

  The festivals were first to respond: both the Chicago International Festival (where Who’s That Knocking? had debuted and been celebrated) and the New York Film Festival accepted it. But Taplin and Scorsese were having no luck with distributors, driving around Los Angeles with cans of 35 mm film, screening the movie at several studios and getting nowhere. Taplin, who’d failed to acquire financing from the studios the previous year, knew he had a quality product on his hands, but the lack of name stars, the strange environment of the film, and the shaggy storytelling made executives at the first studios he approached uneasy. Eventually they showed up in Burbank at Warner Bros., which had acquired a reputation as being a youthful, even hippieish studio, where end-of-the-day martinis in the executive suites had been replaced by joints, and such films as Woodstock, Performance, THX 1138, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Superfly, Deliverance, and Billy Jack had found a home. There wasn’t really a tenor of youth culture to Mean Streets—bohemian Greenwich Village and its drug scene are actually anathema to the main characters—but the impact the film had on the executives in the Warner screening room was real, and they bought the rights to it on the spot, perhaps thinking that they had just discovered their own streetwise answer to The Godfather.

  One other person saw Mean Streets before it was entirely finished, in the spring of 1972: Francis Ford Coppola, who invited Scorsese to his San Francisco studio to screen it for him. Coppola, of course, hadn’t found the right role for De Niro in The Godfather, and Paramount had even traded him away. Now, though, the through-the-roof critical and commercial success of that film encouraged Paramount to demand a sequel almost immediately. And, with that production looming, Coppola looked at Mean Streets with the hope of finding actors for the film.

  As Scorsese remembered, Coppola’s response was instantaneous: as soon as he saw what De Niro did with Johnny Boy, “immediately, he put him in Godfather II.”

  * * *

  *1 Aiello claimed later on that he was mystified when he learned that De Niro would be playing one of the lead roles in the film. He had seen The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight and thought, “He’s an immigrant from Italy. How’s he going to speak the language?”

  *2 Let history note that Leonard Kastle, who wrote the script, replaced him, receiving the sole directorial credit of his career.

  *3 A sign of his increasing ambition was that he was considering changing agents. He would soon leave Richard Bauman’s one-man shop for the gigantic and storied William Morris Agency, which had offices all over the world and where he would be represented by Harry Ufland, a classic agent sort with sharp suits, a businesslike but schmoozy mien, a slew of connections—and a client list that included Martin Scorsese.

  *4 Similarly, Phil Spector was riled to learn that Scorsese had used “Be My Baby” on the soundtrack without prior clearance, only to be mollified by John Lennon, who argued for the quality of the film; Spector agreed not to sue, but did extract a handsome royalty fee.

  HE HAD TESTED FOR MICHAEL, BUT, AS HE CORRECTLY REMEMBERED, “Everybody tested for Michael. The whole fuckin’ city tested for Michael. Even Al tested for it, but everybody knew that he had the part and that Francis wanted him.”

  He had tested for Sonny, and he was good, but in a way too good. “I thought he was very magnetic and had a lot of style,” Francis Coppola recalled. “He seemed like a crazy kind of kid with a lot of energy.” Sonny was all those things, yes, but he was also an eldest son, a father, a future boss; to play him would require at least an appearance of stability. De Niro’s take on the role was too, well, Johnny Boy.

  Now, however, De Niro was being offered something truly extraordinary, a real challenge, and he could have it without having to go through any readings or screen tests: not just a role in the sequel to a film that, commercially and critically, was one of the biggest hits Hollywood had ever produced, but the role of the young Vito Corleone. In essence, De Niro would be able to reverse-engineer the part that Marlon Brando had immortalized just a year earlier.

  Scorsese believed, not without reason, that it was the sight of De Niro as Johnny Boy that cemented Coppola’s decision. But in fact Coppola had been sufficiently impressed by De Niro’s tests for the first Godfather that he had kept him in mind for future roles—not knowing, ironically, that it would be a past role for which he would find the actor best suited. “It kept rolling around in my head that in a funny way De Niro’s face reminded me of Vito Corleone,” Coppola said. “Not of Brando, but of the character he played, with the accentuated jaw, the kind of funny smile. De Niro certainly is believable as being someone in the Corleone family and possibly Al’s father, as a young man.” He noted, too, that underneath De Niro’s wildness lay an aspect of his character that suited the role: “De Niro had a sort of stately bearing, as if he really was the young Vito who would grow into that older man who was Marlon Brando.… He had grace.”

  Paramount had famously tortured Coppola over his casting decisions the first time out, but eleven Academy Award nominations and three Oscars, including Best Picture, and a take of more than $100 million at the box office when that was an almost unimaginable sum had led them to believe he knew what he was doing, and they let him make his own choices on the sequel, more or less. De Niro was one of those choices: “I just decided that it would be him. Very early, I just made the decision, unilaterally, that he was right and that he could do it.”

  The director knew he was setting the actor up for a titanic task. “De Niro’s assignment,” he said in the press notes for the film, “is incredibly difficult when you consider that he’s being asked to become a well-known character created by one of the most famous actors in the world in a role for which he received tremendous credit. To have the audacity to play him as a young man. To evoke that character without doing an imitation of him. And, in addition, to do it all in Sicilian, which he doesn’t speak.”

  Oh, that. De Niro knew New York street Italian, and he had augmented his Italian American vocabulary with a bit of Neapolitan for The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. But Sicilian, as he knew, was another thing entirely, and with the exception of a handful of lines, Vito Corleone’s dialogue was entirely written in it. De Niro got the first chunk of script—131 draft pages—in early July 1973, and, seeing the challenge in front of him, he dove into the task of learning the language with characteristic fervor.

  He enrolled at a Berlitz school in New York, getting high marks from his instructors. Then the studio found him a tutor, Romano Pianti, a Sicilian-born linguist who was working as a director for an Italian-language TV station in the United States. He supplied De Niro with books, including a dictionary of Italian hand gestures, and lots of one-on-one tutelage. It was a crash course in a difficult language, and De Niro respected the singularity of it. “Sicilian is something else,” he said. “It is much more staccato, far less rhy
thmic than Neapolitan. It seems to be related to Greek. I took my tape recorder and talked to Sicilians in California and New York, and then I went to Sicily.”

  He visited Sicily in October 1973, when Coppola was shooting the Nevada scenes of the film. He stayed for a while with Pianti’s family in Trapani, spent time in the towns of Scopello and Castellammare del Golfo, and then, most delicately, traveled to the now-famous village of Corleone, where he ventured alone in order to, as he had in Georgia before Bang the Drum Slowly, get a sense of how his lines should sound in the local manner of speech.

  He didn’t make a secret of his motives. “I was always up front about what I was doing,” he said. “I feel it would be underhanded not to say anything. I’m just an actor doing my work. I’ve found people enjoy helping you and if they understand what you’re looking for, you save a lot of time and unnecessary suspicion.” But even that attitude could seem overly hopeful in Sicily and especially Corleone. “When I went into a bar, I was a little hesitant about mentioning the picture,” he confessed, “because I didn’t know what the reaction would be. But they seemed genuinely proud of The Godfather and complained because the picture wasn’t filmed there.”

  When he returned and continued working with Pianti, the tutor was amazed at his pupil’s progress: “If you’d asked me if it was possible that an actor master a language like Sicilian in such a short time,” Pianti later commented, “I would have said, ‘Never. Impossible.’ But this De Niro has done it.”

  Coppola claimed that he was never in doubt that the man he’d chosen as young Vito could pull off this part of the role: “Bobby De Niro is such a unified, concentrated guy that I always had faith he could do it,” he said. “Later I heard he’d been a terrible student in high school—which tells us something about positive motivation. Also, I always knew, and I’m sure he did too, that if it had turned out a disaster, I could always dub him with a Sicilian. Which, I suppose, tells us something more about motivation.”

  In fact, De Niro’s proficiency in Sicilian became such that he did extensive rewrites of Coppola’s dialogue, not only for his own character but also for all of the Sicilian-language scenes in the script, sometimes emphasizing little idioms and tics of pronunciation, sometimes ratcheting back speeches that he felt, after his exposure to the manners of Sicilians, were too forthright and direct. (This practice came to dominate virtually all of De Niro’s work. Other actors might want to pump their parts up by adding dialogue; throughout his career, based on the evidence of scores of his working copies of scripts, he indulged the opposite impulse, paring and even slashing away at his own lines to make them less explicit, less verbal, less everything—subsuming actorly ego to the belief that he could do more with a gaze or a gesture than could be accomplished with words.)

  Spending time among Sicilians had filled his head with many ideas for his portrayal of the young Vito Corleone. In particular, he found that he ought to augment his linguistic work with the practice of, in a word, silence. “The people are very wonderful to you, invite you into their homes. And yet, there’s another side, another layer of logic that runs through the Sicilian communities,” he said “They have a tremendous disrespect for authority.… The only people they trust are members of the immediate family. Ultimately, everyone else is a foreigner. Suspicion runs high. And although they are very cordial to you as a tourist, you are still aware of this. Sicilians have a way of watching without watching; they’ll scrutinize you thoroughly and you don’t even know it.”

  Reading through Puzo’s novel and the various drafts of Coppola’s script, De Niro continually took note of the stillness of his character, the way Vito would never let on what he was truly thinking, no matter the seeming triviality of the moment. “Never show how you feel cause you never know how things will turn out,” he scribbled in the margins of the book, and “NEVER LET ANYONE KNOW THINKING. ALWAYS KEEP OFF GUARD. BE DOING ONE THING WHILE THINKING ANOTHER.” In the script, he reminded himself to “give smile with mouth, not with eyes. Chilling smile.” And, most revealingly, he underscored a moment in which Vito would like to react but doesn’t with this note: “Think of my father here. Don’t get too rash. Wait. Control yourself.”

  He also, of course, had to calibrate his performance to match Brando’s. The Don Corleone whom Brando had made world-famous had certain physical, vocal, and behavioral characteristics that De Niro would have to incorporate in his portrayal of the younger man in order to make the connection between the two credible to audiences. At first, he admitted, the character eluded him—“There’s a peasant shrewdness which I haven’t found yet,” he said before traveling to Sicily. But then, having gotten a sense of the culture from which the man arose, he went about studying the specifics of Brando’s performance. In a screening room at Paramount, Coppola’s crew set up a videotape camera and filmed each of Brando’s scenes so that De Niro could watch them again and again on his own. He did this at least a half dozen times, making detailed notes on Brando’s gestures, facial expressions, and habits of speech: “lead a little with shoulders … head cocked … when thinking hand to chin … sly smile, sense of humor … raised eyebrows when making certain deliberate expressions … use back of fingers to scratch face … when point lift only forearm when want something … maybe should do more of chin sticking out. Esp. for smiling … Big thing is he is relaxed talker … Lets things happen. Let things happen.”

  He specifically assigned each of the characteristic gestures of Brando’s he had identified to one or more of his own scenes, choosing a strategy of slowly revealing the future man in the nuanced behavior of the man of the past. As he said at the time, “It’s like being a scientist or a technician. Audiences already know Vito Corleone. I watch him and I say, ‘That’s an interesting gesture. When could he have started to do that?’ It’s my job as an actor to find things I can make connections with. I must find things and figure out how can I use them, in what scenes can I use them to suggest what the older man will be like.”

  Besides the physical aspects, he also had to reveal the nascent pieces of the elder Vito’s personality: his easy command, his purring warmth, his confidence, his charm. The character, as he saw it, had a feline quality, “an attitude of just about to strike,” and should be played “perfectly still like a cat ready to STRIKE.” Stillness and silence were, finally, his keys: “I listen. I’m a listener. I don’t have to move to do a lot.… Talking is really not that important.… Don’t just answer. Think … Really think, weigh.” But there was another animal he had in mind, because he was playing someone who would soon be a killer of men: “Don’t forget to get that serpent color.”

  In effect, the job in front of him was to take a prebuilt older man, project what he likely might have been like decades before, and bring that sketch to life. “I watched the tape,” he said, “and I saw if I had done the part myself I would have done it differently. But I tried to connect him with me, how I could be him only younger. So I tried to speed up where he was slower, to get the rasp of his voice, only the beginning of the rasp. It was interesting. It was like a scientific problem.”

  He did the usual physical things that helped him prepare for a role: acquiring hats and other bits of wardrobe that were appropriate for the era of his performance (roughly 1918–23, when Vito would have been in his mid- to late twenties), then aging them to take off the store-bought sheen; finding old-time knives and change purses for Vito to carry, even though they might never appear in the film; and working closely with costumer Theadora Van Runkle to ensure that his wardrobe matched the research he had done in Sicily and in the New York Public Library. He visited Dick Smith, who had helped Brando devise his makeup in the first film, to settle on facial appearances: “The slicked-down hair seemed natural, that was how they wore it in those days. We decided to do a little with the cheeks, suggesting the padding that Brando used.” (They also settled on a makeup scheme to hide the mole on his right cheekbone.) And he even went to Brando’s Los Angeles dentist, Henry Dwork, to be
fitted with a removable implant that would give him some of the facial and vocal appearance Brando had. “He made up a smaller piece,” De Niro explained, “because my character was younger.”

  In early November he arrived in Los Angeles for thirteen days of shooting the interiors of Vito’s Little Italy world: his apartment, his workplaces, various shops and theaters. In January he joined Coppola and the crew in New York, where production designer Dean Tavoularis had undertaken the mammoth task of converting East 6th Street between Avenues A and B on the Lower East Side into a remarkable semblance of it some fifty or sixty years prior; for three weeks De Niro was able to walk from his 14th Street apartment to the film set and go backward in time.*1 At the end of the month, he returned to Sicily for seven days of shooting. The last of his twenty-nine days of work on the film was February 4, and even though production would continue on into June, the workaholic Coppola was already editing, determined to have the film out in theaters by Christmas.

  You would think that with Bang the Drum Slowly and Mean Streets ready to premiere and The Godfather, Part II due the following winter, De Niro could coast on his reputation for a little while. But his metabolism for work had escalated to a pace that wouldn’t allow him to sit still. He formed a brief liaison with the screenwriter James Toback, who wanted De Niro for the title role in his script The Gambler, only to have director Karel Reisz dismiss the actor as too lightweight.*2 In June 1973, while studying the role of Vito Corleone, De Niro went onstage again briefly in playwright Julie Bovasso’s off-Broadway comic romance Schubert’s Last Serenade, playing a right-wing hard hat who saves a debutante from a spot of trouble on the street and then tries to romance her. The production, mounted by the Manhattan Theatre Club, ran barely a week at the Stage 73 space, and Bovasso watched appreciatively during rehearsals as De Niro used his increasingly renowned immersion techniques to find a way into his character. “He wanted to do one scene while chewing on breadsticks,” she remembered. “Dubiously, I let him, and for three days I didn’t hear a word of my play—it was all garbled up in breadsticks. But I could see something happening, he was making a connection with something, a kind of clown element. At dress rehearsal he showed up without the breadsticks. I said, ‘Bobby, where are the breadsticks?’ And he said simply, ‘I don’t need them any more.’ ” His performance was “gruff and a little confused,” per the only review, which was in Show Business. That summer he appeared in yet another production, a one-act entitled Billy Bailey that had an even shorter run at the American Place Theatre; De Niro played the sole character, and the show didn’t garner a single review.) Nor did he need experimental theater anymore. Despite rumored possibilities now and then, he didn’t perform in live theater again for more than a dozen years.