De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  In Bang the Drum Slowly De Niro understood what he wanted to do as the dumb, doomed Southern catcher; he simply couldn’t summon up enough of the juices and flavors. Here he is wild and strong. It’s a flash part, and every actor who sees it will gnash his teeth because he’ll know that anyone with talent could score in it. The part is a success …; De Niro happens to have it. He uses it very well, but, without putting him down, I note that he’s had some good luck in casting lately: a sweet guy doomed to die and a loose, pathetic, obscene quasi-maniac. What actor could ask for more?

  THROUGHOUT THE FALL the two films played virtually side by side (quite literally so in New York, where for a time they were the chief attractions at the famed Upper East Side first-run houses Cinema I and Cinema II). Bang got the bigger release; Mean Streets, which Warner Bros. hadn’t produced but merely acquired for distribution, was starved for attention from the studio, which had The Exorcist chasing down the box office records that The Godfather had set just the previous year. Nevertheless, De Niro’s achievement was widely regarded as tremendous. It was astonishing to see someone do two such different things so well and at seemingly the very same time. His ability to portray such disparate characters became legend that autumn and remained one of the key signatures of his public image for the next few decades of his career. He became famous for doggedly researching his roles and rehearsing until he had internalized a character, until he had, in his phrase, “earned the right to play a person,” after which he would disappear into that person’s skin entirely. In that regard, he reminded Bang the Drum director John Hancock of Alec Guinness, famed for his ability to go so deeply into roles that you could forget it was him inside. “Guinness isn’t a personality actor,” Hancock said. “He’s a character actor who is also a star—and that’s Bobby.” There was a difference, though, and a crucial one: De Niro, Hancock added, “has an eroticism Guinness never had.” Young, gifted, sexy, fresh, and hot, he was emerging as an actor of the moment, maybe the actor of the moment.

  The success that he was to accrue from this pair of performances didn’t quite bloom immediately, at least not in business terms. In late summer, with his work in The Godfather, Part II still ahead of him, he, Scorsese, and Jonathan Taplin were pursuing another film idea, Booster, about a guy who makes his living by shoplifting from Bloomingdale’s; a writer named Ken Friedman was working on the script, which, Scorsese said, told “the story of a guy who’s coming apart. He’s the best and the worst of the New York crazies.” It didn’t gel, and Scorsese went on to follow up his fantastic breakthrough in the ultrapersonal Mean Streets with, of all things, the work-for-hire project Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. The director and his star stayed connected, fully intending to find another project to work on together; De Niro mentioned to a reporter that there was a story they were toying with, a script by Paul Schrader that had something to do with a New York cabbie …

  THERE WAS SOMETHING else that proved elusive for him: the ability to sit still for an interview, to cooperate with the press to help promote a film or himself. He lacked the patience required of a person who succeeds at a public job and must give at least a little bit of his time and, yes, his soul to appease the public and the media that make his success possible.

  His first interviews with journalists appeared in the summer of 1973, after his landing the role of young Vito Corleone had been announced and before the double-barreled blast of Drum and Streets in theaters. At first he seemed willing enough, sitting for chats with reporters for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and New York Post and discussing his preparations for Drum and The Godfather and his relationship with Martin Scorsese. But from the very start there was something hesitant and cagy about him when confronted with the press. Tom Topor of the Post described it thus: “He is not inarticulate but he is a) very shy; b) not used to interviews; c) secretive about how he works,” and that was a generous assessment given that Topor’s story included passages such as this response to the (admittedly banal) question of why he wanted to be an actor: “ ‘Well …’ a long silence. ‘It’s complicated …’ a long silence. ‘Getting into it …’ a long silence. ‘It’s a personal thing.’ Silence. ‘Is that okay?’ ”

  By November, with two smash performances in theaters, he was already becoming downright elusive. New York Times reporter Guy Flatley knew De Niro a bit socially. “We were both at a party on Riverside Drive a few years before,” the journalist remembered. “I recognized him from ‘The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight’ and his work in Shelley Winters’ play. And when he saw me, he came right over toward me and I thought, ‘Who does he think I am?’ We shook hands and he told me how much he enjoyed the story I’d written about Lionel Stander, who was a friend and mentor to him.” Once De Niro’s career seemed on the precipice of blooming, Flatley asked his editor if he could write a feature story on the actor, a task that was easier to imagine than actually execute. “I went up to his apartment and we both sat down with a beer, and everything that I asked him about—his parents, his school, his friends—he would say ‘Oh, I could never say anything about that.’ And it was very difficult because he was so shy and nervous and I was so shy and nervous. We went out to a restaurant and had another beer, but he never really loosened up. He was polite and friendly, but he seemed almost guilty about not being willing to talk.”

  At a loss for material for his story, Flatley turned instead to his acquaintance Shelley Winters, and the story that he finally published was built chiefly of her voluble telephonic ramblings. That in itself would have mortified the taciturn De Niro, never mind the actual things she said, such as

  Listen, let’s put it this way—I had a bigger romance with Bobby than I did with any of my lovers. Better change that to read “any of my husbands.” No, I guess lovers sounds all right. The truth is, I feel very close to Bobby—and don’t you dare tell him I haven’t seen “Bang the Drum Slowly” yet. God forbid that you should miss seeing Bobby act.… By the way, was Bobby’s apartment clean when you interviewed him? It was? Then his girlfriend must have cleaned it up for him.

  Later on, Flatley heard that De Niro was, indeed, upset with Winters for the free way in which she spoke and the sorts of things she shared. And, in time, his aversion to the press became part of his legend, and he would avoid reporters and interviews assiduously over the coming years. When he finally did open up, he had a series of explanations for his reticence:

  Why do people want to know what I eat for breakfast? After my first movies I gave interviews. Then I thought, “What’s so important about where I went to school, and hobbies? What does that have to do with acting, with my own head?” Nothing. (New York, May 16, 1977)

  After I give an interview I spend all my time explaining to people what I meant—or not explaining. (Time, July 25, 1977)

  It was to be, as those remarks would show, a decades-long dance of attraction (on the part of the press and the public) and repulsion (on De Niro’s), and he was only just learning the steps, reluctantly, petulantly, a truant dragged by the ear into the principal’s office.

  IN JANUARY 1974 De Niro was on location as Vito Corleone when end-of-the-year accolades for Mean Streets started to accrue. The film appeared on the top-ten lists in the New York Times, New York Post, Cue, Newsweek, Time, and the syndicated Gannett chain. It was edged out by François Truffaut’s Day for Night for the Best Film prize from both the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle, but De Niro was named Best Supporting Actor by both groups. In early March, when Oscar nominations were announced, the film and his performance were ignored completely by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, prompting a puzzled response from New York Times critic Vincent Canby—“What happened to ‘Mean Streets’?”—and a personal letter to De Niro from director Martin Ritt, who told him, “The fact that your peer group chose not to nominate you is shocking.”

  Peer group wasn’t necessarily an apt choice of phrase. Yes, De Niro ought to have been recognized by the actor
s’ branch of the Academy (which, for the record, nominated his Bang the Drum Slowly co-star Vincent Gardenia alongside the eventual winner, John Houseman for The Paper Chase). But he wasn’t really part of the peer group of Hollywood actors in any meaningful way, at least not entirely, not yet. His role as Vito Corleone marked only his second appearance (after Mario in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight) in a film that was conceived and financed from the start at a major movie studio. And so in March, if he felt slighted by the Academy in any way, it wasn’t like not being invited to a good friend’s wedding. He was still an outsider to the party, looking in from a remove, with a puzzled aspect. At some level he didn’t think of himself as a Hollywood actor, and his response to this first flush of fame and success showed it.

  THERE WERE GIRLS. There were always girls, starting from the time that he’d left his mother’s house to travel and continuing when he lived on his own (albeit nearby, and still attached to her purse strings).

  Often they were actresses whom he met in classes, in productions, in the clubhouse atmosphere of showbiz hangouts like Billy Ray’s Eighth Avenue saloon. Always, remembered Jonathan Taplin, they were gorgeous: “He picked these incredibly strong girls, top chicks.”

  And almost always there was drama. “He’d fight with them all the time,” Taplin continued. “They would always be in tears the next morning, and he would buy them some perfume.”

  Larry Woiwode recalled little quarrels between De Niro and the girl(s) of the moment during their scrambling young actor days. Shelley Winters recalled De Niro being stood up by an actress he’d invited to a dinner party that Winters threw for her little cohort of starving young artists. As she said, “I gave a Thanksgiving party. Invited all my theatrical waifs, my babies. Bobby was there, waiting for his date, a young actress he had a crush on. She didn’t show up until dessert. She sort of floated in: ‘Oh, hi Bobby …’ He went into the bedroom and pounded the headboard with his fist. He was crying. He never talked to her again.” And recall that on the night he was introduced to Scorsese at Verna Bloom’s place, De Niro had showed up with the girl he’d been seeing and spent the night not exchanging so much as a word with her.

  It’s not surprising that these relationships rarely lasted for very long, given his taciturnity, his complete commitment to his work, and the sense, as related by those who knew him as far back as his teens, that he had a thin skin and a quick temper. But one stood out. Her name was Diahnne Abbott, and she was, like so many of De Niro’s girlfriends, African American—specifically, a blend of English, American, and Creole lineage (she believed her father’s family was Haitian, but her paternal cousin, singer Gregory Abbott, understood them to be from Antigua). And she was gorgeous in a way that Gauguin would have appreciated, with sleepy, luxurious eyes, a full figure, a sassy ease, a magnetic and sweet air of melancholy. There was a touch of Billie Holiday to her, a sensual blend of dreaminess and earthiness. She seemed world-wise and pacific, with a husky voice and a languid manner.

  She was born in Boston and raised in Harlem. She left home young: the only child of an estranged couple, she was eventually separated from her mother and lived in a series of disagreeable situations until, at seventeen, she went out on her own altogether. She had ambitions to sing, and perhaps to act, but mainly she was waitressing, first at the West Bank Café and then at the famed Mercer Arts Center in lower Manhattan.*5

  They met in the late 1960s, perhaps 1967, when Abbott was around twenty-two years old (prone to fudging her age, which could sometimes swing three or four years in either direction). She had a daughter, Drena, named for a river in Yugoslavia that Abbott had read a book about when she was pregnant. And she was on her own—so on her own, in fact, that Drena would never meet her biological father, nor would she ever take or even reveal his name. Abbott would occasionally sing in a club under the name Diahnne Dea. She was a young mom living amid the hustle and glamour of downtown New York, open, in the spirit of the day, to whatever might come next.

  She and De Niro didn’t get together at first—although, considering his attraction to black women (which the New York Times noted in 1973 in its first interview with him), De Niro certainly noticed her and, given his habits, more than likely asked her out. In truth, he didn’t seem like much of a catch to her: “When I met him he was on unemployment,” she recalled. In the next few years, though, their paths continued to cross, and after a conversation at a party in the early 1970s they became an item, if not quite exactly a committed couple.

  He continued to see other women—and, now and again, to make scenes with them at parties, at dinners, or once, memorably, at an acclaimed restaurant above Cannes, where the producers, filmmakers, and cast were celebrating the sale of the foreign rights to Mean Streets during the film festival of 1974. (That one started when De Niro killed a bee that had been kibitzing at the table, prompting his date to scold him. They had words, and she walked out—not only of the restaurant but the town. De Niro and the others found her hoofing it along the road as they drove back to Cannes; they gave her a lift.)

  He was gentler around Abbott, or at least more under control. “By temperament he’s mostly Italian,” she admitted to Andy Warhol. In fact, he could be very watchful and judgmental of her behavior around other men, despite the emotionally effusive nature of so many of the show folk they met, not to mention the fact that they seemed to have an on-again, off-again relationship. At another event for Mean Streets, held just after the rapturously received premiere at the New York Film Festival, Abbott was De Niro’s date, and he got loudly upset when he felt that she was being attended to a little too closely by François Truffaut. Privately, friends confirmed that his hot-blooded qualities were never entirely put to rest in the relationship: “Bob is very Italian with Diahnne, very possessive and jealous,” one told the New York Times.

  For a few weeks in 1974, while staying at the Chateau Marmont, De Niro was involved with the actress, model, and writer Carole Mallory, who at the time was engaged to Pablo Picasso’s son Claude and then later had a long affair with Norman Mailer; her relationship with De Niro was mostly sexual, according to her memoir, with no strings attached. Indeed, there were times when, on his own, working in LA or Italy or even New York, he behaved as if he was free to do as he pleased.

  The bond between Abbott and De Niro continued to strengthen, though, and sometime during the period when he was playing Vito Corleone, he and Abbott moved in together, filling his household with Drena and with Abbott’s menagerie of cats, birds, and dogs, including a St. Bernard and a German shepherd. Such was the casualness of the ménage, however, that some of De Niro’s friends and associates didn’t know they were living together until the arrangement had been going on for a couple of years. This makeshift family clearly was too big for the apartment in which De Niro had been raised and which his mother passed on to him when she moved further downtown. So De Niro bought 14 St. Luke’s Place,*6 a staid brick Greenwich Village townhouse on a quiet street in what was still a rough-and-tumble bit of lower Manhattan, and Abbott set about renovating it from its former semicommercial use into a family home. De Niro kept the 14th Street apartment, though, as a storage space, as a crash pad for friends who needed a place to stay, and for times when he needed privacy and quiet.

  WITH HIS WORK on The Godfather behind him, De Niro started making notes on a 108-page treatment (the prose description of a film, as opposed to a script, which is generally much longer) of an epic film by Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian writer-director who had become respected with such films as The Spider’s Stratagem and The Conformist and then genuinely famous with 1973’s Last Tango in Paris, the sexually and psychologically daring film built around a remarkably unguarded performance by Marlon Brando. Now Bertolucci had upward of $6 million at his disposal—the most ever spent in Italy on a home-grown production—for a film that would do nothing less than trace the previous seventy-five years of his country’s history through the story of two men born on the same day in the year 1900. No
vecento, as it would be known in his native tongue, followed the lives of Alfredo Berlinghieri, the heir to a landowner’s riches, and Olmo Dalcò, a peasant born on the wealthy man’s land. The two are youthful playmates, even into their twenties; they share girls, occasionally in the same bed at the same time. But politics, heritage, and the vagaries of fate drive them apart. When World War II arrives, the wealthy man is a committed Fascist and the other a dedicated fighter in the resistance. They both survive the bloody conflict and live on almost to the present day, giving Bertolucci and his co-writers the chance to project forward toward the new Italian culture and civilization for which they yearned.

  On the strength of his work with Brando, Bertolucci stockpiled an impressive roster of international stars for his epic. As the grandfathers of the wealthy man and the peasant, he had cast Burt Lancaster and Sterling Hayden. Donald Sutherland would play a Fascist leader; Dominique Sanda, Alida Valli, and Stefania Sandrelli would play key women in the men’s lives; the rising French leading man Gérard Depardieu would play the peasant Olmo; De Niro, when he finally consented to be cast, would play the landowner Alfredo, a role at one time intended for Jack Nicholson.

  Shooting on the film was well under way by the time De Niro started digging through the pages, wondering whether his character would have taken dancing lessons and opining that the ménage à trois featuring him and Depardieu could be a “good scene, if done right.” De Niro showed up in Parma, Italy, at the start of fall. And he would be there, as the script metastasized in front of his eyes, almost through the end of winter.

  From the start he was unhappy. Bertolucci wanted to begin work with De Niro on the material from near the end of the mammoth script, meaning that he was playing the older Alfredo before getting his legs steady underneath him as the younger man. “We shot the old stuff on the first day,” De Niro recalled, “and I realized there that that was a mistake—it just wouldn’t work, nobody was into it. I didn’t know what I was doing sitting in another country with this director who I like very much but it was like, ‘Where are we?’ If I had thought about it more, I would have said, ‘Can we not do this scene later, not the first day?’ I was sensible enough to know you don’t do things so out of order. But I went along with it, I remember that, and it just didn’t work.”