De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  He became so natural behind the wheel that New Yorkers accepted him as the real thing, even after production had begun. “One day when it was pouring rain,” remembered Scorsese, “we were filming De Niro in the cab near Columbus Circle. Some businessman in a hurry spotted the cab, came rushing over and hopped right in. De Niro was so startled all he could do was point to his ‘off duty’ sign. The guy bounced right back out, cursing a blue streak all the way down the sidewalk. He never even saw the cameras.”

  Outside of the taxi, De Niro took his now standard step of seeking out authentic voices upon which to base his character’s midwestern affect. Schrader, finally, was the best prototype he found, and he had the screenwriter read selections from the script into a tape recorder. He also borrowed some of Schrader’s clothes for his character, until he finally arrived at a Travis Bickle who at least one observer thought was an uncanny likeness of Schrader himself. “Michael Phillips saw one scene in Taxi Driver and said to me, ‘That’s you. Bobby is doing you right to a T in there,’ ” said Schrader.*5

  He worked on the little physical details of the script: how to make dum-dum bullets, how a Marine would do calisthenics, how Travis would eat a cheeseburger. And he wrote up a little backstory about Travis’s exit from the service (in a note, Scorsese indicated that it was via an honorable discharge in May 1971) and his arrival in New York, which, he reckoned, involved coming to see a girl, working in a series of menial jobs, getting introduced to amphetamines, and gradually going broke.

  Mostly, though, he dove into the psyche of a character who was unlike any that he—or, truly, anyone else—had ever played. There was no ethnicity to Travis Bickle, no previous film character from which to triangulate, no real-life counterparts he could sit and observe from a bleacher seat or on TV. This was a role that had to be built of the raw materials of his imagination, his body, and his soul.

  He began, oddly enough, under water. “I got the idea,” he said, “of making Travis move like a crab. It’s a hot sunny day. He’s out of his cab, which is his protective shell—he’s outside his element. He’s all dry and hot, finally he breaks down. I got the image of a crab, moving awkwardly, sideways and back. It’s not that you imitate a crab, but the image gives you something to work with. It gives you another kind of behavior.” Years later he elaborated further on the conceit: “You know how a crab sort of walks sideways and has a gawky, awkward movement? Not devious in that sense. Crabs are very straightforward, but straightforward to them is going to the left and to the right. They turn sideways; that’s the way they’re built.”

  He remembered stories that he’d heard from a few Vietnam veterans he’d met over the years, including a fellow named Millard who had a small role in Glamour, Glory and Gold, and he spoke at some length about the experience of the war with Vic Magnotta, a stuntman whom Scorsese knew from his NYU days and who explained to De Niro that Special Forces commandos would shave their hair into Mohawks to demonstrate their commitment to deadly missions. (Bickle’s Mohawk, so startling in those days before punk rock, wasn’t in Schrader’s script, which simply says of his aspect at the film’s climax, “Travis looks like the most suspicious human alive.”) And De Niro remembered, too, little snatches of ordinary life that he had glimpsed over the years, and that helped him build a character: “Think of all the lonely people I see, like that girl that night on 15th St.”

  In April, Schrader visited De Niro in Italy as he was finishing the last of his work on 1900. When De Niro was back in New York to stay, Schrader moved to town from Los Angeles to put the script through one last rewrite with Scorsese and the cast. Scorsese had taken a suite of rooms at the St. Regis Hotel—the Cecil Beaton Suite—as a base of operations, so Schrader moved into the hotel as well, and they worked at all kinds of odd hours, accepting suggestions from the actors who had been studying for their roles. Peter Boyle, cast as the older cabbie Wizard, who tries to reach out to Bickle as the younger man slides into his psychosis, made a few visits to the legendary Belmore Cafeteria on Fourth Avenue, an all-night spot frequented by taxi drivers, criminals, and street people, and heard some stories that he was allowed to incorporate into his dialogue. Harvey Keitel, who was appearing at the time on Broadway as Happy in a revival of Death of a Salesman starring George C. Scott, spent time talking with pimps and going so far as to have one of them look over his script to check his lines for authenticity. (He asked Michael Phillips if one particular pimp named Lucky could be hired on with the production so as to be handy for consultation during filming, maybe as an extra in street scenes. “Is he a SAG member?” the producer asked. “No man,” Keitel said. “He’s probably a fugitive from justice.”)

  Schrader, who’d been working on the script for three years, found new inspiration in the city. “I was feeling particularly blue in a bar at around three a.m.,” he remembered. “I noticed a girl and ended up picking her up. I should have been forewarned when she was so easy to pick up; I’m very bad at it. The only reason I tried it that night is that I was so drunk. I was shocked by my success until we got back to my hotel and I realized that she was 1) a hooker; 2) under age; and 3) a junkie. Well, at the end of the night I sent Marty a note saying, ‘Iris is in my room. We’re having breakfast at nine. Will you please join us?’ So we came down, Marty came down, and a lot of the character of Iris was rewritten from this girl who had a concentration span of about twenty seconds.”

  Even Cybill Shepherd, thought to be the weakest link in the cast, was given room to fill in her character during a rehearsal period. Shepherd was at a precarious moment in her career. After breaking into the business in a big way with her first two films, The Last Picture Show and The Heartbreak Kid, she had fallen in love with Peter Bogdanovich, who had directed her in the former and subsequently left his wife. The pair had comported themselves with some hauteur among the Hollywood crowd, both socially and professionally, and nobody was exactly weeping for them when they went on to create two critical and commercial flops in a row, Daisy Miller and At Long Last Love. With Shepherd’s standing as a leading lady at a very low ebb, she was willing to take on the role in Taxi Driver for considerably less than her previous asking price. Scorsese and the Phillipses were looking at “Cybill Shepherd types,” in fact, including a still-unknown Farrah Fawcett, when Sue Mengers, Shepherd’s agent, contacted them and let them know that her client was interested in the role. “I told Sue we couldn’t afford Cybill,” Michael Phillips said, “but she said, ‘Let’s get together and we’ll discuss money later.’ ”

  Shepherd was a big name, but she was nobody’s idea of a great actress. Once she arrived in New York, Scorsese and De Niro spent several days with her at the St. Regis working on her scenes, getting her comfortable with their methods and with the intense material of the script. As Scorsese filmed them with a 16 mm black-and-white camera, they spent hours, she remembered, “improvising all our scenes …[Scorsese] let his actors find the characters. His constant advice was ‘Do even less than you’re doing.’ De Niro was a master of underplaying and a master of craft at every level. I learned more about acting on Taxi Driver than on any other film.”

  There was, she said, a current in the air. “There was an enormous amount of chemistry between De Niro and me. We didn’t act on it.… De Niro asked me out. It was a great compliment. Years later I said, ‘Can you believe I turned him down?’ But I was protective of what we were doing.… With actors you never know if too much familiarity really will breed contempt, so if you don’t have that familiarity at least you have the freedom to act.”

  But Bogdanovich saw an uglier side to the rapport of the stars, claiming that De Niro translated his romantic rejection by Shepherd into a loathing for her: “He treated Cybill like a pile of dogshit. It was really hot. One of the grips or somebody gave her a little electric fan because she was in this really hot dress. De Niro would kind of like go ‘the princess’ kind of thing. It was horrendous to watch. The truth is, Bobby treated people badly if he decided they weren’t up to snuf
f.”

  In fact, Shepherd, perhaps without knowing it, was mocked throughout the production. In LA, Julia Phillips would look at rushes of her scenes and cringe as Scorsese repeatedly gave her instructions for line readings and De Niro made his frustration obvious. Schrader, too, felt she wasn’t up to snuff: “We always said we were looking for a Cybill Shepherd type. How much worse could she be than a Cybill Shepherd type? But she was always a Cybill Shepherd ‘type.’ ”

  On the other hand, Bogdanovich felt that Jodie Foster was favored by De Niro: “He treated [her] like a queen.” And, to be fair, she did require special handling. Not quite thirteen, she had done scores of TV episodes and appeared in several films, including a few Disney hits and, most crucially, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, in which she played the exceedingly worldly child of a hooker. But nothing in her experience prepared her for Taxi Driver: “When I first read the script, I thought, ‘Wow, they’ve got to be kidding!’ It was a great part for a 21-year-old, but I couldn’t believe they were offering it to me.”

  As it happened, Foster (and, perhaps even more, her mother, Brandy) wanted the part, but there were significant hurdles to overcome to get a child actor involved in such material. She was examined by a Los Angeles psychiatrist to ascertain if she would be able to play Iris without doing herself any harm. (“I was determined to win,” said Brandy Foster. “Here was some broad trying to tell me what was too adult for my daughter.”) Eventually, Jodie was cast with some stipulations: the production also hired her older sister, Connie, to act as her double for the more explicit moments of sexuality and violence in the film, and every minute in which she appeared on the set was closely monitored by a child welfare worker. “She saw the daily rushes of all my scenes and made sure I wasn’t on the set when Robert De Niro said a dirty word,” Foster remembered.

  She wasn’t bothered by the gore. “It was really neat,” she said. “It was red sugary stuff. And they used Styrofoam for bones. And a pump to make the blood gush out of a man’s arm after his hand was shot off.” And she wasn’t bothered by the sexual aspects of the role. Far from it, in fact. “The memory I have is of [Scorsese] and Robert De Niro telling me how to unzip [De Niro’s] pants,” she said years later. “And Marty keeps bursting out laughing. He can’t get a word out, and he tries to act serious, you know? He keeps smoothing down his face on both sides, but he just keeps laughing. And then De Niro decides he’s going to take over because he can do it.”

  What did rattle her, she admitted, was that she learned in the course of working with De Niro how little she actually knew about the art of acting:

  He kept picking me up from my hotel and taking me to different diners. The first time he basically didn’t say anything. He would just, like, mumble. The second time he started to run lines with me, which was pretty boring because I already knew the lines. The third time, he ran lines with me again and now I was really bored. The fourth time, he ran lines with me, but then he started going off on these completely different ideas within the scene, talking about crazy things and asking me to follow in terms of improvisation.… We’d start with the original script and then he’d go off on some tangent and I’d have to follow, and then it was my job to eventually find the space to bring him back to the last three lines of the text we’d already learned.… There was this moment, in some diner somewhere, when I realized for the first time that it was me who hadn’t brought enough to the table. And I felt this excitement where you’re all sweaty and you can’t eat and you can’t sleep. Changed my life.

  The film shot throughout June and July, entirely in Manhattan, which guaranteed stifling weather, uncontrollable crowds, and infinite unforeseeable little hassles. The air around the production—indeed, around the city—was shot through with a dark undercurrent; Scorsese and his location scouts witnessed a violent mugging outside Lincoln Center in broad daylight. And the weather was brutal. As Shepherd recalled, “New York was a fetid swamp. They couldn’t turn on the air conditioning in the diner where we filmed our first scene because it disrupted the sound.” To exacerbate the unpleasantness, the city, which was suffering an economic freefall, endured a brief but pungent garbage strike that affected not only the atmosphere on the set but the very look of the film. “I was accused, in Mean Streets, of just showing the garbage on the streets,” Scorsese remembered. “When I was shooting Taxi Driver … everywhere I aimed the camera, there were mounds of garbage. I said, ‘They are gonna kill me! Guys, take away some of the garbage.’ Here I was trying to control reality, but that was the reality. In LA, with Mean Streets, we had to put garbage on the street to make it look like New York.”

  There were other aspects of the production that threatened to overwhelm the director: crowds at the staged campaign rallies, random people ruining shots by leaning out of windows or trying to sleep on fire escapes, visitors such as Brian De Palma, who helped Scorsese set up a complex tracking shot, or Scorsese’s own mother, Catherine, who regularly brought homemade zeppoles to the set and ruined at least one shot by wandering into the camera’s eye: “Cut!” her son hollered. “Ma, please, I’m directing a movie!”

  In the middle of the shoot, Scorsese met Julia Cameron, a freelance writer who came to the set with the intention of doing a profile of De Niro that morphed into an assignment to write about Scorsese for Playboy or Oui. After an initial luncheon meeting, lubricated liberally with booze, they talked for hours, and he gave her a copy of the Taxi Driver script with a promise to discuss it at a subsequent meeting, over dinner. That meal wound up becoming a preamble to marriage. Cameron moved into Scorsese’s suite at the St. Regis, and the two became an item. She had some knowledge of politics, and Scorsese allowed her to punch up some of the dialogue that took place in the campaign office. The couple began appearing everywhere together, even dressing alike. Various voices around the film warned Scorsese that too much was happening too quickly, and Cameron wasn’t very popular among his old friends, who saw her as opportunistic (Scorsese’s assistant Amy Jones called her “a heat-seeking missile,” and Julia Phillips dismissed her as someone “who came for an interview and never left”). But it was love, apparently. By the end of the year they were married, and before the following year was over they were parents.

  Cameron’s may have been the most dramatic visit, but she wasn’t the only reporter welcomed to the set of Taxi Driver. The studio had arranged for a steady stream of writers to observe the production on various days, even during some of the most complex and sensitive sequences of the film, including the bloody climax. In those pre-Internet days, they all published stories on what they had seen—while the film was still in production—and most of them revealed the entire plot in their articles. Between the crowds, the reporters, the schedule, the heat, and the subject matter, Scorsese was almost completely overwhelmed, right from the outset, in fact. “The second week,” he confessed, “I wanted to stop. I loved it so much, I wanted to kill it.” Julia Phillips, who was working on Close Encounters of the Third Kind in Los Angeles, had her own ideas about what was happening as gleaned from the rushes she screened: “ ‘Taxi Driver’ is a cokey movie. Big pressure, short schedule, and short money, New York in the summer. Night shooting. I have only visited the set once and they are all doing blow. I don’t see it. I just know it.” It was, in short, mayhem.

  But in the center of it all, De Niro was remarkably silent, still, and inward-gazing, his ability to focus amid mayhem striking onlookers as a combination of diva-like affect and supernatural concentration. “When the camera isn’t turning,” observed Rex Reed, “he turns into Greta Garbo, shunning all communication.” “Bobby chooses to stay in his trailer,” Scorsese told Arthur Bell, “and that’s it. I don’t even bother him.” And Shepherd remembered, “He stayed in character for the whole movie, so that disastrous date where Travis takes Betsy to see a porn film really did make me feel uncomfortable and turned off. When I turned him down in real life, it matched my character.” Like his unwillingness to submit to interviews and the c
hameleonic variety of his roles, his monomaniacal immersion in his character during production was becoming the stuff of legend.

  Indeed, during the shoot his agent, Harry Ufland, visited the set while De Niro, dedicating a little time to the selection of wardrobe for his next film, was decked out in a fashionable suit from the 1930s. As simple as it was, the transformation was so complete that, said Scorsese, “Harry didn’t recognize him. For twenty minutes, Bob wasn’t Travis anymore.” Another visitor, Michael Moriarty, his Bang the Drum Slowly co-star, was about to approach De Niro during the setup of a luncheonette scene and then, getting a glimpse of his fellow actor, begged off. “No, don’t bother,” he told a production assistant who was about to announce his presence. “I don’t know that guy at all. I knew Bruce Pearson. I don’t know Travis Bickle or Robert De Niro.”

  De Niro went places nobody could imagine. His script was filled with reminders to keep himself on edge, to float through scenes in a dissociative haze, to stay still and stare blankly while churning inside, to strain toward an affect of formality and propriety while undergoing internal chaos, to cower meekly from the outside world when it rejects him and to smile coldly when he means to do harm. Gradually he was building toward what Schrader’s script referred to as “the release of all that cumulative pressure … a reality unto itself … the psychopath’s Second Coming.”

  What was perhaps the key moment in this descent, one that would live on for decades and haunt De Niro, sometimes amusingly and sometimes not, wasn’t specifically scripted. After arming himself with a variety of handguns and knives, Bickle stood in his crummy apartment (which, like Iris’s room, was constructed in an abandoned building at Columbus Avenue and West 88th Street) and addressed a mirror menacingly. Imagining himself in a conversation with someone mistreating him, he practiced drawing his weapons and turning the tables on his adversary. And he said it in words that he improvised on the spot: