De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  He drifts into a Manhattan taxi office seeking work, specifically overnight work. He doesn’t make a brilliant first impression. He mutters a little, has trouble making eye contact, and doesn’t understand what it means when he’s asked if he’s “moonlighting”; he makes a joke that lands with a thud, and he apologizes reflexively, though he doesn’t like that he has to do it. Finally he wanders back into the street, sipping from a pint bottle tucked into his military-issue fatigue jacket, so ephemeral a presence that his mere walk along a city block is rendered in a dissociative jump cut.

  Like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Lennon’s Nowhere Man, Travis Bickle is an emblem for alienation, disaffection, isolation, an existential antihero whose connection to our world is tenuous and yet who, in his alienation, is meant to be a symbol for the condition of us all. Until this film, De Niro has principally played southerners and Italians or Italian Americans. But there is no ethnicity to Travis Bickle, only the merest hint of a midwestern twang, and there is no backstory as singular as Johnny Boy’s head injury or Vito Corleone’s witnessing the death of his family. He is an invention of the imagination, of the page, of the movie camera, and of De Niro, relying on a foundation provided by Schrader and existing in a milieu created by Scorsese. He is a pure product of the cinema. It’s even possible, given that the film both begins and ends with a close-up of his eyes, that he doesn’t exist at all, that the events depicted in Taxi Driver are some lurid fantasy that has bubbled up in his sleepless mind.

  He wants to be normal, but he’s just slightly miswired. He swallows pills with a shake of his head like a snake ingesting its prey; he stretches after a long night behind the wheel with his elbows akimbo like a twisted scarecrow. Asked the simplest of questions—“How are you?”—he’s stumped for an answer, seemingly distracted by something but, at the same time, apparently focused on nothing at all.

  But of course he is sentient and, as we see as we stay with him, purposeful, if only in an effort to find a purpose for himself. He starts with a girl. He dons his one good jacket—burgundy, made of velvet or maybe suede—and proffers a surprisingly fluent line of palaver to a pretty girl. (He’s not alone in admiring her: Martin Scorsese himself is depicted seated on a nearby stoop ogling her as she passes by.) Her name is Betsy, a golden, WASPy dream girl, and he takes Betsy on a proper date, for which he shows up in a tie and with a surprise: the movie that he’ll take her to see is porn, Sometimes Sweet Susan, starring Harry Reems. Within minutes of their entering the theater, the courtship ends, and somehow Travis is confused that it has gone wrong.

  Soon he picks up an apparently ordinary fare who turns out to be intent on doing harm to his cheating wife. Perversely inspired by this encounter, he arms himself with a small arsenal of pistols—$915 worth, including a Magnum that could take down an elephant—and hits upon a new way to connect with the world: through that staple of psychotic self-expression of America in the 1960s and ’70s, a political assassination.

  And then another girl catches his eye—a pubescent prostitute who works just a few blocks from the building where De Niro was raised. Her street name is Easy, but, as Travis learns, her real name, which she hates, is Iris. He had dreamed of rescuing Betsy from her loneliness, but Iris, “sweet Iris,” really does need to be rescued. His plan is fixed: self-immolation via the murder of Betsy’s preferred candidate, self-resurrection by leaving his life savings to Iris.

  He devotes himself to a regimen of calisthenics, target range practice, working on a quick draw in the mirror (“You talkin’ to me …?”), making dum-dum bullets, fashioning a device that can deliver an automatic pistol to his hand with a jerk of his arm (and that transforms him, cyberpunkishly, into something that’s half man, half weapon). In the gesture that marks his final intent to push through to his fiery demise, he shaves his hair into a Mohawk, fulfilling the script’s direction: “Anyone scanning the crowd would immediately light upon Travis and think, ‘There is an assassin.’ ” Of course, he is spotted in the throng by the Secret Service and chased away, precipitating a rampage that leaves him, like Johnny Boy, bleeding from a neck wound, his connections to life and security and the future shredded beyond repair.

  The story is singular enough, but what De Niro does with it is truly without precedent. The cinema has served up psychopaths and sociopaths and even sometimes assassins (the Frank Sinatra double bill of Suddenly and The Manchurian Candidate leaps to mind), but none of them has ever been drawn in the forefront of a film so purposefully, and no filmmaker and actor have ever before managed to bring an audience so intimately inside the mind, heart, and even metabolism of such a fellow.

  Much of this effect is achieved through the eyes: we look into the abyss of Travis’s gaze, and the abyss gazes back at us. De Niro’s stare sometimes fastens on the lights and motion and, very often, the little outbursts of violence and sexuality in the world around him; just as often, though, it attaches itself to nothing, resulting in an almost bittersweet expression of wonder, confusion, and emptiness that makes you want to console him. His body, too, is a subject of fascination: early on, sleepless on his cot, almost sunken into the mattress, De Niro is a stick figure given shape only by his clothing; later, baptizing his fists in a flame on his stovetop in what he and Scorsese referred to jokingly as the Charles Atlas scene, his body is so sinewy and veined and gaunt that he looks like he has emerged from a POW camp. There’s something repellent in his asceticism, but also something that elicits sympathy.

  There’s another effect, even more startling, that’s achieved by zooming slightly out and seeing De Niro the actor playing Travis, a sense that the Oscar-winning chameleon has set a new standard not only for himself but for all actors. Was there anyone else who would so fully transform himself into a character so desperate, alienated, and wounded, someone who wouldn’t rescue a single moment from such a harrowing film by giving the audience some sort of reassurance—a nod, a wink, a joke, the lift of an eyebrow—to indicate that this was a fictional depiction of an alternative reality and not a portrait of what was really going on all around them? Pauline Kael, horrified by the finale of the film, is said to have gasped aloud, “He’s still out there!” She meant Travis, of course, not De Niro, but at that moment it was impossible to tell the difference. When he first emerged as Johnny Boy, Bruce Pearson, and Vito Corleone, De Niro seemed like a chameleon. Now, playing a character without attachments, backstory, or explanation, he somehow seemed more like himself, as if the actor who created those amazing characters was nothing more than their hired driver, ferrying them to the movies, seething away in the front seat, ready to explode and to take them—and us—to hell along with him.

  Taxi Driver hit the film public—and the reviewing press—like a thunderbolt or an avalanche. Nobody had seen anything like it before, and nobody seemed entirely sure what to make of it. Its power was undoubted, but for a great many viewers, including critics, its violence, darkness, and ambivalence were overwhelming.

  To fill their superlatives, critics harked back to other films and, indeed, other media. “Imagine Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ if it had been told from the point of view of its title character,” explained Frank Rich in the New York Post. “Taxi Driver is a movie in heat,” said Pauline Kael in the New Yorker, “a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground.”

  The reviews—and, in many publications, re-reviews—waged a back-and-forth war about the morality of the film and its ultimate message (the coda really puzzled people). But very few even among the film’s antagonists doubted Scorsese’s energy or creativity, and nobody was anything less than floored by De Niro’s work.

  “Acting of this sort is rare in films,” wrote Vincent Canby in the New York Times. “It is a display of talent, which one gets in the theater, as well as a demonstration of behavior, which is what movies usually offer.” Frank Rich added, “You simply must see for yourself. He plays Travis … at an intimate human scale that makes even the better movie performances o
f the past few years look artificial and bombastic by comparison.” In the Wall Street Journal, Joy Gould Boyum wrote, “De Niro creates a Travis who manages to evoke from us first a sympathy, then an empathy, and finally an understanding.” Kael, invoking a metaphor that she would come to use again to describe De Niro’s work, said, “Some actors are said to be empty vessels who are filled by the roles they play, but that’s not what appears to be happening here with De Niro. He’s gone the other way. He’s used his emptiness—he’s reached down into his own anomie. Only Brando has done this kind of plunging, and De Niro’s performance has something of the undistanced intensity that Brando’s had in Last Tango.” Even more ecstatically, Jack Kroll of Newsweek declared De Niro

  the most remarkable young actor of the American screen. What the film comes down to is a grotesque pas de deux between Travis and the city, and De Niro has the dance quality that most great film actors have had, whether it’s allegro like Cagney or largo like Brando.… De Niro has created a total behavioral system for his underground man, much of which has a macabre comedy. Unlike most actors, De Niro doesn’t just express a personality, he creates one.

  Taxi Driver would go on to reap more than $25 million in box office in its initial release, against its $2 million budget—which Columbia Pictures was initially reluctant to put up. (Schrader had been paid approximately $30,000 for the rights, but twenty years after the film’s release his 5 percent share of its earnings had come to nearly $700,000.) And Travis Bickle had become a metaphor for every lone gunman, pent-up psychopath, and quiet-boy-next-door-who-went-bonkers for the next forty years. (In 2001, for instance, when Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal unleashed an automatic weapon in the palace in Katmandu, killing the king and queen and seven others and then trying to fire a bullet into his own temple, a New York Times article on the massacre called him “some Himalayan version of the Robert De Niro character in ‘Taxi Driver.’ ”) Along with the “You talkin’ to me?” business, the character De Niro created seemed to seep off the screen and into the real world: Julia Phillips and Paul Schrader drove past theaters in New York where the film originally played and were at once thrilled and sickened to see lines of young men dressed in Bickle’s familiar outfit of army fatigues and blue jeans, waiting to see the film for, presumably, second and third go-rounds.*3

  For decades there was talk of reviving the character for a sequel, and De Niro, Scorsese, and Schrader talked seriously about it more than once. Schrader always contended that the characters he wrote in such films as American Gigolo, Light Sleeper, and even The Last Temptation of Christ were thematic variations on Travis Bickle, but he was rebuffed by De Niro each time he tried to interest him in appearing in one of those films. All three of the principals remained intrigued by the thought of exploring how Travis Bickle would have been treated by time. In 1998, after having lunch with De Niro and talking once more about reviving Travis, Schrader, again inspired by real-life events, thought he’d hit on it. “Theodore Kaczynski,” he wrote to Scorsese, referring to the infamous Unabomber, who’d been arrested a year or so prior. “If the Travis Bickle character had survived, he probably could have ended up a violent, self-absorbed loner like Kaczynski.” (Perhaps joking, he added, “Jodie [Foster] can play the Clarice Starling role.”) The idea, for better or worse, never got further than that note.

  AND WHILE THE world was greeting Travis Bickle, the man who embodied him was a continent—and several decades—removed from the fetid, menacing streets of New York. On the sound stages and backlot of Paramount Pictures, De Niro was playing Monroe Stahr, the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, a roman à clef about the famed producer Irving Thalberg, the boy genius of MGM who died in 1936 at the age of thirty-seven having overseen literally hundreds of films, including the likes of Ben-Hur, Grand Hotel, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Champ, A Night at the Opera, and The Good Earth—almost none of which would, by his choice, bear his name. Fitzgerald found Thalberg a poignant and romantic character and had conceived of exorcising himself of the demons of working in Hollywood through the project—which, ironically, was left incomplete after the author’s own early death, at age forty-four, in 1940.

  The film had been proposed to De Niro as early as the fall of 1974, when Elia Kazan had sent him a copy of the script, which had been adapted by playwright Harold Pinter for producer Sam Spiegel. At the time, De Niro was booked back-to-back-to-back with Taxi Driver, Bogart Slept Here, and New York, New York. But he was interested in working with Kazan, a scion of the Group Theatre and of Method acting, and a former director of his boyhood acting heroes Marlon Brando (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront), Montgomery Clift (Wild River), and James Dean (East of Eden). The pedigree of the production was irresistible, and De Niro agreed to squeeze it in. (He was testing his wardrobe for the role when his agent, Harry Ufland, failed to recognize him on the set of Taxi Driver). Then, when Bogart imploded, he was able to step right into The Last Tycoon.

  He felt, he said, immediate relief: “It was like going from the darkest depths to light and inspiration; from black to white; from total angst to being with Kazan and Sam Spiegel.… It was a whole other thing.” Kazan especially was a godsend to him. Like Scorsese, he was willing to pore over the details of a character endlessly with his star, having long conversations, writing extensive letters and memos, prolonging the production to engage in quiet one-on-one sessions. Kazan, whose understanding of the Stanislavskian system was closer to Lee Strasberg’s than to Stella Adler’s, knew exactly how to coddle or confront an actor—even one of De Niro’s caliber—to exact the performance he was seeking, a discipline to which De Niro was happy to submit himself.

  They met first in London in the spring of 1975, when De Niro was commuting between New York and Rome while finishing 1900 and preparing to shoot Taxi Driver. After that, they kept in touch. Kazan sent De Niro a letter to bring to his attention a detail about Stahr: that he was a good dancer, specifically the fox-trot. De Niro responded on the back of the envelope in which Kazan’s letter arrived, delighted with this detail about his character and promising to learn the dance.

  When De Niro arrived in Hollywood in the fall of 1976 to work on Bogart and Tycoon, Kazan supplied him with a four-page, single-spaced précis of his impressions of Stahr: the character’s attitudes toward art, business, work, women, colleagues, and his failing health, plus even some explanation of what would be going through the character’s mind during and after sexual intercourse. The memo was a wormhole; De Niro loved it, annotating the pages extensively and working on his own copy of the script with fanatical attention to psychological detail.

  In some ways all of this work was moot, as Spiegel, the producer of Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The African Queen, and On the Waterfront, had contractually promised Harold Pinter that his adaptation would be treated like a stage play—that, in effect, it would be shot exactly as he wrote it, with no changes permitted to any of it, not even a single word of dialogue, without his approval. The script was locked as surely as if they’d already shot it; Kazan, describing this straitjacketing, liked to say that he was “realizing” the script, after the French fashion of referring to the director as the réalisateur. All De Niro could do was dive into the psychological and emotional subtleties in almost a theoretical way. But he loved that sort of thing, and Kazan encouraged and inspired him to dig in. On many of the screenplay’s typewritten pages he would wind up writing more words than Pinter had, almost all of them for naught.

  He did have control of some aspects of his character, though, and he took charge with his customary rigor. The wardrobe was bespoke, his suits tailored exactly as Irving Thalberg had worn them; he learned to write shorthand, as both the real Thalberg and the fictional Stahr could; he met with Paramount’s founder, Adolph Zukor, who at age 103 still visited the studio regularly to kibitz; he spoke to doctors about the heart condition from which Stahr, like Thalberg, suffered, learning about the medications he would have taken in the 1930s and how
his moods and energy would have been affected by them and by his illness. Dressed in his old-time wardrobe, with all three buttons of his suit jackets closed, he liked to parade silently around Paramount with an inner sense of ownership. “I spent time just walking around the studio dressed in those three-piece suits, thinking, ‘This is all mine,’ ” he said.

  Kazan knew he would have to mold De Niro to fit the material: “Bobby has never played an executive, he’s never played an intellectual, he’s never played a lover. I had to find that side of him; it was unexplored territory.” He developed a novel technique to immerse his star in the character: having him don a suit and sit in an office, where he was besieged by phone calls, by interruptions from his “assistants” (played by actors), by manufactured crises to which he had to improvise responses and solutions. “I’ve impressed on Bobby that what he says is never a comment,” Kazan explained. “Whatever he says is an instruction which someone has to do something about.… I’ve made him feel that his life is at the mercy of his anteroom, that he’s a victim of the phone. I’ve now got him realizing what it means to be an executive.”

  De Niro ate it up. He adored working with Kazan. “He was an actor at one time,” he reminded a reporter from Rolling Stone. “He’s schooled. He’s—as far as I’m concerned, the best schooling.” And he appreciated the latitude that Kazan allowed him in finding and creating the character: “I sometimes see him as a parent who doesn’t quite approve of his children or what they’re doing,” he said. “He can’t relate to it, but he still loves them.”