by Shawn Levy
As on Taxi Driver, the producers had allowed a number of reporters to visit the set (this time with the proviso that they hold their stories until the film was actually released), and De Niro eluded them as long as possible and then gave them as little of his time as he could. “He didn’t say it out loud,” remembered Chris Hodenfield of Rolling Stone, “but he made it clear with his attitude that I was an annoyance to him by being there to interview him.” The thick air and looming sense of dread that enveloped Taxi Driver seemed almost like a carnival in comparison to the tenor of the New York, New York set—and this one was a musical (or, as Scorsese continually insisted, “a film with music”).
The darkness came shockingly to the surface late in the production, just around the time that, in real life, Scorsese’s affair with Minnelli was discovered by his wife. While filming a scene in which Doyle flew into a rage and caused his pregnant wife to go into labor, De Niro worked himself into such a frenzy that he wound up needing medical attention. “I thought it would be funny to show, out of complete rage, an insane absurdity, where you get so nutty that you become funny, hopping mad,” he said. “I saw that the roof of the car was low, and I hit it with my head, then I hit it with my hand.” It was a hell of a thing, he admitted: “Liza got hurt, and I think I hurt my hand.” The two of them, with Scorsese, raced from the studio to an emergency room. Drugs, adultery, hospital visits, miles of unusable film footage: New York, New York provided gossip pages with fodder for months. It would have to be a hell of a picture to make people forget all the whispers they’d heard.
But just as Scorsese let the film get away from him by turning it into a huge improvisatory exercise—“a $10 million home movie,” as he called it—so did De Niro focus so much on the details of playing the saxophone that he let the characterization of Jimmy Doyle suffer. “I really worked on it very hard,” he said of his saxophone playing. “But I wonder if I should have saved a little more energy for other things and just worried about what was going to be seen. I worked like hell on that thing.”
THERE WERE OTHER distractions as well.
In the early part of 1976, De Niro and Diahnne Abbott visited Rome and stayed at the famed Raphael Hotel near the Piazza Navona. Some weeks after returning home from the trip, she discovered that she was pregnant. In April, in a rented meeting hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on Central Park West, they were married in a nondenominational service attended by, among others, Scorsese, Sally Kirkland, Elia Kazan, Harvey Keitel, Shelley Winters, Julie Bovasso, Joseph Papp, John Hancock, Sam Spiegel, Jay Cocks, Verna Bloom, and Paul Schrader, who, looking around the room, had the thought, “Everybody there was somebody who had helped Bobby to become a different person.”
During the time he was shooting The Last Tycoon, De Niro rented a house in the Brentwood suburb of Los Angeles so that Diahnne Abbott and Drena, whom he had adopted, could join him there. “We would go to parties,” Abbott recalled, “and people wouldn’t be interested in me at all. They’d look at me as if to say ‘Who is this woman?’ When they found out I was Bobby’s wife, it was spooky to see how their attitudes would change.”
De Niro, barely cut out for family life, was learning to negotiate a household that was already populated with nine-year-old Drena and the menagerie of dogs and cats that Abbott seemed always to have on hand. He found that he needed extra space around him, literally, and when it became clear that they would stay in Hollywood awhile, they moved from the Brentwood rental to a Bel Air estate where he really did have a hideaway—an outbuilding where he practiced the saxophone, studied scripts, and retreated into the silence that was a key to his concentration.
Even then, he was out of sorts. Accustomed to being able to flit in and out of scenes in the New York social world, he was entirely inept at the sort of socializing that was part of Hollywood life, where nights out often meant visiting friends and colleagues in their homes rather than, as in New York, meeting up at atmospheric actors’ hangouts. Abbott loved to go out—she and De Niro were habitués of the Sunset Strip club On the Rox, where he liked to sit nursing Black Russians and watching the parade of celebrity flesh. But she also loved to entertain, which made her husband particularly ill at ease. “When De Niro is the host of a party,” wrote a New York Times reporter who dined at his Bel Air house, “it has no center, no focal point.”
They would invite the gang over—Scorsese and Cameron (whose pregnancy was just a month or two ahead of Abbott’s), Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader, fellow actors such as Keitel, Peter Boyle, and Kathi McGinnis, chums from New York such as Steven Prince. But De Niro would stand apart, watching with the same stillness with which he’d carried himself as a boy and an acting student, becoming slightly ruffled when anything resembling excessive exuberance bubbled up in the house. At one dinner party, Boyle cracked up the guests by mooning a roasted turkey that Abbott placed on the dining table, and De Niro responded with a sheepish “Hey, hey guys, hey, that’s too much.” The life of the party he wasn’t.
In October, huge with child, Abbott filmed a cameo appearance in New York, New York, playing a big-band singer performing a rendition of “Honeysuckle Rose,” a brief moment that she infused with grace and glamour—even though she was hiding her very pregnant belly behind the artfully draped folds of her dress. (Told months later that her condition wasn’t visible to the film’s audience, she confessed that she could see it, though that might have been because she was “loaded” on pot on the night of the film’s New York premiere.)
She went on to record the vocal track of the song at an LA studio in the presence of the film’s stars. “I was standing in the box while they were getting ready,” she remembered, “and I thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ Liza Minnelli was there recording, and I felt it was going to be so embarrassing. My husband was there too, and I don’t know if he thought I could sing. Liza was wonderful. She came into the box and said, ‘Relax, you’ll do all right.’ ”
On November 9, 1976, while the film was still shooting, the baby arrived at Cedars-Sinai Hospital: a boy whom they named Raphael, after the hotel in which he’d been conceived. De Niro was thirty-three, had an Oscar, was the magnetic center of the most talked-about movie of the year, was the star of a huge Hollywood production, and was already planning his next film, an epic story about the Vietnam War that would range from the mountains of western Pennsylvania to a prisoner-of-war camp on a fetid Southeast Asian river. He was married, and now he was a dad for the second time—once by adoption, once by blood. He had as full a life as he could ever have wished for.
And he had another iron in the fire: he was meeting a trainer regularly in a Los Angeles gym and taking boxing lessons. One way or another, he was determined to make a film about Jake LaMotta.
* * *
*1 Coincidentally, Simon had been involved a few years prior in the firing of Harvey Keitel in almost identical circumstances from The Sunshine Boys, in which he’d been cast, inaptly, in the part ultimately played by Richard Benjamin. Small world.
*2 A few years later, Simon performed the inadvertent penance of buying a pair of paintings that caught his eye in a New York gallery and that turned out to be the work of Robert De Niro Sr.
*3 There was a chilling footnote to the film’s release. In April 1976, a twenty-year-old Chicago man, Perry Susral, drove over to a convent at three in the morning and fired twenty-seven shots with a .22-caliber pistol at the building, harming no one but interrupting the sleep of the resident nuns, “who were too petrified to do anything except pray their rosaries,” according to police reports. Questioned, Susral explained that he was imitating Taxi Driver: “I liked the shootout scene.” A Chicago reporter tracked Scorsese down in Los Angeles, where he said, “It is all wrong. We never intended anything like that. If you look at the film, the whole thing is surrealism.” True, but it wouldn’t be the last time the filmmakers would have to answer such questions about their creation.
THERE WERE, OF COURSE, TWO ROBERT DE NIROS WITH public ca
reers. De Niro the actor was becoming famous—which wasn’t exactly the reason he had pursued an acting career to begin with, and certainly wasn’t as delicious as a daily dish as it may have seemed at first. He was determined to keep the celebrity in check insofar as he could. (And, to be honest, insofar as he chose: being famous had been a great way to meet girls.) But even as his own work became known and praised and celebrated around the world, the younger De Niro remained as filially loyal to and boastful of the elder as ever.
In 1972, when the senior De Niro was granted a residency at the famed Yaddo art colony near Saratoga Springs, New York, he was driven up there by his son, who managed to squeeze his father’s working materials and personal belongings into a sports car for the trip. Later on, when the younger De Niro became a magnet for news reporters and photographers, and maybe even art patrons, he made a point of showing up at his father’s opening receptions, bringing much-appreciated attention to the work on display. (Once he showed up carrying the infant Raphael on his body in a baby sling, creating an even greater sensation than if he’d merely slipped in and smiled at people.)
Naturally, the elder De Niro was pleased with the higher profile granted his work by his son’s reflected glory, but he was careful, too, to keep some space between himself and his art, on the one hand, and his son’s work and fame, on the other. In 1976, he published a chapbook of poetry, in an extremely limited edition, entitled A Fashionable Watering Place—ninety-six pages of verse (revealing the influence of French Symbolists, Anglo-American Modernists, and, inevitably, Greta Garbo) and drawings. At the beginning, where one might expect to find a dedication or some other note from the author, there was this: “These poems are by Robert DeNiro [sic], the painter, not to be confused with Robert DeNiro [sic], the actor, his son.”
It wasn’t a case of De Niro senior being jealous of or competitive with De Niro junior. There was real affection between them. Tom Mardirosian, a young actor newly arrived in New York at about the same time, knew the elder De Niro slightly from the artist’s teaching stints at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which Mardirosian had attended as an undergrad. He recognized the painter one day at the YMCA and was charmed to learn how excited the older man was to share stories of Bobby’s various successes, of which Mardirosian, like every other young actor on earth, was well aware.
Father and son saw each other regularly when they were in the same city. Usually that meant New York, but when Bobby started to spend more time in Hollywood, his father would visit him there (although he confessed to being overwhelmed by the tumult of Movieland socializing: “I ran to San Francisco to avoid the New Year’s Eve parties”). And Bobby’s paternal grandmother, Helen, was also part of the ménage, staying with her grandson and his family frequently after being widowed in 1976. (Young Raphael would later complain, as kids do, of having to sometimes share a room with his great-grandmother, only to have it explained to him by his father how lucky he was to be able to have visits from her; De Niro would always, but always, be loyal to his family and his oldest friends.) When Bobby acquired a beach house in Montauk, on the tip of Long Island, he petitioned the local council to allow him to build a studio on the property so that his dad could use the house as a place to retreat and paint.
For a while, the elder De Niro enjoyed the limelight that accrued to him through his son’s success (his ex-wife, on the other hand, never did). But he admitted that there were limits to his appreciation. “I don’t really like to talk about Bobby too much because he’s very careful in talking about himself,” he told one inquiring reporter. With another, he shared the view that his son’s fame was a mixed blessing: “It creates a certain interest. But it can overshadow you. Anyway, the people he and I relate to are in two different worlds.” Finally, he seemed happiest when he had nothing to do with it: “At first I was very excited about all the publicity Bobby was getting, but now we’re kind of appalled by it. One of the nice things about a trip I took recently to Santa Cruz was to find students sketching from paintings I had done over 25 years ago, long before Hollywood became such a part of our life.”
He was content to teach (throughout New York, as well as at various art schools and universities around the country), to live his life according to his own eccentric whims, and to make his art his way. His son might have to work within a market-driven field of expression, but the elder De Niro was never so constrained.
IF New York, New York had turned into a kamikaze mission for Martin Scorsese, 1900 had become the Hundred Years’ War for Bernardo Bertolucci. The film wrapped in May 1975, after nearly a year of production, and the director was still editing it right up until the spring of 1976, when he finally brought it to the Cannes Film Festival in a cut that ran five hours and thirty minutes.
After Bertolucci trimmed twenty minutes, 1900 was released into several European markets as a two-part film. The sheer length of it overwhelmed audiences. Though business for part one was solid, part two saw a decline of more than 50 percent in ticket sales, meaning that fewer than half the people who saw the first part bothered with the second. With American distribution looming as one of the few remaining avenues to recoup costs that had metastasized from $3 million to more than $8 million, Bertolucci cut the film down to four and a half hours, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy Paramount Pictures, which had contracted to pay him $1.75 million on the condition that he deliver a film of no more than three hours and fifteen minutes.
A battle was waged in studio offices and in the press—dozens of film critics and journalists, even those who weren’t enamored of the movie they’d seen at Cannes, signed an open letter protesting such extensive cutting. Paramount finally agreed to distribute a cut of four hours and five minutes for a reduced sum. They debuted this version at the New York Film Festival in October 1977, and it moved into theaters a few weeks later, accompanied by mixed-to-hostile reviews.
THE WORLD DIDN’T receive New York, New York all that much better. United Artists banged the drum heroically, getting De Niro onto the covers of New York and Newsweek on the very same day, with a Rolling Stone cover and a Time feature appearing not long afterward. Predictably, all of these pieces painted De Niro as an obsessive, reclusive, recalcitrant genius willing to go to extraordinary lengths to create verisimilitude in his characterizations but equally stinting in personal conversation and public revelation of private emotions, thoughts, and information. Minnelli and Scorsese were trotted out for the press as well, albeit far more cautiously, as rumors of their on-set romance had circulated widely (“Do you think there’s going to be a lot of that kind of shit?” a concerned Scorsese asked a Village Voice reporter who inquired about their affair).
On June 21, the film had its Manhattan premiere in a benefit for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and patrons who paid $100 (in addition to contributing at least $1,000 annually) were invited to a post-screening dinner party at the Rainbow Room, atop Rockefeller Center, and an after-party at Studio 54. As with 1900, what they saw was a lengthy but compromised film. At just over two and a half hours, New York, New York was shorter than Scorsese’s ideal version of the material by about ten minutes—more or less the length of the “Happy Endings” production number, which had been shot at the outset of the production as a mark of its bona fides and then cut at the last minute as being out of tenor with the film that, gropingly, Scorsese and his collaborators had created.
The day after the benefit, the film opened to paying audiences. It didn’t help at all that New York, New York followed Star Wars into theaters by four weeks. Maybe movie audiences never would have wanted what Scorsese had given them—a dark and furtive musical filled with emotional trauma and feel-bad sentiment. But they certainly weren’t buying it in the summer of Luke Skywalker. And the movie press wasn’t much kinder.
Like almost everything else in New York, New York, De Niro’s Jimmy Doyle is too much, too much. Right from the get-go, with his garish shirt and white slacks and saddle shoes and Juicy Fruit gum, he’s like a snappe
d power cable whipping around menacingly and spitting out deadly sparks—a spectacle, for sure, but never warm or inviting, and in the main not sympathetic. In the opening scene, he throws himself again and again at the reluctant Francine Evans like a dog dropping a ball at the feet of a master who refuses to throw it. He tries smooth talk, charm, humor, frankness, practical reasoning, and even bare-assed honesty—“Do I look like a gentleman in this shirt and these pants?” And it’s all bootless. She says no again and again, and she means it, even when she smiles on him and gives him a hint that there may be a yes in their future. You want to like him—his energy is fun, his patter is amusing, his smile is, as ever, a killer-diller—but he’s exhausting.
As he woos her, he reveals even more tools. He can play the sax, of course, and he regards her with big, inviting eyes as he does so. When she finally succumbs, he smothers her in a wave of kisses that total more in number than all the screen kisses De Niro had engaged in up to that point combined. He expresses his affection as a suffocating need to control her. And his marriage proposal consists of a throwaway request and then a melodramatic mock suicide, lying behind the wheels of a taxi on a snowy road and imploring the driver to back up over him rather than have to endure her indecision.
Jimmy Doyle is like Johnny Boy with musical talent and a little less sociopathy, a creature of impulse and rock-headed certitude who will listen only to himself, even when he’s demonstrably doing harm. He’s summed up beautifully by the bandleader Frankie Hart (George Auld) in conversation with Francine: “He’s not only good, baby; he’s a bitch. He blows a barrelful of tenor. But he’s some kind of a pain in the ass.”
