De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  He’s also an egoist who can’t get comfortable with his wife’s professional success or, when she breaks it to him, the news that she’s having a baby. Learning he’ll soon be a father, he stiffens and recedes into shadows, and when their professional trajectories split—she becomes a recording star, while he continues to push into new musical forms with his more adventuresome colleagues—the baby becomes the focus of his resentment, an external thing that he can point to as the cause of his frustration rather than seeking the root of the problem in himself. During an explosive argument in his car that looks like a genuine fight, Jimmy finally shouts, “Did I tell you to have that … that … goddamn baby?” It’s a savage indictment—of himself, really—that no subsequent words or deeds will ever be able to erase.

  Like Francine, we’re taken with and exhausted by Jimmy in equal measure, and we get frustrated with his ceaseless self-concern, to the point of wanting to be done with him for good. Even when the baby arrives—the birth triggered by that final violent argument—he cannot rouse an affectionate, fatherly response: “It’s a him?” he asks, as if his child is an extraterrestrial. And when Francine becomes a movie star as well as a singing star, he can’t resist taking little digs at her—with a smile on his face—for the sorts of films she makes, referring to “Happy Endings” as “Sappy Endings” just to let her know he feels superior to her and her work.

  The film is clearly not intended to be a traditional love story, but the repeated inhumanity of the central character becomes punishing to watch, in part because De Niro is so committed to delivering it raw; none of Scorsese’s often beautiful film craft—the sets, the costumes, the fluent camera work and editing—can make it go down smoothly. There’s one beautifully sweet touch, though, provided by the pregnant Diahnne Abbott, who graces her sole scene with the languid air of Billie Holiday and a richly ironic line of dialogue. Presumably intimate with Jimmy, who’s avoiding her clumsily because Francine is in the nightclub in which they’re performing, she lifts an eyebrow and asks him, “Family night?” If only the rest of the film were so amusing and light.

  PERHAPS BECAUSE OF the mountain of ballyhoo the film accrued during its production, critics were poised to slash at it. And when it turned out to be at best a mixed success, the reviews were accordingly harsh, perhaps overly so. In the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann referred to New York, New York as “one more of the current avalanche of disappointing US films,” declaring it “occasionally repellent but mostly tedious and trite.” Vincent Canby in the New York Times dismissed the film as “nervy and smug.” Christopher Porterfield in Time accused the film of seeking “a dividend of unearned nostalgia,” and Penelope Gilliatt’s review in the New Yorker was simply entitled “Ho Hum, Ho Hum.”

  That said, De Niro was largely unscathed. Although Kauffmann declared him “a nuisance,” Gilliatt called his work “the best thing about the film,” praising his performance as “firm, rapid.” In Newsweek, Jack Kroll agreed: “De Niro is astonishing, funny, crazy, angry, hurt, musical, and manly.” But even in admiration, the critics cited flaws: Porterfield, commending De Niro, explains that “the reason such a character, as written, should interest us remains as elusive as the Lost Chord,” while Canby compared De Niro to “a man running to catch a train, only to pass right by it.”

  To make the torture complete for Scorsese, New York, New York bombed at the box office, grossing less than $14 million. After a string of critical hits and a pair of commercial successes, the director felt slapped. The life he had been building for himself had crumbled to dust: after discovering the affair with Minnelli, Julia Cameron had moved out with their baby daughter, Domenica; he had been replaced as director of the Minnelli stage play by old pro Gower Champion; and his use of cocaine and pills was escalating perilously, particularly once he took Robbie Robertson, guitarist of The Band, as his Mulholland Drive housemate and began to live in a twilight world between rock-and-roll and the movies. His situation, professional and personal, caused him to slip into a slough of guilt, shame, and despair: “For a time after New York, New York I had really been thinking of going to live in Italy and making documentary pictures on the lives of saints for the rest of my life.” He would, in fact, find his penance in the movies, but saints wouldn’t have anything to do with it.

  DE NIRO, in contrast, skated on virtually unharmed by the critical and commercial failure of three straight films. Ironically, his stock had actually risen. In the wake of The Last Tycoon, 1900, and New York, New York, he was esteemed as much as ever, if not more, for demonstrating a desire to stretch himself, to test his abilities, to avoid repetition, to seek opportunities to work with the best directors. His next project was yet another important step in that vein.

  Even though he had managed to avoid conscription during the 1960s, the Vietnam War hovered over De Niro’s early career like an evil spell. In Greetings, he and his friends were intent on dodging the draft; in Hi, Mom! he was either a Vietnam veteran or someone who wanted for obscure reasons to pass as one; Bruce Pearson of Bang the Drum Slowly was a Vietnam veteran; Mean Streets included a scene in which a returning vet was feted by Johnny Boy and company; and Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle had, of course, been honorably discharged from the Marines. But none of those films was truly a “Vietnam movie” of the sort that Hollywood became interested in making a few years after the fall of Saigon.

  In the late 1970s, with the shooting war and the danger to American lives over, Hollywood sifted through the war in a number of significant films. In 1975, Francis Coppola chose to follow his triumphs of the two Godfather films and The Conversation with Apocalypse Now, a free adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness co-written with Hollywood’s favorite right-wing gun nut, John Milius. The film centers on a Special Forces officer sent upriver from Vietnam into Cambodia to kill an American colonel who has gone rogue. Coppola had wanted to make the film for years; the first drafts were written as early as 1969. With his standing in the industry unimaginably high (and, crucially, the shooting war and the danger to American lives over), he would be able to do it. In late 1975 he sent De Niro the script in the hope that he’d be interested in the role of the assassin, Captain Benjamin Willard. Coppola had already courted Steve McQueen, Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson, and Al Pacino for the part; like them, De Niro passed.*1

  Hollywood had seemed assiduously determined not to mention the war while it was being fought—it was glanced on in some youth culture movies, it was explored in a few documentaries (including the controversial Oscar-winner Hearts and Minds), and it was celebrated as a necessary and patriotic enterprise in John Wayne’s 1968 flop The Green Berets. Now, though, the culture seemed ready to grapple with the conflict, as well as its contradictions, cost, and aftermath, in the medium of feature films, and Hollywood’s famously liberal creative community was happy to do the job. By the time Coppola was preparing to go off to the Philippines to make his movie, there were several Vietnam films in the works. Hal Ashby was making a film about veterans adjusting to life back in the States that would eventually be called Coming Home; Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, with a completely different spin on the experience of veterans, was being made by Karel Reisz;*2 Sidney Furie would soon be at work on The Boys in Company C, which would follow a Marine unit from basic training through to Vietnam; and no less than Burt Lancaster was set to appear in Go Tell the Spartans, which dealt with the earliest phases of American involvement in Southeast Asia.

  As he continued with his insanely busy schedule and kept his eye on the Jake LaMotta film that he was determined to make, De Niro was offered a role in yet another Vietnam movie, which was written and would be directed by Michael Cimino. It was a big, sprawling film, following a group of steelworkers from their tiny western Pennsylvania hometown, with its old-time macho ways, to the unimaginable horror show of the war, during which three of them would be taken prisoner by the Viet Cong and forced to play Russian roulette against each other, and finally back home to the war’s haunting aftermath.
Cimino, who had written Clint Eastwood’s Magnum Force, the second of the Dirty Harry series, and written and directed Eastwood and Jeff Bridges in the comic thriller Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, had a military background—he’d served six months as an Army medic in the early 1960s. But the film he wanted to make wasn’t about the war so much as it was about the idea of the war and its impact, particularly on those who were touched immediately by it: young men who went into service under muddled assumptions and the friends and loved ones they left behind and, sometimes even more harrowingly, came home to.

  The film was called The Deer Hunter, for a favored recreational pastime of its protagonists, and De Niro was asked to consider the role of Michael Vronsky, the most charismatic, exacting, and quietly heroic of the characters, a man of iron principles, determination, and inchoate, bottled-up emotions. He liked the script, particularly its focus on the ordinary lives of ordinary men thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and he was pleased to know that it would be shot on location in Pennsylvania and Thailand, which was subbing for Vietnam. Still, his initial response was nevertheless to beg off, explaining that Raging Bull was his focus. But neither that script nor his preferred director, Martin Scorsese, was in good enough shape to start work on that film, and so he agreed to go to war with Cimino.

  It would in some ways be a homey shoot. At De Niro’s suggestion, Cimino went on to cast a number of New York actors in key roles even though they didn’t have much screen history: Christopher Walken and John Savage as Vronsky’s fellow enlistees, Nick and Steven; Meryl Streep as the girl whom Vronsky loves but who has eyes only for Nick; and Streep’s real-life beau, John Cazale, as Stan, one of the steelworking gang who doesn’t enlist.*3 Cazale, who had appeared so memorably as Fredo Corleone in the Godfather films and the gunman Sal in Dog Day Afternoon, was being treated for stomach cancer and was considered too high a risk to cast. But De Niro made it possible for him to appear by offering a portion of his own salary to pay for insurance against the possibility that Cazale couldn’t fulfill his part. Cazale did, in fact, finish the production, but he didn’t live to see the film released or to make another picture. He died at age forty-two, a celebrated performer—and a footnote in film history as a man who made only five films (the two Godfather films, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, and Deer Hunter), all of which were nominated for Oscars as Best Picture.

  CAZALE APPEARED ONLY in the Pennsylvania parts of the film, which were shot in a number of small towns in the region and in the mountains of the Cascade Range in Washington state. The town in the film, Clairton, was a composite of some eight hardscrabble steel towns in four states along the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers (not including, ironically, the actual Clairton, Pennsylvania). Before the production, De Niro, almost predictably, made his way to Mingo Junction, Ohio, just south of Steubenville, where he spent weeks “soaking up the environment. I talked to the mill workers, drank and ate with them, played pool … I studied how steelworkers talk and dress, how they relate to their job, their towns and their friends.” He sought permission to put in a shift in the inferno of their workplace, but none of the mills would permit him (later, to shoot sequences on the factory floor, he and his fellow cast members were filmed among actual mill workers in asbestos suits and hoods within shouting distance of furnaces stoked to 3,000 degrees).

  Also predictably, he did other sorts of research: reading about deer hunting, the war, the procedures of Special Forces, and the experiences of veterans, especially POWs. He spoke at some length with several former prisoners of war, tape-recording their testimony so he could study it. He put together lists of the things he would have as a hunter and sought ways to personalize his military uniform with graffiti on the helmet and custom-made patches. He immersed himself in military jargon and in the linguistic peculiarities of the Allegheny region: gum bands instead of rubber bands, y’uns instead of you all, and such mild oaths as jagoff and jagging around. He learned the words to Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” for a barroom sequence and wrote choreographic notes to himself about how he wanted to move as the song played. During the homefront portions of the film, he lodged in a Holiday Inn in Pittsburgh and remained simultaneously visible and invisible as he devoted himself to the weeks of shooting. A Time reporter watched him pass through a lobby full of college students unnoticed, even though he was at that very moment on the covers of New York and Newsweek (“De Niro does not look like De Niro,” the article noted).

  It was a long shoot—Cimino was sufficiently obsessive about his vision for the film that, for instance, he had his crew turn summertime Mingo Junction into a winter scene by stripping the trees of their leaves, just one of the gestures that would lead the film’s budget to balloon from $8 to nearly $13 million. And the stateside portion was by far the easiest. When the crew went to western Thailand to shoot the Vietnam sequences along the Khwae Yai River—the famed River Kwai of the Oscar-winning film’s title—they were hit with almost the same nightmares of logistics, scarcity, and bad weather that had been plaguing Coppola’s Apocalypse Now production in the Philippines for more than a year. The two months of work called for in the original production schedule extended to nearly double that, and a mood of gloom struck the cast and crew. “Everybody who was going to Thailand was worrying about that,” De Niro said of the protracted shoot. “They heard about the monsoons and the jungle and being forced to shut down the filming. Subconsciously, it affected people. I know it did me. I said, ‘I’m going to get stuck here.’ ”

  He distracted himself by indulging in the local culture, sampling opium, peeking in on Thailand’s infamous Patpong red light district, dining on dishes that he’d never tried before. But he maintained strict fitness, both to keep himself honed for the grueling scenes of combat, imprisonment, and escape and as part of his ongoing effort to make Raging Bull, which still didn’t have a script or a bankroll. Along with Savage and Walken, he did his own stunts. Some were simple, at least on paper, such as shouting abuse at their captors or even at one another to keep themselves focused on survival, particularly as they were forced into games of Russian roulette. But even small things proved rigorous in the execution. “It’s very hard to sustain that kind of intensity,” De Niro recalled. “I mean, we were really slapping each other; you sort of get worked up into a frenzy. It’s a very difficult thing to do. It took a long time.” Walken’s character was repeatedly slapped by one of his captors, and the sequence required take after take, pushing him beyond mere acting. As Walken recalled, “When somebody belts you 50 times, you don’t have to fake a reaction. You don’t have trouble shaking.”

  It was a genuine trial. “We spent a month in that river,” De Niro remembered, and Cimino put the cast through real agonies. “The circumstances were genuine,” Walken said. “We were up to here in water, it was hot, and we’d been doing it a long time. There were mosquitoes. There were rats.”

  And there was a near catastrophe. As part of their escape from the POW camp, the characters played by De Niro and Savage were to be lifted off a bridge by a passing helicopter that they’d managed to signal for help. Cimino and his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, were inside the helicopter, along with a pilot whom the Hungarian-born Zsigmond remembered “spoke very bad English.” (“Perhaps that helped,” he said rosily afterward. “Perhaps it gave an aura of confusion and frustration to the scene?”) Whether as a result of a language barrier, weather conditions, or the sheer scale of the setting in which he had to operate, the pilot didn’t want to bring the craft too low, but he somehow got the runners of the helicopter caught in the cables from which the bridge was suspended.

  “Without knowing it,” De Niro remembered, “the pilot lifted the whole bridge and twisted it around while John Savage and I were hanging from it.… I looked down and shouted ‘Drop!’ and we just dropped. We came up out of the water and saw one of the stunt guys standing on the bridge and lifting the cable off the runner of the helicopter. I thought that was it. I thought the he
licopter would drop down on us.” The irony, he reflected later, was that he was risking his life for no demonstrable purpose: “The thing is, sometimes the stunts don’t even look like anything on film. Or the shot isn’t even used. You could die doing one of those stunts, and when people look at it, they don’t even know how dangerous it was.” It was his first true action role, and he had to at least consider that some aspects of verisimilitude weren’t worth pursuing.

  THE PRODUCTION WRAPPED in early 1978, and Cimino went into an editing process that, like Bertolucci’s on 1900 and Scorsese’s on New York, New York, was not only protracted in itself but guaranteed to produce a protracted film. When he finally delivered a cut to Universal Pictures, which had paid for it, executives were chagrined to see that the opening sequences—the steel mills and bars and bowling alleys, a wedding and a hunting trip—lasted well over an hour. Audiences would have to sit through more than half the length of a standard feature film before the truly harrowing Vietnam sequences, the stuff they could sell, began. The whole picture ran beyond three hours, and although the studio wanted him to trim as much as an hour, Cimino was adamant that he needed every minute of it. There was a brief war between the director and the executives—at one point Cimino threatened to “kidnap” the negative of the film from the editing rooms. At great pains, he managed to put together a compromise edit of two hours and forty minutes, and, perversely, the studio didn’t like the result. “We had every right to cut it,” said Universal production boss Ned Tanen. “Instead, when the director took 20 minutes out, we told him to put it back.”

  But there were other pressures. Cimino and Universal knew that Francis Coppola was editing Apocalypse Now after almost a decade of development and production, and they felt that they had to beat that film into theaters or risk failure by comparison. What was more, the thinking around the studio was that The Deer Hunter, with its impressive length and punishing emotions, would need boosts from critics and awards to have a chance of succeeding in ticket-buying America. They decided to release the film in two stages: first, a one-week, nine-screening, reserved-seat engagement in New York at the end of the year, to qualify the film for Academy Award consideration, then a normal if slow rollout in February, just after Oscar nominations were announced. The unusual strategy prompted wags to start referring to The Deer Hunter as “Apocalypse First” and to encourage some of the most egoistic tendencies in Cimino, who told the New York Times that Coppola had visited his New York hotel suite to declare, “You beat me, baby.” And his ego was, if anything, bolstered by the response the film got from critics and audiences.