De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  PERHAPS BECAUSE he had been raised an only child, De Niro always seemed most at home playing loners. The only clubbish fellows in his canon to this point—Bruce Pearson and Johnny Boy Civello—stood markedly apart from their peers through the happenstance of health, in the former’s case, and temperament, in the latter’s. No character that De Niro had ever played was truly part of a crowd, laddish, one of the boys.

  Michael Vronsky, though, is at least partly that sort of fellow, one of a close-knit group of friends who do virtually everything together: work, hunt, drink, chase girls. It’s a small town they live in, which partly explains it, and there’s a shared ethnic identity, which they all take seriously (you could watch a hundred Slavic movies and not hear as many cries of “Na zdorovie!” as The Deer Hunter squeezes into three hours). But there’s an anxious, clutching quality to their camaraderie: they need the reassurance of one another. Even Michael, the “weirdo” with the strange ideas, is part of a team, shaking hands with all of his work colleagues and even slapping their backs while they shower. For the first time in his acting career, De Niro felt truly knit into an ensemble.

  Of course, top-billed and famous and, in truth, the title character, De Niro played a man who truly is first among equals. Michael’s car, his house, his philosophy of hunting, his romantic longing, his military activity, his escape plan, his efforts to keep his friends alive, his determination to see his promises kept, his ferocious temper, his post-traumatic shock: it’s all the centerpiece of the film. The picture is filled with fine acting, and Streep, Walken, and Cazale are especially memorable. But De Niro is in almost every sequence, and your gaze is drawn his way even when he’s in a crowd. It’s impossible to conceive of the film without him.

  Fascinatingly, De Niro moves between his three chief co-stars in an embodiment of Michael’s personality. With Streep’s Linda he’s courtly and moony, staring longingly, making a drunken pass, and watching with stoic reserve as she lights up around Walken’s Nick. With Nick he’s intimate and fraternal, going so far as to declare the unique sanctity of the bond he feels with him (and, ultimately, telling him explicitly that he loves him). With Cazale’s Stan he’s judgmental, scolding, and short-fused, and, in a gesture of hostility that threatens to rip apart the communal band, even dangerously violent.

  There’s a happy Michael who shoots pool as if he’s fencing with his cue stick, sings along to the jukebox, leaps over cars, bear-hugs his buddies, and races naked through the wet, cold night in a drunken ritual of purification before the hunt. But mainly there’s the Michael of stern ethics, opaque dicta, and calculated action. His philosophy that a deer must be brought down with a single shot, his impeccable preparation for the hunt, his strong belief that the only way to do things is the right way define him and keep him alive and semi-sane, and all of them are embodied by De Niro with a steely certitude.

  Michael has weaknesses: Linda, of course, who continues to move him and serve as a shining star even though she belongs to his best friend; his war wound, particularly his right eye, which he soothes by pressing the heel of his hand to it; his post-combat anxiety, which he can quell only by crouching in what’s almost a combat posture, with his back to a wall; and his short fuse when it comes to Stan, who despite his sloppiness, neurosis, and selfishness is an integral member of the makeshift family.

  But chiefly he is a figure of strength: landing a massive buck with a single shot, just as he prefers; caught up so ferociously in battle that he doesn’t recognize Nick and Steven when they stumble upon him; slamming the table in a firestorm of rage as he rouses to turn the table on his captors (“You’re gonna die, you motherfucker!” he shouts in an otherworldly burst of fury. “You’re gonna die!”); offering himself on the altar of blood sacrifice when Nick, dazed by heroin and his own trauma, tries to communicate with him through the medium of Russian roulette. De Niro was trimming his physique and learning boxing to play Jake LaMotta while shooting The Deer Hunter, and the single-minded purpose of that formidable undertaking informs his work as Michael.

  In contrast to De Niro’s steeliness and muscularity, Walken’s Nick, so slender and delicate you can’t imagine him surviving basic training, is a sympathetic and gentle spirit, gliding stylishly on the dance floor, insisting on fair treatment for Stan when he needs to borrow Michael’s boots to hunt (“What’s wrong wit’chou?” he asks Michael defiantly), describing his love of the wilderness in simple, poetic terms. He’s got mettle in him; unlike Steven, he keeps his horror under wraps when awaiting his turn at the Russian roulette table. Ultimately, though, after months of putting a needle in his arm and a gun to his head, he’s drained, barbed, ugly. Yet even then, at the climax of the film, with him spitting in death’s eye yet again after who knows how many times, a glow slowly enters his eyes, an affection, a love. De Niro has the more powerful performance, but Walken’s is by considerable measure the more lyrical.

  Streep is wonderful in what amounts to, like Walken’s, a coming-out role: pretty and simple and sad and giddy and earnest and vulnerable and grateful and mournful. Linda is infectiously happy dancing with Nick at the wedding and tumbling tipsily around the bowling alley. She’s stoic to the point of grimness when dealing with her boozy, violent father. And she’s incredibly touching when she offers her body to Michael. “Can’t we just comfort each other?” she asks him, but he demurs, mumbling, “I feel a lot of distance; I feel far away.” The Russian roulette is what people remember, but Michael’s initial rejection of Linda may be the most hurtful moment in the film.

  One last note worth remembering: Cazale, in his final role before succumbing to cancer, brings a remarkable frankness and lack of vanity to the role of a small-town Romeo without the inner resources to hunt properly or serve his country. Stan is something of a clown and, with his half-cocked pistol, a danger to himself and his chums; he deserves some of the scorn Michael heaps on him. But Cazale finds humanity and even nobility in Stan. In a remarkable moment—one the studio surely would have trimmed if they’d gotten their way with the film—he stares at himself in a car window before the wedding, fixing his hair and his tux and finally deeming himself, as he has just dubbed the bridesmaids, “beautiful.” It’s impossible to imagine the brutal, self-absorbed Michael or even the sweet-natured, ethereal Nick engaged in so bare a moment of self-regard.

  THE DEER HUNTER gave rise to violent debate between those who felt it bore a muddled streak of jingoism, those who read condescension into its treatment of middle America, and those—by far the largest cadre of critics—who saw its depiction of the Vietnamese as crude, cartoonish, and even racist.

  But nobody in any camp could deny the power of its impact. “It shoves the audience into hell and leaves it stranded without a map,” said Time. “This movie has qualities that we almost never see anymore.…[It] leaves us exhausted and fully satisfied,” said New York. “A film of great courage and overwhelming emotional power,” said Newsweek.

  And De Niro was, once again, praised to the heavens. “De Niro’s acting is perhaps his purest yet … terrifying … poignant and gentle,” said Jack Kroll in Newsweek. David Denby in New York wrote that he “establishes the singularity and strength of Michael through a hundred shadings of irony, mockery and courtly reserve.” Even Pauline Kael, starting to turn on De Niro after a long period of unreserved kudos, found power in what she saw as his failings: “He’s lean, wiry, strong. Physically, he’s everything that one wants the hero to be. (The only thing that’s unheroic about him is that he’s still using the cretinous grin that he developed for Bang the Drum Slowly.) … We have come to expect a lot from De Niro: miracles. And he delivers them—he brings a bronze statue almost to life.”

  In December, after its Oscar-qualifying run had finished, The Deer Hunter was named best English-language film by the New York Film Critics’ Circle after three rounds of balloting and against such other candidates as Days of Heaven, An Unmarried Woman, Coming Home, Interiors, and Who’ll Stop the Rain? (De Niro finished third in th
e Best Actor balloting behind Gary Busey for The Buddy Holly Story and the winner, Jon Voight for Coming Home.) In February, just before its proper release, it was the leader in the Oscar race, landing nine nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Actor (De Niro), Best Supporting Actress (Streep), and Best Supporting Actor (Walken). (De Niro responded to the news of his nomination with a bland statement issued by a publicist, but his mother spoke up for him, uncharacteristically, in People magazine: “I’m sure he cares that he was nominated,” she said, “I don’t think there’s much competition.”) It wasn’t just the critics; moviegoers were drawn powerfully to the film, and it grossed nearly $50 million, an impressive sum considering its length and darkness.

  Added together with the eight nominations for Coming Home, the success of The Deer Hunter ensured that the talk around the Oscars would be dominated by Vietnam War themes. A blowback was starting to be heard against Cimino’s film, with claims that it distorted the facts of the war, that it demonized the Vietnamese, that it was anti-American or somehow cruelly patronizing of the ordinary people it depicted. Cimino had always argued that the film wasn’t meant to be taken literally—“it’s not realistic, it’s surrealistic.” Coming Home star Jane Fonda, who of course had her own complex history with Vietnam, the war, and American veterans, denounced The Deer Hunter as racist and actively campaigned against the film. “I hope it doesn’t win,” she told a Los Angeles newspaper. “I haven’t seen it—I’m afraid to. My friends told me about it, though, and I just think it’s amazing that good people can see the movie and not even consider the racism.” As the awards approached, the critique of The Deer Hunter began to get louder; pickets were planned for Oscar night.

  But the film continued to rack up accolades within the industry: a Golden Globe as Best Picture, and top prizes from the Directors Guild and American Cinema Editors. At the Academy Awards, no less a personage than John Wayne, gaunt from his second significant struggle with cancer, was called upon to open the evening’s final envelope, in what would be his last-ever appearance on a telecast of the Oscars. Inside was the name The Deer Hunter. The film won five prizes altogether, including Best Director and Best Supporting Actor; both Cimino and Christopher Walken took time to thank De Niro in their acceptance speeches.

  De Niro wouldn’t get to make a speech of his own, however. Along with Warren Beatty (Heaven Can Wait), Gary Busey (The Buddy Holly Story), and Laurence Olivier (The Boys from Brazil), he watched as Jon Voight took the Best Actor trophy for Coming Home, duplicating the feat of his co-star, Fonda. Backstage, Fonda continued to rail against The Deer Hunter to the assembled journalists as Cimino, with his two Oscars, was led into the press area. Fonda chose not to sour the evening with debate, leaving Cimino once again to defend and explain a film that had just won the top prize in American cinema. “We’re not trying to rewrite history,” he said, “nor should we. We’re moviemakers. We’re not doing newsreels; that’s what movies are about.”

  Besides, he had his mind on his next film, which looked to be even bigger, an epic based on an extraordinary episode of civil strife—indeed, near civil war—that had occurred in the American West. United Artists had contracted to spend nearly $8 million to produce the picture, which at the time was known by the name of the conflict it depicted, the Johnson County War. Eventually Cimino would entitle it Heaven’s Gate. And he didn’t offer De Niro a part in it, because after almost five years of development, Raging Bull was finally a go.

  * * *

  *1 The role came down to a choice between Nick Nolte and Harvey Keitel, and the latter got it, but not for long: during production, he quarreled sufficiently with Coppola that he was replaced by Martin Sheen, and all of his footage was reshot.

  *2 And would star Nick Nolte.

  *3 At least one unnamed crew member told a national magazine that De Niro had, in fact, pulled rank on Cimino and cast many of these key roles himself.

  Circa 1970, the many moods of a Noisy Passenger (New York Public Library).

  Prodigy: Robert De Niro Sr. seated with Josef Albers and standing with Hans Hofmann (author’s collection).

  Kid actor: nineteen years old, with a crewcut, in The Wedding Party, filmed in 1963 (Photofest).

  Neighborhood guys: with Harvey Keitel on the set of Mean Streets (MPTV).

  Film geek: Martin Scorsese at NYU (Photofest).

  Men of respect: with Francis Ford Coppola on the set of The Godfather, Part II (Photofest).

  The taste of victory: celebrating his Godfather II Oscar while filming 1900 in Italy (author’s collection).

  “I’ll work anytime, anywhere.” (author’s collection).

  Brain trust: with Martin Scorsese on the set of Taxi Driver (Kobal).

  Old Hollywood: with Jeanne Moreau and Elia Kazan on the set of The Last Tycoon (Kobal).

  Family man: with Diahnne Abbott on the Mike Douglas Show (Photofest); and with Drena De Niro, Jack Nicholson, and Anjelica Huston at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards dinner (Getty).

  Beauty and the beasts: with Jake LaMotta and Meryl Streep (ImageCollect).

  Many happy returns: celebrating his birthday on the set of The Deer Hunter with Michael Cimino (in sunglasses) (Photofest).

  The two Jakes: before and after his weight gain in Raging Bull (Kobal).

  AFTER THE BARRAGE OF PRESS FOR NEW YORK, NEW YORK, De Niro wouldn’t consent to a significant interview with a journalist for some four years. But on March 9, 1981, just three weeks before the Academy Awards for 1980’s films would be handed out, he sat patiently and answered hours of questions about his work at great, careful length. His interrogators weren’t members of the film press, however. They were attorneys representing Joseph LaMotta, brother of the boxer Jake, who was suing De Niro, Scorsese, and the Chartoff-Winkler production company over the way he was depicted in Raging Bull.

  De Niro had finally, against significant obstacles, managed to realize his dream of seeing Jake LaMotta’s story to the screen, inspiring Scorsese to create a film even more potent than Taxi Driver and delivering a performance that was recognized as an all-time classic the moment it appeared. But in the arduous process of wrenching a filmic narrative out of LaMotta’s painful story, liberties were taken, corners were cut, and mistakes were made. Joey LaMotta had a legitimate beef and his lawsuit had merit, and all De Niro could do throughout his hours of legal deposition was explain how the film came to be and express regret for an unpleasant legal situation he could only bring himself to refer to as “this.”

  RAGING BULL HAD its genesis more than a decade earlier, when Jake LaMotta, his childhood friend Pete Savage (né Pete Petrella), and journalist Joseph Carter collaborated on the book of the same name, with an eye toward making it into a film. Savage was already something of a moviemaker, having written, produced, and directed about a half dozen independent films, including three—The Runaways (1965) and Cauliflower Cupids and House in Naples (both 1970)—that featured LaMotta in key acting roles.

  As soon as the book appeared, Savage knocked together a screenplay and spent a few years trying to get somebody interested in making it. In 1974, when De Niro was still bouncing back and forth between the Italian set of 1900 and New York, where he was incubating new film projects, usually with Scorsese, Savage got a copy of the book and the script to him.

  De Niro had no interest in the script, but the book genuinely compelled him. Written in the first person, but in an engaging combination of crude street talk and thoughtful reflection, Raging Bull was an astonishingly frank and disturbing account of a deeply flawed man’s emotions, struggles, attitudes, and deeds.

  LaMotta had been one of a generation of Italian American champion and near-champion boxers that included the likes of Rocky Marciano, Rocky Graziano, Two-Ton Tony Galento, Tony Janiro, and Carmen Basilio, among many others. He was a street kid—born in Philadelphia, raised in the Bronx—who was in trouble with the law from a young age and first learned the rudiments of
boxing in reform school. Billed as “The Bronx Bull” and “The Raging Bull,” he was known for an ability to take a beating from opponents and keep charging forward. He held the world middleweight title from June 1949 to February 1951, and he was famed especially for his six bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson, fought over nine years, the second of which marked the great Robinson’s first professional loss (and the only one of the six bouts in which LaMotta was victorious). When he retired in 1954, just before turning thirty-three, LaMotta had a career record of eighty-three wins, nineteen losses, and four draws, scoring thirty knockouts in the process: an estimable record by any account.

  But the story of a once notable boxer was hardly the stuff of a compelling movie or book. In fact, what fascinated De Niro about LaMotta wasn’t his boxing record (De Niro never was much of a sports fan) but his astounding confessions and his fearless attitude toward physical punishment, which, the book indicated, he seemed to invite almost as a form of self-imposed justice, punishment for his bad deeds.