by Shawn Levy
HE HAD NEVER liked to parley with the press. Now he was getting testy with journalists and especially with photographers. In the summer of 1979 he got into a scuffle with a pair of photographers at the Stork Club in New York, where one of them tried to snap him eating dinner with Joe Pesci. Not long after, in Rome to do publicity for Raging Bull, he found himself with Harvey Keitel riding in a taxi that was being pursued by a carload of paparazzi. The cab driver came upon a policeman and told him that he and his passengers were being followed by suspicious people. When the cop questioned the photographers, they got their revenge by declaring that they were chasing a pair of terrorists who were in the taxi. This was the height of Red Brigade revolutionary activity in Italy, and the charge was taken seriously; the taxi was intercepted by the carabinieri, the state police, and De Niro and Keitel were forced out at gunpoint, their hands held high, and made to stand against a wall, the paparazzi photographing the entire episode.
When the police realized that they’d been duped into making a big mistake, they tried to disarm the situation, De Niro recalled. “The chief of police came over to me and said, ‘I take all the cameras; put them over there. Don’t worry, no problem.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, this I’ll believe.’ ” After a talk at the police station—with the paparazzi present, claiming they were entitled to use any tactics whatsoever to get a picture—the actors were released. De Niro understood the cops’ point of view, but he couldn’t fathom the moxie of the paparazzi: “They were saying they had a right to take a picture. Those guys were actually arguing that—they’re the slimiest people who ever lived.”*1
AS IT TURNED OUT, there were reasons other than thin skin or a heightened sense of privacy that made him chary of reporters. Increasingly he was living a lifestyle that he was keen never to have revealed. During the period in which he, Scorsese, and the crowd around them were using drugs, especially cocaine, De Niro became friendly with John Belushi, the gonzo comedian who’d risen to fame on Saturday Night Live and then segued into movies with the smash hit Animal House. They were an unlikely pair: De Niro so reticent in his private life and dogged and precise in his art, Belushi so voluble and voracious and heedless, both personally and professionally. But there was a common love of late night living, of Marlon Brando movies (Belushi, it was said, had seen On the Waterfront dozens of times), and, alas, of cocaine. Belushi clearly idolized De Niro, who was six years his elder, and De Niro surely saw in Belushi a form of comic release that he hadn’t ever approached in his life or his work.
Belushi lived not far from De Niro in lower Manhattan, and De Niro would occasionally visit him at his home, where the comic had a private den that was the scene of many nights of conversation, movie watching, partying, and the planning of yet further bacchanals. (One night in the late 1970s, De Niro cut his hand at Belushi’s house and had to be taken for stitches.) They would similarly spend time together in Los Angeles, where both favored long-term stays at the Chateau Marmont, private dinners at the Imperial Gardens Chinese restaurant, and long boozy, cokey nights at On the Rox.
In February 1982 both were staying at the Chateau, and Belushi, always erratic, frequently living beyond reason in a fog of alcohol and drugs, was more out of control than usual, causing genuine concern among friends. Now and again De Niro would come down from his suite in the hotel’s main building to visit Belushi in the bungalow in which he was living, to talk about a script idea that the comedian was developing with his Saturday Night Live chum, comic and writer Don Novello (aka Father Guido Sarducci). One afternoon De Niro, accompanied by his kids Drena and Raphael for a rare outing, ran into Belushi at a house party in Benedict Canyon at which the comedian, strung out on coke, was snorting heroin with some musicians and excusing himself to go off and vomit.
On a Thursday evening just a few weeks later, De Niro was out on the town with actor Harry Dean Stanton—they stopped in at Dan Tana’s, the famed Italian restaurant to the stars, and then at On the Rox—and De Niro placed several calls to Belushi encouraging him to come out and join the escapades. Belushi didn’t respond, so De Niro and Stanton made the short drive over to the Chateau Marmont to see if they could find him and entice him out into the world. It seemed to De Niro that the comedian had been on edge for days, apparently not sleeping or eating properly, certainly strung out.
They found Belushi in the company of Cathy Smith, a Canadian woman who had drifted in and out of the music business over the years, involved professionally and, often, romantically with the likes of Gordon Lightfoot, Hoyt Axton, various members of The Band, and of the Rolling Stones. Smith had a history of using heroin and cocaine and had turned to dealing to support her drug habit. She had recently met Belushi and was supplying him with heroin and hanging around his bungalow; her presence, according to those who saw her there, was vaguely sexual, vaguely drug-related.
De Niro didn’t like Smith from first contact—he found her “trashy”—and he gladly agreed when Belushi suggested that he go back to On the Rox and return to the bungalow after the club closed. He took Stanton back to the club and then returned to the Chateau after two in the morning, not to Belushi’s bungalow but to his own suite, with a small party including several women. Robin Williams, who was appearing at the Comedy Store, a stone’s throw from the hotel, had gone to On the Rox looking for De Niro and Belushi and finally found De Niro, via phone, in his room; when Williams suggested they meet up at Belushi’s, De Niro explained that he was occupied. Williams went by himself to Belushi’s, where he, too, was creeped out by Smith and by the depressing and even sinister vibe in the air. After a while, sometime around three, he took his leave. Soon afterward, De Niro appeared at the back door of the bungalow, let himself in, helped himself to a little bit of the cocaine displayed on a table, and left again, saying barely a word.
The next day, March 5, De Niro woke late and tried to reach Belushi through the hotel switchboard. No luck. After failing several times, De Niro asked to speak to the hotel manager, who deflected his call. That agitated De Niro, who called back speaking in a much firmer tone of voice and demanding an explanation.
“Where’s John?” he asked.
“There is a problem,” the manager told him.
“What?”
“It’s bad.”
“Is he sick?”
“It’s really bad.”
De Niro started to cry and let the phone drop. John Belushi was dead.
At around noon that day, a friend of Belushi’s had stopped in to help him work on a script and found the bungalow apparently empty. He called out for Belushi and then peeked into the comedian’s bedroom, where he found him in bed, unresponsive to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. By the time De Niro learned what had happened, word was beginning to spread and would soon hit the media like a bomb strike.
Naturally, De Niro was horrified. Not only because Belushi had been a genuine friend, not only because they had been together just hours before Belushi’s death—which everyone immediately knew had to be by drug overdose—but because, as he learned in the coming days, Belushi had been experimenting with heroin in part because he wanted to play a punk rock musician in a movie and was imitating De Niro’s famed technique of immersing himself completely in his roles.
Two days after Belushi’s death, when the medical examiner was releasing a preliminary autopsy report, De Niro got a phone call from Richard Bear, a musician and scenester who’d known Belushi for years and had become acquainted with De Niro in the past few months. Bear had been present one day when Belushi and De Niro discussed the comedian’s idea that he actually shoot up with real heroin on camera in the proposed film. He reminded De Niro about the conversation.
“Don’t talk to anybody about that,” De Niro told him. “I know John wanted to do that.”
Bear was distraught: “Bobby, they rehearsed the scene. That’s what killed him.… They were doing it!”
“Don’t say a word to me,” De Niro commanded. “Not to me. Don’t say a word to anybody.… You, me … we’l
l put our heads together. But don’t talk to anybody.”
In the coming days, weeks, and months, De Niro would stay true to his own advice. When the Los Angeles district attorney investigated Smith for administering Belushi’s fatal dose, a so-called speedball combining heroin and cocaine, De Niro was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. But he was out of the country, making a movie in Italy, and he was permitted to give his testimony over the telephone from Rome. It was the only official tie he would ever have to his friend’s death or to the legal action taken against the woman who, however inadvertently, abetted it.
AND HE WAS MAKING that movie in Italy because, truly, he still had not slowed down. Nor had he even considered slowing down, despite his maniacal workload, the rigor with which he drove his body, the collapse of his marriage, his attraction to partying, and the human damage—both personal and professional—that he had witnessed over the past few years, often uncomfortably up close.
Raging Bull was still being edited when he began production on his next film, True Confessions, an adaptation of John Gregory Dunne’s novel in which a brutal murder, based on the legendary unsolved “Black Dahlia” case, led to the unraveling of a culture of scandal and cover-up within the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in the 1940s. Along with his wife, Joan Didion, Dunne had adapted the book for Winkler-Chartoff, who had put the film in the hands of Ulu Grosbard, a Belgian-born director with a strong track record in the New York theater and such films to his credit as the critically acclaimed The Subject Was Roses (which he’d also directed on Broadway) and the cultishly admired crime story Straight Time.
De Niro was cast as Father Desmond Spellacy, a rising wheeler-dealer in the Catholic hierarchy whose brother, LAPD Detective Tom Spellacy, cannot be dissuaded from digging into the unsavory ties that connected a brutally murdered party girl with the wealthy laymen who form the Church’s financial and civic power base. Robert Duvall, with whom De Niro had shared a credit but no screen time on The Godfather, Part II, would play Tom, and another familiar face, Charles Durning, would appear alongside the likes of Burgess Meredith, Kenneth McMillan, Dan Hedaya, and Cyril Cusack as a cardinal.
The book was atmospheric and powerful, an indictment of spiritual and institutional corruption written in a classical prose quite unlike the heated tenor that James Elroy would later become famous for bringing to bear on very similar themes. Catholicism was extremely important to the book and script, and De Niro was happy to immerse himself in the culture of the Church—the rituals, costumes, language, and daily lives of priests; the Latin liturgy; the intricacies of the profession of the priesthood as a way of life and as a career, with inducements to advancement and punishments for failures and insubordinations as in any career.
The film was shot in Los Angeles from January through April 1980, and De Niro cleverly employed the extra weight that he was still bearing from the previous year’s fattening-up procedure for Raging Bull to give Father Spellacy an appropriately comfortable fullness of face and frame. He also did intensive research on the priesthood and the Church; his formal religious experience, after all, consisted of but a few fleeting encounters with Catholicism as a young child and, later, during his Bobby Milk days of running experimentally with the crowd from Little Italy. He was tutored for the film by Father Henry Fehren, who’d been hired by the production and endured the usual barrage of questions and requests from his pupil. “De Niro is a perfectionist,” Fehren said later. “He wanted not only to master the fundamental routines of an ordained priest, but he wanted the sense, feeling and tradition of what the church was in 1948. He may be the most authentic priest ever seen on the screen.”
In his files De Niro had annotated copies of books and articles about the rites and rituals of the Church; the education of priests; the duties of various members of the diocese; the proper way to don, wear, and remove vestments; the private lives of priests; the specific procedures of confession and communion; even the Latin liturgy, which he practiced daily as production approached, often by attending Mass. To mark the character of the social-climbing Des Spellacy more specifically, he took some golf lessons and had his fingernails manicured. He also added dandruff flakes to the shoulders of his costumes, a subtle hint of the character’s human frailty, and did research into hyperventilation, the frightening condition to which Spellacy was prone (“NOTE OF CAUTION,” a researcher told him, “be careful while doing this repeatedly. Maybe you should breathe into a paper bag between takes to restore your carbon dioxide equilibrium”). He conducted interviews, too. “I talked to tons of priests,” he said. “But then I realized I don’t want to complicate it and clog myself with wrong choices. You can know too much.”
That was interesting in and of itself: De Niro, the famed chameleon and free-diver who would learn and do anything in the name of accuracy, was suggesting that there was maybe a limit to that type of acting, that monomaniacal immersion in the role could become a problem for the performer, that there was a point beyond which the technique he had honed over the past decade, and which he had brought to a pinnacle with Raging Bull, was no longer efficacious.
Just a few years prior, while making The Deer Hunter, De Niro had declared, “You have to earn the right to play a character.” In that same bit of publicity material, he was as explicit as he had ever been up to then in describing his aims in doing research and creating a sense of cocoonlike isolation: “I really don’t like to be distracted when I’m working on these things. So maybe I sublimate my own personality in order to get the totality of the role … I try to make him appear as real as if I’d known him all my life. Therefore, it’s not too easy for me to flip back out of character as I come off camera.”
Just a few years earlier, while making New York, New York, he had told Newsweek: “Technique is concrete.… Acting isn’t really respected enough as an art. Your body is an instrument, and you have to learn how to play an instrument. It’s like knowing how to play the piano. There ought to be acting schools that take you in as children, the way it’s done with musicians. You don’t need experience to learn technique. You’d learn your technique, and as you got older and had experience you’d apply it to what you know.”
In Raging Bull he had taken that technique as far as any screen actor ever had. But here on his very next project, De Niro seemed to be backing away from the thing he had just so recently mastered. He had pursued Raging Bull for the better part of a decade, but he had moved on to True Confessions with mere months of forethought. Following the style of the film as created by Grosbard, he played Des Spellacy, at least outwardly, as reserved, compact, efficient, unprepossessing. Where in Raging Bull he was all flame and heat and cataclysm, in True Confessions he was cool and still and calculating, a characterization more akin to Monroe Stahr or Alfredo Berlinghieri. It was as if he had taken the technique that he’d spent the 1970s perfecting, the Method of Constantin Stanislavski as distilled through Stella Adler and given life by Marlon Brando, brought it to its logical and practical extreme, and then, in a matter of months, weeks maybe, dropped it—not entirely, not by proclamation, but delicately, surely, and irreversibly. He would still be a significant actor and star, but he would never again chase the tiger of his muse and method so willfully and purposefully as he did in Raging Bull.
It wasn’t a precipitous fall. Even as a follow-up to Raging Bull, True Confessions had substance and gave the public a De Niro once again working with quality material and first-rate collaborators. Like Monroe Stahr, Desmond Spellacy is a prince of an order and on the fast track to be something more: impeccable, sharp, exact, and sure. He keeps his own counsel, even when advising his superiors, and is certain of his decisions, even when they create collateral damage (“Looks like a leprechaun, thinks like an Arab,” says one observer of his manner, not entirely disapprovingly). He is full of face, perfect in tailoring, steady of gaze and voice, as meticulous in play on the golf course as he is in the rituals of the Mass. He knows pride is a sin, but he has—perhaps in jest, perhaps not—alread
y chosen his papal name.
Like Raging Bull, True Confessions is a tale of brothers, a responsible one (the monsignor) and a loose cannon (the detective), their public personae distinct from the way they interact with each other, which is warmer, jokier, less guarded, less actorly. With his brother, Des can tell a joke, do an Irish accent, allude to a shared past with a glance or a phrase. Around everyone else he embodies an idea and an ideal; with his brother, even when hearing his brother’s confession, he’s an ordinary man, prone to sentimental reminiscence, goofball humor, flashes of impolitic frustration, and even anger.
The most remarkable moments in the performance, though, are in the silences, as they so often are with De Niro. As the grisly murder case is connected more and more surely to the inner circle of Catholic laymen with whom he does business and threatens to soil the hem of the ambitious Monsignor Spellacy himself, De Niro slowly shifts from hauteur toward self-questioning and, finally, in a truly breathtaking moment, humility. Changing from his golf clothes to his priestly garb, he sits by himself, weary, determined, his doubts starting to outweigh his certainty. He is alone in a sparsely furnished room, but he could be orating a confession to a full auditorium; he is nearly naked with his thoughts, and De Niro conveys them without a sound. It’s a fine, textured performance, and as unlike Jake LaMotta as can be imagined.
