De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  IN THE MONTHS after filming True Confessions, De Niro started working again with his Bang the Drum Slowly director John Hancock, who was developing a script for him based on the true-life story of Rick Cluchey, who had been sentenced to death (and, later, life without parole) in 1957 under California’s “Little Lindbergh” law, which added a mandatory death sentence to any crime that had a kidnapping component. During his time at San Quentin, Cluchey had become interested in writing and acting and composed a play about prison called La Cage. After his sentence was commuted in 1966 by California governor Pat Brown, he traveled the world with a troupe of ex-con actors, eventually making his way to Paris, where no less a personage than Samuel Beckett came to be an admirer of his work. Hancock was crafting this remarkable saga into a film.

  Along with Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, De Niro was interested in the project and worked closely with Hancock as he wrote the film, which had been entitled Weeds. He started to do his usual research thing—talking at length with Cluchey, observing his workshops, visiting a number of prisons, reading about the lives of convicts. That behavior was familiar to Hancock. But he also took note that De Niro was more demanding about a number of details of the film that Hancock felt ought to be the director’s prerogative: casting, music, sets, and so on. In particular, Hancock was uncomfortable with De Niro’s insistence that real convicts play major roles. The film had found a home at United Artists, with MGM distributing, but without an agreement on such a central issue, De Niro was never entirely ready to dive in, and the studio never green-lit the production.

  Two years later, word of Weeds surfaced again, at EMI Films this time, with Universal distributing, again with Hancock and De Niro attached. Again De Niro went from apparent immersion in it to disagreement over how the material would be approached, and again it was shelved. In 1986, Weeds got yet a third life, this time with Nick Nolte in the lead role; it appeared the following year, to modestly favorable reviews and tepid box office, and Hancock and De Niro never came close to working together again.

  BY 1981, DE NIRO had decided that he would live in Los Angeles only when work required it of him, and only in leased or rented housing, preferably at an entirely neutral and anonymous place—the Chateau Marmont being a favored destination, at least until John Belushi’s death.

  He still had his 14th Street apartment in Manhattan, and he still used it for storage and as a crash pad for friends—Meryl Streep and her baby daughter stayed there for a couple of nights in late 1980 when the heating in their own apartment was on the fritz. And he had the townhouse on St. Luke’s Place in Greenwich Village, which he and Abbott had been renovating since they acquired it. It was a massive building—four floors plus a basement, with six bedrooms and four baths, and eventually a sauna, gym, and screening room. The detail work was meticulous, with upward of $200,000 going to, among other fine points, red oak in the entranceway, a redwood skylight in the master bedroom, and lots of teak, butternut, and cedar throughout.

  Although the work on the house took more than two years and was estimated at some $3 million, De Niro was sued by a carpenter who claimed that he was given a check for $15,000 and then found that De Niro had put a stop order on it. When the matter finally came to court, the woodworker told the press he thought De Niro had misused him because “I treated him like just another customer, and he found that difficult because he’s used to people kissing his butt.” He made his case to the court’s satisfaction, and De Niro had to pay him the disputed fee and pay another $5,000 in interest and court costs.

  Undissuaded by the hassles of home ownership, De Niro was looking at acquiring places in Connecticut and on Long Island. If it seemed that he was becoming a land baron or real estate hoarder, it was, in fact, a family habit. His uncle, Jack De Niro, was a big-time real estate agent with thriving businesses in New York City and Florida, and his mother, Virginia Admiral, had been buying and leasing properties in lower Manhattan for some time. Under the umbrellas of a variety of corporate partnerships, formed sometimes just for a single deal, she acquired loft spaces in which the painters and bohemians she had known since the 1940s could live and work, and she was able to keep her ex-husband, who still couldn’t be sure when or where his next paycheck would be, under a roof—a gesture of sisterly love, as it were, that endured throughout their lives. Admiral owned pieces of buildings all over Greenwich Village, SoHo, and other Manhattan neighborhoods that hadn’t yet been branded with names or acquired trendy cachet. She even had a mantra for her wheelings and dealings: “All great fortunes were built on real estate.” Her son might not have been after a fortune, but he clearly had heard the lesson.

  AFTER WORKING for hire on True Confessions, he spent some time doing not much of anything. There were scripts to read, of course. Since The Godfather, Part II, his had been among the first names to come up in casting sessions, and he had scores of parts offered to him, some in films that were never made, some of which turned up on the screen with other actors in the roles De Niro had been offered. Among the former were such never-realized films as Brian De Palma’s Home Movie, intended as yet a third go-round of the John Rubin persona from Greetings and Hi, Mom!; a script by John Cassavetes entitled Knives; and a Jean-Luc Godard film about Bugsy Siegel. The latter included Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo and Blue Collar, John Huston’s Wise Blood, Wim Wenders’s Hammett (originally intended as a Francis Coppola film), Martin Scorsese’s dream project, Gangs of New York, and two films by Richard Attenborough: the World War II epic A Bridge Too Far and the psychological thriller Magic. A fellow might’ve made some pretty good films if he’d just stuck to that list, but De Niro was still chary about committing to projects: he’d rejected A Bridge Too Far, it was said, because Attenborough wouldn’t agree to preliminary meetings with him to discuss his part.

  His next director, though, showed more determination. In 1973, when De Niro was in Italy to play Vito Corleone, Sergio Leone, the great director of such westerns as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, and Once Upon a Time in the West, came to see him about a new project he was nursing along. Leone’s films of the 1960s had enjoyed huge grosses around the world and had made an international star of Clint Eastwood, but they hadn’t yet garnered the critical reputation they would enjoy decades later, and they were still derided as “spaghetti westerns.”

  Leone didn’t wish to talk to De Niro about a western, though.*2 He had in mind a story based on a book he’d read some half dozen years earlier, an account of Jewish gangsters in New York by Harry Gray entitled The Hoods. The story, he later said, “attached itself to me like the malediction of the Mummy in the old movie with Boris Karloff. I wanted to make that film and no other.” He had been going around Europe and the United States sharing his vision for an epic gangster picture for a number of years, and he told the story enthrallingly enough for De Niro, who didn’t know Leone’s work, to be at least politely interested. “He was a big guy,” De Niro remembered, “and I liked him.… He was very Italian, very sympathetic, simpatico.”

  Years passed, and Leone continued to pursue the film, which he had come to call Once Upon a Time in America, chiefly as a producer, presenting it to a number of potential screenwriters, including Norman Mailer (who, Leone said, produced “a Mickey Mouse version” of a script) and journalist Pete Hamill, and such directors as Milos Forman and Peter Bogdanovich. Finally, Leone thought he’d simply direct the film himself, from a script of his own devising, and he wrote a treatment. Most movie treatments—prose descriptions of a story that will be expanded into script form—are perhaps a quarter as long as the completed screenplay. Leone’s treatment for Once Upon a Time in America was 227 pages long, and the first script drafts were even longer: 260 and 290 pages. Given the usual calculation that a page of screenplay equaled a minute of screen time, those would be impossibly long.

  Finally the problem was cracked, and Leone’s epic was boiled down to a long but imaginable screenplay by two writers, t
he Italian Leonardo Benvenuti and the American Stuart Kaminsky, the latter focusing especially on dialogue. A new producer, the former art dealer (and, by his own admission, Israeli spy) Arnon Milchan, agreed to shepherd the project to the screen, and set about raising money. Leone came back to De Niro with the new script and a better pitch than the one of years before.

  “Sergio told me the story in two installments over seven hours,” De Niro remembered. “I sat and listened through a translator. He told the story almost shot by shot, with the flashbacks, and it was beautiful. I said, ‘This is something that I’d like to be part of.’ ” The hook was in, and Leone offered De Niro his choice of the two principal roles—the flamboyant front man Max or his more circumspect boyhood friend and fellow gangster Noodles. De Niro agreed to give it serious thought.

  There were some real obstacles to their collaboration, though. For one thing, the film was going to be shot entirely in Italy, even though it would be cast with American actors, and production would take the better part of a year, if not two. For another, De Niro was leery of putting himself in the hands of a director whose work he didn’t have a real feel for. “Bobby made it clear to me,” Leone later said, “that he has needs to be fulfilled, and one need is that he must feel he is completely understood by the director.” He promised, De Niro remembered, not to be as officious and didactic as Bernardo Bertolucci had been during the making of 1900. “Italian directors sometimes tell you how to do it,” De Niro explained. “They say, ‘You go over there, and you do this or that.’ American actors don’t like that, they want to find it for themselves, they don’t want to be told where to go. But Sergio was very smart and clever and respectful enough not to do that in my case.”

  But then there was the matter of the urine.

  As De Niro started warming up to the project, he visited Leone in New York at the Mayflower Hotel, where Milchan had booked a suite for meetings, allowing each of the principals some private space. As he always did, no matter who was stopping by, the portly Leone greeted De Niro and Milchan, who’d come along to smooth the process, wearing only a bathrobe and close-fitting underpants, a sight that rattled the fastidious actor. Milchan repaired to one of the unused bedrooms to wait for a phone call. After a bit, as he recalled, the phone rang. It was De Niro, calling from another bedroom in the suite and insisting Milchan come see him immediately.

  The producer found De Niro agitated.

  “I can’t do the movie!”

  “Why not?”

  De Niro led him into the en suite bathroom of his bedroom and pointed to the commode. “Can’t you see that he pissed all over my toilet seat?”

  There was, in fact, urine on the toilet seat. A flummoxed Milchan improvised an answer: “Come on, Robert. He didn’t do that on purpose. He’s fat; he didn’t see.”

  But De Niro insisted it was a power play, a marking of territory, a crude show of superiority, and he actually seemed ready to drop out of the film because of it.

  Somehow the faux pas was forgiven, and De Niro, still undecided about the part, agreed to visit the sets that Leone was constructing in Rome. “They were gonna do it, with or without me,” De Niro said, and that, in particular, appealed to him. “He didn’t raise the money on me, so there was no pressure that way.”

  Finally selecting the role of Noodles, through whose aging eyes the epic narrative unfolds in retrospect, he agreed to make the film, and he went from reluctant involvement to active interest. James Woods had been cast as Max (after Gérard Depardieu had first agreed to learn English to play the part and then backed out), and De Niro would urge certain other performers on Leone: Joe Pesci, Burt Young, and Danny Aiello, whose screen test De Niro agreed to participate in just so the actor, who was touchy about having to audition at all, would agree to submit to one.*3

  De Niro took his usual rigorous steps in preparing for the role. He studied Jewish customs (there was a scene in a synagogue) and a bit of Yiddish, and in particular the speech patterns of old-time Jews and the special idioms used by the small set of Jewish gangsters of the Prohibition era. He packed extensively for his trip to Italy: toiletries such as Listerine, Maalox, Tylenol, and Kiehl’s soap; videotapes of various movies he wanted to study; a Walkman and cassettes; a camera to take photos with his kids when they came to visit him in Rome (and on a side trip to London). To play the aged Noodles, he worked on a limp and a slow, raspy voice and submitted to extensive aging makeup. “It took so long to put the makeup on,” he said, “that I was so tired that I had to look old.” He had portraits taken of himself in the makeup chair, gesticulating like an alter kocker in full old-man guise. He seemed to love it.

  Filming took place in Rome, Paris, Montreal, and New York over the span of fifteen months, and De Niro’s presence was required for a great deal of it. During the shoot, Leone discovered a way to work with De Niro that brought the director outside his comfort zone in a way he found illuminating. “For better or worse,” he remembered, “I had worked with actors like marionettes. But with Bobby you must work around him in a way, because the thing had to be explored through his eyes, too. So for the first time, in this film, I have had to follow an actor’s ideas without destroying my own. Yes, Bobby will have his interpretazione artistica.” Comparing De Niro to his frequent star Clint Eastwood, Leone added, “Bobby, first of all, is an actor. Clint, first of all, is a star. Bobby suffers; Clint yawns.”

  When shooting was done, Leone had to wrestle years of work into something like a releasable film, a task that in a real sense was never fully achieved. He arrived at an ideal cut of more than four hours, which he agreed couldn’t be shown in theaters but only on TV or videotape. In May 1984, after cutting it mercilessly, he arrived at a version of three hours and forty minutes, which premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival to mixed but respectful reviews. But that was still an hour longer than his American distributors had contracted for. Leone dreaded the thought that further cuts would be made without his input; “I hope the last version will be my own,” he said at Cannes. But it was effectively out of his hands.

  And, in fact, when Once Upon a Time in America arrived in America, it was butchered, compromised, unrecognizable, ruined. Gone were the flashbacks, replaced with a linear structure that robbed the film of its sense of poetry, nostalgia, and rue. Gone were expository scenes that made the plot coherent. Gone were charming bits of business and hair-raising bits of violence. The version released by Warner Bros. in June 1984 was half the length of Leone’s preferred cut: two hours and fifteen minutes. It was a catastrophe, a crime. And it was a bomb: $5.3 million at the box office, a blip.

  De Niro is but a piece of the epic swirl of Leone’s massive, swoony, and altogether singular film, yet somehow his presence grounds and imparts resonance to the entire enterprise. Given his history of volatile, outsider characters, his ability to hold the audience with a quiet posture had rarely been the focus of one of his performances (the notable exceptions being The Last Tycoon and True Confessions, neither of which really loomed in his canon). But Leone saw in De Niro’s eyes a capacity that could be put to use for something other than the expression of alienation, anger, or psychosis. He saw an ability to convey longing, melancholy, regret. And though his film begins in bloodshed and includes all manner of violence, sexual perversity, and human cruelty, his focus rarely strays from the mournful emotions carried in Ennio Morricone’s score, and De Niro’s eyes and silent glances are his chief visual vehicle for that mood.*4

  We first meet Noodles as a man at the height of his powers, his mind and gaze scrambled gently in an opium den. It’s hard to see what’s going on in there, but soon enough, without learning too many details, we know for sure. We see his pain and sorrow first—and perhaps best—in a long take about a half hour into the film, when the aged Noodles visits Fat Mo’s, the restaurant and speakeasy where so many pivotal events of his life took place. He finds the peephole through which he used to spy on Mo’s sister Deborah, and gazes through it as if at his own y
outh. Leone’s camera stares into De Niro’s eyes for a long, long while, and De Niro demonstrates his ability to become a transparent vessel for emotions. This is the sort of thing he loves best in film—acting without speaking, conveying an inner state through delicate physicality. His eyes—brown, moist, limpid, filled with pain and wistfulness—are the windows into the movie, and Leone holds focus on them for a daringly extended shot.

  The irony, of course, is that those eyes belong to a thief, bootlegger, killer, rapist, and traitor. Somehow in the pantheon of bad guys that De Niro has played, Noodles is generally overlooked, but he commits some of the ugliest crimes of the actor’s career: not one but two rapes, for starters, the second of which, of Mo’s sister Deborah on the eve of her departure for Hollywood, is one of the most horrific things De Niro or Leone (or, for that matter, anyone) ever filmed.

  Even though Leone spends more time in minutes with Noodles the high-living bootlegger, it’s Noodles the broken, ponderous old man who sticks most with you. The hair and makeup work used to turn De Niro into a middle-aged version of himself is stunning—it would be decades before he would reach the age of the elder Noodles, and it would have been very smart money to bet that he’d look just as he does in the film. (As it happened, in real life he kept his enviable hair and regained his rail-thin physique.) Aging actors for roles in this way is a common Hollywood game, but it’s played here with restraint, taste, and fine craft, like many other aspects of the film. If De Niro hadn’t lived to see his own mature years, the old Noodles could have credibly substituted for the real thing.

  And De Niro lends such internal weight that he sells us on the aging makeup completely. “You can always tell the winners at the starting gate,” the aged Noodles tells Fat Mo, and he clearly doesn’t include himself among them. The film’s title suggests a fairy tale, and it’s got its share of ogres, imperiled maidens, dangers, quests, and such. But more than anything else, it’s got plangency and heartache and regret. And De Niro, it turns out, is as adept at conveying those aches as he is with fury or psychosis or wildness—even from under a haze of latex makeup, even with the weight of a four-hour film to bear. Leone’s film is indeed some kind of masterpiece, and De Niro, particularly in his sorrowful aspect, is the heart of it.