De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  That winter, with production well under way, they got him. De Niro returned to Chicago plumped out and with his hairline altered, unrecognizable as the quiet fellow from the previous visit. He sat for the makeup department to give him a prosthetic nose, then went into the wardrobe trailer, put on his silk drawers and bespoke suit, donned a fedora, lit a cigar, and stepped out onto the set. “It was like witnessing a grand magic trick performed by a maestro,” Linson recalled. “Without uttering a word, by merely strolling to his position in front of the camera, Capone–De Niro suddenly became sly, dangerous, confident, and even witty. The entire crew felt the electricity.… The character had been created.”

  Of course, that magical transformation was the result of another of De Niro’s deep exercises in mining and creating a character. He watched several of his old movies, particularly Raging Bull and Once Upon a Time in America, and compared his performances with images of Capone from newsreels; he read books by people who knew Capone, practiced working with a cigar, acquired a manicure and a suntan, listened to Capone’s favorite operas, and looked at hundreds of photographs of Capone and other gangsters of the 1920s, paying particular attention to their clothing, haircuts, hats, and jewelry. (He sought, and failed to find, an audio recording of Capone’s voice. “Getting the voice is the most difficult thing,” he complained.) The hair was particularly vexing, he admitted: “It took a week, sitting in a barber’s chair for seven hours at a stretch while they snipped and shaved and tweezed, checking with photographs of Capone. It was incredible; if just one hair was off it looked artificial.”

  He built his Capone as a man of words, of public relations, of political theater; larger than life, kingly, even godlike. He reminded himself in his script notes to move his head only barely, to speak clearly and forthrightly in expectation of deference, to make a show of candor when it seemed beneficial, to consider that Capone had acquired so much power and authority at a relatively young age, to always remember that he was a spectacle, that people were watching him, that even his most out-of-control moments had to have an element of restraint and dignity. He contrasted Capone’s Neapolitan heritage with the Sicilian blood of Vito Corleone: “The Sicilian is a darker personality, closer to Africa,” he opined. “The Neapolitans are more lively and flamboyant.” The baseball bat scene, in which Capone hosts a banquet and then beats a pair of traitors to death in front of his tuxedo-clad minions, drove him to real depths of self-examination. “It’s also personal what they did to me,” he wrote in his script. “Just think of self, betrayals in life!… These men have betrayed me and I am now giving them a lesson to respect loyalty! Loyalty!… A little tighter and shorter cause I’m about to kill these motherfuckers right here.”

  In total, he spent eleven days filming as Capone—not even two weeks of work after putting on nearly thirty pounds. (“I promise you,” he told a German interviewer, “I will never do it again.”) He commanded a suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he had a barber chair installed, having his hair and nails worked on every single day. In the final film he would be seen in only seven scenes, some quite fleeting, and yet, just as Linson hoped and De Palma knew, he was a dominant presence throughout. As Sean Connery put it, “He appears very little in the film, but you always know he’s there.”

  He was there, too, in the spring of 1987, when the film was being test-screened (his grandmother Helen De Niro gave Linson, who didn’t know who she was, a fit of anxiety by leaving the theater to use the bathroom repeatedly throughout an early screening). And he showed up at other screenings and even did a few interviews. Not only had Paramount gotten him for a lowered price, but they got more out of him, at least publicity-wise, than anybody had in years.

  And it paid off.

  WHEN WE FIRST see him, he is recumbent in a barber’s chair, photographed from above, with a marble floor beneath him and his left arm extended into space: the Adam of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling with no God reaching across the void to bring him to life. He is attended by a manicurist, a shoeshine boy, and a barber, who presently unveils his client’s round, seal-like, hood-eyed face from beneath a hot towel. Three reporters and four bodyguards stand nearby, awaiting his word. “It is the time of Al Capone,” we are told by introductory titles, and the truth of that blunt statement is patently clear from this initial glance.

  It’s Capone the charmer on display here—telling jokes, skirting unpleasant truths, making good newspaper copy. But when he’s asked a question he doesn’t appreciate—namely, whether he furthers his bootlegging business with violence—he reacts with a slight jerk of his head that reveals a flash of his volatile core. The sudden movement causes the barber to nick him with a straight razor, and the man rightly fears reprisal. But Capone, blood on his middle fingertip, assures the fellow that the accident will not have repercussions. Instead, he dismisses the interviewer’s impudence with the assertion that he and his men don’t engage in violence because, as he declares with dead eyes like a man lying on the witness stand, “it’s not good business”—a claim that is shown to be an outright lie by the very next scene, in which a little girl is killed in an explosion triggered by Capone’s henchmen.

  The centerpiece scene, the moment that Art Linson and Brian De Palma knew that De Niro would make indelible, marks his next appearance, after which it is impossible for the audience to join the ranks of the press corps, manicurists, and bodyguards chuckling along at Capone’s banter. Clad in a tux and white tie, squeaky clean and apparently fully self-possessed, he speaks to an assembled banquet table of his soldiers about his “ent’usiasms,” chief of which, he says, is baseball. He’s lecturing, playful, adapting an almost donnish mode.

  But he shifts; his eyes narrow and start to lose their sparkle and take on that dead quality they had at the end of the barber chair scene. And then comes the point of his lecture: four deadly blows with a baseball bat, crushing the skull of a disloyal employee and leaving him—in another shot from the angle of the ceiling—facedown in a puddle of blood that seeps out sickeningly across the table. Now his chest is puffed with the strain of his effort, his lips are pursed, his chin is thrust out defiantly, and he gazes around to see that he has made his point. All along we’ve known that he’s a psychopath and a killer, but he’s kept it hidden underneath a civilized veneer of fine clothes and fancy décor. Now it has been unleashed, and the horror of who the man really is permeates the rest of the film.

  Even with his violence and his outbursts, Capone’s most chilling scene in the film may well be the most decorous: a trip to the Lyric Opera to see Enrico Caruso perform in I Pagliacci. Once again he courts the press from atop a staircase with a big toothy grin, a few bon mots, and a reminder that he is, in his view, “a peaceful man” being hounded unfairly by Ness. Then, as he teeters on the edge of tears at Caruso’s virtuosity in performing “Vesti la Giubba,” he learns that his henchman Frank Nitti (a deliciously unctuous Billy Drago) has killed Ness’s colleague Jimmy Malone. While still dabbing at his eyes and choking back sobs, Capone smiles; De Niro somehow contrives to be laughing and crying at the same time, a living Janus mask, embodying comedy and tragedy, good and evil, at once.

  There are a great many things that De Palma, Mamet, the cast, and the craftspeople do right in The Untouchables, but it’s hard to imagine the film being so beautifully honed and so successful without De Niro’s Capone in the middle of it. His airs of self-satisfaction, self-righteousness, and feral violence permeate even the scenes in which he takes no part. His confidence and power seem unassailable, and surely it won’t be the skinny, boy-faced Ness who will bring him down. But by the end of the film Ness, pictured on a rooftop against a brilliant blue sky like a statue atop a plinth, has become as large a figure as Capone—with, of course, the mentorship of Malone. (There’s an amusing subtext in which a leading man of a fading era, Connery, instructs a rising leading man, Costner, how to topple a reigning leading man, De Niro—a metaphor for the acting business that serves the film exquisitely.) The Un
touchables plays like a comic book, like a fairy tale, like a western, like an opera. And like all of those, it requires a villain whom the audience truly fears. De Niro is all of that and more, translating his work, his ideas, and his experience into the most memorable Al Capone the screen has ever seen.

  The film was well received by the press, and De Niro, especially, made a good impression. “De Niro is flamboyantly entertaining,” said David Ansen in Newsweek. “He’s always been a great actor,” said David Denby in New York; “this is the first time he’s seemed an exuberant one.” And in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael, more disappointed in her onetime golden boy, De Palma, than exercised over her current whipping boy, De Niro, allowed, “De Niro isn’t in many scenes, but his impact is so strong that we wouldn’t want more of him.… He’s ludicrous yet terrifying.”

  On top of that, The Untouchables was a hit, opening to a $10 million weekend en route to a $76.27 million domestic gross, sixth-best of the year. Behind box office like that, De Niro’s gamble to take less money up front in exchange for a percentage of the gross had proved very smart business. Better still, it was his biggest commercial hit since The Deer Hunter, and its success was demonstrably related to his presence. As a result, when he and his agents were entertaining offers for new films, they had a new price: $5 million—or, roughly, a hundred thousand times what he had been paid the first time he worked in front of a movie camera with Brian De Palma in The Wedding Party twenty-four years prior.

  IN MARCH 1986 the great Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was on a grand tour of the United States, and De Niro was honored with the opportunity to join him onstage and read translations from his epic “Babi Yar” at a gala evening at St. John the Divine Cathedral in Manhattan. The event was delayed by a series of phoned-in bomb scares, as De Niro’s old student-acting chum Larry Woiwode recalled. Having become an author and poet of some note, Woiwode also was in attendance that evening, and he reunited with De Niro afterward, the two sitting opposite each other at a gala dinner and resuming, as if they’d just done it the night before, their youthful game of communicating whole conversations to each other using only their eyes and facial gestures.

  It was the era of glasnost, with barriers against cultural exchange between the United States and Russia crumbling, and in the course of Yevtushenko’s visit De Niro was introduced to a number of official representatives of Soviet arts organizations. That resulted in his being invited to the Moscow Film Festival the following year, and, even more, to serve as the first-ever American president of the festival jury. He had been to Havana in 1985, alongside Christopher Walken and Treat Williams, to attend the opening night of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema; a true Manhattan lefty, he had enjoyed the opportunity to taste firsthand a culture that geopolitical conflict had made inaccessible to most Americans.

  Moscow in the summer of 1987 would provide another such opportunity to see some otherwise shadowed sides of the world. He took to it as a once-in-a-lifetime trip, bringing along Drena and Raphael, nineteen and eleven years old, respectively, as well as a friend of Raphael’s and his own personal trainer/assistant (who kept De Niro jogging and riding a stationary bike throughout the festival). The event featured such films as Federico Fellini’s Intervista (which won the top prize), the English drama 84 Charing Cross Road, and the fine American children’s film The Journey of Natty Gann. And De Niro was hardly the only star power imported from the West by festival organizers: also on hand were Gérard Depardieu, Vanessa Redgrave, Marcello Mastroianni, Nastassja Kinski, and Quincy Jones.

  He attended to his duties as jury chair, and he hobnobbed, but he also made time to visit the official Moscow, the burgeoning underground Moscow, and the homes of some famed Russian artists, activists, and cultural icons, including a faith healer who had known the recently deceased director Andrei Tarkovsky. He took the kids with him on almost all of these excursions, explaining to an East German journalist, “I took my children with me, because they should see how Moscow looks. I do the official program, but I like to see the other, unofficial culture, too. If young Russians would visit the USA they would see that there is an underground, too.”

  There were, of course, trips he didn’t take them on, such as a jaunt to Argentina that same year, with Christopher Walken tagging along, to see a production of Cuba and His Teddy Bear and to party in Buenos Aires and then Rio de Janeiro. But he truly did believe in exposing his kids to finer things, and as Drena hit her late teens and twenties she would often accompany him to events around New York: film premieres, charitable galas, and the like. They developed a playful banter, she calling him out for being an oldster out of touch with contemporary culture, he trumping her by claiming personal acquaintance with many of the musicians and actors she admired. (Among his more unusual encounters were a visit to the set of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker film and a sit-down in a London bar with the members of the band Bananarama, who not long before had recorded a song called “Robert De Niro’s Waiting”; they amused him by explaining that they’d originally titled the tune “Al Pacino’s Waiting” but had come to realize that “De Niro” sounded better.) And he had to learn to keep his cool while witnessing such spectacles as Matt Dillon chatting Drena up at a movie premiere. In his forties, with growing children, he would have to evolve, at least a little, into an older lion.

  ARGUABLY THE MOST significant aftereffect of the success of The Untouchables was summed up in an inauspicious six words in Daily Variety of June 5, 1987: “Robert De Niro signed with CAA.” One of the most respected actors in movies was now a client of the most powerful talent agency in Hollywood.

  When De Niro had signed on with agent Harry Ufland at the William Morris Agency some seventeen years prior, he was still touting his dinner theater experience on resumes and head shots that his mom printed for him. Ufland had been a patient proctor of De Niro’s remarkable career—as well as that of Martin Scorsese—through the sorts of successes and opportunities that most agents can only dream of offering their clients. But the business of agenting had changed in the previous few years, and someone like Ufland, even with the might of WMA behind him, seemed old-school in the new environment of show business.

  Creative Artists Agency, or CAA, was the new powerhouse agency, headed by the icy and relentless Michael Ovitz, who brought the most cutthroat business practices of Wall Street into show business, cloaked in a superficial veneer of Asian philosophy (for a time, everyone who wanted to be anyone in Hollywood was reading Sun Tzu). After breaking into the agenting biz via the traditional route of working in the mailroom at WMA, Ovitz had come to realize that the old movie studio model of production could be resurrected, with a twist that would put the talent agency at the center of the equation. In the golden age of the studios, all the creative talent had been under contract to a studio and worked on films as assignments. In the mid-1960s, power had shifted to actors (and, very rarely, directors), who signed on to studio films on a job-by-job basis or, often, developed projects on their own with their own production companies, partnering with studios for funding. Ovitz saw that a talent agency could put together a package—a script, a director, a cast—and then sell it as a turnkey project to a movie studio for a single price. The TV world had long depended on talent agencies to build new shows in just this fashion. CAA would transpose the technique to the movie business and, in effect, put together films in the way that MGM and Warner Bros. once had.

  The keys to maximizing CAA’s ability to force its projects on studios—and, of course, to maximizing the agency’s profits—were getting as much top-flight talent on the books as possible and having CAA’s agents work in strictly disciplined fashion, sharing the agency’s wishes with studios and clients alike as if no negotiation or resistance were possible. To fulfill the first need, CAA had signed the likes of Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Julie Andrews, Sidney Poitier, and, from the ranks of television, the actor-directors Rob Reiner, Danny DeVito, Ron Howard, Penny Marshall, and Leonard Nim
oy. To fulfill the second required steel and brass beyond any so far exhibited in the famously steely and brassy business of Hollywood. In just a few years’ time, Ovitz became celebrated—and, more important, feared—as the most powerful man in Hollywood, in part because he was willing to use his power to crush competitors and even in some cases allies. (In a famed clash with the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who was planning to leave CAA for other representation, Ovitz declared, in a way that Vito—or at least Michael—Corleone would’ve appreciated, “My foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard each day will blow your brains out.”) Compared to that ruthless, monolithic, and corporate frame of mind, Ufland was like an Old World shopkeeper who let his customers run up a tab. In fact, he left agenting altogether and began producing, working with both De Niro and Scorsese over the coming decades.

  For the likes of De Niro and Scorsese, being represented by CAA was like having the Army, CIA, and IRS behind you. They themselves could focus on their art and leave the ugly business of money to Ovitz and his minions. Of course, they were just as deeply involved as ever in choosing their projects and their collaborators. But now they were partnering with CAA and its staff and client list in those processes, and then letting CAA agents hammer whatever projects or prices they came up with through the gates of the studios. It was an ideal situation for De Niro: he could let Ovitz and CAA play the heavy for him, driving his price to new heights and demanding that his ideas about new film projects be taken seriously, while he himself retreated into a more modest stance as the quietly committed artist. In some ways it was like having the fiery Virginia Admiral serving as a business negotiator for her relatively naive husband—with the crucial distinction that, unlike his dad, De Niro became rich.

  * * *

  * These scenes, which featured extensive nudity by the young actress Lisa Bonet, from TV’s The Cosby Show, wound up earning the film an initial rating of X from the Motion Picture Association of America. Parker and company appealed twice, losing both times. They finally cut ten seconds of footage so as to obtain an R rating.