De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  So while Fonda dealt with controversy, De Niro was free to immerse himself in a part that, like those in Midnight Run and Falling in Love, required no external transformation. Instead, he dove into study of the phenomenon of adult illiteracy, watching hours of personal stories that were videotaped for him by a research assistant. He learned little tricks of hiding the condition—pretending to leave one’s reading glasses at home; asking waiters to suggest items from the menu; taking extreme care with household chemicals; pretending to dislike board games, which often involve a lot of reading; being extremely careful about using public transportation and following road maps; and so on. (And he explained that videotape, as opposed to actual conversation, was now his preferred mode of research because it meant not only less work but less engagement with the work: “I could just play it back and pick up a lot of nuances that way,” he said, “and it was at my leisure, and I didn’t have to worry and extend so much of myself.”)

  The chief thing he took away, something he underscored more than once in his notes, was the sense of shame, of secretiveness, of having only partially grown up, of being always on the edge of making an embarrassing mistake or, worse, of being revealed. “There are many examples that I can think of for myself,” he scribbled in his script (in part he compared it to his very limited knowledge of Italian). He came to realize that an adult hiding an inability to read was self-isolating, both in the ordinary things of life and in the deepest emotions, and that became the key to his character—a constant bluffing, defensiveness, and low-level anxiety.

  The videotapes were also useful as a road map to the western Massachusetts accent he wanted to use for his character. Other than that, it was simply a matter of finding the right clothes—he went to the same shop in the town of Meriden, Connecticut, that he’d patronized while making Jackknife—and working on the emotional truth of the scenes with Fonda, because this was, in effect, only the second full-fledged love story of his career.

  Shooting finished in October 1988, but MGM didn’t believe very strongly in the film and held it for release until February 1990, when it would be neglected not only by Oscar voters but by general audiences.

  BY THE TIME Stanley and Iris made its way meekly through distribution, De Niro had already come and gone from theaters in yet another box office disappointment. We’re No Angels was a project that he himself had instigated back in 1987, when he and his new buddy Sean Penn decided that they wanted to work together. “I like Sean,” he remembered. “I have a lot of respect for him, and I know he’s a serious actor. We were talking, and I said, ‘Let’s get together and try and do something.’ Then we got Art Linson.”

  Linson, demonstrating the classic producer’s ability to forget past slights if there’s a new project in the air, discussed with David Mamet an idea he had for a story about prison escapees hiding among holy men at a monastery, based loosely on the largely forgotten 1955 Humphrey Bogart comedy We’re No Angels. As in that film, the characters in the tale Linson had in mind would turn from fugitives seeking only to save their hides to Samaritans actually doing some good in the world for others.

  “When Art called I knew it could bode no good,” Mamet half joked. “But he’s fairly persuasive.” Mamet set the first draft of the screenplay in the 1930s in a town on the U.S. side of the Canadian border, and he forged two characters—hard-boiled Ned and simpleminded Jim—based on what he saw to be the comic personalities of De Niro and Penn, respectively. The script was revised in 1988 to a level that got Paramount Pictures, still tallying the take of The Untouchables, involved, and shooting was scheduled for February through April of the following year in British Columbia, which was becoming a go-to spot for Hollywood productions seeking to save money on wages, taxes, and other expenses.

  The savings were important, as the film wound up being a more ambitious undertaking than its casual genesis might have foretold. The producers built an entire 1930s town in the woods: two dozen buildings, actual roads, and so forth, at a cost of U.S. $2.5 million—the largest set ever constructed in Canada. Orchestrating it all was the Irish novelist and screenwriter-director Neil Jordan, who’d broken out in the business with 1986’s Mona Lisa but run into trouble with his follow-up, the expensive ghost story High Spirits, which had tanked at the box office. He was a little chary of American Method actors, but he loved the setting and he loved the script, the first he’d ever directed that he hadn’t written. “The script has all the things I like—Madonnas, deaf children, a whore with a heart of gold, and low-grade characters who are redeemed,” he said.

  One of the key characters, as Jordan alluded to, was Molly, the town washerwoman and prostitute whose connection to Ned becomes a significant element in the story. Linson and company went through a copious list of possibilities in casting the role: Julia Roberts, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Amy Madigan, Kathleen Quinlan, Diane Lane, Rene Russo, Beverly D’Angelo, and Ann Magnuson, among others. The part finally went to Demi Moore, who possessed a toughness of voice and demeanor that, it was felt, suited the period of the film.

  That sense of a bygone era, Linson argued, was one of the film’s great assets, especially as embodied in its stars. “Sean and Bob,” he said, “don’t have faces, they have mugs.… These guys are not going to be modeling clothes in a department store when their careers are over.” (De Niro, hearing of this description from a reporter, considered it for a while before declaring, “I can live with that.”)

  De Niro tried as much as was practical to get into the low-key energy of the production, forfeiting the right to stay at a five-star hotel near the set and instead traveling back and forth from more modest accommodations. He read extensively on what prison conditions had been like in Vermont in the 1930s, making contact with a former warden who wrote him a detailed account of the daily lives of his charges. And, he later confessed, he struggled a bit with the tempo of the comedy and the responsibility to play a tough guy of the 1930s as Mamet had written it. One scene in particular vexed him:

  I was trying to find a line between what’s funny and what’s serious, because the scene was written in a serious manner and yet the style is funny. It took me many takes to get the right balance.… I didn’t want to be too heavy … and bring it into the floor because there’s a certain buoyancy about it. I never expected it to give me so much trouble. I wanted it to be real but also to have a slant. Plus I was in a position where I was lying down, which put me in a restful position in a moment where I’m supposed to be aggressive. Plus Mamet writes in such a specific way, in this case with a ’30s-style Irish lilt that’s not something natural for me. I never thought it would be such a problem. The whole scene is less than a page. But we kept going over and over it.

  In May, when filming ceased a few weeks later than it had been scheduled to, De Niro got a letter from Paramount president Sid Ganis: “Congrats on the wrap … From what I gather, it was a rough one—with all kinds of day-to-day stuff to deal with … but to me and the gang here at Paramount it feels and looks like something very special, very funny and very touching.”

  It wasn’t, however, a feeling that they were able to convey to audiences. We’re No Angels opened just before Christmas, a curious choice for such offbeat fare. If it proved, finally, too big a production for its intimate and often funny script, it’s saved by the performances, particularly by Penn’s as a street-flavored simpleton, a kind of Stan Laurel to De Niro’s hard, cynical, and selfish Oliver Hardy.

  De Niro’s Ned truly does feel like he’s been sharing a jail cell with Humphrey Bogart or George Raft—there’s a distinctly old-time air to his coarseness, his calculation, his energy. He gives a clever performance of a man giving a performance—a hardened convict attempting to behave as he thinks a priest might, even when events around him drive him to the sort of fury that got him into prison in the first place. (In one of the film’s little in-jokes, he must listen to the confession of an adulterous sheriff’s deputy, played by Bruno Kirby, who, of course, was the young, carpet-stealing C
lemenza in The Godfather, Part II.) The film is, to borrow Andrew Sarris’s useful rubric, lightly likeable, if never quite profound, not as kinky as the best Neil Jordan, not as caustic as the best David Mamet, not as soul-baring as the best De Niro or Penn. But it continually offers up small delights. It certainly deserved better than its almost complete dismissal at the box office, where it recouped only slightly half of its budget.

  IF HIS WORK of the 1980s was spottier than his output of the previous decade, you could mount a pretty good film festival with films that he came close to making during this period but that reached the screen without him or didn’t get made at all. He was going to play a cameo as impresario Sol Hurok in a film about the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, and a key role in Michael Powell’s never-realized production about the Russian author Mikhail Lermontov; he was going to appear in Sergio Leone’s epic about the siege of Leningrad and to play Pancho Villa opposite Tom Cruise in the role of Tom Mix. He was interested in making films of two David Mamet plays—Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-the-Plow—and a film called Waterfront about the struggle to make On the Waterfront. He was cast on paper, but never on film, opposite Danny DeVito in a comedy called The Battling Spumonti Brothers, in a cameo role in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, in Elia Kazan’s adaptation of his own novel Beyond the Aegean, as Prospero in a Cuban film version of The Tempest, and in Michael Cimino’s never-filmed life of gangster Frank Costello, Proud Dreamer. He came very close, in 1988, to playing the role of Sal the pizzeria owner in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (Lee’s production diaries from the weeks when De Niro was attached would include the director’s reminders to himself not to be cowed by an actor of De Niro’s stature). And amid all those unrealized projects, he very nearly debuted as a director with an adaptation of Haywood Gould’s novel Double Bang, a cop story set in New York that he also would have starred in and produced.

  HE’D STEERED CLEAR of the Chateau Marmont for a while after John Belushi’s death, and in fact he barely worked in Hollywood throughout the 1980s, but by the end of the decade he began staying there regularly again—and, once again, it was a star-crossed experience. Twice in November 1988 his bungalow at the Chateau was burgled, once when he was asleep inside. The first theft was relatively minor—some clothes, some audio equipment. But the second, when De Niro was in bed, resulted in the disappearance of a rented Mercedes, which finally turned up a few days later in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Long Beach. At first De Niro claimed that the burglar had used keys to get into the bungalow, but he later confessed to police that he likely had left the sliding patio door unlocked and, he admitted, ajar. “I’m from New York,” he explained. “New York people like fresh air.”

  A few months later he was a victim, in a sense, of an even more invasive crime. Robert Litchfield, a career bank robber from Florida, had escaped the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas (becoming the first such escapee in a dozen years), and while in flight had undergone plastic surgery to accentuate an already close resemblance to De Niro. He was caught six weeks after his escape after robbing yet another bank in Florida, his eyes and ears still slightly swollen from his cosmetic operations. Turned out that being Robert De Niro wasn’t as easy as the man himself made it look.

  WHATEVER MIGHT BE MEANT BY THE PHRASE “CAREER criminal,” it certainly was appropriate for James Burke, aka Jimmy the Gent, a hijacker, loan shark, gambler, extortionist, drug trafficker, and murderer who was born in New York in 1931 and had an adult arrest record from the time he was eligible for one. Burke was taken into custody by the NYPD four times in 1970, three times each in 1948, 1957, 1964, and 1966, twice each in 1961 and 1963, and once each in 1949, 1950, 1953, 1956, 1962, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1972, and 1973: thirty-three collars in twenty-five years, real archcriminal stuff.

  That last bust—for beating a Florida man who owed money to some people in New York—wound up with Burke going to prison for six years, during which time a parole officer noted, with some understatement:

  This resident can be described as “The Model Inmate.”… It is plain to see that this man knows how to “pull time.” During interviews he was always courteous and cooperative and gave the appearance of being self-confident and mature. However, because of his lengthy criminal record he is considered to be street-wise and criminally oriented.… The prognosis for Mr. Burke to remain free of involvement in criminal activities is guarded.

  Burke was aligned with the Lucchese crime family, which held sway over parts of Brooklyn and Queens, where Burke was born and committed most of his crimes. He was particularly keen on Kennedy Airport, which was near his base of operations, provided a rich source of cargo, cash, and valuables, and, in the days before 9/11, featured a loosey-goosey security infrastructure that could be easily exploited by a small and well-connected gang of thieves. Burke was famous in criminal and police circles for his ability to prey upon the airport; the most audacious heist of his audacious career, a $6 million haul of untraceable cash from a Lufthansa Airlines storage facility in 1978, became the stuff of legend, in part because in the years afterward Burke systematically killed so many of the people involved in the job.*1

  What Burke was not was Italian, and thus despite all his collaborations with mafiosi and all the money he made with and for them, he was never initiated into the mob. That was a privilege accorded to full-blooded Italians and never to Irishmen like Burke or even to the likes of Henry Hill, a half-Italian, half-Irish member of Burke’s crew who grew up watching and emulating Jimmy the Gent and other gangsters from his neighborhood. Burke was a father figure to Hill and to the slightly younger Thomas DeSimone, both of whom he’d instructed in the ways of the mob from adolescence onward and who partnered with him on any number of crimes, including the Lufthansa heist. One of the lessons he repeatedly drilled into them was that they should never, under any circumstances, rat on a colleague or assist the police in any way. But when Hill was caught dealing cocaine in 1980—against the orders of Burke and their mutual bosses in the Lucchese family—he did what he’d been tutored never to do: he cooperated with law enforcement authorities against Burke and several others and vanished into the witness protection program. On the strength of Hill’s testimony, Burke went to prison in 1982—not for the Lufthansa heist and all the murders that he’d committed or ordered others to cover up, but for fixing college basketball games as part of a 1978 gambling scheme. While he was incarcerated, though, he was convicted of the 1979 murder of a cocaine dealer, and any chance he had of being paroled disappeared. He died of stomach cancer in a prison hospital in 1996.

  Burke’s story came to the attention of Martin Scorsese in 1985 when he read Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by the New York journalist Nicholas Pileggi. The book was an as-told-to account of Henry Hill’s life and deeds, recounted from the vantage of an unnamed safe harbor and an assumed identity. Said Scorsese, “I was drawn to the book because of the details—life—stuff that I remembered friends saying when I was growing up in Little Italy and that I had never seen written down before.” With Pileggi, Scorsese worked on adapting a script from the book (the title of which could not be used because of a fear of confusion with the then-popular TV series of the same name). They focused their work on the quotidiana of mob life that enthralled Scorsese, ending up with what Pileggi called “a mob home movie.”

  Before Scorsese could get around to it, though, he finally made The Last Temptation of Christ and then the short film Life Lessons, which was part of the New York Stories trilogy that also included pieces by Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola. Finally, in the summer of 1989, he set about making Goodfellas, as the Henry Hill movie had come to be entitled, with a $25 million budget from Warner Bros. Ray Liotta, hot off successes in small but vital roles in Something Wild and Field of Dreams, would play Hill; Lorraine Bracco, then married to Harvey Keitel, would play Hill’s wife, Karen; Paul Sorvino would play a Lucchese family crime boss; Joe Pesci would take on a character based on Tommy DeSimone, and De Niro would play the role of Ji
mmy the Gent—or Jimmy Conway, as the script renamed him.

  Whatever he was energized by—the story, the role, or the chance to work with Scorsese for the first time since The King of Comedy—De Niro dove into preparing for the part of Jimmy the Gent with a vigor he hadn’t demonstrated in years. In some ways it was a supporting role, since Hill was the narrator and the protagonist. But De Niro treated it with fanatical devotion. He never met with Burke—“It would have been too complicated,” he explained cryptically—but he spoke with Henry and Karen Hill repeatedly (they joked about receiving seven or eight phone calls from him a day), and his researchers helped track down other people who could tell him about the mind, the heart, and the habits of the real guy.*2 And he heavily annotated his copy of Pileggi’s book.

  The result was a massive written portrait of Jimmy Burke, larger than the one Pileggi had written, teeming with insights and reflections that would shape De Niro’s performance: an account of how Burke talked, walked, dressed, gambled, killed, ate, drank, moved, loved, hated, thought. In each scene in which he appeared, De Niro distilled his research into specific choices of actions, attitudes, and dialogue. It was the most work he’d done on a film role since Raging Bull. Take, for example, these excerpts from his notes on the character:

  Lots of bets … he liked to laugh … when drunk a little loud … tried to be a part of any situation … good at bullshitting people … bookmaker all the time … plays gin rummy … fabulous memory … dozen roses to mothers of guys in can … glide, little bounce … always shaking hands … Didn’t like strangers … I’d go over in a restaurant if I knew them and say hello, buy drinks, send a bottle … big spender … likes to tell jokes, good company, a laugher … I created my own crew … I was contemporary … I networked very well. I was always working, my mind was working. Anybody and anything … I made myself known and I made myself feared. A rebel … I know that if I wanted to get it done right, anything, I had to do it … seemed to be everywhere, all the time … I have a set of values, set of rules … wonderful around children, respectful, a gentleman … hair short, clean … when had to do business, looked good. Good dresser. A rebel but respectful … expressive with eyes, looked right at you … intense smile you never knew how to take … could smile wide and be very angry … play one person against the other, egg a person … on power trips … never slept; once in a while took a cat nap … loved that he was Irish and when walked into place they’d play “Danny Boy”… a good sport; if someone needed, I’d give … nice smile … normally laid back, take things in stride, always in control … my mind was on making a score, not so much a woman … when walked in the place glowed, but people didn’t like to see me get drunk.