De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  * * *

  *1 As late as 2013, more than seventeen years after his death, Burke’s home was excavated by authorities in search of human remains—which they discovered. In 2014, several of Burke’s associates were arrested for, among other things, the Lufthansa heist.

  *2 Somewhat coyly, De Niro wouldn’t say whether he learned how to pistol-whip somebody from Hill. “Perhaps,” he replied when asked point-blank if that had been something they’d discussed. “I would ask him how this might have been done, or that, y’know?”

  IN JUNE 1990 DE NIRO STOOD ON A STREET CORNER IN LOS Angeles that was covered with snow, staring at a newsstand that was selling New York newspapers from December 1951. His longtime friend and producer, Irwin Winkler, was doing something highly unusual for a producer to do on a movie set: giving direction. “Remember, it’s freezing cold,” Winkler told De Niro, and then he proclaimed “Action,” and a film shot began.

  After nearly twenty-five years as a producer, Winkler was making his directorial debut with a film titled, temporarily, Fear No Evil, a story about the impact of the Communist witch hunts and subsequent blacklist on the Hollywood filmmaking community of the late 1940s. De Niro was cast in the lead as David Merrill, a respected director whose brief dalliance with leftist causes more than a decade earlier was coming back to haunt him, crushing him professionally and personally. The script, which Winkler wrote after conversations with the onetime blacklistee Abraham Polonsky and extensive research on the period, dealt with the reactions of a number of filmmakers to the pressure imposed on them by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC): some named names and saved their careers, some embraced their political beliefs and fled the country, and some, like Merrill, tried to defy the committee by keeping honorable silence and attempting to stay working in the movie business, the management of which was eager to ferret out anyone whom HUAC deemed undesirable. Merrill was a composite character, but the script involved a number of thinly veiled stories that anyone familiar with the period would recognize, including a director, based on Joseph Losey, who moves to Europe because he’s an avowed Communist, and an actor, based on Larry Parks, who caves in to the pressure to testify and is blacklisted despite the fact.

  Winkler brought the script to De Niro when they were making Goodfellas, and De Niro’s interest encouraged Warner Bros. to fund the $13 million budget (“A picture like this with a star like De Niro should cost $20 million,” Winkler bragged/moaned in typical producer fashion). Annette Bening was cast as De Niro’s ex-wife and principal confidante; Chris Cooper played the Parks character, and Patricia Wettig was cast as his wife, an actress based on Dorothy Comingore, whose blacklisting led to a complete collapse and early death. In a nifty twist, Sam Wanamaker, an actor who left Hollywood rather than succumb to HUAC, appeared as an attorney who tries to bully potential witnesses into cooperating.

  De Niro expressed no particular concerns about working with a first-time director. “I had faith he could do it,” he explained. “I have faith in myself, why shouldn’t I have faith in somebody else?” Even though he regarded the film as “simple” dramatically, De Niro was engaged in the process of coming to seem genuinely like a director of the post–World War II era. He had worked with Elia Kazan, who was notorious for having named names in front of HUAC, and drew upon his memories of Kazan’s on-set posture. And he studied photographs of directors at work to see how they dressed, where they positioned themselves in relation to the actors and the camera, what they held in their hands, and so forth. (“It was a question,” he joked, “of whether I should wear a beret and use a bullhorn.”) In the end, he focused on the look of John Huston, of whom he amassed a thick file of photographs, and the at-work personality of Kazan: “Think of involvement … For ex. the way Kazan does, that energy!” He watched film and read transcripts of HUAC hearings, he spoke with some survivors of the period, and he read several books on the subject. It was movie history, and he took it seriously.

  The film, eventually entitled Guilty by Suspicion, shot through the spring of 1990 and debuted the following March. De Niro was in Florida working on another film, but he flew to New York to support the release by appearing at a press conference and giving select interviews. The subject of Kazan came up, inevitably: many in the film world hadn’t yet forgiven him, even four decades on, for cooperating with HUAC. As De Niro reflected, “It was really a no-win situation, and I feel sorry for people no matter what position they took. It was terrible for Kazan that he had to do what he did; I know him, he’s a friend, and I have a great respect for him.” At the same time, though, he acknowledged that he would at least like to think he would have handled himself differently. “I’d like to think I’d refuse to betray anyone and somehow survive like [Arthur] Miller did,” he said, “but I honestly don’t know.” Guilty by Suspicion came and went with little impact, but in time De Niro would have occasion to consider further the history of Hollywood’s blacklist era.

  WHILE WORKING ON Guilty by Suspicion, he lined up his next two films. One was a pet project in which he was taking a producer’s interest: a remake of the 1962 thriller Cape Fear, in which he would play an updated version of Robert Mitchum’s role, an ex-con terrorizing the family of the lawyer who he believed perverted justice to put him away. Martin Scorsese would be directing in Florida and North Carolina in the winter. Before that, though, De Niro would go to Chicago for a chunk of the summer to play a feature role in Backdraft, a sprawling film about firefighters and arsonists written by Greg Widen and set to be directed by Ron Howard. Kurt Russell and Billy Baldwin were the stars, and De Niro would play an obsessive arson investigator named Rimgale, after a famed Chicago fireman who, at six feet six inches tall, cut an impressive figure around fire scenes.

  De Niro was focused, it seemed, more on Cape Fear, for which he was whittling down his body to its slimmest form since the boxing sequences in Raging Bull, working out vigorously every day and observing a strict diet. As a result, he conducted most of his research work for Backdraft more or less on the job, latching on to Bill Cosgrove, a barrel-chested veteran of the Chicago fire department who was offered to De Niro as a technical advisor. Cosgrove had both fought fires and investigated them in his time on the force, and during De Niro’s weeks in Chicago, he let the actor pick his brain, borrow (or, in some cases, outright buy) his equipment, and tag along to fires and fire investigations.

  Just as Art Linson had upon initially meeting the star before shooting The Untouchables, Cosgrove found De Niro a shock at first: unshaven, his clothes slightly disheveled, his hair a mop, his feet sockless in his boat shoes. But he soon saw how De Niro dedicated himself to learning absolutely everything he could about the work he’d be portraying: the protocol, the tools, the language, the attitude. (He had to be admonished about the socks, though: on his first visit to a fire scene, De Niro wound up limping from blisters on his feet caused by wearing heavy boots without socks. When Cosgrove celebrated his birthday during the production, De Niro presented him with a signed script of the film, a bottle of Dom Perignon, a Dominican cigar, and a pair of socks to replace the ones Cosgrove had given him that first day.)

  The two men bonded, De Niro appreciating Cosgrove’s practicality and expertise. The movie star taught the firefighter to drink cappuccinos and, less successfully, Patrón tequila; introduced him to his kids, Drena and Raphael, and to Toukie Smith, all of whom visited Chicago in August for De Niro’s birthday at the posh Chez Paul restaurant; and never stopped asking him questions, a tape recorder always at the ready to soak up more information about the job. De Niro was eager to meet a well-known Chicago arsonist named Fat Albert, and Cosgrove was willing to oblige, but his bosses in the fire department nixed it, fearing that any celebrity falling the fellow’s way might encourage copycats. And De Niro was very respectful when introduced to a veteran fireman who had suffered burns, photographing the man’s scars to serve as the basis of the make-believe scars he’d wear on his own back in a brief but compelling scene.

/>   As Cosgrove remembered, De Niro liked best to drive to a quiet place along the Lake Michigan waterfront and pass away the summer night drinking a beer or two and chatting about the work of firemen. He read up on fire investigation techniques, firehouse life, and the causes of and motivations for arson; the subjects of Hollywood and movie stardom seemed never to be in his mind.

  To others involved in the production, De Niro seemed a little more inscrutable. When Cosgrove had the opportunity to talk to Ron Howard about the star, all the director could do was speak in platitudes about his “greatness.” Greg Widen was a little more observant and revealing with a journalist later on, saying of De Niro, “He’s always cordial, always polite, but I think, in daily life, he can be rattled by things and you can’t be sure what those things are. He can be made uncomfortable. He’s not weird and he never copped an attitude, but he’s apart from the crowd. To know him as a person is grabbing at smoke. He came to the set an unknown quality and, on a personal level, he kind of left it that way.”

  The short prep time meant that a lot of De Niro’s thinking about the character showed up in his script pages: lists of the steps a fire investigator would routinely take in the course of his work, reminders that Rimgale was “not a headline grabber” but rather a sincere and straight character who, like so many firemen, evinced a strain of black humor “because of the grimness of [the] situation.” There was an oddness to him, De Niro surmised, but it wasn’t very deep: “Maybe a beard. Or a moustache.” When he probed deeper, he found some odd questions facing him: “I have a certain specific relationship with fire. What is it? Sexual? What? Fascination? Its power?” He introduced a single memorable line into the script, one borrowed from one of Cosgrove’s real-life colleagues; asked by his superiors what had caused a fire, Rimgale, wanting to give away nothing of his thinking, replies, “Mice with matches.” Apart from that, though, he poured very little of his own invention into the role.

  THE TRIBECA FILM CENTER wasn’t really a movie studio; there weren’t production facilities such as editing rooms or sound stages or labs. But there was one thing that made it seem like something more than just an office building with a very heavy concentration of film biz tenants: the Tribeca Grill. De Niro had dreamed that the interactive energy of the film center would focus on a ground-floor restaurant, which would serve as a clubhouse, a commissary, a watering hole, a gathering place, a party spot. It wouldn’t be a private club—it would have to pay its way just like any lessee. But it would be integral to creating a community space.

  De Niro and Toukie Smith were regulars at Montrachet, a popular and critically esteemed French restaurant that had opened just a few blocks from the Film Center site in 1985. It was casual for a French spot, with no dress code, a menu in English, and a prix fixe dinner that cost as little as $16. It offered some of the best food in the neighborhood, and it was run with a real feel for combining the fine with the comfortable. In 1988, when the Film Center was coming together in his mind, De Niro approached the owner of Montrachet, a robust fellow named Drew Nieporent, and asked him if he’d be willing to consider opening a restaurant to anchor the building.

  As it happened, Nieporent, who’d grown up wanting to be in the restaurant business, studying hospitality at Cornell and working his way up at some of Manhattan’s best restaurants, was already considering opening another eatery of some sort in Tribeca. He liked the idea of having a little empire of restaurants within walking distance of one another. He agreed to consider it—provided it was funded adequately and built according to his standards.

  The funding wasn’t as tricky a matter as it may have seemed, as the late 1980s were a little heyday of showbiz celebrities attaching their names (and wallets) to fine dining establishments in New York and Los Angeles. De Niro had a plethora of friends and colleagues to call upon as potential investors. Some said no, including Madonna, Penny Marshall, Jeremy Irons, Danny DeVito, and Barbra Streisand; the last was all set to invest when she learned that she would have to be fingerprinted by the state liquor board if she were to become an owner of a place that sold booze, and she backed out.

  But some two dozen investors fell into place, including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Christopher Walken, Sean Penn, Bill Murray, Ed Harris, Russell Simmons, Lou Diamond Phillips, the Miramax company, and the chairman of Elektra Records—and such non-showbiz types as a Newark poultry wholesaler. A total of $2.8 million was raised, half going to purchase the space, half for renovations. And then, as elsewhere in the building, everything about the place became more elaborate, more exacting, more detailed, more time-consuming, and more costly as they went along. Eventually, another $350,000 was needed, which was raised by refinancing the mortgage agreement.

  Some of that money—estimates ranged from $15,000 to $50,000—went to the centerpiece of the restaurant: the mahogany bar that had once dominated Maxwell’s Plum, the famed Upper East Side restaurant and singles bar where Nieporent once waited tables during its heyday in the 1970s. The bar was impeccably restored and placed smack in the middle of the room, creating a space, according to the restaurateur, “in which there really are no bad tables because the action is all around.” (There was a private room in the back to which the truly famous would be directed, but by and large the 150-seat restaurant would mix the famous faces among the hoi polloi.) In other regards, the space was done up in downtown chic, with exposed brick and pipes alongside polished brass and woodwork, small islands of green carpeting (installed for sound control) dotting a tiled floor.

  Besides the bar, the most noticeable design touch in the Tribeca Grill was the art on the walls: large canvases and sketches by Robert De Niro, selected and hung by the artist himself. As his son explained, it wasn’t guaranteed at all that the elder De Niro would approve of such a use for his work. “When I approached him about placing them there,” the younger De Niro said, “I wasn’t sure he’d agree—he was very sensitive about giving paintings away. He’d say, ‘You give it to someone, they put it in a closet.’ But once they were up, he liked going to the restaurant to see them and to have them be seen. Larry Salander [then the senior De Niro’s dealer] was worried about the odors and the food affecting the paintings, but I knew that their being there was something that my father had approved of, had blessed, and I didn’t want to take them down, even for their own good.” After the restaurant opened, in fact, the senior De Niro would occasionally hold court under one of his pieces, dining and drinking with friends, a sight that truly warmed his son’s heart.

  After a lengthy string of construction delays and an extended soft opening, the Tribeca Grill finally opened its doors properly for business in April 1990, and it was an immediate hit. Nieporent was doing two seatings a night—three hundred covers—and turning away almost as many diners virtually daily. Both Wall Street and Hollywood seemed to have designated the place as the hot spot of the moment; a partial list of diners in the first weeks included Dustin Hoffman, Gregory Peck, Tom Selleck, Cyndi Lauper, and New York Mets pitcher Ron Darling. Nieporent was concerned—“A scene can kill a restaurant,” he repeatedly told the press—but the place was booming.

  And it wasn’t just celebrity that lured people. The food was praiseworthy as well. At first, just a week or two after the opening, New York Times restaurant critic Bryan Miller was dubious about the fare: “The kitchen will not win any Oscars for the food, nor does it strive to.” But two months later, when he wrote a full assessment, his impression of executive chef Don Pintabona’s work had improved. He summed up his two-star review thus: “It is a good thing for the wide-eyed crowd here that the food is very good.… TriBeCa [sic] Grill is one celebrity restaurant that needs very little editing. It should enjoy a long run.”

  THE IDEA TO REMAKE Cape Fear, director Lee Thompson’s 1962 thriller about an ex-con seeking revenge against a lawyer who bent the rules to put him away, didn’t originate with De Niro, who would come to fill Robert Mitchum’s shoes as the terrifying vengeance seeker, or with Martin Scorsese, who would come to
direct it. Rather, it came from, of all people, Steven Spielberg, who wasn’t exactly noted for the sort of chilling psychosexual drama that made such a memorably disturbing experience of the original film.

  But there was a theme of a family in danger in the original source material, the novel The Executioners by John D. MacDonald, that was well within Spielberg’s wheelhouse. In 1989, he commissioned a new adaptation of the novel from screenwriter Wesley Strick, who’d been among the writers on the comic creature movie Arachnophobia for Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. Thirty years after the original, Strick was free to make the villain of the piece, ex-con Max Cady, even more horrifying and threatening than he had been in the original. But there was a certain Spielbergian patina that would be required for it as well. “I wrote it as an Amblin thriller,” Strick recalled later on. “It was big-budget and conventional, and it concentrated more on plot invention than it does now.” At some point toward the end of the year, Spielberg realized that his directorial plate was full, with Hook in post-production and Jurassic Park in the planning stages, so he became open to finding someone else to make Cape Fear.

  At the same time, he recognized that De Niro would be an exciting choice for Max Cady, and he sent him the script. De Niro liked what he saw well enough to agree to appear in it provided the right director and co-stars were found. The list of prospective directors proposed by Amblin was all over the place: Warren Beatty (who they hoped might also be willing to play Cady’s target), Robert Redford (ditto), Ridley Scott, Jonathan Demme, Kathryn Bigelow, Mike Figgis, Harold Becker, Paul Verhoeven, Tony Scott, Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, and more—a real smorgasbord of styles and talents with few obvious similarities. The suggestions about who might play the lawyer/father were equally diverse: besides Beatty and Redford, they included Mel Gibson, Gene Hackman, Jeremy Irons, Robin Williams, Michael Keaton, Clint Eastwood, Anthony Hopkins, Kevin Costner, Kevin Kline, Don Johnson, Jeff Goldblum, Bruce Dern, John Lithgow, Donald Sutherland, and Liam Neeson. At this point the film could have been anything.