De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  Production wrapped by summer, and Primus edited and reedited with lots of input from De Niro. That would have to suffice, because nearly a year after filming, nobody had agreed to step in and distribute the film. “You’ve got to tell yourself it’s one of those things,” De Niro said, “not to take any of this personally. People wanted Barry Primus to make changes, but I said: ‘Yeah, right. Barry wants to make it his way; it’s his vision, so let’s do it his way.’ ”

  Without a studio to distribute the film, Tribeca finally found a partner in Rainbow Releasing, the boutique distribution company owned and operated by the filmmaker Henry Jaglom principally as a vehicle for his own work. With Harvey Weinstein (whose Miramax had passed on the film) advising from the sidelines, with De Niro willing to do publicity, and now with a novel story of how it made its way to the screen, Mistress was finally released in August 1992.*1 After all those years and all that work, it proved virtually stillborn, never playing on more than thirty-odd screens and grossing less than $600,000.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1991, for the second year in a row, De Niro was in Chicago to shoot a film, but this time in one of the lead roles. Mad Dog and Glory was an original script by novelist Richard Price, whose books The Wanderers and Blood Brothers had been filmed in the 1970s and who had written original screenplays for Martin Scorsese (The Color of Money, the Life Lessons segment of New York Stories) and Al Pacino (Sea of Love). It involved a crime scene photographer who interrupts a holdup and thereby saves the life of a crime boss, who repays the photographer by sending a party girl to live with him as a thank-you gift. An uneasy friendship develops between the two men—the gangster wants to be a stand-up comedian and thinks the photographer has a gift for jokes—and then a rivalry over the girl’s affections ensues.

  The script had once been a project of the director Glenn Gordon Caron. But now it was being produced by Martin Scorsese, and in addition to choosing to shoot it in Chicago rather than New York, where Price had originally set it but where large-scale films were having a hard time getting made, Scorsese hired John McNaughton, a Chicago guy with a couple of fiery genre films to his credit, to direct it: the notorious Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the sci-fi thriller The Borrower. The real novelty of the picture, though, and an indication of the sort of quirky tone the filmmakers were after, came in the casting. De Niro was playing not the hoodlum but rather the hapless milquetoast photographer; the gangster who thought he was a comedian would be played by … drumroll … Bill Murray.

  That was a risk. Murray was a box office star, but his only dramatic role to date, an adaptation of The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham, had been loudly and widely deemed a catastrophe. Still, Price’s script had an off-kilter quality that suggested that such an experiment could work (although at least one more straightforward choice, Stanley Tucci, was in the running for the gangster role for a while). Besides, Murray was a big star at the time, with What About Bob? raking in a huge gross and the Ghostbuster films not long in the past.

  The casting of the female lead proved more elusive, though. A number of rising young actresses were considered, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Mary Stuart Masterson, Annabella Sciorra, Kelly Lynch, Penelope Miller, and Melissa Leo. Finally Uma Thurman was selected, at a time when she and De Niro had been linked romantically in gossip columns.

  De Niro skirted the drama of the casting situation by focusing on his role: Wayne “Mad Dog” Dobie, a punctilious stick-in-the-mud upon whom fortune had never smiled. “I feel like such a non-man,” he wrote of the character. “Have to find movements that fit my character and make me feel awkward.” Wardrobe would have been one way to achieve that sense of discomfort, but costumer Rita Ryack discovered that anything she brought in for De Niro to wear fit him beautifully, while the finest suits tended to look like crumpled messes on Murray. While she worked out a solution, De Niro went for ride-alongs with a crime scene photographer from the New York Police Department, noting how low on the ladder of authority the photographer stood, how his work would be scrutinized more carefully than even that of the supervising detectives, and how to use the most meticulous methods to generate unimpeachable work. Playing such a meek character, and gearing up for encounters with Murray’s vaguely threatening gangster, De Niro reminded himself, “It’s like me with tough guys I know. I take the passive role but give good advice and know how to regulate them.… I’m listening, and it’s that thing where someone is taking themselves very seriously and I’m being attentive in a way to let them know I’m that attentive but giving them all the respect they deserve and think they deserve.”

  The shoot was a relative lark: Murray greeted De Niro on their joint first day with a gift and a card that read, “Thanks for this job. Let’s both break our legs and live happily ever after.” But in January 1992, when the film was tested on what happened to be the director’s birthday, the ending was hammered by the screening audience. “It didn’t go well,” McNaughton remembered. “We had this saccharine, fantasy happy ending, and it just wasn’t working.” Scorsese and company realized they needed to write and shoot a new climax, but that would require not only reconvening the cast but also waiting for the weather in Chicago to return to a semblance of the previous summer. In July they worked another three days and got the ending they wanted, but then the studio, Universal, got balky, uncertain whether it had a summer movie, a Christmas movie, or neither on its hands. Too, there were scheduling conflicts with other films featuring the stars. Eventually they released it in March 1993, almost two years after shooting began.

  GUILTY BY SUSPICION may not have lit the world on fire, but it launched Irwin Winkler as a director, and within months of its quick pass through the nation’s theaters, Winkler was shooting a second film, also with its roots in the post–World War II era, also starring De Niro. Night and the City was a remake of a 1950 film noir based on a novel by Gerald Kersh, directed by Jules Dassin, and starring Richard Widmark as something of a con man living by the seat of his pants in London and trying to raise money to promote a wrestling exhibition. Almost a decade earlier, Richard Price had, at Martin Scorsese’s request, updated the material into a tale of a shyster lawyer in contemporary New York trying to rustle up funds to stage a boxing match; the project languished, but Winkler resurrected the script and Price touched it up to give it an early 1990s feel.

  The film would be shot on location—no fake snow on Wilshire Boulevard this time—and it would reunite De Niro with Jessica Lange, this time as his love interest. Also in the cast were such evocative New York types as Alan King, Barry Primus, Eli Wallach, Cliff Gorman, and Regis Philbin. In shades of Guilty by Suspicion, Dassin himself, a blacklist survivor, would stop by the set for a visit at Winkler’s behest. And Tribeca Productions would have a hand in the picture, though De Niro wouldn’t claim a producing credit.

  De Niro had a vision of his character, Harry Fabian, as a perpetual-motion machine, describing him alternately as “a chicken with his head cut off, or a rabbit darting through a maze” and “someone jumping across the street from rock to rock, just barely missing the piranha fish that are jumping up trying to get him.” His script notes reminded him that Harry was “always moving, tapping knees, feet,” and he directly asked Price, “What rhythm do you see Harry as?” He studied his own youthful performances, especially Mean Streets, and he and Winkler devised a scheme to keep his energy up in each shot: De Niro was outfitted with an earpiece that played Chris Montez’s 1962 Latin pop hit “Let’s Dance” for him on a loop (“We were going to blast it over Seventh Avenue,” Winkler said, only half joking, “but it worked better in Bob’s ear, and he got the rhythm, the cadence”).

  The cadence of De Niro and Lange working together wasn’t so seamlessly achieved. Lange had reached a moment in her career at which she was ambivalent about working as an actress at all (although she had just agreed to play Blanche Dubois on Broadway opposite Alec Baldwin’s Stanley Kowalski), and she didn’t always agree with the actions and motives of her charact
er as conceived by Price, Winkler, and De Niro. As a result, many of the most intimate scenes she had with De Niro were shot multiple times with different shadings of dialogue and action; De Niro, in a rare show of candor, not only allowed a reporter to watch some of these moments but spoke about them soon afterward. Asked why they’d shot a certain scene so many times and so differently, he replied, “Jessica was sensitive about it, and I was sensitive to her being sensitive.… Irwin wasn’t sure, so he shot it both ways. One of them is right. When it gets down to the editing, he’ll make a choice.”

  HE HAD BEEN working a brutal schedule, and he seemed hell-bent on continuing. In August 1991, when he had a short break in the shoot of Mad Dog and Glory, De Niro flew to Los Angeles to do a table reading of a script entitled This Boy’s Life, based on a memoir of the same title by Tobias Wolff and dealing with the period in the 1950s when the author’s mother was briefly married to a cruel and abusive man from rural Washington State. Wolff, who had been raised to harbor great aspirations for his education and career, was suffocated by the brutal small-mindedness of his mother’s husband and the apparent hopelessness of the situation, and he fought openly with the man. But his mother often backed away and tacitly consented to her son being disciplined, afraid to lose the delicate handhold by which she was holding on to a means of support for herself and her son (actually, one of two sons: the other boy, Geoffrey, who would also grow up to be a memoirist, was with her ex-husband).

  Producer Art Linson had commissioned a script of the memoir from screenwriter Robert Getchell and had landed on the Scottish-born Michael Caton-Jones, who had shown a flair for period filmmaking in Scandal and Memphis Belle, to direct it. De Niro had agreed to play the part of Dwight Hansen, the unlikeable stepdad, but would agree to make the picture only if he was comfortable with the choice of the lead character, Toby, who would be depicted between ages fourteen and seventeen and would essay a broad range of intense emotions throughout the film. Visiting Los Angeles, De Niro read with a number of rising young actors in a kind of marathon day of auditions: Tobey Maguire, Lukas Haas, Edward Furlong, and Leaf Phoenix (as Joaquin Phoenix was billing himself at the time). At the table reading of the script—during which actors read the material aloud informally to give the producers a sense of the dialogue and plotting as well as to help fine-tune casting—the role of Toby was read by Fred Savage.

  Another young actor who had auditioned with De Niro previously was on hand at the table reading to handle the remainder of the juvenile parts. De Niro had already taken note of him, telling Linson after the day of one-on-one auditions. “I like the kid that was second-to-last,” he said almost casually as he was leaving for the day. The sixteen-year-old kid had a long television career—sitcoms, mostly—but he’d never acted in a movie before. Linson and Caton-Jones had invited him back for the table reading, then kept looking at him, and finally chose him for the lead role. His name was Leonardo DiCaprio.

  In the course of time, De Niro and DiCaprio would work together again, become real-life pals, and form creative bookends in the career of Martin Scorsese, who made five movies with the younger actor starting in 2002, seven years after the last (to date) of his eight films with De Niro.*2 But at the time De Niro noticed him, DiCaprio was unknown, and being cast opposite a big star in such a large, complex, and volatile role was a real challenge. It wasn’t the only opportunity in front of him—he was set to go straight from shooting This Boy’s Life to another dysfunctional family drama, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape—but it could prove decisive one way or another in his career.

  In fact, on one of his last days of shooting, the film’s third crucial star made a point of telling DiCaprio that he might have reached the end of the best time of his life. Ellen Barkin, the brassy, sexy Bronx-born actress who’d appeared in Diner, Switch, and Sea of Love, was cast as Toby’s mother (Beverly D’Angelo had filled the role at the table reading). Her last day of work with DiCaprio involved a scene of leave-taking, and DiCaprio had to rouse himself to tears. “That’s hard to do, take after take,” Barkin said later. “Of course, he had me whispering in his ear, ‘This is the biggest experience of your career, you just finished a movie with Robert De Niro, it’s all downhill from here.…’ ”

  For his part, De Niro once again dove into his research. He visited Wolff at Syracuse University, showing up with a dog-eared copy of This Boy’s Life and a notebook full of observations and questions. He meticulously selected his wardrobe from vintage Sears catalogues. He studied the idioms and accent of Washington’s Skagit Valley on audiotapes and crafted a strange nasal vocal approach with dialect coach Sam Chwat. He was, as ever, an obliging collaborator, and he was proud enough of his finished work to invite Elia Kazan to the New York premiere. But critics were divided on the picture, and audiences were repelled by De Niro’s unpleasant character. In the end, only DiCaprio came out of the film with a boost.

  DE NIRO HAD never been especially political, and never in public. Even, for instance, when he gave interviews in support of The Deer Hunter he used the vaguest terms possible in describing his opposition to the Vietnam War, which was already over. In fact, he almost never made reference to current events or political topics in interviews or even while inhabiting characters in films. But he had his preferences, of course, and given that he was a son of bohemian New York and an active member in the showbiz community, it’s not surprising that his views were left-leaning. There were his visits to Moscow and Havana, of course, which were controversial in the mid-1980s, when he made them. In 1990, when Nelson Mandela made his triumphal tour of the United States, De Niro attended several of his speeches and private appearances, and hosted a $2,500-a-plate fund-raiser at the Tribeca Grill.

  In the coming years, he would peek his head out a little more openly in political matters. He strongly supported Bill Clinton as a presidential candidate twice, and he joined a group of signatories in a published protest against Clinton’s 1998 impeachment. At home, he had avidly backed David Dinkins in his successful 1989 campaign to become mayor of New York and then filmed and recorded ads and attended fund-raisers for his reelection bid four years later, when Dinkins lost to Rudolph Giuliani.*3 Mostly his touch in politics was light: he read stories to kids one year at the Clinton White House’s Easter egg roll, and he appeared onstage at a New York City fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton’s Senate run (again, against Giuliani) to teach Bill Clinton how to say “fuggedaboudit” properly by manipulating the president’s mouth and cheeks (“Don’t shoot him!” Harvey Weinstein joked with the Secret Service). When the 2000 presidential election devolved into a turmoil of vote counting, De Niro was among the scores of celebrities who signed a petition published in the New York Times calling for a fair result (i.e., the election of Al Gore). Even when he visited troops overseas in 2003, during the Iraq War, he did it without any press coverage.

  In fact, most of his activity in the public sphere was in assisting charitable efforts, only rarely embracing them so that his name and face became synonymous with them. Following through on his work with Toukie Smith, he continued raising money and awareness for AIDS research and care through the Willi Smith Foundation and Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and he made himself similarly available to a few charities in New York, particularly those dedicated to improving the lives of kids or preserving cultural institutions in the city. Urged by Harvey Keitel, he even attended a Marine Corps anniversary dinner that Keitel, an old jarhead, was hosting as a fund-raiser.

  In truth, though, he was far likelier to be visible at events having to do with the world of film, or the high-living adjuncts of it. He chaired a tribute to Martin Scorsese hosted by American Cinematheque, talked about film directing at Long Island University in a joint appearance with Spike Lee, gave a lecture at the Actors Studio West, and, starting with the Best Director prize in 1990, became an occasional presenter on Oscar telecasts, little knowing that his 1992 nomination for Cape Fear would be his last competitive entry at the Academy Awards until 2013. More commonly tha
n any of those, he could be seen at cultural events in New York: a performance by the Alvin Ailey dance troupe, for instance, or an evening of readings by translators of Dante at the 92nd Street Y. More frequently still, he was seen at seats alongside the catwalk at fashion shows during New York’s annual Fashion Week, where he frequently attended events displaying the latest work of Giorgio Armani, with whom he’d struck up a friendship. (Drena De Niro was unofficially the go-to DJ for Armani’s shows, and in 1995, Armani sent her dad a leather jacket in which he had been dressed for a magazine photo shoot and for which he expressed appreciation.)

  As often as he showed up to honor colleagues, share his insights on the movies, or look at fashion models in new outfits, he was even likelier to appear if he was himself the honoree. In March 1991 he was the centerpiece of a gala in support of the American Museum of the Moving Image, a $350-a-plate affair that drew more than eight hundred people to the Waldorf-Astoria to hear De Niro saluted and lightly ribbed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Harvey Keitel, Jeremy Irons, Liza Minnelli, Charles Grodin, Penny Marshall, and Danny Aiello. De Niro, whose tablemates included both Toukie Smith and Diahnne Abbott, spoke at the end in support of the museum’s mission and to gently tweak his peers. “I consider myself too young for awards like this,” the forty-seven-year-old De Niro said. “They should have been given to guys like Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman.”