by Shawn Levy
Two Bobs: with Robert De Niro Sr. and his paintings (MPTV).
A pair of kings: with Jerry Lewis on the set of The King of Comedy (Photofest).
Reunited: with Brian De Palma on the set of The Untouchables (Photofest).
Uptown boys: with Burt Young and Ralph Macchio in Cuba and His Teddy Bear (Photofest).
Goodfellas: at an AIDS-awareness benefit with Sean Penn and Toukie Smith (Corbis).
Diahnne Abbott with Drena and Raphael De Niro (Getty).
The crew: with Ray Liotta, Paul Sorvino, Martin Scorsese, and Joe Pesci publicizing Goodfellas (Photofest).
Fighting trim: in Cape Fear (Photofest).
Castle on Hudson Street: his penthouse home in TriBeCa (ImageCollect).
Partners: announcing the first TriBeCa Film Festival with Jane Rosenthal (ImageCollect).
Partners: opening the first Nobu Hotel with Nobu Matsuhisa and Meir Teper (ImageCollect).
Ringleader: with his family, including Grace Hightower (second from left); sons Elliot, Aaron, Julian, and Raphael (eyes closed); and cousin Jean De Niro (holding his hand) at the Kennedy Center Honors, 2009 (ImageCollect).
“You talkin’ to me?”: with Bruce Springsteen at the Kennedy Center Honors (ImageCollect).
Tears of age: with Grace Hightower at the restoration of Once Upon a Time in America at the Cannes Film Festival, 2012 (Corbis).
Hands up: immortalized at Hollywood’s famed Chinese Theater, 2013 (Corbis).
Kings of old: with Jerry Lewis, Sandra Bernhard, and Martin Scorsese at a thirtieth-anniversary screening of The King of Comedy (ImageCollect).
Big night: at the 2013 Oscar ceremony with Grace Hightower (ImageCollect).
IN AUGUST 1992 DE NIRO GOT THE WORST NEWS THAT ANY Hollywood personality could possibly receive: a missive from the law office of Marvin Mitchelson, the famed palimony attorney in Los Angeles, seeking money from him on the part of Helena Springs, then using her husband’s surname, Lisandrello. The claim was based, of course, on the three years that De Niro and Lisandrello had been intimate and on the birth near the end of that time of her daughter, identified in the lawsuit as Nina Nadeja De Niro, in July 1982. The suit made reference to the romance, to De Niro’s presence in Lisandrello’s life during the baby’s infancy, and to voluntary financial payments, as high as $8,000 to $10,000 a month, that De Niro had allegedly made to Lisandrello until not long before the suit was filed, when the payments simply stopped without explanation. The suit, seeking a total of $3,500 per month in child support, argued that De Niro had bonded with the child in the role of birth father and had established a long-standing relationship of financial and emotional support.
De Niro received the suit with cool aplomb, meeting the process server at the door to his Tribeca office and asking him quietly, “Is that all there is?” His attorneys tried to keep him from appearing in court in Los Angeles, the excuse being his hectic work schedule, but the California State Superior Court, which was handling the case, ordered him to appear, to resume payments for child support and tuition for private school (the Lycée Français in West Los Angeles, at $1,000 a month, merci bien), and to submit to a blood test to determine paternity. In October, he went to Los Angeles to comply.
Predictably, De Niro’s side denied everything and called the case frivolous, so Lisandrello took to the gossip columns, claiming that she and De Niro had resumed their romance in the early 1990s when he had been longing to see more of Nina. She further claimed that he had refused any blood or DNA tests, that she had denied her current husband permission to adopt Nina, and that De Niro had tried to pay her outright for custody of the child—all of which De Niro’s representatives denied.
In late October, the results of two separate blood tests came back: De Niro was not, as he had been told and always assumed, Nina’s father. But that surprising turn didn’t dissuade Lisandrello and Mitchelson from pursuing their suit, claiming, in effect, a kind of parental palimony. “We’ve always proceeded under the assumption that De Niro might not be the biological father,” Mitchelson conceded, referring to another man “who could be the real father [who] was killed in a car accident years ago.” The suit would continue, the attorney explained, because De Niro had voluntarily taken on the bulk of the financial responsibilities of fatherhood and at least some of the emotional ones, and that it was unfair to the child to simply drop them.
In November, without holding a hearing or taking testimony, the court ruled in De Niro’s favor, declaring that he had no obligation to pay any sort of support to Lisandrello. Almost as if to mark his confidence in the outcome, De Niro had been seen out on the town in New York on two separate nights the weekend just before the court’s declaration: once in the company of Toukie Smith and once in the company of Naomi Campbell, the twentyish British supermodel with whom he was now linked.
BY 1994, De Niro and Toukie Smith had more or less drifted apart, or at least could no longer be considered the steady item they once had seemed to be. Since her brother Willi Smith’s death in 1987, De Niro had been supportive of Toukie’s work on AIDS education and charity with the Smith Family Foundation, co-hosting and attending its galas and holding one of its biggest-ever events, a $250-per-plate dinner and auction, at the Tribeca Grill. But those ties had been tested by De Niro’s very public dalliances, particularly one with Campbell, who was barely twenty years old—nearly thirty years his junior—when they began an on-again, off-again relationship in 1990. Campbell, one of the highest-earning models in the world at the time, had recently split from heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson and was developing a reputation as a diva with lofty ambitions and a fiery temperament.
It was a volatile relationship. Even more than Toukie Smith, Campbell drew the limelight, and she was prone to getting into public contretemps such as scuffles at nightclubs. De Niro broke off with her more than once, but they kept reuniting for a few years, and Campbell’s continued presence in his life caused Toukie at one point to threaten a palimony suit. That threat never materialized, even though De Niro and Campbell were spotted together in New York, Los Angeles, and the Caribbean island of Nevis over the span of nearly three years.
When Campbell learned that De Niro would be directing A Bronx Tale, which dealt in part with an interracial romance, she took it upon herself to begin acting lessons and to learn a plausible American accent from vocal coach Sam Chwat, with whom De Niro frequently worked. She didn’t get the part, and by the time the film premiered her romance with De Niro had fizzled, but with no hard feelings, apparently: when they ran into each other at a New York tribute to Aretha Franklin, Campbell gave De Niro a friendly kiss, and in 2007, when she put her Park Avenue apartment on sale for an initial asking price of $5.5 million, her chosen broker was De Niro’s son, Raphael, then working for a high-end Manhattan real estate firm.
Thus did Toukie outlast Campbell, as she also would such other dalliances of De Niro’s as the singer Whitney Houston, the model Veronica Webb, and the actress Uma Thurman. By 1994, Toukie had reinvented herself yet again, opening a restaurant called—what else?—Toukie’s on Houston Street in the West Village. Beneath a mural that depicted the owner among such divas as Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Dandridge, Toukie’s served home-style southern and soul food: fried chicken, short ribs, crazy corn, peach cobbler, black-bottom pie. A New York Times critic couldn’t hide his delight with the big portions, the warm atmosphere, and especially the charm of the proprietor: “When you are greeted by Ms. Smith, you stay greeted. Expect kisses and hugs as if you are a long-lost friend.… Honey, this place makes me smile.” It didn’t, however, make money, closing in 1997.
By then, De Niro and Toukie were no longer together—at least not in any way that could be deemed traditional. In fact, though, in a certain sense they were more together than they ever had been. In early 1995, using their own sperm and eggs and the services of a surrogate, they conceived twin boys, who were born to them on October 20: Aaron Kendrick and Julian Henry. The news broke weeks after the birth, thro
ugh an official announcement from De Niro’s publicist, Stan Rosenfield, which explained that De Niro and Toukie would lead “separate personal and professional lives” and had agreed on “sharing the parenting of the children.”
It seemed like a genteel enough agreement; De Niro and Toukie hadn’t really been a couple for a few years, after all, and he was able to provide financially for the care and upbringing of the boys. But within a year they were battling in the gossip columns and then in Manhattan Family Court. It turned out that their agreement had been verbal only, reached at the beginning of the fertilization process, and that it had become untenable because each wanted to spend as much time as possible with the boys. In short, they were supposed to be Toukie’s kids, but De Niro, who by all accounts was a loving and available father to Drena and Raphael, had bonded with them and wanted them half of the time. Their temporary arrangement—alternating custody of the twins in four-day blocks—was far more complex to execute than they had anticipated, and there were whispers from those close to Toukie that she needed more money than the maintenance sum to which they’d originally agreed. Complicating things even more, De Niro had a new and serious romantic interest: a model and former flight attendant named Grace Hightower.
HE HAD PLAYED a lot of variety in his roles of the previous decade—boldness and timidity, pride and fear, charisma and ugliness, good guys, bad guys, even the devil. But it would have been hard to say that he’d truly stretched. Not since he went to Colombia to shoot The Mission had he taken a part that seemed daring, incongruous, or, frankly, even intriguing. He was in a groove in selecting his roles, yes, and he was reliably good in them, but there is often an imperceptible moment at which a groove becomes a rut—and he hadn’t had a significant box office hit since The Untouchables.
Well, whether he was feeling the weight of routine, seeking a potential smash hit, or simply wanting to invigorate himself and the movie audience with an off-kilter choice, he couldn’t have chosen better than the part he tackled next: the monster in a new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The film was being produced by Francis Ford Coppola, whose 1992 reimagining of Dracula had grossed more than $200 million worldwide against a budget of $40 million. With results like that, it was inevitable that Frankenstein would follow, as the two classic horror characters had been yoked together since being written and had always been linked in the movies as well. A script was commissioned akin to that for Coppola’s version of the vampire classic, which had been entitled Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with the idea being that the original novel—and not the decades of adulterated film versions—would be the source material. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it would be called. And De Niro’s appearance as the monster wasn’t the only eyebrow-raising aspect of it: although Coppola had originally planned to direct the film himself, that job, as well as the role of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, fell to the Northern Irish writer-director-actor Kenneth Branagh.
Branagh had come to fame on the English stage, and then achieved worldwide recognition for his films of Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing, the latter of which had also made a star of his wife, Emma Thompson. He had tried to crack Hollywood in 1991 with the noirish Dead Again and had been rebuffed. But this film, with a $44 million budget, would be a calling card that could not be ignored. It would shoot in England and Switzerland throughout the winter of 1993–94, it would also feature Helena Bonham Carter, Tom Hulce, Aidan Quinn, Ian Holm, and John Cleese, and it would surely prove as big a hit as Coppola’s Dracula had.
After a lengthy transatlantic courtship, De Niro agreed to play the role in April 1993, and right away there was trouble. Coppola’s American Zoetrope studio took out an ad announcing that the film was a go and bearing the legend “It’s alive.” De Niro quickly shot off a letter to Coppola complaining that the ad made the film look “like a cheesy grade B movie. It’s tacky and I’m deeply offended by it.” (He had an associate producer credit on the picture—though Tribeca did not—so Coppola had at least to make a show of taking such notes seriously.)
Fortunately, in the coming months, De Niro busied himself with other aspects of the production—particularly the makeup. The makeup that Jack P. Pierce had devised for Boris Karloff in James Whale’s 1931 version of Frankenstein had become synonymous with the creature but bore little resemblance to Shelley’s description. De Niro—and Branagh and Coppola with him—was intent on creating a monster who was not only viscerally memorable and darkly hideous but also closer to the figure in the novel, in which the creature was created principally out of a single cadaver with various important bits added as needed: “a man made of other men,” as Branagh saw it.
Over the course of several months De Niro traveled regularly to London for long sessions with makeup artist Daniel Parker, fussing over his hairline, his teeth, and a map of scars, burns, and disfigurements all over his body. There were, in essence, multiple characters to build: the original man, a thief who is hung and whose body is stolen for the experiment; the various stages of the creature’s evolution; and the monster itself. De Niro sat patiently for it all, shaving his head, enduring a shower of latex poured all over his body, having prosthetic teeth and contact lenses and such fitted. He had hundreds of Polaroid photos taken of himself throughout the process, and he studied them carefully, sending back feedback to Branagh about what he felt worked and what didn’t. (“The changes we talked about are underway,” Branagh assured him in the summer, as shooting approached.) When the makeup tests finally ended, the snapshots he used as points of reference filled several photo albums as thick as Manhattan phone books.
De Niro got it into his head that he should play the creature as the victim of a cataclysm, and so he read up on survivors of shipwrecks, fires, natural disasters, and the Holocaust, as well as on prisoners of war and the homeless. He studied the bodies of strongmen of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to give himself a notion of physical bearing. He devised a speaking pattern (Shelley’s monster was far more voluble than almost every film version) based on research into post-stroke speech disorders and other forms of dysphasia. And he peppered his scripts with exactingly phonetic transliterations of the way he wanted to say each line, each word, each syllable. (This was all in stark contrast to what Branagh did, buffing himself with weightlifting to almost comic proportions to play the romantic leading man—while, perhaps not coincidentally, beginning a romantic relationship with Bonham-Carter that would end his marriage to Thompson.)
During his visits to London before production began, and during the shoot, De Niro became friendly with Branagh and Thompson, dining at their home and exchanging Christmas gifts (she sent him fun and friendly notes after each visit, it seemed). He also became chummy with John Cleese, who was cast as Waldman, one of Frankenstein’s fellow doctors, a murder victim whose brain will eventually find new life inside the creature’s skull. (“Remember,” De Niro wrote in his script, “Waldman’s brain.”) He took the opportunity of a break in production to visit Paris and appear in a cameo role in Agnès Varda’s Les Cent et Une Nuits de Simon Cinéma, a fairy tale celebrating the centennial of moviemaking; his role required him to laze in a swan boat on a lake with Catherine Deneuve.
He hadn’t made a film in Europe in ten years, and he claimed later that despite the rigors of the shoot—the hours in the makeup trailer, the heavy wardrobe and thick-soled boots he wore—he had fun doing it: “I had some great times with Ken Branagh … particularly when my character of the Creature had to roll around on the floor. We used gallons of K-Y Jelly, and I could hardly focus. We just fell over laughing.”
That wasn’t how it played for other people. The initial previews went badly: audiences found it turgid, bloody, and strange. Coppola’s Dracula was sexy and dark and thrilling. Branagh’s Frankenstein wobbled between tones. Coppola sent a lengthy memo to Branagh suggesting many changes to the film, but very few of them were heeded (near the end of his lengthy note, he confessed, “I once did this for Roman Polanski at his request and he never talked
to me again”).
The film premiered just after Halloween 1994 (that in itself seemed a misstep), and it disappointed commercially: grossing barely half of what Dracula had worldwide.
IN AUGUST 1993 De Niro was in New York, putting the finishing touches on A Bronx Tale and preparing for his upcoming role in Frankenstein, when he got a call from Irwin Winkler inviting him out to dinner at a hot new spot that folks were recommending. Winkler and his wife, Margo, picked him up and brought him to what looked like an unmarked restaurant, and when De Niro walked into the space (actually an empty loft known as the Prop Gallery), he was greeted with shouts of “Surprise!”
It was a fiftieth-birthday party, and even though invitations had gone out months before, everyone had managed to keep it a secret from the guest of honor. His family and near-family were there: Virginia Admiral, Diahnne Abbott, Drena and Raphael, Toukie Smith. Uma Thurman, whom he was dating, was on hand, as were such likely suspects as Martin Scorsese, Harvey Keitel, and Francis Coppola, along with others including Mike Ovitz, Penny Marshall, Robin Williams, Danny DeVito, Raul Julia, Gregory Hines, Kenneth Branagh, and Emma Thompson. Williams stood up to propose a toast and, inevitably, did fifteen minutes of standup, including various riffs on De Niro’s squint-eyed, mumbling offscreen persona. Abbott got a laugh at least as good as any Williams managed by telling the crowd that De Niro was “a lousy husband but a wonderful father.”
