by Shawn Levy
THE IDEA OF visiting a hot new restaurant was a perfect way to lure De Niro into a surprise. He had gotten everything he wanted out of the Tribeca Film Center and Tribeca Grill, but there was something that had eluded him from the start: sushi. He may have been associated in the popular imagination with pasta, but his favorite food was sashimi, and he was particularly fond of the fare at Matsuhisa, an exclusive and tiny Beverly Hills sushi bar in which he tried to make a point of dining whenever he was in Los Angeles.* When they were planning the Tribeca Grill, De Niro urged Drew Nieporent to consider installing a sushi bar, an anomaly considering that the kitchen would be serving American-style cuisine. Nieporent humored De Niro sufficiently to at least take a meeting with the owner of his favored Beverly Hills spot. The sushi master came to New York to inspect the still-under-construction restaurant, but other than handshakes and smiles, nothing was accomplished—in part because the visiting chef spoke almost no English.
Indeed, there really wasn’t an appropriate space in the Tribeca Grill for sushi—either on the menu or in the actual restaurant. But De Niro and Nieporent never lost sight of the idea of importing that great Beverly Hills sushi bar to Manhattan. In 1994, on Hudson Street, just around the corner from their first location, they managed the trick, opening a restaurant that would forever change the image and status of sushi in New York City—and, eventually, around the globe. It was named for the master chef, Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, whom friends and family and regular customers knew as Nobu.
Nobu the man was a classic Japanese master sushi chef, albeit with an unusual pedigree. He had cooked in Lima, Peru, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Anchorage, Alaska, before settling in Los Angeles, first working for other chefs and finally opening his own restaurant in 1987. When he agreed to come to New York, it was with considerable financial resources—as much as $1 million (much of it arranged by De Niro’s former film producer partner, Meir Teper) went into opening Nobu, as the restaurant was named. And it paid off. From virtually the day it opened, Nobu was one of the most celebrated restaurants in New York (“a grand entertainment,” raved Ruth Reichl in the New York Times; “something wonderful is always on the horizon”). With only seventy-five seats and a menu featuring items that no other spot in the city offered, with the cachet of Matsuhisa preceding it and the imprimatur of De Niro and Nieporent on it, with a hip downtown location and imaginative décor by restaurant designer David Rockwell, it was a massive hit, grossing some $6 million per year and forcing ownership to open a second, more casual offshoot, Nobu Next Door, on the same block.
The bit firmly within their teeth, De Niro and Nieporent, under the aegis of the aptly named Myriad Restaurant Group, kept expanding around the neighborhood. In 1995 they opened Layla, a Middle Eastern spot, and TriBakery, which baked goods for various lower Manhattan restaurants and served them on-site. The following year, in the space adjacent to TriBakery, they opened Zeppole, a casual Italian restaurant. Locals began referring to the streets around the Tribeca Film Center as “Bob Row”; everything around them seemed to be owned by De Niro. And there was quality as well as éclat: in 1995, Nieporent’s restaurants won four James Beard Awards, a phenomenal haul of the food world’s equivalent of the Oscars.
They didn’t have an infallibly golden touch: Zeppole lasted barely a year, and an effort by De Niro and Nieporent to restore Harlem’s famed bebop bar Minton’s Playhouse was announced in 1994 and abandoned five years later after they struggled in vain to find funding partners from the neighborhood to help them reach their projected $3.1 million budget. Later, they opened a saloon in Tribeca, Hudson Bar, which stayed open for less than two years. And in 1996, in a scene that seemed more like something out of De Niro’s movies rather than his business affairs, gunmen burst into Nobu and shot the place up, wounding three employees and fleeing with $1,000 before one of them was apprehended hiding behind a nearby Dumpster.
But several of their other spots became staples, such as Rubicon, which they opened together in San Francisco with Francis Coppola and Robin Williams as fellow investors. And Nobu in particular became the seed of an impressive tree of restaurants. A London Nobu would open in 1997 and be awarded a Michelin star the following year; a San Francisco Nobu opened in 1998; by 2001 there were Nobus in Miami, Las Vegas, and Sydney; by 2004, there was one on 57th Street in midtown Manhattan. Eventually there would be more than two dozen of them, literally all over the world: North America, Central America, Asia, Australia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East. De Niro’s fondness for Nobu’s sashimi, his ceviche-inspired Japanese-Peruvian concoctions, and especially his black cod in miso broth had become a global taste.
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* For the record, he was also partial to Italian food, French wine, Patrón tequila, and martinis, in which his tastes varied—sometimes with vermouth and lemon, sometimes with no vermouth but with muddled cucumber, always shaken far longer than usual until they were icy and frothy.
AS RELUCTANT AS HE WAS TO BE INTERVIEWED, HE WAS TRULY loath to be photographed, particularly when doing the normal business of life, particularly when the paparazzi were involved. An antipathy borne of shyness and thin skin became, over the years, a really visceral hatred. Time and again paparazzi came away from encounters with him slightly the worse for wear.
In the summer of 1991, leaving a restaurant with Joe Pesci, he was alleged to have run up on a photographer, yelling repeatedly, “What do you want?,” then grabbing the fellow’s flash attachment. A criminal mischief/harassment charge was filed, and it was dealt with without fanfare. Three years later, again in Pesci’s presence, he was photographed standing in line to use a pay phone at Elaine’s on the Upper East Side. It was the premiere party for Pesci’s new film, Jimmy Hollywood, but it was a low-key affair, and De Niro was surprised and of course annoyed to find flashbulbs popping when he arrived. He managed to sidle past the photographers unmolested, but once he was inside, someone snapped a shot of him, and he lit up: “Don’t you ever take a picture of me waiting for the phone,” he yelled. “Don’t you sneak up on me and take a picture.” (As it turned out, the target of his rage hadn’t taken the offending shot.)
The encounters were getting worse—as, to be fair, were the paparazzi—and it finally came to a head in October 1994, when he was leaving the Bowery Bar in lower Manhattan at approximately one-thirty on a Sunday morning. Outside was a gaggle of photographers, including Joseph Ligier, a twenty-five-year-old paparazzo from Los Angeles. Ligier trained his lens on De Niro, and De Niro took it as a provocation. According to Ligier, De Niro hit his camera, grabbed him by the hair, and knocked him over the hood of a parked car, all the while yelling at him, “Give me the video.” It was an eye-popping scene, according to witnesses, and Ligier got some of it on tape: “You can see De Niro wind up and—boom! The camera goes all over the place,” said a photographer who saw the footage. Ligier and his attorney filed charges of assault, and De Niro was brought in for questioning, fingerprinted, and photographed.
At first the paparazzo was hoping to make a big score with the footage—he claimed to have had a deal with the tabloid TV show Hard Copy, which a spokesman for the show denied. But he and his advisors came up with what they thought was an even better scheme: they would ask De Niro for $300,000 in exchange for the videotape and for Ligier’s dropping the charges. Approached in this fashion, De Niro’s attorneys Thomas Harvey and Edward Hayes smelled extortion, and they proceeded to negotiate a price with Ligier’s lawyer, Anthony Amoscato, while surreptitiously recording the conversations. Over the span of two days, they agreed on a lump sum payment of $150,000: $20,000 for the videotape, $20,000 for release of civil claims, and $110,000 to drop the criminal charges.
On Friday, just five days after the original incident, De Niro withdrew $110,000 from the bank, bundled it with two checks from his lawyers’ firm, and drove in a limousine (borrowed from billionaire investor Ronald Perelman) to meet Ligier and Amoscato. The limo took them to the DA’s office, where the charges were, as agreed, dropped, and then
took them away—and straight into the hands of detectives who grabbed up Ligier and his attorney and took them in for questioning. “We think it’s extortion,” a law enforcement source said. “At best it was a very sleazy approach.” A grand jury was charged with evaluating the evidence against the photographer and his lawyer, and De Niro walked away from the matter unscathed, plus a scalp to show for his time.
IN THE WAKE of writing Wiseguy and seeing it turned into the masterpiece Goodfellas, Nick Pileggi had kept his eyes open for another mob saga that would complement and extend the story. Among the episodes that fascinated him was the way the mob had moved its operations from East Coast cities to Las Vegas. Modern Vegas had begun, of course, with the inspiration of gangsters, and there had been mob involvement in many Vegas casinos from the start. But in the late 1960s, the mob had gone from a shadow group that funded and siphoned off casinos to nearly overt control of several of them, and in the 1970s, that control had been exposed by a series of sensational incidents centered on two Chicago guys who’d been sent to Vegas to run things.
Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal was a gambler who was considered one of the sharpest oddsmakers in all of sports betting. Being Jewish, and being essentially nonviolent, he could never become a made man in the Mafia. But he was a tremendous earner whom mob bosses trusted to make money and to keep up appearances of propriety. He was sent to Vegas in 1968 to run the sports books at a quartet of hotels, the Fremont, the Hacienda, the Marina, and the Stardust, and in time he was effectively managing them, running the casino, food and beverage, and hotel operations with the same acumen and attention to detail he brought to the handicapping of college basketball games.
To back him up with muscle, the bosses sent out Anthony “the Ant” Spilotro, a sociopathic hood from Chicago with a significant arrest record and a horrifying penchant for violence. Along with his brother, Michael, Spilotro was charged with keeping order and making sure that Rosenthal was unimpinged in his moneymaking ventures. But Spilotro was, like many suspected mobsters, banned from the casinos because of his lengthy criminal record, and he resented the way that Rosenthal lorded it over him. He wound up setting up his own operation in the city, working outside of his portfolio, as it were, with his own little loan sharking, extortion, and robbery rackets, becoming a subject of interest to local police. Rosenthal, meanwhile, married a former showgirl and sometime prostitute named Geri, who bridled at the traditional role he expected her to fulfill as his wife. Among many other things that caused conflict in their marriage were her drug use, her spending, and her infidelity, which included a liaison with Spilotro—resulting in yet more friction, drama, and noise.
All of this wild behavior generated publicity and brought police attention—exactly what the eastern bosses didn’t want. By the mid-1980s Geri had relapsed into drug abuse, been kicked out of the house by Rosenthal, and wandered off into a seamy haze, in which she died; Spilotro, banished from Vegas by the eastern bosses, was brutally murdered, along with his brother, in a midwestern cornfield; and Rosenthal, who survived the detonation of a bomb beneath his Cadillac, left Vegas altogether, setting up shop as a gambler in Florida, where he was living when Pileggi heard his story.
Pileggi spent more than two years trying to get Rosenthal to talk to him, and when he finally consented he provided the spine for a book that the writer was planning to call Casino. The new project picked up, in effect, where Wiseguy and Goodfellas had left off, taking the mob from the East Coast in the 1950s and 1960s and focusing on its doings in Las Vegas in the 1960s and 1970s. Martin Scorsese was keen on the subject matter—both the specific story of three desperate characters and the setting: “Any place that pushes people to the edge—and Las Vegas does that—creates great drama.” And he got De Niro interested in playing Rosenthal and Joe Pesci in playing Spilotro.
Scorsese and Pileggi began collaborating on an adaptation of the book even before Pileggi had finished writing it. In early 1994 they broke the narrative down onto index cards, focusing, as Scorsese explained in a lengthy memo to De Niro, on “the emotional beats” of the characters and the story. That material would be structured into a screenplay that would then be put through several layers of revision. The pair would go to Florida to interview Rosenthal again; De Niro would read key scenes and prepare lists of questions for Rosenthal. All of that material would be sewn into the script, and then the process would be repeated at least twice more. Then Joe Pesci would be sent the script in order to let him shape the character of Spilotro, particularly with the dark humor that came so readily to him.
In that early memo, Scorsese repeated that the emphasis would always be on keeping the structure tight, on avoiding getting lost in the sexy details of Vegas life and mob legend, on shaping an emotionally coherent narrative out of a series of real-life events that often seemed chaotic. By August 1994, he and Pileggi had produced no fewer than sixteen drafts of the script, often after receiving notes from De Niro urging them to be clearer, deeper, more specific, more faithful to actual events.
And De Niro knew what the actual events amounted to because Pileggi had made available to him all of the transcripts of interviews he had done in compiling material for the book project. (He admonished Pileggi more than once to be more thorough in reporting facts or to check again with Rosenthal to verify specific details.) He was an experienced producer at this point, and the tenor of the notes he made on script drafts could sometimes be stern and demanding.
There was, of course, his own research. Taking seriously, as ever, the obligation to the real person he was portraying, he met Rosenthal several times for interviews, corresponded with him via telephone and mail for additional insight, talked with other of Pileggi’s sources of information, made a visit to the Las Vegas offices of the FBI to study surveillance photos and tapes of Rosenthal and Spilotro, watched videotapes of Rosenthal’s home movies and TV appearances (including his own late-night talk show, which actually happened), and read and watched anything that he could find about Vegas, the mob, and the Chicago crime milieu from which Rosenthal and Spilotro had emerged. Armed with the knowledge that Rosenthal was a clotheshorse, De Niro studied magazine advertisements from the 1970s to get a sense of the colors and styles then in vogue, and he made an especial study of the fashions favored by MCA entertainment boss Lew Wasserman, a famously dapper character who bore a slight air of mobbish mystery in his persona as a showbiz padrone. Working once again with costumer Rita Ryack, De Niro eventually had fifty-two complete outfits made—suits, shirts, ties, shoes, watches, jewelry. He posed for the most remarkable photos wearing each and every one of them, running full-color contact sheets of his costume tests past Rosenthal for his approval. When production finally began, each new scene required serious conversation among himself, Ryack, and Scorsese about what he should wear, down to the cufflinks.
Production was scheduled to begin in Las Vegas in September 1994, but the one accoutrement De Niro hadn’t acquired as late as the summer was his Geri. A variety of actresses had read for the part—a short list included Jamie Lee Curtis, Lolita Davidovich, Patricia Arquette, Rene Russo, and Ashley Judd—and dozens more were up for consideration: Laura Dern, Sean Young, Melanie Griffith, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jennifer Tilly, Bridget Fonda, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, Linda Hamilton, even Holly Hunter. Debra Messing showed up to audition, dressed in a way that De Niro found unusual. “What? Are you going to a prom?” he asked her. “Every part of my soul just withered,” she recalled.
The process of finding the right Geri was well along when De Niro first heard from casting director Ellen Lewis that Sharon Stone was a possibility. “We are getting a lot of calls,” Lewis told him. “There is interest in her for other things, so if we are at all interested we might want to do something sooner rather than later.” The thirty-six-year-old Stone had been kicking around the business since 1980, when she appeared in a cameo in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, and she had begun to emerge as a headline star in 1992 with her turn as a sexually voracious writer and
murder suspect in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct. She had become famous for her frankness with her body and her daring, if not necessarily for her acting, which would be seriously tested in the wide-ranging role of Geri. After her first meeting with Scorsese and De Niro she was unhappy with the way she’d presented herself. “It was uneven,” she admitted. “I would start to extrovert into the character’s rawness and then pull back.” But she’d made a favorable impression nonetheless: “It was her presence and her look,” Scorsese explained. “She has a tough-edged look that seemed perfect for Vegas at the time, the way her face is structured, something about her eyes. You can believe that she is what someone in the book called the real-life [Geri]: ‘the most respected hustler in Vegas.’ That’s a matter of honor.”
She got the part, and then her toughness nearly deserted her. “I started this movie in a state of abject terror,” she admitted. “I could barely speak.” But she found in De Niro an acting coach, ally, and friend. “De Niro really helped her through those scenes,” Scorsese recalled. “He’s very generous with her, and you can see how he’s always helping. It’s a scary role, a tough one.” During production, De Niro sent Stone gifts (perfume, a bud vase) and encouraging notes.
The cast was filled out with a remarkable blend of old showbiz types (Alan King, Don Rickles, Frankie Avalon, and Steve Allen; Allen knew Lefty Rosenthal and wrote a lengthy memo for De Niro about his memories of the man and the era), Scorsese movie fixtures (Frank Vincent and Frank Adonis, as well as the director’s parents, Catherine and Charles, and daughter, Cathy), and, in a key role as Geri’s former pimp and drug connection, James Woods. The part of a Japanese gambler whom Rosenthal prevents from winning a fortune was played by De Niro’s restaurant biz partner Nobu Matsuhisa, and the famed mob lawyer (and later mayor of Las Vegas) Oscar Goodman appeared as himself.
