De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  Tribeca had been a neighborhood without a name when he showed up there to set up a gym and learn how to box for Raging Bull more than twenty years earlier, and now it was the center of an empire, a place and a style—at once urbane and gritty, monied and low-key, hip and old-school—known all around the world; De Niro and company had even sued a restaurant in London for calling itself TriBeCa and otherwise blatantly ripping off his brand. He was so protective of his manor, in fact, that he was known to surveil it actively via closed-circuit cameras, both as a bachelor with an eye on the ladies and as a family man with a mind toward security. It wasn’t uncommon for acquaintances to learn that De Niro knew they’d been on the block—to dine or shop, say, without any intent to connect with him. He was always private and circumspect, and his zone of comfort had come to extend over a good-sized piece of lower Manhattan. And, truly, was anyone to say he hadn’t earned it?

  But, in fact, he owned properties all over the place. There was the Hudson Street penthouse he’d bought in 1988 for $857,000 and then augmented in 2001 with the purchase of the apartment immediately below, a 1,350-square-foot unit previously owned by Harvey Keitel, who had purchased it in 1988 also. There was the St. Luke’s Place townhouse he had bought for himself and Diahnne Abbott in 1975 and had renovated extensively. There was a house on Long Island, which he’d never quite been able to renovate because of strict real estate codes, and a house in Roxbury, in upstate Ulster County. And there was the Upper East Side condo at the Trump Palace in which Grace Hightower had lived during their period of marital strife and which they still owned. (He had considered but then balked at the idea of buying a place in London a few years later.)

  By 2005, the couple had their eyes on a new home—a new lifestyle, in fact. They wanted to move uptown, to Central Park West, specifically to the Brentmore, a posh and venerable building at West 68th Street, where they entered negotiations to buy a fourth-and-fifth-floor duplex for $20.9 million. That made Hudson Street superfluous, and they sold it that same year for $12.25 million—about $2 million under the initial asking price, but still a very nice return on his decades of residence. The following year, Hightower sold her Trump Palace unit and the extra storage spaces that she owned with it, for just over $2.5 million. And then, ensconced in the Brentmore, they put the St. Luke’s Place home up for sale for $14 million in the summer of 2011; the following year, Raphael De Niro, who’d grown up in the building, sold it to De Niro’s former CAA superagent, Mike Ovitz, for $9.5 million. Ovitz planned an extensive renovation and had architectural drawings made and city permitting hurdles surmounted, then decided to sell the building without doing any of the work; in the summer of 2013, it was once again for sale, this time for $12 million.

  At the time, the De Niros might have wished they’d held on to it. In June 2012, in a clothes dryer in the laundry room of their unit at the Brentmore, which they’d expanded onto the building’s sixth floor, a small fire broke out, causing significant damage and rendering the condo unlivable. It was speculated at the time that they’d need someplace else to live for as much as three years, and they wound up leasing on the Upper East Side.

  HE HAD PLANS for that vacant lot next to the Tribeca Film Center. Way back in 1991, when the Film Center and Grill were new and clearly successful, he had thought about putting a hotel on the spot, a hundred rooms or so, something deluxe. The area, just a pleasant walk away from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, was an underused resource, in part because it lacked high-end accommodations for travelers. Talk started again in the summer of 2001, when he found an investment partner, the hotel developer Richard Born, who had recently built a little chain of chic, high-end spots around the city. But the 9/11 attacks scuttled their plans.

  Two years later, mere weeks after learning about his prostate cancer, De Niro sat in an audience listening to New York governor George Pataki talk about progress on rebuilding the area devastated by the terror attacks. Among the governor’s announcements that day was the news that De Niro and a group of partners—including Born and one Raphael De Niro—would be receiving $38 million in tax-free Liberty Bonds, designated for development in lower Manhattan, to help them build a $43 million, eighty-three-room luxury hotel on that lot at 377 Greenwich Street. A design was approved by the city in 2004, and they hoped to open it the following year.

  In fact, it wasn’t until April 2008 that they finally got the job done. The Greenwich Hotel (so dubbed by De Niro, who thought the name “classic, elegant and simple”) consisted of eighty-eight rooms starting at $525 a night, a restaurant, and a spa spread out over 75,000 square feet. It was high-end but spoke as well to traditional working-class New York. There were light fixtures from Horn and Hardart Automats and glass panels salvaged from the legendary Flatiron Building. The lobby sported furniture from a French flea market, and some Robert De Niro Sr. canvases were on the walls. The showcase was the Japanese-style Shibui Spa, which was built around a 250-year-old house from near Kyoto, dismantled, shipped, and reassembled inside the hotel.

  It was a hit from the day it opened, but there were hiccups. The first restaurant to anchor the building, the high-end Italian spot Ago, failed within a year, to be replaced by the slightly lower-toned and smaller Locanda Verde, which hit the right note with hotel guests, neighborhood residents, and New York foodies upon opening in the spring of 2009. And De Niro and his partners had a fight on their hands from the very beginning with the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which objected to the size and appearance of the eighth-floor penthouse of the hotel, which was built differently from the initial plans. There was talk of actually tearing out the offending structure, and De Niro himself testified before the commission in June 2008, declaring, “We worked on this project a long time, to make it as good as we could make it and make a place that I want to stay in. It was a labor of love.” As he explained, he would be among the first to object if the building had been built out of character with the neighborhood: “Anything that would be offensive would be offensive to me.” The matter was finally settled when plans for a redesign were approved in November 2010.

  THE IDEA THAT Raphael De Niro might have been considered a candidate to be his father’s business partner would have been laughable only a decade before the doors of the Hotel Greenwich opened. Being the son of a movie star, the boy had enjoyed an unusually comfortable upbringing, but it had many of the same textures of partial abandonment and bohemian neglect that had characterized his father’s youth.

  Back in the mid-1980s, De Niro had decided that he wouldn’t keep up a residence in Los Angeles, that he would simply rent homes when he was in town for work (twice in the mid-1990s, he rented Roger Moore’s pile in Beverly Hills). And Diahnne Abbott finally chose to abandon LA as well, moving to New York and the St. Luke’s Place townhouse permanently in 1986, when Raphael was about to turn ten. It wasn’t a happy transition for the boy. He had been living in leafy, suburban Brentwood, and now he was riding a subway to go uptown to the Bank Street School and living in a West Village neighborhood that still hadn’t quite tipped fully into gentrification. “It was dirty,” Raphael remembered of the city of his youth. “It was loud. There was a lot of drug use. There were a lot of murders.”

  Fortunately, there was a safety net of family within walking distance of home: Virginia Admiral lived and worked and taught art classes in her renovated loft on Spring and Lafayette Streets; Robert De Niro Sr. painted and kept his menagerie on West Broadway (Raphael would remember playing with his G.I. Joe action figures on the floor of the cluttered studio); and De Niro himself lived in Tribeca, where, before long, he got busy building his little kingdom.

  Neither of his parents had been a particularly avid student; nor, it turned out, was Raphael. But he did like to work, and he was willing to do it from the time he was in middle school, making a few dollars doing odd jobs at neighborhood street fairs or, later, as a shop assistant in a rug store on Bleecker Street. He got into trouble, almost exactly like his dad, getting pinche
d by the cops as a fifteen-year-old for spraying graffiti on a subway train in Chinatown. But he was, also almost exactly like his dad, scared straight and mostly out of trouble.

  He didn’t have his father’s impulse toward a creative career. He worked on the set of A Bronx Tale and appeared as an extra in a couple of his dad’s films, but it wasn’t his thing.*1 He dabbled in college at NYU, but dropped out; he worked as a doorman at an Upper East Side building but left when his full identity was discovered. If he did the least thing out of the ordinary, the tabloid press hounded him for it: a fistfight outside a nightclub in 1998, another spat at a nightspot in 2002. Petty stuff, but not pretty.

  In time, a different strain of the family’s legacy started to emerge in him. Virginia Admiral had always had a little string of properties that she was developing, renovating, renting, flipping. “All great fortunes were built on real estate,” she liked to say. The elder Robert De Niro’s brother, Jack, had a nice business in commercial and residential real estate sales in New York and Florida. And, of course, De Niro was himself buying and developing properties in lower Manhattan. Raphael started to express interest in the real estate business, and De Niro decided to give him a boost by letting him be part of the team developing the Greenwich Hotel.

  At first, De Niro’s partner Richard Born didn’t cotton to the idea. Raphael seemed to him to be “a little bit of a wild kid” and “our partner’s son who initially wanted to sit in on meetings.” But in time he proved his worth, pointing out ways in which the hotel could be made more amenable to a celebrity clientele.

  Soon after that, Raphael decided to take classes toward obtaining a real estate license, which he did in late 2004. The following year, he was hired by Prudential Douglas Elliman, one of the largest residential real estate firms in New York, and he soon demonstrated a genuine knack for the business, selling two apartments in the $1.6 million range in his first year. He rose steadily at the firm, garnering a reputation for working well with famous clients and with moving expensive properties that sometimes had been sitting on the market for quite a while. In 2007 and 2008, when the New York real estate market started to sour on the eve of the financial crisis, he was able to pull off sales as rich as $14.8 million and to sell the lion’s share of units in a few new condominium buildings in the Tribeca area.

  It would have been easy to attribute his success to his famous surname, but as Raphael would retort, “No one is buying a $10 million apartment because my dad is Robert De Niro.” Besides, he pointed out, “many of [his clients] have more money than my dad.” (His dad concurred that the family name didn’t mean much. “I put him in touch with people,” he said. “Sometimes they don’t even call him back.”) Rather, he was valued as an agent for his professional and personal habits of reliability and doggedness and for even downplaying his family name.

  Raphael’s magic touch continued after the financial crisis: his De Niro Group at Prudential sold more than $80 million in condos in 2009 and 2010 combined, bringing his total sales in his first six years as a broker past the $600 million mark. His grandmother would have been proud.

  JUST AS RAPHAEL was rising to his own personal and professional glory, De Niro was still at work on maintaining the legacy of his own father. The decades after the senior De Niro’s death continued to be filled with commemorations, retrospectives, and celebrations of the man and his work. In 2010, De Niro established the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize, intended to honor a midcareer American painter. Funded by De Niro through the Tribeca Film Institute, the prize granted its recipient $25,000 and the publicity attendant upon receiving such an honor from a movie star. Its first two recipients, Stanley Whitney (2011) and Joyce Pensato (2012), were selected for, in the terms established by the Robert De Niro Sr. Estate, “making a lifelong commitment to their art.” De Niro explained the foundation of the annual prize thus: “It’s a way of getting more involved, because I just never have been that much into the art scene, other than my father’s work.” In 2014 he continued to be involved, though, producing a documentary celebrating his father’s life, art, and legacy, Remembering the Artist: Robert De Niro Sr., a forty-minute film directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Perri Peltz, which premiered at Sundance and aired on HBO and for which De Niro submitted to on-camera interviews and did promotion in the press.

  The one sour note in all of this posthumous glorification: the dealings involving Lawrence Salander, the Upper East Side art dealer who represented the senior De Niro’s work at his Salander-O’Reilly Galleries during the last years of the painter’s life and thereafter. In 2007, word started to circulate in the art world that Salander, whose lavish lifestyle included flying in private jets and hosting a party at the Frick Collection for his wife at an estimated cost of $60,000, was defrauding clients. Several investors gave him paintings only to learn that he had sold them without their permission; others, including tennis star John McEnroe, believed they were investing in masterworks with him but learned that he had never purchased the paintings or had sold them and neglected to share the proceeds. In 2007, it was discovered that Salander had settled a $5 million debt to an Italian art gallery by sending them a collection of paintings that included as many as a dozen works by the elder De Niro, and that was when De Niro put his lawyers on the case.

  Salander was forced to shut his doors in October of that year, and soon after declared bankruptcy. In March 2009 he was arrested on an indictment charging that he’d stolen as much as $88 million from clients and investors; in announcing the arrest, Patrick Dugan, the chief investigator in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, compared him to the character Max Bialystock from Mel Brooks’s The Producers. In the coming months, more wronged parties emerged, and the total estimate of Salander’s crimes was raised to some $93 million and then, a few months later, $120 million.

  Cornered, Salander pled guilty to twenty-nine charges of grand larceny in March 2010 and was sentenced to six to eighteen years in prison and ordered to pay $114 million in fines and restitution. The following year, his associate, Leigh Morse, went on trial for her part in the fraud, including pocketing $77,000 from the sale of two works by the elder De Niro. His son was called upon to testify, which he did in March 2011 at the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. There wasn’t much to it. He was sporting a beard he’d grown for a movie role, and wore an appropriate if somewhat wrinkled dark olive corduroy blazer and gray slacks. He answered questions from both the prosecutor and the defense attorney, suggesting that he had first become suspicious of Salander when he traveled with him to Portugal for an exhibition of the painter’s work and discovered, to his surprise, that the art dealer had his own plane. The one dramatic flourish during his forty-minute testimony came when he was asked to identify Morse. He turned his right hand into a pistol, pointed it at the defendant, and let his hand recoil, as if he’d just fired a shot.*2

  IF RIGHTEOUS KILL wasn’t what anyone wanted out of a De Niro/Pacino crime movie, making it seemed to pique De Niro’s interest in choosing projects. His next few films weren’t all memorable, but they generally had ambitions, intentions, and/or collaborators of substance, especially compared to what he’d done in the past five or six years.

  Everybody’s Fine was a remake of a 1990 Giuseppe Tornatore film in which Marcello Mastroianni played a widower who travels to Italy after his wife’s death to visit his grown children, only to find them all putting up false fronts of happiness and security so as not to reveal the painful truths about their lives to a father who had always seemed uninterested in them. It had been rewritten by the director Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine) for Miramax as a rather generic vehicle for an older male star and a trio of younger actors. De Niro was cast as the dad, Frank Goode, who traveled all across America with a tiny suitcase dropping in on his offspring, who were to be played by Kate Beckinsale, Drew Barrymore, and Sam Rockwell (genetic familial resemblances be damned). In a decision much more to do with money than with art, Connecticut would stand in for the entire United States, including
Las Vegas.

  It was a routine melodrama without much in the way of memorable writing or staging and a patently tacked-on happy ending (a homey Yuletide scene was clearly shot in the summer months, when the film was made). But De Niro took to it with a becoming seriousness, finding something empathetic in Goode’s workaholism and disconnection. In a neat detail, Goode was said to have devoted his professional life to manufacturing insulation for telephone and fiber optic cables—a perfect metaphor for De Niro’s own isolated nature. And he knew he had done something special, if slight, in the film: “I never say this about myself,” he told a reporter, “but I was very proud of that [performance], and Kirk is a terrific director. I certainly worked very hard on that one.”

  Considerably more interesting was his next picture, Stone, a small and intense story of crime, punishment, sin, and redemption. One of the chief appeals of the film, which shot around Detroit in the spring of 2009, was that it would reunite him with Edward Norton on something that might erase the memory of the sturm-und-drang that made the production of The Score such an ordeal. Stone was a pet project of writer-director John Curran, who’d previously worked with Norton on The Painted Veil. Based on a play by Angus MacLachlan, it deals with the relationship of a prison convict, his wife, and his parole officer, to whom the wife is willing to offer herself sexually in exchange for her husband’s freedom. Curran had thought of Norton for the prisoner and De Niro for the parole officer, but they couldn’t make their schedules mesh, and Norton dropped out. Not long afterward, Norton’s calendar suddenly opened up. De Niro was still available and willing, and with the two stars aboard, a budget of $22 million became available.