De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  The role of Lucetta, the prisoner’s wife, was still unfilled. Curran wanted an African American actress in the part, which would mesh with the Detroit setting and with Norton’s character’s self-presentation as a street tough. As Norton recalled, “I was into that idea [and] Bob was into that idea.” But there were some pressures from the international financial entities who put up the production budget to seek a name that carried some weight abroad. Then Norton remembered how good the Ukrainian actress Milla Jovovich had been as a street-smart New Yorker in Spike Lee’s He Got Game, and when De Niro and Curran watched the film they agreed.

  There was a long period of going over the script very carefully in New York, a kind of combination of rehearsal and revision between Curran and his stars, and Norton noticed that De Niro was more engaged in the process than he had been with The Score. “I think Bob was just switched on from the get-go,” he recalled. “It was like weeks and weeks and weeks of kind of meeting with John in his office and going through stuff and all the best ways of working, talking, thinking, trying it out.”

  For all their careful planning, when they finally went to Michigan to shoot, Norton had a surprise to pop on De Niro. The younger actor had been having some trouble coming up with a characterization for his part, and he’d been interviewing prison inmates for inspiration when he met a fellow who he felt was perfect: a white man who wore his hair in cornrows and spoke in a raspy voice that bore a slight whistle on certain sounds. On the day they shot the convict’s initial encounter with the parole officer, Norton sprang his persona on De Niro for the first time. De Niro, of course, relished the surprise and wove his astonishment into the scene.

  Norton came away from the film impressed with De Niro’s powerful sense of minimalism, the way in which he seemed almost to prefer not speaking dialogue, but to act from internal cues. “A lot of times actors want more lines,” he said. “Both times I’ve worked with him he just takes a pen to it and kind of goes, I don’t think I need to say that, I don’t think I need to say that, I don’t think I need to say that. Almost to a fault … I almost think a good director ends up having to persuade Bob … that certain text is actually needed.”*3

  DE NIRO STARTED accepting awards again: from the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic in 2008; from BAFTA-LA and from the Hollywood Film Festival in 2009; from the Taormina Film Festival in Italy in 2010. The biggest of these was the Kennedy Center Honors, the nation’s highest cultural award, presented to him by Barack Obama alongside fellow honorees Mel Brooks, Bruce Springsteen, jazz musician Dave Brubeck, and opera singer Grace Bumbry. Meryl Streep introduced him (he returned the favor the following year, when she received the same honor), Ben Stiller and others offered their memories of working with him, and the whole evening had an air of dignity.

  In early 2011 he accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award from the Golden Globes for Outstanding Contributions to the World of Entertainment—but there was very little dignity in the air at all. Just the previous year, he had appeared at the same awards show to present Martin Scorsese with the same honor. On the night he accepted the award, though, De Niro’s acceptance speech was a disaster of bad, even tasteless jokes (one suggested the service at the stars’ tables was lousy because so many waiters had been deported, along with Javier Bardem), and he read it from a teleprompter ineptly, as if seeing it for the first time. He even took a lighthearted dig at his hosts, declaring, “We’re all in this together: the filmmakers who make the movies and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association [which hands out the Golden Globes], who in turn pose for pictures with the movie stars.” The responses to his speech—both in social media during the event and in the following day’s newspapers—weren’t kind.

  The next year, he was honored by his hometown during the seventh Made in New York awards ceremony. Noting that Meryl Streep would be receiving an award later in the evening, he joked, “I’m proud I have the same number of these as Meryl. For now. By this time next year, she’ll have seven. Last October, she beat me out for Italian-American man of the year.”

  And he gave as many awards as he got. In 2010, he presented an honorary Oscar to ninety-five-year-old Eli Wallach, quipping, “Now that we’re going up for the same parts, I hope we can remain friends.… There’s nothing I like to see more than an even older actor.”

  A few years later, accepting yet another acting prize, he went off on a rare comic spree about his status as an éminence grise in show business:

  What mostly gets me here is to present awards to other people. I’ve handed out Oscars to Sean Penn, Eli Wallach and Francis Coppola. I’ve honored Meryl Streep at the Kennedy Center. I’ve handed out about a half-dozen lifetime achievement awards to Marty Scorsese, from the BAFTA to the Golden Globes. So even though DiCaprio has taken my place in Marty’s movies, I’m apparently the go-to guy in handing out the hardware. I’ve gotten pretty good at giving out awards, but frankly I’ve gotten out of practice accepting an award myself. It’s been a while, except for getting that medal from the Irish American League when they couldn’t get Liam Neeson.

  AS INTERESTING as Stone was, it satisfied neither his thirst to work nor his need to earn, and before the year was over he would address both of those with two more films, Machete, in which he played an evil-hearted southern politician with more than one dirty secret, and Little Fockers, yet a third go-round with Ben Stiller and Blythe Danner.

  In Machete he seemed to have some fun, chewing up scenery in a way that suited writer-director Robert Rodriguez’s overheated B-movie sensibility (the film had its origins in a mock trailer for a nonexistent film that appeared in Grindhouse, the portmanteau genre picture from 2007 that Rodriguez made with Quentin Tarantino). The script even gave him a little character twist—revealed in his final scenes—that allowed him to dig into the part with a bit of a wink and a spin.

  Little Fockers, on the other hand, was about as subtle and nuanced as a steamroller leveling a fruit stand. There was a new director, Paul Weitz, who had made About a Boy for Tribeca, but virtually nothing else was added to the Meet the Fockers recipe save Harvey Keitel as a home-building contractor who’s apparently milking his commission, leading to a shouting match with De Niro’s Jack Byrnes staged, inelegantly, as an echo of the stairwell quarrel in which the actors had engaged in Mean Streets almost forty years prior. Everything about this third Fockers film was smaller, paler, and more strained, and audiences weren’t nearly so charmed by it, resulting in $148 million domestically and $162 million abroad—the least any of the Fockers films had earned. That said, the three of them had a worldwide gross of $1.156 billion, and as De Niro and Tribeca were participants in the profits from the outset, they wound up constituting the most lucrative enterprise of his life.*4

  You’d think that would have slowed him down, but the late 2010 crop of films (Machete, Stone, Little Fockers) turned out to be the launch of quite literally the busiest phase of his career. In the coming three years, he would appear in no fewer than seventeen films, including one that never played in American theaters, one that played a single Times Square screen for a single week before appearing on home media, and one that would earn him his first Oscar nomination in more than two decades.

  In 2011 he appeared as a shadowy Wall Street tycoon in Neil Burger’s Limitless, a thriller about a struggling novelist (Bradley Cooper) whose use of a drug to combat writer’s block gives him superhuman abilities of concentration and application; as a bloodless mercenary (alongside Jason Statham and Clive Owen) in Gary McKendry’s Killer Elite; and as a dying photojournalist whose last wish is to see the ball drop in Times Square at the stroke of midnight in Garry Marshall’s New Year’s Eve. (There was also Giovanni Veronesi’s The Ages of Love, an Italian ensemble film in which he played a divorced art professor living in Rome and which never appeared in the United States either theatrically or for home viewing—a first for De Niro, not counting a few TV commercials he’d shot in Japan.) These pictures came and went almost unnoticed, often not screened f
or critics or only after virtually every print publication’s deadlines for opening day reviews had passed. New Year’s Eve made a small splash; buoyed by a cast that included Sarah Jessica Parker, Zac Efron, Michelle Pfeiffer, Halle Berry, Ashton Kutcher, Jessica Biel, and Jon Bon Jovi, it did $55.5 million in ticket sales against a budget of a similar sum. But that hardly excused it as a piece of work—nor did it make De Niro’s appearance in it any less embarrassing.

  He was similarly busy in 2012, with some wildly divergent results. In Rodrigo Cortés’s Red Lights he had a sometimes amusing but ultimately grating role as Simon Silver, a blind psychic whose claims to paranormal abilities confound a team of scientists dedicated to debunking such phenomena. (A bit of levity was provided by director Eugenio Mira, Cortés’s fellow Spaniard and an uncanny look-alike for De Niro, playing the young Silver in archival footage.) That picture came and went like a rumor, earning just over $50,000 at the American box office. But that was a massive hit compared to Freelancers, a film starring Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as a rookie New York cop drawn into a culture of corruption by De Niro’s senior officer; that film played just one New York screen for only one week—surely fulfilling a contractual mandate of some sort—before appearing for home viewing. It was as near to straight-to-video, to use the outdated phrase, as anything De Niro had ever done.

  ONCE AGAIN, the murmurs rose: What had happened to Robert De Niro? Why was the man so widely regarded as the greatest American screen actor of the latter half of the twentieth century so willing to make so many movies of so little worth?

  One obvious answer might be money, but how much could a fellow earn for an Italian film with no U.S. release, or in a direct-to-home-viewing thriller, or in films with entire budgets smaller than his individual paycheck for appearing in Analyze That or the Fockers sequels? No, not only was he working easy, he was apparently working cheap. He loved to quote Stella Adler’s dictum “Your talent lies in your choices”; what did the choices he made in his sixties and beyond say about his own impression of his talent at that late moment in his life and career? Why was he working so much—and so seemingly indifferently?

  The answer may have lain in the very word work. For De Niro, work seemed to be an end in itself—not so much something he liked to do as something he was fulfilled by doing and saw as a point of life. There were pleasures in the world—women, food, travel, exercise, booze (and, decades earlier, drugs)—and there was work, and it was almost as if he had some sense that one could not fully enjoy the former unless one had truly engaged with the latter. It was a product, perhaps, of a childhood spent watching two adults work hard at divergent fields of endeavor: Robert De Niro Sr. struggling to make art that satisfied his own high standards, even if the world wouldn’t recognize or compensate him for it, and Virginia Admiral building a business and then a small real estate empire out of dogged determination.

  In his earliest acting days, even before Greetings and Hi, Mom!, De Niro impressed student directors and fellow performers with his professionalism, his seriousness, his drive—not careerism, exactly, but complete application to the task of becoming an actor. This was the fellow who wrote letters to college newspapers to get tear sheets of their reviews of his work, who traveled on his own dime to learn accents and spent his own money on pieces of wardrobe even when he was working in films financed by major studios, who floored Elia Kazan with requests to work through the weekend, who learned to play the saxophone and to box at the same time. He poured himself wholly into his work in ways that almost no American actor of his stature ever had.

  That determination to delve thoroughly into his own resources and into the contours of a character—whether wholly imagined or based on a real-life original—stuck with him well into the 1990s. His work on Goodfellas, Awakenings, Backdraft, Cape Fear, This Boy’s Life, Frankenstein, Casino, Heat, and Flawless was, no matter what you thought of the films or even his performances, earnest and engaged. Sometime after making Meet the Parents, though, after achieving his greatest payday to date, his technique and especially his application slackened. He began to skim through roles more frequently than dive into them, to do minimal research if any, to repeat himself by rote. For the first time in his acting career, he seemed not to care what he was in, what he was playing, who was making it, what the truth underneath it all was, or how best to convey it.

  He was not, however, lazy. As he ratcheted back on his effort in each film that he made, he still behaved as if the work-focused machinery inside him needed to achieve full expression. So, rather than pour himself wholly into individual roles as he so often had in the 1970s, ’80s, and even ’90s, digging deep and filling the spaces created by his excavations with the raw material of his talent and research, he began to expend the same amount of total energy, more or less, on a greater number of films, aiming for breadth rather than depth. It was almost as if he had a certain amount of time, strength, passion, and interest for his work, and instead of dedicating it to one film at a time he was meting it out widely all at once—and, far too often, less than discriminatingly.

  Of course, once an actor decides that he will increase his workload, the paucity of worthy material becomes increasingly evident. The American movie industry has always been a factory, churning out products aimed chiefly at selling tickets, following fashions and trends, eyes always on the bottom line; only when attention is pointed its way and it is wearing its finest tuxedoes and gowns does it focus on art. Still, for all the wildcatting energy in the early days of the system, under the imperial powers of the movie studios, or in the renegade days of the 1970s or even the 1990s, there was no time when the sheer output of feature movies was greater than the twenty-first century. In the film exhibition capitals of America, New York and Los Angeles, it was possible to go to theaters and see nearly one thousand new films a year by 2010—and to watch perhaps that many premieres again, if not more, on home media. In such a climate, audiences weren’t the only ones puzzled by the multiplicity of choices; filmmakers were as well. Which scripts to read, which to fund, which to distribute, and, in De Niro’s case, which to appear in: none of it seemed terribly clear.

  Somewhere in his brain—maybe even consciously—a switch had flipped, and he had begun to take a different attitude toward work. And he had chosen to do so at a ruinous time for his art and his legacy. Decades before, at the dawn of his career, when the sheer magnitude of his talent was beginning fully to emerge, he had said, “People now tell me if I will consent to a project, they can get the deal going. But what should I commit myself to?” Now that same conundrum faced him again: there were too many films to choose among, many of them needing only his approval to get made. And far too often after 2001 or so, for reasons that were genuinely unclear and even troubling, he chose wrongly. Once his talent had seemed like vintage wine, carefully decanted drop by painstaking drop into the finest crystal. Now he was pouring it sloppily into so many paper cups as if it were the cheapest, most indifferently made plonk. He couldn’t even point to eye-popping box office or massive personal gains as excuses for his choices. His need to work had always bordered on a pathology, but whereas it once produced magical alchemy, now it left little spills that nobody could be bothered to mop up.*5

  ALONG WITH BECOMING a legitimate business force, Raphael De Niro had become a family man. In March 2008 he wed Claudine DeMatos, the daughter of a Brazilian restaurateur and travel agent, whom he met when she was working for his dad’s old squeeze Naomi Campbell, at the time that he was finding an apartment for the supermodel. Raphael convinced Claudine to come work with him at Prudential Douglas Elliman, and they dated and were finally married at a private home in the Bahamas. The two hundred guests included Harvey Keitel, Chazz Palminteri, magician David Blaine (a Raphael De Niro client, who performed some illusions at the party), and, in a detail that delighted tabloid gossips, all three women with whom De Niro had children: Diahnne Abbott, the mother of the groom, of course (by then married to the artist Noel Copeland); Toukie Smith; and G
race Hightower. Within three years, the young couple, who lived in a $3 million condo on Greenwich Street, just up the block from the Tribeca Film Center, had two children, a boy, Nicholas, born in May 2009, and a girl, Alexandria, born in March 2011.

  Alexandria wasn’t the only De Niro baby of the year. In December 2011 the world was briefly startled by the news that De Niro and Hightower, sixty-eight and fifty-six, respectively, were new parents. Helen Grace (her name a variation on that of her mother, Grace Helen, as well as a nod to De Niro’s paternal grandmother, Helen O’Reilly De Niro, who died in 1999, just months shy of her hundredth birthday) was, like her twin half brothers Aaron and Julian, born to a surrogate. The couple’s son, Elliot, was thirteen, and their marital difficulties were a decade or so behind them. The decision to bring a new baby into the family at their ages seemed puzzling, but it was a significant affirmation that their bond was strong and all of the fractures in it had fully healed.

  The following year, with De Niro taking on a busier workload than ever before, Hightower started to make headlines with a business venture. Like most Americans, she was only partially informed about the effects of civil war and genocide on the people of Rwanda, but in 2011 she met the country’s president, Paul Kagame, at an evening hosted by Jane Rosenthal. Inspired by the president’s statement that his country needed “trade, not aid,” Hightower, who had a history of working on the sort of charitable endeavors commonly supported by New York socialites, began to look into what sort of businesses she could help foster in the impoverished African nation, and she hit on coffee. In 2012 she started a business named, a mite inelegantly, Grace Hightower and Coffees of Rwanda, a fair-trade brand of gourmet coffee beans grown in Africa, roasted in Connecticut, and sold at upscale markets in New York City and online. The company was designed to funnel the profits back to local Rwandan coffee farmers, but by 2013 it was robust enough that Hightower was considering opening a storefront to sell the coffee—in bulk and to drink on the spot—in, where else, Tribeca.