De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  He did interviews in Vanity Fair (to whose Proust Questionnaire query of “On what occasion do you lie?” he responded, “When I’m being polite. Like when Vanity Fair asked if I wanted to do the Proust Questionnaire and I said, ‘Sure’ ”) and two in the New York Times; he visited CBS This Morning and The Tonight Show and The David Letterman Show. In an appearance that made headlines, he broke down in tears on Katie Couric’s syndicated talk show when he revealed, for the first time in public, that he had a son at home who struggled with emotional issues. After Russell described directing his own son in a scene, Couric asked De Niro if he felt any special responsibility to bring the story to the screen because of the director’s familial situation. De Niro was already on the verge of crying when he started to speak: “I understand what he …” He teared up and raised a finger as if to call a time-out, then wiped his eyes with a tissue that Couric handed him, while Cooper, his own eyes filling, patted him on the shoulder. De Niro continued, his voice choked, “I don’t like to get emotional. But I know exactly what he goes through.” A reaction shot of the audience showed much of it sobbing along with him. It was stunning.

  He flew to Los Angeles, where in a single day he put his hands in the cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, attended the annual Oscar luncheon with his fellow nominees from all categories, and spoke at a screening of Silver Linings at the American Cinematheque. He attended the BAFTA awards show in London, the AACTA awards show in Sydney, the Screen Actors Guild awards in Los Angeles (he presented Jennifer Lawrence with her prize; “It’s what I do,” he joked), the Los Angeles Italia Fest, where he was himself honored, and the Weinstein Company’s private Oscar weekend shindig. (He missed out on the Golden Globes, which failed to nominate him, staying in Nevada to work on a film and a business project.) He even showed up in person to receive a special proclamation from New York governor Andrew Cuomo acknowledging his New York heritage and all the work he’d done in and for his hometown.

  And then, bless him, on Oscar night, he sat beside Grace Hightower applauding graciously as Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained) beat him (and Alan Arkin in Argo, Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master, and Tommy Lee Jones in Lincoln) for the prize. The cliché says that it’s an honor just to be nominated. Throughout the process, from the premiere in Toronto to Oscar night itself, De Niro comported himself as if it truly was.

  YOU WOULD THINK that an Oscar nomination and a heartily waged awards season campaign might reignite his career, might make De Niro select roles more prudently or give him more top-shelf stuff from which to choose. But 2013 proved to be the single busiest year in his acting career, and a rather appalling one—six films in theaters from April to December, almost none of them worth leaving the house to see. There was The Big Wedding, a raunchy comedy by director Justin Zackham about a long-divorced couple (De Niro and Diane Keaton) reunited for the nuptials of their adopted son; Killing Season, Mark Steven Johnson’s tepid thriller with John Travolta as a Serbian soldier going after the American officer (De Niro) who tripped him up during the Balkan War and has removed himself to isolation in the mountains to deal with his postwar stresses; The Family, a dark comedy by Luc Besson about a mobster (De Niro) and his family (including Michelle Pfeiffer as his wife) hidden in a small village in Normandy by the witness protection program; Last Vegas, a buddy movie by Jon Turteltaub, with De Niro, Morgan Freeman, and Kevin Kline joining their never-wed chum Michael Douglas for a bachelor weekend in the gambling mecca; Grudge Match, with De Niro and Sylvester Stallone directed by Peter Segal as boxers lured back into the ring to settle a beef born thirty years prior; and, the sole appetizing prospect in the bunch, American Hustle, a film about financial scams in the 1970s that reunited him—if only for a single powerful scene—with his Silver Linings Playbook writer-director David O. Russell and co-stars Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence.

  It was, in the main, an appalling butcher’s bill of make-work. The production cycle of filmmaking is such that most of these projects were under contract by the time Silver Linings Playbook proved a hit, but there was very little to recommend any of them in any context, much less as follow-ups to an Oscar nomination. Oh, there was some fun to be had in The Family, which allowed De Niro to indulge himself in bits of droll self-mockery akin to those practiced by Marlon Brando in The Freshman, which explicitly parodied his Don Corleone performance. And there was at least the potential for comic hay to result from such celebrity romps as Last Vegas and Grudge Match. But, like the overwhelming percentage of the films he had made in the preceding decade, his glut of work in 2013 consisted almost wholly of small movies—small, that is, in ambition, craft, budget, impact, and ultimately in public and critical esteem.

  Offscreen, though, he maintained a defter touch. One of the original ideas for the Greenwich Hotel had been a Japanese-style oasis, a space of minimalism, quiet, clean lines, blank spaces. De Niro couldn’t imagine it in the middle of Tribeca—“He doesn’t like trendy, he doesn’t like square lines. He likes curves, so to speak,” said one of his Greenwich Hotel partners, Ira Drukier. But the idea still appealed to him, and he toyed with the notion of creating a residential hotel—a so-called condotel—with such an aesthetic in Manhattan. The post-crash economy scuttled that plan, but a few years later, with his first hotel running well in the black, he found the perfect setting for a second, built in a strongly Japanese style and carrying the cachet of the Nobu brand: Las Vegas, and specifically Caesar’s Palace.

  In February 2013 De Niro was in Nevada shooting Last Vegas, and he and Nobu Matsuhisa were on hand to cut the ribbon on the Hotel Nobu, the first of what they hoped would be a series of such hotels around the world. It opened properly in April, revealing itself to be at least as luxurious as the Greenwich and altogether otherworldly, a hotel within a hotel, costing $45 million, with 181 rooms and suites sitting on top of the largest of the twenty-five or so Nobu restaurants. In fact, the Asian-themed rooms featured the first-ever Nobu room service menu, with such breakfast staples as bagels and lox transformed by the chef into a crispy rice cake with salmon sashimi and tofu in lieu of cream cheese.

  What on earth was a New York guy like De Niro doing opening a hotel on the Vegas Strip? “I kept seeing that people wanted Nobu to open restaurants in their hotels because it was a calling card,” he explained. “So I asked, ‘Why are we not doing our own?’ Vegas is the place where things are always happening. It was the realization of a dream for me, too. I used to think about building [hotels] in a variety of places where you could have distinct experiences, from the tropics to a winter resort. I’d have fantasies that if I had enough money, I’d give it a shot.” After only a few months of operation, the Nobu Hotel was such a success that it expanded its footprint at Caesar’s Palace, and De Niro’s fantasy of a global empire started to materialize as a distinct possibility, with talks beginning about opening branches of the hotel in London, Riyadh, and Bahrain. By year’s end, he and some business partners, including his son Raphael, had signed an agreement to develop an 850,000-square-foot hotel, dining, and entertainment complex in Shanghai’s famed Bund district. And yet another hotel site—Manila—was selected.

  FOR A GUY pushing seventy who seemed shy about chatting, he could get in trouble with his mouth surprisingly often. In March 2012, at a fund-raiser to support the reelection of Barack Obama (whom he’d endorsed in 2008 against Hillary Clinton, despite his long, friendly history with her and her husband), De Niro noted Michelle Obama in the audience and quipped of the wives of the prospective Republican presidential nominees, “Calista Gingrich, Karen Santorum, Ann Romney. Now, do you think our country is ready for a white First Lady?”

  It was a harmless if leaden joke, but it provided fuel for people who could get a few headlines out of a show of indignation, such as Newt Gingrich, who demanded an apology from both De Niro and the president. (Ann Romney, to her credit, dismissed the entire episode as trivial.) Michelle Obama’s spokesperson expressed disapproval, De Niro’s expressed contrition, and that was the
end of it. (A year and a half later, he’d ruffle conservative feathers again by declaring that President Obama was a “good person” who was doing “the best job he can”—a bland sentiment for which he was pilloried in the right-wing chatter-verse.)

  In November of that same year, he attended a charitable fund-raising party marking the birthday of Leonardo DiCaprio and got into a beef with the rapper Jay-Z. The hip-hop artist had noticed De Niro sitting at a table in a room filled with such boldface names as Martin Scorsese, Chris Rock, Emma Watson, Jamie Foxx, and Cameron Diaz, and he came over to say hello, only to find himself being chastised by De Niro for failing to return his phone calls. Jay tried to back out of the matter, and his wife, Beyoncé Knowles, even stepped in to try to mollify De Niro, but the actor, according to the sorts of people who whisper about such goings-on to gossip columnists, wouldn’t relent. In the summer of 2013, promoting his new album, Jay was asked about the incident and declared indignantly that respect was something a person had to earn through his or her comportment, not by virtue of a name, an observation to which De Niro made no recorded retort.

  IN AUGUST 2013 his seventieth birthday was marked with a private party at a Manhattan restaurant that was simply crawling with famous flesh. On hand were family members, old friends who might as well have been family (Scorsese, DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Harvey Weinstein), and other big names, Bradley Cooper and Keith Richards among them. The guests enjoyed a live performance by Lenny Kravitz, watched a filmed greeting from Kirk and Michael Douglas, and were treated to a couple of comical tributes, also on film, from Billy Crystal and Robin Williams. In the age of oversharing via social media, Samuel L. Jackson snapped a photo of De Niro, Harvey Keitel, and Chris Walken seated at a table, eating and laughing, and posted it on Instagram, where it enjoyed a day or two of viral heat.

  The year found him everywhere: in Israel for the ninetieth birthday of Shimon Peres, in the Bay Area for the wedding of George Lucas, in Berlin and Tokyo and London and India to promote films. Along with fellow cast members from Last Vegas he appeared on Sesame Street to give a dramatic reading of a pop song (he was assigned Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball”) and co-hosted an hour of Today, including a cooking segment in which he prepared pumpkin casserole. He became the advertising face of a new checking service being offered by Santander Bank; his first commercial, in which he played himself chatting too much at a Robert De Niro film festival, was rather a hoot.

  He signed on to more film projects: the crime story The Bag Man, the workplace comedy The Intern, the boxing biopic Hands of Stone, the police drama Candy Store. He talked often about working again with Martin Scorsese and Joe Pesci (and, why not, Al Pacino) on a mob picture called The Irishman.

  He was relentless.

  HIS SCHEDULE AS a septuagenarian showed that he was, like his parents, defined in large part by his work. Yet there was something that seemed to drive him even more than the film performances, which piled up almost faster than anyone could watch them; the publicity campaigns, which seemed to become less onerous to him over time; the restaurant openings and the hotel deals, the awards given and received, the almost inexplicable ventures into advertising. And that something, almost inevitably, was his family.

  He kept his father’s memory alive by maintaining his studio and his artistic reputation. To a lesser extent, he tried to honor his mother’s legacy—if only through pursuing her passion for Manhattan real estate. There had been lapses, he confessed, in his filial duties: “I always wanted to chronicle the family history with my mother. She was always interested in that.… But I wasn’t forceful and I didn’t make it happen. That’s one regret I have.”

  He had, however, come to a place past regret with the family he had created. After all they had endured, he and Grace Hightower had finally become the committed couple they had twice vowed to be. At a birthday party he threw for her in the VIP room of his Locanda Verde restaurant, he toasted her briefly, warmly, and to much appreciation with “When she’s happy, I’m happy.” They traveled together on his various film and business obligations, and he supported her charitable work and her coffee venture. Standing side by side on red carpets all over the world, they seemed comfortable, connected, beyond the conflicts and upheavals that had once roiled them.

  Too, his kids—six in all—were in the forefront of his mind, even after the eldest of them had become parents themselves. “I guess you could call it a fractionalized family of sorts,” he said. “But I care deeply about all of them, and I have made a conscious effort to talk to and to listen to them.”

  He came to see himself as a paterfamilias, the graying man in the center of a teeming brood. It was a role unlike any he’d ever played on-screen, yet it suited him in real life. “I like my kids to be all around,” he said. “I don’t like them to be off here and there unless they really have a reason or a job that pulls them there. I think the Italian thing is good because the communities stay together.… You know, the whole family lives in different apartments in a building. That’s nice stuff if you can do it.”

  His children must have agreed. From Drena in her forties to baby Helen in her diapers, they were all close to him, even when, as in the case of Raphael, they were entirely self-sufficient. When De Niro was young, it had seemed to some friends that he felt pressured by an obligation to keep a healthy bond between his parents. Over the decades, he had come to see that same intrafamilial responsibility from a different vantage: not as a son but as a father. An although his brood was somewhat motley in age and heritage, he worked to impart to it the tenor of a traditional family.

  This wasn’t easy as he entered his seventies. He knew there was an immense gap between the aging face he saw in the mirror and the young—some very young—people who were his children, and he somehow developed the equanimity to be a positive presence in their lives, or at least to have a philosophy about how he could do that. “I have young kids,” he said, “and want to see them through a certain stage. I want to give them advice, but I know they’re not going to listen. So I tell them, ‘Ask me. Whatever you’ve been through, I’m sure I’ve been close to that.’ I always want to be there for them. That’s the most important thing in my life.”

  He was born bearing the name of a rising young star in the art world, and he had turned that name into a currency of its own, a legend built of decades of worthy and sometimes titanic artistic work, of unlikely and often quite successful business ventures, of rigorous adherence to an ethos of responsibility, loyalty, and hard work. He knew that he wasn’t an ideal role model; “as I tell my kids,” he said, “ ‘Everyone has their own mishegoss.’ ” But he had lived in such a way that he could remain optimistic about having created luck for himself and that his good fortune in life and work could be sustained through the power of his attitude, if nothing else: “I feel optimistic about things. You certainly don’t want to think that the worst is yet to come.… We don’t know what lies ahead. So I’m only going to think about the best.”

  Somehow, in all the work he was laying out in front of himself, he saw glimpses of the best.

  And who could say that he was wrong to think that these glimpses, in and of themselves, were their own just reward?

  * * *

  * The film relocated the book’s Boston setting to New York, meaning that De Niro spent a lot of time pretending to be homeless in a neighborhood where he owned millions of dollars’ worth of properties.

  Robert De Niro, through the offices of his publicist Stan Rosenfield, chose not to respond to perhaps a half dozen requests to be interviewed for this book, and a great many people who have known and/or worked with him over the decades followed suit, unwilling to participate in what is, technically, an unauthorized biography. However, as I often remind people, unauthorized doesn’t mean salacious, and it is entirely possible to write a full and fair biography without ever speaking to the subject—as authors of books about, say, Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon prove every year. With work in archives and interviews with forty or so indi
viduals who have had firsthand experience with De Niro, I have endeavored to produce a serious and reflective portrait balancing the private life of a man with his public work—which, of course, is what makes him interesting to begin with.

  In very large part, I did this through many weeks of toil at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, where De Niro has stored his massive archives of scripts, research, production materials, costumes, props, and memorabilia. I pored over literally hundreds of boxes of materials, finding illuminating and delightful details at every turn, getting a real sense of De Niro’s working methods as both an actor and a producer, discovering nuances of his thought that informed my deeper understanding of the man and the artist, and learning to decipher his rushed, crabbed, handwriting. I am grateful to the staff of the Ransom Center and to my friends in Austin for abiding my monomania on the subject of De Niro during my visits there.

  That work in Texas was augmented by research elsewhere. In New York, I worked at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library of the New York Public Library and, especially, the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. In Los Angeles, I worked at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. In Portland, as ever, I relied heavily on the good offices of the Multnomah County Library, as well as those of Powell’s City of Books and Movie Madness—the best book store and video store, respectively, in America. Online, I was well served almost daily by such resources as Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, Google News, the Internet Movie Database, Rootsweb, and Wikipedia, among many others.