DE NIRO EPUB ED EB

John Baxter

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780006532309
• eBook ISBN: 9780007460151
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

The life of Hollywood's number one movie actor, the elusive Robert De Niro, who shuns the limelight and rarely gives interviews, written by the leading film critic and biographer of Spielberg, Kubrick, Woody Allen and George Lucas.

Robert De Niro is the pre-eminent Hollywood character performer of our time: film portraits like the young Don Vito Corleone in THE GODFATHER II, Jake La Motta in RAGING BULL and Travis Bickle in TAXI DRIVER are some of the most vivid ever put on celluloid. De Niro cannot be cast to type, prefers to work for old friends like Martin Scorsese, and (apart from FRANKENSTEIN) has never played anything but 20th-century roles.

John Baxter calls him 'the archetypal empty bottle which only becomes visible when it's filled by a role': which makes him such a tempting subject for one of Hollywood's finest historian/biographers.

As well as his film roles, Baxter examines De Niro's often controversial private life, his collaborations with directors like Martin Scorsese and performers like Harvey Keitel and Meryl Streep, and his increasingly ambitious off-screen activities.

CHAPTER ONE

The Last Actor Alive

Player (lost): There we were – demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance – and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. (He rounds on them) Don’t you see?! We’re actors – we’re the opposite of people!

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1989.

From the offices along the Strip of Sunset Boulevard, there’s a classic LA view. No palms, no lawns, no art moderne architecture; leave those to the glitzier residential suburbs closer to the Pacific: Beverly Hills, Westwood, Santa Monica.

Here, in the DMZ between Beverly Hills and Hollywood, everything is commerce. The very light and air are for sale – perhaps the only things Hollywood has to sell.

Film interfaces with the record business. The monuments are all to bad taste and the hard sell. Tonight, in Bill Gazzarri’s Rock Club, with its self-aggrandising billboard portrait of its pouchy proprietor on the façade, and his boast of the groups launched here, the Hollywood porn-movie community is having its annual bash to present its Oscars, the Heart-Ons, with awards for Best Anal Love Scene and Best Blow Job.

But in Hollywood there’s always a gaudier image, a louder voice. Opposite, higher, brighter, more strident, a billboard has been erected for the personal junk-lit industry of Jackie Collins, author of Hollywood Husbands and Once is not Enough. Ten times larger than life, she glares out over her domain. Underneath her image is the rubric of her reign. More than a Hundred Million Sold.

At Hollywood’s smartest restaurants, Le Dôme and Spago, black stretch limos queue decorously to drop off their clients, then circle back into the dark. The drivers wait in empty parking lots, smoking and listening to the radio until the car phone burrs its summons.

One white chauffeured Cadillac limousine glides past Le Dôme, moving west on Sunset, heading for the 405 Freeway. LAX. The east.

In its air-conditioned hush, Robert De Niro takes a last look at Hollywood through smoky yellow glass. When he comes back, it will no longer be the same place.

It’s said that every performing artist has ten years in which to make his or her mark. By that standard, De Niro had succeeded better than most. From Taxi Driver and his Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for The Godfather II in 1975 to the acclaim for Awakenings in 1987, he’d taken twelve years to create the benchmarks against which every other screen actor of his generation needs to measure himself.

But now he is turning his back on all that, leaving the febrile society he has always affected to despise, but whose blandishments he can never quite resist.

He has already passed Tower Records’ gigantic Hollywood outlet, where anything that can be put on disc is for sale. He has passed On the Rox, the disco where he’d spent more than his share of white nights. He has passed below the Xanadu-like silhouette of the Château Marmont Hotel, in the grounds of which his friend John Belushi died.

As the sun sinks, Sunset comes alive with black leather, Spandex, studs. On Sunset Strip, the sidewalk is jammed with Harleys, and Porsches parked three-deep as, twittering like parakeets, the Valley Girls from Sherman Oaks and Encino, bums and tits compressed into tank tops and jeans tight and hard as lacquer, jostle for attention as they gather for a night of disco. Manes of moussed hair – male and female – shimmer in the streetlights, and down the gutters roll dusty skeins of tape from gutted cassettes. Sunset Tumbleweed.

Jackie’s billboard ignites, neon outlining the imperious Collins silhouette.

Showtime.

De Niro’s limo drives by, its passenger no longer noticing. He is forty-six, but feels ten years older. He has won the greatest honours his craft can bestow, but he believes himself without merit. He is returning to New York, where he thinks he belongs. But part of him knows he doesn’t really belong anywhere. Nobody is waiting for him in New York. Nothing is waiting for him – except work.

‘You travel a lot?’ the girl in the bookstore will ask.

‘Yeah,’ he’ll reply.

‘Does it make you lonely?’

‘I am alone,’ he will say mildly. ‘I’m not lonely.’

Sure, Bobby.

The big Cadillac undulates silkily as it rolls over a hump in the shifting surface of the slide area that is Hollywood, and glides into the warm and scented dark.

To talk about ‘performance’ in movies at the beginning of the twenty-first century is to discuss an art as fossilised as Egyptian wall painting. Jack Nicholson has rightly called himself a member of the last generation of film performers. Already, the ‘synthespians’ who will replace him are crowding on camera. Electronics routinely resuscitate actors who die in mid-production, and raise long-dead stars from the grave. Joe Dante’s threat in Gremlins II of an updated Casablanca, ‘in colour, and with a happier ending’, now sounds like next week’s Fox-TV programming. As for the science-fictional proposal that old films might be cleansed of politically incorrect activities like smoking, Steven Spielberg showed the way in 2002 with a sanitised E.T. in which agents’ guns became torches.

As he turns sixty, Robert De Niro, one of the most gifted screen performers of his generation, can be seen as also the last of a line in which he was already a throwback. Born a century too late, he belonged in the barnstorming theatre of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the world of John Barrymore, Emil Jannings, Werner Krauss, Fritz Kortner. No six degrees of separation divide De Niro from a theatre of putty noses and crêpe hair, of rhetoric and speeches from the scaffold. Erwin Piscator of Berlin’s pamphleteering Communist pre-war Volksbühne theatre was a childhood friend, and his teacher, Stella Adler, came from the Theater Guild of the thirties and the nineteenth-century Yiddish theatre.

Born to perform in a theatre that no longer existed, De Niro crammed the djinn of his skill into the constricted bottle of the movies. Watching him writhe and grimace through the glass, audiences imagined they were seeing great acting, when in fact they were watching great acting distorted.

‘These days,’ writes the British playwright and actor Alan Bennett, ‘what the public calls Great Acting is often not even good acting. It’s acting with a line around it, acting in inverted commas, acting which shows. The popular idea of Great Acting is a rhetorical performance (award-winning for choice) at the extremes, preferably the extremes of degradation and despair. Such a performance seems to the public to require all an actor has got. Actors know that this is a false assessment. The limit of an actor’s ability is a spacious and fairly comfortable place to be; such parts require energy rather than judgment. Anything goes.’

At the start by force of circumstances, but later out of a need for reassurance, De Niro became the last star in this ‘anything goes’ school of screen performing. He could have done better by doing less, and by doing less with what he did do. A character actor by birth, he allowed himself to be made a leading man, and, born to play villains, agreed to play the hero; and a hero, moreover, in a medium littered with heroes – which, any actor will tell you, are far easier to play.

Robert Towne, screenwriter of Chinatown and Shampoo, has written, ‘Gifted movie actors affect the most, I believe, not by talking, fighting, fucking, killing, cursing or cross-dressing. They do it by being photographed.

‘It is said of such actors that the camera loves them. Whatever that means, I’ve always felt their features are expressive in a unique way; they seem to register swift and dramatic mood changes with no discernible change of expression … Great movie actors have features that are ruthlessly efficient. Efficiency that’s been touched with a bit of lightning, perhaps. Certainly such actors have this in common with lightning; they can illuminate a moment with shock and scorching clarity. And virtually no dialogue.’

Robert De Niro is such an actor. To see him at his best is to be aware of a new capacity in the art of cinema. His gift is all the greater for the reticence with which it is exercised; like those Japanese painters who work with a heavily inked brush on wet paper, the slightest hesitation brings everything to naught. ‘Great feeling shows itself in silence,’ wrote the poet Marianne Moore – then corrected herself. ‘No, not in silence, but restraint.’

When he chooses to restrain himself, to rely on silence, Robert De Niro is among the finest performers of his generation. That he has chosen so infrequently to exercise that control is his tragedy.

CHAPTER TWO

New York

I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, ‘There’s no place like New York. It’s the most exciting city in the world now. That’s the way it is. That’s it.’

Robert De Niro

Actors often come from homes that lack imaginative stimulus; the urge to dress up and play other characters is a form of flight from that environment. Yet De Niro’s parents were both artists, and he grew up surrounded by artists. In that, he resembles Bernardo Bertolucci, who directed him in Novecento. Both are artists over whom an affection-filled childhood with creative parents exercised an ambiguous influence, at once stimulating and stifling.

De Niro’s father, also Robert, was born in 1922 in Tipperary Hill, the predominantly Irish quarter of Syracuse in northern New York state. Robert Sr’s mother, Bobby’s grandmother, was Helen O’Reilly before she married Henry De Niro, a salesman and, later, a health inspector, but Robert Sr inherited the dark good looks and mystical temperament of his Italian father, which he passed on to his own son.

The De Niros came from Campobasso, near Naples, well south of the notional divide which separates the cooler northern Italians from the dark and fiery meridionali. A penchant for argument, depression and rage passed largely undiminished from the first of the De Niro name to arrive in the United States at the turn of the century to those members of the family born on American soil, as did an apparently genetic Italian rhythm of speech which became even more pronounced in adulthood.

Robert Sr started painting at five. ‘Why? I don’t know. I was very isolated,’ he said later. By the time he was eleven he was attending art classes at the Syracuse Museum, and showing such ability that the directors gave him a studio of his own. When adolescence brought the usual soul-searching, he shocked his family by embracing atheism, though, in the best traditions of the lapsed Catholic, religious iconography preoccupied him for most of his life, the Crucifixion and other elements of his discarded faith recurring in his work.

He spent the summer of 1938 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, studying with Ralph Pearson, an artist best known for his landscapes. Pearson held his classes on a coal barge in Gloucester Harbour, which is where De Niro first read the plays of Eugene O’Neill. The grim picture of the emigrant experience in O’Neill’s Anna Christie impressed him so much that he modelled a stage set for a possible production.

After Gloucester, De Niro gravitated to New York, studying by day and waiting tables at night. Much serious art discourse in New York at that time centred on Hans Hofmann, who had arrived from Munich via Paris, trailing an impressive record as a teacher and theoretician. Hofmann opened a school in 1933, and in the summer of 1935 started summer sessions in Provincetown, Rhode Island.

In the winter of 1938–39 Hofmann gave an influential series of six lectures in New York on new movements in European art. They were attended by the best emerging American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, and future critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, all of whom, recognising that Surrealism was waning, were alert for the next new thing, Abstract Expressionism. The following summer, Pollock and some others followed Hofmann to Provincetown. He only accepted twenty-five students for his summer school. Among them in 1939 was Robert De Niro.

At the end of 1939, De Niro won a place at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, where one of the greatest of contemporary artists, Josef Albers, taught. Set up in 1933 by a group of liberal academics, Black Mountain admitted only fifty students, and gave them superior teaching and maximum freedom. De Niro spent most of 1939 and 1940 there – a frustrating time, since Albers found his work ‘too emotional’. De Niro, then, as later, inclined to be argumentative, protested, ‘A painting can’t be too emotional. It can be controlled, but never too emotional.’ After a year of trying to satisfy Albers, he returned to New York early in 1941, with only $5 in his pocket. That summer, he once again attended Hofmann’s summer school.

A village of cr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• 1 The Last Actor Alive
• 2 New York
• 3 My Father’s Business
• 4 Stella
• 5 Sally, Candy, Andy and the Others
• 6 Shelley and the Boys
• 7 The Year of the Turkey
• 8 Boyz of the ’Hood
• 9 An Offer You Can’t Refuse
• 10 Sleepless
• 11 If You Can Make it There …
• 12 Going for a Soldier
• 13 Jake
• 14 A Harp with Class
• 15 The Epic that Never Was
• 16 The South American Picture
• 17 Falling Angel
• 18 The Man Upstairs
• 19 A Made Man
• 20 Rabbit in a Maze
• 21 In Cop Land
• 22 Ageing Bull
• Filmography
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher