“WE’VE MISCAST IT.”
In a Warner Bros. screening room in Burbank in August 1975, director Mike Nichols, screenwriter Neil Simon, and a pair of studio executives were watching rushes from the set of Bogart Slept Here, a comedy about an off-Broadway actor who finds himself overwhelmed by good fortune when his very first movie unexpectedly becomes a huge international success. The film had only been shooting for a week, but there were alarms indicating that something was going very wrong.
Marsha Mason, Simon’s actress wife, was playing the actor’s wife, a role written specifically for her. Playing the actor was De Niro. And it was De Niro whose work was worrying the filmmakers.
De Niro had arrived on the Hollywood set of Bogart only three days after wrapping Taxi Driver, and Simon and the other principals felt extremely lucky to have him. He was a rising star, a box office attraction, the hot new thing. Personally, Simon found him affable and approachable, if shy. “He didn’t say very much,” the writer recalled, “but what he said, you listened to. He spoke softly, nodded and shrugged a lot, and occasionally he gave you a quick smile that caused his eyes to squint.”
But from the start there were troubling signs. De Niro had decided that his character should wear a single earring, and he spent, as Simon remembered, the better part of a day poring over a selection of earrings that the property master rustled up for him. Then there was the matter of acting styles. Mason had performed Simon’s work onstage and was familiar with its blend of spritzing patter and warm sentiment. De Niro hadn’t played such material since his dinner theater days, and scheduling the shoot so soon after Taxi Driver meant that he wouldn’t be able to undertake his normal studying process or get to know the script in a proper rehearsal period. He would be finding his character, in effect, in front of the camera—a dicey prospect.
In fact, it was disastrous. He flailed at Simon’s sensibility, unable to find a pry hole that would allow him to enter the world of the screenplay. And Mason was left to act opposite a cipher, forced to abandon her own instincts about how to play a part that had always been hers in order to find a way to engage with her co-star.
Simon, who’d seen enough theatrical work to know that it could take an actor a bit of time to get into the rhythm of a role, was willing at first to ride it out, to let De Niro find his sea legs. But he was growing concerned. “In the first few days of dailies,” he remembered, “it was clear that any of the humor I had written was going to get lost. It’s not that De Niro is not funny, but his humor comes mostly from his nuances.” The script Simon had written was broader than that, and De Niro’s subtlety was pushing it into a different tenor.
Nichols, who may not even have remembered that he had auditioned De Niro for The Graduate almost a decade prior, told Simon that it was going badly, that De Niro was misreading the part. “Well,” said the writer, “maybe it shouldn’t be funny. Maybe it should be a more serious picture.”
“That’s not what you wrote,” Nichols replied, “and it’s not what I saw when I read this script. If there’s no humor in the first half of the film, we’re dead.”
So they ran the rushes for the Warner Bros. brass, who agreed that something was wrong. And when they asked Nichols what he thought should be done, he gave them a stunning answer: “Stop the picture.”
“Reshoot what we have?” asked an executive.
“Yes,” Nichols said. “But not with De Niro … We’ve miscast it.” They sighed, they huddled, and the next day they called De Niro into an office and, in effect, fired him.
“He was, of course, livid,” Simon recalled. “Luckily I was not in the room when he was told.”*1
The word hit the trade papers like a mortar shell; rumors circulated that Nichols had called De Niro “undirectable” and that De Niro had outright walked off the production when Nichols and Mason tried to tell him that he didn’t know what comedy was. His friends, including Shelley Winters, spoke publicly to defend him, but there was sourness in the air. De Niro explained years later, “It didn’t work, just didn’t work out.” But, he added, “then they tried not to pay me.”
Everyone just wanted the whole sad episode to go away. Warner Bros. halfheartedly looked at a few other actors in the hope that there was a way to save the project, but nobody was deemed appropriate, for any number of reasons. Nichols went back to New York to the stage; he wouldn’t direct another dramatic film until 1983. Simon continued to write smash hits for Broadway and the screen, arguably none bigger than one that grew out of the aborted Bogart Slept Here. Among the actors who tested to fill De Niro’s shoes was Richard Dreyfuss, right on the heels of his titanic success in Jaws; Dreyfuss wasn’t right for the part, according to Nichols, but Simon liked his rapport with Mason so much that he retooled the material for the pair, resulting two years later in The Goodbye Girl, for which Dreyfuss would win an Oscar.*2
WHILE HIS STAR was getting himself fired from a Neil Simon comedy, Martin Scorsese had come to Hollywood to put the finishing touches on Taxi Driver, tweaking the edit to slide the violence past the censors, and adding a score by the legendary Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite composer, the man who wrote the terrifying staccato chords of the shower scene of Psycho, among dozens of other works for film and orchestra, including the scores of Citizen Kane, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Cape Fear, and most recently Brian De Palma’s Sisters. It was a new situation for Scorsese: Mean Streets and, to a lesser extent, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, were particularly celebrated for soundtracks built out of the sort of popular music that the characters in them would have listened to. But Travis Bickle, cipher that he was, didn’t listen to music (“I don’t follow music too much,” he confesses on a date. “But I would like to, I really would”). Scorsese needed an original score, and he went for the best.
At first Herrmann wanted nothing to do with the project, based on the proletarian sound of its title alone. Then Scorsese got him to agree at least to read the script, and one thing seemed to sway Hermann to the film: “I like when he poured peach brandy on the cornflakes,” he told Scorsese. “I’ll do it.”
He came to Los Angeles to do his work just before the Christmas holidays, and conducted the recording of the soundtrack himself, right up until the final session, which was held on December 23 and witnessed by Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, who’d been invited to meet the composer. Herrmann finished his work and went back to his hotel for the night. He never woke up, dying in his sleep of a heart condition on Christmas Eve. Not two months later, the first ominous notes of his remarkable score, which would go on to be recognized with an Oscar nomination, would be heard by audiences for the first time, as Taxi Driver made its way into the world.
To call the film a sensation would be an understatement. Critics and audiences had never seen anything like it, and the reviews and box office were beyond anything that Paul Schrader, the Phillipses, Scorsese, or De Niro had ever imagined.
HE IS A twenty-six-year-old midwesterner, honorably discharged from the Marine Corps two years before, alone in New York with no work, living on a steady diet of junk food, booze, pills, and porn, his life an eddying pool of loneliness, stasis, thoughts turned inward on themselves. He has received only a scattered education, yet he keeps a diary—a quaint affectation—and it reveals an intelligence, a sense of aspiration, an acquaintance with the Bible. You can see pain, fuzziness, skittishness in his eyes, which are often squinched defensively. But in the main he’s a cipher—out of touch, by his own confession, with music, films, politics, social mores, and most every other aspect of ordinary life.
He drifts into a Manhattan taxi office seeking work, specifically overnight work. He doesn’t make a brilliant first impression. He mutters a little, has trouble making eye contact, and doesn’t understand what it means when he’s asked if he’s “moonlighting”; he makes a joke that lands with a thud, and he apologizes reflexively, though he doesn’t like that he has to do it. Finally he wanders back into the street, sipping from a pint bottle tucked into his military-issue fatigue jacket, so ephemeral a presence that his mere walk along a city block is rendered in a dissociative jump cut.
Like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Lennon’s Nowhere Man, Travis Bickle is an emblem for alienation, disaffection, isolation, an existential antihero whose connection to our world is tenuous and yet who, in his alienation, is meant to be a symbol for the condition of us all. Until this film, De Niro has principally played southerners and Italians or Italian Americans. But there is no ethnicity to Travis Bickle, only the merest hint of a midwestern twang, and there is no backstory as singular as Johnny Boy’s head injury or Vito Corleone’s witnessing the death of his family. He is an invention of the imagination, of the page, of the movie camera, and of De Niro, relying on a foundation provided by Schrader and existing in a milieu created by Scorsese. He is a pure product of the cinema. It’s even possible, given that the film both begins and ends with a close-up of his eyes, that he doesn’t exist at all, that the events depicted in Taxi Driver are some lurid fantasy that has bubbled up in his sleepless mind.
He wants to be normal, but he’s just slightly miswired. He swallows pills with a shake of his head like a snake ingesting its prey; he stretches after a long night behind the wheel with his elbows akimbo like a twisted scarecrow. Asked the simplest of questions—“How are you?”—he’s stumped for an answer, seemingly distracted by something but, at the same time, apparently focused on nothing at all.
But of course he is sentient and, as we see as we stay with him, purposeful, if only in an effort to find a purpose for himself. He starts with a girl. He dons his one good jacket—burgundy, made of velvet or maybe suede—and proffers a surprisingly fluent line of palaver to a pretty girl. (He’s not alone in admiring her: Martin Scorsese himself is depicted seated on a nearby stoop ogling her as she passes by.) Her name is Betsy, a golden, WASPy dream girl, and he takes Betsy on a proper date, for which he shows up in a tie and with a surprise: the movie that he’ll take her to see is porn, Sometimes Sweet Susan, starring Harry Reems. Within minutes of their entering the theater, the courtship ends, and somehow Travis is confused that it has gone wrong.
Soon he picks up an apparently ordinary fare who turns out to be intent on doing harm to his cheating wife. Perversely inspired by this encounter, he arms himself with a small arsenal of pistols—$915 worth, including a Magnum that could take down an elephant—and hits upon a new way to connect with the world: through that staple of psychotic self-expression of America in the 1960s and ’70s, a political assassination.
And then another girl catches his eye—a pubescent prostitute who works just a few blocks from the building where De Niro was raised. Her street name is Easy, but, as Travis learns, her real name, which she hates, is Iris. He had dreamed of rescuing Betsy from her loneliness, but Iris, “sweet Iris,” really does need to be rescued. His plan is fixed: self-immolation via the murder of Betsy’s preferred candidate, self-resurrection by leaving his life savings to Iris.
He devotes himself to a regimen of calisthenics, target range practice, working on a quick draw in the mirror (“You talkin’ to me …?”), making dum-dum bullets, fashioning a device that can deliver an automatic pistol to his hand with a jerk of his arm (and that transforms him, cyberpunkishly, into something that’s half man, half weapon). In the gesture that marks his final intent to push through to his fiery demise, he shaves his hair into a Mohawk, fulfilling the script’s direction: “Anyone scanning the crowd would immediately light upon Travis and think, ‘There is an assassin.’ ” Of course, he is spotted in the throng by the Secret Service and chased away, precipitating a rampage that leaves him, like Johnny Boy, bleeding from a neck wound, his connections to life and security and the future shredded beyond repair.
The story is singular enough, but what De Niro does with it is truly without precedent. The cinema has served up psychopaths and sociopaths and even sometimes assassins (the Frank Sinatra double bill of Suddenly and The Manchurian Candidate leaps to mind), but none of them has ever been drawn in the forefront of a film so purposefully, and no filmmaker and actor have ever before managed to bring an audience so intimately inside the mind, heart, and even metabolism of such a fellow.
Much of this effect is achieved through the eyes: we look into the abyss of Travis’s gaze, and the abyss gazes back at us. De Niro’s stare sometimes fastens on the lights and motion and, very often, the little outbursts of violence and sexuality in the world around him; just as often, though, it attaches itself to nothing, resulting in an almost bittersweet expression of wonder, confusion, and emptiness that makes you want to console him. His body, too, is a subject of fascination: early on, sleepless on his cot, almost sunken into the mattress, De Niro is a stick figure given shape only by his clothing; later, baptizing his fists in a flame on his stovetop in what he and Scorsese referred to jokingly as the Charles Atlas scene, his body is so sinewy and veined and gaunt that he looks like he has emerged from a POW camp. There’s something repellent in his asceticism, but also something that elicits sympathy.
There’s another effect, even more startling, that’s achieved by zooming slightly out and seeing De Niro the actor playing Travis, a sense that the Oscar-winning chameleon has set a new standard not only for himself but for all actors. Was there anyone else who would so fully transform himself into a character so desperate, alienated, and wounded, someone who wouldn’t rescue a single moment from such a harrowing film by giving the audience some sort of reassurance—a nod, a wink, a joke, the lift of an eyebrow—to indicate that this was a fictional depiction of an alternative reality and not a portrait of what was really going on all around them? Pauline Kael, horrified by the finale of the film, is said to have gasped aloud, “He’s still out there!” She meant Travis, of course, not De Niro, but at that moment it was impossible to tell the difference. When he first emerged as Johnny Boy, Bruce Pearson, and Vito Corleone, De Niro seemed like a chameleon. Now, playing a character without attachments, backstory, or explanation, he somehow seemed more like himself, as if the actor who created those amazing characters was nothing more than their hired driver, ferrying them to the movies, seething away in the front seat, ready to explode and to take them—and us—to hell along with him.
Taxi Driver hit the film public—and the reviewing press—like a thunderbolt or an avalanche. Nobody had seen anything like it before, and nobody seemed entirely sure what to make of it. Its power was undoubted, but for a great many viewers, including critics, its violence, darkness, and ambivalence were overwhelming.
To fill their superlatives, critics harked back to other films and, indeed, other media. “Imagine Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ if it had been told from the point of view of its title character,” explained Frank Rich in the New York Post. “Taxi Driver is a movie in heat,” said Pauline Kael in the New Yorker, “a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground.”
The reviews—and, in many publications, re-reviews—waged a back-and-forth war about the morality of the film and its ultimate message (the coda really puzzled people). But very few even among the film’s antagonists doubted Scorsese’s energy or creativity, and nobody was anything less than floored by De Niro’s work.
“Acting of this sort is rare in films,” wrote Vincent Canby in the New York Times. “It is a display of talent, which one gets in the theater, as well as a demonstration of behavior, which is what movies usually offer.” Frank Rich added, “You simply must see for yourself. He plays Travis … at an intimate human scale that makes even the better movie performances of the past few years look artificial and bombastic by comparison.” In the Wall Street Journal, Joy Gould Boyum wrote, “De Niro creates a Travis who manages to evoke from us first a sympathy, then an empathy, and finally an understanding.” Kael, invoking a metaphor that she would come to use again to describe De Niro’s work, said, “Some actors are said to be empty vessels who are filled by the roles they play, but that’s not what appears to be happening here with De Niro. He’s gone the other way. He’s used his emptiness—he’s reached down into his own anomie. Only Brando has done this kind of plunging, and De Niro’s performance has something of the undistanced intensity that Brando’s had in Last Tango.” Even more ecstatically, Jack Kroll of Newsweek declared De Niro
the most remarkable young actor of the American screen. What the film comes down to is a grotesque pas de deux between Travis and the city, and De Niro has the dance quality that most great film actors have had, whether it’s allegro like Cagney or largo like Brando.… De Niro has created a total behavioral system for his underground man, much of which has a macabre comedy. Unlike most actors, De Niro doesn’t just express a personality, he creates one.
Taxi Driver would go on to reap more than $25 million in box office in its initial release, against its $2 million budget—which Columbia Pictures was initially reluctant to put up. (Schrader had been paid approximately $30,000 for the rights, but twenty years after the film’s release his 5 percent share of its earnings had come to nearly $700,000.) And Travis Bickle had become a metaphor for every lone gunman, pent-up psychopath, and quiet-boy-next-door-who-went-bonkers for the next forty years. (In 2001, for instance, when Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal unleashed an automatic weapon in the palace in Katmandu, killing the king and queen and seven others and then trying to fire a bullet into his own temple, a New York Times article on the massacre called him “some Himalayan version of the Robert De Niro character in ‘Taxi Driver.’ ”) Along with the “You talkin’ to me?” business, the character De Niro created seemed to seep off the screen and into the real world: Julia Phillips and Paul Schrader drove past theaters in New York where the film originally played and were at once thrilled and sickened to see lines of young men dressed in Bickle’s familiar outfit of army fatigues and blue jeans, waiting to see the film for, presumably, second and third go-rounds.*3
For decades there was talk of reviving the character for a sequel, and De Niro, Scorsese, and Schrader talked seriously about it more than once. Schrader always contended that the characters he wrote in such films as American Gigolo, Light Sleeper, and even The Last Temptation of Christ were thematic variations on Travis Bickle, but he was rebuffed by De Niro each time he tried to interest him in appearing in one of those films. All three of the principals remained intrigued by the thought of exploring how Travis Bickle would have been treated by time. In 1998, after having lunch with De Niro and talking once more about reviving Travis, Schrader, again inspired by real-life events, thought he’d hit on it. “Theodore Kaczynski,” he wrote to Scorsese, referring to the infamous Unabomber, who’d been arrested a year or so prior. “If the Travis Bickle character had survived, he probably could have ended up a violent, self-absorbed loner like Kaczynski.” (Perhaps joking, he added, “Jodie [Foster] can play the Clarice Starling role.”) The idea, for better or worse, never got further than that note.
AND WHILE THE world was greeting Travis Bickle, the man who embodied him was a continent—and several decades—removed from the fetid, menacing streets of New York. On the sound stages and backlot of Paramount Pictures, De Niro was playing Monroe Stahr, the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, a roman à clef about the famed producer Irving Thalberg, the boy genius of MGM who died in 1936 at the age of thirty-seven having overseen literally hundreds of films, including the likes of Ben-Hur, Grand Hotel, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Champ, A Night at the Opera, and The Good Earth—almost none of which would, by his choice, bear his name. Fitzgerald found Thalberg a poignant and romantic character and had conceived of exorcising himself of the demons of working in Hollywood through the project—which, ironically, was left incomplete after the author’s own early death, at age forty-four, in 1940.
The film had been proposed to De Niro as early as the fall of 1974, when Elia Kazan had sent him a copy of the script, which had been adapted by playwright Harold Pinter for producer Sam Spiegel. At the time, De Niro was booked back-to-back-to-back with Taxi Driver, Bogart Slept Here, and New York, New York. But he was interested in working with Kazan, a scion of the Group Theatre and of Method acting, and a former director of his boyhood acting heroes Marlon Brando (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront), Montgomery Clift (Wild River), and James Dean (East of Eden). The pedigree of the production was irresistible, and De Niro agreed to squeeze it in. (He was testing his wardrobe for the role when his agent, Harry Ufland, failed to recognize him on the set of Taxi Driver). Then, when Bogart imploded, he was able to step right into The Last Tycoon.
He felt, he said, immediate relief: “It was like going from the darkest depths to light and inspiration; from black to white; from total angst to being with Kazan and Sam Spiegel.… It was a whole other thing.” Kazan especially was a godsend to him. Like Scorsese, he was willing to pore over the details of a character endlessly with his star, having long conversations, writing extensive letters and memos, prolonging the production to engage in quiet one-on-one sessions. Kazan, whose understanding of the Stanislavskian system was closer to Lee Strasberg’s than to Stella Adler’s, knew exactly how to coddle or confront an actor—even one of De Niro’s caliber—to exact the performance he was seeking, a discipline to which De Niro was happy to submit himself.
They met first in London in the spring of 1975, when De Niro was commuting between New York and Rome while finishing 1900 and preparing to shoot Taxi Driver. After that, they kept in touch. Kazan sent De Niro a letter to bring to his attention a detail about Stahr: that he was a good dancer, specifically the fox-trot. De Niro responded on the back of the envelope in which Kazan’s letter arrived, delighted with this detail about his character and promising to learn the dance.
When De Niro arrived in Hollywood in the fall of 1976 to work on Bogart and Tycoon, Kazan supplied him with a four-page, single-spaced précis of his impressions of Stahr: the character’s attitudes toward art, business, work, women, colleagues, and his failing health, plus even some explanation of what would be going through the character’s mind during and after sexual intercourse. The memo was a wormhole; De Niro loved it, annotating the pages extensively and working on his own copy of the script with fanatical attention to psychological detail.
In some ways all of this work was moot, as Spiegel, the producer of Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The African Queen, and On the Waterfront, had contractually promised Harold Pinter that his adaptation would be treated like a stage play—that, in effect, it would be shot exactly as he wrote it, with no changes permitted to any of it, not even a single word of dialogue, without his approval. The script was locked as surely as if they’d already shot it; Kazan, describing this straitjacketing, liked to say that he was “realizing” the script, after the French fashion of referring to the director as the réalisateur. All De Niro could do was dive into the psychological and emotional subtleties in almost a theoretical way. But he loved that sort of thing, and Kazan encouraged and inspired him to dig in. On many of the screenplay’s typewritten pages he would wind up writing more words than Pinter had, almost all of them for naught.
He did have control of some aspects of his character, though, and he took charge with his customary rigor. The wardrobe was bespoke, his suits tailored exactly as Irving Thalberg had worn them; he learned to write shorthand, as both the real Thalberg and the fictional Stahr could; he met with Paramount’s founder, Adolph Zukor, who at age 103 still visited the studio regularly to kibitz; he spoke to doctors about the heart condition from which Stahr, like Thalberg, suffered, learning about the medications he would have taken in the 1930s and how his moods and energy would have been affected by them and by his illness. Dressed in his old-time wardrobe, with all three buttons of his suit jackets closed, he liked to parade silently around Paramount with an inner sense of ownership. “I spent time just walking around the studio dressed in those three-piece suits, thinking, ‘This is all mine,’ ” he said.
Kazan knew he would have to mold De Niro to fit the material: “Bobby has never played an executive, he’s never played an intellectual, he’s never played a lover. I had to find that side of him; it was unexplored territory.” He developed a novel technique to immerse his star in the character: having him don a suit and sit in an office, where he was besieged by phone calls, by interruptions from his “assistants” (played by actors), by manufactured crises to which he had to improvise responses and solutions. “I’ve impressed on Bobby that what he says is never a comment,” Kazan explained. “Whatever he says is an instruction which someone has to do something about.… I’ve made him feel that his life is at the mercy of his anteroom, that he’s a victim of the phone. I’ve now got him realizing what it means to be an executive.”
De Niro ate it up. He adored working with Kazan. “He was an actor at one time,” he reminded a reporter from Rolling Stone. “He’s schooled. He’s—as far as I’m concerned, the best schooling.” And he appreciated the latitude that Kazan allowed him in finding and creating the character: “I sometimes see him as a parent who doesn’t quite approve of his children or what they’re doing,” he said. “He can’t relate to it, but he still loves them.”
Kazan, for his part, was deeply impressed by De Niro’s exactitude and commitment, noting, “He’s very precise. He figures everything out both inside and outside.… Everything he does he calculates. In a good way, but he calculates, just how he sits, what his suits are, what ring is where.… Everything is very exact.” And he was nearly overwhelmed by his star’s work ethic: “He’s the only actor I’ve ever known who called me on Friday night after we finished shooting and said, ‘Let’s work tomorrow and Sunday together.’ ” He did, however, notice that De Niro was prone to overdoing things: “He’s getting thinner and thinner. I’m worried about him. Thalberg … had a rheumatic heart and was very frail. Bobby went to the greatest lengths to get that. I admire him for it.” (At least one member of the cast thought it was an uncanny transformation. Ray Milland, who knew the real man, said, “De Niro is very much like Thalberg: very meek, very quiet, very thin.”)
But not everyone involved with the production was similarly enamored. Spiegel, one of those old-school producers who worked independently of a studio and reckoned that every cent spent on a film was coming right out of his pocket, tried, according to De Niro, to shortchange him on his salary. “Sam pulled one on me,” the actor remembered. “He tried to finagle paying me what he said he would. It was very simple. I don’t understand why people do that. He was famous for it. And yet he had good taste and he was funny.… I still walked away from him, though. In the make-up trailer one night when we were shooting, Sam came over and said, ‘Bobby …,’ and I said, ‘Sam, you didn’t do what you were supposed to do.’ ‘Well …,’ he said, and I just walked away from him. But I liked him.”
The feeling wasn’t necessarily mutual. Kazan had lobbied Spiegel to give De Niro the part—he had literally taken the actor by the arm and dragged him to a hotel suite, where he made the introduction—and Spiegel fought the casting even after the film was under way. Spiegel complained that De Niro brought “no nobility” to the role and that he insulted Spiegel behind his back around the studio. He denigrated De Niro’s work while watching the daily rushes. He tried to scrimp on the wardrobe, complaining to Kazan that De Niro had asked for fourteen tailor-made suits. Once, as De Niro and Kazan ate lunch with him at the Paramount executive dining room, Spiegel excused himself and walked over to where Robert Evans, the young production executive who’d green-lit Love Story, Chinatown, and the two Godfather films, was eating. “Look at Irving Thalberg over there,” Spiegel said quietly to Evans, indicating De Niro. “He doesn’t even know how to pick up a knife and fork.”
But De Niro stayed aboard, and Kazan finished the film, which would be his last. Compared to the protracted post-production De Niro’s other recent films had been put through (1900, which wrapped before shooting began on Taxi Driver, was still being edited), The Last Tycoon made it from the sound stage to the screen in very quick order, and reactions were mixed to sour.
DE NIRO, if it’s possible, is almost too true to the material and the character of Monroe Stahr. He captures the character’s caution, reserve, reticence, prudence, and emotional stillness in such a way as to seem almost as if he’s not in the film at all but rather a ghostly presence, as the dying Thalberg may well have been, pouring all his energy into the one thing he’s incontestably best at—making movies. Excessively formal, perennially under wraps, pallid, with a flat affect and the hoping-to-please tenor of a boy being allowed to sit at the grown-ups’ table, he sips water cautiously, gives orders in a soft voice, and floats elegantly but almost mistily through the film. It all feels played exactly as Kazan and De Niro had wished—and it’s all lifeless and remote and tepid, as if De Niro were reading the part to himself rather than inhabiting it for an audience.
Stahr’s milkiness is part of the story—his physical frailty, the incongruity of his talent and his manner, the longing of a young widower, the dreaminess of a man who can make up a beguiling film premise out of thin air or pinpoint the exact problem with someone else’s story, the earthly disinterest of a man who works all day and leaves his beach house half finished partly because he’s mournful and partly because he’s other than (more than? less than?) human. Toward the end of the film he acquires a physical solidity, engaging in sex and boozing and even a fistfight (he doesn’t get a single punch in and gets knocked on his ass with the first blow).
It’s tough to fault De Niro’s performance, as he appears to be doing exactly what was asked of him. He is meant to be vaporous, evanescent, vague, a ghost in the making. And that’s precisely what he is. You’re never magnetized by, compelled by, or even terribly interested in Stahr; the film’s only red-blooded character, in fact, is the labor organizer, played by Jack Nicholson, who quarrels with Stahr and puts him down with that lone punch. De Niro manages to hint at an inner life, but that, too, is cloudy, couched, obscure. It’s the imitative fallacy in action: an embodiment of wanness suggesting a wan character. It’s no wonder at all that the picture and his role in it had so little impact.
If Tycoon was a setback, it was only a minor one. Taxi Driver was still dominating conversation about American movies when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival—and, in the great tradition of the event, was booed not just once but twice: once upon screening, once again upon winning the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. And it was part of the mix on Oscar night 1977, when it was up for a mere four awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress (Jodie Foster), and Best Original Score. (It would win nothing, as Rocky and Network dominated the evening.) Schrader and Scorsese may have been ignored by their peers in the Academy, but their film was clearly resonant in the culture. On Oscar night, Scorsese was under the cloud of a threat from an enraged fan of Jodie Foster, who said that if the actress won a prize for the things Scorsese had made her say and do, he’d pay for it with his life. The director was surrounded by FBI agents and was, not surprisingly, relieved when Beatrice Straight took home the Best Supporting Actress prize for Network. (Also swept aside in the evening’s surge of recognition for Network was De Niro’s performance; along with Giancarlo Giannini for Seven Beauties, William Holden for Network, and Sylvester Stallone for Rocky, he lost the Best Actor prize to Peter Finch, who had died that January of a sudden heart attack and was, with Bernard Herrmann, one of two prominent figures nominated posthumously that night.)
But his real trouble, Scorsese later confessed, was internal. “I was crazier when I finished Taxi Driver than when I began,” he told Schrader. He was spiraling downward into a nightmare of drug use, adultery, hubris, paranoia, and anxiety. He was doing it all daily on the set of the most costly film he’d ever made. And De Niro was along for the ride.
SCORSESE FIRST ENCOUNTERED New York, New York, Earl Mac Rauch’s screenplay about a love affair between a big-band singer and a saxophonist, in 1974 and thought it would be exciting to try an old-fashioned movie with a new-fashioned sensibility, to film a picture about New York on Hollywood sound stages, just as so many pictures he loved as a boy had been made, to infuse a film about the 1940s with the psychological depth that movies were permitting themselves in the 1970s. It was an ambitious project, entailing elaborate production numbers crammed with extras and filmed on huge sets filled with antique props and such. To do it properly would involve more time and money than Scorsese had ever spent on a film: twenty-two weeks (compared to the nine in which Taxi Driver was made) and at least $8 million, four times the biggest budget he’d ever worked with. It would star De Niro, who at that time had never played a truly romantic role, and Liza Minnelli, who had made only one movie in Hollywood—the expensive flop Lucky Lady—since winning an Oscar three years earlier for Cabaret.
And all of those obstacles, considerable as they were, paled in comparison to the real trouble the film was facing. Scorsese and De Niro decided that the film needed to be dark, lifelike, and probing, qualities they felt the script was lacking. And so they chose to rewrite it on the fly, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid leaping from a cliff into the unknown. “After winning the Cannes Golden Palm for Taxi Driver,” Scorsese confessed, “we got big heads and felt that no script was good enough.”
Scorsese hired his old friend Mardik Martin to rewrite the original script, first with Mac Rauch and later with his own wife, Julia Cameron, working alongside them. It was a combination guaranteed to result in conflict: the director’s old friend and collaborator having to quarrel with his new wife, an aspiring screenwriter, over every passage in the script while the original writer shrank further and further back from the process. Cameron, pregnant with a honeymoon baby, clearly had the upper hand, but Martin had access to Scorsese and a shared history, and he risked their collaboration by warning his old friend that his wife was out of control and hurting the picture. Eventually, Mac Rauch just walked away and let the two of them have at it.
And have at it they did. As Cameron recalled, “We had a hard time agreeing on anything. ‘I don’t think she would do that, Mardik,’ I would complain. ‘Well, she certainly wouldn’t do what you’re having her do,’ ” he would reply. (As Martin recalled, it was even uglier: “She was insanely jealous of anybody who came next to Marty, very possessive. Marty was easily fooled by women.”)
It would turn out that both of them were right to protect their points of view stubbornly, to be cynical about the viability of the work they were doing, and most of all to be afraid of where it was leading.
For starters, Scorsese somehow got it in his head that he could let his actors improvise, as they’d done so fruitfully on intimate, low-budget films such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, despite the fact that the scale of the production before him was massive. At first it worked. He began by shooting an intricate production number, “Happy Endings,” which was meant to be the climax of the film. It was a ten-day job filled with color, music, elaborate camera movements, and artful cutting, and it so impressed studio executives when it was screened for them that they threw a party to celebrate the success of the film before they were even halfway through the shooting schedule. No less than Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor were among those invited to observe a day’s filming, to watch the “Happy Endings” footage, and to toast Scorsese’s achievement. For the movie-mad director, it was yet another crowning moment.
But there were few such golden days during the production. Right after shooting “Happy Endings,” they spent seven or eight days on the beginning of the film, the encounter of up-and-coming saxophonist Jimmy Doyle and aspiring singer Francine Evans during the riotous celebration of VJ Day in Times Square and inside a jumpin’ New York nightclub. As opposed to the carefully choreographed “Happy Endings” number, this crucial scene of the film was largely improvised by De Niro and Minnelli, who wasn’t trained the way he was. “He would throw something at her,” Scorsese said, “and she’d keep coming back. There was no stopping her.” It was a risk, but it was one of those fortunate risks that proved successful in a way that doomed them: they made what everybody agreed was a great sequence: “That’s when everything sort of fell to pieces and came together at the same time,” Scorsese reflected. “It was beautiful.”
In the wake of that lucky break, they began to believe that they could do the whole film as improv, despite the hugely expensive apparatus of the production. “We started to get cocky,” Scorsese recalled. (“They went crazy,” remembered Mardik Martin. “Everything got out of hand. Everyone was trying to improve it by improvisation.”) Even De Niro, who loved to improvise within the confines of a character and a script, knew they were in trouble: “We’d all be trying to rectify things that just were not working,” he remembered. “We were trying to shape it, but because of the improvisation we were always trying to build on what had been shot before or to fit a scene in if we shot out of sequence.” In effect, each improvised scene had an impact on the scenes that surrounded it, and the problems that they initially saw in the script were multiplied, not lessened, by each change they made. The script ballooned into a crayon box of color-coded pages written and rewritten virtually the night before each day’s shoot and then altered once again on the set. “It was a nightmare,” said Mardik Martin. “I was writing up till the final frame. You don’t make movies like that.”
Later, wiser, Scorsese knew the truth of it: “It was a mess,” he admitted. But at the time he couldn’t see it, in part—in large part—because he was fueling himself on a combination of adrenaline, daring, hubris, and, by his own confession, drugs. Even though it’s set in the big-band era, New York, New York was made under the influence of Hollywood’s drug of choice circa 1976, cocaine. “I started taking drugs to explore,” Scorsese admitted, “and got sidetracked.” He had always used medication for his asthma and for some of his neurotic conditions—as a boy, he was known around Elizabeth Street as “Marty Pills.” But now he was living the high life of success and hedonism, and little by little he became more lost in it.
He also wandered in another way, beginning an affair with Minnelli, who was at the time not only married (to Jack Haley Jr., whose father had played the Tin Man to Liza’s mother’s Dorothy) but already caught up in a dalliance with Mikhail Baryshnikov. What’s more, not only were the star and her director engaged in an overwhelming movie production and a romantic liaison, but they began working on a stage musical entitled Shine It On (later renamed The Act) based on Minnelli’s Francine Evans character.
And why not burn the candle in the middle as well as at both ends? So Scorsese agreed to make another film, a documentary about the final concert of the legendary rock group The Band, as soon as shooting on New York, New York was done. Jean-Luc Godard, one of Scorsese’s heroes, famously declared, “I am cinema.” Scorsese was pushing himself very near to a point where he could say truthfully, “Cinema killed me.”
YET THROUGH IT ALL, while the cameras rolled for nearly six months, while the director strayed from his pregnant wife, while the female lead’s private life fed the gossip columns, while the script metastasized into something its original writer no longer recognized and produced a film that not even three editors could make clear or smooth, De Niro bore an aspect of almost holy calm, dedicating himself to the details of the character and, in particular, losing himself in the study of the saxophone. Because it wouldn’t be enough, of course, for Robert De Niro to play a musician; he was intent on becoming one—or, at least, on becoming indistinguishable from one.
Most actors who played musicians would be content to learn the postures and movements associated with an instrument, to do a dumb show of being an able player. But De Niro insisted that he actually be able to make music on the thing. He wouldn’t ultimately be heard in the film—veteran big-band saxophonist Georgie Auld played the parts used in the soundtrack—but he was absolutely determined that nobody could tell that it wasn’t him. “I wanted it to look like my horn,” he explained, “that it belonged to me. I didn’t want to look like some schmuck up there. You can do that, you can get away with that. But what’s the point?”
De Niro started taking lessons from Auld, a tenor player who had been a member of orchestras led by Bunny Berrigan, Artie Shaw, and Benny Goodman during the big-band era and even had a group of his own in the 1940s, through which such future stars as Sarah Vaughan, Erroll Garner, and Dizzy Gillespie had passed. Auld, an old-time character who oozed jazz charisma, was cast as a big-band leader in the film and alternately marveled and bridled at his tutee’s skill and dedication.
“It’s incredible the way he learned,” Auld said just before production began. “I’ll teach him something on a Friday—a difficult passage—and by Monday morning, that son of a gun has learned it, he’s got it down cold. He’s got a little hideaway, and he practices until midnight. The kid plays a good tenor sax, and I mean it, and he learned it in three months.” (In fact, De Niro practiced on an alto horn: “It’s easier to carry around,” he admitted.) Before long, though, De Niro’s obsessive dedication found its way under Auld’s skin. “He asked me ten million questions a day,” Auld griped. “It got to be a pain in the ass.” And: “He’s about as much fun as the clap.” Even Auld’s wife, Diane, was overwhelmed: “We thought he was going to climb into bed with us with the horn.”
Of course, De Niro had other things to do in order to create his character. “I thought of Jimmy Doyle as a fly stuck on flypaper,” he explained, “trying to get himself free.” In his copious annotations to the script and his research materials, he identified with the jazz musicians who were barred from improvising freely in the confines of the big-band sound and who had to join a union and obey a hierarchy of authority. He continually reminded himself to appear agitated and hyped up, to follow a beat or a melody that only he could hear, to tap his fingers on his knees or a table, to approach dialogue with musical rhythm. He fastened on such props of the jazz saxophonist’s trade as reeds, tubes of ChapStick, handkerchiefs, and of course his horn. He made sure to remember that Doyle always had an eye peeled for the ladies, even when in the company of his wife. He devised a method of creating a drunken appearance by downing a shot of bourbon and spinning himself around in circles right before the camera rolled. And he repeatedly reminded himself that he wanted to convey in Doyle a combination of blunt directness and overweening ambition, whether it be for women, for music, or for money, regardless of whom else it affected or how. “I don’t mind being a bastard,” he told Minnelli, “as long as I’m an interesting bastard.”
More than in any of his previous films, De Niro developed a aura of detachment and aloofness during the production of New York, New York. He had been installed, aptly enough, in Greta Garbo’s former dressing room on the MGM lot, and he was extremely particular about the behavior around him on the set. At one point, he asked his lighting double, Jon Cutler, to replace another actor, who wasn’t on camera, in a close-up shot of Doyle getting angry. “I can’t get anything off that guy,” he complained.
As on Taxi Driver, the producers had allowed a number of reporters to visit the set (this time with the proviso that they hold their stories until the film was actually released), and De Niro eluded them as long as possible and then gave them as little of his time as he could. “He didn’t say it out loud,” remembered Chris Hodenfield of Rolling Stone, “but he made it clear with his attitude that I was an annoyance to him by being there to interview him.” The thick air and looming sense of dread that enveloped Taxi Driver seemed almost like a carnival in comparison to the tenor of the New York, New York set—and this one was a musical (or, as Scorsese continually insisted, “a film with music”).
The darkness came shockingly to the surface late in the production, just around the time that, in real life, Scorsese’s affair with Minnelli was discovered by his wife. While filming a scene in which Doyle flew into a rage and caused his pregnant wife to go into labor, De Niro worked himself into such a frenzy that he wound up needing medical attention. “I thought it would be funny to show, out of complete rage, an insane absurdity, where you get so nutty that you become funny, hopping mad,” he said. “I saw that the roof of the car was low, and I hit it with my head, then I hit it with my hand.” It was a hell of a thing, he admitted: “Liza got hurt, and I think I hurt my hand.” The two of them, with Scorsese, raced from the studio to an emergency room. Drugs, adultery, hospital visits, miles of unusable film footage: New York, New York provided gossip pages with fodder for months. It would have to be a hell of a picture to make people forget all the whispers they’d heard.
But just as Scorsese let the film get away from him by turning it into a huge improvisatory exercise—“a $10 million home movie,” as he called it—so did De Niro focus so much on the details of playing the saxophone that he let the characterization of Jimmy Doyle suffer. “I really worked on it very hard,” he said of his saxophone playing. “But I wonder if I should have saved a little more energy for other things and just worried about what was going to be seen. I worked like hell on that thing.”
THERE WERE OTHER distractions as well.
In the early part of 1976, De Niro and Diahnne Abbott visited Rome and stayed at the famed Raphael Hotel near the Piazza Navona. Some weeks after returning home from the trip, she discovered that she was pregnant. In April, in a rented meeting hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on Central Park West, they were married in a nondenominational service attended by, among others, Scorsese, Sally Kirkland, Elia Kazan, Harvey Keitel, Shelley Winters, Julie Bovasso, Joseph Papp, John Hancock, Sam Spiegel, Jay Cocks, Verna Bloom, and Paul Schrader, who, looking around the room, had the thought, “Everybody there was somebody who had helped Bobby to become a different person.”
During the time he was shooting The Last Tycoon, De Niro rented a house in the Brentwood suburb of Los Angeles so that Diahnne Abbott and Drena, whom he had adopted, could join him there. “We would go to parties,” Abbott recalled, “and people wouldn’t be interested in me at all. They’d look at me as if to say ‘Who is this woman?’ When they found out I was Bobby’s wife, it was spooky to see how their attitudes would change.”
De Niro, barely cut out for family life, was learning to negotiate a household that was already populated with nine-year-old Drena and the menagerie of dogs and cats that Abbott seemed always to have on hand. He found that he needed extra space around him, literally, and when it became clear that they would stay in Hollywood awhile, they moved from the Brentwood rental to a Bel Air estate where he really did have a hideaway—an outbuilding where he practiced the saxophone, studied scripts, and retreated into the silence that was a key to his concentration.
Even then, he was out of sorts. Accustomed to being able to flit in and out of scenes in the New York social world, he was entirely inept at the sort of socializing that was part of Hollywood life, where nights out often meant visiting friends and colleagues in their homes rather than, as in New York, meeting up at atmospheric actors’ hangouts. Abbott loved to go out—she and De Niro were habitués of the Sunset Strip club On the Rox, where he liked to sit nursing Black Russians and watching the parade of celebrity flesh. But she also loved to entertain, which made her husband particularly ill at ease. “When De Niro is the host of a party,” wrote a New York Times reporter who dined at his Bel Air house, “it has no center, no focal point.”
They would invite the gang over—Scorsese and Cameron (whose pregnancy was just a month or two ahead of Abbott’s), Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader, fellow actors such as Keitel, Peter Boyle, and Kathi McGinnis, chums from New York such as Steven Prince. But De Niro would stand apart, watching with the same stillness with which he’d carried himself as a boy and an acting student, becoming slightly ruffled when anything resembling excessive exuberance bubbled up in the house. At one dinner party, Boyle cracked up the guests by mooning a roasted turkey that Abbott placed on the dining table, and De Niro responded with a sheepish “Hey, hey guys, hey, that’s too much.” The life of the party he wasn’t.
In October, huge with child, Abbott filmed a cameo appearance in New York, New York, playing a big-band singer performing a rendition of “Honeysuckle Rose,” a brief moment that she infused with grace and glamour—even though she was hiding her very pregnant belly behind the artfully draped folds of her dress. (Told months later that her condition wasn’t visible to the film’s audience, she confessed that she could see it, though that might have been because she was “loaded” on pot on the night of the film’s New York premiere.)
She went on to record the vocal track of the song at an LA studio in the presence of the film’s stars. “I was standing in the box while they were getting ready,” she remembered, “and I thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ Liza Minnelli was there recording, and I felt it was going to be so embarrassing. My husband was there too, and I don’t know if he thought I could sing. Liza was wonderful. She came into the box and said, ‘Relax, you’ll do all right.’ ”
On November 9, 1976, while the film was still shooting, the baby arrived at Cedars-Sinai Hospital: a boy whom they named Raphael, after the hotel in which he’d been conceived. De Niro was thirty-three, had an Oscar, was the magnetic center of the most talked-about movie of the year, was the star of a huge Hollywood production, and was already planning his next film, an epic story about the Vietnam War that would range from the mountains of western Pennsylvania to a prisoner-of-war camp on a fetid Southeast Asian river. He was married, and now he was a dad for the second time—once by adoption, once by blood. He had as full a life as he could ever have wished for.
And he had another iron in the fire: he was meeting a trainer regularly in a Los Angeles gym and taking boxing lessons. One way or another, he was determined to make a film about Jake LaMotta.
*1 Coincidentally, Simon had been involved a few years prior in the firing of Harvey Keitel in almost identical circumstances from The Sunshine Boys, in which he’d been cast, inaptly, in the part ultimately played by Richard Benjamin. Small world.
*2 A few years later, Simon performed the inadvertent penance of buying a pair of paintings that caught his eye in a New York gallery and that turned out to be the work of Robert De Niro Sr.
*3 There was a chilling footnote to the film’s release. In April 1976, a twenty-year-old Chicago man, Perry Susral, drove over to a convent at three in the morning and fired twenty-seven shots with a .22-caliber pistol at the building, harming no one but interrupting the sleep of the resident nuns, “who were too petrified to do anything except pray their rosaries,” according to police reports. Questioned, Susral explained that he was imitating Taxi Driver: “I liked the shootout scene.” A Chicago reporter tracked Scorsese down in Los Angeles, where he said, “It is all wrong. We never intended anything like that. If you look at the film, the whole thing is surrealism.” True, but it wouldn’t be the last time the filmmakers would have to answer such questions about their creation.