WHEN HE AWOKE ON APRIL 1, 1981, IN POSSESSION OF HIS second Oscar and a pile of congratulatory telegrams from, among many others, Jack Nicholson, Mickey Rooney, California governor Edmund G. Brown, and Israeli politician Moshe Dayan, Robert De Niro was by almost anyone’s reckoning the greatest screen actor on earth.
Just eight or nine years prior, he had been almost completely unknown, doggedly chasing small parts in independent films and appearing in off-off-Broadway plays, just as likely to be skipped over for work as to have his name misspelled in the credits or be ignored in reviews when he got a role.
Then came the remarkable one-two punch of Bang the Drum Slowly and Mean Streets, followed by the revelation of The Godfather, Part II (and the anointment of an Oscar) and the unimaginable explosion of Taxi Driver. In five years, he’d claimed a significant spot in the upper tier of his profession. There followed three expensive and visible flops (The Last Tycoon, 1900, New York, New York), the blame for none of which was hung on him. Rather, he was for the most part admired for stretching his range and for choosing intriguing projects and, always, the best collaborators; if anything, his reputation was enhanced. And then came another pair of back-to-back thunderbolts, The Deer Hunter and Raging Bull.
His triumph was undeniable and complete. Nine films, including several outright masterworks, and nine completely distinct performances. He had learned to speak in dialects and even in a foreign language; he had learned to drive a taxi, to play the saxophone, to box; he had literally rebuilt his physique twice; he had become other people again and again, and almost none of them resembled Bobby De Niro of Greenwich Village, whoever he was. He had taken the venerated standard of the actor as chameleon, as embodied by the likes of Marlon Brando during his first flush of glory and Laurence Olivier through his long and varied career, and infused it with a modern energy and freedom. There was no direct line, not of thought or gesture or intent or execution, that connected Bruce Pearson, Johnny Boy Civello, Vito Corleone, Travis Bickle, Monroe Stahr, Alfredo Berlinghieri, Jimmy Doyle, Michael Vronsky, and Jake LaMotta, only the tirelessness, selflessness, talent, dedication, imagination, application, and will to power of the performer who had created them. He had been nominated for an Oscar four times and won twice; he’d gotten four Golden Globe nominations, winning once; and he had a trove of prizes from critics’ groups, including three from the New York Film Critics Circle, two each from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics, and one each from the Boston Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. He had peers, yes—Hoffman, Pacino, Nicholson, Keitel, Voight, Hackman, movie stars and fine actors all—but he had no equals, not at that very moment, and everybody knew it.
His collaborators, even those with their own estimable accomplishments, spoke of him in terms of awe and respect. “Bobby De Niro’s a perfectionist,” Donald Sutherland said, “but he knows what’s perfect; I don’t.” His technique left other actors agog: “De Niro once figured out what the guy he was playing would have had in his wallet,” said Ryan O’Neal, admitting he didn’t have the same tools. As Chris Hodenfield, virtually the last journalist De Niro had spoken to at any length at the time, put it: “A Dr. Jekyll who shifts into an endless number of Mr. Hydes, he doesn’t imitate people, he stages an inquisition.” His excellence was a given; his process was a legend. He had gone, in perhaps fifteen years’ time, from sniffing inquisitively around the edge of the acting profession to, at age thirty-seven, standing indisputably on top of it.
But that remarkable rise—the struggle to get a foot in the door, to get those plum roles, to create those indelible performances, to maintain focus on the work, to avoid the distractions of the limelight, to keep from being bled by the press and the accoutrements of showbiz—came at a personal cost.
When he woke that morning, he was a man living apart from his wife and children. In 1979, with the hard work and travel of The Deer Hunter barely past and the Raging Bull preparation consuming him more than ever, he and Diahnne Abbott separated. She, Drena, and Raphael split their time between the home De Niro had leased in Brentwood and the townhouse he owned in lower Manhattan; he spent time between the New York building and a rented suite at the famed Chateau Marmont in Hollywood.
Their troubles were, per rumormongers, the result of their differing tastes and priorities. Their early days in California had been idyllic, Shelley Winters recalled. “We spent wonderful weekends together. I remember we used to lug big bags of cracked crab and iced white wine out to this funky beach—we called it Doggy Beach.” But their differences had become vexations. De Niro had grown frustrated with the hassles and expense of maintaining the menagerie that Abbott insisted on living with. At first her cats had been the cause of problems when they were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I’ve heard they have hookers running all around the pool,” De Niro remembered, “and yet when you have cats … I was told not to have cats, but I did and they locked us out. They put a padlock on the door and put the cats outside. I was furious. The manager threatened to call the police in front of me.… This was at night, we got home at midnight, and they had locked us out. I wanted to sue—he was a pig. It looked like he enjoyed being a son of a bitch.” Then, after they vacated their first Los Angeles rental home, in Bel Air, they were sued by the owners for the extensive damage done by their “great number of cats” to the rugs, draperies, and furniture; the suit sought $10,000 in reparations. For a fellow as meticulous, parsimonious, and particular as De Niro, it was becoming an ongoing provocation.
But it went deeper than run-ins with obnoxious hoteliers or cats peeing on rugs. De Niro really was as quiet, self-contained, and sphinx-like in his private life as the press liked to depict him, while Abbott had more of a taste for partying and gadding about in a crowd. He had a handful of haunts he preferred—low-key spots limited only to A-list clientele, such as the ultra-private On the Rox nightclub on the Sunset Strip. She preferred to be in larger throngs, more visible and more varied: parties, premieres, awards shows.
De Niro told the press that their estrangement was simply “a cooling-off period” and that it was the fault of his celebrity, without which he “would have gone on being an ordinary guy, living a simple life, and nothing would have changed my marriage.” But, of course, he had sought the life he now lived with single-minded purpose, and it was virtually inevitable that success would mean the sacrifice of “ordinary” and “simple.” The marriage was still a work in progress; they were together more than they were apart during this period of difficulty, and Abbott continued to be presented and to give interviews as the wife of Robert De Niro. But he was rumored around Hollywood to be involved with several well-known women (gossips linked him to Bette Midler and Barbara Carrera), and there were many reports of him being on the town, in his furtive fashion, with female companionship. He could be obsessively secretive even in these liaisons, not acknowledging his actual identity and even asking dates to leave their own bedrooms so he could hide his wallet during trysts, but he was known to be comporting himself as if genuinely single.
In Italy on a publicity tour for Raging Bull, he reunited with Stefania Sandrelli, one of his co-stars from 1900, who followed him after a while to New York, where they behaved affectionately toward each other in public. And in Los Angeles, he chased down—literally, while driving along in his convertible on San Vicente Blvd.—a beautiful young African American woman who turned out to be a singer named Helena Springs. Springs, who was approximately twenty-two at the time they met, remembered feeling frustrated by the behavior of the driver who seemed to be focused on her. “This guy is cutting me off,” she said. “I’d go fast, he’d go fast. I’d slow down, he’d slow down. This asshole kept following me. I didn’t even know him. Finally he put his hands in a prayer position and said, ‘Pull over.’ So I stopped and he said, ‘Can we have lunch?’ ”
Springs, who had been a background singer for, among others, Bob Dylan, Bette Midler, and Elton John, finally realized who her pursuer was, and she agreed to go to dinner with him, leading to their spending the night together. Over the span of a few years, they maintained a non-exclusive relationship, during which, Springs later said, she became pregnant twice. She aborted the first pregnancy, she claimed, without telling De Niro about it. But she said that when she found herself pregnant again, in late 1981, she determined that she would have the baby, and she told De Niro, setting him off on what she described as a series of ugly and intimidating conversations and encounters aimed at getting her to terminate the pregnancy. “It was mental abuse,” she concluded, but she held firm to her choice.
On July 1, 1982, she gave birth to a baby girl who was named—by De Niro, Springs said—Nina. De Niro, Springs claimed, gave her $50,000 to help with the care of the baby and even pitched in on setting up a room for her. But he drew the line at providing her with his medical history or a blood sample, fearing that she didn’t merely want to be able to fill in the gaps in the baby’s medical records, as she said, but rather that she was after more money. Springs dropped the matter, she later explained, partly because of her own low self-esteem: “Black women aren’t used to being courted by handsome, famous, rich white guys. So they don’t say no to whatever the man wants.” It would be more than three years before De Niro would see Springs, or baby Nina, again.
HE HAD NEVER liked to parley with the press. Now he was getting testy with journalists and especially with photographers. In the summer of 1979 he got into a scuffle with a pair of photographers at the Stork Club in New York, where one of them tried to snap him eating dinner with Joe Pesci. Not long after, in Rome to do publicity for Raging Bull, he found himself with Harvey Keitel riding in a taxi that was being pursued by a carload of paparazzi. The cab driver came upon a policeman and told him that he and his passengers were being followed by suspicious people. When the cop questioned the photographers, they got their revenge by declaring that they were chasing a pair of terrorists who were in the taxi. This was the height of Red Brigade revolutionary activity in Italy, and the charge was taken seriously; the taxi was intercepted by the carabinieri, the state police, and De Niro and Keitel were forced out at gunpoint, their hands held high, and made to stand against a wall, the paparazzi photographing the entire episode.
When the police realized that they’d been duped into making a big mistake, they tried to disarm the situation, De Niro recalled. “The chief of police came over to me and said, ‘I take all the cameras; put them over there. Don’t worry, no problem.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, this I’ll believe.’ ” After a talk at the police station—with the paparazzi present, claiming they were entitled to use any tactics whatsoever to get a picture—the actors were released. De Niro understood the cops’ point of view, but he couldn’t fathom the moxie of the paparazzi: “They were saying they had a right to take a picture. Those guys were actually arguing that—they’re the slimiest people who ever lived.”*1
AS IT TURNED OUT, there were reasons other than thin skin or a heightened sense of privacy that made him chary of reporters. Increasingly he was living a lifestyle that he was keen never to have revealed. During the period in which he, Scorsese, and the crowd around them were using drugs, especially cocaine, De Niro became friendly with John Belushi, the gonzo comedian who’d risen to fame on Saturday Night Live and then segued into movies with the smash hit Animal House. They were an unlikely pair: De Niro so reticent in his private life and dogged and precise in his art, Belushi so voluble and voracious and heedless, both personally and professionally. But there was a common love of late night living, of Marlon Brando movies (Belushi, it was said, had seen On the Waterfront dozens of times), and, alas, of cocaine. Belushi clearly idolized De Niro, who was six years his elder, and De Niro surely saw in Belushi a form of comic release that he hadn’t ever approached in his life or his work.
Belushi lived not far from De Niro in lower Manhattan, and De Niro would occasionally visit him at his home, where the comic had a private den that was the scene of many nights of conversation, movie watching, partying, and the planning of yet further bacchanals. (One night in the late 1970s, De Niro cut his hand at Belushi’s house and had to be taken for stitches.) They would similarly spend time together in Los Angeles, where both favored long-term stays at the Chateau Marmont, private dinners at the Imperial Gardens Chinese restaurant, and long boozy, cokey nights at On the Rox.
In February 1982 both were staying at the Chateau, and Belushi, always erratic, frequently living beyond reason in a fog of alcohol and drugs, was more out of control than usual, causing genuine concern among friends. Now and again De Niro would come down from his suite in the hotel’s main building to visit Belushi in the bungalow in which he was living, to talk about a script idea that the comedian was developing with his Saturday Night Live chum, comic and writer Don Novello (aka Father Guido Sarducci). One afternoon De Niro, accompanied by his kids Drena and Raphael for a rare outing, ran into Belushi at a house party in Benedict Canyon at which the comedian, strung out on coke, was snorting heroin with some musicians and excusing himself to go off and vomit.
On a Thursday evening just a few weeks later, De Niro was out on the town with actor Harry Dean Stanton—they stopped in at Dan Tana’s, the famed Italian restaurant to the stars, and then at On the Rox—and De Niro placed several calls to Belushi encouraging him to come out and join the escapades. Belushi didn’t respond, so De Niro and Stanton made the short drive over to the Chateau Marmont to see if they could find him and entice him out into the world. It seemed to De Niro that the comedian had been on edge for days, apparently not sleeping or eating properly, certainly strung out.
They found Belushi in the company of Cathy Smith, a Canadian woman who had drifted in and out of the music business over the years, involved professionally and, often, romantically with the likes of Gordon Lightfoot, Hoyt Axton, various members of The Band, and of the Rolling Stones. Smith had a history of using heroin and cocaine and had turned to dealing to support her drug habit. She had recently met Belushi and was supplying him with heroin and hanging around his bungalow; her presence, according to those who saw her there, was vaguely sexual, vaguely drug-related.
De Niro didn’t like Smith from first contact—he found her “trashy”—and he gladly agreed when Belushi suggested that he go back to On the Rox and return to the bungalow after the club closed. He took Stanton back to the club and then returned to the Chateau after two in the morning, not to Belushi’s bungalow but to his own suite, with a small party including several women. Robin Williams, who was appearing at the Comedy Store, a stone’s throw from the hotel, had gone to On the Rox looking for De Niro and Belushi and finally found De Niro, via phone, in his room; when Williams suggested they meet up at Belushi’s, De Niro explained that he was occupied. Williams went by himself to Belushi’s, where he, too, was creeped out by Smith and by the depressing and even sinister vibe in the air. After a while, sometime around three, he took his leave. Soon afterward, De Niro appeared at the back door of the bungalow, let himself in, helped himself to a little bit of the cocaine displayed on a table, and left again, saying barely a word.
The next day, March 5, De Niro woke late and tried to reach Belushi through the hotel switchboard. No luck. After failing several times, De Niro asked to speak to the hotel manager, who deflected his call. That agitated De Niro, who called back speaking in a much firmer tone of voice and demanding an explanation.
“There is a problem,” the manager told him.
“What?”
“It’s bad.”
“Is he sick?”
“It’s really bad.”
De Niro started to cry and let the phone drop. John Belushi was dead.
At around noon that day, a friend of Belushi’s had stopped in to help him work on a script and found the bungalow apparently empty. He called out for Belushi and then peeked into the comedian’s bedroom, where he found him in bed, unresponsive to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. By the time De Niro learned what had happened, word was beginning to spread and would soon hit the media like a bomb strike.
Naturally, De Niro was horrified. Not only because Belushi had been a genuine friend, not only because they had been together just hours before Belushi’s death—which everyone immediately knew had to be by drug overdose—but because, as he learned in the coming days, Belushi had been experimenting with heroin in part because he wanted to play a punk rock musician in a movie and was imitating De Niro’s famed technique of immersing himself completely in his roles.
Two days after Belushi’s death, when the medical examiner was releasing a preliminary autopsy report, De Niro got a phone call from Richard Bear, a musician and scenester who’d known Belushi for years and had become acquainted with De Niro in the past few months. Bear had been present one day when Belushi and De Niro discussed the comedian’s idea that he actually shoot up with real heroin on camera in the proposed film. He reminded De Niro about the conversation.
“Don’t talk to anybody about that,” De Niro told him. “I know John wanted to do that.”
Bear was distraught: “Bobby, they rehearsed the scene. That’s what killed him.… They were doing it!”
“Don’t say a word to me,” De Niro commanded. “Not to me. Don’t say a word to anybody.… You, me … we’ll put our heads together. But don’t talk to anybody.”
In the coming days, weeks, and months, De Niro would stay true to his own advice. When the Los Angeles district attorney investigated Smith for administering Belushi’s fatal dose, a so-called speedball combining heroin and cocaine, De Niro was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. But he was out of the country, making a movie in Italy, and he was permitted to give his testimony over the telephone from Rome. It was the only official tie he would ever have to his friend’s death or to the legal action taken against the woman who, however inadvertently, abetted it.
AND HE WAS MAKING that movie in Italy because, truly, he still had not slowed down. Nor had he even considered slowing down, despite his maniacal workload, the rigor with which he drove his body, the collapse of his marriage, his attraction to partying, and the human damage—both personal and professional—that he had witnessed over the past few years, often uncomfortably up close.
Raging Bull was still being edited when he began production on his next film, True Confessions, an adaptation of John Gregory Dunne’s novel in which a brutal murder, based on the legendary unsolved “Black Dahlia” case, led to the unraveling of a culture of scandal and cover-up within the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in the 1940s. Along with his wife, Joan Didion, Dunne had adapted the book for Winkler-Chartoff, who had put the film in the hands of Ulu Grosbard, a Belgian-born director with a strong track record in the New York theater and such films to his credit as the critically acclaimed The Subject Was Roses (which he’d also directed on Broadway) and the cultishly admired crime story Straight Time.
De Niro was cast as Father Desmond Spellacy, a rising wheeler-dealer in the Catholic hierarchy whose brother, LAPD Detective Tom Spellacy, cannot be dissuaded from digging into the unsavory ties that connected a brutally murdered party girl with the wealthy laymen who form the Church’s financial and civic power base. Robert Duvall, with whom De Niro had shared a credit but no screen time on The Godfather, Part II, would play Tom, and another familiar face, Charles Durning, would appear alongside the likes of Burgess Meredith, Kenneth McMillan, Dan Hedaya, and Cyril Cusack as a cardinal.
The book was atmospheric and powerful, an indictment of spiritual and institutional corruption written in a classical prose quite unlike the heated tenor that James Elroy would later become famous for bringing to bear on very similar themes. Catholicism was extremely important to the book and script, and De Niro was happy to immerse himself in the culture of the Church—the rituals, costumes, language, and daily lives of priests; the Latin liturgy; the intricacies of the profession of the priesthood as a way of life and as a career, with inducements to advancement and punishments for failures and insubordinations as in any career.
The film was shot in Los Angeles from January through April 1980, and De Niro cleverly employed the extra weight that he was still bearing from the previous year’s fattening-up procedure for Raging Bull to give Father Spellacy an appropriately comfortable fullness of face and frame. He also did intensive research on the priesthood and the Church; his formal religious experience, after all, consisted of but a few fleeting encounters with Catholicism as a young child and, later, during his Bobby Milk days of running experimentally with the crowd from Little Italy. He was tutored for the film by Father Henry Fehren, who’d been hired by the production and endured the usual barrage of questions and requests from his pupil. “De Niro is a perfectionist,” Fehren said later. “He wanted not only to master the fundamental routines of an ordained priest, but he wanted the sense, feeling and tradition of what the church was in 1948. He may be the most authentic priest ever seen on the screen.”
In his files De Niro had annotated copies of books and articles about the rites and rituals of the Church; the education of priests; the duties of various members of the diocese; the proper way to don, wear, and remove vestments; the private lives of priests; the specific procedures of confession and communion; even the Latin liturgy, which he practiced daily as production approached, often by attending Mass. To mark the character of the social-climbing Des Spellacy more specifically, he took some golf lessons and had his fingernails manicured. He also added dandruff flakes to the shoulders of his costumes, a subtle hint of the character’s human frailty, and did research into hyperventilation, the frightening condition to which Spellacy was prone (“NOTE OF CAUTION,” a researcher told him, “be careful while doing this repeatedly. Maybe you should breathe into a paper bag between takes to restore your carbon dioxide equilibrium”). He conducted interviews, too. “I talked to tons of priests,” he said. “But then I realized I don’t want to complicate it and clog myself with wrong choices. You can know too much.”
That was interesting in and of itself: De Niro, the famed chameleon and free-diver who would learn and do anything in the name of accuracy, was suggesting that there was maybe a limit to that type of acting, that monomaniacal immersion in the role could become a problem for the performer, that there was a point beyond which the technique he had honed over the past decade, and which he had brought to a pinnacle with Raging Bull, was no longer efficacious.
Just a few years prior, while making The Deer Hunter, De Niro had declared, “You have to earn the right to play a character.” In that same bit of publicity material, he was as explicit as he had ever been up to then in describing his aims in doing research and creating a sense of cocoonlike isolation: “I really don’t like to be distracted when I’m working on these things. So maybe I sublimate my own personality in order to get the totality of the role … I try to make him appear as real as if I’d known him all my life. Therefore, it’s not too easy for me to flip back out of character as I come off camera.”
Just a few years earlier, while making New York, New York, he had told Newsweek: “Technique is concrete.… Acting isn’t really respected enough as an art. Your body is an instrument, and you have to learn how to play an instrument. It’s like knowing how to play the piano. There ought to be acting schools that take you in as children, the way it’s done with musicians. You don’t need experience to learn technique. You’d learn your technique, and as you got older and had experience you’d apply it to what you know.”
In Raging Bull he had taken that technique as far as any screen actor ever had. But here on his very next project, De Niro seemed to be backing away from the thing he had just so recently mastered. He had pursued Raging Bull for the better part of a decade, but he had moved on to True Confessions with mere months of forethought. Following the style of the film as created by Grosbard, he played Des Spellacy, at least outwardly, as reserved, compact, efficient, unprepossessing. Where in Raging Bull he was all flame and heat and cataclysm, in True Confessions he was cool and still and calculating, a characterization more akin to Monroe Stahr or Alfredo Berlinghieri. It was as if he had taken the technique that he’d spent the 1970s perfecting, the Method of Constantin Stanislavski as distilled through Stella Adler and given life by Marlon Brando, brought it to its logical and practical extreme, and then, in a matter of months, weeks maybe, dropped it—not entirely, not by proclamation, but delicately, surely, and irreversibly. He would still be a significant actor and star, but he would never again chase the tiger of his muse and method so willfully and purposefully as he did in Raging Bull.
It wasn’t a precipitous fall. Even as a follow-up to Raging Bull, True Confessions had substance and gave the public a De Niro once again working with quality material and first-rate collaborators. Like Monroe Stahr, Desmond Spellacy is a prince of an order and on the fast track to be something more: impeccable, sharp, exact, and sure. He keeps his own counsel, even when advising his superiors, and is certain of his decisions, even when they create collateral damage (“Looks like a leprechaun, thinks like an Arab,” says one observer of his manner, not entirely disapprovingly). He is full of face, perfect in tailoring, steady of gaze and voice, as meticulous in play on the golf course as he is in the rituals of the Mass. He knows pride is a sin, but he has—perhaps in jest, perhaps not—already chosen his papal name.
Like Raging Bull, True Confessions is a tale of brothers, a responsible one (the monsignor) and a loose cannon (the detective), their public personae distinct from the way they interact with each other, which is warmer, jokier, less guarded, less actorly. With his brother, Des can tell a joke, do an Irish accent, allude to a shared past with a glance or a phrase. Around everyone else he embodies an idea and an ideal; with his brother, even when hearing his brother’s confession, he’s an ordinary man, prone to sentimental reminiscence, goofball humor, flashes of impolitic frustration, and even anger.
The most remarkable moments in the performance, though, are in the silences, as they so often are with De Niro. As the grisly murder case is connected more and more surely to the inner circle of Catholic laymen with whom he does business and threatens to soil the hem of the ambitious Monsignor Spellacy himself, De Niro slowly shifts from hauteur toward self-questioning and, finally, in a truly breathtaking moment, humility. Changing from his golf clothes to his priestly garb, he sits by himself, weary, determined, his doubts starting to outweigh his certainty. He is alone in a sparsely furnished room, but he could be orating a confession to a full auditorium; he is nearly naked with his thoughts, and De Niro conveys them without a sound. It’s a fine, textured performance, and as unlike Jake LaMotta as can be imagined.
IN THE MONTHS after filming True Confessions, De Niro started working again with his Bang the Drum Slowly director John Hancock, who was developing a script for him based on the true-life story of Rick Cluchey, who had been sentenced to death (and, later, life without parole) in 1957 under California’s “Little Lindbergh” law, which added a mandatory death sentence to any crime that had a kidnapping component. During his time at San Quentin, Cluchey had become interested in writing and acting and composed a play about prison called La Cage. After his sentence was commuted in 1966 by California governor Pat Brown, he traveled the world with a troupe of ex-con actors, eventually making his way to Paris, where no less a personage than Samuel Beckett came to be an admirer of his work. Hancock was crafting this remarkable saga into a film.
Along with Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, De Niro was interested in the project and worked closely with Hancock as he wrote the film, which had been entitled Weeds. He started to do his usual research thing—talking at length with Cluchey, observing his workshops, visiting a number of prisons, reading about the lives of convicts. That behavior was familiar to Hancock. But he also took note that De Niro was more demanding about a number of details of the film that Hancock felt ought to be the director’s prerogative: casting, music, sets, and so on. In particular, Hancock was uncomfortable with De Niro’s insistence that real convicts play major roles. The film had found a home at United Artists, with MGM distributing, but without an agreement on such a central issue, De Niro was never entirely ready to dive in, and the studio never green-lit the production.
Two years later, word of Weeds surfaced again, at EMI Films this time, with Universal distributing, again with Hancock and De Niro attached. Again De Niro went from apparent immersion in it to disagreement over how the material would be approached, and again it was shelved. In 1986, Weeds got yet a third life, this time with Nick Nolte in the lead role; it appeared the following year, to modestly favorable reviews and tepid box office, and Hancock and De Niro never came close to working together again.
BY 1981, DE NIRO had decided that he would live in Los Angeles only when work required it of him, and only in leased or rented housing, preferably at an entirely neutral and anonymous place—the Chateau Marmont being a favored destination, at least until John Belushi’s death.
He still had his 14th Street apartment in Manhattan, and he still used it for storage and as a crash pad for friends—Meryl Streep and her baby daughter stayed there for a couple of nights in late 1980 when the heating in their own apartment was on the fritz. And he had the townhouse on St. Luke’s Place in Greenwich Village, which he and Abbott had been renovating since they acquired it. It was a massive building—four floors plus a basement, with six bedrooms and four baths, and eventually a sauna, gym, and screening room. The detail work was meticulous, with upward of $200,000 going to, among other fine points, red oak in the entranceway, a redwood skylight in the master bedroom, and lots of teak, butternut, and cedar throughout.
Although the work on the house took more than two years and was estimated at some $3 million, De Niro was sued by a carpenter who claimed that he was given a check for $15,000 and then found that De Niro had put a stop order on it. When the matter finally came to court, the woodworker told the press he thought De Niro had misused him because “I treated him like just another customer, and he found that difficult because he’s used to people kissing his butt.” He made his case to the court’s satisfaction, and De Niro had to pay him the disputed fee and pay another $5,000 in interest and court costs.
Undissuaded by the hassles of home ownership, De Niro was looking at acquiring places in Connecticut and on Long Island. If it seemed that he was becoming a land baron or real estate hoarder, it was, in fact, a family habit. His uncle, Jack De Niro, was a big-time real estate agent with thriving businesses in New York City and Florida, and his mother, Virginia Admiral, had been buying and leasing properties in lower Manhattan for some time. Under the umbrellas of a variety of corporate partnerships, formed sometimes just for a single deal, she acquired loft spaces in which the painters and bohemians she had known since the 1940s could live and work, and she was able to keep her ex-husband, who still couldn’t be sure when or where his next paycheck would be, under a roof—a gesture of sisterly love, as it were, that endured throughout their lives. Admiral owned pieces of buildings all over Greenwich Village, SoHo, and other Manhattan neighborhoods that hadn’t yet been branded with names or acquired trendy cachet. She even had a mantra for her wheelings and dealings: “All great fortunes were built on real estate.” Her son might not have been after a fortune, but he clearly had heard the lesson.
AFTER WORKING for hire on True Confessions, he spent some time doing not much of anything. There were scripts to read, of course. Since The Godfather, Part II, his had been among the first names to come up in casting sessions, and he had scores of parts offered to him, some in films that were never made, some of which turned up on the screen with other actors in the roles De Niro had been offered. Among the former were such never-realized films as Brian De Palma’s Home Movie, intended as yet a third go-round of the John Rubin persona from Greetings and Hi, Mom!; a script by John Cassavetes entitled Knives; and a Jean-Luc Godard film about Bugsy Siegel. The latter included Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo and Blue Collar, John Huston’s Wise Blood, Wim Wenders’s Hammett (originally intended as a Francis Coppola film), Martin Scorsese’s dream project, Gangs of New York, and two films by Richard Attenborough: the World War II epic A Bridge Too Far and the psychological thriller Magic. A fellow might’ve made some pretty good films if he’d just stuck to that list, but De Niro was still chary about committing to projects: he’d rejected A Bridge Too Far, it was said, because Attenborough wouldn’t agree to preliminary meetings with him to discuss his part.
His next director, though, showed more determination. In 1973, when De Niro was in Italy to play Vito Corleone, Sergio Leone, the great director of such westerns as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, and Once Upon a Time in the West, came to see him about a new project he was nursing along. Leone’s films of the 1960s had enjoyed huge grosses around the world and had made an international star of Clint Eastwood, but they hadn’t yet garnered the critical reputation they would enjoy decades later, and they were still derided as “spaghetti westerns.”
Leone didn’t wish to talk to De Niro about a western, though.*2 He had in mind a story based on a book he’d read some half dozen years earlier, an account of Jewish gangsters in New York by Harry Gray entitled The Hoods. The story, he later said, “attached itself to me like the malediction of the Mummy in the old movie with Boris Karloff. I wanted to make that film and no other.” He had been going around Europe and the United States sharing his vision for an epic gangster picture for a number of years, and he told the story enthrallingly enough for De Niro, who didn’t know Leone’s work, to be at least politely interested. “He was a big guy,” De Niro remembered, “and I liked him.… He was very Italian, very sympathetic, simpatico.”
Years passed, and Leone continued to pursue the film, which he had come to call Once Upon a Time in America, chiefly as a producer, presenting it to a number of potential screenwriters, including Norman Mailer (who, Leone said, produced “a Mickey Mouse version” of a script) and journalist Pete Hamill, and such directors as Milos Forman and Peter Bogdanovich. Finally, Leone thought he’d simply direct the film himself, from a script of his own devising, and he wrote a treatment. Most movie treatments—prose descriptions of a story that will be expanded into script form—are perhaps a quarter as long as the completed screenplay. Leone’s treatment for Once Upon a Time in America was 227 pages long, and the first script drafts were even longer: 260 and 290 pages. Given the usual calculation that a page of screenplay equaled a minute of screen time, those would be impossibly long.
Finally the problem was cracked, and Leone’s epic was boiled down to a long but imaginable screenplay by two writers, the Italian Leonardo Benvenuti and the American Stuart Kaminsky, the latter focusing especially on dialogue. A new producer, the former art dealer (and, by his own admission, Israeli spy) Arnon Milchan, agreed to shepherd the project to the screen, and set about raising money. Leone came back to De Niro with the new script and a better pitch than the one of years before.
“Sergio told me the story in two installments over seven hours,” De Niro remembered. “I sat and listened through a translator. He told the story almost shot by shot, with the flashbacks, and it was beautiful. I said, ‘This is something that I’d like to be part of.’ ” The hook was in, and Leone offered De Niro his choice of the two principal roles—the flamboyant front man Max or his more circumspect boyhood friend and fellow gangster Noodles. De Niro agreed to give it serious thought.
There were some real obstacles to their collaboration, though. For one thing, the film was going to be shot entirely in Italy, even though it would be cast with American actors, and production would take the better part of a year, if not two. For another, De Niro was leery of putting himself in the hands of a director whose work he didn’t have a real feel for. “Bobby made it clear to me,” Leone later said, “that he has needs to be fulfilled, and one need is that he must feel he is completely understood by the director.” He promised, De Niro remembered, not to be as officious and didactic as Bernardo Bertolucci had been during the making of 1900. “Italian directors sometimes tell you how to do it,” De Niro explained. “They say, ‘You go over there, and you do this or that.’ American actors don’t like that, they want to find it for themselves, they don’t want to be told where to go. But Sergio was very smart and clever and respectful enough not to do that in my case.”
But then there was the matter of the urine.
As De Niro started warming up to the project, he visited Leone in New York at the Mayflower Hotel, where Milchan had booked a suite for meetings, allowing each of the principals some private space. As he always did, no matter who was stopping by, the portly Leone greeted De Niro and Milchan, who’d come along to smooth the process, wearing only a bathrobe and close-fitting underpants, a sight that rattled the fastidious actor. Milchan repaired to one of the unused bedrooms to wait for a phone call. After a bit, as he recalled, the phone rang. It was De Niro, calling from another bedroom in the suite and insisting Milchan come see him immediately.
The producer found De Niro agitated.
“Why not?”
De Niro led him into the en suite bathroom of his bedroom and pointed to the commode. “Can’t you see that he pissed all over my toilet seat?”
There was, in fact, urine on the toilet seat. A flummoxed Milchan improvised an answer: “Come on, Robert. He didn’t do that on purpose. He’s fat; he didn’t see.”
But De Niro insisted it was a power play, a marking of territory, a crude show of superiority, and he actually seemed ready to drop out of the film because of it.
Somehow the faux pas was forgiven, and De Niro, still undecided about the part, agreed to visit the sets that Leone was constructing in Rome. “They were gonna do it, with or without me,” De Niro said, and that, in particular, appealed to him. “He didn’t raise the money on me, so there was no pressure that way.”
Finally selecting the role of Noodles, through whose aging eyes the epic narrative unfolds in retrospect, he agreed to make the film, and he went from reluctant involvement to active interest. James Woods had been cast as Max (after Gérard Depardieu had first agreed to learn English to play the part and then backed out), and De Niro would urge certain other performers on Leone: Joe Pesci, Burt Young, and Danny Aiello, whose screen test De Niro agreed to participate in just so the actor, who was touchy about having to audition at all, would agree to submit to one.*3
De Niro took his usual rigorous steps in preparing for the role. He studied Jewish customs (there was a scene in a synagogue) and a bit of Yiddish, and in particular the speech patterns of old-time Jews and the special idioms used by the small set of Jewish gangsters of the Prohibition era. He packed extensively for his trip to Italy: toiletries such as Listerine, Maalox, Tylenol, and Kiehl’s soap; videotapes of various movies he wanted to study; a Walkman and cassettes; a camera to take photos with his kids when they came to visit him in Rome (and on a side trip to London). To play the aged Noodles, he worked on a limp and a slow, raspy voice and submitted to extensive aging makeup. “It took so long to put the makeup on,” he said, “that I was so tired that I had to look old.” He had portraits taken of himself in the makeup chair, gesticulating like an alter kocker in full old-man guise. He seemed to love it.
Filming took place in Rome, Paris, Montreal, and New York over the span of fifteen months, and De Niro’s presence was required for a great deal of it. During the shoot, Leone discovered a way to work with De Niro that brought the director outside his comfort zone in a way he found illuminating. “For better or worse,” he remembered, “I had worked with actors like marionettes. But with Bobby you must work around him in a way, because the thing had to be explored through his eyes, too. So for the first time, in this film, I have had to follow an actor’s ideas without destroying my own. Yes, Bobby will have his interpretazione artistica.” Comparing De Niro to his frequent star Clint Eastwood, Leone added, “Bobby, first of all, is an actor. Clint, first of all, is a star. Bobby suffers; Clint yawns.”
When shooting was done, Leone had to wrestle years of work into something like a releasable film, a task that in a real sense was never fully achieved. He arrived at an ideal cut of more than four hours, which he agreed couldn’t be shown in theaters but only on TV or videotape. In May 1984, after cutting it mercilessly, he arrived at a version of three hours and forty minutes, which premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival to mixed but respectful reviews. But that was still an hour longer than his American distributors had contracted for. Leone dreaded the thought that further cuts would be made without his input; “I hope the last version will be my own,” he said at Cannes. But it was effectively out of his hands.
And, in fact, when Once Upon a Time in America arrived in America, it was butchered, compromised, unrecognizable, ruined. Gone were the flashbacks, replaced with a linear structure that robbed the film of its sense of poetry, nostalgia, and rue. Gone were expository scenes that made the plot coherent. Gone were charming bits of business and hair-raising bits of violence. The version released by Warner Bros. in June 1984 was half the length of Leone’s preferred cut: two hours and fifteen minutes. It was a catastrophe, a crime. And it was a bomb: $5.3 million at the box office, a blip.
De Niro is but a piece of the epic swirl of Leone’s massive, swoony, and altogether singular film, yet somehow his presence grounds and imparts resonance to the entire enterprise. Given his history of volatile, outsider characters, his ability to hold the audience with a quiet posture had rarely been the focus of one of his performances (the notable exceptions being The Last Tycoon and True Confessions, neither of which really loomed in his canon). But Leone saw in De Niro’s eyes a capacity that could be put to use for something other than the expression of alienation, anger, or psychosis. He saw an ability to convey longing, melancholy, regret. And though his film begins in bloodshed and includes all manner of violence, sexual perversity, and human cruelty, his focus rarely strays from the mournful emotions carried in Ennio Morricone’s score, and De Niro’s eyes and silent glances are his chief visual vehicle for that mood.*4
We first meet Noodles as a man at the height of his powers, his mind and gaze scrambled gently in an opium den. It’s hard to see what’s going on in there, but soon enough, without learning too many details, we know for sure. We see his pain and sorrow first—and perhaps best—in a long take about a half hour into the film, when the aged Noodles visits Fat Mo’s, the restaurant and speakeasy where so many pivotal events of his life took place. He finds the peephole through which he used to spy on Mo’s sister Deborah, and gazes through it as if at his own youth. Leone’s camera stares into De Niro’s eyes for a long, long while, and De Niro demonstrates his ability to become a transparent vessel for emotions. This is the sort of thing he loves best in film—acting without speaking, conveying an inner state through delicate physicality. His eyes—brown, moist, limpid, filled with pain and wistfulness—are the windows into the movie, and Leone holds focus on them for a daringly extended shot.
The irony, of course, is that those eyes belong to a thief, bootlegger, killer, rapist, and traitor. Somehow in the pantheon of bad guys that De Niro has played, Noodles is generally overlooked, but he commits some of the ugliest crimes of the actor’s career: not one but two rapes, for starters, the second of which, of Mo’s sister Deborah on the eve of her departure for Hollywood, is one of the most horrific things De Niro or Leone (or, for that matter, anyone) ever filmed.
Even though Leone spends more time in minutes with Noodles the high-living bootlegger, it’s Noodles the broken, ponderous old man who sticks most with you. The hair and makeup work used to turn De Niro into a middle-aged version of himself is stunning—it would be decades before he would reach the age of the elder Noodles, and it would have been very smart money to bet that he’d look just as he does in the film. (As it happened, in real life he kept his enviable hair and regained his rail-thin physique.) Aging actors for roles in this way is a common Hollywood game, but it’s played here with restraint, taste, and fine craft, like many other aspects of the film. If De Niro hadn’t lived to see his own mature years, the old Noodles could have credibly substituted for the real thing.
And De Niro lends such internal weight that he sells us on the aging makeup completely. “You can always tell the winners at the starting gate,” the aged Noodles tells Fat Mo, and he clearly doesn’t include himself among them. The film’s title suggests a fairy tale, and it’s got its share of ogres, imperiled maidens, dangers, quests, and such. But more than anything else, it’s got plangency and heartache and regret. And De Niro, it turns out, is as adept at conveying those aches as he is with fury or psychosis or wildness—even from under a haze of latex makeup, even with the weight of a four-hour film to bear. Leone’s film is indeed some kind of masterpiece, and De Niro, particularly in his sorrowful aspect, is the heart of it.
WHEN IT WAS all over, when distributors had crippled and buried the film, De Niro felt sick for his director. “They tried to make it a linear picture, which never worked,” he said. “I understand why Sergio didn’t come back to the U.S. and deal with it, confront them, fight for it, say, ‘Listen, this is the way it has to be. I’ll give you this, but I want to take that.’ That’s really what you have to do. It’s like having a child: you don’t want somebody to come in and fool with it.”
Leone was crushed, and he tried to rally himself to something positive, something forward-looking. He had been working on a new idea, a movie about the siege of Leningrad in World War II, and he tried to interest De Niro in taking a role. But the film was not to be. The director’s health, never truly robust, declined after the catastrophic failure of Once Upon a Time in America, and he died in 1989, at the age of sixty, without directing another film.
Over the ensuing decades, various cuts of the film that were closer to Leone’s vision would be released, and its reputation would grow substantially, until it was genuinely regarded as one of the best gangster films ever made and one of the best films of the 1980s. And it would be in support of the release of one of those restored versions that De Niro would, at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, climb the stairs of the Grand Palais to the strains of Ennio Morricone’s score and mist up at the thought of so much time, so much loss, more similar, in that moment, to the aged Noodles than ever before.
*1 Bizarrely, some of the first press reports about the incident to reach the United States claimed that De Niro’s companion in the taxicab was Keith Carradine.
*2 And good thing: “I wouldn’t want to touch a Western,” De Niro said in 1980. “They’ve been done so often, and who wants to be out in the middle of the desert for three months?”
*3 Leone auditioned scores of actors for the film, among them Val Kilmer, Sean Penn, Mandy Patinkin, Tom Beringer, Patrick Swayze, Michael Ontkean, Alex Rocco, Steve Guttenberg, David Paymer, and Peter Coyote, and, for the women’s roles, Theresa Russell, Amanda Plummer, Joan Hackett, Sean Young, Candy Clark, Connie Sellecca, Stockard Channing, and Helen Hunt.
*4 Once Upon a Time in America would mark the start of a remarkable, if accidental, collaboration between De Niro and Morricone in the 1980s, followed by The Mission and The Untouchables.