IN JANUARY 1984 DE NIRO STAYED AT THE DISCREETLY LUXURIOUS Blakes Hotel in the Kensington district of London, where he had gone to do something he’d never done before: play a cameo role in a feature film.
The picture in question was Brazil, a mammoth, darkly comic fantasy by Terry Gilliam, the American-born member of the Monty Python troupe who’d gone from animating surreal short pieces for the group’s famed TV series to directing features, starting with the beloved Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Since then, in such films as Jabberwocky and Time Bandits, Gilliam’s cinematic vision had become grander, more baroque, more mordant. He was making dazzling pictures as big as Steven Spielberg’s, with special effects and massive sets and costumes, but with not one trace of Spielberg’s sentiment or warmth. They were funny, they were eye-popping, they were singular, but they were cool and dark and strange and very expensive to make.
Brazil would be his most ambitious film yet. Based on a script co-written by Gilliam with, among others, Tom Stoppard, it was a dystopian tale of a totalitarian bureaucracy run amok, with a lovelorn functionary named Sam Lowry questioning his role as a cog in the machinery and coming into contact with a group of subversive revolutionaries, one of whom is (literally, in fact) his dream girl. Among the producers of the film (which was first known as 1984-and-a-Half, in homage to George Orwell and Federico Fellini, both of whose influences can be felt everywhere in it) was Arnon Milchan, who seemed to be everywhere in De Niro’s working life of late. With Gilliam’s blessing, Milchan sent the script to De Niro with a note saying, “Pick your part.”
De Niro loved what he read—“That will be remembered in years to come,” he said later of the film, “no matter what you think of it.” He responded to Gilliam and Milchan saying that he was interested in appearing in the film, specifically in the significant supporting role of Jack Lint, Lowry’s old friend, fellow bureaucrat, and, though Lowry doesn’t know it, a torturer for the regime. But that part had already been set aside for Gilliam’s fellow Python Michael Palin, so Gilliam and Milchan steered De Niro the other way entirely, focusing his attention instead on the character of Harry Tuttle, the rogue state operative who leads the resistance and whose name is misspelled on an arrest order, setting off the plot. Tuttle would appear in only two scenes, but he constituted a crucial figure in the story line and in the psyche of Lowry, who sees him as a renegade hero and a father surrogate, a man’s man whose determination to take action sharply contrasts with Lowry’s milquetoast mien. Gilliam was somewhat surprised that De Niro agreed to such a small part: “He had to take what he could get,” he joked. But he soon realized that De Niro “liked the idea of not having the burden of carrying the starring role in a film for a change.”
In fact, it was the smallest role he’d played on-screen in nearly fifteen years, not that he saw it that way. The part of Tuttle called for just a week of shooting, but that didn’t stop De Niro from preparing for it in his usual thorough fashion. He supplied his own prop tool belt and tools (Tuttle’s rebellion takes the shape, in part, of a willingness to make repairs to the omnipresent government-owned heating ducts without following the protocols of paperwork). He toyed with adopting a British accent (and with constructing it so that it was clear it was a put-on). He determined to give his Tuttle a John Wayne–ish air of confidence, whistling and humming while he worked, even as he entered each encounter with prudent caution. He saw it, in short, as an acting job.
On the set, he drove Gilliam daft. Gilliam had been dealing in caricature, grotesquerie, and cartoonishness since before his Python days; there was to be humanity and pathos in Brazil, but it would be centered in Lowry (who was being played by Jonathan Pryce, for whom Gilliam had conceived the role). De Niro, however, prodded his director, as was his wont, for insight into his character, for take after take after take until, as Gilliam later said, he “wanted to strangle him.” The week that had been blocked out for De Niro’s work became two, adding to the film’s overlong production schedule and helping to push it over its $15 million budget (contrary to its later reputation, Brazil wasn’t nearly as costly as it looked).
Despite the brevity of his involvement and any on-set frustration that he may have caused, De Niro became a strong ally of Gilliam’s in late 1985, when Universal Pictures refused to release the film in the United States in the director’s cut, particularly with the downbeat ending that he’d written. Although Brazil had been playing profitably for months in Europe and elsewhere, although it was warmly received at the Cannes Film Festival, Universal, which had put up roughly two-thirds of the budget, refused to show it to the American film press or schedule a firm opening date. Gilliam bought full-page ads in the Hollywood trade papers, bordered in black like funeral notices, addressed to the Universal production chief who was his main antagonist: “Dear Sid Sheinberg, when are you going to release my film?” Gilliam showed the film at universities, which his contract permitted, and invited members of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association to see it. They rallied around him by naming Brazil the best film of 1985—even without a theatrical release.
Still Universal remained obdurate. In another gambit, Gilliam showed up on ABC’s Good Morning America to state his case, and he achieved a considerable coup by bringing De Niro along with him as a star and advocate of the film. De Niro barely spoke, and only in niceties and commonplaces, but his heft as a respected megastar surely played some part in getting Universal to finally release Gilliam’s cut of the film—albeit in the most cynical way possible, at once trying to capitalize on the Los Angeles Film Critics prize as a potential Oscar lure and keeping bookings and advertising to an absolute minimum. It didn’t matter that Gilliam had produced a visionary classic; Brazil, and the battle to get it onto American screens, would mark him as a profligate and a nuisance for the rest of his career.
IN THE SPRING, De Niro was in New York doing something else he hadn’t ever done before: playing the leading role in a romance, Falling in Love. There were little love stories in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, 1900, The Last Tycoon, The Deer Hunter, and Raging Bull, but none of those could truly be said to be romantic films, let alone full-fledged melodramas. (Told by Gene Siskel in an interview a few years later that he had never said “I love you” on-screen before, De Niro was taken aback: “Didn’t I say ‘I love you’ to the girl in ‘Once Upon a Time in America’? No, ah, I guess I didn’t say it quite that way. I guess I’ve never said it before that directly. That’s interesting.”)
But, as indicated by the title of the new movie, which was written by Michael Cristofer, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of The Shadow Box, this was first and foremost a love story. It would be something of an old-home week as well. It would pair De Niro with Meryl Streep for the first time since The Deer Hunter, and feature Harvey Keitel as his character’s pal and confidante; Ulu Grosbard would direct. And it would be filmed in and around New York, which, increasingly, was a matter of genuine import in De Niro’s choice of projects. “I was tired,” he explained. “This script came along. It was a nice story, set here in New York.”
That didn’t exactly speak of an obsessive need to play the part. In fact, De Niro’s notes for the film were scantier than any he had ever made in a film in which he had a significant role. (It’s interesting, too, to note that on the two occasions he chose to work with Grosbard, he did so partly, by his own confession, so that he could commit himself less to his work than ordinarily.) His choice of props was minimal—a watch, a wallet, a ring, a shopping list. He wore the most workaday clothes as wardrobe. Remarkably, he didn’t figure out what his character did for a living. “We weren’t even sure if this guy was an engineer or a construction worker,” he confessed. “I still don’t know. That isn’t what mattered.”
To be fair, he did put effort into calculating the nuances of the progress his character, Frank Raftis, was making from an ordinary life to the verge of a passionate extramarital affair. In his first scenes, his notes reminded him to remain oblivious to the goings-on around him that had nothing to do with him, to adopt an air, as he put it, of a non-actor caught on the reality TV prank show series Candid Camera, “totally unaware of anyone watching me.” He later indicates that he’ll note his character’s movement from interest in his new acquaintance to romantic feelings: “There’s got to be that look, that imperceptible look!” And he spells out with precision his character’s frame of mind during the climactic confession of his feelings: “Telling her is more important than anything, precedes and supersedes anything, and not only do I love her but she loves me and she knows it. She might not want to see me and might not think we ought to see each other, but she can’t say she doesn’t feel the same way about me.”
He also finally shed almost all the extra weight he’d gained for Raging Bull, hiring a personal trainer named Dan Harvey to work with him at his own gym and whip those final twenty pounds off his stomach and legs, bringing his body fat down from an uncharacteristic 20 percent to a far more familiar 9 percent. His character was tweaked to include a fondness for exercising, and for the first time in years on-screen his famous cheekbones were once again clearly defined; when he smiled, the crinkles around his eyes were sharper and deeper than they had been since The Deer Hunter.
But the recovery of his fitness didn’t translate into happy responses to the film. Falling in Love was released at Thanksgiving, as a kind of alternative at the multiplex for grown-ups, and it got swamped by its competition, finishing sixth at the box office in its opening weekend with $3.1 million in its first five days, well behind the ticket-selling champ of the week, Supergirl.
IF HE HAD CHOSEN to play a small role in Brazil and an easy-to-manage role in Falling in Love, at least in part because he was tired, De Niro soon found sufficient energy to tackle a series of new challenges and one of the most arduous projects in which he’d ever involve himself. The Mission was based on “a suggestion for an original screenplay” written in 1975 by Robert Bolt, the prize-winning playwright and screenwriter responsible for, among many things, A Man for All Seasons, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago.
Asked by Italian producer Fernando Ghia to look into colonial South America as inspiration for a story, Bolt learned of the Guarani War, an eighteenth-century conflict between Amazonian natives and the forces of colonial Europe, which meant to impose slavery on the indigenous population despite the objections of the Jesuit order of Catholic priests, who made up a large portion of the missionary corps. He conflated that story with the life of Roque González de la Cruz, a Jesuit priest born of Spanish noble stock in 1576 in what is now Paraguay, who devoted himself to forging peaceful coexistence between colonists and natives and brought the ire of Spanish authorities down onto the Jesuit order.*1 Helping himself to bits of de la Cruz’s story as raw material for one of his protagonists, the Jesuit Father Gabriel, Bolt created the other out of whole cloth. Rodrigo Mendoza is a savage Spanish mercenary, exmilitary, who traffics in slaves. After a personal crisis, he forsakes his ways of anger and violence to follow the guidance of Gabriel, whose order he joins after a dramatic penance. Combined, the two men and their adherents try to create a small Eden of peaceful cooperative life in the remote jungle. But they have run afoul of political change, and they are attacked by a joint force of Spanish and Portuguese militaries.
After he wrote a screenplay for Ghia, who failed to find interest in it, Bolt poured the story into a novel, his first. But the idea of seeing it on-screen was never far from his mind. As he explained in his original eighteen-page “suggestion”: “The visual background is spectacular and like the story little known to the world at large. All this affords the opportunity to make an artistically exceptional film of international appeal.” In 1984, Ghia brought the material to London’s Goldcrest Films and David Puttnam, the Oscar-winning producer of Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, and most recently The Killing Fields. Puttnam, like Bolt, thought that big was the right size for this film, and he commissioned a revision of the screenplay with an eye toward making it the second theatrical film by Roland Joffé, who’d directed The Killing Fields. By late 1984 they were casting around for lead actors, and Joffé made the bold suggestion that they contact De Niro for the role of Mendoza.
It was hardly an obvious choice. De Niro had almost never played a character who was born before 1900 (Vito Corleone and Monroe Stahr were the exceptions, born in the 1890s). For movie audiences, he was unvaryingly a figure of concrete and neon, of the New World and the American century; it was virtually impossible to picture him on horseback, wielding a sword, hacking his way through the jungle. But he was also an international star, somebody upon whom Puttnam and company could hang a $22 million budget and an epic running time and hope to recoup their investment. For Gabriel they had chosen Jeremy Irons, an accomplished actor but still not a movie star, having been seen principally on exports of British TV’s Brideshead Revisited and in the screen version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. De Niro, or someone of similar stature, would be necessary to infuse the production with star power.
Joffé and Puttnam met De Niro at Blakes Hotel when he was in London to make Brazil, and it was something of a delicate dance of diplomacy. De Niro liked the material. “I thought it was really a wonderful, meaningful story,” he later said, “and the idea of this man changing appealed to me a lot.” It didn’t seem to matter to him, somehow, that he would have to spend months in rugged and remote corners of Colombia or that he was playing a part almost as physically demanding as Jake LaMotta. The challenge was part of the appeal for him.
But Puttnam wasn’t sure De Niro was the right man. He knew of the actor’s penchant for multiple takes and on-camera rehearsal, and he expressed concerns about those habits right up front. De Niro sought to appease him: “I understand your problem,” Puttnam recalled him saying, “and I will never delay your picture.” Puttnam had other reservations about how well suited De Niro was for the part, but he was mollified by De Niro’s collaborative assurances, and he eventually agreed to the actor’s terms: $1.5 million, plus a percentage of the net profits, plus expenses. He did, however, have a backup plan: Liam Neeson, a strapping and little-known Irish actor, was hired to play a small part with the thought in the back of Puttnam’s mind that he could use him as a substitute if, for any reason, De Niro couldn’t do the film.
As so often in the past, De Niro treated the film as his own project. In addition to learning horsemanship (in Manhattan, naturally, at the Claremont Riding Academy on the Upper West Side), swordsmanship, and a bit of Spanish, he pitched in on the production in material ways. “He spent eight weeks with Roland Joffé,” recalled Puttnam, “reading every actor we cast.” He dined with Robert Bolt, who had suffered a stroke since writing the script and struggled to communicate his thoughts about Mendoza, which De Niro dug for regardless. (He also, per Bolt’s biographer, failed to pick up the bill for dinner.) When the producers hired the radical Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan to accompany the crew to Colombia and serve as both an actor (in a cameo role) and a technical consultant, De Niro availed himself of access to the famed activist. (In his diary of the production, Berrigan admitted that he was of more use to Irons, whose character he understood more thoroughly. “Bob sees his role as someone who must make plausible an extraordinary change of heart, from murderer to Jesuit. He has to explain what would lead one to such a change. I can only outline the steps.”)
De Niro arrived in Cartagena in the early spring of 1985 and was greeted with a box of Cuban cigars from Joffé and a cadre of bodyguards, two of whom would be with him at all times—outside his hotel room door, on the set, wherever. It was the height of Colombia’s cocaine-fueled drug wars, in retrospect an absurd time to shoot a multimillion-dollar production there. Puttnam said that it was “sheer hell.” Not only did nobody outside of the capital, Bogotá, care that the government wished the filmmakers to be shown all courtesies, but some fool of a functionary had decided to build crucial sets along a well-traveled drug courier route, meaning that there was a constant threat of genuine peril and a heavy-handed military presence. The weather proved oppressive. “There were floods,” recalled Puttnam, “torrential rains, temperatures of 110 degrees.” Worse, he said, “almost everybody fell ill with dysentery—except Bob. He takes terrific care of his body.” Whether by virtue of his diet or his constitution, De Niro, who had the most arduous role in the film, never succumbed.
He built Mendoza with his characteristic exactness, adding such physical touches as a scar, reminding himself that the character ought constantly to be “tense like Mad Dog Kelly,” and continually stressing that the transforming Mendoza must learn how to empathize with other human beings, whom he’d previously seen as objects: “Remember, always relate, always relate, the key, the key.” Joffé was astounded to watch his star transform himself for the role: “Bobby De Niro actually changed,” he said. “His look changed. In three days of walking about with Colombian men and observing their ways, the New York Italian began to disappear and a powerful Hispanic appeared.” After meeting him in New York and spending time with him in Cartagena, Berrigan was fascinated by De Niro’s absorption in the role and the process. “De Niro seems many light-years distant,” he wrote in his diary. “Somewhat as though his existence and personality have passed into the film. As though, for the duration, his life will be available only to the camera and the director. This is a hard vocation; also, if the term makes any sense, a notable asceticism.” (Imagine how the elder Robert De Niro would have appreciated that insight into the making of art!)
But even with the pressures of mass-scale filmmaking, angry weather, and a drug war just off camera, De Niro insisted, as ever, on working his scenes as he always had, take by take, piece by piece, despite the conditions, even despite the response of his co-star. As Puttnam remembered, “Jeremy [Irons] would come entirely prepared. He would be word perfect whereas De Niro was used to rehearsing on camera … by take three, it was probably as good as Jeremy would ever be. [But] on take three, De Niro was just limbering up. By take seven, when De Niro was beginning to get somewhere near a performance, Jeremy would get bored. By take 13, when De Niro was delivering a very, very good performance, Jeremy was glassy-eyed!” (To be fair, as difficult as this may have proven on the set, the film’s editor, Jim Clark, saw the point of De Niro’s craft: “With De Niro, you don’t cut him, you mine him. You have to seek out the performance because it varies so.”) Nobody faulted De Niro’s application to the tasks the film presented him. Patsy Puttnam, the producer’s wife, was visiting the set when she noticed a ragamuffin figure bounding about the jungle barefooted. She asked associate producer Iain Smith, “Who on earth’s that?” “It’s Bobby De Niro,” Smith answered. “He’s got to do that in his scene tomorrow.” She was appalled: “But his feet …”
Still, there were limits to what the producers would let their star do. At one point he questioned not only his dialogue in a certain scene but the very actions and thoughts behind it, suggesting that the script was flawed. Joffé tried to talk him into seeing through the pages as written, but he was stubborn. That night, dining at their hotel, De Niro discussed his reservations with Puttnam at length. When the producer realized that he wasn’t making any progress in steering the actor back onto the task at hand, he took another tack: “Well, Bobby, you may be right, but if you’re not, we stand to lose a lot of money. We’re walking into a brick wall here. You know, if ‘The Mission’ only takes as much as your last four films combined, we’ll lose a lot of money.” De Niro, chastened by the reminder that moviemaking was a team sport and that his team had been on a poor streak of late, made no further protests.
After more than four months’ work, shooting of The Mission wrapped in late 1984, and the completed film premiered in May 1986 at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the top prize, the Palme d’Or, marking the second time in a decade that De Niro was the star of a film to be so recognized.
PERSONALLY, DE NIRO seemed pleased with the film. He loved Colombia, calling it “an incredibly beautiful, mysterious place,” and he was fond of Joffé: “He’s a good director with a lot of heart.” But there would be no denying that he was at the very least a curiosity in the finished picture. In his first-ever film set prior to the twentieth century, De Niro is, by and large, a man lost in time. He credibly conveys Mendoza’s macho hauteur, his ruthlessness, his pride. He bears himself with a ramrod certitude, a fearless gaze, a beefy masculinity, a somehow credibly Latin air of nobility; he manages to look at home on a horse and plausible with a sword. But as soon as he opens his mouth and essays Bolt’s stagey, old-timey dialogue, he’s sunk. “So me you do not love?” he asks the woman he wishes to wed, sounding like he’s translating his lines in real time, and badly. Only in the scene in which, having taken religious vows, he makes a grandiloquent and sarcastic display of apologizing to everyone in Asunción for an outburst of temper does he manage to wrestle the language into something that feels his own.
As it happens, the physical aspects of the role are more prominent, though that isn’t always to the film’s advantage. In the excruciating sequence in which Mendoza commits a personal penance by schlepping his battle armor over a mountain, up a waterfall, and through a jungle, De Niro seems entirely determined in what he’s doing and entirely blind to how daffy he looks: a guy from Greenwich Village sent back to the eighteenth century to drag a bag of pots around Paraguay. But in the final going, when Mendoza forsakes his priestly vows and resumes his warlike ways, something of the character’s earlier confidence returns to him, and his ferocious fight is credibly engaged. That spectacle is among the strengths of the film. But, like its star, whenever The Mission opens its mouth to say what it’s thinking, it loses almost all of its power.
As it happened, David Puttnam had been right to be anxious about De Niro at the box office. Although the film had a certain middlebrow cachet and was widely admired for its epic craft, it grossed barely $17 million at the North American box office, not close to earning back its budget. (It did earn seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, though it won just one prize, for cinematography.)
BY THE 1980S, his marriage to Diahnne Abbott seemed less solid than ever, and De Niro’s cat-on-the-town reputation grew. He was regularly seen in the company of attractive African American women, often in their twenties, always beautiful, always slender, and rarely with him more than once or twice. In New York and Los Angeles, restaurateurs and club-goers would often spot him in the company of these women, whom he met however he could: chasing them down in his car, approaching them in public places or at events, even spotting them on TV and in newspapers and contacting them through third parties. While he was making Brazil in London he got an eyeful of one of the Sun’s Page Three girls, a gorgeous South Londoner of Caribbean heritage named Gillian de Terville. Getting her phone number through the agency of one of his showbiz contacts, he rang her at her parents’ house and began a now-and-then relationship that lasted longer than a year, seeing her whenever he was in the United Kingdom and inviting her occasionally to see him in New York.*2
But of all the girls who drifted through his life when he was still legally married to Abbott, none would have the impact of Toukie Smith, a buoyant woman whom Esquire once called “a cyclone of dizzy charm.” Smith was a well-known figure in the New York fashion and dance worlds, in the city’s night life and charitable circles—in connection, it often seemed, with anything and everything to do with glamour, sparkle, and joie de vivre.
She was born in 1953 in Philadelphia, the youngest of three children of a butcher and a factory worker. Her parents split when she was four, and she and her older brothers, Willi and Norman, were raised by the combined energies of her mother’s family. In that female-dominated household, Willi, the eldest, born five years before his sister, liked to joke that there was more clothing than food. He became interested in fashion and clothing design from a young age, winning a scholarship to the Parsons School of Design in New York. Soon after graduating, he entered the world of women’s fashion with great energy, flair, and—for his age—success.
By the time he was twenty-five, Smith was one of the stars of a boom in African American fashion designers, with his clothing—mainly sports and evening wear for women of ordinary means—regularly featured in layouts in Vogue, Glamour, and the New York Times. And he had a favorite model, who sometimes gave him inspirations for specific designs: his sister, Doris, aka Toukie, thus dubbed for the way she pronounced the “toot-toot” of a choo-choo train in a favorite childhood song. “Toukie is my total inspiration,” Willi once said. “She has enough energy to light up the World Trade Center.” The fun that Toukie radiated in her modeling perfectly suited her brother’s work; she smiled on the catwalk and actually seemed to mean it, which was just the sort of attitude that Willi’s playful, trendy work embodied: “I don’t design clothes for the Queen,” as he put it, “but for the people who wave at her as she goes by.”
At just twenty years old, Toukie hit New York like a ball of fire. She studied dance with the Alvin Ailey troupe, appeared in almost all of her brother’s fashion shows, designed shoes, attended parties, got a contract to model for Issey Miyake, was named “Bloomingdale’s Favorite Model” of 1978, and signed on with the powerful Wilhelmina modeling agency. She and Willi formed a clothing company that didn’t last long, but he rebounded with a more stable firm, Williwear, that within a decade would grow to serve more than five hundred department stores and gross $25 million per year. And he was a critical as well as financial success. In 1983 he was awarded the Winnie, the top prize for women’s fashion, at the annual Coty American Fashion Critics’ Awards; two years later, he took the top prize at the Cutty Sark Menswear Awards.
Toukie met De Niro at a party after Williwear had become a thriving concern and her star had risen alongside her brother’s. Physically, she was De Niro’s type: bosomy, slender-waisted, very pretty. But she had more energy for socializing, party-going, and scene-making even than Abbott, which seemed to make it unlikely that she and De Niro could sustain a relationship. Yet somehow, because she doggedly maintained her independence from him—“I tell people, ‘You deal with me as Toukie Smith,’ ” she insisted to a reporter—they kept seeing each other and formed a genuine bond that lasted for years. She would appear at premieres with him, at the public events that he rarely (and begrudgingly) attended, at private occasions such as dinner parties and birthdays and the like. But she maintained her own homes in New York and Paris; from his point of view, it was ideal.
As in all of his relationships, including his marriage, which would officially end with what his soon-to-be ex-wife Diahnne Abbott called a “reasonable … pleasant and friendly” divorce in 1989, De Niro was extremely circumspect and private. He had his pleasures, he had his preferences, he had his needs, he had his comforts, and he had his freedom, but he also managed to form genuine connections with formidable women. Soon after the divorce, the open secret of his relationship with Toukie was made public knowledge, and newspapers and such were referring to her as his “companion.”
At the same time as her connection with De Niro was reaching this public level, Toukie began to suffer a series of personal losses. In 1986 her mother, June Harllee, died in New York of cirrhosis of the liver. In April of the following year came an even more devastating blow: Willi, age thirty-nine, died suddenly—“He went into the hospital on Wednesday and died on Friday,” recalled a business partner—of what was at first reported to be pneumonia and was later acknowledged to be AIDS, which turned lethal very quickly when he contracted a parasite on a trip to India. He had always been frail and secretive, and apparently nobody around him knew how sick he was until it was too late for any of them to be of help or comfort. Toukie was still feeling those losses in June 1988 when she suffered more heartbreak, miscarrying De Niro’s child. Characteristically, she rebounded from these losses with aplomb and vigor. She had been working on AIDS awareness programs and charity through the Smith Family Foundation, which she formed after Willi’s death (De Niro joined her in hosting a Willi Smith Day fund-raiser in April 1990). She did some acting on television, danced and sang in benefits, and continued to make the scene not only on red carpets but, in effect, behind them, building a party-planning business, which grew to include catering, and yet another business as a beauty and fashion consultant, and continuing to model for fashion shows, charitable events, and catalogues. And even as she did all that, the losses continued to pile up. Patrick Kelly, another African American fashion designer close to both Willi and Toukie, died of AIDS in 1990, and Williwear spiraled financially, declaring bankruptcy in 1991, barely four years after its founder’s demise.
DE NIRO HADN’T appeared onstage in any sort of dramatic production since the early 1970s, but his apparently total metamorphosis into a screen actor did not dissuade the indefatigable New York theatrical impresario Joe Papp from trying to coax him back to the stage. In early 1980, Papp, who ran the Public Theater in Greenwich Village and the New York Shakespeare Festival, famed for its summertime productions in Central Park, announced plans to mount a series of repertory plays with big stars, including Meryl Streep, Jill Clayburgh, Raul Julia, and De Niro. De Niro and Streep were said to be cast in three of them, one being a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the other two, unannounced, to be directed by Wilford Leach and Ulu Grosbard. De Niro didn’t really seem serious about the project at the time—“I told them they can use my name,” he explained to Drama-Logue—and by the springtime Papp, millions of dollars shy of the funds the venture would require, dropped it.*3
But in February 1986 the news broke that Papp had finally landed the big fish he’d had so long on his line: De Niro would be appearing onstage at the Public in April in Cuba and His Teddy Bear, the world premiere of the first full-length work by a twenty-six-year-old playwright named Reinaldo Povod. Povod’s play had been developed in playwriting workshops at the Public, but Papp didn’t at first think that it would become one of the star vehicles for which the theater was noted. As he told a reporter: “I had no intention of casting it with stars, but after I read it, I thought, I wonder if De Niro would be interested in this? I had been after him for years to get back to the theater. So I sent him the script.” De Niro, Papp said, “was interested in it, but he kept saying, ‘I don’t know. Well, maybe all right, but I still have these movies to do.’ ”
The play concerned an illiterate Hispanic drug dealer, Cuba, raising his son Teddy in an unpromising and sometimes dangerous environment on the Lower East Side. The boy has aspirations to be a writer, but he has chosen to emulate Che, a famed “playwright junkie” celebrated in the New York media, and his father’s concerns with the protocols and particulars of his own chosen profession blind him to the danger toward which his son is tending.*4 The pressures under which the two men live build in the play’s second act to an explosive climax between father and son.
De Niro was vague when asked what drew him to the material: “I always wanted to do a play, but I wanted to do a new play,” he said. “New plays are more interesting; you don’t have all the stigma, the baggage you have with old plays. I just felt this one was very well written and very strong.” He wouldn’t commit, but he continued to respond to Papp’s entreaties. “I introduced him to the playwright and his father,” the producer remembered, “and we had two workshop readings with most of the same people who are in the cast with him now. But there was no commitment still, just wait and see. Finally I grabbed De Niro and asked, ‘Are we going to do it?’ and he said, ‘We’ll have to work it out.’ ”
The deal was struck: with a cast that included Burt Young and Ralph Macchio, who had taken part in the workshop readings, De Niro was scheduled to appear in Cuba from May 18 through June 14, with preview performances beginning in mid-April. The announcement proved to be lightning at the box office: the entire run of the show was sold out in three hours (impressive, but to be fair, the theater in which the show would be performed seated just over a hundred). Ever innovative, Papp found a way to sell even more tickets: petitioning Actors’ Equity for a waiver of their policies against broadcasts of live plays, he was given permission to air closed-circuit television streams of the performances into another auditorium at the Public’s complex; those seats went for $7 a pop.
The mounting of the play was the sort of work De Niro loved: real roll-up-the-sleeves acting, with lots of conversation about the characters and scenes. As Povod noted, “He trusted us entirely. He was willing to accept anything we would submit to him and give it a trial. He knew that a lot of the writing had to be examined or tested in rehearsal.” The creators understood they had a rare opportunity at hand, and they were careful not to ask too much of their star; indeed, they gave him the latitude to perform the role as his instincts guided him. As Bill Hart, who was given Cuba as his directorial debut, noted, “With Bob De Niro, you’d just better be very careful about insisting on anything. Because you may insist on something that will be a lot less interesting than something he’s going to come up with himself two weeks from now.”
Young, who’d already appeared in three films with De Niro while sharing virtually no scenes with him, found him an engaged and accessible co-star. “After rehearsals,” he recalled, “we’d rehearse some more in his loft. He had a floor plan laid out in his living room and everything. He was meticulous. And very patient with Ralph Macchio, who was his son in the show and had never been onstage before. I thought of Bob as our leader.” In fact, De Niro fostered a variety of bonding efforts with the cast, going so far as to initiate the ritual of a football-team-style huddle before the opening curtain.
The show went through a month of previews before opening on May 18. De Niro was greeted with almost universally positive reviews. De Niro, per Mel Gussow of the New York Times, “amasses character detail, and … gives Cuba stage life … he reveals an earthy naturalness and an ability to extinguish his own star charisma. Artfully, he subordinates himself within a company of actors.” In the Village Voice, Michael Feingold declared, “Robert De Niro’s an actor, a real actor, and a good one.… He has a lead actor’s authority, which in the theater is a better asset than a star’s mythical magic.” The New Yorker declared the performance “stunning” and added that De Niro “couldn’t be better.” Jack Kroll of Newsweek, who’d written appreciatively of De Niro’s last stage performance, in Shelley Winters’s One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger, said that the star gave his character “a riveting reality.” And the hard-to-please John Simon of New York simply said: “As Cuba, Robert De Niro is every bit as effective and affecting as in his best movie roles—more than which I needn’t say.”
The reviews of the actual play were mixed, but commercially Cuba was review-proof. That month of previews had sold out in a snap, as had the four weeks of the official run, as had a $250-a-pop benefit performance, which included dinner. Tickets were nearly impossible to come by, even for stars: Tom Cruise, then dominating the movie screen in Top Gun, had to sit apart from his date on the night he caught the show, because neither Papp nor De Niro could get him a pair of seats together at the last minute. Powered by De Niro’s presence, if not necessarily his work, the show was a massive hit for the always-underfunded Public Theater. It surprised exactly no one in New York, then, when Joe Papp announced, just as the production was winding down, that he was moving Cuba and His Teddy Bear to Broadway.
De Niro had committed to appear in fifty-five performances at the Longacre Theatre—a Broadway house with a capacity more than ten times that of the original Public Theater auditorium in which the play debuted. Tickets, with prices ranging from $10 to $37.50, went on sale on June 30, and by the end of business on July 1, more than $500,000 worth had been sold—more than 30 percent of the total potential gross. Considering that De Niro, Young, and Macchio, the stars of Raging Bull, Rocky, and The Karate Kid, were working for the Broadway minimum of $700, Papp and the Public were set to make a killing.
The Broadway production of Cuba opened on July 16. That night, De Niro received flowers from Diahnne Abbott and the kids, as well as from Sally Kirkland and Liza Minnelli, telegrams and letters from Harvey Keitel, Twyla Tharp, Michael Cristofer, Christopher Walken, and Tommy Lee Jones, and thank-you notes from Joe Papp and Ralph Macchio. The opening-night party was star-studded, but, as Mardirosian remembered, De Niro was more interested in family than celebrities. “Because I was an understudy,” he said, “I was able to get to the party early. There were a lot of tables, and at one of them I saw Robert De Niro Sr., and I thought, ‘I’ll go sit with Bob,’ and he beckoned me over, and I sat across from him. And we’re chatting, mostly about tennis, and then the people start coming in from the theater. And when Bob, the actor, walks in, everybody’s wondering where he’s gonna sit, because that’s gonna be the center of attention. And where does he sit? He sits next to his father! I had frankly had been hoping to stay in the background. Nobody had seen me in the show, nobody knew who I was, but as soon as Bob comes in, suddenly it was as if all the headlights in the room were pointing at us.”
The engagement ran until late September, and once again it was a celebrity carnival; on one memorable night, the audience included Robin Williams, Richard Chamberlain, and Sylvester Stallone with his wife of the moment, Brigitte Nielsen. An even more intriguing crowd was treated to the play on August 18, when the cast performed it on Rikers Island before seven hundred inmates.
As Tom Mardirosian remembered, De Niro was always inclusive of his collaborators. Even though he was but an understudy in the show, Mardirosian was invited to De Niro’s birthday party. “All these big celebrities were there,” he said. “And I sat near Robert De Niro Sr., and he had a dog that he was petting. And when they brought out the cake and all these big celebrities were singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Bobby, the dad said to me, ‘Look at this: I remember when nobody came to his birthday party.’ ”
Onstage De Niro proved, once again, a willing collaborator. Mardirosian, among many others in the cast, was a more experienced stage actor than De Niro, and on the night that he understudied Young, he realized that De Niro didn’t know how to, as theatrical actors call it, “hold for the laugh”—that is, wait for the audience to finish laughing at a funny line before resuming the dialogue. As Mardirosian recalled,
There was this one scene in the play that I always thought was funny and should have gotten laughs, but it never did, and I always thought that was odd. So when I went on for my one night, I was determined to have a good time … By the time the scene came on, I was real comfortable, and he says his line, and I say my line, and the audience laughs where they had never laughed before, and he talked over the laugh, because he’s not used to them laughing there. And he stopped, and he kind of looked at me funny, like, “I don’t understand that.” And he said the next line, and I said the next line, and they laughed again. And again they topped him. So now he’s thinking, “Hmmm … something’s going on here.” And by the time the scene was over, he had learned to hold for the laugh. I literally taught him how to do that onstage while we were performing in a Broadway house. At the end of the show, he came to my dressing room and knocked on the door and said, “You know, you’re a funny guy.” And I said, “Well, thank you …” And he said, “No: you’re a funny guy.” And I said, “No, really …” And he said, “No. I’m telling you: you’re a funny guy.” So I finally said, “Thanks, Bobby.”
Cuba, sans De Niro, would be performed in London and Buenos Aires in the coming years, and a movie script, which De Niro didn’t care for, appeared on his desk in 1988. There was talk in the fall, just after Cuba closed, of De Niro staying on Broadway to direct and star in a production of Bertolt Brecht’s Arturo Ui, which came to naught, and the following year Joe Papp announced plans to mount a series consisting of every play by William Shakespeare featuring prominent stars, De Niro among them. But though he didn’t specifically say no, it was clear soon afterward that De Niro had no plans to return to the stage anytime soon, and certainly not in a classical role. “I don’t know that my way would be that special or interesting that I would want to put all that time in, to put myself on the line,” he said. “There are other people with much better qualifications for doing it. I mean, Shakespeare is great, but I’d rather have the same problems in a contemporary situation where people can relate to it more directly.”
*1 Beatified in 1934, he would be canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1988.
*2 De Terville would go on to minor fame as a softcore porn model and actress.
*3 A few years later, Dustin Hoffman actually proposed to his producers that De Niro play the role of Biff opposite his own Willy Loman in a Broadway production of Death of a Salesman. Word got to De Niro. “You want me to be your son onstage?” De Niro asked Hoffman incredulously. The role went to John Malkovich.
*4 Povod was an acolyte of the playwright and drug-and-booze addict Miguel Piñero.