Читать книгу De Niro: A Biography - John Baxter - Страница 7

I’ve never been one of those actors who has touted myself as a fascinating human being. I had to decide early on whether I was to be an actor or a personality.

Robert De Niro

Why did De Niro decide at the age of seventeen to become an actor?

Withdrawn, ill-educated, physically unremarkable, he was nobody’s idea of a stage or screen star. And it’s perhaps there that the answer lies. How does a timid person express himself except by taking on another personality? Lon Chaney’s parents were deaf-mutes, with whom he could communicate only via sign language – a situation analogous to De Niro’s upbringing by two people preoccupied with their own agendas.

Theatre was undergoing drastic redefinition when De Niro entered it. Acting and writing, regarded as professions before World War II, with formal structures, standards and requirements, were being invaded by people stronger on feeling than technique. The new writers, in the words of Jack Kerouac to Truman Capote, ‘didn’t want to get it right; just get it written’. Capote’s scornful response, ‘That’s not writing, Jack. That’s type writing,’ summed up the horror of classical stylists at such ad hoc creativity; but they were in the minority. By the early fifties, anyone who felt they’d like to try acting, singing or writing could usually find a platform.

Performance in particular became a magnet to the maladjusted. The actor was no longer the rock-jawed hero of Victorian melodrama, but a human being, weak and fallible. Producers and writers began to speak of ‘American’ and ‘European’ acting. American acting stressed flair and feeling, European acting text and technique. ‘The big difference is that in England we have a great tradition of theatre,’ says Kenneth Branagh, who in 1993 directed, produced and acted with De Niro in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. ‘Most actors work through many different styles, from Shakespeare to Noël Coward to Harold Pinter, so you learn technique. The Americans are wonderful at being ordinary, at being real and gritty, and yet they have difficulty when technique is required. You ask an American actor to immediately turn on the tears and play a very emotional scene, and he will find it difficult.’

Working at the Moscow Art Theatre through the 1920s, Konstantin Stanislavski developed a system of mental exercises and games for actors to help them access the feelings that paralleled the emotions of the characters they played. Books like Building a Character elaborated his system. It never had a formal name, but came to be called in theatre circles just ‘the Method’.

Until 1949, while the Piscators remained in charge at the New School, two of his teachers were edgy, vivacious Stella Adler, daughter of a distinguished family in the Yiddish theatre, and an irascible and opinionated little man named Lee Strasberg. Adler and Strasberg shared a rivalry that went back to 1931, when three producer/directors, Strasberg, Howard Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, broke away from New York’s conservative Theater Guild to launch the Group Theater. The Group Theater presented plays in repertory, like European companies, playing them in rotation with the same company of actors who, as in Europe, worked to achieve a unified style of performance. Stella Adler, who married its co-founder Howard Clurman, became a star with the Group, of which Lee Strasberg was the acting ideologue.

In Strasberg’s version of the Method, the performer built up a role by ‘affective memory’, tapping deep emotions and ‘sense memories’, which he or she used to create the character. To play comedy, one accessed happy memories; for tragedy, childhood traumas. Not everyone in the Group cared for this self-analysis. An actor in the grip of a primal Oedipal conflict, they argued, could hardly be expected to give a sensitive portrayal of Hamlet.

Convinced that Strasberg had got it wrong, Adler went to Paris in 1934 to study under Stanislavski. Her description of Strasberg’s system surprised him. This was a version of the Method he’d long since abandoned. ‘Affective memory’, he explained, endangered both the mental health of the actor and the validity of the performance. Adler returned to New York in triumph with the news, but Strasberg shrugged. ‘I don’t teach the Stanislavski Method,’ he said. ‘I teach the Strasberg Method.’

In 1947, Cheryl Crawford, with director Elia Kazan and producer Robert Lewis, bought a converted Orthodox church on West 44th Street and opened the Actors Studio, where performers could practise ‘American acting’. Here, with an audience of professional colleagues, they could try new things, and, probably, fail. But in the process of failure they would learn and grow. It was exactly the milieu Strasberg needed, and he jumped at the chance to become the Actors Studio’s director.

From the start, Strasberg imposed a strict regime. Only performers could attend. It would be years before producers and directors were allowed in as guests. Doors were ritually locked before each session. All applicants had to audition, and most didn’t make it. In 1955, out of the two thousand who tried, only two were admitted: Martin Landau and Steve McQueen. Once in, however, membership was for life, and the eight hundred ‘anointed’ members were regarded as a theatrical elite.

Adler set up in opposition at the New School, where she taught her version of the Method. Tennessee Williams was a student. So were Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Ben Gazzara and Marlon Brando, who became Adler’s lover, as he had been the lover of almost every other woman in the school.

While Piscator remained, he preached Expressionism: exaggerated gestures, symbolic poses, movements that externalised emotion – ‘Be big!’. Meanwhile, Stella in the basement was screaming at her students, ‘Don’t act! Stop acting!’ But once Piscator returned to East Germany, Adler inherited undisputed control, pointedly renaming the school ‘The Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting’. Her pronouncements became more dogmatic. ‘You act with your soul,’ she said. ‘That’s why you all want to be actors, because your souls are not used up by life.’ At times, she approached folie de grandeur. Asked during a May Day parade if she could imagine living in a Communist state, she said she’d be happy to, providing it would crown her its queen.

Bobby drifted into classes with Luther James, an African-American director – hardly an obvious choice, given the racial tensions still persisting even in Manhattan. His mother didn’t try to dissuade him from his decision. ‘They were both supportive,’ he says of his parents. ‘They would never tell me, “No.”’

De Niro’s choice of a teacher clearly resonates with his subsequent preference for African-American wives and girlfriends. He’d been impressed by a 1960 Broadway stage version of Kyle Onstott’s trashy sex-and-slavery novel Mandingo. Franchot Tone played opposite the young Dennis Hopper, whom De Niro had seen in Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean. Bobby went backstage to meet him. As the two were introduced for the first time, a beautiful girl came up to Hopper and asked a question about acting. Acting as a way of meeting girls? De Niro had never thought of that.

Bobby returned to the New School in 1960, where Stella Adler was totally in charge. By then, her bête noire was the Actors Studio, where Strasberg was expounding his version of the Method to an increasingly mesmerised acting community. ‘She was always putting down the Actors Studio,’ says De Niro. ‘The Method thing – as opposed to the Conservatory of Acting.’

Unlike the Actors Studio, where people dressed as they liked, Adler’s male students were required to wear white shirts, black trousers and black shoes, while the girls wore skirts, blouses with high collars, shoes with heels, and hair pulled back from their faces. When she entered each day, usually late, dressed in black, made up as if for a stage appearance, and flanked by two assistants, the students stood and recited, ‘Good morning, Miss Adler. We are pleased to meet you and look forward to embarking with you on our journey to discover our art.’ This ritual over, Adler took her place in a leather chair at the centre of the stage, with her assistants on either side, and the class began.

‘She would be inspirational as a teacher for me,’ De Niro said. ‘There was a lot of pomp and splendour with her, but … she was a good teacher. Very good. I always give her credit for having a big effect on me. [She talked a lot about] Stanislavski. Building a Character. I think that that was really very important. I thought it was important for any actor. I couldn’t see how you wouldn’t be made aware of that. [Acting] is not about neurosis; playing on your neuroses. It’s about the character, and about doing that first: the tasks of the character. Not going on about it as if it was all about you and how you would do it. It was more about the character, being faithful to the text, the script.’

Adler cleansed the Method of psychoanalysis. ‘Affective memory’ was used sparingly, and only when the actor could find the character in no other way. Above all, the ‘given circumstances’ of a play, its plot and character, were the actor’s fundamental concerns. Real acting, she stressed, lay in making choices – not in imposing your psychology on the character but finding the character and choosing the way you explored and illuminated that character. ‘The talent is in the choices’ became not only her catchphrase but that of the generations of students she trained.

Between 1960 and 1963, the Conservatory of Acting totally occupied De Niro. He had no right to be there, since he hadn’t graduated from high school, but, subdued and diffident, he was conveniently invisible in the Conservatory’s large classes. Charles Carshon, who taught ‘Sight Reading’, a class in audition techniques which De Niro later singled out as particularly useful, says, ‘While I am very gratified that Robert De Niro remembered me, it is true that he was so self-effacing in those days that I had to confirm with a student with whom I am still in contact that he had indeed studied with me.’ The most memorable thing about De Niro to most people was his habit of getting around town on a bicycle.

‘Stella Adler had a very good script-breakdown-and-analysis class that nobody else was teaching,’ De Niro recalled. ‘It was just a way of making people aware of character, style, period, and so on.’ It appealed particularly to De Niro because it didn’t involve getting up and performing in front of the class, as at the Actors Studio. ‘People could sit down in a classroom as opposed to having to get up and demonstrate it,’ he said.

De Niro loathed being forced to perform in public until he’d totally grasped a character, and reserved a particular distaste for a feature of the Actors Studio curriculum called ‘Private Moment’, when a student was asked to perform some trivial task as if doing so in the privacy of his home and not in front of a critical audience. At its worst, a ‘Private Moment’ could involve removing all one’s clothes. Even at best, it usually made one look foolish.

‘It was hard to get up,’ De Niro said. ‘You had to try to overcome that.’ Teachers like Carshon helped him do so. ‘At the end of the day, you’ve got to get up and do it. And the sooner you get to knowing you’ve got to get up and do it, the quicker you’ll do it. I had this problem, where I was afraid to make a move. “You have to feel it,” and all that. Carshon would say, “You’ve got to, sometimes, just … jump in,” and that was true. If I just jumped in, took the leap, I’d arrive at the place where you thought you’d have to go.’

Echoes of Stella Adler’s teaching ring through De Niro’s work. Writer David Scott Milton, who went through the Conservatory about the same time, recalls, ‘When we were at Stella Adler’s, she had an acting exercise that went like this: she would call on each student and the student would have this line: “Are you talking to me?” She would have each student do it with several different adjustments: “Are you talking to me?” “Are you talking to me?” Not line readings, but adjustments; that is, character attitudes that determined the line reading. When I saw Taxi Driver, the De Niro in the mirror scene, it appeared to me that he was doing a reprise of the Stella Adler exercise, “Are you talking to me?”’

Among the people for whom De Niro auditioned in his last year at the Conservatory was a film student from Sarah Lawrence College casting his first feature. A film with New York actors, not Hollywood imports, was sufficiently novel to attract attention, even if, as was the case with The Wedding Party, both project and film-makers were erratic.

Though Sarah Lawrence was a women’s college, the director was the dark, glowering Brian De Palma. De Palma, whose shark-like smile and aggressive manner telegraphed his inner torments – ‘His sense of outrage is limitless,’ said his mentor, Wilford Leach – came to film late. His first love was physics, but in 1958 he saw Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which transformed his life.

As a student at Columbia, De Palma was accosted on campus by a courteous Southerner who asked if he’d ever thought of acting. Wilford Leach taught drama at Sarah Lawrence, and had come to Columbia looking for males to balance his all-female casts. Leach offered to let De Palma make films to use in his plays if he agreed to come, and De Palma signed up to do an MA at Sarah Lawrence after graduating from Columbia in 1962.

De Palma’s Byronic character and taste for film violence drew many of the college’s students to him, and he used some of them in his films. They included Jennifer Salt, daughter of blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Waldo Salt; a wealthy young woman named Cynthia Munroe; and leggy, neurotic Jill Clayburgh. The product of a wealthy but dysfunctional family, Clayburgh was in psychoanalysis from the age of nine. De Palma also roped in his Columbia roommates Jared Martin and William Finley, and a handsome young blond actor named Gerrit Graham, who would figure in his career for many years.

In 1963, America’s student film-makers were besotted with the nouvelle vague. De Palma suggested making a film à sketches, as some young French directors had done, each contributing a segment. De Palma planned a fantasy called Fairy Tale, while Munroe’s contribution would be a story based on the riotous wedding of De Palma’s friend Jared Martin. ‘Then the whole thing fell apart,’ recalls De Palma. ‘Cynthia’s story was basically the best, and we decided to do that one as a movie all by itself.’ They called it The Wedding Party.

De Palma, Munroe and Leach boosted the screenplay to feature length, though most of it would be improvised. Munroe raised the money – often quoted as $100,000, though, from the look of the film, shot on black-and-white 16mm with a hand-held camera, a small cast and almost no crew, the real figure was probably a tenth of that.

The budget didn’t allow for the best actors, so De Palma advertised in Billboard and Variety. Among those who turned up to audition was De Niro.

‘He was very mild, very shy and very self-effacing,’ De Palma recalls. ‘Nobody knew him, he was only a kid of about nineteen. [He] came in about nine or ten at night. We gave him some material to read. He did it well and then we asked him to improvise, and he was extraordinary. Then he said he had something else he wanted to show us, something he was working on. He left the room and was gone about twenty minutes. We thought he’d changed his mind and gone home. Then the door flies open and he bursts in from nowhere and he does a scene from a play by Clifford Odets. It was like watching Lee J. Cobb. Personally De Niro may be shy and soft-spoken, but in character he could be anybody.’

The Odets monologue came from Waiting for Lefty. As cabbies at a union meeting argue and wait for their leader, Lefty, news comes that he’s been murdered by management goons. Periodically, the narrative flashes away to examples of class oppression, including one manifestation of it that Odets knew well from his days on Broadway – a young actor auditioning for an indifferent producer. De Niro knew the play, since Stella Adler insisted her students study it. She’d starred in the Group Theater’s production, of which Harold Clurman said ecstatically, ‘It was the birth cry of the thirties. Our youth had found its voice.’ De Niro too found his voice in Odets’ words. De Palma was instantly convinced, and offered him the part for $50 – not, as De Niro assumed, $50 a week, but, as his mother confirmed when she read the contract, $50 for the entire role. The contract also promised a percentage of the profits, but as usual there were none.

The Wedding Party started shooting in the spring of 1963, on an estate on Shelter Island, at the eastern end of Long Island. The plot resembles Meet the Parents, in which De Niro was to have a hit almost forty years later. Charlie (Charles Pfluger), a Harvard student about to marry his rich fiancée Josephine Fish (Jill Clayburgh), arrives at her estate by ferry with his two friends, Cecil (De Niro) and Baker (John Quinn), who will act as ushers at the wedding.

Neither can understand why the tomcatting Charlie wants to get married, and one look at his prospective in-laws, a horde of elderly ladies in unfortunate hats, has Charlie doubting too. Invading Josephine’s bedroom on the first night, he discovers her in neck-to-ankle flannel. When he suggests she slip into something lacy, she tells him, ‘If you want lace, I’ll give you a hankie.’ Interruptions by an aged nanny also ruin the mood.

Half-convinced now that his friends are right, Charlie tries to sneak off the island, and when one of Josephine’s old lovers, a wealthy Indian with a penchant for sail-planing, turns up, coaxes him to take her off his hands, even at the cost of going gliding with him. When this fails, he makes a drunken pass at a pretty cousin, but gets cold feet when she responds with enthusiasm. Finally, after being chased all over the island by his friends, he gives up and says yes.

As Munroe finished writing each scene, she and De Palma recorded it on tape. The actors used the tapes as the basis for improvisation, then passed back their versions for her to rewrite. When she wasn’t writing, Munroe cooked the team’s meals. De Palma doubled as runner, calling up people in his capacity as producer, then putting on a cap and mounting a motorbike to collect the item he’d demanded. The cast were asked to supply their own clothing, and even props. Neither Clayburgh nor Salt minded, but De Niro felt exploited, particularly when one such prop, a new suitcase, fell off the top of a car as it pulled into the mansion, and was damaged.

Leach and De Palma directed, with Leach having the deciding vote, usually after argument from the combative De Palma. Leach, later highly successful on Broadway with an updated version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance and his productions of Shakespeare, strove for high production values, which the amateur crew and inexperienced cast could seldom achieve. De Palma felt Pfluger played Charlie in a superficial manner. For his part, Leach disliked the occasional references to movies, from Singin’ in the Rain to Psycho, and the decision to introduce each segment with a silent-movie-style title card quoting from an imaginary marriage guide, ‘The Compleat Bridegroom’. He also disliked De Palma’s decision to undercrank the camera in the chase and driving scenes, giving the movie a Keystone Kops jerkiness.

As Cecil, comic relief of the trio of friends, De Niro had little to do. Arriving on the island struggling with a pile of sporting equipment, he bumbles about in the background, periodically taking part in rambling improvised conversations in which he and Baker first try to talk Charlie out of marriage, then into it. A drunken speech at the pre-wedding banquet that might have been his chance to shine is so badly post-synched that his words are mostly inaudible.

Periodically, production stopped as Leach returned to teaching. In one such break, in the summer of 1964, De Niro made another trip to Europe to see his father. De Niro Sr hadn’t lingered in Paris, but had moved to Gravigny, west of the city, then to Saint-Just-en-Chevalet, in the centre of France, near Clermont-Ferrand, and finally to Baren, above the resort of Luchon, near the Spanish border, his base for excursions into Spain and to North Africa. But France hadn’t proved the stimulant he’d hoped for, and Virginia could tell from his infrequent letters that her ex-husband was in trouble. She financed Bobby’s trip, with the idea that he would bring him back.

Bobby spent an enjoyable few weeks in Paris, where he could lose himself in the small hotels of the Left Bank around the Odeon and the Quartier Latin. He took language classes at the Alliance Française and met his share of local expatriates, but had little success with the French, whose reserve almost equalled his own.

Convincing his father to return to New York was an uphill task. Though Robert had been shipping his canvases back to American galleries, sales were meagre. Bobby urged him to look for a gallery in Paris, but his father refused; the market for his work, he insisted, was in New York.

After that, Bobby took off on an extended search for his roots. He hitchhiked around Ireland for a fortnight, looking for his mother’s family, but the country was thick with O’Reillys and he had no luck. Italy proved more fruitful, and he found cousins in Campobasso, sixty miles north-east of Naples. He also penetrated the Iron Curtain to visit Erwin and Marie Ley Piscator in East Berlin. When he returned to New York, it was with his father reluctantly in tow. Of that aspect of the trip, Bobby later told a friend, ‘It was an absolute nightmare.’