Читать книгу De Niro: A Biography - John Baxter - Страница 8

He can’t do Shakespeare and he can’t do comedy. How can you even begin to compare him with Brando?

Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, on De Niro’s acting ability

Editing The Wedding Party took years. Cynthia Munroe died, bequeathing the uncompleted film to Wilford Leach. Despite the delay, De Palma and De Niro remained friendly, even though De Niro was reticent, withdrawn, while De Palma, loud, sarcastic, with a genius for undiplomatic remarks, was the opposite.

Both came from Italian Catholic families but were raised in another faith, in De Palma’s case Presbyterian. Both fell under the influence of charismatic fathers, in De Palma’s case an orthopaedic surgeon. Just as De Niro had spent many hours watching his father work, De Palma sat in on his father’s operations, establishing a lifelong preoccupation with blood and flesh. In both cases, the marriage of their parents collapsed, though De Palma’s reaction to the break-up was characteristically extreme. He stalked his father, observing and recording his assignations with his mistress – an episode that appeared in his 1980 film Dressed to Kill.

In 1965 De Niro scored a role in a film which, though he is barely visible in his one scene, and the film was shown almost entirely in France, would reach the screen quickly, giving him his first official movie appearance.

Marcel Carné’s great days had been in the thirties and during World War II, near the end of which he had made Les Enfants du Paradis. In 1965, with his career running down, he was happy to take on an adaptation of Georges Simenon’s 1946 novel Trois chambres à Manhattan, which Jean Renoir had just abandoned after working at it, on and off, for a decade. Its hero, François, an actor, goes to New York to work on a television film after breaking up with his wife. In a bar he meets Kay, another lost soul whose flatmate has just left her. François and Kay start an affair. Maurice Ronet played François and Annie Girardot Kay.

Carné was given a week in New York to film some exteriors and ‘atmosphere’, including a scene in a Greenwich Village bar. Among the extras hired for a day was De Niro. It was not a particularly agreeable experience. ‘I remember a bunch of other young actors hanging around,’ he said, ‘moaning and bitching, all made-up, with pieces of tissue in their collars; it was the kind of thing you always hear about actors – where they’re just silly or vain, complaining back and forth, walking around primping, not wanting to get the make-up on their suits.’

But something about De Niro caught Girardot’s eye. ‘We chatted a little,’ says the actress. ‘And later, someone else on the film told me he had said I was “a good little guy”. Years later, I was surprised when I met him at a party in Paris, and he reminded me that we knew each other already, from Trois chambres.’

In 1963, seventeen-year-old Jimmy Slattery from Massapequa Park, Long Island, began a course of hormone shots that would turn him into a woman. Taking the name Hope Slattery, he began haunting Manhattan’s gay bars, and fell for Jackie Curtis, who, despite his cross-dressing, insisted truculently, ‘I got balls under my ballgown and I don’t care who knows it.’ Curtis completed Jimmy’s make-over with a new name, Candy Darling.

In 1968 Candy played a bit part in Andy Warhol’s Flesh, then starred in Women in Revolt, contributing the unforgettable line, ‘I’m young, I’m rich, I’m beautiful. Why shouldn’t I sleep with my brother?’

Lou Reed immortalised Candy in his anthem of the Warhol years, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, and Jackie, recognising star quality, volunteered to create a vehicle for her. Working day and night for a week, high on amphetamines, and inspired by the Hollywood stars of the forties whom Candy revered, in particular Lana Turner, he wrote a high-camp musical satire called Glory, Glamour and Gold, subtitled ‘The Life and Legend of Nola Noonan, Goddess and Star’. Candy would play Nola, enduring every indignity men could inflict, including rape. Curtis also wrote parts for prominent drag queens like Holly Woodlawn, another graduate of the Andy Warhol atelier.

Ten men contributed to Nola’s rise and fall, but nobody thought all of them could be played by the same actor until Bobby De Niro volunteered. Curtis claimed he ‘begged’ to be cast. ‘He came over to the director’s apartment where Candy, Holly Woodlawn and I were sitting around, and you would have thought he was crazy – we did.

“‘I gotta be in the play! I gotta be in the play! Please! I’ll do anything!’” he kept pleading.

‘I said to him, “Ten roles?”

‘He said, “Yes. And I’ll do the posters too – my mother has a printing press.’”

The play perfectly suited a chameleon like De Niro. Curtis and Candy persuaded Warhol and his entourage to attend the opening at the tiny Bastiano’s Cellar Studio in Greenwich Village on 7 August 1968. Andy called De Niro’s performance ‘a tour de force’. The Village Voice would write, ‘De Niro made clean, distinct character statements in a series of parts which many actors would have fused into a general mush. De Niro is new on the scene and deserves to be welcomed.’

Actress Sally Kirkland was in Warhol’s group at the opening, and went backstage to compliment De Niro. ‘Do you know that you are going to be the most incredible star?’ she told him.

To De Niro, Kirkland, tall, busty and blonde, seemed to live in the headlines. She’d just become the first actress to appear totally nude in a ‘legitimate’ play, the off-Broadway production of Sweet Eros by Terrence McNally. With ‘Yippies’ Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, she’d invaded the New York Stock Exchange and showered incredulous brokers with dollar bills. She also appeared naked on the cover of Screw magazine, riding a pig. Later, she moved to California, was ordained as a minister of the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, and started teaching acting and relaxation technique, as well as playing occasional small roles in movies.

‘He was unbelievably shy,’ Kirkland says of De Niro. ‘I thought perhaps I was embarrassing him. But I could tell that, more than anything, he wanted to believe it.’ De Niro was still reticent with women. Traditionally, 85 per cent of theatre students are female, a fact which his most distinguished predecessor at the Conservatory, Marlon Brando, had exploited without scruple, but De Niro felt uncomfortable around his fellow students, and had no regular girlfriends. All his energy was directed towards performance. As one friend of the time, Diane Ladd, remarked, ‘Bobby was hell-bent on being a success but not just a movie star. He didn’t want to be a star. He wanted to be an actor.’

But Kirkland’s compliments fell on fertile ground. Thereafter, De Niro would ring up and ask her, ‘Do you really think I’m any good? Do you really?’ His naked need for reassurance shocked some friends. A few years later, when his mentor Shelley Winters confessed she hadn’t seen a preview of his film Bang the Drum Slowly, De Niro hung up on her.

The acquaintance with Kirkland ripened into a friendship that would influence De Niro’s career. ‘We were very, very close friends then in that whole time frame,’ Kirkland says. ‘I think he liked me because I had always been very social and he was always shy. I really thought he was a genius and I told everyone. I was always telling people, “Hire Robert De Niro.” He was always very intense. If you pushed his buttons, you’d know it. He’s Italian. He has that caution. He seemed to know that because of my work with Strasberg and Shelley Winters, I could match his intensity, and I was forgiving of it.’

Both ambitious, they spent hours in the De Niros’ 14th Street apartment rehearsing, mostly in the kitchen. Kirkland’s eccentricity resonated with the fury on which De Niro drew for his best work. ‘We had so much rage and energy in us,’ she says. ‘We would go at each other, have knockdown fights – kitchen-sink-drama-style.’

Already De Niro had formulated his theory that one had to ‘earn the right’ to play a role, either by detailed research or by transforming one’s appearance. When a scene demanded a costume, he had plenty to choose from. ‘Bobby had this walk-in closet,’ says Kirkland. ‘It was like going into a costume room backstage of a theatre. He had every conceivable kind of get-up imaginable – and the hats! Derbies, straw hats, caps, homburgs.’

Well into the eighties, De Niro browsed the flea markets and thrift shops of the Lower East Side, collecting all sorts of clothing – because ‘costumes can look too created’. It was to pay off -notably on Raging Bull, where a cheap two-toned jacket gave him the clue to the character of Jake La Motta.

De Niro got interested in photography, and offered to make a photographic record of his father’s canvases. He also took a professional interest in his own portraits. ‘Bobby had this composite [photograph] he’d carry around with him to auditions,’ recalls Sally Kirkland. ‘Twenty-five pictures of himself in various disguises. In one, he was like this IBM executive, in another, a professor with glasses and a goatee, in another a cab driver – to prove to casting directors he wasn’t an exotic. And he’d always have a stack of paperback novels with him too – ideas for characters he might play, might turn into screenplays for himself. He was totally focused on his work.’

Casting director Marion Dougherty, a friend of many years, also remembers De Niro’s portfolio of pictures. ‘One of them, I remember, was particularly striking. He was made-up as an eighty-year-old man. In other shots, he was wearing costumes of all kinds. I had never seen anything like that in any of the portfolios young actors carry around, which are for the most part glamour shots.’

De Niro’s degree of preparation went well beyond simply putting on costume and make-up to have his portrait taken. David Scott Milton, who created the original material for the 1971 film Born to Win, in which De Niro had a small part, remembered how he turned up for his first interview with a thick ‘character’ book, an album of pictures showing him in various make-ups and outfits.

‘Now, it was common practice for actors in those days – as it’s done even today – to work up a series of character photos. But Bobby had done more than that: he had actually worked on the characters. He told me he had done this for Stella Adler’s classes, worked up fully-drawn characters, not just character photos: dozens of them.’

Just how much costume and make-up meant to De Niro emerged more than thirty years later, when he revealed that he’d hoarded every major item of wardrobe from all his films, a collection that, in the year 2000, comprised 2600 costumes and five hundred items of make-up and props.

To find inspiration in a costume isn’t in itself odd, but to hoard them distinguishes De Niro from the majority of movie actors, who attempt to remove barriers between themselves and the audience rather than erecting them. Once again, it’s behaviour one would expect from actors of an earlier tradition, like Chaney, Muni and such character comics as Bert Lahr. John Lahr wrote of his father, ‘Our small, sunless 5th Avenue apartment was full of Dad’s disguises, which he’d first used onstage and in which he now occasionally appeared on TV. The closet contained a woodsman’s props (axe, jodhpurs, and boots); a policeman’s suit and baton; a New York Giants baseball outfit, with cap and cleats. The drawers of an apothecary’s cabinet, which served as a wall-length bedroom bureau, held his toupees, starting pistol, monocle, putty noses, and make-up.’ In an odd coincidence, De Niro’s first acting role was also the one that made Lahr famous – the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

De Niro’s interest in costumes and transformation, as well as demonstrating again his roots in nineteenth-century theatre and the Hollywood of the thirties, shows how much, despite his many friends at the Actors Studio, his sympathy lay with Adler’s theory, not Strasberg’s. Strasberg performers shunned costumes. Nor did his Method stress physical transformation. Marlon Brando, whether playing the Emperor Napoleon or a beat-up-boxer-turned-dockworker, was always recognisably Brando.

Actors Studio performers spoke of their body as their ‘instrument’ – a device which, though capable of many tunes, remained physically untransformed. De Niro, by contrast, thrived on transformation. None of his outfits, however, were costumes that might be used in classical roles: no doublets, no cloaks, no togas. Except for the reformed eighteenth-century slaver Mendoza in The Mission, De Niro has never played a period role. Even Martin Scorsese couldn’t persuade him to play Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, De Niro explaining that he would always feel uncomfortable in robes.

In his early twenties, De Niro spent some time in psychoanalysis, the better to understand his conflicted attitude to his parents and his need to hide himself in invented characters. He was also helped by Kirkland to deal with his anger. ‘I taught him yoga,’ she said, ‘even though I have no idea if he ever practised it again. We had a group of actors, sort of an actors’ co-op group, with him, Raul Julia, James Keach, myself; we all hung out at Raul’s house with his wife in the late sixties.’ Many years later, when Kirkland joined the West Coast branch of the Actors Studio in Los Angeles as a teacher, De Niro appeared as a guest speaker. A student asked, ‘Mr De Niro, how do you relax?’, and De Niro pointed to Kirkland and said, ‘Talk to her.’ But Bobby was seldom relaxed. When Kirkland asked Virginia what drove her son, she was in no doubt. ‘Will,’ she said shortly. ‘Force of will.’

Despite his success in Glory, Glamour and Gold, De Niro didn’t find it any easier to get parts. He went on the road through the Southern states in ‘dinner theatre’, where the audience sat at tables and ate a meal before the show, with the performers acting as waiters and, also like waiters, dividing up their tips. De Niro always passed this off as ‘good experience’, but it must have galled him, as it galled most actors.

French actor/director/writer Robert Cordier met De Niro through Barry Primus, another New York actor, a few years older than De Niro, who became, and has remained, one of Bobby’s closest friends. Cordier was casting an off-Broadway play. ‘I had a friend called Steve McQueen,’ he says, ‘who had been unknown in Greenwich Village, and I thought he would be great to play the lead. I went to parties with Steve. He wangled himself into the Actors Studio. Then somebody said, “There’s this kid. He’s wonderful. He takes classes with Stella Adler. He’s the son of this painter Bob De Niro, and he’s quite a comer.” I was seeing actors, and Barry Primus took an audition. Then he said, “I have this friend, Bob De Niro, do you want to see him too?”’

Cordier didn’t audition De Niro on that occasion. ‘I had done the play,’ he says. ‘It had gotten good reviews and Barry had been noticed and signed up for the lead in The Changeling at Lincoln Center. I was at Max’s Kansas City and this guy came and tapped on my shoulder and said, “You never called me for the play that Barry was in.” It was Bob De Niro, and he said, “I’m gonna give you my phone number and I want you to call me the next time there’s something.”’

Well-known Living Theater actor Warren Finidy initially played the lead in Cordier’s play, but Cordier fired him for drinking, despite the fact that he’d appeared in Jack Gelber’s The Connection, to considerable acclaim. ‘Bob thought it was funny that I had fired the actor of the year, a year after his award,’ says Cordier. ‘Then Warren walked up and said, “Hey Bob, Robert!”, and Bob said, “Well, you guys are still on very good terms.” I think he was impressed, and he said “Let’s work together sometime.”’

De Niro cultivated Cordier, as he did anybody who might push his career. ‘He used to call me to ask what was up. We went to parties; you know, kicking around at parties, but the main social life was going to cafés, bars and restaurants. We all went practically every night either to the Cedar Bar, to Bradley or to Max’s Kansas City, or Elaine’s uptown, you know, we went to these few places.’

Meanwhile, De Niro won another film role in a New York independent production, but Sam’s Song was to haunt him for the next twenty years, and provide, through no fault of his, one of his least distinguished credits. Directed by editor and underground film-maker Jordan Leondopoulos, it was shot, very professionally and in colour, by Alex Phillips Jr, who would go on to light Sam Peckinpah’s Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. The film was meant as a ‘calling card’, intended, like Steven Spielberg’s Amblin’, to win the director a job in features, though, by scattering fashionable hommages to the nouvelle vague, Leondopoulos also hoped for an art-house release.

Most of the action takes place in the grounds of a Long Island mansion like the one in The Wedding Party, with a further sequence at sea on a cabin cruiser. Young film-maker Sam (De Niro) is invited to join a house party thrown by friends of the wealthy Erica (Jennifer Warren) and Andrew (Jarred Mickey). The three drive up in the couple’s convertible, Sam reading Andre Bazin’s film criticism and Erica quoting from the book by Louis Ferdinand Céline which she’s translating.

When they arrive, they find their hosts have invited some people to an impromptu birthday party. They include the glamorous and very available Carol (Terrayne Crawford), who, to the chagrin of Erica and the envy of Andrew, sneaks off with Sam to have sex. When the party transfers to a boat, Carol disappears into a cabin, this time with Andrew, and a furious Erica asks to be taken back to shore on a conveniently passing launch. Sam joins her. Back on the beach, they act out their own version of a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, an imaginary gunfight using pointed fingers, with Sam improvising a series of facetious slow-motion death scenes.

De Niro, behind a heavy moustache, makes a believable New York movie-maker, and Jennifer Warren, who later had a solid career in films (Night Moves), TV and, more recently, as a director (Partners in Crime), is equally convincing, if dressed unflatteringly and forced to deliver some ridiculous lines. At the time, however, nobody saw either of them, since the film had almost no release, and would languish in a New York warehouse for more than a decade.

In 1969, De Palma’s The Wedding Party finally screened in a single small cinema downtown, drawing little attention. To De Niro’s irritation, the credits mis-spelled his name ‘DeNero’. Small as his role was, however, it admitted him to the select group of young New York actors with feature-film experience.

Another of these was a short, intense Actors Studio alumnus named Al Pacino. ‘I had seen Robert in The Wedding Party,’ Pacino said later, ‘and was very impressed by him.’ In Pacino’s version of their first meeting, he stopped De Niro on 14th Street and introduced himself. It’s more likely, however, that they met at Jimmy Ray’s, a bar on 8th Avenue where young out-of-work performers could drink on credit. Another hang-out where they would almost certainly have run into one another was the Bear Garden, an all-night restaurant on the Upper East Side run by playwright David Scott Milton.

De Niro became a regular at the Bear Garden, an establishment which, Milton recalls with some pride, ‘attracted a number of strong-arm men, gangsters, whores, junkies. Our luncheon waitress was Jill Clayburgh, dinner waiter Frederick Forrest. Peter Boyle worked for us for a short while. Louise Lasser, who was married to Woody Allen at the time, was our late-night waitress. Waldo Salt, who later wrote Midnight Cowboy, was a regular; his daughter, Jennifer, worked there occasionally. Norman Wexler, screenwriter of Joe and Saturday Night Fever, was also a regular. William Saroyan’s son, Aram, a writer and a poet, also mis-spent much of his youth there.’

Films were so rarely shot in New York that the same actors, including Christopher Walken, Ralph Waite, Allen Garfield and Charles Durning, as well as De Niro and Pacino, often found themselves competing for roles. De Niro auditioned for Jerry Schatzberg’s 1971 Panic in Needle Park, but Pacino won the part, and made his movie debut.

Pacino, devoted to Lee Strasberg both personally and professionally, pressed De Niro to audition for the Actors Studio, about which De Niro had begun to change his mind. Pacino’s experience showed that Studio members got first shot at the best roles. Robert Cordier, then in the Studio’s Directors’ Unit, recalls, ‘Bob was not at the Actors Studio then, but he was trying to get in. He called me a few times and said, “What’s up, what’s going on? I’m trying to get into the Actors Studio.”’

His chance came, indirectly, though Sally Kirkland, who one afternoon at Jimmy Ray’s introduced him to her godmother, Shelley Winters. Winters had passed through Stella Adler’s Conservatory en route to a Hollywood career that culminated in her 1951 Academy Award nomination for A Place in the Sun. She’d hoped for better things after this success, but her subsequent films were largely routine, and following some roles in Britain, she returned to New York, determined to relaunch herself as a stage actress and playwright. In 1955, she found a niche at the Actors Studio.

Strasberg, as part of an infatuation with Hollywood which many Studio members viewed with alarm, now admitted ‘observers’, who could watch but not participate. Paul Newman and Marilyn Monroe attended regularly, as did Charles Laughton, who had a particularly close relationship with Al Pacino. Winters, by virtue of her movie career, was appointed one of the ‘Moderators’ who guided discussions when Strasberg wasn’t present. At the same time, resigning herself to the onset of middle age, she began taking character roles, and even won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 1959 for The Diary of Anne Frank.

De Niro impressed Winters instantly. ‘He was skinny and very gentle, with dark watchful eyes,’ she recalled. ‘He didn’t say much. He had very little money at that point and he used to ride around town on a rickety old bike.’ She later implied a romance between them – almost certainly wishful thinking. Despite his involvements with Kirkland and the actress Susan Tyrrell, De Niro was immature, still living at home and very much under the thumb of the assertive Virginia.

Winters did, however, have an ulterior motive for wanting to meet him. In 1959, in the throes of redefining herself, she had written a play, Gestations of a Weather Man. Not surprisingly, it portrayed three incidents in the life of an Oscar-winning actress. The third section called for a charismatic young actor, and from what Kirkland had told her, De Niro seemed ideal. Pulling strings, she got him into the Studio. ‘She got permission for he and I to work on scenes as working observers,’ recalls Kirkland. ‘She had just made me a member; talked Lee Strasberg into allowing my audition to get me in. Bobby was very good and we worked almost every week for a period of time.’

Though Strasberg would retrospectively claim De Niro as a product of the Studio, and display among his trophies a photograph of the two embracing, Bobby never auditioned for the Studio, and though he spent seven years as occasional observer and performer, remains circumspect about the worth of Strasberg’s teaching, which he calls ‘another thing’ from Stella Adler’s system. Many actors, Pacino among them, accepted the professional value of membership of the Actors Studio without necessarily embracing its ideas, and De Niro, like Pacino, may well have ‘blocked his ears’ to the discussions that followed each student performance; Pacino admitted he would count numbers mentally rather than listen.

‘It was beneficial and helpful,’ De Niro said of his Strasberg experience, choosing his words carefully. ‘What I thought was better was when a director would come up and have a session. Because a director had a mixture of experience and practical doing. A director would get up and say, “We’ll do this and do that.” 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.’

Once her two protégés were established at the Studio, Winters tried to persuade her agency, ICM, to represent them, but it was a bridge too far. Kirkland says, ‘The higher-ups at ICM said, “Who are they?” We both got turned down by ICM in 1968.’ But shortly after, De Niro acquired an agent, in Richard Bauman, who would represent him through the first part of a fast-accelerating career.