De Niro: A Life (16 page)

Such was the case with both of these films.
Jennifer
was directed by Noel Black, who’d had a small, cultish success a few years earlier with the thriller
Pretty Poison
; its screenwriter, Erich Segal, was just breaking huge with his hit novel and film
Love Story
, which hit theaters while
Jennifer
was still being made.
Born to Win
director Ivan Passer was the latest of a group of young East European directors (including Roman Polanski and Milos Forman) who were making headway in American movies.
Jennifer
starred the relatively unknown Michael Brandon and Tippy Walker as young lovers whose lives are controlled by their drug use;
Born
may have had an unproven writer and director, but it centered on the stalwart George Segal, already something of an au courant, if offbeat, screen star, as a hepcat turned junkie whose habit had forced him into a life of street crime.

Whatever promise the films had, they offered only limited opportunities for De Niro, whose roles were peripheral. In
Jennifer
he played, of all things, a cab driver, blasting around New York on a cocktail of drugs and rock music; in
Born
, he had a slightly larger role as a cop who gets pleasure from roughing up Segal’s character. Living up to his reputation as a serious and hardworking actor, he put as much as he could into his roles, giving
Jennifer
a terrific jolt of comic energy in his brief appearance and delving deeply into the business of playing a cop in
Born
, annotating his script with notes about how to frisk suspects and how to bear himself with a properly steely mien: “
Attitude: always cocky … act as if voice made of steel … I never trust anyone … doesn’t matter how I
look
but that I
am
a cop.”

But, serious and hardworking as he was, he was also a creature of the insular world of New York theater and movie actors, and he had to have noticed that Al Pacino, like him a recent alumnus of the Theatre Company of Boston, was also making a drug film—Jerry Schatzberg’s
The Panic in Needle Park
—and he had to have noticed that Pacino was the lead. Yes, De Niro’s career was starting to blossom, but he was getting second-shelf stuff compared to his peers.

T
HAT STATUS MUST
have been abundantly clear to him when his next film opportunity arose. Along with half of Hollywood and every
wannabe actor with an Italian American surname, he auditioned for a role—a number of roles, actually—in Paramount Pictures’ upcoming adaptation of Mario Puzo’s smash-hit novel,
The Godfather.
The studio had considered a number of accomplished directors for the job of helping Puzo get his epic novel to fit into the small vessel of a movie, including Hollywood veterans Richard Brooks, Fred Zinnemann, and Otto Preminger and foreign talents Sergio Leone and Costa-Gavras. They all turned the job down. And then production executives met with a thirty-year-old director who had made some nudie movies, a few indie films (including a horror picture,
Dementia 13
, for Roger Corman), and a flop Hollywood musical (
Finian’s Rainbow
). He’d moved from LA to San Francisco and set up his own studio there, which made him an extreme long shot for the gig, but he’d also written the script for
Patton
, which had premiered in April 1970 and was doing fabulous box office (on its way to winning a haul of Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay). It was a gamble to give this kid such a hot property, but Robert Evans, the head of production at the studio, was a gambler, and he liked the fact that the guy was an Italian American. And so in September 1970 he hired Francis Ford Coppola to co-write and direct
The Godfather.

The battles Coppola would wage in the coming months to get his preferred cast would become legendary. There was the war over Marlon Brando, who seemed happy to burn every useful bridge he had to Hollywood but who perked up at the thought of playing Mafia boss Vito Corleone. One of the biggest names in movies, Brando was forced to do several screen tests, some in full makeup, before he finally won the approval of the studio. An even bigger struggle was over Coppola’s desire to cast Al Pacino in the role of Michael, Vito’s son and reluctant successor. The studio saw no upside to having this unknown, broody actor in such a key role, and they demanded that Coppola test virtually every actor under forty in the business. Coppola’s notes for the process would list a number of names for every key role in the film—joining De Niro and Pacino in the list were Dustin Hoffman, Martin Sheen, and Michael Parks—and many of these shot screen tests for the role. De Niro’s was strong enough that Coppola tested him further for the role of Michael’s hot-headed older brother, Sonny.

It was an impressive effort. Dressed in a dark sports coat and a pork-pie hat, with his shirt buttoned to the neck but not wearing a tie, his hair, worn fashionably long, held in place by bobby pins, he adopted a preening, sneering humor to read Sonny’s warning to Michael about what it was like to shoot a man, spinning around and gesturing with crackles of energy, interjecting self-amused notes of disbelief (“Madonna mi!”), smiling with genuine menace as he tells his brother that he’ll get “brains all over your nice new Ivy League suit,” holding that last syllable with a musical hint of mockery. Coppola was dazzled—“spectacular,” he called it, “Sonny as killer”—but he was realistic, too: “It was nothing you could ever sell.”

Besides, James Caan, who’d also tested for Michael, was being cast by the studio as Sonny. So De Niro was penciled in as Connie Corleone’s traitorous husband, Carlo Rizzi, only to see the role go to Gianni Russo, a Las Vegas TV show host who’d never acted but spent $2,000 on a screen test of himself and sent it the producers. Finally, he was offered the part of Paulie Gatto, errand boy and chauffeur to the capo Pete Clemenza (the guy who would utter the famous line “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”). A tiny part, but a big step. Naturally, he was excited.

And then he had his hopes dashed. Coppola finally won the Battle of Michael, getting his bosses to agree that Pacino was the right choice for the role. But Pacino was under contract to MGM—in fact, he was about to shoot a
different
Mafia picture for them. The two studios worked out a deal with a curious wrinkle. In exchange for letting Pacino go, MGM wanted Paramount to give an actor to replace him in
their
mob movie. Paramount agreed … and gave them De Niro.

T
HE
G
ANG
T
HAT
C
OULDN
’
T
S
HOOT
S
TRAIGHT
was a 1969 novel by New York newspaperman Jimmy Breslin, who turned the recent Mafia wars within the Colombo family into a garish, ghoulish, and truly hilarious satire. The focus was the outcast crew of Crazy Joe Gallo, transformed in Breslin’s hand to Kid Sally Palumbo, a chic and daring but not too clever mobster with aspirations to take over a crime family from the aged and wily gang boss Baccala. The novel lampooned mob rituals,
mob families, the operatic religiosity of gangsters, the rococo aesthetics of Italian Americans, even the great Italian love of bicycle racing. The book was so clearly going to be a smash hit that Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, talent agents who’d gotten into the producing biz and had such pictures as
Point Blank
,
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
, and
The Strawberry Statement
to their credit, optioned it in February 1969, before its actual publication. They had big plans for the film, talking about hiring Marcello Mastroianni to play Kid Sally and Al Pacino to play the role of Mario, an Italian bicycle racer and petty thief visiting America as part of one of Kid Sally’s moneymaking schemes. But Mastroianni still considered himself unprepared to appear in American movies, and Pacino, off to play Michael Corleone, was out. So the lead went to Jerry Orbach, a recent Tony Award winner for the musical
Promises, Promises.
And De Niro stepped in as Mario.

The film was set to shoot in and around New York in the spring of 1971, at exactly the same time that
The Godfather
was in front of the cameras in the same city, which had to sting. But De Niro dove into the work of his part with what would become famously characteristic commitment. His character was an Italian thief and con artist who comes to New York as a competitor in a multiday bicycle race but spends his time glomming everything he can—clothes, food, consumer goods, and, when wearing a stolen priest’s suit, cash donations from sentimental Italian Americans who intended their money to benefit his (completely fictional) tiny parish back home.

Mario’s part was written largely in broken English, and De Niro thought it sufficiently important to get the character’s accent right that he asked the producers if they’d send him to Italy to study the language. They balked at the cost, but he went anyway, at his own expense, for a quick linguistic immersion. He spent his own money on some pieces of wardrobe as well, adding to the store of costumes in his 14th Street apartment. And, as ever, he made fastidious character notes in his script, describing Mario’s shoplifting technique as a form of studied nonchalance: “
I make believe I don’t see where to pay or how. It’s like something that doesn’t concern me.”

Among the things that Mario steals is the heart of Angela, the young sister of Kid Sally and the white sheep of her family, a college girl with
no part in the Palumbos’ life of crime. The role went to Leigh Taylor-Young, who had become famous when she had an affair with and then married her
Peyton Place
co-star Ryan O’Neal (who was married when they met) and had been in a number of flashy films, including
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas
and, with O’Neal,
The Big Bounce.
Like Orbach—and, indeed, like director James Goldstone and most of the key members of a cast that included Lionel Stander, Jo Van Fleet, and Herve Villechaize—Taylor-Young had no ethnic connection to the material, and she was a bit intimidated when De Niro showed up at rehearsals with an impeccable accent and a seemingly absolute connection to his character.

But she was put at ease when he suggested that they spend a day or two traveling around New York City in character, with her taking the lead as the local showing the sights to the out-of-towner. They visited a few famous spots, took the bus, and then, at De Niro’s suggestion, tried their hand at a little shoplifting at Macy’s in Herald Square, where they were promptly collared and turned over to the police. Explaining their actual intent, they urged the cops to phone the production office, where somebody vouched for them and secured their release. It was, finally, a comical incident, but one that drew the actors close; they had, Taylor-Young later revealed, a brief affair that ended with the production.

H
E HAD THREE
films coming out virtually simultaneously at the end of the year, but he kept working. In November, he took a role in one of a pair of one-act plays being staged by the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, which had just launched a series of workshop productions under the rubric “Explorations in the Forum.”
Kool Aid
, as it was called, was composed of two works by Merle Molofsky, a former Miss Beatnik of 1959 who was studying playwriting at NYU with Jack Gelber, noted author of the famed drug world play
The Connection
, who would be directing.

As Molofsky remembered, Gelber was very excited that De Niro was going to be in one of the two short plays,
Three Zen Koans
. “
He told me, ‘I’m casting someone that no one has ever heard of yet,’ ” she
said. “ ‘He just finished shooting a film, and when it premieres he’ll be one of the biggest stars in the world.’ ” Such was Gelber’s certainty that the role in which he cast the gaunt, gangly De Niro was a character called Fat Boy. That surprised the playwright, who, Molofsky recalled, “always envisioned a fat actor. But it didn’t matter. [De Niro] was rock-steady. He gave a beautiful performance, and he was hardworking, scrupulous, and attentive.”

Also in the cast was Verna Bloom, a stage and television actress who had just appeared in the films
Medium Cool
and
The Hired Hand
and who was married to
Time
magazine film critic Jay Cocks. Bloom didn’t care for the play, in particular for a plot line involving the junkies having gotten a noisy child high to keep her quiet. “
I had a real problem with that,” she remembered. And she wasn’t overly impressed with her co-star. “He was just this guy at the time,” she said. “He wasn’t near showing us he was gonna be an icon. But he was fun.” They stayed in touch after the show’s five-performance run.

W
HILE
D
E
N
IRO
was in rehearsals for
Kool Aid
at Lincoln Center,
Born to Win
had its premiere in the very same location, during the New York Film Festival of October 1971. It made its way to commercial theaters at the end of the year, almost simultaneous with the short release of
Jennifer on My Mind.
In fact, neither film was very much noted at the time: the vogue for gritty tales of urban junkies was short-lived, and these films came near the end of it. De Niro, however, made a favorable impression in at least one. For
Jennifer
, his gypsy cab driver was virtually the only aspect of the film critics found worthy of praise: he was commended in
Time
and
Boxoffice
, and the
Hollywood Reporter
positively raved about him: “There is one memorable, original character in ‘Jennifer on My Mind’: Mardigan, or ‘the gypsy cab driver,’ ” declared Craig Fisher, adding, “Apart from De Niro, there’s not much that’s memorable.… Watching it is like mainlining taffy.”

There’s little to say about his work in
Born to Win
, which has points of interest as a low-key film of its moment and milieu; De Niro’s few scenes seem to have been shot in just a few days (three of his four appearances find him wearing the same costume), and aside from his
habit of calling the sorry junkie he’s roughing up “Baby,” he leaves as little impression as any run-of-the-mill TV cop of the time.