De Niro: A Life (2 page)

Two
Parents
sequels would follow, culminating in a trilogy that took in more than $1.2 billion at the box office globally and accounted for three of the four highest-grossing films De Niro ever made. And they were, relatively, the highlights of his career in the 2000s and 2010s. In that era, he shared billing with the likes of Eddie Murphy, Edward Burns, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Dakota Fanning, as well as James Franco and Bradley Cooper before either of the latter two proved a solid talent. He appeared in action movies that the distributors hid from the critical press until opening day (one such,
Righteous Kill
, co-starred Al Pacino), and he worked with directors of finite gifts and dubious reputation.

He’d had misfires in the 1970s and ’80s—
New York, New York
,
Falling in Love
,
Stanley and Iris
—but it had always been clear that they’d been made with superior collaborators and with an idea, perhaps unrealized, of quality at their heart. But the films he made after the first
Parents
and
Analyze
films were of another breed: make-work, work-for-hire, paycheck jobs, call them what you will. He was capable of moments of inspiration, but by and large, the De Niro of the twenty-first century erased much of the goodwill—and, indeed, awe—accrued by the younger De Niro. “How does he do it?” was the most common question asked about his gifts early in his career: later it would be replaced with “What happened?”

In 2012 there was a brief upswing—a grounded and unflattering performance as a self-styled literary genius (and sometime taxi driver) hobbled by mental illness in
Being Flynn
and, miracle of miracles, a wrenching and savvy turn as a neurotic gambler trying to connect with his troubled adult son in
Silver Linings Playbook
, which earned him his first Oscar nomination in twenty-one years. But he quickly followed those up with the sort of wheel-spinning and money-grabbing stuff that had marked his work of the previous decade. If the old De Niro had reemerged, he hadn’t, seemingly, decided to stick around.

A
ND YET IN
other ways, the qualities of application, focus, and doggedness that marked the work of his younger days were still salient as De Niro turned seventy. While his choice of acting roles in the 2000s and ’10s may have seemed dubious, his working life
away
from the movie set had expanded in scope and had come to define him in dimensions having nothing to do with acting. He regularly produced films and TV shows and even theatrical works; some of them, such as
We Will Rock You
, a stage celebration of the music of Queen, turned out to be enormously profitable. He continued to pursue directing, spending years to make the quietly tense and credible 2006 spy saga
The Good Shepherd.
He amassed a real estate and restaurant empire, starting in New York and spreading around the world, by 2014 elevating his net worth to an estimated $310 million. And he raised second and third sets of kids following up on the pair of children he’d sired and adopted in the 1970s.

Most visible, and perhaps most significant, was his investment since the early 1990s in the economic and cultural renaissance of lower Manhattan, his birthplace and the site of so much of his most memorable screen work. He was one of the first high-profile residents of the community known as Tribeca (for “Triangle below Canal”) and came to be a significant investor in the infrastructure of the neighborhood, which once was filled with small industries and warehouses but, after De Niro committed himself to its development, became an enclave of pricey apartments, chic restaurants, trendy boutiques and night spots, and cultural and tourist activity. He built a film center in the neighborhood, a block of offices suited to production companies and their ancillaries; he opened restaurants; and he provided Tribeca with a draw and an identity, even if the community was not always entirely willing. After the devastation of the 9/11 attacks on the nearby World Trade Center, De Niro and his associates created the Tribeca Film Festival, an event specifically geared toward celebrating independent film in a way that would bring vitality and attention to the neighborhood. He was a bona fide New York icon, both on and off the screen.

And
icon
is an entirely fitting term for a man of such secret depths. From virtually the first time reporters came to him to ask questions, De Niro scurried away like a wild animal. Though toward those who asked, he was respectful and apologetic through his clumsiness, he was determined to share, reveal, or explain next to nothing about his private life or his working methods. At first it was a seemingly playful thing—the new Brando acting much like the old one with the press. And when he did talk, the content was generally so bland and nonspecific that there was almost a comic air to it. In time, though, his reticence was discussed in darker tones as a pathology, a form of control, even a lack of professionalism, and by the 1980s, his stardom cemented, it became a theme in discussions of the man and his work. Whole articles were written in major magazines about the very subject of De Niro’s reluctance to be interviewed, about journalists’ courtships of and rejections by the star, and about the lengths to which shopkeepers and restaurateurs in Tribeca were willing to go to help their neighbor protect his privacy. Whenever he finally did emerge—to discuss a new business venture or a charitable venture—he lacked the ease and depth that
marked the talk of, say, his famously garrulous chum Martin Scorsese. And when in 2012 he dove into the rigors of his first modern Oscar campaign, there was an air of unreality about the whole thing: when had Robert De Niro become the sort of movie star who would appear on daytime TV and choke back tears while discussing his family life?

Or was it just who he was—a man of unusual emotional capacity who had learned almost from childhood to be self-contained, guarded, and chary, even as he made tremendous strides in the most public of all occupations, acting? In many regards, De Niro’s early life and the strong identities of his parents marked him in ways that he never escaped and maybe never even tried to.

His father, also named Robert De Niro, was a highly respected but somewhat neglected painter of the post–World War II New York School; his mother, born Virginia Admiral and known by that name after the brief two-year marriage that produced her only child, was an independent businesswoman in the midst of bohemian Greenwich Village, active in progressive arts and political scenes but savvy, wary, and tough with a dollar.

From his father, with whom he never lived after about 1945 but with whom he was always close, De Niro learned the virtues of dogged work, self-criticism, and creative integrity; the elder De Niro’s career was at its brightest in the 1950s, and as his commercial luster faded he held ferociously to his artistic vision and ideals, sometimes taking menial work to keep a meager roof over his head, but always maintaining a strong sense of purpose in pursuit of his aesthetic standards. From his mother, who possessed a firm ethic of Yankee thrift and caution and who built a one-woman typing service into a full printing business and, years before her son, a small real estate empire in lower Manhattan, De Niro learned financial acumen and strong senses of loyalty and territoriality. Both parents were creatures of powerful will: the senior De Niro was brutally hard on his own work, abandoning version after version of paintings until they met his criteria of worthiness, and Admiral was, in her son’s formative years, a tireless worker and networker, connected to theatrical, literary, and artistic lights and sufficiently intent on carving her own way in life that she never remarried.

Together not even long enough to see their son out of diapers, De
Niro’s parents maintained separate households (such as households were in their circles), and the boy not infrequently bounced between the two, often on his own, a silent observer of grown-up life with his nose in books, bereft of siblings and cousins and, often, playmates. It can’t be any sort of surprise that a child raised among adults—and adults who were swimming determinedly against the current of mainstream postwar American ideas of normalcy—should turn out to be guarded, suspicious, leery.

And yet, for all his vaunted privacy and secrecy, De Niro would spend most of his adult life in the most public of professions, pursuing it at first with his parents’ sense of zeal and toil, then with a ferocious thirst for work that outweighed even that of his coevals and peers Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Jack Nicholson. Only four of the years after 1968 failed to see a new film featuring De Niro, often in the lead, and often, especially in those first decades, revealing startling depths, abilities, and personality. In his performances—and in the frequently arduous effort he put into creating his performances—he opened himself up in ways that he was almost never willing to when in the presence of a journalist with a microphone. He never, as he once suggested he might, wrote a memoir, but his work—and the work that went into his work—stands as his autobiography.

A
ND WHO WAS
he, this inscrutable, talented, and elusive man? What did he bring to the screen, and what did audiences take from him?

Start with the looks. He was always handsome, with the aspect of a slightly more rugged Alain Delon. But with just a little tweak of lighting he could be either appealing or ugly.

There was that mole, perched on the corner of his right cheekbone like an asterisk, a mark of jauntiness or irony, or even, when he was roused to anger, the sight on the end of a rifle barrel: unblinking, accusatory, immutable. When his face was lean, as it was generally, the mole was accentuated and defined, almost like a third eye; when he was heavy, it could seem like a scrap left on his cheek after a messy meal. It was so clearly visible that it almost threatened his handsomeness,
which bordered on prettiness when he was young and developed into ruggedness as he aged. But he carried it so unconsciously that you felt as guilty noting it as if you were staring at someone’s lazy eye.

A lot of actresses sported such moles—beauty marks—almost as if defying the audience to see them as faults: Marilyn Monroe, Marion Cotillard, Angelina Jolie, Madonna. And, too, there might have been a time, perhaps when he was a young actor, when De Niro was tempted to have the thing removed. (Actors have done far more to themselves in their struggles toward careers.) Fortunately, he never succumbed to such a vain impulse, and the mole became as much a part of his persona as his smile, in which his whole face seems to pucker in delight (he can grin and grimace at once, show delight and menace at the same time, offer a smile that’s a threat or a scowl that embraces), or his enviable, ever-changing hair, always thick and pliant and wavy even as it turned gray, often long enough to make him look like a rocker, sometimes cut short for the sake of accuracy or even to shock.

His body, too, was a malleable thing, at times chiseled and fit, at times soft and homey, now and then genuinely rotund. Lots of actors changed their looks for parts with makeup, hairpieces, prosthetics; De Niro, more than once, changed his entire shape, his commitment to his roles so thoroughgoing as to make his journey
beneath
the skin immediately apparent, like a tattoo,
upon
the skin.

And that’s just what could be
seen
of his actorly craft. His work, from his earliest days as a student actor to very near the present, was actually far deeper, more technical, and more immersive than was generally acknowledged or understood. For the first forty years of his acting career, De Niro dove into almost every role he took with fervent research on the page and, when possible, in person: brutally paring away at dialogue (his preference was always for showing rather than telling), having long colloquies with screenwriters, directors, and fellow actors, and being meticulous in the preparation of props and costumes.

From his earliest days, he was prone to keeping lists of questions to ask, items to acquire, skills to master—always with an eye toward presenting a character as realistically as possible. He learned to speak Neapolitan and Sicilian dialects, drive a cab, play the saxophone, box,
customize a military uniform like an Army Ranger in Vietnam, toss a catcher’s mask aside like a major league ballplayer, and speak like a native of the American South, Northeast, and Northwest.

He could drive directors and acting colleagues crazy with his obsessive focus on detail, but he learned to build a character from the outside in, to allow the inner life of the men he played to emerge through a firmly established air of external realism. Even very late in his career, when critics and audiences often accused him of taking any part for a paycheck or phoning in his performances, you could see him building real men out of specifically chosen items of clothing, props, habits, turns of speech, and mannerisms. In a very real sense he saw acting as work and playing a character as a moral act, and he would almost always make an effort to live up to his own professional and ethical standards and do right by the men he portrayed.

That discipline of building from the outside in made him an actor with whom directors had to exhibit patience. Very rarely was he fully ready to play a scene at its best in the first or second take. He had to steep himself in the emotion of the story, feel the energy of his fellow actors, mine himself for psychological and physical nuances. When he and his colleagues had sufficient bonds of trust to allow him to explore, he could create remarkable moments—real and convincing and seemingly unrehearsed. In the first decades of his movie career, working in lead roles on large films with powerful directors and the luxury of time, he was able to produce one remarkable performance after another in just this fashion. Later, when the scripts weren’t as precise and the directors not so patient or capable, his performances could come to feel generic; you get the very strong sense that he was given fewer chances to play each scene in, say,
Meet the Parents
than he was in
Taxi Driver.
But by then, like so many actors with scores of memorable films behind them, he could rely on an audience’s accrued trust and memory and affection to add the depth that maybe he himself couldn’t bring to a character. Lots of actors, for instance, could have played the neurotic mobster in
Analyze This
; De Niro, arguably, was the only leading man in Hollywood who could bring decades of resonant performances as a hard man to the film’s seriocomic psychodrama.