De Niro: A Life (21 page)

When he returned and continued working with Pianti, the tutor was amazed at his pupil’s progress: “
If you’d asked me if it was possible that an actor master a language like Sicilian in such a short time,” Pianti later commented, “I would have said, ‘Never. Impossible.’ But this De Niro has done it.”

Coppola claimed that he was never in doubt that the man he’d chosen as young Vito could pull off this part of the role: “Bobby De Niro is such a unified, concentrated guy that I always had faith he could do it,” he said. “Later I heard he’d been a terrible student in high school—which tells us something about positive motivation. Also, I always knew, and I’m sure he did too, that if it had turned out a disaster, I could always dub him with a Sicilian. Which, I suppose, tells us something more about motivation.”

In fact, De Niro’s proficiency in Sicilian became such that he did extensive rewrites of Coppola’s dialogue, not only for his own character
but also for all of the Sicilian-language scenes in the script, sometimes emphasizing little idioms and tics of pronunciation, sometimes ratcheting back speeches that he felt, after his exposure to the manners of Sicilians, were too forthright and direct. (This practice came to dominate virtually all of De Niro’s work. Other actors might want to pump their parts up by adding dialogue; throughout his career, based on the evidence of scores of his working copies of scripts, he indulged the opposite impulse, paring and even slashing away at his own lines to make them less explicit, less verbal, less everything—subsuming actorly ego to the belief that he could do more with a gaze or a gesture than could be accomplished with words.)

Spending time among Sicilians had filled his head with many ideas for his portrayal of the young Vito Corleone. In particular, he found that he ought to augment his linguistic work with the practice of, in a word, silence. “
The people are very wonderful to you, invite you into their homes. And yet, there’s another side, another layer of logic that runs through the Sicilian communities,” he said “They have a tremendous disrespect for authority.… The only people they trust are members of the immediate family. Ultimately, everyone else is a foreigner. Suspicion runs high. And although they are very cordial to you as a tourist, you are still aware of this. Sicilians have a way of watching without watching; they’ll scrutinize you thoroughly and you don’t even know it.”

Reading through Puzo’s novel and the various drafts of Coppola’s script, De Niro continually took note of the stillness of his character, the way Vito would never let on what he was truly thinking, no matter the seeming triviality of the moment. “
Never show how you feel cause you never know how things will turn out,” he scribbled in the margins of the book, and “
NEVER LET ANYONE KNOW THINKING
.
ALWAYS KEEP OFF GUARD
.
BE DOING ONE THING WHILE THINKING
ANOTHER
.” In the script, he reminded himself to “give smile with mouth, not with eyes. Chilling smile.” And, most revealingly, he underscored a moment in which Vito would like to react but doesn’t with this note: “Think of my father here. Don’t get too rash. Wait. Control yourself.”

He also, of course, had to calibrate his performance to match
Brando’s. The Don Corleone whom Brando had made world-famous had certain physical, vocal, and behavioral characteristics that De Niro would have to incorporate in his portrayal of the younger man in order to make the connection between the two credible to audiences. At first, he admitted, the character eluded him—“
There’s a peasant shrewdness which I haven’t found yet,” he said before traveling to Sicily. But then, having gotten a sense of the culture from which the man arose, he went about studying the specifics of Brando’s performance. In a screening room at Paramount, Coppola’s crew set up a videotape camera and filmed each of Brando’s scenes so that De Niro could watch them again and again on his own. He did this at least a half dozen times, making detailed notes on Brando’s gestures, facial expressions, and habits of speech: “
lead a little with shoulders … head cocked … when thinking hand to chin … sly smile, sense of humor … raised eyebrows when making certain deliberate expressions … use back of fingers to scratch face … when point lift only forearm when want something … maybe should do more of chin sticking out. Esp. for smiling … Big thing is he is relaxed talker … Lets things happen. Let things happen.”

He specifically assigned each of the characteristic gestures of Brando’s he had identified to one or more of his own scenes, choosing a strategy of slowly revealing the future man in the nuanced behavior of the man of the past. As he said at the time, “
It’s like being a scientist or a technician. Audiences already know Vito Corleone. I watch him and I say, ‘That’s an interesting gesture. When could he have started to do that?’ It’s my job as an actor to find things I can make connections with. I must find things and figure out how can I use them, in what scenes can I use them to suggest what the older man will be like.”

Besides the physical aspects, he also had to reveal the nascent pieces of the elder Vito’s personality: his easy command, his purring warmth, his confidence, his charm. The character, as he saw it, had a feline quality, “
an attitude of just about to
strike
,” and should be played “perfectly still like a cat ready to
STRIKE
.” Stillness and silence were, finally, his keys: “I listen. I’m a listener. I don’t have to move to do a lot.… Talking is really not that important.… Don’t just answer. Think … Really think, weigh.” But there was another animal he had in mind,
because he was playing someone who would soon be a killer of men: “Don’t forget to get that serpent color.”

In effect, the job in front of him was to take a prebuilt older man, project what he likely might have been like decades before, and bring that sketch to life. “
I watched the tape,” he said, “and I saw if I had done the part myself I would have done it differently. But I tried to connect him with me, how I could be him only younger. So I tried to speed up where he was slower, to get the rasp of his voice, only the beginning of the rasp. It was interesting. It was like a scientific problem.”

He did the usual physical things that helped him prepare for a role: acquiring hats and other bits of wardrobe that were appropriate for the era of his performance (roughly 1918–23, when Vito would have been in his mid- to late twenties), then aging them to take off the store-bought sheen; finding old-time knives and change purses for Vito to carry, even though they might never appear in the film; and working closely with costumer Theadora Van Runkle to ensure that his wardrobe matched the research he had done in Sicily and in the New York Public Library. He visited Dick Smith, who had helped Brando devise his makeup in the first film, to settle on facial appearances: “
The slicked-down hair seemed natural, that was how they wore it in those days. We decided to do a little with the cheeks, suggesting the padding that Brando used.” (They also settled on a makeup scheme to hide the mole on his right cheekbone.) And he even went to Brando’s Los Angeles dentist, Henry Dwork, to be fitted with a removable implant that would give him some of the facial and vocal appearance Brando had. “He made up a smaller piece,” De Niro explained, “because my character was younger.”

In early November he arrived in Los Angeles for thirteen days of shooting the interiors of Vito’s Little Italy world: his apartment, his workplaces, various shops and theaters. In January he joined Coppola and the crew in New York, where production designer Dean Tavoularis had undertaken the mammoth task of converting East 6th Street between Avenues A and B on the Lower East Side into a remarkable semblance of it some fifty or sixty years prior; for three weeks De Niro was able to walk from his 14th Street apartment to the film set and go
backward in time.
^*1
At the end of the month, he returned to Sicily for seven days of shooting. The last of his twenty-nine days of work on the film was February 4, and even though production would continue on into June, the workaholic Coppola was already editing, determined to have the film out in theaters by Christmas.

You would think that with
Bang the Drum Slowly
and
Mean Streets
ready to premiere and
The Godfather, Part II
due the following winter, De Niro could coast on his reputation for a little while. But his metabolism for work had escalated to a pace that wouldn’t allow him to sit still. He formed a brief liaison with the screenwriter James Toback, who wanted De Niro for the title role in his script
The Gambler
, only to have director Karel Reisz dismiss the actor as too lightweight.
^*2
In June 1973, while studying the role of Vito Corleone, De Niro went onstage again briefly in playwright Julie Bovasso’s off-Broadway comic romance
Schubert’s Last Serenade
, playing a right-wing hard hat who saves a debutante from a spot of trouble on the street and then tries to romance her. The production, mounted by the Manhattan Theatre Club, ran barely a week at the Stage 73 space, and Bovasso watched appreciatively during rehearsals as De Niro used his increasingly renowned immersion techniques to find a way into his character. “
He wanted to do one scene while chewing on breadsticks,” she remembered. “Dubiously, I let him, and for three days I didn’t hear a word of my play—it was all garbled up in breadsticks. But I could see something happening, he was making a connection with something, a kind of clown element. At dress rehearsal he showed up without the breadsticks. I said, ‘Bobby, where are the breadsticks?’ And he said simply, ‘I don’t need them any more.’ ” His performance was “gruff and a little confused,” per the only review, which was in
Show Business.
That summer
he appeared in yet another production, a one-act entitled
Billy Bailey
that had an even shorter run at the American Place Theatre; De Niro played the sole character, and the show didn’t garner a single review.) Nor did he need experimental theater anymore. Despite rumored possibilities now and then, he didn’t perform in live theater again for more than a dozen years.

D
URING ALL THIS
, while he was figuring out Sicilian and fiddling with old hats and dental implants and a rasp in his voice, De Niro became famous. In August, as he was studying at Berlitz,
Bang the Drum Slowly
was released to reviews that were largely favorable for the film and almost entirely adulatory for De Niro and Michael Moriarty.

De Niro’s Pearson builds on elements of Lloyd Barker—the accent, of course, and the feral passions and the dumb grin. But it’s a fuller portrayal, a whole character with a variety of habits and longings and fears and relationships and attitudes, and it’s genuinely moving, his most thoroughgoing performance yet on film.

Pearson isn’t a great player—he still lacks in some rudiments of catching such as snapping the ball back to the pitcher, and his batting average usually hovers in the .250 range.
^*3
He’s no good at ragging his teammates, or at the card games in which players and coaches engage outsiders to rob them of beer money. But he participates, when permitted, with the glee of a kid brother following the older boys’ lead, even if he’s not entirely sure what it’s all about.

In fact, he’s a rube. His greasy pompadour, piled high like meringue, makes him look like Woody Woodpecker or an Elvis imitator. He wears a smiley-face shirt under a white suit to go the ballpark on game day, and white socks with dark shoes when dressed more formally, and the belt on his pants is far too long for him, leaving a long line of slack flopping about. He pees in the hotel room sink; he chews
tobacco and spits juice everywhere; he drinks his beer with salt; he mistakes the attentions of a predatory call girl for true love.

But De Niro invests all of these traits with a grounded realism, making them seem human and true, if not always dignified, and not in the least lampoonish. And because we know, virtually from the start, that Pearson is dying, and because his only friend takes his situation so seriously, there is no license to laugh at him. We watch him carefully for signs of illness, of weakening, and he allows us none. Even when he’s been discovered, he tries to put on a brave face, and a real nobility emerges.
^*4

There’s actual gravity in the performance. De Niro has some difficult lines to play: “I got to develop brains,” “Sometimes I don’t know what’s goin’ on sometimes,” “I know I got faults, I always did.” Dialogue like this is, in the contemporary critical phrase, too on-the-nose, but the lines are plausible as played because De Niro makes it seem as if Pearson is revealing things about himself that he’s discovered through a deep inner quest. They’re confessions, sometimes grudging, and they’re presented with sufficient naturalism that it doesn’t matter that they’re not profound.

Partway through the film, Pearson has a health scare, waking up with night sweats and calling out to Wiggen, “Something’s happening.” As they wait for a doctor, fearing the worst, Pearson lets down all pretenses of macho and beseeches his roommate, “I’m scared. Hold onta me.” Wiggen responds to this wrenching and tender request with a brotherly embrace. It’s a devastating moment, partly because the two actors play it so well, and perhaps even more so because the director doesn’t try to milk even a drop of sentimentality out of it, respecting the intimacy, vulnerability, and sincerity of Pearson’s fear and Wiggen’s honorable friendship.

But for all this gravity, there is humor and playfulness in De Niro’s performance. He’s quite handy with that chewing tobacco, with a
plum-sized bulge of the stuff always stretching a cheek and virtuosic spitting skills. He greets a coach (who doesn’t care much for him) with a laddish “Oh, Joe, how’s the shoooooooow …?” When he’s asked to join a few of his teammates who perform as a vocal group on TV (the Singing Mammoths, of course), he’s stone-faced and almost pitifully unable to keep up with the extremely pedestrian choreography, only to break out into a dance solo that’s charmingly goofy and several degrees defter than might be expected. And when his teammates, who have learned his secret but don’t let him know it, throw a beer blast in his room, he beamingly approves of them all, assuring Wiggen, “They a great buncha boys!”