De Niro: A Life (25 page)

Vito is almost equally taciturn with his enemy Don Fanucci (Gaston Moschin), a Black Hand big shot. Vito’s friends Abbandando, Clemenza, and Tessio are all cowed by the gangster, but Vito regards him as someone to be tested for strength of character. The two have three encounters, and in each Fanucci does the majority of the talking and Vito is the observer, heeding each word and probing beneath it to feel whether it is supported by steel or air.

De Niro’s Vito has three conversations that account for the majority
of his dialogue in the film:
^*1
a brief talk when he loses his position in the grocery, a strategy session in which he convinces Clemenza and Tessio to trust him to handle Don Fanucci, and a meeting with a slumlord in which he tries to convince the man to change his mind about evicting Carmella’s friend. Tellingly, all of these have to do with money and with relationships of power. Vito expresses or promises gratitude and loyalty in each case, assuring the others of his steadiness and attempting to convince them to go along with his wishes. In each case, along with his escalating power, his words carry real weight. Buying oranges at a fruit stand, he finds that the peddler won’t accept his money. “If there’s something I can do for you, you come, we talk,” he tells the man. It’s his longest line in English in the entire film, and it is the foundation of the life and career of Vito Corleone.

In the absence of words, De Niro creates his character out of gestures, poses, and gazes. The first three times the film fades from the tale of Michael Corleone in the late 1950s to Vito in the 1910s and ’20s, De Niro is captured staring silently: at the playful Sonny, the ailing Fredo, the fruit seller’s wares. The second is the most characteristic: in his undershirt and suspenders, standing outside the bedroom where the baby is being treated for pneumonia, he’s as thin and edgy as a jackknife, unable to offer any assistance, beset by real anxiety, silent but revealing his fear in the way he shields his body and face from the scene. His empathy and helplessness are palpable.

In action, he is a man of calculation, resolve, and purpose. He kills Fanucci with three bullets, the last of which he delivers with cool calculation directly into his victim’s mouth. He rifles the man’s pockets for money, then moves swiftly but collectedly to the roof, smashing the murder weapon and scattering the pieces of it into various chimneys. Afterward, he walks determinedly against the flow of a crowd to the stoop where his family waits. He puts the toddler Michael on his lap and waves a tiny American flag with him, having,
in a sense, arrived anew in the New World by eliminating an emblem of the old.

De Niro has also, in a sense, usurped Brando’s place. He only slightly resembles the older man, but he has the rasp in the voice (which becomes more pronounced as the character ages) and much of the body language: the stiff-backed formality, the habit of stroking his face with his fingers when engaged in deep thought, the impeccable wardrobe, the slicked-back hair. He has hints of Brando’s jowliness and one of Brando’s most famous lines—“I make an offer he don’t refuse”—but more than that he has Brando’s bearing. In barely forty-five minutes of screen time, De Niro has suggested how one of the most memorable characters in film history rose from grocery clerk to Mafia lord, and he does it less by projecting forward than by finding the seeds of the older man in the younger and letting them germinate in a way the audience can see. When you recollect that this is the first that critics or moviegoers had seen of him since the stunning one-two of
Bang the Drum Slowly
and
Mean Streets
, there is little wonder that he was being hailed as potentially the most gifted actor the screen had ever seen.

W
HEN THE
O
SCAR
nominations came around,
The Godfather, Part II
was overwhelmingly acclaimed, with eleven nominations in all, including three for Best Supporting Actor: Michael V. Gazzo, Lee Strasberg, and De Niro.
^*2
Francis Coppola, nominated as director and screenwriter for
Godfather II
, as he had been for the first film, was also cited as the sequel’s producer. In combination with the nominations of his other film
The Conversation
for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, it was a stupefying achievement. The other players in the Best Picture race were
Chinatown
,
Lenny
, and
The Towering Inferno
, but, esteemed as at least the first two may have been,
Godfather II
was easily the strongest candidate.

The nominations for Gazzo and Strasberg were particularly revealing, both of how well acted the
Godfather
films were and of how
the array of performances in them was related directly to the Stanislavskian system that Strasberg (and, of course, his rival Stella Adler) had so long promulgated. The dean of the Actors Studio hadn’t been seen on-screen for more than twenty years, yet the first
Godfather
film was built on the performances of two of his most celebrated students, Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. The sequel would add both Strasberg and Gazzo, the author of the play
A Hatful of Rain
, which had been performed by Actors Studio students consistently for decades.
^*3
Either of them could have been selected as a sentimental choice by the Academy, as could have Fred Astaire for his role in
The Towering Inferno.
Although
Inferno
was a ludicrous nominee for Best Picture, it had eight nominations altogether, and the producers of the Oscars telecast were planning a tribute to the great dancer to be performed by one of the evening’s co-hosts, Sammy Davis Jr. It seemed entirely possible that the three
Godfather II
actors could split the ballot for Best Supporting Actor between them and allow Astaire to waltz off with his first Oscar.

De Niro was working on
1900
in Italy when the nominations were announced, and he was still there on April 8, 1975, when the Oscar ceremony was held on a rainy night in Los Angeles. It would turn out to be a tumultuous evening, going down in history for the remarks about the Vietnam War that Bert Schneider, producer of Best Documentary winner
Hearts and Minds
, made during his acceptance speech and for the angry rebuttal penned backstage by co-hosts Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra and read aloud on the broadcast by the latter. By the time those fireworks had exploded, the Best Supporting Actor prize had already been announced by the father-daughter team of Ryan and Tatum O’Neal: Robert De Niro for
Godfather II
.

In the absence of his star, Coppola accepted the prize, as he would three Oscars of his own that night for
Godfather II
, which took six prizes altogether, including Best Picture. He declared, “Well, I’m happy that one of my boys made it. I think this is a very richly deserved award. I think Robert De Niro is an extraordinary actor, and he is going to enrich the films that are made for years to come, and I thank you on his behalf.”

De Niro didn’t offer a statement immediately, but he was interviewed about the Oscar later that spring and tried delicately to dance around his feelings about a competitive prize that had been publicly shunned or denigrated in recent years by the likes of Brando, George C. Scott, and Dustin Hoffman. “
Lots of people who win the award don’t deserve it,” he told
W
magazine, “so it makes you a little cynical about how much it means. Did it mean that much to me? Well, I don’t know. It changes your life like anything like that will change your life. People react to it. I mean, it’s not
bad
winning it.” This ambivalence may have been at the heart of things a year or so later, when Coppola, interviewed for a profile of De Niro, opined, “
I like him, but I don’t know if he likes himself.”
^*4

A
S RECOGNITION FOR
his impressive achievement of the past few years mounted, both inside and outside the business, De Niro felt something new: a pressure to choose roles well, rather than the automatic drive to go after every possible opportunity that presented itself, no matter how ill-suited or beyond his grasp. “
I’ve got to decide what I want to do,” he fretted to a reporter. “People now tell me if I will consent to a project, they can get the deal going. But what should I commit myself to? ‘Godfather’ took a year of my life. This one (‘1900’) will take another year. The years go by and what will be left?”

But, in fact, he knew what he was going to do. While making
1900
he would be granted regular hiatuses, and he usually used them to return to New York (though, in fact, he dallied in Italy at times, often with female companions). On September 11, 1974, in a municipal building on Beaver Street in lower Manhattan, he applied for a hack driver’s license at the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission. And now and then over the coming months he would arrange to drive a taxi through the streets of the city, hacking through the city at night and never refusing to go to the most dangerous neighborhoods, preparing
to make that movie about a cab driver that so captivated Martin Scorsese.

As those words from the shooting script convey,
Taxi Driver
would stand as the cinema’s most lifelike and harrowing vision of the decay of New York City in the mid-1970s. But it had its origins in Los Angeles, in a hospital room and a dirty car and a rented room—and, even further back, in a suffocating Calvinist household in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Paul Schrader was born in 1946 to deeply religious parents who regularly inflicted pain on their children—Paul and his older brother, Leonard—in order to give them a sense of what eternal damnation might feel like: whippings, pinpricks, belittling lectures, deprivation of comforts, real psychological torture. It almost goes without saying that the boys were permitted virtually no popular entertainment. There was no TV in the house, and they were not permitted to go to the movies. They were, though, permitted to have guns, and they both grew into the habit of sleeping with them, Leonard going so far as to stick the barrel into his mouth “
like some infant’s pacifier” to help him sleep. And so it wasn’t until he had reached his late teens that Paul ever saw a film. He would later remember that he lost his cinematic virginity to
The Absent-Minded Professor
, which failed to ignite him in any way. The next was
Wild in the Country
, an Elvis Presley film co-starring Tuesday Weld in which the King plays, of all things, a budding writer. The combination of the girl and the plot got him: he had the movie bug.

Dutifully he attended a Calvinist college near home, but while
studying theology formally, he began, as so many in his generation did, to devour movies—a local art house was showing the works of Ingmar Bergman, which struck a nerve—and he aspired to connect his talent for writing with his passion for the screen. He worked for a student film society and wrote reviews for a student newspaper, and he sent off some of them (including some of the germs of what became his 1972 book
Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu
,
Bresson
,
Dreyer
) to
New Yorker
critic Pauline Kael, who was deservedly earning a reputation for cultivating and helping young writers. She recommended he attend film school, and so he did, at UCLA, starting in 1968.

It must have been like being yanked out of a dark cellar and thrust into the noontime sun of a carnival midway. The atmosphere was like nothing he had imagined, not even in a movie theater seat, and it overwhelmed him. Short, schlubby, chubby, inexperienced, anxious, itchy, culturally naive, socially inept, and prone to fits of depression, Schrader was hopelessly, painfully out of his element. But he could write, and as he learned more about film he became a more confident critic. He got some assignments reviewing movies for the underground press in LA (he lost one of them for panning
Easy Rider
), and then, his rise abetted by a word from Kael in the right ear, he found himself editing the prestigious journal
Cinema
.

But writing about movies wasn’t as sexy as making them, at least not in Los Angeles, and he was ambitious; he began to conceive that he could be a screenwriter. It would be another metamorphosis, and it was a traumatic one. Always tightly wound, Schrader began to drink heavily, to use pills, to turn his gun fetish into a threatening and dangerous habit, carrying a loaded pistol around and sometimes brandishing it for effect among the flowery Hollywood types with whom he’d begun to associate. He made some friends in the film business—Brian De Palma, with whom he played chess; John Milius, a fellow wordsmith and firearms enthusiast—and he found himself invited to parties where young filmmakers met, bonded, and networked. But he was still an outsider, and no one was interested in his scripts. He was, frankly, in crisis. A youthful marriage fell apart; his nights were consumed by insomnia; he would drink until he ran dry and then start again when the bars and liquor stores opened; he haunted pornographic theaters;
his money, never a grand sum, withered to near nothing; and he would sometimes sleep in his car. “I was,” he later confessed, “
very suicidal.” Finally, in the spring of 1972, his body simply crashed: he was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital with a bleeding ulcer.

The ulcer, Schrader later realized, saved his life. He had experienced an epiphany while he was convalescing, and he felt that he had to pursue it before he said goodbye to the life and career he had apparently failed to build. In his mind, the wry, rueful wisdom of the song “Taxi” by Harry Chapin fused with the increasingly iconic image of the lone gunman, as embodied most recently by Arthur Bremer, who shot Alabama governor George Wallace. He realized that he had stumbled upon an astounding metaphor, and in the coming weeks he alchemized all of his anxiety, self-loathing, and hurt and poured it onto the page. “
I wrote the script very quickly, in something like fifteen days. The script just jumped from my mind almost intact.”