De Niro: A Life (33 page)

Naturally, the elder De Niro was pleased with the higher profile granted his work by his son’s reflected glory, but he was careful, too, to keep some space between himself and his art, on the one hand, and his son’s work and fame, on the other. In 1976, he published a chapbook of poetry, in an extremely limited edition, entitled
A Fashionable Watering Place
—ninety-six pages of verse (revealing the influence of French Symbolists, Anglo-American Modernists, and, inevitably,
Greta Garbo) and drawings. At the beginning, where one might expect to find a dedication or some other note from the author, there was this: “These poems are by Robert DeNiro [
sic
], the painter, not to be confused with Robert DeNiro [
sic
], the actor, his son.”

It wasn’t a case of De Niro senior being jealous of or competitive with De Niro junior. There was real affection between them. Tom Mardirosian, a young actor newly arrived in New York at about the same time, knew the elder De Niro slightly from the artist’s teaching stints at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which Mardirosian had attended as an undergrad. He recognized the painter one day at the YMCA and was charmed to learn how excited the older man was to share stories of Bobby’s various successes, of which Mardirosian, like every other young actor on earth, was well aware.

Father and son saw each other regularly when they were in the same city. Usually that meant New York, but when Bobby started to spend more time in Hollywood, his father would visit him there (although he confessed to being overwhelmed by the tumult of Movieland socializing: “
I ran to San Francisco to avoid the New Year’s Eve parties”). And Bobby’s paternal grandmother, Helen, was also part of the ménage, staying with her grandson and his family frequently after being widowed in 1976. (Young Raphael would later complain, as kids do, of having to sometimes share a room with his great-grandmother, only to have it explained to him by his father how lucky he was to be able to have visits from her; De Niro would always, but
always
, be loyal to his family and his oldest friends.) When Bobby acquired a beach house in Montauk, on the tip of Long Island, he petitioned the local council to allow him to build a studio on the property so that his dad could use the house as a place to retreat and paint.

For a while, the elder De Niro enjoyed the limelight that accrued to him through his son’s success (his ex-wife, on the other hand,
never
did). But he admitted that there were limits to his appreciation. “
I don’t really like to talk about Bobby too much because he’s very careful in talking about himself,” he told one inquiring reporter. With another, he shared the view that his son’s fame was a mixed blessing: “
It creates a certain interest. But it can overshadow you. Anyway, the people he and I relate to are in two different worlds.” Finally, he seemed happiest
when he had nothing to do with it: “
At first I was very excited about all the publicity Bobby was getting, but now we’re kind of appalled by it. One of the nice things about a trip I took recently to Santa Cruz was to find students sketching from paintings I had done over 25 years ago, long before Hollywood became such a part of our life.”

He was content to teach (throughout New York, as well as at various art schools and universities around the country), to live his life according to his own eccentric whims, and to make
his
art
his
way. His son might have to work within a market-driven field of expression, but the elder De Niro was never so constrained.

I
F
New York, New York
had turned into a kamikaze mission for Martin Scorsese,
1900
had become the Hundred Years’ War for Bernardo Bertolucci. The film wrapped in May 1975, after nearly a year of production, and the director was still editing it right up until the spring of 1976, when he finally brought it to the Cannes Film Festival in a cut that ran five hours and thirty minutes.

After Bertolucci trimmed twenty minutes,
1900
was released into several European markets as a two-part film. The sheer length of it overwhelmed audiences. Though business for part one was solid, part two saw a decline of more than 50 percent in ticket sales, meaning that fewer than half the people who saw the first part bothered with the second. With American distribution looming as one of the few remaining avenues to recoup costs that had metastasized from $3 million to more than $8 million, Bertolucci cut the film down to four and a half hours, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy Paramount Pictures, which had contracted to pay him $1.75 million on the condition that he deliver a film of no more than three hours and fifteen minutes.

A battle was waged in studio offices and in the press—dozens of film critics and journalists, even those who weren’t enamored of the movie they’d seen at Cannes, signed an open letter protesting such extensive cutting. Paramount finally agreed to distribute a cut of four hours and five minutes for a reduced sum. They debuted this version at the New York Film Festival in October 1977, and it moved into theaters a few weeks later, accompanied by mixed-to-hostile reviews.

T
HE WORLD DIDN
’
T
receive
New York, New York
all that much better. United Artists banged the drum heroically, getting De Niro onto the covers of
New York
and
Newsweek
on the very same day, with a
Rolling Stone
cover and a
Time
feature appearing not long afterward. Predictably, all of these pieces painted De Niro as an obsessive, reclusive, recalcitrant genius willing to go to extraordinary lengths to create verisimilitude in his characterizations but equally stinting in personal conversation and public revelation of private emotions, thoughts, and information. Minnelli and Scorsese were trotted out for the press as well, albeit far more cautiously, as rumors of their on-set romance had circulated widely (“
Do you think there’s going to be a lot of that kind of shit?” a concerned Scorsese asked a
Village Voice
reporter who inquired about their affair).

On June 21, the film had its Manhattan premiere in a benefit for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and patrons who paid $100 (in addition to contributing at least $1,000 annually) were invited to a post-screening dinner party at the Rainbow Room, atop Rockefeller Center, and an after-party at Studio 54. As with
1900
, what they saw was a lengthy but compromised film. At just over two and a half hours,
New York, New York
was shorter than Scorsese’s ideal version of the material by about ten minutes—more or less the length of the “Happy Endings” production number, which had been shot at the outset of the production as a mark of its bona fides and then cut at the last minute as being out of tenor with the film that, gropingly, Scorsese and his collaborators had created.

The day after the benefit, the film opened to paying audiences. It didn’t help at all that
New York, New York
followed
Star Wars
into theaters by four weeks. Maybe movie audiences never would have wanted what Scorsese had given them—a dark and furtive musical filled with emotional trauma and feel-bad sentiment. But they certainly weren’t buying it in the summer of Luke Skywalker. And the movie press wasn’t much kinder.

Like almost everything else in
New York, New York
, De Niro’s Jimmy Doyle is too much, too much. Right from the get-go, with his garish
shirt and white slacks and saddle shoes and Juicy Fruit gum, he’s like a snapped power cable whipping around menacingly and spitting out deadly sparks—a spectacle, for sure, but never warm or inviting, and in the main not sympathetic. In the opening scene, he throws himself again and again at the reluctant Francine Evans like a dog dropping a ball at the feet of a master who refuses to throw it. He tries smooth talk, charm, humor, frankness, practical reasoning, and even bare-assed honesty—“Do I look like a gentleman in this shirt and these pants?” And it’s all bootless. She says no again and again, and she means it, even when she smiles on him and gives him a hint that there may be a yes in their future. You want to like him—his energy is fun, his patter is amusing, his smile is, as ever, a killer-diller—but he’s exhausting.

As he woos her, he reveals even more tools. He can play the sax, of course, and he regards her with big, inviting eyes as he does so. When she finally succumbs, he smothers her in a wave of kisses that total more in number than all the screen kisses De Niro had engaged in up to that point combined. He expresses his affection as a suffocating need to control her. And his marriage proposal consists of a throwaway request and then a melodramatic mock suicide, lying behind the wheels of a taxi on a snowy road and imploring the driver to back up over him rather than have to endure her indecision.

Jimmy Doyle is like Johnny Boy with musical talent and a little less sociopathy, a creature of impulse and rock-headed certitude who will listen only to himself, even when he’s demonstrably doing harm. He’s summed up beautifully by the bandleader Frankie Hart (George Auld) in conversation with Francine: “He’s not only good, baby; he’s a bitch. He blows a barrelful of tenor. But he’s some kind of a pain in the ass.”

He’s also an egoist who can’t get comfortable with his wife’s professional success or, when she breaks it to him, the news that she’s having a baby. Learning he’ll soon be a father, he stiffens and recedes into shadows, and when their professional trajectories split—she becomes a recording star, while he continues to push into new musical forms with his more adventuresome colleagues—the baby becomes the focus of his resentment, an external thing that he can point to as the cause of his frustration rather than seeking the root of the problem in himself. During an explosive argument in his car that looks like a genuine fight,
Jimmy finally shouts, “Did I tell you to have that … that … goddamn baby?” It’s a savage indictment—of himself, really—that no subsequent words or deeds will ever be able to erase.

Like Francine, we’re taken with and exhausted by Jimmy in equal measure, and we get frustrated with his ceaseless self-concern, to the point of wanting to be done with him for good. Even when the baby arrives—the birth triggered by that final violent argument—he cannot rouse an affectionate, fatherly response: “It’s a him?” he asks, as if his child is an extraterrestrial. And when Francine becomes a movie star as well as a singing star, he can’t resist taking little digs at her—with a smile on his face—for the sorts of films she makes, referring to “Happy Endings” as “Sappy Endings” just to let her know he feels superior to her and her work.

The film is clearly not intended to be a traditional love story, but the repeated inhumanity of the central character becomes punishing to watch, in part because De Niro is so committed to delivering it raw; none of Scorsese’s often beautiful film craft—the sets, the costumes, the fluent camera work and editing—can make it go down smoothly. There’s one beautifully sweet touch, though, provided by the pregnant Diahnne Abbott, who graces her sole scene with the languid air of Billie Holiday and a richly ironic line of dialogue. Presumably intimate with Jimmy, who’s avoiding her clumsily because Francine is in the nightclub in which they’re performing, she lifts an eyebrow and asks him, “Family night?” If only the rest of the film were so amusing and light.

P
ERHAPS BECAUSE OF
the mountain of ballyhoo the film accrued during its production, critics were poised to slash at it. And when it turned out to be at best a mixed success, the reviews were accordingly harsh, perhaps overly so. In the
New Republic
, Stanley Kauffmann referred to
New York, New York
as “one more of the current avalanche of disappointing US films,” declaring it “occasionally repellent but mostly tedious and trite.” Vincent Canby in the
New York Times
dismissed the film as “nervy and smug.” Christopher Porterfield in
Time
accused the film of seeking “a dividend of unearned nostalgia,” and Penelope Gilliatt’s review in the
New Yorker
was simply entitled “Ho Hum, Ho Hum.”

That said, De Niro was largely unscathed. Although Kauffmann declared him “a nuisance,” Gilliatt called his work “the best thing about the film,” praising his performance as “firm, rapid.” In
Newsweek
, Jack Kroll agreed: “De Niro is astonishing, funny, crazy, angry, hurt, musical, and manly.” But even in admiration, the critics cited flaws: Porterfield, commending De Niro, explains that “the reason such a character, as written, should interest us remains as elusive as the Lost Chord,” while Canby compared De Niro to “a man running to catch a train, only to pass right by it.”

To make the torture complete for Scorsese,
New York, New York
bombed at the box office, grossing less than $14 million. After a string of critical hits and a pair of commercial successes, the director felt slapped. The life he had been building for himself had crumbled to dust: after discovering the affair with Minnelli, Julia Cameron had moved out with their baby daughter, Domenica; he had been replaced as director of the Minnelli stage play by old pro Gower Champion; and his use of cocaine and pills was escalating perilously, particularly once he took Robbie Robertson, guitarist of The Band, as his Mulholland Drive housemate and began to live in a twilight world between rock-and-roll and the movies. His situation, professional and personal, caused him to slip into a slough of guilt, shame, and despair: “
For a time after
New York, New York
I had really been thinking of going to live in Italy and making documentary pictures on the lives of saints for the rest of my life.” He would, in fact, find his penance in the movies, but saints wouldn’t have anything to do with it.