De Niro: A Life (41 page)

In the backstage press room, reporters tried to get De Niro to comment on the Hinckley business, but he was predictably reluctant. “I don’t know about the story,” he said. “I don’t want to discuss the matter now.” When the questions persisted, he put his foot down: “Look, I said what I wanted to say out there. You’re all very nice, but that’s it.” He then left to pass the better part of the evening with the
Raging Bull
team at a Beverly Hills restaurant, where they had repaired to make sense of the day’s events in privacy. He had been compelled by the law to answer the questions put to him by Joey LaMotta’s attorneys. Hollywood reporters, as he well knew, had no such power over him.

W
HEN HE AWOKE ON
A
PRIL 1, 1981
,
IN POSSESSION OF HIS
second Oscar and a pile of congratulatory telegrams from, among many others, Jack Nicholson, Mickey Rooney, California governor Edmund G. Brown, and Israeli politician Moshe Dayan, Robert De Niro was by almost anyone’s reckoning the greatest screen actor on earth.

Just eight or nine years prior, he had been almost completely unknown, doggedly chasing small parts in independent films and appearing in off-off-Broadway plays, just as likely to be skipped over for work as to have his name misspelled in the credits or be ignored in reviews when he got a role.

Then came the remarkable one-two punch of
Bang the Drum Slowly
and
Mean Streets
, followed by the revelation of
The Godfather, Part II
(and the anointment of an Oscar) and the unimaginable explosion of
Taxi Driver.
In five years, he’d claimed a significant spot in the upper tier of his profession. There followed three expensive and visible flops (
The Last Tycoon
,
1900
,
New York, New York
), the blame for none of which was hung on him. Rather, he was for the most part admired for stretching his range and for choosing intriguing projects and, always, the best collaborators; if anything, his reputation was enhanced. And then came another pair of back-to-back thunderbolts,
The Deer Hunter
and
Raging Bull
.

His triumph was undeniable and complete. Nine films, including several outright masterworks, and nine completely distinct performances. He had learned to speak in dialects and even in a foreign language; he had learned to drive a taxi, to play the saxophone, to box;
he had literally rebuilt his physique twice; he had become other people again and again, and almost none of them resembled Bobby De Niro of Greenwich Village, whoever
he
was. He had taken the venerated standard of the actor as chameleon, as embodied by the likes of Marlon Brando during his first flush of glory and Laurence Olivier through his long and varied career, and infused it with a modern energy and freedom. There was no direct line, not of thought or gesture or intent or execution, that connected Bruce Pearson, Johnny Boy Civello, Vito Corleone, Travis Bickle, Monroe Stahr, Alfredo Berlinghieri, Jimmy Doyle, Michael Vronsky, and Jake LaMotta, only the tirelessness, selflessness, talent, dedication, imagination, application, and will to power of the performer who had created them. He had been nominated for an Oscar four times and won twice; he’d gotten four Golden Globe nominations, winning once; and he had a trove of prizes from critics’ groups, including three from the New York Film Critics Circle, two each from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics, and one each from the Boston Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. He had peers, yes—Hoffman, Pacino, Nicholson, Keitel, Voight, Hackman, movie stars and fine actors all—but he had no equals, not at that very moment, and everybody knew it.

His collaborators, even those with their own estimable accomplishments, spoke of him in terms of awe and respect. “
Bobby De Niro’s a perfectionist,” Donald Sutherland said, “but he knows what’s perfect; I don’t.” His technique left other actors agog: “
De Niro once figured out what the guy he was playing would have had in his wallet,” said Ryan O’Neal, admitting he didn’t have the same tools. As Chris Hodenfield, virtually the last journalist De Niro had spoken to at any length at the time, put it: “
A Dr. Jekyll who shifts into an endless number of Mr. Hydes, he doesn’t imitate people, he stages an inquisition.” His excellence was a given; his process was a legend. He had gone, in perhaps fifteen years’ time, from sniffing inquisitively around the edge of the acting profession to, at age thirty-seven, standing indisputably on top of it.

But that remarkable rise—the struggle to get a foot in the door, to get those plum roles, to create those indelible performances, to maintain
focus on the work, to avoid the distractions of the limelight, to keep from being bled by the press and the accoutrements of showbiz—came at a personal cost.

When he woke that morning, he was a man living apart from his wife and children. In 1979, with the hard work and travel of
The Deer Hunter
barely past and the
Raging Bull
preparation consuming him more than ever, he and Diahnne Abbott separated. She, Drena, and Raphael split their time between the home De Niro had leased in Brentwood and the townhouse he owned in lower Manhattan; he spent time between the New York building and a rented suite at the famed Chateau Marmont in Hollywood.

Their troubles were, per rumormongers, the result of their differing tastes and priorities. Their early days in California had been idyllic, Shelley Winters recalled. “
We spent wonderful weekends together. I remember we used to lug big bags of cracked crab and iced white wine out to this funky beach—we called it Doggy Beach.” But their differences had become vexations. De Niro had grown frustrated with the hassles and expense of maintaining the menagerie that Abbott insisted on living with. At first her cats had been the cause of problems when they were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “
I’ve heard they have hookers running all around the pool,” De Niro remembered, “and yet when you have cats … I was told not to have cats, but I did and they locked us out. They put a padlock on the door and put the cats outside. I was furious. The manager threatened to call the police in front of me.… This was at night, we got home at midnight, and they had locked us out. I wanted to sue—he was a pig. It looked like he enjoyed being a son of a bitch.” Then, after they vacated their first Los Angeles rental home, in Bel Air, they were sued by the owners for the extensive damage done by their “great number of cats” to the rugs, draperies, and furniture; the suit sought $10,000 in reparations. For a fellow as meticulous, parsimonious, and particular as De Niro, it was becoming an ongoing provocation.

But it went deeper than run-ins with obnoxious hoteliers or cats peeing on rugs. De Niro really was as quiet, self-contained, and sphinx-like in his private life as the press liked to depict him, while Abbott had more of a taste for partying and gadding about in a crowd. He had
a handful of haunts he preferred—low-key spots limited only to A-list clientele, such as the ultra-private On the Rox nightclub on the Sunset Strip. She preferred to be in larger throngs, more visible and more varied: parties, premieres, awards shows.

De Niro told the press that their estrangement was simply “
a cooling-off period” and that it was the fault of his celebrity, without which he “would have gone on being an ordinary guy, living a simple life, and nothing would have changed my marriage.” But, of course, he had sought the life he now lived with single-minded purpose, and it was virtually inevitable that success would mean the sacrifice of “ordinary” and “simple.” The marriage was still a work in progress; they were together more than they were apart during this period of difficulty, and Abbott continued to be presented and to give interviews as the wife of Robert De Niro. But he was rumored around Hollywood to be involved with several well-known women (gossips linked him to Bette Midler and Barbara Carrera), and there were many reports of him being on the town, in his furtive fashion, with female companionship. He could be obsessively secretive even in these liaisons, not acknowledging his actual identity and even asking dates to leave their own bedrooms so he could hide his wallet during trysts, but he was known to be comporting himself as if genuinely single.

In Italy on a publicity tour for
Raging Bull
, he reunited with Stefania Sandrelli, one of his co-stars from
1900
, who followed him after a while to New York, where they behaved affectionately toward each other in public. And in Los Angeles, he chased down—literally, while driving along in his convertible on San Vicente Blvd.—a beautiful young African American woman who turned out to be a singer named Helena Springs. Springs, who was approximately twenty-two at the time they met, remembered feeling frustrated by the behavior of the driver who seemed to be focused on her. “
This guy is cutting me off,” she said. “I’d go fast, he’d go fast. I’d slow down, he’d slow down. This asshole kept following me. I didn’t even know him. Finally he put his hands in a prayer position and said, ‘Pull over.’ So I stopped and he said, ‘Can we have lunch?’ ”

Springs, who had been a background singer for, among others, Bob Dylan, Bette Midler, and Elton John, finally realized who her pursuer
was, and she agreed to go to dinner with him, leading to their spending the night together. Over the span of a few years, they maintained a non-exclusive relationship, during which, Springs later said, she became pregnant twice. She aborted the first pregnancy, she claimed, without telling De Niro about it. But she said that when she found herself pregnant again, in late 1981, she determined that she would have the baby, and she told De Niro, setting him off on what she described as a series of ugly and intimidating conversations and encounters aimed at getting her to terminate the pregnancy. “It was mental abuse,” she concluded, but she held firm to her choice.

On July 1, 1982, she gave birth to a baby girl who was named—by De Niro, Springs said—Nina. De Niro, Springs claimed, gave her $50,000 to help with the care of the baby and even pitched in on setting up a room for her. But he drew the line at providing her with his medical history or a blood sample, fearing that she didn’t merely want to be able to fill in the gaps in the baby’s medical records, as she said, but rather that she was after more money. Springs dropped the matter, she later explained, partly because of her own low self-esteem: “Black women aren’t used to being courted by handsome, famous, rich white guys. So they don’t say no to whatever the man wants.” It would be more than three years before De Niro would see Springs, or baby Nina, again.

H
E HAD NEVER
liked to parley with the press. Now he was getting testy with journalists and especially with photographers. In the summer of 1979 he got into a scuffle with a pair of photographers at the Stork Club in New York, where one of them tried to snap him eating dinner with Joe Pesci. Not long after, in Rome to do publicity for
Raging Bull
, he found himself with Harvey Keitel riding in a taxi that was being pursued by a carload of paparazzi. The cab driver came upon a policeman and told him that he and his passengers were being followed by suspicious people. When the cop questioned the photographers, they got their revenge by declaring that they were chasing a pair of terrorists who were in the taxi. This was the height of Red Brigade revolutionary activity in Italy, and the charge was taken seriously; the taxi was
intercepted by the
carabinieri
, the state police, and De Niro and Keitel were forced out at gunpoint, their hands held high, and made to stand against a wall, the paparazzi photographing the entire episode.