De Niro: A Life (50 page)

B
Y THE 1980S
, his marriage to Diahnne Abbott seemed less solid than ever, and De Niro’s cat-on-the-town reputation grew. He was regularly seen in the company of attractive African American women, often in their twenties, always beautiful, always slender, and rarely with him more than once or twice. In New York and Los Angeles, restaurateurs and club-goers would often spot him in the company of these women, whom he met however he could: chasing them down in his car, approaching them in public places or at events, even spotting them on TV and in newspapers and contacting them through third parties. While he was making
Brazil
in London he got an eyeful of one of the
Sun
’s Page Three girls, a gorgeous South Londoner of Caribbean heritage named Gillian de Terville. Getting her phone number through the agency of one of his showbiz contacts, he rang her at her parents’ house and began a now-and-then relationship that lasted longer than a
year, seeing her whenever he was in the United Kingdom and inviting her occasionally to see him in New York.
^*2

But of all the girls who drifted through his life when he was still legally married to Abbott, none would have the impact of Toukie Smith, a buoyant woman whom
Esquire
once called “a cyclone of dizzy charm.” Smith was a well-known figure in the New York fashion and dance worlds, in the city’s night life and charitable circles—in connection, it often seemed, with anything and everything to do with glamour, sparkle, and joie de vivre.

She was born in 1953 in Philadelphia, the youngest of three children of a butcher and a factory worker. Her parents split when she was four, and she and her older brothers, Willi and Norman, were raised by the combined energies of her mother’s family. In that female-dominated household, Willi, the eldest, born five years before his sister, liked to joke that there was more clothing than food. He became interested in fashion and clothing design from a young age, winning a scholarship to the Parsons School of Design in New York. Soon after graduating, he entered the world of women’s fashion with great energy, flair, and—for his age—success.

By the time he was twenty-five, Smith was one of the stars of a boom in African American fashion designers, with his clothing—mainly sports and evening wear for women of ordinary means—regularly featured in layouts in
Vogue
,
Glamour
, and the
New York Times.
And he had a favorite model, who sometimes gave him inspirations for specific designs: his sister, Doris, aka Toukie, thus dubbed for the way she pronounced the “toot-toot” of a choo-choo train in a favorite childhood song. “Toukie is my total inspiration,” Willi once said. “She has enough energy to light up the World Trade Center.” The fun that Toukie radiated in her modeling perfectly suited her brother’s work; she smiled on the catwalk and actually seemed to mean it, which was just the sort of attitude that Willi’s playful, trendy work embodied: “I don’t design clothes for the Queen,” as he put it, “but for the people who wave at her as she goes by.”

At just twenty years old, Toukie hit New York like a ball of fire. She studied dance with the Alvin Ailey troupe, appeared in almost all of her brother’s fashion shows, designed shoes, attended parties, got a contract to model for Issey Miyake, was named “Bloomingdale’s Favorite Model” of 1978, and signed on with the powerful Wilhelmina modeling agency. She and Willi formed a clothing company that didn’t last long, but he rebounded with a more stable firm, Williwear, that within a decade would grow to serve more than five hundred department stores and gross $25 million per year. And he was a critical as well as financial success. In 1983 he was awarded the Winnie, the top prize for women’s fashion, at the annual Coty American Fashion Critics’ Awards; two years later, he took the top prize at the Cutty Sark Menswear Awards.

Toukie met De Niro at a party after Williwear had become a thriving concern and her star had risen alongside her brother’s. Physically, she was De Niro’s type: bosomy, slender-waisted, very pretty. But she had more energy for socializing, party-going, and scene-making even than Abbott, which seemed to make it unlikely that she and De Niro could sustain a relationship. Yet somehow, because she doggedly maintained her independence from him—“
I tell people, ‘You deal with me as
Toukie Smith
,’ ” she insisted to a reporter—they kept seeing each other and formed a genuine bond that lasted for years. She would appear at premieres with him, at the public events that he rarely (and begrudgingly) attended, at private occasions such as dinner parties and birthdays and the like. But she maintained her own homes in New York and Paris; from his point of view, it was ideal.

As in all of his relationships, including his marriage, which would officially end with what his soon-to-be ex-wife Diahnne Abbott called a “reasonable … pleasant and friendly” divorce in 1989, De Niro was extremely circumspect and private. He had his pleasures, he had his preferences, he had his needs, he had his comforts, and he had his freedom, but he also managed to form genuine connections with formidable women. Soon after the divorce, the open secret of his relationship with Toukie was made public knowledge, and newspapers and such were referring to her as his “companion.”

At the same time as her connection with De Niro was reaching this
public level, Toukie began to suffer a series of personal losses. In 1986 her mother, June Harllee, died in New York of cirrhosis of the liver. In April of the following year came an even more devastating blow: Willi, age thirty-nine, died suddenly—“He went into the hospital on Wednesday and died on Friday,” recalled a business partner—of what was at first reported to be pneumonia and was later acknowledged to be AIDS, which turned lethal very quickly when he contracted a parasite on a trip to India. He had always been frail and secretive, and apparently nobody around him knew how sick he was until it was too late for any of them to be of help or comfort. Toukie was still feeling those losses in June 1988 when she suffered more heartbreak, miscarrying De Niro’s child. Characteristically, she rebounded from these losses with aplomb and vigor. She had been working on AIDS awareness programs and charity through the Smith Family Foundation, which she formed after Willi’s death (De Niro joined her in hosting a Willi Smith Day fund-raiser in April 1990). She did some acting on television, danced and sang in benefits, and continued to make the scene not only on red carpets but, in effect, behind them, building a party-planning business, which grew to include catering, and yet another business as a beauty and fashion consultant, and continuing to model for fashion shows, charitable events, and catalogues. And even as she did all that, the losses continued to pile up. Patrick Kelly, another African American fashion designer close to both Willi and Toukie, died of AIDS in 1990, and Williwear spiraled financially, declaring bankruptcy in 1991, barely four years after its founder’s demise.

D
E
N
IRO HADN
’
T
appeared onstage in any sort of dramatic production since the early 1970s, but his apparently total metamorphosis into a screen actor did not dissuade the indefatigable New York theatrical impresario Joe Papp from trying to coax him back to the stage. In early 1980, Papp, who ran the Public Theater in Greenwich Village and the New York Shakespeare Festival, famed for its summertime productions in Central Park, announced plans to mount a series of repertory plays with big stars, including Meryl Streep, Jill Clayburgh, Raul Julia, and De Niro. De Niro and Streep were said to be cast in three of them, one
being a production of Chekhov’s
Three Sisters
, the other two, unannounced, to be directed by Wilford Leach and Ulu Grosbard. De Niro didn’t really seem serious about the project at the time—“I told them they can use my name,” he explained to
Drama-Logue
—and by the springtime Papp, millions of dollars shy of the funds the venture would require, dropped it.
^*3

But in February 1986 the news broke that Papp had finally landed the big fish he’d had so long on his line: De Niro would be appearing onstage at the Public in April in
Cuba and His Teddy Bear
, the world premiere of the first full-length work by a twenty-six-year-old playwright named Reinaldo Povod. Povod’s play had been developed in playwriting workshops at the Public, but Papp didn’t at first think that it would become one of the star vehicles for which the theater was noted. As he told a reporter: “I had no intention of casting it with stars, but after I read it, I thought, I wonder if De Niro would be interested in this? I had been after him for years to get back to the theater. So I sent him the script.” De Niro, Papp said, “was interested in it, but he kept saying, ‘I don’t know. Well, maybe all right, but I still have these movies to do.’ ”

The play concerned an illiterate Hispanic drug dealer, Cuba, raising his son Teddy in an unpromising and sometimes dangerous environment on the Lower East Side. The boy has aspirations to be a writer, but he has chosen to emulate Che, a famed “playwright junkie” celebrated in the New York media, and his father’s concerns with the protocols and particulars of his own chosen profession blind him to the danger toward which his son is tending.
^*4
The pressures under which the two men live build in the play’s second act to an explosive climax between father and son.

De Niro was vague when asked what drew him to the material: “
I always wanted to do a play, but I wanted to do a new play,” he said.
“New plays are more interesting; you don’t have all the stigma, the baggage you have with old plays. I just felt this one was very well written and very strong.” He wouldn’t commit, but he continued to respond to Papp’s entreaties. “I introduced him to the playwright and his father,” the producer remembered, “and we had two workshop readings with most of the same people who are in the cast with him now. But there was no commitment still, just wait and see. Finally I grabbed De Niro and asked, ‘Are we going to do it?’ and he said, ‘We’ll have to work it out.’ ”

The deal was struck: with a cast that included Burt Young and Ralph Macchio, who had taken part in the workshop readings, De Niro was scheduled to appear in
Cuba
from May 18 through June 14, with preview performances beginning in mid-April. The announcement proved to be lightning at the box office: the entire run of the show was sold out in three hours (impressive, but to be fair, the theater in which the show would be performed seated just over a hundred). Ever innovative, Papp found a way to sell even more tickets: petitioning Actors’ Equity for a waiver of their policies against broadcasts of live plays, he was given permission to air closed-circuit television streams of the performances into another auditorium at the Public’s complex; those seats went for $7 a pop.

The mounting of the play was the sort of work De Niro loved: real roll-up-the-sleeves acting, with lots of conversation about the characters and scenes. As Povod noted, “
He trusted us entirely. He was willing to accept anything we would submit to him and give it a trial. He knew that a lot of the writing had to be examined or tested in rehearsal.” The creators understood they had a rare opportunity at hand, and they were careful not to ask too much of their star; indeed, they gave him the latitude to perform the role as his instincts guided him. As Bill Hart, who was given
Cuba
as his directorial debut, noted, “
With Bob De Niro, you’d just better be very careful about insisting on anything. Because you may insist on something that will be a lot less interesting than something he’s going to come up with himself two weeks from now.”

Young, who’d already appeared in three films with De Niro while sharing virtually no scenes with him, found him an engaged and accessible co-star. “
After rehearsals,” he recalled, “we’d rehearse some
more in his loft. He had a floor plan laid out in his living room and everything. He was meticulous. And very patient with Ralph Macchio, who was his son in the show and had never been onstage before. I thought of Bob as our leader.” In fact, De Niro fostered a variety of bonding efforts with the cast, going so far as to initiate the ritual of a football-team-style huddle before the opening curtain.

The show went through a month of previews before opening on May 18. De Niro was greeted with almost universally positive reviews. De Niro, per Mel Gussow of the
New York Times
, “amasses character detail, and … gives Cuba stage life … he reveals an earthy naturalness and an ability to extinguish his own star charisma. Artfully, he subordinates himself within a company of actors.” In the
Village Voice
, Michael Feingold declared, “Robert De Niro’s an actor, a real actor, and a good one.… He has a lead actor’s authority, which in the theater is a better asset than a star’s mythical magic.” The
New Yorker
declared the performance “stunning” and added that De Niro “couldn’t be better.” Jack Kroll of
Newsweek
, who’d written appreciatively of De Niro’s last stage performance, in Shelley Winters’s
One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger
, said that the star gave his character “a riveting reality.” And the hard-to-please John Simon of
New York
simply said: “As Cuba, Robert De Niro is every bit as effective and affecting as in his best movie roles—more than which I needn’t say.”

The reviews of the actual play were mixed, but commercially
Cuba
was review-proof. That month of previews had sold out in a snap, as had the four weeks of the official run, as had a $250-a-pop benefit performance, which included dinner. Tickets were nearly impossible to come by, even for stars: Tom Cruise, then dominating the movie screen in
Top Gun
, had to sit apart from his date on the night he caught the show, because neither Papp nor De Niro could get him a pair of seats together at the last minute. Powered by De Niro’s presence, if not necessarily his work, the show was a massive hit for the always-underfunded Public Theater. It surprised exactly no one in New York, then, when Joe Papp announced, just as the production was winding down, that he was moving
Cuba and His Teddy Bear
to Broadway.