De Niro: A Life (52 page)

That agreement turned into a long process of script drafting. Mamet quickly realized that he had to throw away not only the fondly remembered
Untouchables
of his youth but the historical record as well. The story he crafted, over a series of first three and then ultimately seven drafts of the script, was a mythical tale of a white knight and a dark-hearted villain, with Chicago as a kind of fairy kingdom over which they struggled for control. Mamet envisioned Ness as a puritanical Treasury agent who has none of the street smarts needed for the battle. He acquires a mentor in Jimmy Malone, a weary veteran patrolman who is sick of corruption and relishes the chance to go head-to-head with Capone on something like equal terms. Mamet’s Capone wasn’t
the drooling psychopath of some other film versions (in particular the Capone-inspired character played by Al Pacino in 1983’s
Scarface
); rather, he was a man of slick words, political savvy, and even a kind of charm, utterly and irredeemably ruthless when he needed to be, but able to consort with journalists, celebrities, and elected officials on something like
their
own terms.

Linson brought the script to Brian De Palma, who had directed that recent hit version of
Scarface
but had become best known as a director of stylish gore with strong influences of Alfred Hitchcock and other masters, whose works he often cheekily quoted in films such as
Carrie
,
Dressed to Kill
,
Blow Out
, and
Obsession.
De Palma was in something of a low moment—he had just flopped with a goofball mob comedy,
Wise
Guys—when Linson approached him. He saw the potential for an
Untouchables
that combined elements of myth and even comic book morality with a traditional gangster picture and a stylish look and feel. He, too, was in.

But without a star, they would get nowhere in their quest for a $15–$20 million budget from Paramount. For the almost-too-good-to-be-true Ness, they were steered by the studio toward box office heavyweights Harrison Ford, William Hurt, and Mel Gibson, and they were grateful, Linson said, to learn that they were all unavailable. Mamet’s Ness wasn’t as heavy a presence as those fellows, at least not at first. They needed someone whom the audience could see grow from a naive out-of-towner to a figure equivalent to the titanic Capone.

They found their man in Kevin Costner, a lean and handsome thirty-one-year-old actor from Southern California who’d broken into showbiz as a tour guide at Disneyland and who’d had only sporadic luck in movies thus far. He’d been offered the lead in the computer-themed adventure movie
War Games
and turned it down for a role in the ensemble film
The Big Chill
, only to have his part cut entirely out of the picture save for a shot of his wrist at the very outset. He appeared in a bicycling movie called
Fandango
and had a splashy role in the western
Silverado
(a makeup call, as it were, from
Big Chill
writer-director Lawrence Kasdan). But despite his good looks and all-American bearing, he hadn’t really entered into the awareness of most moviegoers or, indeed, moviemakers. He was, however, fresh-faced and
clean-seeming and carried a natural combination of grace and dignity that felt of a piece with the personae of Gary Cooper and James Stewart. He fit Mamet’s vision of Ness perfectly.

As Ness’s mentor, the streetwise Malone, they cast Sean Connery, whose raffish worldliness and thick brogue (Scottish, not Irish, yes, but still …) were ideal for the contours of Mamet’s character. And as the slick, ferocious Capone they hit on the stocky, menacing English actor Bob Hoskins, who’d come to worldwide attention playing a gangster in 1980’s
The Long Good Friday
and had recently played an American mobster in Francis Ford Coppola’s ill-fated 1984 period crime-and-music film
The Cotton Club.
Not only was Hoskins happy to play the small but powerful part, he was willing to do it for the producers’ budget line for the role: $200,000.

But Hoskins, Linson admitted later, wasn’t their first choice. That was De Niro. When De Palma and De Niro first talked about Capone, the actor seemed loath to add a significant film role to his workload so soon after the arduous process of appearing live onstage. It was true that Capone made only a handful of appearances in Mamet’s script. But it was a role that De Niro, who’d been playing a lean and hungry drug dealer onstage, would have to undergo another of his famed transformations to fill. “I didn’t want to have to carry a movie,” he said yet again when asked about his motives for taking on a relatively small role. “But doing
The Untouchables
was a lot like being a principal in the movie because of the preparation I had to do.”

There would be a weight gain, and another episode of applied indulgence in rich foods. His hair, too, was all wrong: Cuba the gangster wore his long hair slicked back into a ponytail, while Capone had a thinning pate, and so De Niro would have wanted to alter his own hairline to play the part. And there was a long history of, in his view, bad screen Capones: he didn’t like Paul Muni in the original
Scarface
, for instance, or Rod Steiger in 1959’s
Capone.
What with the heavy lifting the role would entail, the hard work he’d just finished, and the relatively small fee the production would be able to offer him, it was easiest to tell De Palma thanks but no thanks.

Still, he was genuinely interested in the part. At the same time, Linson and De Palma were getting anxious about the actors they’d already
signed. “
Brian and I both worried,” the producer recalled, “that with Connery being a Scot and Hoskins English, it was beginning to feel like a foreign cast. We needed De Niro.” They knew the studio would balk at the additional expense of De Niro’s salary, so they devised a plan that would allow them, in effect, to force the studio to hire him. They put off the Capone scenes until the end of the shoot, taking the chance that they would soon be able to demonstrate to Paramount executives the point of enhancing the film through the hiring of a real movie star.

In the fall, just as production began in Chicago, Paramount’s Ned Tanen flew in to see how things were going. He was impressed by the preparation and the footage that had already been shot—the bombing of a speakeasy. Then Linson and De Palma sat him down and De Palma laid out his case to pursue De Niro: “
We have the opportunity to get De Niro to play Capone. I believe if we stay with the cast we have, shorten the schedule [as the studio was hoping], and reduce the scale of the picture, that you will end up with a movie that at best will be suited for ‘Masterpiece Theatre.’ It is not the movie I want to direct. It will not work, and I cannot afford to make a movie that will not work.” Linson added, “Ned, think of it, when Bob De Niro kills somebody with a baseball bat, with Brian directing, it will never be forgotten.”

Tanen was hesitant, but he was mollified by word that De Niro would be willing to drop his fee by $1 million, taking $1.5 million and a piece of the gross of the film as his salary. He begrudgingly agreed to replace Hoskins, paying the actor his entire fee as a parting gift. Hoskins, for his part, had absolutely nothing bad to say. Asked if he was upset at being let go, he told a reporter, “
Are you kidding? I got $200,000 for doing nothing and went on to my next project. De Niro has shown me only kindness. He’s a real friend. He’s helped me shop for my wife’s and my kids’ Christmas presents. He’s invited me around to meet his granny, and he’s come to my house for a pot-luck dinner. That really knocked my wife out. I think she was finally impressed with me. You can’t do better than that for a friend.”

Working with De Niro had been smooth thus far. His only demand had been that all his scenes be shot on continuous workdays, which actually
made things easier for the production. But when he showed up in Chicago for rehearsals, some weeks before he was scheduled to begin shooting, Linson was alarmed. The producer went with De Palma to visit De Niro in a hotel suite and couldn’t believe that the thin, sheepish fellow before him was the man he’d just hired to play Al Capone. “
He was thin; his face was gaunt. He was quiet and he looked young. His hair was thick and low on his forehead and he wore a ponytail.” As he later recalled, “If De Palma’s introduction had not confirmed that this was Robert De Niro, I would’ve asked for some verification.” When they left after their chat with the actor, Linson put his fears bluntly to De Palma: “If I didn’t know that was Robert De Niro, I’d say we were doomed. Tell me we haven’t made fools of ourselves.”

Determined to go forward, De Niro told Linson about some problems he was having with the script. To De Niro’s surprise, the producer indicated that Mamet had turned hostile toward the production and might not even be willing to answer any of his questions; he gave De Niro Mamet’s phone number and wished him luck. Then he accompanied him to the wardrobe department, where De Niro looked at the costumes that had been prepared for him and declared them “
great … good … nice … interesting …” Linson knew that what he was hearing was, in fact, the opposite of what the words said. “You have come to the conclusion that you hate the wardrobe,” he said. “You would like me to start over and have it completely redesigned … under your supervision.” De Niro smiled. Linson calculated another $50,000 had just been added to his budget, but he had passed the point at which he could say no.

De Niro took off for Italy, where he spent five or six weeks eating an obscenely rich diet like the one he’d indulged in during the production of
Raging Bull.
Linson, meanwhile, put in orders for ten bespoke suits, at $3,000 each, from a tailor whom De Niro recommended in lower Manhattan who’d actually made clothes for Al Capone. He also splurged on underwear: silk, from the famed Sulka haberdashery, which again was where the real Capone had shopped. Per De Niro’s instructions, specific items of jewelry, hats, even cigars (Havanas, illegal, at $25 a pop) were obtained. Now all they needed was their Capone.

That winter, with production well under way, they got him. De
Niro returned to Chicago plumped out and with his hairline altered, unrecognizable as the quiet fellow from the previous visit. He sat for the makeup department to give him a prosthetic nose, then went into the wardrobe trailer, put on his silk drawers and bespoke suit, donned a fedora, lit a cigar, and stepped out onto the set. “
It was like witnessing a grand magic trick performed by a maestro,” Linson recalled. “Without uttering a word, by merely strolling to his position in front of the camera, Capone–De Niro suddenly became sly, dangerous, confident, and even witty. The entire crew felt the electricity.… The character had been created.”

Of course, that magical transformation was the result of another of De Niro’s deep exercises in mining and creating a character. He watched several of his old movies, particularly
Raging Bull
and
Once Upon a Time in America
, and compared his performances with images of Capone from newsreels; he read books by people who knew Capone, practiced working with a cigar, acquired a manicure and a suntan, listened to Capone’s favorite operas, and looked at hundreds of photographs of Capone and other gangsters of the 1920s, paying particular attention to their clothing, haircuts, hats, and jewelry. (He sought, and failed to find, an audio recording of Capone’s voice. “Getting the voice is
the
most difficult thing,” he complained.) The hair was particularly vexing, he admitted: “
It took a week, sitting in a barber’s chair for seven hours at a stretch while they snipped and shaved and tweezed, checking with photographs of Capone. It was incredible; if just one hair was off it looked artificial.”

He built his Capone as a man of words, of public relations, of political theater; larger than life, kingly, even godlike. He reminded himself in his script notes to move his head only barely, to speak clearly and forthrightly in expectation of deference, to make a show of candor when it seemed beneficial, to consider that Capone had acquired so much power and authority at a relatively young age, to always remember that he was a spectacle, that people were watching him, that even his most out-of-control moments had to have an element of restraint and dignity. He contrasted Capone’s Neapolitan heritage with the Sicilian blood of Vito Corleone: “
The Sicilian is a darker personality, closer to Africa,” he opined. “The Neapolitans are more lively and
flamboyant.” The baseball bat scene, in which Capone hosts a banquet and then beats a pair of traitors to death in front of his tuxedo-clad minions, drove him to real depths of self-examination. “
It’s also personal what they did to me,” he wrote in his script. “Just think of self, betrayals in life!… These men have betrayed me and I am now giving them a lesson to respect
loyalty! Loyalty!
… A little tighter and shorter cause I’m about to kill these motherfuckers right here.”

In total, he spent eleven days filming as Capone—not even two weeks of work after putting on nearly thirty pounds. (“I promise you,” he told a German interviewer, “I will never do it again.”) He commanded a suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he had a barber chair installed, having his hair and nails worked on every single day. In the final film he would be seen in only seven scenes, some quite fleeting, and yet, just as Linson hoped and De Palma knew, he was a dominant presence throughout. As Sean Connery put it, “He appears very little in the film, but you always know he’s there.”

He was there, too, in the spring of 1987, when the film was being test-screened (his grandmother Helen De Niro gave Linson, who didn’t know who she was, a fit of anxiety by leaving the theater to use the bathroom repeatedly throughout an early screening). And he showed up at other screenings and even did a few interviews. Not only had Paramount gotten him for a lowered price, but they got more out of him, at least publicity-wise, than anybody had in years.

And it paid off.

W
HEN WE FIRST
see him, he is recumbent in a barber’s chair, photographed from above, with a marble floor beneath him and his left arm extended into space: the Adam of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling with no God reaching across the void to bring him to life. He is attended by a manicurist, a shoeshine boy, and a barber, who presently unveils his client’s round, seal-like, hood-eyed face from beneath a hot towel. Three reporters and four bodyguards stand nearby, awaiting his word. “It is the time of Al Capone,” we are told by introductory titles, and the truth of that blunt statement is patently clear from this initial glance.