De Niro: A Life (60 page)

As Cosgrove remembered, De Niro liked best to drive to a quiet place along the Lake Michigan waterfront and pass away the summer night drinking a beer or two and chatting about the work of firemen. He read up on fire investigation techniques, firehouse life, and the causes of and motivations for arson; the subjects of Hollywood and movie stardom seemed never to be in his mind.

To others involved in the production, De Niro seemed a little more inscrutable. When Cosgrove had the opportunity to talk to Ron
Howard about the star, all the director could do was speak in platitudes about his “greatness.” Greg Widen was a little more observant and revealing with a journalist later on, saying of De Niro, “
He’s always cordial, always polite, but I think, in daily life, he can be rattled by things and you can’t be sure what those things are. He can be made uncomfortable. He’s not weird and he never copped an attitude, but he’s apart from the crowd. To know him as a person is grabbing at smoke. He came to the set an unknown quality and, on a personal level, he kind of left it that way.”

The short prep time meant that a lot of De Niro’s thinking about the character showed up in his script pages: lists of the steps a fire investigator would routinely take in the course of his work, reminders that Rimgale was “
not a headline grabber” but rather a sincere and straight character who, like so many firemen, evinced a strain of black humor “
because
of the grimness of [the] situation.” There was an oddness to him, De Niro surmised, but it wasn’t very deep: “Maybe a beard. Or a moustache.” When he probed deeper, he found some odd questions facing him: “I have a certain specific relationship with fire. What is it? Sexual? What? Fascination? Its power?” He introduced a single memorable line into the script, one borrowed from one of Cosgrove’s real-life colleagues; asked by his superiors what had caused a fire, Rimgale, wanting to give away nothing of his thinking, replies, “Mice with matches.” Apart from that, though, he poured very little of his own invention into the role.

T
HE
T
RIBECA
F
ILM
C
ENTER
wasn’t really a movie studio; there weren’t production facilities such as editing rooms or sound stages or labs. But there was one thing that made it seem like something more than just an office building with a very heavy concentration of film biz tenants: the Tribeca Grill. De Niro had dreamed that the interactive energy of the film center would focus on a ground-floor restaurant, which would serve as a clubhouse, a commissary, a watering hole, a gathering place, a party spot. It wouldn’t be a private club—it would have to pay its way just like any lessee. But it would be integral to creating a community space.

De Niro and Toukie Smith were regulars at Montrachet, a popular and critically esteemed French restaurant that had opened just a few blocks from the Film Center site in 1985. It was casual for a French spot, with no dress code, a menu in English, and a prix fixe dinner that cost as little as $16. It offered some of the best food in the neighborhood, and it was run with a real feel for combining the fine with the comfortable. In 1988, when the Film Center was coming together in his mind, De Niro approached the owner of Montrachet, a robust fellow named Drew Nieporent, and asked him if he’d be willing to consider opening a restaurant to anchor the building.

As it happened, Nieporent, who’d grown up wanting to be in the restaurant business, studying hospitality at Cornell and working his way up at some of Manhattan’s best restaurants, was already considering opening another eatery of some sort in Tribeca. He liked the idea of having a little empire of restaurants within walking distance of one another. He agreed to consider it—provided it was funded adequately and built according to his standards.

The funding wasn’t as tricky a matter as it may have seemed, as the late 1980s were a little heyday of showbiz celebrities attaching their names (and wallets) to fine dining establishments in New York and Los Angeles. De Niro had a plethora of friends and colleagues to call upon as potential investors. Some said no, including Madonna, Penny Marshall, Jeremy Irons, Danny DeVito, and Barbra Streisand; the last was all set to invest when she learned that she would have to be fingerprinted by the state liquor board if she were to become an owner of a place that sold booze, and she backed out.

But some two dozen investors fell into place, including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Christopher Walken, Sean Penn, Bill Murray, Ed Harris, Russell Simmons, Lou Diamond Phillips, the Miramax company, and the chairman of Elektra Records—and such non-showbiz types as a Newark poultry wholesaler. A total of $2.8 million was raised, half going to purchase the space, half for renovations. And then, as elsewhere in the building, everything about the place became more elaborate, more exacting, more detailed, more time-consuming, and more costly as they went along. Eventually, another $350,000 was needed, which was raised by refinancing the mortgage agreement.

Some of that money—estimates ranged from $15,000 to $50,000—went to the centerpiece of the restaurant: the mahogany bar that had once dominated Maxwell’s Plum, the famed Upper East Side restaurant and singles bar where Nieporent once waited tables during its heyday in the 1970s. The bar was impeccably restored and placed smack in the middle of the room, creating a space, according to the restaurateur, “in which there really are no bad tables because the action is all around.” (There was a private room in the back to which the truly famous would be directed, but by and large the 150-seat restaurant would mix the famous faces among the hoi polloi.) In other regards, the space was done up in downtown chic, with exposed brick and pipes alongside polished brass and woodwork, small islands of green carpeting (installed for sound control) dotting a tiled floor.

Besides the bar, the most noticeable design touch in the Tribeca Grill was the art on the walls: large canvases and sketches by Robert De Niro, selected and hung by the artist himself. As his son explained, it wasn’t guaranteed at all that the elder De Niro would approve of such a use for his work. “
When I approached him about placing them there,” the younger De Niro said, “I wasn’t sure he’d agree—he was very sensitive about giving paintings away. He’d say, ‘You give it to someone, they put it in a closet.’ But once they were up, he liked going to the restaurant to see them and to have them be seen. Larry Salander [then the senior De Niro’s dealer] was worried about the odors and the food affecting the paintings, but I knew that their being there was something that my father had approved of, had blessed, and I didn’t want to take them down, even for their own good.” After the restaurant opened, in fact, the senior De Niro would occasionally hold court under one of his pieces, dining and drinking with friends, a sight that truly warmed his son’s heart.

After a lengthy string of construction delays and an extended soft opening, the Tribeca Grill finally opened its doors properly for business in April 1990, and it was an immediate hit. Nieporent was doing two seatings a night—three hundred covers—and turning away almost as many diners virtually daily. Both Wall Street and Hollywood seemed to have designated the place as the hot spot of the moment; a
partial list of diners in the first weeks included Dustin Hoffman, Gregory Peck, Tom Selleck, Cyndi Lauper, and New York Mets pitcher Ron Darling. Nieporent was concerned—“A scene can kill a restaurant,” he repeatedly told the press—but the place was booming.

And it wasn’t just celebrity that lured people. The food was praiseworthy as well. At first, just a week or two after the opening,
New York Times
restaurant critic Bryan Miller was dubious about the fare: “The kitchen will not win any Oscars for the food, nor does it strive to.” But two months later, when he wrote a full assessment, his impression of executive chef Don Pintabona’s work had improved. He summed up his two-star review thus: “It is a good thing for the wide-eyed crowd here that the food is very good.… TriBeCa [
sic
] Grill is one celebrity restaurant that needs very little editing. It should enjoy a long run.”

T
HE IDEA TO REMAKE
Cape Fear
, director Lee Thompson’s 1962 thriller about an ex-con seeking revenge against a lawyer who bent the rules to put him away, didn’t originate with De Niro, who would come to fill Robert Mitchum’s shoes as the terrifying vengeance seeker, or with Martin Scorsese, who would come to direct it. Rather, it came from, of all people, Steven Spielberg, who wasn’t exactly noted for the sort of chilling psychosexual drama that made such a memorably disturbing experience of the original film.

But there was a theme of a family in danger in the original source material, the novel
The Executioners
by John D. MacDonald, that was well within Spielberg’s wheelhouse. In 1989, he commissioned a new adaptation of the novel from screenwriter Wesley Strick, who’d been among the writers on the comic creature movie
Arachnophobia
for Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. Thirty years after the original, Strick was free to make the villain of the piece, ex-con Max Cady, even more horrifying and threatening than he had been in the original. But there was a certain Spielbergian patina that would be required for it as well. “
I wrote it as an Amblin thriller,” Strick recalled later on. “It was big-budget and conventional, and it concentrated more on plot invention than it does now.” At some point toward the end of the
year, Spielberg realized that his directorial plate was full, with
Hook
in post-production and
Jurassic Park
in the planning stages, so he became open to finding someone else to make
Cape Fear.

At the same time, he recognized that De Niro would be an exciting choice for Max Cady, and he sent him the script. De Niro liked what he saw well enough to agree to appear in it provided the right director and co-stars were found. The list of prospective directors proposed by Amblin was all over the place: Warren Beatty (who they hoped might also be willing to play Cady’s target), Robert Redford (ditto), Ridley Scott, Jonathan Demme, Kathryn Bigelow, Mike Figgis, Harold Becker, Paul Verhoeven, Tony Scott, Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, and more—a real smorgasbord of styles and talents with few obvious similarities. The suggestions about who might play the lawyer/father were equally diverse: besides Beatty and Redford, they included Mel Gibson, Gene Hackman, Jeremy Irons, Robin Williams, Michael Keaton, Clint Eastwood, Anthony Hopkins, Kevin Costner, Kevin Kline, Don Johnson, Jeff Goldblum, Bruce Dern, John Lithgow, Donald Sutherland, and Liam Neeson. At this point the film could have been anything.

But then De Niro had an idea: why not offer the film to Martin Scorsese? At first, as with
Raging Bull
, Scorsese didn’t want to do it. He was a lifelong fan of the original film and he had never made a remake (though he had done well with a sequel, 1987’s
The Color of Money
, which updated 1961’s
The Hustler
). What was more, Scorsese had been working on an idea for his next film, an adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s
Schindler’s List
, a project about the Holocaust in which Spielberg had also shown interest. Urged by De Niro to consider
Cape Fear
(“We can do something with this guy,” the actor told his longtime director), and with Spielberg willing to, in effect, swap it for
Schindler
, Scorsese softened. (According to Strick, De Niro and Spielberg “
together sort of twisted Marty’s arm—relentlessly, from what I gather.”) In July 1990, a table reading of the script was held for Scorsese’s benefit in New York, with De Niro as Cady, Kevin Kline as the attorney Sam Bowden, Patricia Clarkson as his wife, Leigh, and Moira Kelly as their daughter, Dany. Scorsese perked up. He agreed to go ahead with the film.

In the coming months, Scorsese and De Niro put Strick through
extensive rewrites of the script, removing all traces of the sweetness and family focus with which Spielberg had sought to infuse his version, and the cast started to fill in. Nick Nolte, who’d worked with Scorsese on
Life Lessons
, would play Sam (after Redford nearly took the job), and Jessica Lange would play Leigh. Various actors from the original film, including Mitchum, Gregory Peck (the original Sam), Martin Balsam, and Telly Savalas, were offered cameo parts; all but Savalas appeared. But by the end of August, the role of the daughter hadn’t yet been filled. Scorsese and De Niro spent several long days auditioning young actresses, including Moira Kelly, Fairuza Balk, Ileana Douglas, and Martha Plimpton. (Another hopeful, Reese Witherspoon, remembered her visit with De Niro and Scorsese as a disaster. She didn’t know them by name when her agent prepared her for the meeting, she said, and then, “when I walked in, I did recognize De Niro, and I just lost it. My hand was shaking, and I was a blubbering idiot.”) Finally they cast Juliette Lewis, a nearly unknown seventeen-year-old from Los Angeles, in the key role.

De Niro was making
Backdraft
while the casting, rewriting, and pre-production work was going on, but he had decided to take a producer’s interest in
Cape Fear
and he kept abreast of all of the developments. He dove into the role with an energy not unlike that he’d expended on his research for
Goodfellas
or even
Raging Bull
—as if only working with Scorsese could get him to immerse himself at his fullest capacities.

Most impressive was that he completely remade his body. For
Raging Bull
he’d honed himself into the picture of youthful athleticism and then piled on abuse to embody a pathetic extreme of excess. For
Cape Fear
, he wanted to resemble a jailhouse hard case, a man who’d spent his time in prison sculpting himself into a weapon of vengeance. As De Niro noted on a piece of hotel stationery while in Chicago making
Backdraft:
“I [that is, Max Cady] worked out to keep from cracking up, going crazy.” He stuck to a meticulous diet and exercised hard daily, building up the muscles in his chest, back, and arms. When he arrived on the
Cape Fear
set in Florida in the fall, he was carrying just 3 percent body fat. “He’s probably the most focused person I’ve ever met,” marveled his personal trainer, Dan Harvey. During production, De Niro would spend his nights working out for as much as five hours
at a stretch, and he asked Scorsese to shoot his several bare-chested shots at the end of the film so that his body would be at its most jacked.