De Niro: A Life (78 page)

O
N
J
ULY 27, 2000,
V
IRGINIA
A
DMIRAL PASSED AWAY IN
N
EW
York at age eighty-five, and in keeping with the silence in which she preferred to live—“I want to keep my life
my life
,” she’d once told a reporter—the news didn’t reach the
New York Times
until August 15. She had been a formidable woman, active in the arts (especially her own painting), a vocal participant in political issues, and busy with her various real estate deals. At various times she had owned buildings in several lower Manhattan neighborhoods, some quite well known in bohemian circles and some further beyond, such as the building that housed Gerdes Folk City up until the club was evicted for excessive noise in 1986. She had never remarried, but she had been present in the life of her only son, not quite a matron but a part of his circle. Near the end of her life, she had even gone door-to-door for him among his neighbors in Montauk, asking if they would mind if De Niro expanded his house (her efforts failed). De Niro never rhapsodized about her as he did his father, but he was filially respectful and, in his fashion, connected.

While Admiral passed away quietly, her onetime husband and lifelong partner continued to be in the spotlight nearly a decade after his death, and not only because of his son’s movie world fame. Through the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, the elder De Niro’s work was exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States and in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Japan. Along with these came catalogue publications, often with essays filled with reminiscences of the man and insights into his work, culminating in a large and handsome hardbound volume in 2004. The book included photographs of the
painter, biographical and critical writings about his life and art, and reproductions of scores of his works in a variety of media, including his poetry and art criticism.

By then, the elder De Niro’s reputation had taken on far more luster than it had at any time in his life after that first flush of glory in the 1940s—a classic instance of the stereotypical artist-neglected-in-his-lifetime. In 1995, the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “
I feel indebted to Robert De Niro Sr.… for many glancing hits of pleasure over the last 30 years.… He was a New York treasure.” And a decade later, a critic of a completely opposed sensibility, Hilton Kramer, wrote:

A
S HIS FATHER
’
S
reputation continued to swell, De Niro’s continued to ebb. For decades De Niro had been known as a chameleon, able to transform himself wholly into someone else, someone he’d never been before. He didn’t do it as often as he used to; there was more mannerism and repetition in his work in his fifties than there had ever been before. He was still respected, although not so unconditionally as once. But his most daring transformations seemed to be well behind him,
Cape Fear
notwithstanding.

Now that he was doing comedies, in fact, his various screen personae became a ripe target of spoofs. Roles such as Travis Bickle, Michael Vronsky, Jake LaMotta, and Al Capone had become so enshrined as cultural icons that they were ripe for parody, or at least gentle comedy. The old, frighteningly immersive De Niro, apparently so at home in roles teetering on madness, was far enough in the past to have lost any sense of threat. And the new comic De Niro—softer, more domesticated, familiar—bore habits and tics that were endearing or at least comforting, rather than frightening or intimidating.

As a result, he was becoming a favorite subject of impressionists and others seeking to make a little bit of comic hay by imitating his physical and vocal manner. The most famous of these—and one of the earliest and best—was Frank Caliendo, an impersonator of genuine talent and range (he did John Madden
and
Charles Barkley, for instance). His De Niro, like so many others in its wake, began with the eyes and cheeks—an exaggerated squint and a tight, furtive smile, often rendered with the shoulders slightly hunched, the head slightly bobbing, the hands upraised in a “whattaya want from me” gesture. You could do De Niro by simply mugging with your face clenched and your head nodding, saying nothing, and people could still see it. But there were standard lines, too: “You talking to me?” of course, and “Never knocked me down, Ray,” plus the baseball bat scene from
The Untouchables
and the “You insulted him a little bit” business from
Goodfellas.

An apotheosis of sorts of this kind of thing came on MTV’s
Celebrity Deathmatch
, a TV comedy series in which movie stars and their ilk engaged in professional wrestling bouts rendered in Claymation. In 1999, the show pitted De Niro against Al Pacino in a match refereed by the rotund Marlon Brando and following the rule that the combatants needed to talk and fight in the personae of characters they’d played. De Niro was the winner, fighting as Jake LaMotta and Travis Bickle before transforming into Al Capone and using Brando’s minute sidekick from
The Island of Dr. Moreau
as a baseball bat with which to smash his rival’s head clear off. (And it was done quite funnily and intelligently, in fact.)

An even stranger use of De Niro’s manner and aura came to light in November 2001 when a fifty-one-year-old New Jersey man named Joseph Manuella, who bore a genuinely striking resemblance to his movie hero, was arrested on two counts of criminal impersonation after he posed as De Niro and convinced an upstate New York man who operated a private museum dedicated to Vietnam veterans to build sets on his property for a film about the war. Manuella, billing himself as De Niro, met with Vietnam vets in the region, asking them to share stories of their experiences, promising them considerations and payoffs when the movie got made; he got free meals and hotel rooms in
exchange for autographs. His victim, who was living on a military pension, finally began to realize that the “star” wasn’t who he said he was when he started griping about having to lay out $300 of his own money to purchase supplies.

A few years later, a short documentary about Manuella and a Joe Pesci impersonator named Mario Occhicone was actually submitted to the Tribeca Film Festival; in one scene, Manuella was shown carefully applying a mole to his right cheek to enhance his De Niro–ish appearance. De Niro and the festival had no comment about the film, but De Niro’s lawyer, Tom Harvey, was happy to offer a comment on Manuella: “
He’s pathetic, and it’s sad that he hasn’t learned his lesson. I hope he seeks help.”

T
HE STUNNING SUCCESS
of
Meet the Parents
overshadowed De Niro’s next picture, a rather by-the-book biopic of a significant but overlooked pioneer of racial equality, Carl Brashear, the first black sailor to attain the rank of master diver in the United States Navy. Born to a Kentucky dirt-farming family, Brashear had tried to join the army just before it was fully integrated in 1948; rebuffed, he entered the navy and was assigned to menial duties. But he was fascinated by the work of salvage divers and requested admission to diving school, an assignment that was denied him more than a hundred times, by his count, before he was finally admitted in 1954. He continued to run into racial barriers—both institutional and personal—in diving school and, after he graduated, in the active ranks. But he continued to rise, working at the requisite academic exercises and mastering deep sea diving techniques until in 1964 he achieved the rank of first-class diver.

Two years later, helping to recover a hydrogen bomb that had fallen to the bottom of the Mediterranean after a plane crash, he nearly died in an accident caused by equipment failure. He survived only by agreeing to have his left leg amputated. After being fitted with a prosthesis, he refused to leave the service, insisting that he could do the same work he’d done before his accident and just as well. He went through grueling tests to prove himself, including walking twelve steps unassisted while wearing three hundred pounds of diving equipment inside
a naval courtroom, before being reinstated. His designation as a master diver followed in 1970.

Brashear’s story came to De Niro and Tribeca in 1996 under the title
Navy Diver
, with the thought that De Niro would play a composite character built out of the bigoted senior officers who made Brashear’s progress so difficult. But it wasn’t until three years later that it became a tenable reality when Cuba Gooding Jr., an Oscar for
Jerry Maguire
on his mantle, agreed to play the lead. It was touch-and-go for a bit—Gooding was in and then he wasn’t. But finally, in the summer of 1999, the film was shot in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia under the eyes of director George Tillman Jr., who had a family-reunion film,
Soul Food
, as his best-known feature credit.

De Niro was cast as Master Chief Billy Sunday, a son of the South with a ferocious drinking problem married to a younger woman whose own boozy, flirtatious behavior brought out the worst in her husband. Charlize Theron, still better known for her beauty than her talent, was cast as his wife, Gwen, after the likes of Hope Davis, Kelly Lynch, Julia Ormond, Sheryl Lee, Mimi Rogers, Virginia Madsen, and Elizabeth Perkins read for the role.

De Niro was provided by Tillman and screenwriter Scott Marshall Smith with extensive notes comparing the script to the actual details of Brashear’s life and with item-by-item comparisons of the lives of Brashear and the (fictional) Sunday. But he was chiefly interested in the character’s Arkansas dialect, in the alcoholic codependency of Sunday and his wife, and in the details of diving. He took a course in commercial diving in Seattle and achieved a diploma in surface-supplied air and helium diving from the Divers Institute of Technology. He was put up in a rented private home while shooting in and around Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, British Columbia, and Grace and Elliott came to stay with him, the baby’s toys and crib and such shipped west at the production’s expense.

As Gooding recalled, De Niro took to the role of a military taskmaster so seriously that the real servicemen hired to play extras were cowed by him. “He was walking in front of us,” the actor said, “and there were some 25 soldiers in front of him, and a good majority were Navy SEALs—big, strong guys. He messed up one of his lines, and one
of them laughed. But he stayed right in character and went up to him and demanded, ‘What the fuck!’ and scared the hell out of the guy. The next day, every single extra was performing just like he was in the military.”

When the film, retitled
Men of Honor
, showed up in theaters in November 2000, it was recognized as earnest but unexceptional, doing a semirespectable $49 million at the box office, where
Meet the Parents
was still going strong.

B
EFORE SPENDING ALL
that time in the water on the West Coast to make
Men of Honor
, De Niro worked on a more or less routine police thriller shot mainly in New York and entitled
15 Minutes
after Andy Warhol’s famous precept about the nature of celebrity in the modern world. The film was written in the early 1990s by its eventual director, John Herzfeld, as a caustic look at the phenomenon of instant celebrity that became increasingly common in the age of reality television. It focused on a pair of East European criminals who come to New York to film themselves committing heinous crimes. A cop (De Niro) and fire marshal (Edward Burns) combine forces to track the bad guys down as the crime spree grows increasingly awful.

At this point, De Niro had played enough roles of this sort in enough films of this type that he did very little in the way of extra preparation or research. Arguably, he was the least involved he’d been in any film role he’d undertaken up to this time. The hardest task he faced, in fact, was a chase scene, shot on Madison Avenue, in which he did his own stunt work despite the summertime heat soaring into the triple digits. (“He earned his money that day,” Herzfeld said.) The film was shot and in the can for more than a year before being released by New Line Pictures in the slow season of late winter 2001; it grossed $24.4 million against a budget of nearly double that size.

M
EET THE
P
ARENTS
was still atop the box office charts when De Niro’s agents negotiated another pay raise for a film that promised to be many of the things that
Meet the Parents
never even tried to be.
The Score
was based on a script that was ultimately credited to the combined efforts of Lem Dobbs, Kario Salem, Scott Marshall Smith, and Daniel E. Taylor, although there would be several more hands involved in it along the way, including one of the principal stars. It centered on Nick, a Montreal jazz club owner and veteran thief who agrees to engage in one final heist as a favor to his old fence, Max. The two, along with Jack, a young upstart who has ambitions to be a master crook like the older men, have plans to steal a one-of-a-kind jewel-encrusted scepter. Nick doesn’t want to undertake the job because he doesn’t trust the kid and he has a girlfriend who wishes he would quit the life of crime.

Nobody was asking De Niro to quit his line of work. Mandelay Pictures gave him $15 million to play Nick and allowed him to revamp the script. Frank Oz, the former Muppeteer (and voice of Yoda) who had directed such popular comedies as
Bowfinger
,
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
,
What About Bob?
, and
In and Out
, had Ben Affleck in mind to play Jack. But Affleck bowed out, penning a heartfelt letter to De Niro saying that he didn’t feel he was up to the challenge (“If I’m going to work with an actor of your caliber, I’d better be great—and this is not a role I can be great in”). Affleck was soon replaced by Edward Norton, an exciting young actor with two Oscar nominations in his first five films. And then Mandelay scored a truly tremendous coup in casting the world-weary Max: Marlon Brando, who had barely made a film since 1996’s risible
The Island of Dr. Moreau
, agreed, after a two-hour meeting with Oz, to join the party.