De Niro: A Life (81 page)

Over the years, levels of the bloodborne protein PSA, which when elevated indicate prostate disease, had always been in the normal range, though they had risen over time, as happens in many men; an upward trend in the PSA doesn’t necessarily indicate cancer. Still, in the later summer of 2003, the combination of his family history and the widely publicized prostate cancer episodes of Rudolph Giuliani, Joe Torre, and John Kerry inspired De Niro to get even more serious, to seek out a second urologist and to have a biopsy taken of his prostate, which was the most definitive way to identify or rule out cancer. “
I decided to be even more proactive about monitoring my prostate health,” he said. “I was concerned because of my age, and because [my PSA] was rising a bit. Although everybody was telling me there’s no problem, I still was concerned because my father had died from it and I just wanted to be a little more proactive.” On October 10, 2003, he had a biopsy taken.

Three days later, De Niro was in a Manhattan clothing store being fitted for costumes for a new film,
Hide and Seek
, which was set to begin shooting on October 27 and in which he would play a widowed New York psychiatrist whose daughter begins to have supernatural visions. As a routine part of the pre-production process, he was given a medical examination in the store by a doctor working for the producers and the insurance company that protected the production against delays and interruptions caused by health problems in essential members of the cast and crew. That exam raised no flags, and as a result, De Niro and the production were forthwith insured by Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company to the tune of $2 million.

Two days after that, De Niro learned from his urologist that his biopsy had come back positive for prostate cancer.

It was, of course, staggering news. De Niro had just turned sixty, approximately the same age his father was at the time his cancer was diagnosed, and even though the thought of cancer had always loomed over him, he declared himself “shocked” in a statement his spokesperson revealed to the world a week later. In the years since the senior De Niro’s cancer had been discovered, the survival rate of prostate cancer patients had dramatically increased from 67 percent to 97 percent, a trend attributed in large part to public awareness of the disease and an emphasis on screening and early treatment. The elder De Niro had struggled for a decade before succumbing, but his son was fortunate to have caught his condition earlier, almost without symptoms to prompt him to look for it. Given the very early detection and De Niro’s overall fine health—he still worked out regularly to keep himself trim—his chance for a complete recovery was excellent.

On December 1, he went into Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital, Manhattan’s premier cancer treatment facility, to have surgery to remove the cancerous tissue; there were no complications of any significance, and his recovery went well. And by late January, he began production on
Hide and Seek.

In October 2006, long after the shoot had wrapped, Fireman’s Fund sued De Niro for fraud and misrepresentation, claiming that he had bent the facts when he was examined on October 13 of the previous year and declared that he had never had cancer and had never been treated for prostate illness—both true on the day. The case went to trial, and in March 2008 a California court found in De Niro’s favor, a decision upheld by the Court of Appeals of California in June 2009.

That was a gratifying result, though not nearly as gratifying, of course, as being free of a disease the fear of which had loomed over him for so long. And there was another positive outcome: during the time of his treatment, the person whom he could most rely on and who looked most vigilantly after him turned out to be his wife, Grace Hightower, who just a year or two before had been living apart from him and trading barbs with him in court and in gossip columns.

Somehow, despite the acrimony and the court visits and the splashy tabloid headlines of just a few years prior, the problems between them vanished. Not right away, not in so public a forum as their quarrels and
split had been afforded. But by the summer of 2003, Hightower and Elliot were once again living in Tribeca with De Niro, she helped stage his sixtieth-birthday party at Le Cirque, and they traveled to Montecatini, Italy, where they were feted by restaurateur Sirio Maccioni at a gala dinner at which Andrea Bocelli sang.

Perhaps it was the counseling in which they took part, per the judge’s orders. Or perhaps it was the growing recognition that Elliot was facing challenges greater than those that caused friction between his parents. Although no diagnosis would ever be made public, De Niro would occasionally allude to having a child who suffered from an emotional disorder, a description that didn’t fit either the oldest kids, Drena and Raphael, who were adults embarking upon independent lives and careers, or the twins, who were attending school along with their peers.

Whatever the reason, the reunited couple seemed determined to make it last. In November 2004 they renewed their vows in a civil ceremony on the grounds of the farmhouse De Niro owned in Ulster County in the Hudson Valley. This time it was a bash, with 150 guests including Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Harvey Keitel, Chazz Palminteri, Tom Brokaw, Ben Stiller, and all of De Niro’s children. Guests gathered around an indoor pool while two justices of the peace (“So they can make sure this one sticks,” De Niro joked) supervised an exchange of rings. A meal from Nobu, a raspberry napoleon cake baked by Daniel Boulud, and cases of Veuve Clicquot were served, and the newly recommitted couple danced to Tina Turner’s rendition of “Simply the Best.”

I
N
2002, he made two pictures.
Analyze That
, the sequel to the 1999 film that changed his life and career, was another milestone for him: a $20 million payday. But it was a film that nobody involved with it seemed to want to make.
“I don’t know if I
hoped
it would go away or I
thought
it would go away,” writer-director Harold Ramis said when it was released. As Ramis explained, De Niro was relatively enthusiastic to revisit the big hit, Billy Crystal was “reserved,” and he himself was “skeptical … When I go to the movies, and when I feel people are just flogging the franchise, I resent it.” (As proof, Ramis and his collaborators
had, in fact, successfully resisted the pressure to make a third
Ghostbusters
film for more than a decade.)

Even with De Niro’s salary more than doubling since the first film, when he was paid $8 million,
Analyze That
was made for a lower budget, $60 million compared to $80 million. All the more disappointing, then, that it should make only $32 million total, compared to the previous film’s $107 million. It didn’t help that the reviews were almost universally (and deservedly) condemnatory. But such notices didn’t always put audiences off. Rather, it seemed as if moviegoers were beginning to smell out the quality of De Niro’s recent films before they were released.

His next picture didn’t reverse the trend:
Godsend
, a sci-fi-ish thriller about human cloning shot for approximately $25 million in the fall of 2002 by director Nick Hamm. De Niro’s role was tiny—how else, at this point, could the budget stay so low?—and so was the film’s impact: it earned back only $14.4 million when it was released in the spring of 2004.

That delay, in fact, meant that in 2003, despite all of the energy he was putting into work, De Niro failed to appear in a new release in North American theaters—the first time since 1982. He worked that year: he provided a voice for
Shark Tale
, an animated movie that combined
Finding Nemo
with
The Godfather
, and he appeared, even more randomly, as the Archbishop of Peru in an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
that was shot in Spain and also featured Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Kathy Bates, Geraldine Chaplin, and Gabriel Byrne.
^*2
Both pictures surfaced in American theaters long after they were shot:
Shark Tale
to robust business in October 2004 (with a gross of $161 million, it would be the third-largest box office in De Niro’s career),
San Luis Rey
to puzzlement, obscurity, and $42,880 in ticket sales in June 2005.

I
F IT SOUNDS
crass to think so much about the cost and earnings of these films, it at least provides some sort of context to explain why they
were made. And no film would prove that point more obviously than
Meet the Fockers
, his second sequel to hit multiplexes at Christmastime in two years. As with
Analyze That
, he would command a $20 million fee and Tribeca Productions would be involved in the creation and the profits. But whereas
Analyze That
churned over old ground tiresomely,
Meet the Fockers
was enlivened by the addition of Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman to the comic mix, which turned out to be a canny choice. Playing the parents of Ben Stiller’s Gaylord/Greg, the pair were sex-mad, drug-friendly hippies utterly unlike either their son or his in-laws. De Niro would be asked to do the same things, more or less, as in the first picture, but the context would be significantly wilder.

There were several iterations of the script, including one by David O. Russell, the indie auteur whose
Flirting with Disaster
with Stiller had been a smart, if small, hit. But, really, none of that mattered. De Niro had almost nothing to do except show up on the Los Angeles sets, play happily with Hoffman and Stiller, and think about other projects.
Fockers
was an even bigger hit than the original, claiming the top slot in the box office charts for three weeks compared to
Meet the Parents
’s four (a result of being released in the competitive Christmas season), but grossing $279 million in North America and $237 million abroad—nearly double the first film’s earnings and easily the top-grossing film in De Niro’s career.

Meet the Fockers
was still holding its own at the box office in January when the delayed
Hide and Seek
debuted in the number one spot at the American box office. Another potboiler made by another little-known name (the Australian actor-turned-director John Polson), it echoed
The Shining
and
The Sixth Sense
in depicting a fractured man (a widower, De Niro) living in isolation with a child (his daughter, played by Dakota Fanning) with apparent extrasensory knowledge of some horrible secret. The reviews, as they seemed to be for all of De Niro’s films now, were dismissive. But the film was a hit, grossing $51 million against its $25 million budget. When it finally dropped out of the box office top ten, the same week that
Meet the Fockers
did, De Niro had completed the most commercially successful two months of his career. Did it matter what anyone actually thought of the films and his work in them?

I
T SEEMED LIKE A NICE BIT OF PUBLICITY WHEN THE
I
TALIAN
government decided to bestow honorary citizenship on a couple of notables of Italian American descent: Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, two demi-sons of Italy who would be at the Venice Film Festival in August 2004 to present
Shark Tale
, the tongue-in-cheek animated movie about a blood feud between denizens of the deep, with De Niro and Scorsese providing the voices of Mafia-esque fishies.

But when the announcement was made before the festival, an outcry arose in the United States, where a heritage group known as the Order of the Sons of Italy objected to De Niro’s career of portraying mobsters and belittling Italian Americans. “
He has done nothing to promote the image of Italians,” their spokesperson said, “and he has actually damaged their image by constantly playing criminal roles which tarnish the reputation of Italians.” A De Niro spokesman immediately retorted by pointing out that “Robert De Niro has portrayed men of many nationalities. He has portrayed doctors, policemen, bus drivers, presidential advisors, CIA agents, prize fighters, military men and priests. That’s what actors do—portray other people. He has brought nothing but pride and credit to his life, his profession, and his heritage. To suggest otherwise is irresponsible.”

It was a silly spat—like housewives swinging handbags at one another in a Monty Python sketch—but it made for lurid headlines and genuinely hurt feelings. Italian authorities promised to take the protest seriously and look into the question more carefully, leading them to delay awarding De Niro his citizenship. De Niro defended himself personally in Venice: “The characters I play are real. They are real. So
they have as much right to be portrayed as any other characters.” But he felt sufficiently slighted by the whole business to skip a press event in Rome meant to celebrate a showcase of Italian movies at the Tribeca Film Festival, and he was a no-show at a film festival in Milan where he was to be awarded the city’s highest civilian honor, the Gold Medal of St. Ambrose. It would be a full year before the wounds from this absurd slapfight fully healed.