De Niro: A Life (88 page)

He did interviews in
Vanity Fair
(to whose Proust Questionnaire query of “On what occasion do you lie?” he responded, “
When I’m being polite. Like when
Vanity Fair
asked if I wanted to do the Proust Questionnaire and I said, ‘Sure’ ”) and two in the
New York Times
; he visited
CBS This Morning
and
The Tonight Show
and
The David Letterman Show
. In an appearance that made headlines, he broke down in tears on Katie Couric’s syndicated talk show when he revealed, for the first time in public, that he had a son at home who struggled with emotional issues. After Russell described directing his own son in a scene,
Couric asked De Niro if he felt any special responsibility to bring the story to the screen because of the director’s familial situation. De Niro was already on the verge of crying when he started to speak: “I understand what he …” He teared up and raised a finger as if to call a time-out, then wiped his eyes with a tissue that Couric handed him, while Cooper, his own eyes filling, patted him on the shoulder. De Niro continued, his voice choked, “I don’t like to get emotional. But I know exactly what he goes through.” A reaction shot of the audience showed much of it sobbing along with him. It was stunning.

He flew to Los Angeles, where in a single day he put his hands in the cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, attended the annual Oscar luncheon with his fellow nominees from all categories, and spoke at a screening of
Silver Linings
at the American Cinematheque. He attended the BAFTA awards show in London, the AACTA awards show in Sydney, the Screen Actors Guild awards in Los Angeles (he presented Jennifer Lawrence with her prize; “It’s what I do,” he joked), the Los Angeles Italia Fest, where he was himself honored, and the Weinstein Company’s private Oscar weekend shindig. (He missed out on the Golden Globes, which failed to nominate him, staying in Nevada to work on a film and a business project.) He even showed up in person to receive a special proclamation from New York governor Andrew Cuomo acknowledging his New York heritage and all the work he’d done in and for his hometown.

And then, bless him, on Oscar night, he sat beside Grace Hightower applauding graciously as Christoph Waltz (
Django Unchained
) beat him (and Alan Arkin in
Argo
, Philip Seymour Hoffman in
The Master
, and Tommy Lee Jones in
Lincoln
) for the prize. The cliché says that it’s an honor just to be nominated. Throughout the process, from the premiere in Toronto to Oscar night itself, De Niro comported himself as if it truly was.

Y
OU WOULD THINK
that an Oscar nomination and a heartily waged awards season campaign might reignite his career, might make De Niro select roles more prudently or give him more top-shelf stuff from which to choose. But 2013 proved to be the single busiest year in his
acting career, and a rather appalling one—six films in theaters from April to December, almost none of them worth leaving the house to see. There was
The Big Wedding
, a raunchy comedy by director Justin Zackham about a long-divorced couple (De Niro and Diane Keaton) reunited for the nuptials of their adopted son;
Killing Season
, Mark Steven Johnson’s tepid thriller with John Travolta as a Serbian soldier going after the American officer (De Niro) who tripped him up during the Balkan War and has removed himself to isolation in the mountains to deal with his postwar stresses;
The Family
, a dark comedy by Luc Besson about a mobster (De Niro) and his family (including Michelle Pfeiffer as his wife) hidden in a small village in Normandy by the witness protection program;
Last Vegas
, a buddy movie by Jon Turteltaub, with De Niro, Morgan Freeman, and Kevin Kline joining their never-wed chum Michael Douglas for a bachelor weekend in the gambling mecca;
Grudge Match
, with De Niro and Sylvester Stallone directed by Peter Segal as boxers lured back into the ring to settle a beef born thirty years prior; and, the sole appetizing prospect in the bunch,
American Hustle
, a film about financial scams in the 1970s that reunited him—if only for a single powerful scene—with his
Silver Linings Playbook
writer-director David O. Russell and co-stars Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence.

It was, in the main, an appalling butcher’s bill of make-work. The production cycle of filmmaking is such that most of these projects were under contract by the time
Silver Linings Playbook
proved a hit, but there was very little to recommend any of them in any context, much less as follow-ups to an Oscar nomination. Oh, there was some fun to be had in
The Family
, which allowed De Niro to indulge himself in bits of droll self-mockery akin to those practiced by Marlon Brando in
The Freshman
, which explicitly parodied his Don Corleone performance. And there was at least the potential for comic hay to result from such celebrity romps as
Last Vegas
and
Grudge Match.
But, like the overwhelming percentage of the films he had made in the preceding decade, his glut of work in 2013 consisted almost wholly of small movies—small, that is, in ambition, craft, budget, impact, and ultimately in public and critical esteem.

Offscreen, though, he maintained a defter touch. One of the original
ideas for the Greenwich Hotel had been a Japanese-style oasis, a space of minimalism, quiet, clean lines, blank spaces. De Niro couldn’t imagine it in the middle of Tribeca—“He doesn’t like trendy, he doesn’t like square lines. He likes curves, so to speak,” said one of his Greenwich Hotel partners, Ira Drukier. But the idea still appealed to him, and he toyed with the notion of creating a residential hotel—a so-called condotel—with such an aesthetic in Manhattan. The post-crash economy scuttled that plan, but a few years later, with his first hotel running well in the black, he found the perfect setting for a second, built in a strongly Japanese style and carrying the cachet of the Nobu brand: Las Vegas, and specifically Caesar’s Palace.

In February 2013 De Niro was in Nevada shooting
Last Vegas
, and he and Nobu Matsuhisa were on hand to cut the ribbon on the Hotel Nobu, the first of what they hoped would be a series of such hotels around the world. It opened properly in April, revealing itself to be at least as luxurious as the Greenwich and altogether otherworldly, a hotel within a hotel, costing $45 million, with 181 rooms and suites sitting on top of the largest of the twenty-five or so Nobu restaurants. In fact, the Asian-themed rooms featured the first-ever Nobu room service menu, with such breakfast staples as bagels and lox transformed by the chef into a crispy rice cake with salmon sashimi and tofu in lieu of cream cheese.

What on earth was a New York guy like De Niro doing opening a hotel on the Vegas Strip? “I kept seeing that people wanted Nobu to open restaurants in their hotels because it was a calling card,” he explained. “So I asked, ‘Why are we not doing our own?’ Vegas is the place where things are always happening. It was the realization of a dream for me, too. I used to think about building [hotels] in a variety of places where you could have distinct experiences, from the tropics to a winter resort. I’d have fantasies that if I had enough money, I’d give it a shot.” After only a few months of operation, the Nobu Hotel was such a success that it expanded its footprint at Caesar’s Palace, and De Niro’s fantasy of a global empire started to materialize as a distinct possibility, with talks beginning about opening branches of the hotel in London, Riyadh, and Bahrain. By year’s end, he and some business partners, including his son Raphael, had signed an agreement to develop an 850,000-square-foot
hotel, dining, and entertainment complex in Shanghai’s famed Bund district. And yet another hotel site—Manila—was selected.

F
OR A GUY
pushing seventy who seemed shy about chatting, he could get in trouble with his mouth surprisingly often. In March 2012, at a fund-raiser to support the reelection of Barack Obama (whom he’d endorsed in 2008 against Hillary Clinton, despite his long, friendly history with her and her husband), De Niro noted Michelle Obama in the audience and quipped of the wives of the prospective Republican presidential nominees, “Calista Gingrich, Karen Santorum, Ann Romney. Now, do you think our country is ready for a white First Lady?”

It was a harmless if leaden joke, but it provided fuel for people who could get a few headlines out of a show of indignation, such as Newt Gingrich, who demanded an apology from both De Niro and the president. (Ann Romney, to her credit, dismissed the entire episode as trivial.) Michelle Obama’s spokesperson expressed disapproval, De Niro’s expressed contrition, and that was the end of it. (A year and a half later, he’d ruffle conservative feathers again by declaring that President Obama was a “good person” who was doing “the best job he can”—a bland sentiment for which he was pilloried in the right-wing chatter-verse.)

In November of that same year, he attended a charitable fund-raising party marking the birthday of Leonardo DiCaprio and got into a beef with the rapper Jay-Z. The hip-hop artist had noticed De Niro sitting at a table in a room filled with such boldface names as Martin Scorsese, Chris Rock, Emma Watson, Jamie Foxx, and Cameron Diaz, and he came over to say hello, only to find himself being chastised by De Niro for failing to return his phone calls. Jay tried to back out of the matter, and his wife, Beyoncé Knowles, even stepped in to try to mollify De Niro, but the actor, according to the sorts of people who whisper about such goings-on to gossip columnists, wouldn’t relent. In the summer of 2013, promoting his new album, Jay was asked about the incident and declared indignantly that respect was something a person had to earn through his or her comportment, not by virtue of a name, an observation to which De Niro made no recorded retort.

I
N
A
UGUST 2013
his seventieth birthday was marked with a private party at a Manhattan restaurant that was simply crawling with famous flesh. On hand were family members, old friends who might as well have been family (Scorsese, DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Harvey Weinstein), and other big names, Bradley Cooper and Keith Richards among them. The guests enjoyed a live performance by Lenny Kravitz, watched a filmed greeting from Kirk and Michael Douglas, and were treated to a couple of comical tributes, also on film, from Billy Crystal and Robin Williams. In the age of oversharing via social media, Samuel L. Jackson snapped a photo of De Niro, Harvey Keitel, and Chris Walken seated at a table, eating and laughing, and posted it on Instagram, where it enjoyed a day or two of viral heat.

The year found him everywhere: in Israel for the ninetieth birthday of Shimon Peres, in the Bay Area for the wedding of George Lucas, in Berlin and Tokyo and London and India to promote films. Along with fellow cast members from
Last Vegas
he appeared on
Sesame Street
to give a dramatic reading of a pop song (he was assigned Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball”) and co-hosted an hour of
Today
, including a cooking segment in which he prepared pumpkin casserole. He became the advertising face of a new checking service being offered by Santander Bank; his first commercial, in which he played himself chatting too much at a Robert De Niro film festival, was rather a hoot.

He signed on to more film projects: the crime story
The Bag Man
, the workplace comedy
The Intern
, the boxing biopic
Hands of Stone
, the police drama
Candy Store.
He talked often about working again with Martin Scorsese and Joe Pesci (and, why not, Al Pacino) on a mob picture called
The Irishman.

He was relentless.

H
IS SCHEDULE AS
a septuagenarian showed that he was, like his parents, defined in large part by his work. Yet there was something that seemed to drive him even more than the film performances, which piled up almost faster than anyone could watch them; the publicity
campaigns, which seemed to become less onerous to him over time; the restaurant openings and the hotel deals, the awards given and received, the almost inexplicable ventures into advertising. And that something, almost inevitably, was his family.

He kept his father’s memory alive by maintaining his studio and his artistic reputation. To a lesser extent, he tried to honor his mother’s legacy—if only through pursuing her passion for Manhattan real estate. There had been lapses, he confessed, in his filial duties: “
I always wanted to chronicle the family history with my mother. She was always interested in that.… But I wasn’t forceful and I didn’t make it happen. That’s one regret I have.”

He had, however, come to a place past regret with the family he had created. After all they had endured, he and Grace Hightower had finally become the committed couple they had twice vowed to be. At a birthday party he threw for her in the VIP room of his Locanda Verde restaurant, he toasted her briefly, warmly, and to much appreciation with “When she’s happy, I’m happy.” They traveled together on his various film and business obligations, and he supported her charitable work and her coffee venture. Standing side by side on red carpets all over the world, they seemed comfortable, connected, beyond the conflicts and upheavals that had once roiled them.