De Niro: A Life (89 page)

Too, his kids—six in all—were in the forefront of his mind, even after the eldest of them had become parents themselves. “
I guess you could call it a fractionalized family of sorts,” he said. “But I care deeply about all of them, and I have made a conscious effort to talk to and to listen to them.”

He came to see himself as a paterfamilias, the graying man in the center of a teeming brood. It was a role unlike any he’d ever played on-screen, yet it suited him in real life. “I like my kids to be all around,” he said. “I don’t like them to be off here and there unless they really have a reason or a job that pulls them there. I think the Italian thing is good because the communities stay together.… You know, the whole family lives in different apartments in a building. That’s nice stuff if you can do it.”

His children must have agreed. From Drena in her forties to baby Helen in her diapers, they were all close to him, even when, as in the
case of Raphael, they were entirely self-sufficient. When De Niro was young, it had seemed to some friends that he felt pressured by an obligation to keep a healthy bond between his parents. Over the decades, he had come to see that same intrafamilial responsibility from a different vantage: not as a son but as a father. An although his brood was somewhat motley in age and heritage, he worked to impart to it the tenor of a traditional family.

This wasn’t easy as he entered his seventies. He knew there was an immense gap between the aging face he saw in the mirror and the young—some
very
young—people who were his children, and he somehow developed the equanimity to be a positive presence in their lives, or at least to have a philosophy about how he could do that. “
I have young kids,” he said, “and want to see them through a certain stage. I want to give them advice, but I know they’re not going to listen. So I tell them, ‘Ask me. Whatever you’ve been through, I’m sure I’ve been close to that.’ I always want to be there for them. That’s the most important thing in my life.”

He was born bearing the name of a rising young star in the art world, and he had turned that name into a currency of its own, a legend built of decades of worthy and sometimes titanic artistic work, of unlikely and often quite successful business ventures, of rigorous adherence to an ethos of responsibility, loyalty, and hard work. He knew that he wasn’t an ideal role model; “as I tell my kids,” he said, “ ‘Everyone has their own
mishegoss.
’ ” But he had lived in such a way that he could remain optimistic about having created luck for himself and that his good fortune in life and work could be sustained through the power of his attitude, if nothing else: “
I feel optimistic about things. You certainly don’t want to think that the
worst
is yet to come.… We don’t know what lies ahead. So I’m only going to think about the best.”

Somehow, in all the work he was laying out in front of himself, he saw glimpses of the best.

And who could say that he was wrong to think that these glimpses, in and of themselves, were their own just reward?

Robert De Niro, through the offices of his publicist Stan Rosenfield, chose not to respond to perhaps a half dozen requests to be interviewed for this book, and a great many people who have known and/or worked with him over the decades followed suit, unwilling to participate in what is, technically, an unauthorized biography. However, as I often remind people, unauthorized doesn’t mean salacious, and it is entirely possible to write a full and fair biography without ever speaking to the subject—as authors of books about, say, Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon prove every year. With work in archives and interviews with forty or so individuals who have had firsthand experience with De Niro, I have endeavored to produce a serious and reflective portrait balancing the private life of a man with his public work—which, of course, is what makes him interesting to begin with.

In very large part, I did this through many weeks of toil at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, where De Niro has stored his massive archives of scripts, research, production materials, costumes, props, and memorabilia. I pored over literally hundreds of boxes of materials, finding illuminating and delightful details at every turn, getting a real sense of De Niro’s working methods as both an actor and a producer, discovering nuances of his thought that informed my deeper understanding of the man and the artist, and learning to decipher his rushed, crabbed, handwriting. I am grateful to the staff of the Ransom Center and to my friends in Austin for abiding my monomania on the subject of De Niro during my visits there.

That work in Texas was augmented by research elsewhere. In New York, I worked at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library of the
New York Public Library and, especially, the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. In Los Angeles, I worked at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. In Portland, as ever, I relied heavily on the good offices of the Multnomah County Library, as well as those of Powell’s City of Books and Movie Madness—the best book store and video store, respectively, in America. Online, I was well served almost daily by such resources as
Ancestry.com
,
Genealogy.com
, Google News, the Internet Movie Database, Rootsweb, and Wikipedia, among many others.

As I say, I spoke and/or corresponded with perhaps four dozen people who have had firsthand acquaintance with De Niro and with events recounted in this book, some of whom wished to remain anonymous. Among those whom I can thank publicly are Verna Bloom, Christopher Cerrone, Norman Chaitin, John Curran, Paul Dano, Guy Flatley, William Friedkin, Charles Hirsch, Chris Hodenfield, Tom Kane, Sally Kirkland, Tom Mardirosian, Eugenio Mira, Merle Molofsky, Harold Ramis, Roberta Sklar, Jonathan Taplin, Dyanne Thorne, and Larry Woiwode. I wish in particular to cite the contributions of Sandra Bernhard, Jerry Lewis, and Martin Scorsese, all of whom spoke to me some years ago when I was writing
King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis
and whose memories and impressions are as vital today as when they first shared them. Additional sources—or paths to them—were provided by Jay Cocks, Gerald Peary, Sheldon Renan, and Carrie Rickey. I’d like to acknowledge the help of Michael Millar in nosing through Manhattan real estate records. And I wish especially to thank Glenn Kenny for sharing an interview with Edward Norton that he conducted for his own book, “Robert De Niro: Anatomy of an Actor” (unpublished at the time of this writing).

When I began work on this project, I was in my last years of serving as film critic at the
Oregonian
, and I thank the newspaper and my editors and colleagues sincerely; for twenty-plus years I got to write about movies in a movie-mad city where people read the newspaper and took its content as the start of a (mostly civilized) conversation about film, art, and life; nobody ever had a better job than that. During the years I was working on De Niro—or should have been—I sustained
my household coffers with projects edited by James Greenberg at DGA
Quarterly
and Tony Nourmand of Reel Arts Press; I thank them both.

At Crown I am grateful to John Glusman, who commissioned the book, and Dominick Anfuso, who has edited it. Likewise, I’m obliged to Sue Warga for careful copyediting and Amelia Zalcman for judicious legal oversight.

My deep, deep thanks go, as ever, to my agent, Richard Pine, and his staff at Inkwell Management, without whom I might well be asking you if you’d like to see a dessert menu rather than telling you all of this.

I have relied, often overly, on the brains, hearts, and shoulders of such friends and loved ones as Mary Bartholemy, Shannon Brazil, Chelsea Cain, Paul Carvelli, Marc Mohan, Lucretia Thornton, and Krista Walter, as well as untold numbers of the Timbers Army, and, as the dedication indicates, my sister, Jennifer, and her family, Jason, Harry, and Fanny Freeland. My mom, Mickie, left us while I was working on this book, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she isn’t its biggest fan.

For all that, nobody has done more to spur, inspire, and fulfill me than my children, Vincent, Anthony, and Paula, who mean far, far more than any book ever could.

Note: Citations marked “HRC” refer to materials from the Robert De Niro collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas; citations marked “HRC Schrader” refer to materials from the Paul Schrader collection at the Harry Ransom Center.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2