De Niro: A Life (10 page)

Through a friend of a friend he learned about a role that had become available in a play being put on at Hunter College, a German Expressionist drama by Rolf Lauckner entitled
Cry in the Street
that involved three blind men accosting a woman on a New Year’s Eve. An actor playing one of the blind men had dropped out—unlike the play, his gig driving a taxi paid actual money, and he couldn’t afford to give it up—and De Niro presented himself to the show’s director, Roberta Sklar, as a replacement.

Sklar was then a graduate student in theater at Hunter, and she had the good fortune to be able to draw on the pool of young New York actors in her casting. Her other key actors were Sylvester Ciraulo, who would have a long career as a soap opera actor under the name Michael Durrell, and a collegiate actor and aspiring novelist from North Dakota named Larry Woiwode. “
Larry was serious about acting,” remembered Sklar, “but De Niro was
serious.
” All three actors, she said, treated the production with respect, doing research and thinking along with her about how to play a pack of three. “They spent time watching monkeys at the Central Park Zoo,” she recalled, “and came back with bodily expressions they got from the animals.” But De Niro, she said, went even further. “I knew he was sitting somewhere watching some old guys,” she said. “He didn’t mention it, but you knew from watching him that what he was doing had come from real observation of real life.” (De Niro did mention to Woiwode that he’d spent some time watching blind men get around New York.)

De Niro’s reticence about discussing his technique was, Sklar remembered, exactly who he was. “He was very polite,” she said.

Woiwode, too, found in the young De Niro a stage presence of evident power but one that could be dangerously raw as well. He wrote later, “
He seems oblivious to an unwritten rule of the stage, which is never, no, never manhandle a fellow actor, especially his or her body, but do only what you must for things to look good out front.… Bob grabs hold so hard in our blind grapples he is, according to Syl, out of control, wholly internal, with no sense of ensemble work.… He
seems
eager to please but is a lightning rod attracting the emotions of any observers … a presence to work with or to back from, not a performer of mere skills.”

Offstage, De Niro would present another aspect entirely, and it drew Woiwode in. De Niro liked to mention, casually but seeking to create an effect, that he was studying with Stella Adler, and he was especially proud of his father’s name and work. He carried around novels in a battered leather briefcase he’d picked up overseas—he was taking a speed-reading class (“the same one JFK took”)—and he was keen to seek out new books. Woiwode was halfheartedly committed to pursuing acting; he was far more serious about writing fiction and had the legendary
New Yorker
editor William Maxwell as a mentor. But he was sufficiently engaged by De Niro’s personality and energy to stay connected to him, at least for a time.

“
He’s out to please, with an easy, unselfconscious smile,” he later wrote of his new friend, “which can shift into one of such abandon it draws his hairline back—the grin of a young man secure in his new maturity.… Caught off guard, he looks entirely like himself yet different each time.… It’s difficult talking to him, because any question moves him to another quadrant of character, if not a new character altogether—the chameleon nature.”

When they met, De Niro was living in a small apartment on Irving Place, a few blocks from his mom’s place, which was still the
headquarters of her typing and printing business. Admiral supported her son with gifts of cash—Woiwode saw multiple $20 bills change hands—and seemed unconcerned with his lack of financial independence or his pursuit of an acting career. There was a young lady on the scene, whom De Niro referred to as “my French girlfriend.” And there was an undercurrent of anxiety. Woiwode noted that Bobby would bring up his parents whenever he felt blue and would speak as if he felt personally responsible for their separation and owed it to them to keep them connected.

There were larks as well. De Niro and Woiwode would sit in bars and practice communicating only with facial gestures (“He can focus one eye directly on you,” Woiwode recalled, “while the other goes blank”), or they would lure a friend into a fake séance in one of their apartments, moving the table surreptitiously and startling their unsuspecting chum. When Woiwode and his wife acquired a large car, a Bonneville convertible, De Niro donned some of his costumes and pretended to be their chauffeur, driving them from one of their regular haunts to another and clearing the crowd as if for visiting celebrities. They would go on auditions together, talk about acting and even writing (De Niro hinted that he was trying to compose a novel that would feature a starring role for himself), and drink in their apartments or at Jimmy Ray’s bar, a showbiz haunt on Eighth Avenue in the theater district. They became real pals.

W
ITH A
“diamond in the rough” such as De Niro in her cast, Rebecca Sklar had hopes for
Cry in the Street
, but she saw something remarkable during the show’s brief run: the young actor who’d been so galvanizing in the rehearsal space shrank away onstage. “He was intensely engaging in rehearsal,” she remembered. “Every word and move. But it didn’t translate to the stage in a larger arena. I knew he was an extraordinary actor, and I expected a spectacular public performance. But it wasn’t anything like the explosive energy of the smaller venue.” Strangely, Sklar wasn’t as disappointed as might be expected. Instead, she had an epiphany about acting. “I didn’t think, ‘Oh my God, he’s
letting me down,’ ” she said. “I thought, ‘This guy belongs in movies.’ He was the same, but it didn’t come across on a stage.”
^*1

De Niro kept pursuing auditions and other opportunities advertised in the showbiz trades. He quickly found something else worth pursuing: a microbudget film being planned by a professor and two graduate students at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, just a few miles north of Manhattan. “
I had seen an advertisement in
Show Business
,” he remembered years later. “I went into De Palma’s studio for the audition and after that he called me.”

But there was more to it than that. The De Palma in question was, of course, Brian De Palma, a twenty-three-year-old doctor’s son and science prodigy from Philadelphia who had graduated from Columbia College in 1962 and enrolled, as one of Sarah Lawrence’s first male students, in the graduate theater program with the intention of becoming a filmmaker. Along with his professor Wilford Leach (who would go on to win Tony Awards for directing
The Pirates of Penzance
and
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
in 1981 and 1986, respectively) and another theater student, Cynthia Munroe, De Palma shared writing, directing, editing, and producing credits on a film, a comedy set during a wedding weekend. And they had so few resources that they would consider almost anyone for a role.

This audition would be the start of De Niro’s first important working relationship with a director—as well as a memorable moment for those there to witness it. De Palma would tell the story in a number of ways, but they boiled down to the same initial impression that Woiwode had: a quiet kid who could somehow amp himself up into a release of explosive power. “
He was very mild, shy, self-effacing,” De Palma said a decade or so later. “He asked if he could do a scene from acting class. He disappeared for fifteen minutes and returned doing a heavy Lee J. Cobb number.” (In another account, De Palma changed actors but
created a similar impression: “It was amazing. Suddenly, from this shy 19-year-old kid, came this Broderick Crawford–like character of such power and force it blasted us out of the room.”)

Naturally, De Palma and company wanted a dynamo like this in their movie. But there was the matter of money—or, more precisely, the lack of it. When they called him back and offered De Niro the part, he was so excited that he misheard what he would be paid. “
I thought I was getting $50 a week,” he remembered. “But my mother, who signed the contract because I was underage, told me, ‘You get $50 for the complete movie.’ ” Chicken feed, yes, but, for the first time, he would be paid for acting. He took the job.

Virtually every face on-screen in the film, eventually entitled
The Wedding Party
, would be a new one, and most of them would only be seen this one time. But there were others beside De Niro with significant futures in acting. William Finley, who would become a staple figure in De Palma films, made his feature debut, and the film also introduced two Sarah Lawrence students: Jill Clayburgh, who had a large role as the bride, and Jennifer Salt, daughter of the famed screenwriter Waldo Salt and a girl who would have been at the High School of Music and Art when De Niro breezed through the place, as a member of the wedding party.

I
N ADDITION TO
his scanty fee, De Niro took some tutelage from the experience of making the film. He appeared in a workshop production of
La Ronde
at the college, and the professor overseeing it offered him some advice that he held on to. “
There was a teacher who taught at Sarah Lawrence,” he remembered, “and he said, ‘Just go on instinct.’ And it kind of frees you because you get distracted with ‘What’s my character? What’s my motivation?’… You forget in life people don’t behave that way. They just do what they’re doing; there’s no thought behind it.”

He learned as well to keep an eye on shifty independent producers, who were just as likely to seek perks for themselves as the starving actors who nourished themselves at the crafts service table. In the prop list he composed for himself, De Niro noted a few items from his
own costume collection that he wanted to use for the production, then added a note of caution: “
Have certain things like rifle and fishing that would like to use; what’s this about producer keeping stuff?”

His script for the shoot was marked up, in a fashion he would follow for the rest of his life, with all sorts of insights, reminders, questions, prompts, and instructions, much the way that Stella Adler’s script analysis class had taught him. “
I have a disrespect for things like people’s clothes,” he wrote of his character, Cecil, “so I keep touching people all the time, and the same with any and all objects … Keep looking at all the nice broads that pass. Think which is good for a lay and which is not … Use napkin and don’t put it in lap but finish and throw it in plate on rest of food … I bought my suit for $25 at Smith’s Bargain Hall.” Tiny, seemingly inconsequential things, written in a crabbed hand, but they would be the sorts of pry bars he would use to open up the script and the role and climb inside.

The film that resulted from all of this work was a sporadically charming, overlong pastiche about an uncertain bridegroom who must work out whether, in fact, he’ll go through with his wedding during a long weekend spent on an eastern seaboard island. Charlie (Charles Pfluger) arrives via ferry, accompanied by his groomsmen, Cecil (De Niro, billed as “Denero”) and Alistair (William Finley), and finds himself cowed by the blue-blooded milieu in which his intended, Josephine (Clayburgh), has been raised. His chums tempt him to ditch the whole thing, but he chooses to stay on, only to develop cold feet all on his own before the fateful ceremony. Finally he submits, and the film ends with the pealing of wedding bells.

De Niro, his face still round with baby fat, his head crowned with a buzz cut, plays Cecil as an overassured jock, arriving at the island with gear for fishing, water skiing, hunting, and baseball, and speaking in the fusty, patrician manner of a man of far older years. There isn’t enough written for Cecil to be made into an actual character, and a few of De Niro’s scenes would be altered into incomprehensibility by the post-production decision to impart a vaguely druggy style to them, but he does convince in the role of a worldly and mature fellow, and there is nothing of the Greenwich Village bohemian boy or the Little Italy street kid in his performance. When the film was finally seen by
critics, he was one of three actors cited by
Variety
as “making any impression.”
^*2

T
HROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD
of his son’s nascent career, the elder Robert De Niro continued to live, however precariously, in France. His son wrote to him regularly, entreating him to return home, to no avail.

As his friend Larry Woiwode suspected, the subject of his parents was an extremely sensitive one for Bobby, and it could release a startling and angry energy from him when he felt prodded. There was the incident of a watercolor painted by the elder De Niro entitled “The Actor.” Visiting De Niro’s apartment—a new one, larger, on 14th Street, closer yet to Admiral’s place—Woiwode had expressed admiration for the picture. Months later, when Woiwode and his wife moved into their own place in Brooklyn, De Niro and his sweetie of the moment (not the French girl, but a waitress from Max’s Kansas City) showed up with a housewarming gift: “The Actor.” Bashful and clumsy, Woiwode protested that it was too generous, saying, “
Your dad gave it to you.” But Bobby assured him that wasn’t the case: “I kind of took it from stuff at Mom’s! He’s got hundreds. Oils! I like a lot of them better.” After a little while, and some drinks, Woiwode tried once again to beg off the gift, and this time De Niro exploded: “It’s not good enough for you? You’re too damn special or what?” He leapt up and, yanking his girlfriend by the arm, left the apartment.