De Niro: A Life (13 page)

The Playwrites (
sic
) Workshop Club, which had produced the first version of the show, would do the show again, at the tiny Bastiano’s Cellar Studio theater on Waverly Place where it had played before. This time, Link would go with a less gender-bending cast, with the actress Paula Shaw in the lead role and, as in the original, a small cast of male actors playing multiple roles. De Niro certainly didn’t run with a Warholian crowd, but he heard about the play and auditioned, trying
to sweeten his chances of being hired by offering to have the posters and programs for the show printed for free by his mom.

He got the part, or rather the
parts
, ten in all: Duke, Lefty, Vinny, Peter Billings, Leading Man, Irvin, Harold Minsky, G.I. Joe, Baby Leroy, and Grady Eagles, per his resume. It was the biggest thing he’d ever done and the greatest proof yet of the versatility and malleability that he hinted at in those composite shots he passed out along with his resumes. The play opened in August, providing De Niro with the first reviews of his fledgling career. They were very, very positive: “Robert DeNiro [
sic
] appears in no less than ten cameo characterizations and is a standout comic actor,” said
Show Business.
“He’s a master of the art of underplaying.” The
Village Voice
concurred: “DeNiro [
sic
] made clean, distinct character statements in a series of parts which many actors would have fused into a general mush. DeNiro is new on the scene and deserves to be welcomed.”

The run of the play was brief, but it was crucial in a number of ways. With it, De Niro had gotten his foot well in the door of experimental theater in New York, he had acquired his first significant positive press, and he had grabbed the attention of a young woman who would become a booster of his work and his career as well as briefly a romantic partner.

Sally Kirkland was a big-eyed, statuesque twenty-year-old blonde from Pennsylvania who had been born to a life completely different from De Niro’s. Named after her mother, also Sally Kirkland, a Vassar grad who had been an influential fashion editor for
Vogue
and held the same position at
Life
for decades, the younger Sally had been raised on Philadelphia’s Main Line and the Upper East Side of Manhattan as a debutante and society girl (Ted Koppel took her to his prom and stole a kiss). But she had chucked it all for an acting career and an offstage role as a scene-sweller in the Manhattan of the 1960s.

In the summer of 1968 she was preparing for a daring new role in Terrence McNally’s
Sweet Eros
, a one-act play that called for extended nudity (“My mother was showing people what to put on,” she liked to joke, “and I was showing them how to take it off”). Along with her roommate, another aspiring actress named Susan Tyrell, she took in De Niro’s performance in
Glamour, Glory and Gold
, and, like the
critics, was deeply impressed. “
He was electrifying,” she remembered, “totally different in each part. I went backstage and told him, ‘You are the greatest actor since Brando, and you are going to be a huge star.’ And after, Bobby would phone me and ask over and over again, ‘Do you really think I’m any good? Do you really think I’m any good?’ ”

There was a romance between them, but there was also an acting partnership. Kirkland was a member of the Actors Studio, the holy temple of Method acting in which Lee Strasberg practiced the Stanislavski system as he understood it. She wanted De Niro to seek admission to the Studio, but he demurred: there was a rigorous vetting process consisting of two auditions, and he was wary of Strasberg after having listened to Adler rail against her rival’s theories in her classes. Instead, they created a little Actors Studio of their own, working on scenes in De Niro’s apartment, giving real vent to their theatrical passions, as Kirkland remembered, without any fear of exposure or critique. “We had so much rage and energy in us,” she said. “We would go at each other, have knockdown fights—kitchen-sink-drama-style.”

He showed her his cache of wardrobe pieces and props. “It was like going into a costume room backstage of a theater,” she remembered. “He had every conceivable kind of getup imaginable—and the hats! Derbies, straw hats, caps, homburgs.” And in exchange for her insight and connections, he offered some advice of his own. When she told him she’d been rejected for a part for which she was sure she had auditioned well, he counseled her, “You are giving away too much. Hold something back. Be mysterious. It’s more seductive.”

During their time together, De Niro was granted entrée to a slightly tonier crowd than he had known on his own, and while very few of his new acquaintances became friends or colleagues, one in particular became both, and a tremendous boon to him. Among those to whom Kirkland introduced him, during one of many actors’ nights out at Jimmy Ray’s, the saloon on Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan that served for decades as a clubhouse for young performers, was Shelley Winters, who would become his first truly powerful advocate.

Winters was acting royalty, with two Oscars on her mantle (famously, she once brought them along when asked by a director to audition for a film part, pulling them slowly out of her bag one at a time
to make the case that she didn’t need to read for him to prove herself). She’d been born Shirley Schrift in St. Louis in 1920 and raised from age three in Brooklyn. She’d pursued a theatrical career throughout her teens, and she became a starlet in the blond-bombshell mode in her early twenties, with a little work on Broadway and in Hollywood. She finally found a niche in a string of films in which she played fallen women and/or the discarded victims of awful men: A
Double Life
,
Winchester 73
,
A Place in the Sun
,
The Night of the Hunter
,
Lolita.
Throughout that period she remained a serious student of acting, working principally with Lee Strasberg and her Actors Studio peers. And in time her dedication to the craft resulted in those Academy Awards, for her supporting roles in
The Diary of Anne Frank
(1959) and
A Patch of Blue
(1965).

With her brassy manner, zaftig figure, and penchant for blunt honesty, Winters had a lot of Brooklyn and more than a little bit of Stella Adler in her, and she was well known for a private life as colorful as the figure she cut in the world. She’d been married and divorced three times by 1960 (her husbands had included the actors Vittorio Gassman and Anthony Franciosa), and among the men with whom she’d shared romances, however fleeting, were Errol Flynn, William Holden, Clark Gable, Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, and Sean Connery. In her forties she had let her sexpot veneer fade, a decision that seemed to free her from all sorts of formalities, and she became the flamboyant den mother and Auntie Mame of the young New York Method acting scene, holding court in bars and restaurants, anointing tiny productions by arriving (often loudly) to take them in, encouraging study and work, and pulling strings to help further careers when she could.

Kirkland, who was an unofficial goddaughter of Winters’s, insisted that she see De Niro perform, and so Winters made her way down to Waverly Place and
Glamour, Glory and Gold
. Right away she knew she was seeing something special. “
When he moved across the stage it was like lightning,” she remembered. “Gave me tingles. I haven’t felt or seen anything like that since the ’40s, when I saw Brando in a four-performance flop.”

Winters immediately welcomed De Niro into her graces, honoring the raw talent she saw but recognizing, too, his boyish combination
of frailty, earnestness, and energy. Just a few years after meeting him, when he was beginning to merit attention in the newspapers for his film work, she gushed about him in a telephone interview with the
New York Times:

By the time those words were printed, De Niro was already accruing a reputation for reticence in his dealings with the press, so it would be easy to imagine him being cross with his stage mama for her effusion. But amid the embarrassing kvelling, Winters offered some astounding insight into De Niro’s craft, something that she had noticed almost immediately upon meeting him and seeing him perform:

I
N LATE 1968
Virginia Admiral hosted a private screening of
Greetings
at her loft on 14th Street, and soon movie audiences around the country would get a chance to see what it was that had so captivated Kirkland and Winters—or, rather, some of them would.
Greetings
, De Niro’s second film with Brian De Palma, was released on a single screen in midtown Manhattan with an X rating attached—only the fifth ever imposed by the Motion Picture Association of America in
the two years of its ratings system (and, in turn, the first film to have its rating appealed and the first to have its appeal fail).

Decades later it would be hard to imagine anyone being scandalized by the picture. It follows three young New Yorkers—Paul (Warden), Lloyd (Graham), and Jon Rubin (De Niro)—as they strive to avoid the draft
^*4
and to follow their peculiar muses: Paul’s forays into computer dating, Lloyd’s obsession with the death of John Kennedy, and Jon’s fascination with pornography and especially voyeurism, which he combines into a new medium he calls “peep art.” In a series of disjointed episodes that don’t remotely amount to a plot, they cavort around Manhattan—the Central Park Zoo, a Bleecker Street coffeehouse, an Upper East Side bookshop, the Staten Island ferry—encountering kindred and hostile souls, preying on women, scheming up ways to trick the Selective Service into classifying them as unfit for the military. Among the curiosities is a conversation between Graham and the famed English artist Richard Hamilton, widely credited with the first Pop Art painting, about making abstract art out of ordinary photographs. And there are many bits shot on the streets of the city clearly without permits or production assistants to keep out the passersby: guerilla moments that impart a strong sense of time and place.

De Niro wears donnish little spectacles and, again, a mustache, and he speaks in a high-toned, nearly stilted diction, as if striving to rid his voice of any trace of a Noo Yawk upbringing (he doesn’t always succeed). He chases a few women, first a shoplifter (Ruth Alda) whom he directs in one of his little voyeuristic fantasies, then a leggy beauty whom he follows through Central Park to the Whitney Museum, where he is accosted by Alan Garfield, who chats him up and sells him a pornographic 8 mm film (and, in a very long take, causes De Niro to collapse with genuine laughter). As the film isn’t really a narrative but rather a series of vignettes, it’s difficult to speak about an actual characterization, but De Niro reveals a droll comic sense, an easy loquaciousness, and a genuine versatility. He’s called on to read aloud from a sex manual, to chat up girls, to behave like a right-wing fanatic
(his draft board ruse is to make himself seem
too
eager to serve), to playact a scene in Vietnam. But his best moments are in the scene with Garfield as he continually tries to edge away from his interlocutor, dragging the newspaper he’s resting his elbows on with each sideways move as though using it to keep himself clean. Graham’s Dealey Plaza–obsessed bookstore clerk is perhaps more vividly rendered, but De Niro does many more things and does them well.

B
ILLED AS
“an over-ground sex protest film,”
Greetings
wasn’t widely reviewed. The
New York Times
sent Howard Thompson, who called it “tired, tawdry and tattered” and said of the cast, “Of [Graham’s] pals, Robert De Niro and Jonathan Warden, the latter gives at least some evidence of a little talent.” Briefly,
Greetings
became a cause célèbre. New York documentarian William Bayer wrote a letter to the
Times
protesting Thompson’s notice (and at least three times as long). And then it became truly celebrated, playing at the Berlin Film Festival that winter and sharing, with two other films, the prestigious Silver Bear prize.

On the strength of the profit their tiny film had generated, Hirsch and De Palma began thinking about a follow-up, another pastiche of provocative scenes combining a little sex, a little comedy, a touch of the avant-garde, a splash of social satire. The success of
Greetings
meant that the budget available to them had more than doubled, to upward of $100,000. (As a lark, during the dreaming-up phase, they referred to the new film as
Son of Greetings.
) And this time they would be more focused in their approach. Rather than scatter the hijinks among three actors, they would have one character provide the spine of the film. Perhaps out of sheer habit’s sake, they referred to him by the name of one of the fellows from
Greetings
: Jon Rubin. And they wanted De Niro, the original Jon, to take on the role, the starring part in a feature film.

Once again they would be working from a script that was more a bunch of discrete scenarios than a classically structured drama. This time, though, they began working with De Niro on his scenes well
before the production or even the rehearsals. He went over the various episodes with a typewriter, scissors, and adhesive tape, stitching together specific scenes sometimes down to the level of dialogue, so that it looked like a cross between a traditional script and a ransom note. He made notes to himself—lists of props and costumes he wanted to acquire, the names of secondhand stores where some of the stuff might be found, things to do with his hair, bits of physical business. He wrote about Jon Rubin’s motivation, state of mind, and intent, and he encouraged himself in certain behaviors: “
When walking always looking at girls in street.” Most of all, he roused himself to the challenge of the role: “Do whole thing with complete
conviction
and
confidence.
” De Palma and Hirsch felt the same way: they shot the picture in early 1969 and worked determinedly to release it before the end of the year.