De Niro: A Life (24 page)

For a few weeks in 1974, while staying at the Chateau Marmont, De Niro was involved with the actress, model, and writer Carole Mallory, who at the time was engaged to Pablo Picasso’s son Claude and then later had a long affair with Norman Mailer; her relationship with De Niro was mostly sexual, according to her memoir, with no strings attached. Indeed, there were times when, on his own, working in LA or Italy or even New York, he behaved as if he was free to do as he pleased.

The bond between Abbott and De Niro continued to strengthen, though, and sometime during the period when he was playing Vito Corleone, he and Abbott moved in together, filling his household with Drena and with Abbott’s menagerie of cats, birds, and dogs, including a St. Bernard and a German shepherd. Such was the casualness of the ménage, however, that some of De Niro’s friends and associates didn’t know they were living together until the arrangement had been going on for a couple of years. This makeshift family clearly was too big for the apartment in which De Niro had been raised and which his mother passed on to him when she moved further downtown. So De Niro bought 14 St. Luke’s Place,
^*6
a staid brick Greenwich Village townhouse on a quiet street in what was still a rough-and-tumble bit of lower Manhattan, and Abbott set about renovating it from its former semicommercial use into a family home. De Niro kept the 14th Street apartment, though, as a storage space, as a crash pad for friends who needed a place to stay, and for times when he needed privacy and quiet.

W
ITH HIS WORK
on
The Godfather
behind him, De Niro started making notes on a 108-page treatment (the prose description of a film, as opposed to a script, which is generally much longer) of an epic film by
Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian writer-director who had become respected with such films as
The Spider’s Stratagem
and
The Conformist
and then genuinely famous with 1973’s
Last Tango in Paris
, the sexually and psychologically daring film built around a remarkably unguarded performance by Marlon Brando. Now Bertolucci had upward of $6 million at his disposal—the most ever spent in Italy on a home-grown production—for a film that would do nothing less than trace the previous seventy-five years of his country’s history through the story of two men born on the same day in the year 1900. Novecento, as it would be known in his native tongue, followed the lives of Alfredo Berlinghieri, the heir to a landowner’s riches, and Olmo Dalcò, a peasant born on the wealthy man’s land. The two are youthful playmates, even into their twenties; they share girls, occasionally in the same bed at the same time. But politics, heritage, and the vagaries of fate drive them apart. When World War II arrives, the wealthy man is a committed Fascist and the other a dedicated fighter in the resistance. They both survive the bloody conflict and live on almost to the present day, giving Bertolucci and his co-writers the chance to project forward toward the new Italian culture and civilization for which they yearned.

On the strength of his work with Brando, Bertolucci stockpiled an impressive roster of international stars for his epic. As the grandfathers of the wealthy man and the peasant, he had cast Burt Lancaster and Sterling Hayden. Donald Sutherland would play a Fascist leader; Dominique Sanda, Alida Valli, and Stefania Sandrelli would play key women in the men’s lives; the rising French leading man Gérard Depardieu would play the peasant Olmo; De Niro, when he finally consented to be cast, would play the landowner Alfredo, a role at one time intended for Jack Nicholson.

Shooting on the film was well under way by the time De Niro started digging through the pages, wondering whether his character would have taken dancing lessons and opining that the ménage à trois featuring him and Depardieu could be a “good scene, if done right.” De Niro showed up in Parma, Italy, at the start of fall. And he would be there, as the script metastasized in front of his eyes, almost through the end of winter.

From the start he was unhappy. Bertolucci wanted to begin work
with De Niro on the material from near the end of the mammoth script, meaning that he was playing the older Alfredo before getting his legs steady underneath him as the younger man. “
We shot the old stuff on the first day,” De Niro recalled, “and I realized there that that was a mistake—it just wouldn’t work, nobody was into it. I didn’t know what I was doing sitting in another country with this director who I like very much but it was like, ‘Where are we?’ If I had thought about it more, I would have said, ‘Can we not do this scene later, not the first day?’ I was sensible enough to know you don’t do things so out of order. But I went along with it, I remember that, and it just didn’t work.”

Bertolucci, too, knew he had a problem on his hands. “
The first few days were a nightmare,” he admitted. “But I told myself that what I had felt about Bob when I met him was so strong I couldn’t have been wrong. I began to try to help him build confidence, and slowly a fantastic actor emerged. The fact is that with Bob you mustn’t judge by the first few days. He’s a very sensitive and probably neurotic person, so a director can be fooled. But if one has patience, well, it’s worth it.”

The conflict, though, was deeper than they could ever work out. Bertolucci came from the Italian school in which the director was absolutely the autonomous power on a film; De Niro thrived on partnerly collaboration with his directors. As a result, rather than give his star the room and time to find his way into the role, Bertolucci instructed him outright how to behave, a tactic that completely rankled De Niro. “
Bertolucci … would tell me what to do,” he complained later. “As a person I liked him very much, but as a director he has another style that for me wasn’t as good as it could have been.”

As the months dragged on, the career that De Niro should have been enjoying in American films was left to idle. Martin Scorsese still wanted him for that cab driver project that he had sharpened together with screenwriter Paul Schrader, but De Niro’s absence caused delays that threatened the financing. (Scorsese, to his credit, wouldn’t budge when it was suggested he go with another actor: “
I can’t do it without Bobby. I gotta have him,” he said.) And Harry Ufland, who should have been casting his hot young star in lucrative and high-profile works, kept deferring offers from studios and filmmakers until finally, in a sense, he threw up his hands and let De Niro carve his own path. “
Bob will
never be a movie star,” the agent sighed. “He is just not seduced by glamour.”

Then in December, while De Niro was still living in hotels in Italy,
The Godfather, Part II
arrived fully finished into the world, and the stardom that was rumbling in the background of his life became, inescapably, its dominant theme.

F
RANCIS
C
OPPOLA
’
S SECOND
G
ODFATHER FILM IN LESS THAN
three years opened in five Manhattan theaters on December 14, 1974, and the reception was absolutely rapturous, maybe better than that accorded the first film. And as for De Niro, whatever reservations the critics had (and they were few) about praising him for the double-barreled debut of
Bang the Drum Slowly
and
Mean Streets
were utterly obliterated. His performance was hailed instantly as a work of mastery, and overnight he went from being an actor’s actor to being a star—in, of course, his tenth screen appearance (thirteenth, technically, if you counted walk-ons and unreleased films).

In a rapturous review in the
New Yorker
, Pauline Kael said that De Niro “amply convinces one that he had it in him to become the old man that Brando was.… It is much like seeing a photograph of one’s own dead father when he was a strapping young man; the burning spirit we see in his face spooks us, because of our knowledge of what he was at the end … suggesting Brando not from the outside but from the inside.” Similarly, Charles Champlin of the
Los Angeles Times
noted that “De Niro, hoarse-voiced and imperiously handsome as he grows in assurance, does an amazing job of preparing us for the Brando we remember.”

To be fair, the
New York Times
actually panned
The Godfather, Part II
, Vincent Canby saying, “The only remarkable thing about [it] is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better [the first] was.… It’s a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from leftover parts.… The plot defies any rational synopsis.” Accusing Coppola’s film of “self-parody,”
Canby didn’t spare the stars: “De Niro, one of our best young actors, is interesting as the young Vito until, toward the end of his section of the film, he starts giving a nightclub imitation of Mr. Brando’s elderly Vito.” But this was decidedly the minority view of what would come to be hailed as a classic performance.

M
ARLON
B
RANDO
’
S
Vito Corleone was a lion: courtly, patient, slow-moving, wise, judicious, deadly. He made speeches, coined catch-phrases, cracked sly jokes, spoke in judiciously weighed words, flashed anger only when absolutely necessary, and did everything in cautious proportion. He was solid and authoritative, a man who lived his creed (however crooked it might be) and demanded a similar integrity of those around him. He treasured his family, stood resolutely by his word, and treated friends and enemies with just fairness.

The young Vito Corleone, whom De Niro would play, would effectively fill in the background of this titanic figure. He would embody a bridge connecting Sicily to New York, 1891 to 1955, the Old World to the New. He would be an immigrant without resources who fashioned himself into a man of respect: part hoodlum, part businessman, part king. He would kill with guns, knives, words, patrimony—whatever it took. He would demonstrate in nascent form the unforgettable qualities of the elder man who was still fresh in the minds of movie audiences. And he would do it all in minuscule portions, with very little dialogue.

De Niro would appear in less than 47 minutes of the 202-minute theatrical cut of
The Godfather, Part II.
He would speak a mere 122 sentences, many of them fragmentary, and most of them in the demotic Sicilian that De Niro had mastered, often paring away at his lines to achieve a more credible semblance of the silence and cunning of the mature character. Brando spoke in fluent, flowery English, but De Niro’s Vito Corleone has but seven lines in his adopted language, forty-two words in all, many of them muttered, all of them heavily accented. The powerful impact he imparts comes not from his tongue but, indeed, from his entire being.

De Niro’s Vito is a watcher, staring in silence at his children, at his wife, at a stage show, at a parcel of guns, at a looming threat. He absorbs everything around him and rarely projects any emotion whatever, and yet his thought process is somehow always apparent. Partly this is the effect of the audience’s knowledge that he will become the character played by Brando. But partly it is because of De Niro’s amazing ability to become, in effect, translucent, to allow himself to be inhabited by the character’s inner life and use his body and especially his eyes to convey it. He creates intimacy or draws lines of enmity with a gesture, a posture, a gaze.

As a measure of De Niro’s strength in the role, consider Vito’s relationship with his wife, Carmella, played by Francesca De Sapio. By the time De Niro enters the film, in 1917, he is married with a son, and he relies on his wife to run their meager little household in a traditional, responsible, respectful manner. Returning home with some bad news, he places a pear, carefully unwrapped from its paper packaging, on the dinner table; as he watches, she expresses delight with the surprise, and he breaks into a smile. As they sit to eat, he puts his hand over hers and stretches across the table to kiss her cheek. Several times in the ensuing scenes Vito communes similarly with her: watching as she tends to the ailing Fredo, helping her serve dinner to his (literal) partners in crime, listening patiently as her friend complains about ill treatment at the hands of a slumlord. Now and again Vito communicates his feelings to his wife with a gaze, but never in words. It’s astounding. The two actors (and Coppola) create an impression of a complete marriage, a loving partnership, an intimate understanding, and yet De Niro’s Vito speaks not one word aloud to De Sapio’s Carmella. It’s uncanny.