De Niro: A Life (30 page)

There’s another effect, even more startling, that’s achieved by zooming slightly out and seeing De Niro the actor playing Travis, a sense that the Oscar-winning chameleon has set a new standard not only for himself but for all actors. Was there anyone else who would so fully transform himself into a character so desperate, alienated, and wounded, someone who wouldn’t rescue a single moment from such a harrowing film by giving the audience some sort of reassurance—a nod, a wink, a joke, the lift of an eyebrow—to indicate that this was a fictional depiction of an alternative reality and not a portrait of what was really going on all around them? Pauline Kael, horrified by the finale of the film, is said to have gasped aloud, “
He’s still out there!” She meant Travis, of course, not De Niro, but at that moment it was impossible to tell the difference. When he first emerged as Johnny Boy, Bruce Pearson, and Vito Corleone, De Niro seemed like a chameleon. Now, playing a character without attachments, backstory, or explanation, he
somehow seemed more like himself, as if the actor who created those amazing characters was nothing more than their hired driver, ferrying them to the movies, seething away in the front seat, ready to explode and to take them—and us—to hell along with him.

Taxi Driver
hit the film public—and the reviewing press—like a thunderbolt or an avalanche. Nobody had seen anything like it before, and nobody seemed entirely sure what to make of it. Its power was undoubted, but for a great many viewers, including critics, its violence, darkness, and ambivalence were overwhelming.

To fill their superlatives, critics harked back to other films and, indeed, other media. “Imagine Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ if it had been told from the point of view of
its
title character,” explained Frank Rich in the
New York Post.
“
Taxi Driver
is a movie in heat,” said Pauline Kael in the
New Yorker
, “a raw, tabloid version of
Notes from the Underground.
”

The reviews—and, in many publications, re-reviews—waged a back-and-forth war about the morality of the film and its ultimate message (the coda
really
puzzled people). But very few even among the film’s antagonists doubted Scorsese’s energy or creativity, and nobody was anything less than floored by De Niro’s work.

“Acting of this sort is rare in films,” wrote Vincent Canby in the
New York Times
. “It is a display of talent, which one gets in the theater, as well as a demonstration of behavior, which is what movies usually offer.” Frank Rich added, “You simply must see for yourself. He plays Travis … at an intimate human scale that makes even the better movie performances of the past few years look artificial and bombastic by comparison.” In the
Wall Street Journal
, Joy Gould Boyum wrote, “De Niro creates a Travis who manages to evoke from us first a sympathy, then an empathy, and finally an understanding.” Kael, invoking a metaphor that she would come to use again to describe De Niro’s work, said, “Some actors are said to be empty vessels who are filled by the roles they play, but that’s not what appears to be happening here with De Niro. He’s gone the other way. He’s used his emptiness—he’s reached down into his own anomie. Only Brando has done this kind of plunging, and De Niro’s performance has something of the undistanced intensity that Brando’s had in
Last Tango.
” Even more ecstatically, Jack Kroll of
Newsweek
declared De Niro

Taxi Driver
would go on to reap more than $25 million in box office in its initial release, against its $2 million budget—which Columbia Pictures was initially reluctant to put up. (Schrader had been paid approximately $30,000 for the rights, but twenty years after the film’s release his 5 percent share of its earnings had come to nearly $700,000.) And Travis Bickle had become a metaphor for every lone gunman, pent-up psychopath, and quiet-boy-next-door-who-went-bonkers for the next forty years. (In 2001, for instance, when Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal unleashed an automatic weapon in the palace in Katmandu, killing the king and queen and seven others and then trying to fire a bullet into his own temple, a
New York Times
article on the massacre called him “some Himalayan version of the Robert De Niro character in ‘Taxi Driver.’ ”) Along with the “You talkin’ to me?” business, the character De Niro created seemed to seep off the screen and into the real world: Julia Phillips and Paul Schrader drove past theaters in New York where the film originally played and were at once thrilled and sickened to see lines of young men dressed in Bickle’s familiar outfit of army fatigues and blue jeans, waiting to see the film for, presumably, second and third go-rounds.
^*3

For decades there was talk of reviving the character for a sequel, and De Niro, Scorsese, and Schrader talked seriously about it more than once. Schrader always contended that the characters he wrote in such films as
American Gigolo
,
Light Sleeper
, and even
The Last Temptation of Christ
were thematic variations on Travis Bickle, but he was rebuffed by De Niro each time he tried to interest him in appearing in one of those films. All three of the principals remained intrigued by the thought of exploring how Travis Bickle would have been treated by time. In 1998, after having lunch with De Niro and talking once more about reviving Travis, Schrader, again inspired by real-life events, thought he’d hit on it. “Theodore Kaczynski,” he wrote to Scorsese, referring to the infamous Unabomber, who’d been arrested a year or so prior. “
If the Travis Bickle character had survived, he probably could have ended up a violent, self-absorbed loner like Kaczynski.” (Perhaps joking, he added, “Jodie [Foster] can play the Clarice Starling role.”) The idea, for better or worse, never got further than that note.

A
ND WHILE THE
world was greeting Travis Bickle, the man who embodied him was a continent—and several decades—removed from the fetid, menacing streets of New York. On the sound stages and backlot of Paramount Pictures, De Niro was playing Monroe Stahr, the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Last Tycoon
, a roman à clef about the famed producer Irving Thalberg, the boy genius of MGM who died in 1936 at the age of thirty-seven having overseen literally hundreds of films, including the likes of
Ben-Hur
,
Grand Hotel
,
Mutiny on the Bounty
,
The Champ
,
A Night at the Opera
, and
The Good Earth
—almost none of which would, by his choice, bear his name. Fitzgerald found Thalberg a poignant and romantic character and had conceived of exorcising himself of the demons of working in Hollywood through the project—which, ironically, was left incomplete after the author’s own early death, at age forty-four, in 1940.

The film had been proposed to De Niro as early as the fall of 1974, when Elia Kazan had sent him a copy of the script, which had been adapted by playwright Harold Pinter for producer Sam Spiegel. At the time, De Niro was booked back-to-back-to-back with
Taxi Driver
,
Bogart Slept Here
, and
New York, New York.
But he was interested in working with Kazan, a scion of the Group Theatre and of Method acting, and a former director of his boyhood acting heroes Marlon Brando (
A Streetcar Named Desire
,
On the Waterfront
), Montgomery Clift (
Wild River
), and James Dean (
East of Eden
). The pedigree of the production was irresistible, and De Niro agreed to squeeze it in. (He was testing his wardrobe for the role when his agent, Harry Ufland, failed to recognize him on the set of
Taxi Driver
). Then, when
Bogart
imploded, he was able to step right into
The Last Tycoon.

He felt, he said, immediate relief: “
It was like going from the darkest depths to light and inspiration; from black to white; from total angst to being with Kazan and Sam Spiegel.… It was a whole other thing.” Kazan especially was a godsend to him. Like Scorsese, he was willing to pore over the details of a character endlessly with his star, having long conversations, writing extensive letters and memos, prolonging the production to engage in quiet one-on-one sessions. Kazan, whose understanding of the Stanislavskian system was closer to Lee Strasberg’s than to Stella Adler’s, knew exactly how to coddle or confront an actor—even one of De Niro’s caliber—to exact the performance he was seeking, a discipline to which De Niro was happy to submit himself.

They met first in London in the spring of 1975, when De Niro was commuting between New York and Rome while finishing
1900
and preparing to shoot
Taxi Driver
. After that, they kept in touch. Kazan sent De Niro a letter to bring to his attention a detail about Stahr: that he was a good dancer, specifically the fox-trot. De Niro responded on the back of the envelope in which Kazan’s letter arrived, delighted with this detail about his character and promising to learn the dance.

When De Niro arrived in Hollywood in the fall of 1976 to work on
Bogart
and
Tycoon
, Kazan supplied him with a four-page, single-spaced précis of his impressions of Stahr: the character’s attitudes toward art, business, work, women, colleagues, and his failing health, plus even some explanation of what would be going through the character’s mind during and after sexual intercourse. The memo was a wormhole; De Niro loved it, annotating the pages extensively and working on his own copy of the script with fanatical attention to psychological detail.

In some ways all of this work was moot, as Spiegel, the producer of
Lawrence of Arabia
,
The Bridge on the River Kwai
,
The African Queen
, and
On the Waterfront
, had contractually promised Harold Pinter that his adaptation would be treated like a stage play—that, in effect, it would be shot exactly as he wrote it, with no changes permitted to any of it, not even a single word of dialogue, without his approval. The script was locked as surely as if they’d already shot it; Kazan, describing this straitjacketing, liked to say that he was “realizing” the script, after the French fashion of referring to the director as the
réalisateur.
All De Niro could do was dive into the psychological and emotional subtleties in almost a theoretical way. But he loved that sort of thing, and Kazan encouraged and inspired him to dig in. On many of the screenplay’s typewritten pages he would wind up writing more words than Pinter had, almost all of them for naught.

He did have control of some aspects of his character, though, and he took charge with his customary rigor. The wardrobe was bespoke, his suits tailored exactly as Irving Thalberg had worn them; he learned to write shorthand, as both the real Thalberg and the fictional Stahr could; he met with Paramount’s founder, Adolph Zukor, who at age 103 still visited the studio regularly to kibitz; he spoke to doctors about the heart condition from which Stahr, like Thalberg, suffered, learning about the medications he would have taken in the 1930s and how his moods and energy would have been affected by them and by his illness. Dressed in his old-time wardrobe, with all three buttons of his suit jackets closed, he liked to parade silently around Paramount with an inner sense of ownership. “
I spent time just walking around the studio dressed in those three-piece suits, thinking, ‘This is all mine,’ ” he said.

Kazan knew he would have to mold De Niro to fit the material: “
Bobby has never played an executive, he’s never played an intellectual, he’s never played a lover. I had to find that side of him; it was unexplored territory.” He developed a novel technique to immerse his star in the character: having him don a suit and sit in an office, where he was besieged by phone calls, by interruptions from his “assistants” (played by actors), by manufactured crises to which he had to improvise responses and solutions. “I’ve impressed on Bobby that what he says is never a comment,” Kazan explained. “Whatever he says is an
instruction which someone has to do something about.… I’ve made him feel that his life is at the mercy of his anteroom, that he’s a victim of the phone. I’ve now got him realizing what it means to be an executive.”

De Niro ate it up. He adored working with Kazan. “
He was an actor at one time,” he reminded a reporter from
Rolling Stone.
“He’s schooled. He’s—as far as I’m concerned, the
best
schooling.” And he appreciated the latitude that Kazan allowed him in finding and creating the character: “
I sometimes see him as a parent who doesn’t quite approve of his children or what they’re doing,” he said. “He can’t relate to it, but he still loves them.”

Kazan, for his part, was deeply impressed by De Niro’s exactitude and commitment, noting, “
He’s very precise. He figures everything out both inside and outside.… Everything he does he calculates. In a good way, but he calculates, just how he sits, what his suits are, what ring is where.… Everything is very exact.” And he was nearly overwhelmed by his star’s work ethic: “He’s the only actor I’ve ever known who called me on Friday night after we finished shooting and said, ‘Let’s work tomorrow and Sunday together.’ ” He did, however, notice that De Niro was prone to overdoing things: “He’s getting thinner and thinner. I’m worried about him. Thalberg … had a rheumatic heart and was very frail. Bobby went to the greatest lengths to get that. I admire him for it.” (At least one member of the cast thought it was an uncanny transformation. Ray Milland, who knew the real man, said, “De Niro
is
very much like Thalberg: very meek, very quiet, very thin.”)