De Niro: A Life (43 page)

It wasn’t a precipitous fall. Even as a follow-up to
Raging Bull
,
True Confessions
had substance and gave the public a De Niro once again
working with quality material and first-rate collaborators. Like Monroe Stahr, Desmond Spellacy is a prince of an order and on the fast track to be something more: impeccable, sharp, exact, and sure. He keeps his own counsel, even when advising his superiors, and is certain of his decisions, even when they create collateral damage (“Looks like a leprechaun, thinks like an Arab,” says one observer of his manner, not entirely disapprovingly). He is full of face, perfect in tailoring, steady of gaze and voice, as meticulous in play on the golf course as he is in the rituals of the Mass. He knows pride is a sin, but he has—perhaps in jest, perhaps not—already chosen his papal name.

Like
Raging Bull
,
True Confessions
is a tale of brothers, a responsible one (the monsignor) and a loose cannon (the detective), their public personae distinct from the way they interact with each other, which is warmer, jokier, less guarded, less actorly. With his brother, Des can tell a joke, do an Irish accent, allude to a shared past with a glance or a phrase. Around everyone else he embodies an idea and an ideal; with his brother, even when hearing his brother’s confession, he’s an ordinary man, prone to sentimental reminiscence, goofball humor, flashes of impolitic frustration, and even anger.

The most remarkable moments in the performance, though, are in the silences, as they so often are with De Niro. As the grisly murder case is connected more and more surely to the inner circle of Catholic laymen with whom he does business and threatens to soil the hem of the ambitious Monsignor Spellacy himself, De Niro slowly shifts from hauteur toward self-questioning and, finally, in a truly breathtaking moment, humility. Changing from his golf clothes to his priestly garb, he sits by himself, weary, determined, his doubts starting to outweigh his certainty. He is alone in a sparsely furnished room, but he could be orating a confession to a full auditorium; he is nearly naked with his thoughts, and De Niro conveys them without a sound. It’s a fine, textured performance, and as unlike Jake LaMotta as can be imagined.

I
N THE MONTHS
after filming
True Confessions
, De Niro started working again with his
Bang the Drum Slowly
director John Hancock, who was developing a script for him based on the true-life story of Rick
Cluchey, who had been sentenced to death (and, later, life without parole) in 1957 under California’s “Little Lindbergh” law, which added a mandatory death sentence to any crime that had a kidnapping component. During his time at San Quentin, Cluchey had become interested in writing and acting and composed a play about prison called
La Cage.
After his sentence was commuted in 1966 by California governor Pat Brown, he traveled the world with a troupe of ex-con actors, eventually making his way to Paris, where no less a personage than Samuel Beckett came to be an admirer of his work. Hancock was crafting this remarkable saga into a film.

Along with Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, De Niro was interested in the project and worked closely with Hancock as he wrote the film, which had been entitled
Weeds.
He started to do his usual research thing—talking at length with Cluchey, observing his workshops, visiting a number of prisons, reading about the lives of convicts. That behavior was familiar to Hancock. But he also took note that De Niro was more demanding about a number of details of the film that Hancock felt ought to be the director’s prerogative: casting, music, sets, and so on. In particular, Hancock was uncomfortable with De Niro’s insistence that real convicts play major roles. The film had found a home at United Artists, with MGM distributing, but without an agreement on such a central issue, De Niro was never entirely ready to dive in, and the studio never green-lit the production.

Two years later, word of
Weeds
surfaced again, at EMI Films this time, with Universal distributing, again with Hancock and De Niro attached. Again De Niro went from apparent immersion in it to disagreement over how the material would be approached, and again it was shelved. In 1986,
Weeds
got yet a third life, this time with Nick Nolte in the lead role; it appeared the following year, to modestly favorable reviews and tepid box office, and Hancock and De Niro never came close to working together again.

B
Y 1981
, D
E
N
IRO
had decided that he would live in Los Angeles only when work required it of him, and only in leased or rented housing,
preferably at an entirely neutral and anonymous place—the Chateau Marmont being a favored destination, at least until John Belushi’s death.

He still had his 14th Street apartment in Manhattan, and he still used it for storage and as a crash pad for friends—Meryl Streep and her baby daughter stayed there for a couple of nights in late 1980 when the heating in their own apartment was on the fritz. And he had the townhouse on St. Luke’s Place in Greenwich Village, which he and Abbott had been renovating since they acquired it. It was a massive building—four floors plus a basement, with six bedrooms and four baths, and eventually a sauna, gym, and screening room. The detail work was meticulous, with upward of $200,000 going to, among other fine points, red oak in the entranceway, a redwood skylight in the master bedroom, and lots of teak, butternut, and cedar throughout.

Although the work on the house took more than two years and was estimated at some $3 million, De Niro was sued by a carpenter who claimed that he was given a check for $15,000 and then found that De Niro had put a stop order on it. When the matter finally came to court, the woodworker told the press he thought De Niro had misused him because “I treated him like just another customer, and he found that difficult because he’s used to people kissing his butt.” He made his case to the court’s satisfaction, and De Niro had to pay him the disputed fee and pay another $5,000 in interest and court costs.

Undissuaded by the hassles of home ownership, De Niro was looking at acquiring places in Connecticut and on Long Island. If it seemed that he was becoming a land baron or real estate hoarder, it was, in fact, a family habit. His uncle, Jack De Niro, was a big-time real estate agent with thriving businesses in New York City and Florida, and his mother, Virginia Admiral, had been buying and leasing properties in lower Manhattan for some time. Under the umbrellas of a variety of corporate partnerships, formed sometimes just for a single deal, she acquired loft spaces in which the painters and bohemians she had known since the 1940s could live and work, and she was able to keep her ex-husband, who still couldn’t be sure when or where his next paycheck would be, under a roof—a gesture of sisterly love, as it were, that
endured throughout their lives. Admiral owned pieces of buildings all over Greenwich Village, SoHo, and other Manhattan neighborhoods that hadn’t yet been branded with names or acquired trendy cachet. She even had a mantra for her wheelings and dealings: “All great fortunes were built on real estate.” Her son might not have been after a fortune, but he clearly had heard the lesson.

A
FTER WORKING
for hire on
True Confessions
, he spent some time doing not much of anything. There were scripts to read, of course. Since
The Godfather, Part II
, his had been among the first names to come up in casting sessions, and he had scores of parts offered to him, some in films that were never made, some of which turned up on the screen with other actors in the roles De Niro had been offered. Among the former were such never-realized films as Brian De Palma’s
Home Movie
, intended as yet a third go-round of the John Rubin persona from
Greetings
and
Hi, Mom!
; a script by John Cassavetes entitled
Knives
; and a Jean-Luc Godard film about Bugsy Siegel. The latter included Bob Fosse’s
All That Jazz
, Paul Schrader’s
American Gigolo
and
Blue Collar
, John Huston’s
Wise Blood
, Wim Wenders’s
Hammett
(originally intended as a Francis Coppola film), Martin Scorsese’s dream project,
Gangs of New York
, and two films by Richard Attenborough: the World War II epic A
Bridge Too Far
and the psychological thriller
Magic.
A fellow might’ve made some pretty good films if he’d just stuck to that list, but De Niro was still chary about committing to projects: he’d rejected
A Bridge Too Far
, it was said, because Attenborough wouldn’t agree to preliminary meetings with him to discuss his part.

His next director, though, showed more determination. In 1973, when De Niro was in Italy to play Vito Corleone, Sergio Leone, the great director of such westerns as
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
,
A Fistful of Dollars
, and
Once Upon a Time in the West
, came to see him about a new project he was nursing along. Leone’s films of the 1960s had enjoyed huge grosses around the world and had made an international star of Clint Eastwood, but they hadn’t yet garnered the critical reputation they would enjoy decades later, and they were still derided as “spaghetti westerns.”

Leone didn’t wish to talk to De Niro about a western, though.
^*2
He had in mind a story based on a book he’d read some half dozen years earlier, an account of Jewish gangsters in New York by Harry Gray entitled
The Hoods.
The story, he later said, “
attached itself to me like the malediction of the Mummy in the old movie with Boris Karloff. I wanted to make that film and no other.” He had been going around Europe and the United States sharing his vision for an epic gangster picture for a number of years, and he told the story enthrallingly enough for De Niro, who didn’t know Leone’s work, to be at least politely interested. “
He was a big guy,” De Niro remembered, “and I liked him.… He was very Italian, very sympathetic,
simpatico.
”

Years passed, and Leone continued to pursue the film, which he had come to call
Once Upon a Time in America
, chiefly as a producer, presenting it to a number of potential screenwriters, including Norman Mailer (who, Leone said, produced “a Mickey Mouse version” of a script) and journalist Pete Hamill, and such directors as Milos Forman and Peter Bogdanovich. Finally, Leone thought he’d simply direct the film himself, from a script of his own devising, and he wrote a treatment. Most movie treatments—prose descriptions of a story that will be expanded into script form—are perhaps a quarter as long as the completed screenplay. Leone’s treatment for
Once Upon a Time in America
was 227 pages long, and the first script drafts were even longer: 260 and 290 pages. Given the usual calculation that a page of screenplay equaled a minute of screen time, those would be impossibly long.

Finally the problem was cracked, and Leone’s epic was boiled down to a long but imaginable screenplay by two writers, the Italian Leonardo Benvenuti and the American Stuart Kaminsky, the latter focusing especially on dialogue. A new producer, the former art dealer (and, by his own admission, Israeli spy) Arnon Milchan, agreed to shepherd the project to the screen, and set about raising money. Leone came back to De Niro with the new script and a better pitch than the one of years before.

“
Sergio told me the story in two installments over seven hours,” De Niro remembered. “I sat and listened through a translator. He told the story almost shot by shot, with the flashbacks, and it was beautiful. I said, ‘This is something that I’d like to be part of.’ ” The hook was in, and Leone offered De Niro his choice of the two principal roles—the flamboyant front man Max or his more circumspect boyhood friend and fellow gangster Noodles. De Niro agreed to give it serious thought.

There were some real obstacles to their collaboration, though. For one thing, the film was going to be shot entirely in Italy, even though it would be cast with American actors, and production would take the better part of a year, if not two. For another, De Niro was leery of putting himself in the hands of a director whose work he didn’t have a real feel for. “
Bobby made it clear to me,” Leone later said, “that he has needs to be fulfilled, and one need is that he must feel he is completely understood by the director.” He promised, De Niro remembered, not to be as officious and didactic as Bernardo Bertolucci had been during the making of
1900.
“
Italian directors sometimes tell you how to do it,” De Niro explained. “They say, ‘You go over there, and you do this or that.’ American actors don’t like that, they want to find it for themselves, they don’t want to be told where to go. But Sergio was very smart and clever and respectful enough not to do that in my case.”

But then there was the matter of the urine.

As De Niro started warming up to the project, he visited Leone in New York at the Mayflower Hotel, where Milchan had booked a suite for meetings, allowing each of the principals some private space. As he always did, no matter who was stopping by, the portly Leone greeted De Niro and Milchan, who’d come along to smooth the process, wearing only a bathrobe and close-fitting underpants, a sight that rattled the fastidious actor. Milchan repaired to one of the unused bedrooms to wait for a phone call. After a bit, as he recalled, the phone rang. It was De Niro, calling from another bedroom in the suite and insisting Milchan come see him immediately.

The producer found De Niro agitated.

“
I can’t do the movie!”

“Why not?”

De Niro led him into the en suite bathroom of his bedroom and
pointed to the commode. “Can’t you see that he pissed all over my toilet seat?”

There was, in fact, urine on the toilet seat. A flummoxed Milchan improvised an answer: “Come on, Robert. He didn’t do that on purpose. He’s fat; he didn’t see.”

But De Niro insisted it was a power play, a marking of territory, a crude show of superiority, and he actually seemed ready to drop out of the film because of it.