De Niro: A Life (51 page)
Authors: Shawn Levy
De Niro had committed to appear in fifty-five performances at the Longacre Theatre—a Broadway house with a capacity more than ten
times that of the original Public Theater auditorium in which the play debuted. Tickets, with prices ranging from $10 to $37.50, went on sale on June 30, and by the end of business on July 1, more than $500,000 worth had been sold—more than 30 percent of the total potential gross. Considering that De Niro, Young, and Macchio, the stars of
Raging Bull
,
Rocky
, and
The Karate Kid
, were working for the Broadway minimum of $700, Papp and the Public were set to make a killing.
The Broadway production of
Cuba
opened on July 16. That night, De Niro received flowers from Diahnne Abbott and the kids, as well as from Sally Kirkland and Liza Minnelli, telegrams and letters from Harvey Keitel, Twyla Tharp, Michael Cristofer, Christopher Walken, and Tommy Lee Jones, and thank-you notes from Joe Papp and Ralph Macchio. The opening-night party was star-studded, but, as Mardirosian remembered, De Niro was more interested in family than celebrities. “
Because I was an understudy,” he said, “I was able to get to the party early. There were a lot of tables, and at one of them I saw Robert De Niro Sr., and I thought, ‘I’ll go sit with Bob,’ and he beckoned me over, and I sat across from him. And we’re chatting, mostly about tennis, and then the people start coming in from the theater. And when Bob, the actor, walks in, everybody’s wondering where he’s gonna sit, because that’s gonna be the center of attention. And where does he sit? He sits next to his father! I had frankly had been hoping to stay in the background. Nobody had seen me in the show, nobody knew who I was, but as soon as Bob comes in, suddenly it was as if all the headlights in the room were pointing at us.”
The engagement ran until late September, and once again it was a celebrity carnival; on one memorable night, the audience included Robin Williams, Richard Chamberlain, and Sylvester Stallone with his wife of the moment, Brigitte Nielsen. An even more intriguing crowd was treated to the play on August 18, when the cast performed it on Rikers Island before seven hundred inmates.
As Tom Mardirosian remembered, De Niro was always inclusive of his collaborators. Even though he was but an understudy in the show, Mardirosian was invited to De Niro’s birthday party. “
All these big celebrities were there,” he said. “And I sat near Robert De Niro Sr., and he had a dog that he was petting. And when they brought out the cake
and all these big celebrities were singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Bobby, the dad said to me, ‘Look at this: I remember when
nobody
came to his birthday party.’ ”
Onstage De Niro proved, once again, a willing collaborator. Mardirosian, among many others in the cast, was a more experienced stage actor than De Niro, and on the night that he understudied Young, he realized that De Niro didn’t know how to, as theatrical actors call it, “hold for the laugh”—that is, wait for the audience to finish laughing at a funny line before resuming the dialogue. As Mardirosian recalled,
There was this one scene in the play that I always thought was funny and should have gotten laughs, but it never did, and I always thought that was odd. So when I went on for my one night, I was determined to have a good time … By the time the scene came on, I was real comfortable, and he says his line, and I say my line, and the audience laughs where they had never laughed before, and he talked over the laugh, because he’s not used to them laughing there. And he stopped, and he kind of looked at me funny, like, “I don’t understand that.” And he said the next line, and I said the next line, and they laughed again. And again they topped him. So now he’s thinking, “Hmmm … something’s going on here.” And by the time the scene was over, he had learned to hold for the laugh. I literally taught him how to do that
onstage
while we were performing in a Broadway house. At the end of the show, he came to my dressing room and knocked on the door and said, “You know, you’re a funny guy.” And I said, “Well, thank you …” And he said, “No: you’re a funny guy.” And I said, “No, really …” And he said, “
No.
I’m telling you: you’re a funny guy.” So I finally said
,
“Thanks
,
Bobby.”
Cuba
, sans De Niro, would be performed in London and Buenos Aires in the coming years, and a movie script, which De Niro didn’t care for, appeared on his desk in 1988. There was talk in the fall, just after
Cuba
closed, of De Niro staying on Broadway to direct and star in a production of Bertolt Brecht’s
Arturo Ui
, which came to naught, and the following year Joe Papp announced plans to mount a series consisting
of every play by William Shakespeare featuring prominent stars, De Niro among them. But though he didn’t specifically say no, it was clear soon afterward that De Niro had no plans to return to the stage anytime soon, and certainly not in a classical role. “
I don’t know that my way would be that special or interesting that I would want to put all that time in, to put myself on the line,” he said. “There are other people with much better qualifications for doing it. I mean, Shakespeare is great, but I’d rather have the same problems in a contemporary situation where people can relate to it more directly.”
*1
Beatified in 1934, he would be canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1988.
*2
De Terville would go on to minor fame as a softcore porn model and actress.
*3
A few years later, Dustin Hoffman actually proposed to his producers that De Niro play the role of Biff opposite his own Willy Loman in a Broadway production of
Death of a Salesman.
Word got to De Niro. “You want me to be your son onstage?” De Niro asked Hoffman incredulously. The role went to John Malkovich.
*4
Povod was an acolyte of the playwright and drug-and-booze addict Miguel Piñero.
W
HILE HE WAS BUILDING AND PERFORMING HIS ROLE IN
Cuba
, De Niro was playing a different sort of heavy in a brief but crucial performance in
Angel Heart
, an atmospheric thriller that director Alan Parker was adapting from William Hjortsberg’s novel
Falling Angel.
Parker, a onetime client of David Puttnam’s when the producer was still an agent, had broken into feature directing with the very strange kids-as-gangsters picture
Bugsy Malone
and gone on to critical, commercial, and cult success with
Midnight Express
,
Fame
,
Pink Floyd—The Wall
, and, least seen but best, the domestic drama
Shoot the Moon.
His new film was a mystery about a private detective, Harold Angel, hired by a shadowy client, named Louis Cyphre, to find a fellow named Johnny Favourite, with whom Cyphre has some sort of contract; Favourite, claiming amnesia, has reneged on his portion of the deal and disappeared, and Cyphre wants him found and brought to account. It was a lurid, sexy, overheated story steeped in blood and sex and the occult, set in the 1950s and moving between Harlem and New Orleans. Parker, a lush visualist and iconoclast, planned to push the material to a provocative edge, preparing to include an explicit sex scene between Angel and a voodoo priestess.
*
It was a picture designed to make waves.
At first Parker courted De Niro for the role of Angel. But De Niro
had problems with the script. “I told Alan Parker that there were a lot of things wrong,” he remembered. After a series of communications in which De Niro explained his reservations, Parker made him a different offer: what if he were to play Cyphre, who only had a handful of scenes? De Niro still objected to the structure of the screenplay, but he found himself engaged by the opportunity to build a memorable character without carrying a script. “It was what you’d call a cameo,” he said. “But then it took me a lot of time to agree to that, too.”
As Parker recalled, “
He was lovely, only he wasn’t definite. It took a lot of talking.” But he understood the actor’s trepidation. “De Niro has made very few errors in any of his choices. That burden weighs heavily on him each time he has to decide what to do. Certainly he’s extremely careful with someone like Roland Joffé or myself, directors he hasn’t worked with before.” In the meantime, Parker had cast Mickey Rourke, then rising to the top tier of American screen acting, in the part of Harold Angel. De Niro, satisfied that the bulk of the heavy lifting would fall to someone else, agreed to play Cyphre. As he put it, “I thought it would be fun to do, not having to worry about doing the whole movie, you know, concentrating on four scenes, and that’s it. It worked out schedulewise.”
The film shot in Louisiana and New York through the spring of 1986, and De Niro was, as ever, punctilious about the appearance, emotional state, and background of his character. He had Polaroids taken of himself wearing dozens of different shades of contact lenses; he worked on specific looks for his eyebrows, hairline, facial hair, and fingernails; he practiced working with a cane and peeling a hard-boiled egg (this bit of business particularly absorbed and vexed him and wound up taking seven separate takes when it was finally shot); he sought out Hjortsberg to ask questions about Cyphre; and he read extensively in the background of the occult elements of the script, paying particular attention to historic illustrations of demons. (Ironically, he had a model close at hand for the eventual look of his character, perhaps without even knowing it. As he admitted in an interview, “
You know, one morning I was looking at myself in the mirror, and I said to myself, ‘Gee, you know, this looks a lot like Marty …’ ”)
The connection between Scorsese and Cyphre ran deeper than the
dark goatee and the provocative demeanor. As
Angel Heart
unfolds, it becomes clear that Louis Cyphre is not only an evil man but evil incarnate—Lucifer, in fact—and that Harold Angel is being led by the Prince of Darkness toward a revelation about himself in a fashion not unlike the process by which a film director might coax hidden truths out of a Method actor. But that subtlety was lost in the storm about the ratings board that preceded the film into theaters when it finally opened in March 1987.
D
E
N
IRO APPEARS
in only four scenes in
Angel Heart
, and they form little archipelagoes in the film, pauses for conversations that are somehow weighted and coded and only become entirely coherent in retrospect. Of course, Louis Cyphre (or, as Harold Angel pronounces it, “Sigh-fee-aire”) knows exactly what he’s up to, whom he’s dealing with, and how it will all play out: it’s his nature. But the audience, at least at the outset, is as clueless as the private eye.
De Niro playfully engages the macabre qualities of the script and the role: the long fingernails, the delicate fingering of his cane, the deliberately wispy, almost singsong voice, the dainty way in which he waggles his fingers when he describes something as a “fuss.” He is at once cagily testing Angel to see if he really is ignorant of the truth of his situation and teasing him with all the clues he’d need to figure it out. Chief among these is the hard-boiled egg, which Cyphre says is believed to be a symbol of the soul; he cracks it open meticulously, salts it liberally, and bites the top off it purposefully, staring at Angel with unguarded intent as he does so.
Now and again De Niro flashes his eyes in response to something Angel says—particularly when he seems to implicate himself in someone’s death—and the game is almost given away. Finally, when he reveals himself in their last meeting, he is resplendent: fingernails longer than ever, hair unfastened, eyes transformed with contact lenses into fiery amber lasers. He seems thicker of body, regal, a true demon king. It’s not really a performance; it’s more like a playful bit of hokum in the service of a punning riddle. But De Niro’s pleasure in being the side
dish and not the main course seems real. As a first real step in breaking away from having to bear the burden of an entire film, it shows promise.
W
HILE STILL ON
Broadway with
Cuba
, De Niro agreed to yet another smallish film appearance, with a completely different pedigree from
Angel Heart.
The new film was the brainchild of Art Linson, a Chicago native who’d amassed a track record of hits (
Car Wash
,
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
), critical successes (
Melvin and Howard
), and outright flops (
Where the Buffalo Roam
) as an independent Hollywood producer. Linson, like so many of his age, had grown up watching the adventures of federal lawman Eliot Ness in his battles against the bootleggers and mobsters led by Al Capone in TV’s
The Untouchables.
In 1985, he learned that Paramount Pictures owned the rights to the series, and he was gladdened to discover that Ned Tanen, who was running the studio’s film department, was also an
Untouchables
fan and had at one time tried to launch a film version of the story.
Encouraged at the possibility of bringing Ness and Capone to the big screen, Linson found himself dining one night in New York with yet another Chicago guy, David Mamet, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for
Glengarry Glen Ross
. Linson rather audaciously proposed to the newly minted laureate that he consider adapting the story of
The Untouchables
as a screenplay, and to his surprise, Mamet answered almost immediately, “I’m in.”