De Niro: A Life (74 page)

He even had at least one significant project of his own that went at least as far along as Ahab: Stolen Flower, an adaptation of Philip Carlo’s novel about a Manhattan private eye hired to track down a girl who has
been kidnapped and used in a child pornography ring. For that one, he had scripts drafted and spent a while scouting locations in New York and Europe. But it never came together, joining a pile of unmade films that would have constituted a full career in itself.

H
E HAD BARELY
finished
Jackie Brown
when he jumped into another high-style crime film with an ensemble cast. He would spend the winter of 1997–98 primarily in France shooting
Ronin
, an espionage and heist film filled with stunning car chases and a cast of international faces including the French Jean Reno, the Swedish Stellan Skarsgård, the English Sean Bean, Natascha McElhone, and Jonathan Pryce, and even the German ice skater Katarina Witt. The script by J. D. Zeik, from his own story, had gone through at least six drafts, including a punch-up by David Mamet (writing under the pseudonym Richard Weisz). And the director was the legendary John Frankenheimer, who had been making pictures of this kind when De Niro was still sitting in a classroom bidding Stella Adler good morning.

It was a bit of a gamble, at least from the studio’s point of view. The film involved several long action sequences that would take weeks upon weeks to shoot and push the budget over $60 million. Frankenheimer was in his late sixties, and his last film, the 1996 remake of
The Island of Dr. Moreau
, had been a widely ridiculed flop—albeit one that he had been hired mid-production to rescue from the original director, who’d been fired for being unable to rein in stars Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer, among other sins. But among his many stellar credits (
The Manchurian Candidate
,
The Birdman of Alcatraz
,
The Train
,
Seven Days in May
), Frankenheimer counted
Grand Prix
, the 1966 race car film, and
Black Sunday
, the 1977 film about international terrorism. He had lived in France for a period, and actors loved him. So in some ways he was a natural choice.

De Niro was brought in relatively late in the process, and his salary, a reported $14 million, was more than 20 percent of the whole budget. But his name gave the picture a global reach that the otherwise distinguished but low-wattage cast lacked. And he was a willing collaborator, boning up on his French and probing deeply into the logic and
practice of espionage behind the script’s details (Milt Bearden, a former CIA agent whom Frankenheimer had brought in as a consultant on what he hoped to be his next project, a history of the spying agency called
The Good Shepherd
, was De Niro’s go-to source for questions about spies and their tradecraft). He even took some lessons in race car driving—although he would be filmed behind a dummy wheel, with a real auto racer driving from the right side of the cars.

He liked Frankenheimer—he gave him a custom-made chair for Christmas and a video camera to mark the end of shooting along with a note declaring “What a guy!… What a cineaste!” And he liked France—or at least he did until the morning of February 10, 1998, when, with a month still to go in the production, he was taken from his suite at the Hotel Bristol by as many as eight Parisian police officers and brought to the offices of judge Frédéric N’Guyen, where he was held for most of the day and questioned for more than three hours about his possible involvement in a high-end prostitution ring.

At issue was the case of Jean-Pierre Bourgeois, a soft-core porn photographer who was in custody pending trial as the operator of a high-class call girl ring. The charges against Bourgeois were sensational, involving the use of underage girls, $8,000-a-night escorts, Middle Eastern oil billionaires, shady middlemen, briefcases full of cash, and even an epic tryst involving an Arab prince, $1 million, and a well-known entertainment personality. De Niro’s name was found in Bourgeois’s address book, and there were at least three women involved in the prostitution ring who claimed to have met De Niro, one of whom, the English porn star Charmaine Sinclair, had told investigators that he had been her lover. Sinclair—shapely and dark-skinned, like almost all of the women in his life in the past twenty years—said she’d met De Niro in the early 1990s and would see him, on and off, until 1995. “
He was attentive, very gentle and passionate,” she told a London tabloid. “He left me totally satisfied.… I know I’ll never make love like that again.”

Confronted with Sinclair’s story, De Niro didn’t deny it, laying out the entire chain of events for N’Guyen. As he testified, he’d met Bourgeois through the Polish tennis star Wojtek Fibak, who

De Niro said he flew to Nice from Paris, took a helicopter to St. Tropez, and met Bourgeois and Sinclair in a villa. “
I had sex with Charmaine in the villa. I left in the afternoon by helicopter, then took the plane to Paris. There had been no money transaction.” Another girl who was on the scene said she’d seen Fibak and Bourgeois handling a bag full of cash while De Niro was at the villa, but the actor insisted, “
I never had any attaché case full of dollars the day I met Charmaine in St. Tropez.” As for any of the other girls involved in the prostitution ring who named him, he would say only that it was possible that he had “shaken hands” with them, and he insisted that nothing more had happened. He wasn’t arrested, charged, or even given reason to believe that he would be, and he was let go at around 9:00 p.m.

The story of De Niro’s testimony broke all over the world overnight, and he had paparazzi camped outside his hotel constantly (he received regular messages from the front desk about whether or not it was safe to emerge, and he generally did so through a back entrance). It was so bad that he actually called the New York
Daily News
gossip columnists George Rush and Joanna Molloy to deny any wrongdoing point-blank: “No matter how violent and defamatory the attacks on me are, it will all come out at the trial that I acted properly,” he said, adding cryptically, “
I have 20 years of experience. I am doing everything according to the law. I know what I am doing.”

Privately, he fumed. The previous year he’d been named to the French Légion d’Honneur, a distinction that named him, in effect, an asset to the culture of France. He declared angrily that he’d send
the medal back, and he also said that once
Ronin
was finished filming, he’d never work in or visit France again. With its treatment of him, he said, France had “betrayed its own motto of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity.’ ”

Among the things he did was hire a prominent attorney, former French justice minister Georges Kiejman, who held a press conference to defend De Niro and denounce the investigator’s tactics: “
I was shocked and upset by the way in which [De Niro] was treated in a case in which his name came up only incidentally.” He described his client as a ripe target for the attention of women: “
He’s a charming man. Young women are introduced to him all the time.… If you knew the number of women who are pretty and ravishing who have his phone number … He has a right to a private life.” More specifically, Kiejman denounced the sensational tactics of N’Guyen, whom he called “another Kenneth Starr” and accused of seeking to create a “media circus” for his own glory.
^*2
“
The name of Robert De Niro is like a jewel for a judge,” he said. “He submitted voluntarily to be questioned on a matter that did not directly concern him. He in no way, shape or form is a subject of any investigation.…[But] they never let him free. He could phone me, he was not under formal arrest, but without freedom all day … He kept repeating the same answers to the same questions.” After his angry conversation with reporters, Kiejman filed a complaint accusing the judge of “violation of secrecy in an investigation.”

De Niro was guilty, prosecutors determined, of nothing more than having sex with a woman who, at other times, sold her favors for (lots of) money, but the whole ugly episode cost him at least one potential job: he had been among the actors invited to read English-language translations of the poetry of Pope John Paul II for a CD project that had been successful all over the world in the previous months. When news of this scandal broke, the invitation was rescinded. “
De Niro’s participation no longer seems such a good idea,” said Father Giuseppe Moscati, who was coordinating the recording project. “It appears that the image we had of De Niro when we made the proposal is far from
the truth.” For his part, De Niro sued the Parisian tabloid
France Soir
for defamation and violation of privacy for their coverage of his brush with the law, and he was eventually awarded more than $13,000 in damages by a court.

The whole matter had vanished from newspapers by the fall, when
Ronin
was released.
^*3
Producers might have worried that news of their big star in a sex scandal would hurt the film, but the star of
Ronin
, really,
is
the film
Ronin
: the construct of it, the execution of the driving sequences, the shootouts, the cat-and-mouse sequences, and especially the interplay between the very well-cast performers. De Niro’s Sam is from the get-go presented as cagy, untrusting, and demanding, but he’s also undoubtedly professional, possessed of a dab hand’s tricks and insights and a sixth sense for danger, duplicity, and the likelihood of a scenario playing out a certain way. He forms bonds within the little cadre of players, principally a friendship with Reno’s Vincent and a not-quite-romance with McElhone’s Deirdre. But he’s quick to smell a rat, to suss out a hopeless situation, and to deflect inquiries into his own past and motivation with black humor. “You worried about saving your skin?” he’s asked, and he responds, almost without a glance, “Yeah, I am. It covers my whole body.”

Sam is relentless in trying to get Deirdre to introduce him to her bosses, to get a heftier payment for his work, and, when the time for action comes, to see that he holds up his end and then some. He shoots, he drives, he fights, he connives, and in one of the film’s most remarkable scenes, he even performs surgery on himself to remove a bullet. If he seemed at first a reluctant warrior, he proves himself a valuable one. And he has a code: “Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt.” Stuff like that, played to low-key, hard-boiled perfection, is clearly what drew De Niro to the role, and he plays it just as he did Neil McCauley in
Heat
, giving himself over willingly to the larger enterprise, playing a part in a big, engaging cinematic machine. It’s not a great movie, but
it’s a damn good genre film, and De Niro elevates it with the weight of his presence and his lack of showiness and vanity. (He didn’t elevate it into a hit, though; the film grossed less than $42 million against a budget of around $55 million.)

E
VEN BEFORE HE
left for France and
Ronin
, De Niro was looking ahead to yet another film and another new direction: a script called
Analyze This
, about the relationship of a mob boss and the psychotherapist whom he starts to visit when he loses his confidence in himself. Billy Crystal had been attached to produce the picture and star as the shrink, and there was a director on board, Richard Loncraine, an Englishman with a resume that included period comedy (
The Missionary
) and Shakespeare (an updated
Richard III
with Ian McKellen).

De Niro had been courted for roles as a comic gangster since
Midnight Run
, but as Jane Rosenthal explained, “We weren’t willing at the time to have Bob parody the one franchiseable character he has.” In early 1997, though, he was willing to reconsider, and so he was game when he got a gander at the script, which had originally been written by playwright Kenneth Lonergan and had been put into the churning cycle of rewrites that so often plagued Hollywood comedies. During the next year and a half, writers Peter Tolan, George Gallo, and Phoef Sutton would all take cracks at the material, along with Crystal himself; in May 1997 Loncraine would be replaced by
Caddyshack
and
Groundhog Day
director Harold Ramis, who worked on yet another set of script revisions, along with colleagues Mort Nathan and Barry Fanaro.

Ramis was walking a tightrope of sorts: mixing genres, casting well-known actors against type, and having both of his stars as producers. “
Bob was afraid Billy would turn it into a sentimental farce, a sitcom,” Ramis said. “He was afraid it would be too pat, too unrealistic. And Billy was afraid it would turn into ‘Goodfellas’: too violent, too mean-spirited. I came in sort of to reconcile these points of view. I reassured Billy the film would be funny. And I told Bob this wouldn’t be a send-up of ‘The Godfather.’ I said, ‘Imagine you’re watching ‘Goodfellas,’ and Woody Allen enters.’ ”

The script was finally shaped to everyone’s satisfaction in the late spring of 1998, by which time De Niro had agreed to help produce the film and to join a cast that would include Lisa Kudrow, Chazz Palminteri, and the very credible Joe Viterelli, a shady character off the streets of Little Italy who liked to keep his background mysterious and had appeared memorably in Woody Allen’s mob-and-theater comedy
Bullets over Broadway.
De Niro didn’t dig very deep for his character; principally he made a detailed study of how contemporary mob bosses—particularly the famed “Dapper Don,” John Gotti—dressed and wore their hair. But he did make the acquaintance of at least one bona fide made man, Anthony (Fat Andy) Ruggiano, a soldier in the Gambino crime family; another Gambino associate, Anthony Corozzo, had been cast in the film as an extra (he was a member of the Screen Actors Guild), and he brought Ruggiano to the set one day and made introductions, during which time a photo, which surfaced during a 2009 mob trial, was taken showing De Niro with his arm around Ruggiano. (Asked a few years earlier about running into mobsters, De Niro explained, “You know perfectly well who they are, but if I find them in front of me and they say, ‘Hello,’ I can’t really turn away, can I?”)