De Niro: A Life (76 page)

T
HAT SUMMER
, De Niro surprised Grace Hightower—and delighted gossip columnists—with the news that he wanted a divorce. The couple had always had lifestyle issues, according to whispers, and they were struggling as parents to Elliot, who was exhibiting some developmental difficulties. De Niro was happy to have nannies see to the boy, but Hightower wasn’t, and he was said to be frustrated with having forfeited her, in effect, to the child. As per contingencies they’d ironed out before the marriage, they separated, and De Niro bought Hightower a twenty-fifth-floor condo at the Trump Palace on East 69th Street: three bedrooms, a living room with a balcony, a marble Jacuzzi in the master suite, custom built-ins everywhere, plus a set of four storage rooms in the basement. Elliot would live with his mother, and De Niro would be allowed to see him three times a week in the company of Hightower or a nanny.

They hadn’t officially divorced, but they seemed to have reached a perfectly civilized entente, traveling and attending events together and seeing each other during holidays; Hightower and Elliot even
visited the Montreal set of
The Score
in the summer of 2000. As he had during his separation from Diahnne Abbott, De Niro dated openly; tabloids connected him to Sharon Webb, a Philadelphia TV host, among others.

The following summer, however, the De Niros hit a truly acrimonious patch and made ugly headlines. De Niro filed suit in New York Supreme Court to have his visitation rights amended so that he could see Elliot on his own, including overnight visits at his Tribeca home; what was more, he wanted a legal guardian appointed for the boy. Hightower, he claimed, was unstable and had struck him during a violent outburst on a Florida cruise, fracturing a rib. Hightower’s attorneys countered that De Niro had exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated, the attack and his injuries and that
he
was the unstable one, with a lifestyle that included indulgence in alcohol, drugs, and women; he should not be allowed to have Elliot without supervision under any circumstances, they argued.

The conflict spun out of events that occurred in June in Miami on a yacht owned by the actor/singer Marc Anthony and his wife, Dayanara Torres. According to both parties, De Niro and Hightower had brought along Elliot and his twin brothers and everyone was enjoying the day. At some point during the cruise, De Niro went belowdecks and was followed after a time by Hightower, who discovered her husband with the vessel’s cook, who was also the wife of the captain. According to De Niro, she was showing him how to close and lock the bathroom door; according to Hightower, she was closing not a door but her blouse, and De Niro had “a frozen look on his face.” Hightower stormed back up to the deck, announcing loudly what she’d seen and demanding to be taken back to shore; De Niro followed her, trying to talk to her, and she turned around and struck him, more than once.

In court in July, the pair and their lawyers were strongly encouraged by Judge Judith Gische to iron out their problems as best they could, and they managed to make some progress. But they were unable to reach an agreement on the visitation issues, and Gische ordered them all—De Niro, Hightower, and Elliot—to be evaluated by a court-approved psychologist. It was a situation that only a gossip columnist could enjoy.

W
ITH
Analyze This
reaping rewards for him and his production company, De Niro could afford to take a job close to home that gave him a chance to noodle, and that turned out to be
Flawless
, an offbeat story about a retired cop who suffers a stroke and is nursed back to health by his Lower East Side neighbor, a drag queen whose very existence is anathema to the cop’s way of thinking. The script was written by Joel Schumacher, the onetime Bloomingdale’s window dresser who had directed such hits as
The Lost Boys
,
Falling Down
, and
The Client.
Philip Seymour Hoffman, rising to recognition on the back of his well-regarded stage work and such films as
Scent of a Woman
,
Boogie Nights
, and
Happiness
, was cast as the drag queen. Despite the boldface names, the film would be made on the down-low and cheap, with a budget under $15 million.

De Niro hadn’t truly researched a role in years, and the challenge of playing a stroke victim excited him. He brought the script to neurologists at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in Manhattan to have them vet it for accuracy in depicting post-stroke recovery. He observed patients at various stages of recuperation and read up on dysarthria, aphasia, physical therapy, and other post-stroke phenomena. And, as with
Awakenings
, he visited his old friend Ed Weinberg to remind himself of how a body frozen by disease functioned.

He worked hard at the details of the role. “He designed weights for his arm so it would hang right,” Schumacher said. “He designed four different prostheses for his mouth so it would show his progress over time. He had a therapist on the set, and if he didn’t feel that what we were doing was … absolutely, totally correct, we did it over.” His script was filled with notes about physical business such as “Let lips get rubbery” and “Bannister: cross over to right with left hand.” He had specific instructions for himself about how to hold cards in a poker game, how to struggle with making a knot in a tie with one hand, and what to do with his cane.

But
Flawless
would be one of those films in which he would have been better served putting work in on the script, or at least supervising revisions. Schumacher hadn’t written a movie since 1985’s
St. Elmo’s
Fire
, and his work on the page in
Flawless
was hammered when the film was released.

O
N A WEEKEND
night in late April 1999, in a chair at Gracie Mansion, the traditional home of New York City’s mayors, De Niro sat patiently while the city’s current chief executive, Rudolph Giuliani, the onetime United States attorney who famously had busted up the traditional Mafia in the 1980s, did impressions of Vito Corleone and Paul Vitti, the gangsters De Niro played in
The Godfather, Part II
and
Analyze This.

De Niro hadn’t come to the stately manor to be entertained. The mayor’s sketch was a light moment in the context of a business conversation. De Niro was accompanied by Harvey Weinstein of Miramax Films and was discussing with Giuliani and his top aides a plan to invest $150 million in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an industrial ghost town of fifteen acres between the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, and build a 700,000-square-foot movie studio—twelve state-of-the-art soundstages just across the river from Manhattan.

De Niro and Weinstein, among many other New York–based filmmakers, had long lamented the dearth of adequate production space in the city. The two most prominent studios, in Astoria, Queens, and on the Chelsea Piers, were almost always being used for such TV series as
Sex and the City
,
The Sopranos
, and
Law & Order
, and even when empty they weren’t quite large enough for big-money movies, which were inevitably filmed in Los Angeles, London, Toronto, or Vancouver. Although New York was becoming a popular filming location, there really wasn’t a proper place to make movies there. The historic Navy Yard—built in 1801, birthplace of the USS
Maine
and many other ships, swollen at the height of World War II with seventy-one thousand workers, abandoned in 1966, and in 1970 acquired by the city, which had no pressing use for it—was in many ways a perfect site.

With the Tribeca Film Center an uncontested success a decade into its existence, De Niro was ready to think bigger, and Weinstein, always eager to build more and high off his recent Oscar victory for
Shakespeare in Love
, was if anything even more ambitious. The two
had no intention of building a film studio, however, when in the early months of 1999 they were approached by a pair of real estate entrepreneurs, Cary Dean Hart and Louis Madigan, who just the previous year had signed a contract with the city to develop a film studio on the Navy Yard site and were seeking investors. De Niro and Weinstein discussed the possibility at dinner and ran with it. By April, they were able to propose a deal to the city that had almost half of the $150 million attached and would likely prove sexy enough to lure the rest without much effort.

On May 3, in a hastily assembled news conference, Giuliani, De Niro, Weinstein, Hart, Madigan, and others shared the contents of a press release snappily entitled “Mayor Giuliani Announces Major Film and Television Production Facility to Be Built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—Facility to Serve as Pre-eminent East Coast Film and Television Production Studio and Create Thousands of Film, Television and Construction Jobs.” It was a glitzy moment and a wonderful bit of news; De Niro muttered a few carefully noncommittal words to the press, and Giuliani refrained from his gangster movie impersonations. But in the background, Hart and Madigan were unhappy. They had birthed the idea and brought it to De Niro and Weinstein, and they felt that the small percentage they were being offered for their participation didn’t reflect their importance to the deal. What’s more, they had an ally in Giuliani’s office: a deputy mayor who believed that there was a way to finance the deal without the $25 million from the city that the De Niro/Weinstein plan called for—and, perhaps, without De Niro and Weinstein at all.

By midsummer, the rifts between the various parties had widened, and word began leaking into the press that the film studio wouldn’t be built as had been advertised on that hopeful May morning. The scale seemed out of whack, for one thing: there were perpetually empty soundstages in Los Angeles, and Miramax and Tribeca didn’t generate enough production activity between them to fill a dozen such facilities in New York. Further, the way to make real money in the film biz wasn’t to own the factory but to own the
product
—that is, the movies themselves. A huge investment in infrastructure would pay off only if it resulted in hit films, which nobody could promise would be the case.
And lastly, the two factions in City Hall continued to vie against each other, and Giuliani was privately fuming that he hadn’t been sufficiently warned about the lack of cohesion among the principals behind the De Niro/Weinstein proposal.

It all came undone in October. Giuliani made another announcement: there would be a film studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but the De Niro/Weinstein faction would not be part of it. Rather, Hart and Madigan would be backed by David S. Steiner, a New Jersey financier who so happened to be a strong supporter of Giuliani’s bid to be a United States senator—in a race against Hillary Clinton, whom De Niro and Weinstein happened to endorse. True, the Steiner-backed bid was more favorable financially to the city, but no one who knew Giuliani could believe for a second that political one-upmanship wasn’t involved in the calculations.

De Niro, Weinstein, and Jane Rosenthal issued a statement declaring themselves “shocked and perplexed” by the turn of events. Describing the conversations of the spring, they said, “
The mayor told us we had a deal, all that remained to do was dot the I’s and cross the T’s.” But a counsel for the city declared, “They had nothing. They had a press conference.” And Giuliani, urged by reporters to explain what had happened, reminded them that he was a lawyer and that the announcement they’d seen back in May “says ‘explore’ at least three times, so it was explored. That’s what the word means. It doesn’t mean ‘agreement.’ It doesn’t mean ‘deal.’ ”

And it didn’t mean “film studio.” By the following spring, the Hart/Madigan/Steiner bid had collapsed, in part because Steiner was caught breaking into a judge’s chambers to look into the contents of his wife’s laptop computer during a divorce action. De Niro and Weinstein moved on to consider sites in New Jersey and Yonkers, neither of which seemed suitable or affordable, though they would have loved to have built outside of the city, according to one participant in their conversations, just to “
stick it up Rudy’s knickers.” It may well have been true, as De Niro and Weinstein said when they were edged out of the deal, that “there is no question that our proposal, from the leading film producers on the East Coast, is better for Brooklyn and the needs of the city,” but by 2014 there was still no new film studio in New York.