De Niro: A Life (9 page)

Adler, a voracious creature of the theater, was thoroughly taken with Stanislavski’s system, both its theory and as it was practiced by the Moscow Art Theatre and American Laboratory Theatre. She relocated to Paris for a time in the 1930s, becoming the only American actor ever to study with Stanislavski himself. Upon her return, she was among the ardent modernists who created the Group Theatre, which was
dedicated to translating the Russian director’s theories of stagecraft, dramaturgy, and acting, into an American idiom; the remarkable roster of founders included Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford, Sanford Meisner, John Garfield, and Franchot Tone, and above all Harold Clurman, the architect of this acting revolution (and incidentally, Adler’s second husband). In time, the likes of Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, and Lee J. Cobb would become involved in the Group Theatre, helping to form a pantheon of talents whose stage, film, and classroom work would give rise to a half century and more of American masterpieces.

In the 1940s, Adler taught occasionally at Erwin Piscator and Maria Ley-Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop, but by the end of that decade she had all but retired from acting and opened a school of her own, where she espoused a philosophy of acting that was distinct from the Piscators’ and from that of her Group Theatre colleague and pedagogical rival Lee Strasberg—and maybe even from that of Stanislavski himself.

For Strasberg, whose Actors Studio became the high temple of the Method, Stanislavski’s “emotion memory” meant that actors must explicitly find a reality within themselves to express the situations presented by the script; focusing on the actual emotions of the men and women who were acting the roles of fictional people, he encouraged the use of what he called “sense memory,” an ability to recall, on command, an emotional sensation in an actor’s own life that corresponded to the one demanded by a scene.

For Adler, Stanislavski’s words and deeds meant something quite different—and she loved citing the fact that she’d personally studied with the man as proof that she was correct. She understood the principal task of Stanislavskian acting to be an imaginative commingling of the actor with the text and with the human situations contained in it—not a mining of the self to fill the emotions of the scene with traces of one’s own life, but an effort to picture oneself in the shoes of one’s character and then behaving as one’s character would.

“The play is not in the words,” Adler declared in one of her most famous precepts, “it is in
you.
” She stressed using the imagination to deepen and expand the meaning of a scene; focusing on action and interaction as a means of communicating; cultivating the actor’s psyche, spirit, and personality beyond mere stagecraft; and, especially, interpreting
the script—a sometimes technical means of inhabiting and absorbing the material to be performed. “Your talent is in your choice” was her other most famous dictum (and Robert De Niro’s favorite). She taught actors to use the script and the world around them to create a performance, and not, as she thought Strasberg did, to psychoanalyze themselves and use what they’d found to make the script their own.

When Method actors Montgomery Clift and, more explosively, Marlon Brando broke into the Hollywood mainstream, Adler was lifted along with them. Brando was her most famous student (he surely relished the in-joke in his famous bellow “Stella!”), and she was immediately recognized as among the most important teachers of the newly dominant American acting style. At the time De Niro entered her class, Adler could count among her past and present students the likes of Warren Beatty, Anthony Quinn, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, and Elaine Stritch. By the dawn of the 1960s, her class was the largest in New York, and students would come from literally all over the world, sometimes to be launched into stardom or at least a career, sometimes to suffer withering dismissal. (A sign posted outside the classroom cautioned, “Stella wants everyone to know that criticism in the theatre is not personal. Nothing in the theatre is personal.”)

The young De Niro entered this emotional and artistic minefield possessed of a personal bent toward silence, observation, and nose-to-the-grindstone work that happened to mesh with Adler’s ideas. If watching his mother and father at work had taught him anything, it was the value of application, self-scrutiny, doggedness. Art could, at least in part, result from elbow grease. He studied the modern classics with Adler: Chekhov, Odets, and of course his dad’s old chum Tennessee Williams. He appreciated the nuts-and-bolts aspect of Adler’s approach: “
It was just a way of making people aware of character, style, period, and so on. People could sit down in a classroom as opposed to having to get up and demonstrate it.… In fact, that’s a class I’d want to take again. It taught me that if you have a very balanced script, you can
take
from the script without putting anything into something that isn’t there. That’s what she would call fictionalizing—which is not real, there’s no substance to it, it’s not concrete.” She made something elusive seem, to his way of thinking, rational.

The idea that acting was built of observation and imagination must have been particularly resonant for De Niro. After a childhood spent among adults, left alone with his books, permitted to go out by himself to play in the street, the only kid at the table or at the party, he was constantly observing the world. He was an outsider: as an only child, as a student, as a kid from Greenwich Village at a time when being from the Village was truly a remarkable thing. Somewhere along the way, his silence and watchfulness became a form of alchemy. He knew how to look at people and read them, and converting his research, as it were, into art by pretending to climb inside their skins must have seemed a challenge, yes, but also something like a game. “To totally submerge into another character,” he explained, “and experience life through him, without having to risk the real-life consequences—well, it’s a cheap way to do things you would never dare to do yourself.”

Given his tendency to watch and emulate, one of the strangest things about De Niro is how little he seemed to partake of the counterculture that was so vital in his community during his early twenties. He had grown up in one of the most bohemian and cosmopolitan neighborhoods on earth, with parents who were artists, and with aspirations toward a career of his own in the arts. He was twenty when the Beatles arrived, and he turned twenty-four during the Summer of Love; he managed to avoid military service in the Vietnam era, but he never really, by his own confession, seemed to have a hippie or even countercultural moment. Not once, he would tell
Playboy
, did he take LSD, nor was he an active antiwar protester. If anything, his bearing in his first films would reveal a kind of old-fashioned straightness and normalcy: he wanted to be thought of, at some level, as an ordinary fellow—or at least that was one of the guises he wore most comfortably. (The mini-Mafioso act he could easily slip into was also tinged with manners and echoes of a cultural past.)

Reflecting on his early acting days in the heart of the 1960s, he confessed that there had been a gap between him and the momentous goings-on of the time. “
It was an exciting time to grow up,” he admitted. “Kind of bohemian. Things were happening. There were big changes. I wasn’t really a part of it, though. I was more on the outside.
But by virtue of being an actor I was a good observer of it.
”

Silence, stillness, observation, imitation, performance: the keys to his art were already inside him, had been since childhood, and Adler’s methodology, with its emphasis on imagination, choices, and the text helped him unlock it and put it powerfully to use.

More specifically, especially given the nature of his work in the decades after he studied with Adler, De Niro explained that he learned how to do the most chaotic form of acting—that is, improvisation—by employing the hard, detail-oriented techniques on which Adler focused:

If De Niro shone in Adler’s class, he didn’t exactly blind people. Thurman Scott, among those who would eventually inherit Adler’s mantle as a New York teacher-actor-director, recalled, “
I was the star at Stella’s; Bobby was about eighth in the class.” (Scott noted as well, without knowing many details of his classmate’s upbringing, his suspicion that “Bobby had abandonment issues. I know the pain of being connected on a journey with someone and then have them say, ‘You can’t come.’ ”)

There were aspects of studying with Adler that weren’t appealing to De Niro. “
How she behaved, her affectation, that whole side of her, I never cared for personally,” he admitted. “But she made a lot of sense as a teacher. She had a very healthy approach toward acting and technique.” He was aware that there were other ideas about acting, such as those Lee Strasberg was promulgating at the Actors Studio. But he knew that Adler was a great resource—and, as he remembered, “she had a great actor, Brando, with her.” He would always credit her with his foundations as an actor, and he would talk far more willingly about
her influence on his thinking and practice than he would about almost anything else in his professional history.

I
N MANY WAYS
, he was just where he should have been. Still not twenty, with little to no performing experience since before he was a teen, he was far better-off in the classroom setting of Adler’s Conservatory than at the Actors Studio, which focused on praxis and critique of a sort more suited to working actors. Besides, he wasn’t yet convinced that he wanted to
be
a working actor. He briefly enrolled in the Delehanty Institute, a technical school that specialized in preparing students for civil service careers, with an eye toward possibly attending the Police Academy. And he still wanted to satisfy the urge to see the world that had been sparked by the visit to his father a few years earlier. That most of all was what prevented him from immersing himself fully in the business of acting.

“
I was afraid that I could get wrapped up in it so much that I wouldn’t have time to do what I wanted, like travel,” he later confessed. He had put together enough money to return to Europe for an extended hitchhiking jaunt, months longer than the previous had lasted. He “hitched all over Europe,” as he recalled—Scotland, Yugoslavia, Greece—and spent several weeks living in Paris. “I lived in hotels near the Odéon on the Left Bank,” he said. “I finally found a hotel in Montmartre. I went to Alliance Française, met a lot of expatriates. The French are hard to meet.”

A principal attraction of France was, of course, visiting his father, who had left Paris and had taken to living in a string of what he referred to as “places I could afford”: farmhouses, barns, cottages, and airy flats in such pastoral settings as Baren (in the Midi-Pyrénées), Gravigny (in Upper Normandy), and, finally, Saint-Just-en-Chevalet (in the Rhône-Alpes), where Bobby caught up with him: “I hitchhiked to where he was living in Central France in the Loire Valley, and I stayed with him for a week.”

At first the elder De Niro’s accounts of life in the countryside had been positive. In a 1962 letter to his friend Dick Brewer he said: “
I never expected such beauty when I came here. It’s dazzling.” By the
time Bobby reached him, though, there was a different tenor to the man, and the son was troubled by what he found. His father hadn’t fared well in isolation. There was some suggestion of a genuine mental crisis: a scholar of his work would claim that “
his ‘erratic’ behavior, culminating in a nervous breakdown in Paris, was diagnosed as bipolar disorder, and he was one of the first people treated with lithium.” Decades later, the son disputed that diagnosis: “
He didn’t have a breakdown, but something happened to him there in France.”

He tried to help his father by encouraging him in his work. “I felt that he had lost some of his career momentum,” he recalled. “At one point I was on the Left Bank and took his paintings with me to show to gallery owners to push for him and try to get his work seen. But nothing came of it.” De Niro’s name was unknown in Europe, and he had no champions in the French art press. He knew all that, but his son did not. “Bobby was very impressed with France,” the painter recalled years later in New York, “and urged me to take my paintings to the Parisian galleries. But the market was here.”

Initially the younger De Niro continued hitchhiking around the Continent. But he was disturbed by what he’d seen in his dad—perhaps especially by the widening gap between his mother’s relatively stable life and the professionally and emotionally troubled penury of his father. He returned to France and took a firmer tone with his father: life abroad wasn’t working out for him, and he needed to be in familiar surroundings and near people who could help support him, financially and otherwise. They struggled with each other, the son urging the father to return home, to no avail. (Recollecting the experience at separate times, both men would refer to it as a “nightmare.”) He came back alone to his studies with Stella Adler, to his slow acclimation to the acting profession.

P
RACTICAL SON OF
practical folks, De Niro determined that if he was going to pursue acting, he was going to make money at it, and he set about becoming a professional in the disciplined way in which he’d seen his parents go about their work. He kept a keen eye on the bulletin boards at the Adler school, where small productions posted
advertisements for auditions and other casting opportunities; he became a habitual reader of theatrical trade magazines—
Drama-Logue
,
Backstage
,
Show Business
, and such. More and more he seemed to have turned a corner and committed himself to a path.