De Niro: A Life (12 page)

F
OR THE NEXT YEAR
, De Niro continued his litany of auditions, augmented by the occasional working (but almost never paying) gig: a role as The Sheriff in a production of Arthur Sanier’s
God Wants What Man Wants
at the Bridge Theatre on St. Mark’s Place; a part as The Poet, the narrator of a production of
The World of Günter Grass
that featured a similarly unknown Charles Durning (a
New York Times
review by Stanley Kauffmann praised Durning as “completely credible” and failed to single out De Niro from among a cast prone to “transparent staginess”). He was given the opportunity to read for the lead in Mike Nichols’s
The Graduate
, one of only two unknowns to be offered that chance, but he was far too raw and didn’t really get anywhere near it.

Keeping himself afloat financially could be a dicey thing, even with his mom supplementing his income. But, like his dad, he kept his overhead low (he rode a bike to save cab and subway fare), and he didn’t mind living a little rough. “
I had years where I didn’t work,” he admitted. “Unemployment, stuff like that. Typical, usual stuff. I was lucky in that there was always something that I would wind up doing from here to there. It kept me moving just enough. I had down periods, but not where you would give up and say, ‘I’ve got to do something else.’ ”

Surely thoughts of doing something else crossed his mind in the summer of 1967, when he left New York in April for a spell of work at the Barn Dinner Theatre in Greensboro, North Carolina—not exactly the sort of promising journey that his father had made when, as
a teenager, he undertook a nearly identical trip to nearby Black Mountain College.

The Barn was the second in what would become a small chain of regional theaters that specialized in bringing relatively recent big-town shows to smaller cities in the South. De Niro had been cast in a role originated on Broadway by Anthony Quinn in Sidney Michael’s
Tchin-Tchin
: Caesario Grimaldi, a construction worker who tries to seduce the wife of a surgeon out of revenge for the surgeon’s having seduced
his
wife after removing her appendix.

It was a lukewarm domestic farce, but the folks in Greensboro loved it—or at least they loved De Niro. “Acting Is Good in Barn Play,” read the review in the
Greensboro Daily News
, which commented that “De Niro and [Faith] Stanfield are both exceptionally talented actors. They never once let the action falter.”

De Niro, who was becoming something of a pack rat of materials from his working career, kept a cutting of that notice, as well as several others. And he wrote a letter to the
Daily Tarheel
at the nearby University of North Carolina asking for a copy of its review (and enclosing a dollar to cover the cost of the newspaper and postage).

It wasn’t Broadway, but it did pay: $35 a week, plus $3 a day in expenses, and he was given a room to live in right on the premises of the Barn for the duration of his stay. It was actually a bit of fun, he recalled. The show was performed in a theater-in-the-round, with the novelty of the stage actually being lowered into the theater after dinner. “We’d serve the desserts,” De Niro remembered, “and then go upstairs to prepare for the play, and then the stage would drop and we’d perform. I liked it.”

A few months later he came back, this time to Charlotte and the brand-new Pineville Country Dinner Theater, which had opened to rival the Barn chain and advertised “Broadway plays with New York casts.” In William Goodhart’s
Generation
, De Niro, by all accounts, stole the show in the role of a kooky obstetrician helping a hippieish young couple navigate the wife’s first pregnancy (“Those laughs the playwright didn’t give him, he took anyway,” wrote the
Orlando Evening Star
). The play ran for two weeks in August, during which time he also found work acting on a pair of local television commercials,
one for Duke Power, one for BankAmericard. Upon returning home, De Niro was greeted with a personal letter from the president of the theater, F. W. (Bill) Lorick, who thanked him for his “fine job” and assured him, “The patrons enjoyed your work of acting very, very much.”

In reflection, De Niro was fond of the gigs. “I got so many tips that I didn’t worry about having no job,” he joked later. He reckoned it was a better job than summer stock, at least in terms of his craft: “You rehearse next week’s show while you’re playing this week’s.… At least you do the same play every night and you can learn something from it.”

He was making distinctions, making sacrifices, taking pains, all for his work. He was serious. And, again, the example of his father’s willingness to forgo the ordinary comforts and niceties of life to pursue a career was a comfort to him. “
I did not have a Plan B,” he remembered, adding, “I never got to the point of needing one. I did one thing, then the next. I was able to sustain myself.” (Sometimes that meant working odd jobs, such as waiting at catered affairs; years later he remembered that he’d served Dustin Hoffman—who, of course, had gotten the part in
The Graduate
for which De Niro had read—at a Eugene McCarthy fund-raiser in New York on the night in June 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was shot.)

He was becoming increasingly professional. He hired a telephone answering service (Orchard 5-4372, in case you needed to reach him), but he wasn’t yet comfortable with the expense and hassle of professional representation—or perhaps he wasn’t able to secure it. “
I got my first jobs without an agent,” he said. “Sent out my resume and pictures and showed up at auditions. When you’re starting out, you really have to do it all by yourself. And you still end up having to make the decisions. I don’t like people to make decisions for me.”

In 1968 he was onstage in New York again in the National Theatre Company’s production of
The Boor
by Anton Chekhov. And then he got an unexpected bit of good fortune: the kid director for whom he’d worked on that film at Sarah Lawrence a few years earlier (which nobody had yet seen) was making a quickie independent film, mostly improvised, right in New York, with a budget of more than $40,000. Two weeks of work, and better-paid. Plus this time, instead of a professor and
another student sharing in all the filmmaking duties with him, the kid, Brian De Palma, would direct the film on his own and have as a producer and co-writer Charles Hirsch, a young talent scout for Universal Pictures who’d been sent to New York to find youth-oriented projects and fresh faces.

Hirsch understood the emerging American market for exploitation films with an arty edge. In the course of his talent search, he encountered De Palma, who was just finishing up a groovy little thriller entitled
Murder à la Mod
(which would be his first release, as
The Wedding Party
remained unfinished). They discussed making a film about American youth alienation with a Gallic twist, a Truffaut-inspired tale of a young man flailing at the world and his obsessions, which happened to mirror those of his creators: voyeurism, filmmaking, the Vietnam War, the John F. Kennedy assassination, and computer dating. A little sex, a little politics, a little slapstick, a little social satire—they could sell just the novelty of it, they thought.

In time, the pair realized they might be asking too much of an actor (and an audience) to bundle all of that up into one character’s head, so they split their hero into three heroes, a comic troika like that in
The Wedding Party.
Hirsch approached his bosses at Universal with the script, but they passed. He and De Palma raised the money by soliciting friends and relatives, and they planned to shoot the film in a breakneck two weeks while Hirsch was on (paid) vacation from the studio. De Palma knew how to do things cheap: “
The most expensive thing in Greetings,” he later noted, “was the stock, and getting it processed.” He telephoned Columbia University, which he’d attended as an undergrad, and asked if he could use the rehearsal space and costumes of the student troupe, the Columbia Players, and maybe audition a few of them for roles.

He wound up finding one of his leads there: Gerrit Graham, a French major from New York. As Graham remembered, he learned that “there was a scenario but no screenplay” and that he’d have to improvise his audition with the other aspirants, including De Niro. After they’d both been cast, they found themselves working in what for all of them was essentially an experimental fashion. “We just plunged in,” said Hirsch, “because the only way to find out about making a film
is to make a film.” The movie was basically a series of episodes, each based on a scenario that was presented to the actors to flesh out with dialogue and action of their own invention, with De Palma and Hirsch serving as guides and ringmasters. “We improvised a situation, then we filmed the scene, looked at it, and learned again,” De Niro remembered. “Then finally we shot the scene.”

“
It was all ad-lib,” according to Graham, “and what struck me was that De Niro worked so incredibly hard on everything. Bob was analytical of every scene in a Method way—he had to know why this scene had to have this material, where we were going with that scene.… He was a real actor. He’d already committed himself to it, devoted his life to it.” De Palma, too, noted De Niro’s work ethic and intensity, but he saw something else as well: the actor’s chameleonic power was evident in a way it hadn’t been a few years earlier. “
He showed up to shoot a scene,” he remembered, “and I didn’t recognize him. We had to hang a title card on him to remind the audience that they’d seen him earlier in the film. It was make-up and clothes, but it was more than that—he just inhabits a character and becomes different physically.”

H
E HAD MADE
four movies, and he still had yet to see himself on-screen in anything. But he kept at it, and in the summer another indie filmmaker looking to break into the biz hired him. Jordan Leondopoulos had written and would direct a picture entitled
Sam’s Song
, a European-influenced movie about a young filmmaker invited by some well-to-do old friends to spend a weekend on their Long Island estate, where he meets a mysterious girl and is drawn unwillingly into mind games, bed-hopping, and other pursuits of the idle and indifferent rich.

Like
The Wedding Party
,
Sam’s Song
was a debut film shot on spec with a tiny budget, but it was more accomplished as a narrative and a portrait of human beings than
The Wedding Party
or even
Greetings.
The mustachioed De Niro plays Sam, an aspiring director working as an editor of TV documentaries, reading André Bazin’s
What Is Cinema?
, living on a diet of Yoo-hoo and cheese slices, drifting through Manhattan in search of inspiration and opportunity. His college friends Andrew (Jered Mickey) and Erica (Jennifer Warren) are in a long-term
relationship that’s prospering, and they appreciate his artistic purity and his quirks. The atmosphere is staid and even bucolic—a weekend-at-a-country-house movie, complete with cocktail parties, gambols on the beach, and a cruise.

The plotting, though, is threadbare. On the drive to the Hamptons (which, strangely, takes them from Manhattan through Staten Island) Andrew notices Carol, a leggy blonde (Terrayne Crawford), driving in the same direction in her Porsche; when she turns up at a luncheon party, she and Sam cavort together, and Andrew becomes frankly and obviously jealous. The next day, aboard a friend’s yacht, Andrew moves in on her (he literally takes Sam’s place in her bed within minutes of Sam’s vacating it), leading Erica to a drastic response.

It all moves stolidly and glumly, with a fair amount of pretense and opacity: for instance, when Sam and Carol discover a windmill on their promenade, he charges at it with a large log. “You cast yourself very well,” she tells him. “You think I’m a dreamer?,” he responds, as though wounded. Influences of the French New Wave and especially Michelangelo Antonioni permeate the film, but none of it feels digested.

De Niro, though, is given lots to do and plenty of chances to shine. In one set piece, he plays cops and robbers and acts out getting shot in a series of amusing slow-motion takes. Later on, Sam and Carol turn the lights of a bedroom on and off quickly and pull faces at each other, and De Niro displays rubbery comic energy. Now and again Sam is given to spouting movie quotes and clichés, a task that De Niro clearly relishes (He also displays his nude body twice, albeit never from the front.) If anybody had seen
Sam’s Song
at the time or in the form in which Leondopoulos made it, De Niro surely would have been noticed. But that was not to be the film’s fate. In fact, no one would see it for more than a decade: in 1980, with De Niro one of the biggest stars in movies, the film played a very brief run in New York. A few years later, Cannon Films, which then owned the rights, shot segments of a thriller about a tough guy looking for his brother and cut Leondopoulos’s movie into their new footage, using it as, in effect, the backstory. The original was utterly bastardized (for instance, the United Farm Workers documentary that Sam is editing on a Moviola in the original
is replaced in the Cannon film, almost comically, with soft-core porn); retitled
The Swap
(and later
Line of Fire
), the recut film briefly played a single theater in New York.

I
F HE WAS DOOMED
to make movies that nobody would see, at least he still had the theater. Like the burgeoning indie film movement, the experimental theater scene in New York meant that there was ample work for somebody who was more interested in gaining experience than in working for fame or wealth or even mere pay. De Niro may have felt like an onlooker in the political and cultural events of the 1960s, but he was willing to throw himself in with any number of avant-garde artists who were pursuing radical new directions in film and theater.

One of them was Ron Link, a celebrated off-Broadway director who was preparing a revival of a campy show he’d had a minor hit with the previous year:
Glamour, Glory and Gold: The Life and Legend of Nola Noonan
,
Goddess and Star.
The play was a pastiche of the life of a tragic actress of old Hollywood (Jean Harlow’s name was often mentioned in reviews), cobbled together as a series of sketches and blackouts rather than as a sustained drama. The makeshift structure of the script may have been the result of its having been the work of a first-time playwright, a twenty-year-old drag queen named Jackie Curtis who was a rising star in the firmament of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene. The original production in the fall of 1967 became a cult smash on the strength of the casting of Curtis and another of Warhol’s superstars, the famed drag queen Candy Darling, in support of Melba La Rose Jr.—an actual woman—who tackled the lead. (Warhol came to the show and gave it a word-of-mouth review that was, coming from him, a rave: “For the first time, I wasn’t bored.”)