De Niro: A Life (14 page)

D
E
N
IRO, MEANWHILE
, pressed forward however he could. He was onstage in April, back at Bastiano’s Cellar Studio, in a Café Mama production of playwright Julie Bovasso’s
Gloria and Esperanza.
In the summer he shot a commercial for American Motors. As Joey, a neighborhood kid all grown up and making good money as a CPA, he drives a new Ambassador to his mom and pop’s shop and offers them a ride while his little brother and the others in the street all coo over the car’s air-conditioning, which comes standard. It was recognizably him in every syllable and gesture—grand arm gestures, a second-generation Italian American accent, the soon-to-be-famous crinkle-faced smile. It wasn’t a full part, of course, but he was charming, and he clearly relished the broadly drawn texture of it. It would vanish—like the Ambassador—until he became famous, when it would resurface on the Internet, the first performance in which the actor who would soon become known everywhere was wholly visible.
^*5

But if you wanted to see him actually at work that summer, you’d have to go to Arkansas, of all places, where he was joining Shelley Winters on a new film project. On August 1,
Variety
reported that “Bob
Deniro [
sic
] has been cast by American International Pictures as one of Ma Barker’s notorious sons in ‘Bloody Mama.’ ” He had finally broken out of the arty New York scene and was stepping into some old-fashioned Hollywood trash. No one could say if it would be a good movie, but it would definitely get seen.

T
HAT TINY ANNOUNCEMENT IN
V
ARIETY
WAS PROOF THAT HIS
career had begun to take shape. Here was an actor who had appeared on-screen only once, who hadn’t been on Broadway or a TV show, and who was known just barely to aficionados of New York avant-garde theater, and yet his name was being dropped in a Hollywood trade paper as an addition to a film cast as if that were a fact worth noting.

This small but quite meaningful step was no doubt thanks to De Niro’s having acquired his first agent, Richard Bauman, a former actor who ran a small New York office and would come to make a specialty of finding talent in the nooks of the city and helping launch it toward bigger things (he’d soon do the same for Bette Midler). Bauman not only would have negotiated De Niro’s contract (still peanuts, causing Shelley Winters to make a stink when she found out about it) but also would have seeded the trade papers with the casting news. And he would’ve been a help in getting De Niro into the Screen Actors Guild and Actors’ Equity, both of which he joined after shooting
Son of Greetings
(the title had changed to
Blue Manhattan
and then to
Confessions of a Peeping John
), which was still being edited. De Niro was unknown to the public, but he was becoming a commodity in the business.

For
Bloody Mama
, he would demonstrate to the greatest degree yet the extent to which he took his art, his career, and himself seriously. The film, about the famed Depression-era bandit Kate “Ma” Barker and her feral brood of sons, was built to capitalize on the excitement around
Bonnie and Clyde
, the 1967 film that had begun to bring some of the energies of exploitation movies and youthful rebellion into the
Hollywood mainstream. American International Pictures, the font of much of that grindhouse fare, had already hopped on the gangster bandwagon with an Al Capone film,
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
, which actually beat
Bonnie and Clyde
into theaters. A script for a Ma Barker film was written that year, but it seemed overly violent in the wake of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy slayings. In the spring of 1969, though, AIP still saw opportunity in the project, and director and co-producer Roger Corman, the wild, kindly uncle of American exploitation cinema, went off to Arkansas to direct. The cast would include Shelley Winters in the center, Corman regular Bruce Dern as a member of the gang, Diane Varsi as the gal of one of the Barker boys, and Don Stroud, Clint Kimbrough, and Robert Walden as three of Barker’s sons; the fourth, the drug-and-candy-bar addict, Lloyd, would be played by De Niro.

He went out to Arkansas by car, though it’s not clear that he drove (AMC commercial or no, there was some dispute about whether, as a Manhattan native, he knew how to at the time). He spent a few weeks poking around the Ozarks before the shoot getting to know the regional accents, asking locals to read his lines into a tape recorder, and learning the speech patterns so well that he served as an unofficial dialogue coach for the rest of the cast. He also helped Winters when she struggled with a scene in which she gave her four grown-up sons a bath. “
I don’t even know all of you,” she told him when he asked why she was so nervous. “But Shelley, we’re you’re babies,” he reminded her.

Before arriving in Arkansas, De Niro learned all he could about the physical reality of being an addict: hygiene, teeth, habits, diet (he became a Baby Ruth fiend during the shoot). He may have had eighth billing in the promotional materials that were being printed as the film was in production, but he worked on his part as if it were the key to the picture: going to the New York Public Library to read up on the Barkers and Alvin Karpis and to absorb photographs and music of the Ozarks in the 1930s, learning to roll his own cigarettes, filling the margins of his script with handwritten notes that dealt sometimes with minutiae (“
blow nose with finger, wipe nose on sleeve”) and sometimes with profundities (“The satisfaction I have when stoned is so much better than the life around us. That’s a key for me”). His chief transformation
was physical: always thin, he dropped twenty or thirty pounds to play Lloyd, even staying up all night before some of his scenes to achieve a hollow aspect, acquiring without the help of makeup a pallor over his skin and even some sores on his body. His Jewish mama was, naturally, alarmed: “
I thought he was concentrating too much on externals—I mean, the things he did to his body!” But as De Niro reminded himself in a note in his script, Lloyd was not wholly of this earth: “I’m closer to God. Always alienated.”

For all the pains he took, he nevertheless had bouts of self-doubt along the way. One night in Arkansas he confessed his anxiety to Winters, and she wrote him a note the next morning, telling him, “
You have a marvelous
mind
,
instinct
and
talent.
Leave yourself
alone
and GO.” When he finally got himself together, he did so in a way that actually frightened her. Lloyd was the first of Ma Barker’s boys to die, collapsing of an overdose by a lakeside, and De Niro chose to play the scene of his corpse being discovered even though he wouldn’t be photographed in it. He crawled down into the shallow grave that Lloyd’s brothers had dug for him and lay there to, he said, “
help the actors … once they saw me like that, they were forced to deal with it.” He stayed in character in the makeshift grave throughout lunch, he recalled, even though technically his character no longer existed. And he nearly got Winters to join him in his make-believe afterlife … in real life. “I walked over to the open grave,” she remembered, “and got the shock of my life. ‘Bobby,’ I screamed, ‘I don’t believe this! You come out of that grave this minute!’ ”

The pace that Corman kept pleased him, and he was given additional bits of business as the film progressed, such as driving an old car down to a ferry landing, something that, he wrote in his script pages, was “fun to do.” In fact, he noted many of his impressions of the production, writing on the very first day of shooting, August 12, that “
Roger is brief, gets what he wants and goes on to the next take without much excessive shooting on each set-up.” They were done in Arkansas, after twenty-six days of work, before the end of September.

The shoot didn’t delight everyone. An Arkansas College professor and three of his students who’d been hired on as interns quit midway through to protest the explicit violence, nudity, and drug use. That sort
of news would only help such a film, of course; if Brian De Palma was piquing the movie ratings board with satire and titillation, Corman and AIP were blasting at them with blood and bosoms. Before the film was released, it was advertised on the Sunset Strip with a billboard reading, “The family that slays together, stays together.” Though it was a tremendously tone-deaf gesture just weeks after the arrest of Charles Manson and
his
“family” for the Tate-LaBianca murders and garnered much protest, AIP kept using the slogan to promote the film.

T
HE MARKETING OF
Bloody Mama
would be a typically splashy AIP affair, and De Niro would take part, traveling to a few select locations, including North Carolina, to promote the film with personal appearances, complete with replica tommy gun. But there was yet more work ahead of him: the film had barely wrapped when he was off to another job, appearing with the Theatre Company of Boston in December 1969 in a repertory presentation of three short plays:
The Basement
by Harold Pinter,
Captain Smith in His Glory
by David Freeman, and
Come and Go
by Samuel Beckett. It was only a five-night stand and only a regional theater, but it was an important gig: such talents as Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, and Robert Duvall, all of whom were emerging ahead of him, had been through the company in recent seasons, and artistic director David Wheeler would soon offer work to the likes of Al Pacino, Stockard Channing, and Blythe Danner. But De Niro felt that he was on the cusp of bigger things, with two films due in the spring, and he returned to New York after the run ended.

He was still looking for his next gig when
Bloody Mama
opened in March to a surprisingly serious reception. Normally a picture from AIP wouldn’t get much attention, but the strange critical history of
Bonnie and Clyde
seemed to hover over the film.
Bonnie
had been panned in the
New York Times
and
Newsweek
, though
Newsweek
published a reevaluatory mea culpa by its lead movie critic, Joe Morgenstern, a mere week after he had slammed the film, and not long afterward the
Times
removed its lead movie critic, Bosley Crowther, from his beat. Then, just months before
Bloody Mama
’s release,
Easy Rider
took the Cannes Film Festival, Hollywood, and the rest of the world by storm.
The film press knew there was something happening, something to do with youth and violence and drugs and cheap moviemaking and young stars, and—whether through chariness about their own positions or genuine enthusiasm for the work—they were increasingly willing to give a movie such as
Bloody Mama
a serious look.

In fact, they were kind to it. Howard Thompson of the
New York Times
specifically noted that he preferred it to
Bonnie and Clyde
, calling it “more honest and less pretentious” and deeming Winters “plain wonderful.” (De Niro was cited among a number of cast members as “fine.”) A few weeks later, in the same paper, Peter Schjeldahl compared
Bloody Mama
favorably to Corman’s horror films, suggesting that Winters was in the role usually played by Vincent Price and her sons took the place of the monsters; he particularly praised the performances, naming Winters and De Niro among a few others and declaring that “Academy Awards have been given for far lesser efforts.” But he argued, against the film’s admirers, that its bloodshed was prurient rather than cathartic: “What’s so honest about a violent film that doesn’t leave one feeling uneasy?” he asked, echoing the sentiments of the censors who would briefly ban the film from release in France the following year.

De Niro, whose role was billed in the publicity materials as “the way-out pothead of Ma Barker’s belligerent brood,” was singled out for attention in
Film Quarterly
, where Joseph McBride referred to him as “the most interesting character” in the film, “compulsively pulling on Baby Ruth bars and emitting defenselessness.” And the
Hollywood Reporter
declared him “rather good, given the limited dimensions of his junkie role.” Not every critic went for the film—
Life
and especially the
Los Angeles Times
were hard on it—but De Niro was commended in every review that mentioned him.