De Niro: A Life (32 page)

Most actors who played musicians would be content to learn the
postures and movements associated with an instrument, to do a dumb show of being an able player. But De Niro insisted that he actually be able to make music on the thing. He wouldn’t ultimately be heard in the film—veteran big-band saxophonist Georgie Auld played the parts used in the soundtrack—but he was absolutely determined that nobody could tell that it wasn’t him. “
I wanted it to look like my horn,” he explained, “that it belonged to me. I didn’t want to look like some schmuck up there. You can do that, you can get away with that. But what’s the point?”

De Niro started taking lessons from Auld, a tenor player who had been a member of orchestras led by Bunny Berrigan, Artie Shaw, and Benny Goodman during the big-band era and even had a group of his own in the 1940s, through which such future stars as Sarah Vaughan, Erroll Garner, and Dizzy Gillespie had passed. Auld, an old-time character who oozed jazz charisma, was cast as a big-band leader in the film and alternately marveled and bridled at his tutee’s skill and dedication.

“
It’s incredible the way he learned,” Auld said just before production began. “I’ll teach him something on a Friday—a difficult passage—and by Monday morning, that son of a gun has learned it, he’s got it down cold. He’s got a little hideaway, and he practices until midnight. The kid plays a good tenor sax, and I mean it, and he learned it in three months.” (In fact, De Niro practiced on an alto horn: “It’s easier to carry around,” he admitted.) Before long, though, De Niro’s obsessive dedication found its way under Auld’s skin. “
He asked me ten million questions a day,” Auld griped. “It got to be a pain in the ass.” And: “He’s about as much fun as the clap.” Even Auld’s wife, Diane, was overwhelmed: “We thought he was going to climb into bed with us with the horn.”

Of course, De Niro had other things to do in order to create his character. “I thought of Jimmy Doyle as a fly stuck on flypaper,” he explained, “trying to get himself free.” In his copious annotations to the script and his research materials, he identified with the jazz musicians who were barred from improvising freely in the confines of the big-band sound and who had to join a union and obey a hierarchy of authority. He continually reminded himself to appear agitated and hyped up, to follow a beat or a melody that only he could hear, to tap
his fingers on his knees or a table, to approach dialogue with musical rhythm. He fastened on such props of the jazz saxophonist’s trade as reeds, tubes of ChapStick, handkerchiefs, and of course his horn. He made sure to remember that Doyle always had an eye peeled for the ladies, even when in the company of his wife. He devised a method of creating a drunken appearance by downing a shot of bourbon and spinning himself around in circles right before the camera rolled. And he repeatedly reminded himself that he wanted to convey in Doyle a combination of blunt directness and overweening ambition, whether it be for women, for music, or for money, regardless of whom else it affected or how. “
I don’t mind being a bastard,” he told Minnelli, “as long as I’m an interesting bastard.”

More than in any of his previous films, De Niro developed a aura of detachment and aloofness during the production of
New York, New York.
He had been installed, aptly enough, in Greta Garbo’s former dressing room on the MGM lot, and he was extremely particular about the behavior around him on the set. At one point, he asked his lighting double, Jon Cutler, to replace another actor, who wasn’t on camera, in a close-up shot of Doyle getting angry. “I can’t get anything off that guy,” he complained.

As on
Taxi Driver
, the producers had allowed a number of reporters to visit the set (this time with the proviso that they hold their stories until the film was actually released), and De Niro eluded them as long as possible and then gave them as little of his time as he could. “
He didn’t say it out loud,” remembered Chris Hodenfield of
Rolling Stone
, “but he made it clear with his attitude that I was an annoyance to him by being there to interview him.” The thick air and looming sense of dread that enveloped
Taxi Driver
seemed almost like a carnival in comparison to the tenor of the
New York, New York
set—and this one was a musical (or, as Scorsese continually insisted, “a film
with
music”).

The darkness came shockingly to the surface late in the production, just around the time that, in real life, Scorsese’s affair with Minnelli was discovered by his wife. While filming a scene in which Doyle flew into a rage and caused his pregnant wife to go into labor, De Niro worked himself into such a frenzy that he wound up needing medical attention. “
I thought it would be funny to show, out of complete rage,
an insane absurdity, where you get so nutty that you become funny, hopping mad,” he said. “I saw that the roof of the car was low, and I hit it with my head, then I hit it with my hand.” It was a hell of a thing, he admitted: “Liza got hurt, and I think I hurt my hand.” The two of them, with Scorsese, raced from the studio to an emergency room. Drugs, adultery, hospital visits, miles of unusable film footage:
New York, New York
provided gossip pages with fodder for months. It would have to be a hell of a picture to make people forget all the whispers they’d heard.

But just as Scorsese let the film get away from him by turning it into a huge improvisatory exercise—“
a $10 million home movie,” as he called it—so did De Niro focus so much on the details of playing the saxophone that he let the characterization of Jimmy Doyle suffer. “
I really worked on it very hard,” he said of his saxophone playing. “But I wonder if I should have saved a little more energy for other things and just worried about what was going to be seen. I worked like hell on that thing.”

T
HERE WERE OTHER
distractions as well.

In the early part of 1976, De Niro and Diahnne Abbott visited Rome and stayed at the famed Raphael Hotel near the Piazza Navona. Some weeks after returning home from the trip, she discovered that she was pregnant. In April, in a rented meeting hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on Central Park West, they were married in a nondenominational service attended by, among others, Scorsese, Sally Kirkland, Elia Kazan, Harvey Keitel, Shelley Winters, Julie Bovasso, Joseph Papp, John Hancock, Sam Spiegel, Jay Cocks, Verna Bloom, and Paul Schrader, who, looking around the room, had the thought, “
Everybody there was somebody who had helped Bobby to become a different person.”

During the time he was shooting
The Last Tycoon
, De Niro rented a house in the Brentwood suburb of Los Angeles so that Diahnne Abbott and Drena, whom he had adopted, could join him there. “
We would go to parties,” Abbott recalled, “and people wouldn’t be interested in me at all. They’d look at me as if to say ‘Who
is
this woman?’
When they found out I was Bobby’s wife, it was spooky to see how their attitudes would change.”

De Niro, barely cut out for family life, was learning to negotiate a household that was already populated with nine-year-old Drena and the menagerie of dogs and cats that Abbott seemed always to have on hand. He found that he needed extra space around him, literally, and when it became clear that they would stay in Hollywood awhile, they moved from the Brentwood rental to a Bel Air estate where he really did have a hideaway—an outbuilding where he practiced the saxophone, studied scripts, and retreated into the silence that was a key to his concentration.

Even then, he was out of sorts. Accustomed to being able to flit in and out of scenes in the New York social world, he was entirely inept at the sort of socializing that was part of Hollywood life, where nights out often meant visiting friends and colleagues in their homes rather than, as in New York, meeting up at atmospheric actors’ hangouts. Abbott loved to go out—she and De Niro were habitués of the Sunset Strip club On the Rox, where he liked to sit nursing Black Russians and watching the parade of celebrity flesh. But she also loved to entertain, which made her husband particularly ill at ease. “When De Niro is the host of a party,” wrote a
New York Times
reporter who dined at his Bel Air house, “it has no center, no focal point.”

They would invite the gang over—Scorsese and Cameron (whose pregnancy was just a month or two ahead of Abbott’s), Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader, fellow actors such as Keitel, Peter Boyle, and Kathi McGinnis, chums from New York such as Steven Prince. But De Niro would stand apart, watching with the same stillness with which he’d carried himself as a boy and an acting student, becoming slightly ruffled when anything resembling excessive exuberance bubbled up in the house. At one dinner party, Boyle cracked up the guests by mooning a roasted turkey that Abbott placed on the dining table, and De Niro responded with a sheepish “Hey, hey guys, hey, that’s too much.” The life of the party he wasn’t.

In October, huge with child, Abbott filmed a cameo appearance in
New York, New York
, playing a big-band singer performing a rendition of “Honeysuckle Rose,” a brief moment that she infused with grace
and glamour—even though she was hiding her very pregnant belly behind the artfully draped folds of her dress. (Told months later that her condition wasn’t visible to the film’s audience, she confessed that
she
could see it, though that might have been because she was “
loaded” on pot on the night of the film’s New York premiere.)

She went on to record the vocal track of the song at an LA studio in the presence of the film’s stars. “
I was standing in the box while they were getting ready,” she remembered, “and I thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ Liza Minnelli was there recording, and I felt it was going to be so embarrassing. My husband was there too, and I don’t know if he thought I could sing. Liza was wonderful. She came into the box and said, ‘Relax, you’ll do all right.’ ”

On November 9, 1976, while the film was still shooting, the baby arrived at Cedars-Sinai Hospital: a boy whom they named Raphael, after the hotel in which he’d been conceived. De Niro was thirty-three, had an Oscar, was the magnetic center of the most talked-about movie of the year, was the star of a huge Hollywood production, and was already planning his next film, an epic story about the Vietnam War that would range from the mountains of western Pennsylvania to a prisoner-of-war camp on a fetid Southeast Asian river. He was married, and now he was a dad for the second time—once by adoption, once by blood. He had as full a life as he could ever have wished for.

And he had another iron in the fire: he was meeting a trainer regularly in a Los Angeles gym and taking boxing lessons. One way or another, he was determined to make a film about Jake LaMotta.

T
HERE WERE, OF COURSE, TWO
R
OBERT
D
E
N
IROS WITH
public careers. De Niro the actor was becoming famous—which wasn’t exactly the reason he had pursued an acting career to begin with, and certainly wasn’t as delicious as a daily dish as it may have seemed at first. He was determined to keep the celebrity in check insofar as he could. (And, to be honest, insofar as he
chose
: being famous had been a great way to meet girls.) But even as his own work became known and praised and celebrated around the world, the younger De Niro remained as filially loyal to and boastful of the elder as ever.

In 1972, when the senior De Niro was granted a residency at the famed Yaddo art colony near Saratoga Springs, New York, he was driven up there by his son, who managed to squeeze his father’s working materials and personal belongings into a sports car for the trip. Later on, when the younger De Niro became a magnet for news reporters and photographers, and maybe even art patrons, he made a point of showing up at his father’s opening receptions, bringing much-appreciated attention to the work on display. (Once he showed up carrying the infant Raphael on his body in a baby sling, creating an even greater sensation than if he’d merely slipped in and smiled at people.)