De Niro: A Life (44 page)

Somehow the faux pas was forgiven, and De Niro, still undecided about the part, agreed to visit the sets that Leone was constructing in Rome. “They were gonna do it, with or without me,” De Niro said, and that, in particular, appealed to him. “He didn’t raise the money on me, so there was no pressure that way.”

Finally selecting the role of Noodles, through whose aging eyes the epic narrative unfolds in retrospect, he agreed to make the film, and he went from reluctant involvement to active interest. James Woods had been cast as Max (after Gérard Depardieu had first agreed to learn English to play the part and then backed out), and De Niro would urge certain other performers on Leone: Joe Pesci, Burt Young, and Danny Aiello, whose screen test De Niro agreed to participate in just so the actor, who was touchy about having to audition at all, would agree to submit to one.
^*3

De Niro took his usual rigorous steps in preparing for the role. He studied Jewish customs (there was a scene in a synagogue) and a bit of Yiddish, and in particular the speech patterns of old-time Jews and the special idioms used by the small set of Jewish gangsters of the Prohibition era. He packed extensively for his trip to Italy: toiletries such as Listerine, Maalox, Tylenol, and Kiehl’s soap; videotapes of various movies he wanted to study; a Walkman and cassettes; a camera to take photos with his kids when they came to visit him in Rome (and on a side trip to London). To play the aged Noodles, he worked on a limp and a
slow, raspy voice and submitted to extensive aging makeup. “It took so long to put the makeup on,” he said, “that I was so tired that I
had
to look old.” He had portraits taken of himself in the makeup chair, gesticulating like an
alter kocker
in full old-man guise. He seemed to love it.

Filming took place in Rome, Paris, Montreal, and New York over the span of fifteen months, and De Niro’s presence was required for a great deal of it. During the shoot, Leone discovered a way to work with De Niro that brought the director outside his comfort zone in a way he found illuminating. “
For better or worse,” he remembered, “I had worked with actors like marionettes. But with Bobby you must work around him in a way, because the thing had to be explored through his eyes, too. So for the first time, in this film, I have had to follow an actor’s ideas without destroying my own. Yes, Bobby will have his
interpretazione artistica.
” Comparing De Niro to his frequent star Clint Eastwood, Leone added, “Bobby, first of all, is an actor. Clint, first of all, is a star. Bobby suffers; Clint yawns.”

When shooting was done, Leone had to wrestle years of work into something like a releasable film, a task that in a real sense was never fully achieved. He arrived at an ideal cut of more than four hours, which he agreed couldn’t be shown in theaters but only on TV or videotape. In May 1984, after cutting it mercilessly, he arrived at a version of three hours and forty minutes, which premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival to mixed but respectful reviews. But that was still an hour longer than his American distributors had contracted for. Leone dreaded the thought that further cuts would be made without his input; “I hope the last version will be my own,” he said at Cannes. But it was effectively out of his hands.

And, in fact, when
Once Upon a Time in America
arrived in America, it was butchered, compromised, unrecognizable, ruined. Gone were the flashbacks, replaced with a linear structure that robbed the film of its sense of poetry, nostalgia, and rue. Gone were expository scenes that made the plot coherent. Gone were charming bits of business and hair-raising bits of violence. The version released by Warner Bros. in June 1984 was half the length of Leone’s preferred cut: two hours and fifteen minutes. It was a catastrophe, a crime. And it was a bomb: $5.3 million at the box office, a blip.

De Niro is but a piece of the epic swirl of Leone’s massive, swoony, and altogether singular film, yet somehow his presence grounds and imparts resonance to the entire enterprise. Given his history of volatile, outsider characters, his ability to hold the audience with a quiet posture had rarely been the focus of one of his performances (the notable exceptions being
The Last Tycoon
and
True Confessions
, neither of which really loomed in his canon). But Leone saw in De Niro’s eyes a capacity that could be put to use for something other than the expression of alienation, anger, or psychosis. He saw an ability to convey longing, melancholy, regret. And though his film begins in bloodshed and includes all manner of violence, sexual perversity, and human cruelty, his focus rarely strays from the mournful emotions carried in Ennio Morricone’s score, and De Niro’s eyes and silent glances are his chief visual vehicle for that mood.
^*4

We first meet Noodles as a man at the height of his powers, his mind and gaze scrambled gently in an opium den. It’s hard to see what’s going on in there, but soon enough, without learning too many details, we know for sure. We see his pain and sorrow first—and perhaps best—in a long take about a half hour into the film, when the aged Noodles visits Fat Mo’s, the restaurant and speakeasy where so many pivotal events of his life took place. He finds the peephole through which he used to spy on Mo’s sister Deborah, and gazes through it as if at his own youth. Leone’s camera stares into De Niro’s eyes for a long, long while, and De Niro demonstrates his ability to become a transparent vessel for emotions. This is the sort of thing he loves best in film—acting without speaking, conveying an inner state through delicate physicality. His eyes—brown, moist, limpid, filled with pain and wistfulness—are the windows into the movie, and Leone holds focus on them for a daringly extended shot.

The irony, of course, is that those eyes belong to a thief, bootlegger, killer, rapist, and traitor. Somehow in the pantheon of bad guys that De Niro has played, Noodles is generally overlooked, but he commits
some of the ugliest crimes of the actor’s career: not one but two rapes, for starters, the second of which, of Mo’s sister Deborah on the eve of her departure for Hollywood, is one of the most horrific things De Niro or Leone (or, for that matter, anyone) ever filmed.

Even though Leone spends more time in minutes with Noodles the high-living bootlegger, it’s Noodles the broken, ponderous old man who sticks most with you. The hair and makeup work used to turn De Niro into a middle-aged version of himself is stunning—it would be decades before he would reach the age of the elder Noodles, and it would have been very smart money to bet that he’d look just as he does in the film. (As it happened, in real life he kept his enviable hair and regained his rail-thin physique.) Aging actors for roles in this way is a common Hollywood game, but it’s played here with restraint, taste, and fine craft, like many other aspects of the film. If De Niro hadn’t lived to see his own mature years, the old Noodles could have credibly substituted for the real thing.

And De Niro lends such internal weight that he sells us on the aging makeup completely. “You can always tell the winners at the starting gate,” the aged Noodles tells Fat Mo, and he clearly doesn’t include himself among them. The film’s title suggests a fairy tale, and it’s got its share of ogres, imperiled maidens, dangers, quests, and such. But more than anything else, it’s got plangency and heartache and regret. And De Niro, it turns out, is as adept at conveying those aches as he is with fury or psychosis or wildness—even from under a haze of latex makeup, even with the weight of a four-hour film to bear. Leone’s film is indeed some kind of masterpiece, and De Niro, particularly in his sorrowful aspect, is the heart of it.

W
HEN IT WAS
all over, when distributors had crippled and buried the film, De Niro felt sick for his director. “They tried to make it a linear picture, which never worked,” he said. “I understand why Sergio didn’t come back to the U.S. and deal with it, confront them, fight for it, say, ‘Listen, this is the way it has to be. I’ll give you this, but I want to take that.’ That’s really what you have to do. It’s like having a child: you don’t want somebody to come in and fool with it.”

Leone was crushed, and he tried to rally himself to something positive, something forward-looking. He had been working on a new idea, a movie about the siege of Leningrad in World War II, and he tried to interest De Niro in taking a role. But the film was not to be. The director’s health, never truly robust, declined after the catastrophic failure of
Once Upon a Time in America
, and he died in 1989, at the age of sixty, without directing another film.

Over the ensuing decades, various cuts of the film that were closer to Leone’s vision would be released, and its reputation would grow substantially, until it was genuinely regarded as one of the best gangster films ever made and one of the best films of the 1980s. And it would be in support of the release of one of those restored versions that De Niro would, at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, climb the stairs of the Grand Palais to the strains of Ennio Morricone’s score and mist up at the thought of so much time, so much loss, more similar, in that moment, to the aged Noodles than ever before.

B
EFORE
S
ERGIO
L
EONE COULD BRING
O
NCE
U
PON A
T
IME IN
America
to the screen, in any form or at any length, De Niro appeared in yet another film that had undergone a protracted genesis.
The King of Comedy
first came to De Niro’s attention in 1974, when he was sent the manuscript of an unpublished novel by Paul Zimmerman, formerly a film critic at
Newsweek.
The book, which began with an epigraph from Alexander Pope (“How quick Ambition hastes to Ridicule!”) and another from baseball great Lefty O’Doul (“What’s the use of doing something when nobody’s looking?”), was a dark comedy about the age of celebrity, a frighteningly prescient vision of a world in which the cachet of fame trumped morality and the quest to place oneself in the center of the media spotlight drained people of their humanity.

Zimmerman had been inspired by an episode of David Susskind’s talk show on which a group of autograph hounds explained themselves. “
I was struck by the personal way they related to the stars,” he recalled. “One said, ‘Barbra is hard to work with.’ Barbra Streisand had asked this guy not to bother her, but he turned that into ‘Barbra is hard to work with.’ ” There was another fellow he learned of who kept a daily diary of his impressions of the Johnny Carson show. Finally, and perhaps inevitably given the times, he came to see a correlation between the celebrity stalker and the assassin: both, he said, “rise out of the crowd to make contact for an instant.”

He combined the two notions to create Rupert Pupkin, an autograph hound and aspiring stand-up comedian who seeks the approval—and, indeed, the career—of Jerry Langford, a late-night TV show host in the
Johnny Carson mold. Pupkin insinuates himself into Langford’s life and tries to get booked onto the star’s show, but his unpolished material doesn’t impress. He resorts to crime: with another autograph hound, the psychotic rich girl Masha, who has developed a sexual fantasy life around Langford, he kidnaps the star, ransoming him for a chance to perform on the show. At the same time, Pupkin courts Rita, a girl who ignored him in high school and who is trapped in a disappointing life from which he promises to rescue her.

His novel unpublished, Zimmerman adapted it into a screenplay and got it to Martin Scorsese, who passed it along to De Niro even before the production of
Taxi Driver.
It looked destined for the ever-growing pile of De Niro’s maybe/what-if/not-in-this-form/no screenplays. But something in the story spoke to De Niro. “
He understood the bravery of Rupert Pupkin,” Zimmerman recalled, “his chutzpah, the simplicity of his motives. Bobby said he liked the single-minded sense of purpose.… I think Bobby understood Rupert because he’s an obsessive person himself.… Bobby could see Rupert as someone who would rather die than live anonymously.”

Another version of the script appeared in 1976, adapted from Zimmerman’s still-unpublished book by screenwriter Buck Henry, who intended it as a project for Milos Forman. That project came back to De Niro, who mulled it over for a while and then told Forman and Henry flat out, “I really like the original. Do you mind if I take it and go to Marty with it?”