De Niro: A Life (45 page)

Of course, working with Scorsese would take a while, as the personal and professional ordeals and crises of 1976 through 1980 took their toll. What was more, Scorsese explained to De Niro that he really didn’t have a feel for the material; he was more interested in another project he had in mind to make with De Niro,
Night Life
, a film about two brothers, one a cop, the other a comedian. But on the heels of
Raging Bull
and
True Confessions
, the theme of warring/loving brothers didn’t appeal to De Niro very much. Brushing off
Night Life
, he kept pushing
The King of Comedy
on Scorsese.

In part it was because he was fascinated with Rupert Pupkin. De Niro had become a big enough star in the past half decade to acquire his own real-life cadre of Rupert Pupkins, hero-worshippers and
semi-stalkers drawn to his aura of fame. As
King of Comedy
percolated in his head, he took the opportunity to accost his accosters, picking the brains of autograph hounds who approached him and scaring them by asking for their contact information; he wasn’t trying to prosecute them, but rather to use them as research sources and even as extras. “
Bobby developed a technique,” Scorsese remembered. “Role reversal! He would set about chasing autograph-hunters, stalking them, terrifying them by asking them tons of questions.” And, true to his word, De Niro threw some work at a few of them. “Some of the people I used to run into,” he said, “I used in the film.”

According to Scorsese, one semi-stalker in particular proved a font of insight. For years he had pestered De Niro to meet and talk with him, and with the new film in mind, De Niro finally agreed. As Scorsese said: “The guy was waiting for him with his wife, a shy suburban woman who was rather embarrassed by the situation. He wanted to take him to dinner at their house, a two-hour drive from New York. After he had persuaded him to stay in Manhattan, Bobby asked him, ‘Why are you stalking me? What do you want?’ He replied, ‘To have dinner with you, have a drink, chat. My mom asked me to say hi.’ ” For De Niro, such an unaffected obsessive was pure gold.

Finally, not very long before
Raging Bull
premiered, Scorsese agreed to pursue
King of Comedy
with De Niro. He had been reluctant, he later explained, because “
it was more Bob’s project than mine.… The motives for making a film are very important for me. They have to be good motives. Mine weren’t very clear when I started out on this picture.”
^*1

De Niro and Scorsese went out to Long Island with Zimmerman’s still-unpublished novel and the two screenplays and worked out a new
take on the material. The author later admitted to uncertainty about what the result might be, but when he saw the new version of the script he was delighted: “I literally jumped up and down.… They had synthesized the script and the book.” (And, as with
Raging Bull
, they would neither take nor seek credit for their rewrite.)

Like
Raging Bull
,
King of Comedy
was a three-hander, meaning that the casting of the other two lead roles, Jerry Langford and Masha, would be vital. For the former, Zimmerman’s original inspiration had been Dick Cavett, who didn’t seem to have the proper gravitas to play the role (nor, six years after inspiring it, the career profile to qualify as a movie star). Johnny Carson was the obvious first choice, but he considered himself strictly a TV guy and told Scorsese he wouldn’t enjoy the rigors of long days with multiple reshoots of scenes: “One take is good enough for me,” he said. The next choice was Frank Sinatra, who was nearing the end of his screen acting days and demurred. Scorsese and casting director Cis Corman thought of Orson Welles, but they decided he “wasn’t ‘showbiz’ enough.” Then they circled back to the idea of, if not Sinatra, perhaps other members of his Rat Pack: Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and especially Dean Martin, who was also virtually done with acting. And the thought of Dean Martin led them to consider his onetime partner, Jerry Lewis.

During his years with Martin (roughly 1946–56) and the decade thereafter, Jerry Lewis was one of the biggest stars in showbiz, with a sizable film audience, considerable drawing power as a live act in Vegas and elsewhere, and tremendous success on television with his annual muscular dystrophy telethon.
^*2
He hadn’t enjoyed a favorable critical reputation in the United States since the 1950s, but he was celebrated in France and other foreign markets for his clowning; he had taught at the University of Southern California, where the likes of Steven Spielberg vouched for the quality of his instruction; and he had a cultish following
among a new generation of comedians who had grown up with TV viewings of
The Nutty Professor
,
The Errand Boy
,
The Ladies’ Man
, and other comedy hits that Lewis had written, produced, directed, and starred in decades earlier.

By 1980, Lewis had fallen on hard times: he hadn’t made a film between 1972, when he was forced to abandon the star-crossed movie
The Day the Clown Cried
, about a clown held by the Nazis at Auschwitz, and 1979, when he made the ultra-low-budget
Hardly Working
in Florida, which wouldn’t get released for two years and then proved a surprise hit. In his mid-fifties, Lewis was possessed of a darkness, a thin skin, and a quick temper that worked against him enjoying a late-life career, and he had only recently overcome an addiction to painkillers he’d developed after injuring himself in a pratfall on
The Andy Williams Show
in 1965. He was, in short, a risk in any number of ways.

But Scorsese was drawn to casting him as Langford almost because of all that. The telethon, in particular, fascinated him. As he explained, “
With its combination of money pouring in for charity and its Vegas sensibility, [it] seems at times to verge on nervous breakdown. Also the thin line between reality and drama seems to be shattered constantly.… Anyone who could conjure up and sustain this atmosphere is quite extraordinary.” He and Lewis took a couple of meetings, and Scorsese recalled, “
I could see the man was
ripe
for it.”

But the final call on the casting would belong to De Niro, who required that Lewis meet with him several times so that he could get a sense of Lewis as a collaborator—and, presumably, as a target for Rupert Pupkin’s mania. “
What we went through before we decided that we were gonna do it,” Lewis recalled. “Bobby and I have five meetings, five separate meetings in six months.” As he explained, “
Bobby has to know the people that he’s gonna work with. What he needs from them, I can’t tell you—whether he has to know that they’re genuine, whether he has to know that they’re just goddamn good actors, that they’ll commit—I’m not too sure, but he needs to know some stuff.”

De Niro expressed his reservations about the casting choice in a note to Scorsese: “
It’s harder to imagine Jerry Lewis doing this as opposed to Johnny Carson. He (JL) has to do it straighter than he’s ever done anything in his whole life.” In conversation with Lewis, De Niro
quizzed the comedian extensively about his years with Dean Martin, his ideas about filmmaking, the details of his personal life, even his relationship with his parents—things that had no immediate bearing on anything in the scripted role of Jerry Langford. Finally De Niro agreed to cast Lewis and the contracts were struck, whereupon he phoned Lewis and said, as Lewis remembered it, “ ‘
Jer—I need you to know that I really want to kill you on this picture. We can’t socialize, we can’t have dinner, we can’t go out.’ I said, ‘Whatever turns you on, sweetheart.… Are there any ground rules about saying “Good morning”?’ ”

Scorsese and De Niro enlisted Lewis to sharpen Langford’s character by bringing his longtime experience of oversized fame and celebrity to bear. “
They don’t know celebrity,” Lewis said years later. “They only know anonymity. You could walk by Bobby De Niro today, you wouldn’t know him. It’s just the way he is. And for many of the films—
Taxi Driver
,
Mean Streets
,
Bang the Drum Slowly
,
Raging Bull
,
The Deer Hunter
: who the fuck knows who that is? They needed me to tell them about celebrity. And we wrote together—Paul Zimmerman and Marty and myself—we wrote the things that they had never heard about.”

Among Lewis’s contributions was an encounter on the streets of New York in which a passerby recognizes Langford and asks for an autograph. When Langford demurs, the woman turns hostile: “You should get cancer!” It was, Lewis claimed, something that had actually happened to him at a Las Vegas hotel. Further, following De Niro’s practice, Scorsese encouraged Lewis to bring as much of his personal life to the character as possible. Lewis wound up wearing his own clothes in many scenes, Langford’s apartment was decorated with some of Lewis’s personal knickknacks, and the part of Langford’s dog was played by Lewis’s shih-tzu, Angel.

The casting of Masha proved another laborious process. It was a highly coveted role—the last young woman selected by De Niro and Scorsese for a big part, Cathy Moriarty, had been nominated for an Oscar, after all. The part called for a wild, almost psychotic energy, for comic chops, for someone who would play every scene with De Niro except for a long, excruciating one in which Masha would attempt to seduce the bound and gagged Langford.

De Niro promoted his
Deer Hunter
co-star and good friend Meryl Streep for the part. “
I asked Meryl to come in and meet Marty and talk about it, because I thought she’d be terrific,” he remembered. “She’s very, very funny. She’s a great comedienne. She came in, but I don’t think she wanted to do it, obviously, for what reason I never really knew. But I knew that she
could
do it.”
^*3

Other young actresses met with Scorsese and De Niro, Ellen Barkin and Debra Winger among them. And then Cis Corman, who was combing through the ranks of stand-up comedians, got wind of a gangly young woman from Arizona named Sandra Bernhard. Bernhard was staying at the Chateau Marmont when she was summoned to meet Corman and read from the script for her. “
She looked stunned,” Bernhard said. “Maybe she was frightened. And she said, ‘I think. You need. To meet Marty.’ ”

Bernhard auditioned for Scorsese and De Niro, and they came to see her act at the Comedy Store, just down the hill from the Chateau. After that she was flown to New York to meet Lewis, who was, she said later, “
the most intimidating factor in the whole situation. Jerry Lewis was a large, looming figure. So I was scared to meet him, and he lived up to his reputation. He’s one of the only showbiz people I’ve met who really has an aura.” Her anxiety at meeting the grand star was exactly what the part of Masha called for; she was hired.

During this process, De Niro went about building Pupkin inside and out. Along with Scorsese and costumer Dick Bruno, he shopped in the sorts of old-school Times Square stores where magicians and other performers got their wardrobe: “
There was one of these Broadway showbiz type stores, near the Stage Deli,” De Niro remembered, “that had all these flashy clothes that you’d find in Vegas now. This little store with a mannequin, and the mannequin had the suit on and the hair and everything. We went in, took the clothes, I took the hairstyle, the mannequin hairstyle, I said it’s all perfect. Marty said, great, let’s just do that.”

De Niro borrowed the swaying-while-standing-in-place behavior and the rat-a-tat speech pattern of Paul Zimmerman, who spoke even
faster than the famously fast-talking Scorsese, and he mimicked the gait of a chicken. “Gawky. A bird whose neck goes out as he walks,” as he recalled. He reminded himself to allow nervousness to show through, to add a whine to his voice, to hunch a little like an acquaintance who struggled with multiple sclerosis, to infuse his dialogue with what he called a “Jewish lilt.” (In fact, Pupkin’s ethnicity isn’t made explicit in the film.) He picked the brain of a New York paparazzo named Barry Talesnick, looked up old gags in joke books, and bombarded Zimmerman with questions, prompting a frustrated letter from the screenwriter in which he declared,
“
I HAVE NOTHING LEFT
.
THIS IS IT
.… This is all I know about Rupert. This is all you need to know about what I know about Rupert. Shit, you know more about him by now than I do, and I invented him.”

And what did De Niro know about Pupkin? As he noted to himself, he was “
very determined, no nonsense,” but “basically ineffectual.” He wanted to be careful, he told Scorsese, not to be “weird or creepy … there has to be something funny about me.” He was a very keen observer of his prey, Jerry Langford: “
I watch him closely always!
Just to see what makes him great.” He knew that Pupkin ironed his own clothes, kept an organized room (it would never be filmed or shown), had been an English major, was fast with a lighter with someone else’s cigarette, stared without meaning to, and was polite to almost everyone he met for fear of being disliked if he wasn’t. He knew that Pupkin would keep his comedy routine short so as not to overstay his welcome and that he would remain at all times “a gentleman … A little desperate perhaps but still a gentleman.” Even when Pupkin turns dangerous, De Niro noted, he was “still so respectful. But a little tougher, a little harder. I learned.”

T
HE FILM WAS
scheduled to shoot in Manhattan in the summer of 1981, but Scorsese took ill that spring and sought to delay production. That wasn’t possible, though, because of an impending strike by the Directors Guild of America; if a certain quota of key material on a film hadn’t been shot by a specific date, the production would be shut down. Ill or not—and he was, per his own words, “
coughing on the floor and
sounding like a character from
The Magic Mountain
”—Scorsese would have to proceed.

Ironically, given that he was as thoroughly associated with New York as were Woody Allen and Sidney Lumet, this was only the second film that Scorsese would shoot entirely in the city since turning pro, and he found that the requirements of unions, permitting officials, and traffic control turned even the simplest procedure into an elaborate ritual. “
It was like making a film with a dinosaur,” he remembered. “The tail was so big it was wagging and slamming into everything, perhaps not intentionally, but destroying things as in a
Godzilla
movie.” On top of his struggles with his health and De Niro’s need for excessive retakes and reshoots, the filming schedule began to expand well beyond its original length—and all during the fetid heat of a Manhattan summer.