De Niro: A Life (46 page)

For Lewis, who had made dozens of films at the rapid-fire pace of the old Hollywood system, the protracted shoot was astounding. “
When I saw Take 29 for a scene with no words,” he remembered, “just walking from a theater mob to a limo, I said, ‘We’re in a mess.’ I never saw the number 29 before in my career! When I saw we had four pages of dialogue the next day, I said to one of the crew, ‘If this doesn’t go to 136 takes, I’ll buy you a car.’ ”

But Lewis knew he was in on a good thing, and from the very beginning he determined to keep his peace and do whatever was asked of him. As Scorsese recalled, Lewis told him at the outset, “
I know I’m number two in this picture. I won’t give you any difficulty and I’ll do what you want. I’m a consummate professional. I know where I stand. If you want me to wait around, you’re paying for my time, I’ll do that.” Lewis remembered the conversation with more or less the same gist but with a spicier tenor:

As Lewis came to see, Scorsese’s indulgence of his star paid off in extraordinary bits of acting. “
Bobby is no fool,” he said. “He knows his craft. And that his craft needs his time, it needs his gut for it. Marty could tell him from now until next Tuesday that Take 5 was super. But De Niro knows fucking well that if he goes into Take 12 and 14 and 15, he’ll find an ‘if’ and an ‘and.’ If he does Take 20, he’ll pick up a quick turn, and on Take 28 he’s got lips tightening, which he never had through the first 27 takes. I watched him feign poor retention just to work a scene. I watched him literally look like he couldn’t remember dialogue. He knew the fucking dialogue. It was masterful. There’s nothing he did that didn’t stagger me.”

L
EWIS
’
S EQUANIMITY WAS
tested repeatedly, however, not so much by the waiting around as by the actual material in which he was performing. In one of the most indelible scenes in the film, Rupert Pupkin shows up uninvited at Jerry Langford’s Long Island estate and tries to wheedle the talk show host into letting him stay. Langford, predictably and understandably, takes a firm line and then explodes. The scene took two weeks to shoot, Scorsese said, and it was “
extremely difficult for everyone.… It was just so painful because the scene itself was so excruciating.”

Perhaps the length of time spent on the sequence was causing Lewis’s energy to lag, because De Niro finally felt he had to prod his co-star
into a more believable performance than he was giving. When it came time to shoot Langford’s explosion, De Niro showed up agitated and mumbling invective, apparently upset with Lewis. The Jews, De Niro muttered, “
turned this world into garbage for 5,000 years.” Lewis, always quick to detect anti-Semitism, was truly staggered, and shot right back at him:

(Questioned about this legendary bit of scene-building some time later, De Niro sidestepped it: “
I don’t know if I said anything anti-Semitic. I might have said something to really bust his balls.”)

Lewis had a similarly volatile experience acting opposite Bernhard, with whom he had just the one long, difficult scene in which he has been kidnapped, bound and gagged, and subjected to her psychosexual ministrations. Bernhard, cast in large part for her ability to improvise in the scene, taunted, teased, and provoked Lewis, and he had to sit there in squelched silence, burning with rage underneath his bindings.

Bernhard adored working with De Niro and Scorsese—“
When you work with great people it gives you a great sense of confidence, and it’s a vote of confidence for your talents. You’re like, ‘How could I go wrong here?’ ” Propitiously, her first scene—Masha attacking Langford as he gets into his limo after a TV broadcast—was shot on the night of her birthday, June 6. But Lewis, she remembered,
“didn’t have anything to
do with making things easier … I was just who I was, and that’s who he was stuck with. I think he would’ve felt the same way about any actress who he had to play that role with.… I don’t think he felt comfortable at all in the situation. Being intimidated by a young woman isn’t really Jerry’s forte.” Lewis tried to improvise Langford’s escape so as to physically humiliate Bernhard—“he wanted me, in my bra and panties and high heels, to spin into a large glass table lit with a hundred candles.” But Scorsese devised a simpler, if similarly violent, bit of action. (“
Marty told me later,” Bernhard said, “that he had thought I really scared Jerry Lewis.”)

Finally, Scorsese was happy with Lewis’s participation. “
Jerry is totally surreal,” he said. “But he was very easy to direct. The role was difficult. He had to look as if nothing were going on—as if he were just walking along the street. He wasn’t used to acting that way, and he had to keep his face less than elastic. That’s hard to do.” And Lewis, for his part, saved his highest praise for De Niro, with some reservations: “
In order to work with Bobby, you have to make a deal with the Devil. He’s one of the best actors I’ve ever seen in my fuckin’ life when he’s banging it out of the park. Bobby is very, very much like Babe Ruth in that he gets 60 out of that park. But remember, Ruth struck out 3,766
^*4
times.… I’m awestruck by Bobby’s work, by his commitment. But he fears intellect. He fears anyone who can say anything other than ‘Hi.’ ”

For De Niro, the difficulty in the film had nothing to do with getting along with Lewis or protecting Bernhard. He was interested in pushing Pupkin as far as he could, bringing the character to the edge of caricature but retaining a patent sense of his humanity. “What De Niro and I were trying for,” Scorsese said, “was to see how far we could push that character—how far over the top Rupert could go and still remain within a realistic framework. How much could he get away with as an actor playing a character like that.” Bernhard concurred that De Niro seemed vulnerable as Pupkin: “
He didn’t have that helmet on. He didn’t have that shield, because somebody that intense and desperate, they don’t even think about protecting themselves.”

It all came to a head for De Niro when he shot the climactic comedy
routine that Pupkin delivers on national TV as his payment for the safe release of the kidnapped Langford. The monologue—brutally self-lacerating and actually rather funny—was scripted carefully and built up by De Niro in exactly the way a stand-up comedian builds a set of jokes: the timing, the wording, the costume and posture. “
The whole routine,” he remembered, “was word-for-word—the whole timing and the way it builds.” But shooting it, he confessed, was a trauma. As Scorsese recalled, when they finished the first take of it, De Niro told him, “I’ve never been as terrified, as humiliated in my life.” Scorsese felt that De Niro had nailed it, but they went for another take. Again, it was grueling. After that they did one more take, and then they let it drop. “We reshot that monologue twice,” De Niro remembered. “I wanted to do it again, but we let it go.” They did make one change to it, at De Niro’s suggestion. In the earliest versions of the script, the monologue appeared chronologically, at the moment in which it was performed live; De Niro urged Scorsese to show it later, when Rupert watches it on tape, along with the rest of the world, broadcast on the small TV in the tavern where his old high school crush tends bar. It was a savvy insight, adding both to the drama (is he any good?) and to the pathos of the climactic scene: Rupert may not be a king, we learn, but he’s actually kind of funny and not at all bad at what he aspires to do.

Shooting on
King of Comedy
wrapped in early autumn, and Scorsese spent the rest of the fall and the better part of the winter editing. When he presented it to 20th Century Fox, they didn’t know what to do with it. It fit no genre, its stars were either wildly out of their familiar métiers or completely unknown, and it had an ambiguous ending that seemed almost to mock the audience’s credulity. They tested it in a few midwestern markets and it received horrible scores from preview audiences. They decided to release it in early February 1983, nearly two years after production had begun.

Y
OU START WITH
the name, an impossible encumbrance: Rupert Pupkin. “Often misspelled and mispronounced,” he repeatedly says, and before long we hear “Pipkin” and “Pumpkin” and “Pupnik.”

There is the hair, combed to one side like a snowdrift, so big and
thick and full that it almost looks like he snaps it on in the morning. The mustache is a dapper touch, and the wardrobe, well … On one hand, he’s impeccable: three-piece suits, ties, polished shoes, always cleaned and pressed and straightened. But the colors can be a bit loud, the cuts a tad out of fashion, the shoes glaringly white beneath dark slacks: the whole thing is off, somehow, but never exactly objectionable. He’s presentable, but within quotation marks, as it were. (Even dressed down to perform a kidnapping, he’s a peacock, in a flame-red and orange aloha shirt, oversized sunglasses, and a Panama hat.) He’s decorous, solicitous, polite. And yet somehow you feel it’s a put-on. There’s nobody
actually
like this guy, is there? Not in New York in 1982, not on planet Earth, not in real life.

In fact, Rupert Pupkin only
partly
exists in real life. He lives in New Jersey, commutes to Manhattan to work as the world’s best-dressed messenger, hovers around stage doors to collect autographs (although he insists, “It’s not my whole life”), drinks coffee at Howard Johnson’s, has insane parleys with his frenemy Masha. He’s
alive
, he’s
here
, as far as that goes.

But he is truly and most completely alive when he’s
not
here—when he’s having imaginary conversations with Jerry Langford in his head, dreaming of himself as a guest on Langford’s show, or sitting in his basement on a mock-up of the Langford show set, complete with fullsized cardboard cutouts of Langford and Liza Minnelli (just five years, mind, after
New York, New York
). In these moments, Rupert chats, schmoozes, argues, exchanges hugs, shares knee-slapping show-biz laughs, and genuinely seems to commune with his celebrity heroes. It’s all in his head, but it’s more real to him than Times Square.

If his ambition ended at reverie, he would be a simple soul—deluded, living at home with his mother, content to be, in his words, a “schmuck for a lifetime.” But his desire for more, for a career in showbiz, for a
real
spot on the
real
couch on the
real
Langford show, leads him into conflicts: with his never-seen mother (voiced, almost inevitably, by Catherine Scorsese), who complains that he’s too loud; with Masha, with whom he gets into wailing, siblinglike arguments in the street; with Langford’s staff, from a receptionist who can’t remember his name and an assistant program director who takes a pass on his
material to a security guard who gives him the bum’s rush and a butler who claims he’s “having a heart attack” when Rupert touches things around Langford’s house; and finally with Langford himself. Conflict, we’re told, reveals the true inner person. If that is the case, the true Rupert Pupkin is a whining, wheedling brat who insists on getting his own way and will stop at nothing until he does.

But if his conversations with his mother and especially with Masha reveal the innermost man most clearly, the conversations with Langford reveal the full Rupert Pupkin in all his contradictory glory. There is the flustered Rupert, so eager to make a good impression on Langford in the back of a limousine that he can’t get his words out and won’t let the encounter end (“You don’t know how many times I’ve had this conversation in my head,” he confesses, almost innocently). There is the imaginary superstar Rupert who dotes on his own public image and makes the dream-world Langford beg him for a favor. There is the humble-ish Rupert who confesses, again in his own mind, that his comedy comes from his human pain (“I look at my whole life, and I see the awful, terrible things in my life, and I turn it into something funny”). There is the showbiz Rupert, appearing on the Langford show, where he is kowtowed to by his high school principal and then, on live TV, married to his high school crush. There is the determined Rupert who holds a (fake) gun to Langford’s head and forces him to read cue cards about his own doom, but who is still sufficiently star-struck to help himself to one of the TV host’s cough drops, like a saint’s relic.