De Niro: A Life (5 page)

Nin taught Admiral, Duncan, and their set, particularly the young
women, about writing, about nightlife, about sexual freedom, about behaving in empowered and assertive ways. But Nin was not entirely a beneficent presence in the lives of her new acolytes. For one thing, she felt wholly superior to Virginia and the other young women in her circle. As she wrote in her diary:

And when she described her visits to Admiral’s loft on 14th Street, she was again condescending:

For her part, Virginia would claim, years later, that she and her friends saw Nin as more of a sugar mama than an inspiration. Duncan was the only one among them truly smitten by Nin, both erotically and intellectually. But Admiral had other ideas.
“My role,” she told Nin’s biographer Deirdre Bair, “was to string along with Anaïs as long as Robert felt as he did about her. We were just two kids from Berkeley, and as she took us to parties and fed us, well …”

There was, in fact, a frankly financial aspect to the relationship
of Nin and Admiral. One of Admiral’s moneymaking enterprises was working as a typist (among her clients was the poet Kenneth Patchen). As Nin was in the process of having her journals transcribed from longhand into typescript, it was natural the two should cut a deal. As Admiral remembered,

In total, Admiral would type a full sixty volumes of Nin’s diaries, the pages of which Nin then edited and returned to Admiral for retyping. After that they were again tucked away in a secure spot, awaiting their publication decades later.

Admiral told one of Nin’s biographers that she found the material in these pages boring, but Nin claimed (in a later diary, which, like the previously quoted passages, Admiral wouldn’t have seen until they appeared in a published volume),

It was true, in fact, that Nin inspired Admiral’s circle to examine themselves in new ways, to submit to sessions of psychoanalysis and write about their inner lives. But it wasn’t the only thing they did, and
hers wasn’t the only inspiration they heeded or sought. Admiral, for one, was still painting. In the fall of 1941 she enrolled in Hans Hofmann’s New York school. And there she met Robert De Niro.

O
N PAPER THEY
had almost nothing in common: a blue-blooded, pre-
Mayflower
Presbyterian spitfire from California and a taciturn second-generation Irish-Italian American from Syracuse. He was considerably taller than her, and she, of course, was considerably older, especially given their relative youth. But in light of his sexual mercuriality and her comfort with a variety of lifestyles, there seemed to be an ease between them. Both were reckoned physically attractive by their peers. And they were among the most accomplished and praised of Hofmann’s students, which surely established a kinship or a kind of sibling rivalry—whether sexual or not. According to a fellow student, painter Nell Blaine,
“Virginia and De Niro were considered among the most talented, the most gifted of Hofmann’s students. We talked about them with great respect. They left an aura.” That alone might have formed the basis of their bond. But a photo taken in the 1940s shows Admiral regarding De Niro with evident affection as they sit beside each other at a casual gathering. There was real love there.

During the latter months of the academic year, De Niro moved in with Admiral, and when summer arrived, they made their way to Hofmann’s Provincetown school together. When Hofmann headed back to New York at season’s end, Admiral and De Niro chose to stay on for a time, and he went to work at a fishery to help keep their little household afloat. But there was another moneymaking scheme in the air: Nin had been in Provincetown as well, and she enlisted the help of her clutch of young bohemian friends in writing pornography that she sold to a private collector who paid her a buck a page, first for fully formed fictions, ultimately for juicy passages alone. Although she found the famously scandalous pages of Nin’s diaries “boring,” Admiral was game to try her hand at writing erotica. However, Nin deemed her initial effort “too satiric.” De Niro, with his love of Verlaine and Rimbaud (as Nin remembered, he “wanted to hear all about life in Paris”), had been doing some writing of his own at the time, and he was at
least willing to try to earn a dollar with a pen, even if it was smut for hire. But it wasn’t his ideal medium. As he later remembered,
“I was working in the fishery … and having a hard time with money. Anaïs Nin suggested I write some pornography at $1 a page. Thirty years ago that was a lot of money.… It was very hard work, so eventually I went back to the fishery.” Additionally, the couple threw parties to help cover household expenses.
“Every Friday night Bob and Virginia had a rent party,” remembered Larry Rivers. “You danced, you drank, and you brought money.”

There was some trauma between the pair that summer. One night De Niro revealed to Admiral that he’d been sexually intimate with Duncan, instigating a row loud enough to be heard in an adjacent studio. According to Nin, during a lull in their quarrel the two suddenly heard one of their neighbors addressing them through the thin wall:
“I have been listening to you. I have been weighing all your arguments. I think that Virginia is absolutely fair and right and the behavior of Bob and Robert treacherous and ugly.” (In another account, the unseen commentator declared that De Niro had behaved “like a real shit.”) For the circumspect De Niro, this was an utter humiliation, at least as Nin imagined it in a diary:

De Niro would struggle with depression and neurosis throughout his adult life, but this was the first time it became manifest to his friends.

Eventually the couple returned to New York for the winter. De
Niro found work waiting tables alongside Tennessee Williams at the Beggar’s Bar, a celebrated Greenwich Village watering hole that their old Provincetown acquaintance, Valeska Gert, had opened. The jobs didn’t last long—Williams’s lover of the moment, another painter who was also working at the bar, apparently flipped out over the policy of pooling tips, leading Gert to rid herself of the troublesome lot of them.

Nin, too, was out of the picture, weary of dealing with Admiral’s provincialism. She was out one evening with Admiral and De Niro and talking about the various great artists she had encountered since arriving in New York.
“Virginia stopped me with a prim tone of voice,” Nin wrote. “ ‘I’m not interested in the unfamiliar. I like the familiar.’ After this I kept away from them.”

Money for such necessities as food, rent, and art materials was still scarce, but a bigger challenge faced them all that December when the United States entered the global war and the likes of nineteen-year-old Robert De Niro and twenty-two-year-old Robert Duncan would have been prime candidates for service. Duncan, the ROTC dropout, was eventually drafted and spent several weeks in boot camp before wrangling a discharge on the basis of his homosexuality. De Niro, who had begun a furtive and sporadic sexual relationship with Duncan, had another means of avoiding the war: not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he and Admiral were married.

T
HE FOLLOWING YEAR
provided plenty of excitement for the newlywed couple. For one thing, they began to experience some real—if modest—success in the world beyond Hofmann’s classroom. Admiral sold a canvas to the Museum of Modern Art for the princely sum of $100 (about $1,350 in 2013 dollars) and then another to Peggy Guggenheim, who had arrived in New York and begun to acquire and exhibit the work of new young artists at her 57th Street gallery, Art of This Century. De Niro would later acknowledge how impressive these sales were: the young Admiral, he recalled years later, was “a
very good
painter.” As he put it,
“What she was doing then wasn’t fashionable,” he recalled, “and a woman painter had a harder time.” Nell Blaine, another painter in Hofmann’s classes, affirmed the rare stature that
Admiral—and De Niro alongside her—had attained: “Virginia was the only student I knew at that time to sell a painting to the Museum of Modern Art.”

The couple had another important patron in Guggenheim’s uncle, Solomon Guggenheim, who had begun to amass the collection that formed the basis of the famed Fifth Avenue museum that would eventually bear his name. At the time, the nascent institution was known inelegantly as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, and as part of its mission it had begun to offer small stipends to promising young artists, including the cream of Hans Hofmann’s school. Admiral and De Niro were granted $15 per month each by a foundation run by Guggenheim’s mistress, Hilla Rebay (Baroness Hildegard Rebay von Ehrenwiesen), who further aided the young couple’s fortunes by hiring De Niro as an information desk clerk and night watchman at the museum, a position that found him working alongside his chum Jackson Pollock.

These windfalls allowed Admiral and De Niro to move from the 14th Street loft into a pair of adjacent studios on Bleecker Street. Likely they needed the space as much for personal as artistic reasons: before the year was over, Admiral found herself pregnant. And on August 17, 1943, the child, destined to be their only one, was born. They chose Hans Hofmann to be the baby’s godfather, a purely honorary title, as no baptism was intended. They named the boy Robert Anthony De Niro, but around the house they would always call him Bobby.

I
T
’
S INEVITABLE, PROBABLY, THAT WE THINK OF
R
OBERT
D
E
N
IRO
as a product of the tumult and color of Manhattan’s Little Italy, as he first came to prominence in
Mean Streets
and
The Godfather, Part II
, both of which were set (and partly filmed) there.