De Niro: A Life (56 page)

I
F HIS WORK
of the 1980s was spottier than his output of the previous decade, you could mount a pretty good film festival with films that he came close to making during this period but that reached the screen without him or didn’t get made at all. He was going to play a cameo as impresario Sol Hurok in a film about the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, and a key role in Michael Powell’s never-realized production about the Russian author Mikhail Lermontov; he was going to appear in Sergio Leone’s epic about the siege of Leningrad and to play Pancho Villa opposite Tom Cruise in the role of Tom Mix. He was interested in making films of two David Mamet plays—
Glengarry Glen Ross
and
Speed-the-Plow
—and a film called
Waterfront
about the struggle to make
On the Waterfront.
He was cast on paper, but never on film, opposite Danny DeVito in a comedy called
The Battling Spumonti Brothers
, in a cameo role in
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
, in Elia Kazan’s adaptation of his own novel
Beyond the Aegean
, as Prospero in a Cuban film version of
The Tempest
, and in Michael Cimino’s never-filmed life of gangster Frank Costello,
Proud Dreamer
. He came very close, in 1988, to playing the role of Sal the pizzeria owner in Spike Lee’s
Do the Right Thing
(Lee’s production diaries from the weeks when De Niro was attached would include the director’s reminders to himself not to be cowed by an actor of De Niro’s stature). And amid all
those unrealized projects, he very nearly debuted as a director with an adaptation of Haywood Gould’s novel
Double Bang
, a cop story set in New York that he also would have starred in and produced.

H
E
’
D STEERED CLEAR
of the Chateau Marmont for a while after John Belushi’s death, and in fact he barely worked in Hollywood throughout the 1980s, but by the end of the decade he began staying there regularly again—and, once again, it was a star-crossed experience. Twice in November 1988 his bungalow at the Chateau was burgled, once when he was asleep inside. The first theft was relatively minor—some clothes, some audio equipment. But the second, when De Niro was in bed, resulted in the disappearance of a rented Mercedes, which finally turned up a few days later in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Long Beach. At first De Niro claimed that the burglar had used keys to get into the bungalow, but he later confessed to police that he likely had left the sliding patio door unlocked and, he admitted, ajar. “I’m from New York,” he explained. “New York people like fresh air.”

A few months later he was a victim, in a sense, of an even more invasive crime. Robert Litchfield, a career bank robber from Florida, had escaped the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas (becoming the first such escapee in a dozen years), and while in flight had undergone plastic surgery to accentuate an already close resemblance to De Niro. He was caught six weeks after his escape after robbing yet another bank in Florida, his eyes and ears still slightly swollen from his cosmetic operations. Turned out that being Robert De Niro wasn’t as easy as the man himself made it look.

W
HATEVER MIGHT BE MEANT BY THE PHRASE
“
CAREER
criminal,” it certainly was appropriate for James Burke, aka Jimmy the Gent, a hijacker, loan shark, gambler, extortionist, drug trafficker, and murderer who was born in New York in 1931 and had an adult arrest record from the time he was eligible for one. Burke was taken into custody by the NYPD four times in 1970, three times each in 1948, 1957, 1964, and 1966, twice each in 1961 and 1963, and once each in 1949, 1950, 1953, 1956, 1962, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1972, and 1973: thirty-three collars in twenty-five years, real archcriminal stuff.

That last bust—for beating a Florida man who owed money to some people in New York—wound up with Burke going to prison for six years, during which time a parole officer noted, with some understatement:

Burke was aligned with the Lucchese crime family, which held sway over parts of Brooklyn and Queens, where Burke was born and
committed most of his crimes. He was particularly keen on Kennedy Airport, which was near his base of operations, provided a rich source of cargo, cash, and valuables, and, in the days before 9/11, featured a loosey-goosey security infrastructure that could be easily exploited by a small and well-connected gang of thieves. Burke was famous in criminal and police circles for his ability to prey upon the airport; the most audacious heist of his audacious career, a $6 million haul of untraceable cash from a Lufthansa Airlines storage facility in 1978, became the stuff of legend, in part because in the years afterward Burke systematically killed so many of the people involved in the job.
^*1

What Burke was
not
was Italian, and thus despite all his collaborations with mafiosi and all the money he made with and for them, he was never initiated into the mob. That was a privilege accorded to full-blooded Italians and never to Irishmen like Burke or even to the likes of Henry Hill, a half-Italian, half-Irish member of Burke’s crew who grew up watching and emulating Jimmy the Gent and other gangsters from his neighborhood. Burke was a father figure to Hill and to the slightly younger Thomas DeSimone, both of whom he’d instructed in the ways of the mob from adolescence onward and who partnered with him on any number of crimes, including the Lufthansa heist. One of the lessons he repeatedly drilled into them was that they should never, under any circumstances, rat on a colleague or assist the police in any way. But when Hill was caught dealing cocaine in 1980—against the orders of Burke and their mutual bosses in the Lucchese family—he did what he’d been tutored never to do: he cooperated with law enforcement authorities against Burke and several others and vanished into the witness protection program. On the strength of Hill’s testimony, Burke went to prison in 1982—not for the Lufthansa heist and all the murders that he’d committed or ordered others to cover up, but for fixing college basketball games as part of a 1978 gambling scheme. While he was incarcerated, though, he was convicted of the 1979 murder
of a cocaine dealer, and any chance he had of being paroled disappeared. He died of stomach cancer in a prison hospital in 1996.

Burke’s story came to the attention of Martin Scorsese in 1985 when he read
Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family
by the New York journalist Nicholas Pileggi. The book was an as-told-to account of Henry Hill’s life and deeds, recounted from the vantage of an unnamed safe harbor and an assumed identity. Said Scorsese, “
I was drawn to the book because of the details—life—stuff that I remembered friends saying when I was growing up in Little Italy and that I had never seen written down before.” With Pileggi, Scorsese worked on adapting a script from the book (the title of which could not be used because of a fear of confusion with the then-popular TV series of the same name). They focused their work on the quotidiana of mob life that enthralled Scorsese, ending up with what Pileggi called “a mob home movie.”

Before Scorsese could get around to it, though, he finally made
The Last Temptation of Christ
and then the short film
Life Lessons
, which was part of the
New York Stories
trilogy that also included pieces by Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola. Finally, in the summer of 1989, he set about making
Goodfellas
, as the Henry Hill movie had come to be entitled, with a $25 million budget from Warner Bros. Ray Liotta, hot off successes in small but vital roles in
Something Wild
and
Field of Dreams
, would play Hill; Lorraine Bracco, then married to Harvey Keitel, would play Hill’s wife, Karen; Paul Sorvino would play a Lucchese family crime boss; Joe Pesci would take on a character based on Tommy DeSimone, and De Niro would play the role of Jimmy the Gent—or Jimmy Conway, as the script renamed him.

Whatever he was energized by—the story, the role, or the chance to work with Scorsese for the first time since
The King of Comedy
—De Niro dove into preparing for the part of Jimmy the Gent with a vigor he hadn’t demonstrated in years. In some ways it was a supporting role, since Hill was the narrator and the protagonist. But De Niro treated it with fanatical devotion. He never met with Burke—“It would have been too complicated,” he explained cryptically—but he spoke with Henry and Karen Hill repeatedly (they joked about receiving seven or eight phone calls from him a day), and his researchers helped track
down other people who could tell him about the mind, the heart, and the habits of the real guy.
^*2
And he heavily annotated his copy of Pileggi’s book.

The result was a massive written portrait of Jimmy Burke, larger than the one Pileggi had written, teeming with insights and reflections that would shape De Niro’s performance: an account of how Burke talked, walked, dressed, gambled, killed, ate, drank, moved, loved, hated, thought. In each scene in which he appeared, De Niro distilled his research into specific choices of actions, attitudes, and dialogue. It was the most work he’d done on a film role since
Raging Bull.
Take, for example, these excerpts from his notes on the character:

There are the makings of a complete performance in those observations, and De Niro’s dossier would go on for pages and pages, noting Burke’s love of ketchup on his food, his preference for Chivas Regal or J&B scotch neat with a glass of water on the side, his workaholism, his inability to relate to women, his love of elevated diction, and especially his singular status as an Irishman working for the Mafia: “Part of my power was Italians needed me. They had the money but I had the connection with the Irish DA and politicians. I being Irish they could trust me. So if I whacked guys from time to time they’d let it go, cause I was too important to them and I knew that.” He also cannily noted another oddity of Jimmy’s status vis-à-vis his Mafia connections: “I did all the shit that the wiseguys wouldn’t and couldn’t do. I just
did
it! What
ever
it was … I’m more of a wiseguy big shot than the actual wiseguy big shots. I got more style than they do.… I act more Italian than the Italians to overcompensate.”

In the course of the film, Jimmy the Gent would age twenty-four years, and De Niro was, predictably, scrupulous in addressing the changes in physique, diction, wardrobe, and especially hair color and hair style that the character would undergo. (During production, he went to a Manhattan nightclub to see the jazz singer Little Jimmy Scott perform and was approached by a woman unknown to him who wanted to know why he looked so gray. “That comes from the aggravation of being a star,” he replied.)

He wasn’t the only actor devoted to verisimilitude throughout the production. Scorsese gave Joe Pesci the go-ahead to fill his prop pistol with blanks for a scene in which he shot an errand boy in a fit of pique, and the loud report of the gun genuinely took the other players in the scene by surprise: “Everyone in the room was shocked,” Pesci recalled. “No one moved. I think they were really scared.”

Pesci also remembered how carefully De Niro observed everything
about the film, not just the details concerning Jimmy the Gent. When they filmed the famous body-in-the-car-trunk scene, he said, “I attacked Frank [Vincent] with the knife viciously. After the first take, Bob kept staring at me. I said, ‘How was it? Was I ok?’ Bob said, ‘Yeah, it’s fine.’ But he kept staring like he wanted to tell me something. He said, ‘Well, Joe, your emotions are great, but I don’t see how you can get that knife in and out of the chest area that fast because of the bones and the tendons all around it. It’s such a big butcher knife, it seems you’d have to force it in and force it out.’ That’s Bob. He really wants to help.”