De Niro: A Life (63 page)

For his part, De Niro once again dove into his research. He visited Wolff at Syracuse University, showing up with a dog-eared copy of
This Boy’s Life
and a notebook full of observations and questions. He meticulously selected his wardrobe from vintage Sears catalogues. He studied the idioms and accent of Washington’s Skagit Valley on audiotapes and crafted a strange nasal vocal approach with dialect coach Sam Chwat.
He was, as ever, an obliging collaborator, and he was proud enough of his finished work to invite Elia Kazan to the New York premiere. But critics were divided on the picture, and audiences were repelled by De Niro’s unpleasant character. In the end, only DiCaprio came out of the film with a boost.

D
E
N
IRO HAD
never been especially political, and never in public. Even, for instance, when he gave interviews in support of
The Deer Hunter
he used the vaguest terms possible in describing his opposition to the Vietnam War, which was already over. In fact, he almost never made reference to current events or political topics in interviews or even while inhabiting characters in films. But he had his preferences, of course, and given that he was a son of bohemian New York and an active member in the showbiz community, it’s not surprising that his views were left-leaning. There were his visits to Moscow and Havana, of course, which were controversial in the mid-1980s, when he made them. In 1990, when Nelson Mandela made his triumphal tour of the United States, De Niro attended several of his speeches and private appearances, and hosted a $2,500-a-plate fund-raiser at the Tribeca Grill.

In the coming years, he would peek his head out a little more openly in political matters. He strongly supported Bill Clinton as a presidential candidate twice, and he joined a group of signatories in a published protest against Clinton’s 1998 impeachment. At home, he had avidly backed David Dinkins in his successful 1989 campaign to become mayor of New York and then filmed and recorded ads and attended fund-raisers for his reelection bid four years later, when Dinkins lost to Rudolph Giuliani.
^*3
Mostly his touch in politics was light: he read stories to kids one year at the Clinton White House’s Easter egg roll, and he appeared onstage at a New York City fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton’s Senate run (again, against Giuliani) to teach Bill Clinton how to say “fuggedaboudit” properly by manipulating the
president’s mouth and cheeks (“Don’t shoot him!” Harvey Weinstein joked with the Secret Service). When the 2000 presidential election devolved into a turmoil of vote counting, De Niro was among the scores of celebrities who signed a petition published in the
New York Times
calling for a fair result (i.e., the election of Al Gore). Even when he visited troops overseas in 2003, during the Iraq War, he did it without any press coverage.

In fact, most of his activity in the public sphere was in assisting charitable efforts, only rarely embracing them so that his name and face became synonymous with them. Following through on his work with Toukie Smith, he continued raising money and awareness for AIDS research and care through the Willi Smith Foundation and Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and he made himself similarly available to a few charities in New York, particularly those dedicated to improving the lives of kids or preserving cultural institutions in the city. Urged by Harvey Keitel, he even attended a Marine Corps anniversary dinner that Keitel, an old jarhead, was hosting as a fund-raiser.

In truth, though, he was far likelier to be visible at events having to do with the world of film, or the high-living adjuncts of it. He chaired a tribute to Martin Scorsese hosted by American Cinematheque, talked about film directing at Long Island University in a joint appearance with Spike Lee, gave a lecture at the Actors Studio West, and, starting with the Best Director prize in 1990, became an occasional presenter on Oscar telecasts, little knowing that his 1992 nomination for
Cape Fear
would be his last competitive entry at the Academy Awards until 2013. More commonly than any of those, he could be seen at cultural events in New York: a performance by the Alvin Ailey dance troupe, for instance, or an evening of readings by translators of Dante at the 92nd Street Y. More frequently still, he was seen at seats alongside the catwalk at fashion shows during New York’s annual Fashion Week, where he frequently attended events displaying the latest work of Giorgio Armani, with whom he’d struck up a friendship. (Drena De Niro was unofficially the go-to DJ for Armani’s shows, and in 1995, Armani sent her dad a leather jacket in which he had been dressed for a magazine photo shoot and for which he expressed appreciation.)

As often as he showed up to honor colleagues, share his insights on the movies, or look at fashion models in new outfits, he was even likelier to appear if he was himself the honoree. In March 1991 he was the centerpiece of a gala in support of the American Museum of the Moving Image, a $350-a-plate affair that drew more than eight hundred people to the Waldorf-Astoria to hear De Niro saluted and lightly ribbed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Harvey Keitel, Jeremy Irons, Liza Minnelli, Charles Grodin, Penny Marshall, and Danny Aiello. De Niro, whose tablemates included both Toukie Smith and Diahnne Abbott, spoke at the end in support of the museum’s mission and to gently tweak his peers. “I consider myself too young for awards like this,” the forty-seven-year-old De Niro said. “They should have been given to guys like Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman.”

Just two months later, attending the Cannes Film Festival in support of the release of
Guilty by Suspicion
, he was decorated by Jack Lang, the culture minister of France, with that nation’s Commander of Arts and Letters award, marking his life’s work. A few years later, it was the Deauville Film Festival, which specialized in American cinema, that honored him. And then the citations, ribbons, and awards started coming faster: an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from New York University in 1996 (Steven Spielberg was also honored on the day), a New York State Governor’s Arts Award later that same year, and, the following winter, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Medal from the Municipal Art Society of New York for his work in preserving the architectural history of lower Manhattan.
^*4
This busy season of awards was capped in the spring of 1997 when he was in France once again, this time to be knighted as a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, the highest cultural honor that the nation could accord a noncitizen.

As a citizen of New York City, meanwhile, he did things that only a movie star could do, such as appear in commercials promoting tourism
in the city, and things that anyone might do, such as show up for jury duty when summoned, as he was in 1998.
^*5
He even, in a sense, raced at Belmont Park, where in the summers of 1994 and 1995 a colt named Robert De Niro ran several promising races for owner Peter Brant, a billionaire friend of the human Robert De Niro. The horse won a significant victory in the 1994 Tremont Breeders’ Cup, coming from last to first and claiming a $53,240 stake, but he fared poorly at that summer’s Saratoga Springs meet and in subsequent runs at Belmont, never fulfilling the promise of that earlier start. (A few years later, De Niro had a line in
Wag the Dog
that sounded the perfect final note on this curious episode: “If Kissinger could win the Peace Prize, I wouldn’t be surprised to wake up and find out I’d won the Preakness.”)

W
ITH ALL THE YEARS HE
’
D SPENT IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA
, with all the red carpets and talk shows and press conferences and galas and notepads and tape recorders stuck into his face, he still hated interviews, still avoided them at any cost, still sat through them in obvious discomfort, still answered questions tersely and generically, as if being interrogated. As a result, not only was he a difficult interview to get, he was a
lousy
interview: grudging, stammering, terse, evasive, sometimes adversarial, and almost always obviously itchy to end it.

Virtually from the time journalists first started seeking him out, he’d been hinky. In his very first interviews he was chary, reticent, almost suspicious. Now and again journalists would demonstrate how uncomfortable he was with interviews by transliterating his pause-filled responses, which could sometimes read like dialogue from a play about stoners. He hated it, and in time he simply did whatever he could to avoid the press altogether. He did almost no interviews in support of
Taxi Driver
,
The Deer Hunter
, or
Raging Bull
, and the press began to compare him to Greta Garbo and Marlon Brando, who were also well known for their aversion to publicity. Asked by the
Chicago Tribune
’s Gene Siskel why he was so parsimonious with interviews, he replied, “I know I’m right not to do them. Sometimes there’s really nothing to say.” And not long after that, he sounded off in
Parade
on the same topic: “I’ve never read anything that’s completely correct. What we’re dealing with here is a one-dimensional portrait. If I say something, that isn’t
all
of what I said, or it isn’t what I meant to say, or it isn’t something compared to something else I said.”

In 1987,
Vanity Fair
decided to profile him on its cover, and the job was assigned to the biographer Patricia Bosworth, like De Niro a life member of the Actors Studio. Through his publicist, Stan Rosenfield, his manager, Jay Julien, and his personal assistant/secretary, Trixie Bourne, De Niro repeatedly rebuffed her efforts to get a sit-down interview. She continued to ask. Finally Bourne broke the news to her bluntly: “
Mr. De Niro will probably never talk to you, but he is giving you permission to talk to his friends.”

Bosworth did just that, getting some time with unnamed acquaintances of his parents, colleagues from his early stage and theater days, collaborators on his film work, and such key names in De Niro’s story as Martin Scorsese, Shelley Winters, Burt Young, Sally Kirkland, Brian De Palma, Barry Primus, and Art Linson. But, of course, not De Niro.

It was a thorough profile, and credible, but Bosworth’s editors, perhaps peeved that their icon of the month should spurn them, splashed the headline “How Weirdo Is De Niro?” on the cover and entitled the story “The Shadow King” inside, asking in a subhead, “Is he pulling a Brando? Or is the secret that he has no secret?” No matter how even-handed the story, this was far from a flattering way to frame it.

Not coincidentally, De Niro fired back the following year, explaining in an interview in
Rolling Stone
, “
There was a mixed signal. People were asking me if they should do it, and I said, ‘Do what you want.’ ” As he saw it, “People were telling me that they liked the article—well, fine, that was okay. Certain things that people said were totally crazy. Not totally crazy, but just off.” And he explained that his refusal to participate was based on principles, not on fear. “I didn’t want to do it; I just sort of stayed out of it. I didn’t want to be—not that they were doing that—but I didn’t want to be shaken down: ‘We’re writing an article about you. If you talk to us, you’ll only set the record straight.’ Well, who cares about setting the record straight?”

But at the same time, almost as if dragged by the ear like a truant schoolboy, he was making a concerted effort to set the record straight. He consented to sit for a
Playboy
Q&A, one of the most thoroughgoing experiences in all of celebrity journalism. Lawrence Grobel, a contributing editor to the magazine, spoke with him throughout the year—eight sessions on two coasts over the span of seven months, resulting in
a published article of nearly fifteen thousand words. It was the result of some real struggle: the published version recounts that De Niro turned off Grobel’s tape recorder eleven times (“
If I don’t turn it off,” he explained, “I may
say
it’s off the record, but it’s still on your tape”), looked at his watch in obvious impatience constantly, and outright declared that he wanted to leave five times.