De Niro: A Life (67 page)

Tears of age: with Grace Hightower at the restoration of
Once Upon a Time in America
at the Cannes Film Festival, 2012
(Corbis).

Hands up: immortalized at Hollywood’s famed Chinese Theater, 2013
(Corbis).

Kings of old: with Jerry Lewis, Sandra Bernhard, and Martin Scorsese at a thirtieth-anniversary screening of
The King of Comedy (ImageCollect).

Big night: at the 2013 Oscar ceremony with Grace Hightower
(ImageCollect).

I
N
A
UGUST 1992
D
E
N
IRO GOT THE WORST NEWS THAT ANY
Hollywood personality could possibly receive: a missive from the law office of Marvin Mitchelson, the famed palimony attorney in Los Angeles, seeking money from him on the part of Helena Springs, then using her husband’s surname, Lisandrello. The claim was based, of course, on the three years that De Niro and Lisandrello had been intimate and on the birth near the end of that time of her daughter, identified in the lawsuit as Nina Nadeja De Niro, in July 1982. The suit made reference to the romance, to De Niro’s presence in Lisandrello’s life during the baby’s infancy, and to voluntary financial payments, as high as $8,000 to $10,000 a month, that De Niro had allegedly made to Lisandrello until not long before the suit was filed, when the payments simply stopped without explanation. The suit, seeking a total of $3,500 per month in child support, argued that De Niro had bonded with the child in the role of birth father and had established a long-standing relationship of financial and emotional support.

De Niro received the suit with cool aplomb, meeting the process server at the door to his Tribeca office and asking him quietly, “
Is that all there is?” His attorneys tried to keep him from appearing in court in Los Angeles, the excuse being his hectic work schedule, but the California State Superior Court, which was handling the case, ordered him to appear, to resume payments for child support and tuition for private school (the Lycée Français in West Los Angeles, at $1,000 a month,
merci bien
), and to submit to a blood test to determine paternity. In October, he went to Los Angeles to comply.

Predictably, De Niro’s side denied everything and called the case
frivolous, so Lisandrello took to the gossip columns, claiming that she and De Niro had resumed their romance in the early 1990s when he had been longing to see more of Nina. She further claimed that he had refused any blood or DNA tests, that she had denied her current husband permission to adopt Nina, and that De Niro had tried to pay her outright for custody of the child—all of which De Niro’s representatives denied.

In late October, the results of two separate blood tests came back: De Niro was
not
, as he had been told and always assumed, Nina’s father. But that surprising turn didn’t dissuade Lisandrello and Mitchelson from pursuing their suit, claiming, in effect, a kind of parental palimony. “
We’ve always proceeded under the assumption that De Niro might not be the biological father,” Mitchelson conceded, referring to another man “who could be the real father [who] was killed in a car accident years ago.” The suit would continue, the attorney explained, because De Niro had voluntarily taken on the bulk of the financial responsibilities of fatherhood and at least some of the emotional ones, and that it was unfair to the child to simply drop them.

In November, without holding a hearing or taking testimony, the court ruled in De Niro’s favor, declaring that he had no obligation to pay any sort of support to Lisandrello. Almost as if to mark his confidence in the outcome, De Niro had been seen out on the town in New York on two separate nights the weekend just before the court’s declaration: once in the company of Toukie Smith and once in the company of Naomi Campbell, the twentyish British supermodel with whom he was now linked.

B
Y 1994
, De Niro and Toukie Smith had more or less drifted apart, or at least could no longer be considered the steady item they once had seemed to be. Since her brother Willi Smith’s death in 1987, De Niro had been supportive of Toukie’s work on AIDS education and charity with the Smith Family Foundation, co-hosting and attending its galas and holding one of its biggest-ever events, a $250-per-plate dinner and auction, at the Tribeca Grill. But those ties had been tested by
De Niro’s very public dalliances, particularly one with Campbell, who was barely twenty years old—nearly thirty years his junior—when they began an on-again, off-again relationship in 1990. Campbell, one of the highest-earning models in the world at the time, had recently split from heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson and was developing a reputation as a diva with lofty ambitions and a fiery temperament.

It was a volatile relationship. Even more than Toukie Smith, Campbell drew the limelight, and she was prone to getting into public contretemps such as scuffles at nightclubs. De Niro broke off with her more than once, but they kept reuniting for a few years, and Campbell’s continued presence in his life caused Toukie at one point to threaten a palimony suit. That threat never materialized, even though De Niro and Campbell were spotted together in New York, Los Angeles, and the Caribbean island of Nevis over the span of nearly three years.

When Campbell learned that De Niro would be directing A
Bronx Tale
, which dealt in part with an interracial romance, she took it upon herself to begin acting lessons and to learn a plausible American accent from vocal coach Sam Chwat, with whom De Niro frequently worked. She didn’t get the part, and by the time the film premiered her romance with De Niro had fizzled, but with no hard feelings, apparently: when they ran into each other at a New York tribute to Aretha Franklin, Campbell gave De Niro a friendly kiss, and in 2007, when she put her Park Avenue apartment on sale for an initial asking price of $5.5 million, her chosen broker was De Niro’s son, Raphael, then working for a high-end Manhattan real estate firm.

Thus did Toukie outlast Campbell, as she also would such other dalliances of De Niro’s as the singer Whitney Houston, the model Veronica Webb, and the actress Uma Thurman. By 1994, Toukie had reinvented herself yet again, opening a restaurant called—what else?—Toukie’s on Houston Street in the West Village. Beneath a mural that depicted the owner among such divas as Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Dandridge, Toukie’s served home-style southern and soul food: fried chicken, short ribs, crazy corn, peach cobbler, black-bottom pie. A
New York Times
critic couldn’t hide his delight with the big portions, the warm atmosphere, and especially the charm of the proprietor: “When
you are greeted by Ms. Smith, you stay greeted. Expect kisses and hugs as if you are a long-lost friend.… Honey, this place makes me smile.” It didn’t, however, make money, closing in 1997.

By then, De Niro and Toukie were no longer together—at least not in any way that could be deemed traditional. In fact, though, in a certain sense they were more together than they ever had been. In early 1995, using their own sperm and eggs and the services of a surrogate, they conceived twin boys, who were born to them on October 20: Aaron Kendrick and Julian Henry. The news broke weeks after the birth, through an official announcement from De Niro’s publicist, Stan Rosenfield, which explained that De Niro and Toukie would lead “separate personal and professional lives” and had agreed on “sharing the parenting of the children.”

It seemed like a genteel enough agreement; De Niro and Toukie hadn’t really been a couple for a few years, after all, and he was able to provide financially for the care and upbringing of the boys. But within a year they were battling in the gossip columns and then in Manhattan Family Court. It turned out that their agreement had been verbal only, reached at the beginning of the fertilization process, and that it had become untenable because each wanted to spend as much time as possible with the boys. In short, they were supposed to be Toukie’s kids, but De Niro, who by all accounts was a loving and available father to Drena and Raphael, had bonded with them and wanted them half of the time. Their temporary arrangement—alternating custody of the twins in four-day blocks—was far more complex to execute than they had anticipated, and there were whispers from those close to Toukie that she needed more money than the maintenance sum to which they’d originally agreed. Complicating things even more, De Niro had a new and serious romantic interest: a model and former flight attendant named Grace Hightower.

H
E HAD PLAYED
a lot of variety in his roles of the previous decade—boldness and timidity, pride and fear, charisma and ugliness, good guys, bad guys, even the devil. But it would have been hard to say that he’d truly stretched. Not since he went to Colombia to shoot
The Mission
had he taken a part that seemed daring, incongruous, or, frankly, even intriguing. He was in a groove in selecting his roles, yes, and he was reliably good in them, but there is often an imperceptible moment at which a groove becomes a rut—and he hadn’t had a significant box office hit since
The Untouchables.

Well, whether he was feeling the weight of routine, seeking a potential smash hit, or simply wanting to invigorate himself and the movie audience with an off-kilter choice, he couldn’t have chosen better than the part he tackled next: the monster in a new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein.
The film was being produced by Francis Ford Coppola, whose 1992 reimagining of
Dracula
had grossed more than $200 million worldwide against a budget of $40 million. With results like that, it was inevitable that
Frankenstein
would follow, as the two classic horror characters had been yoked together since being written and had always been linked in the movies as well. A script was commissioned akin to that for Coppola’s version of the vampire classic, which had been entitled
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
, with the idea being that the original novel—and not the decades of adulterated film versions—would be the source material.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
, it would be called. And De Niro’s appearance as the monster wasn’t the only eyebrow-raising aspect of it: although Coppola had originally planned to direct the film himself, that job, as well as the role of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, fell to the Northern Irish writer-director-actor Kenneth Branagh.