De Niro: A Life (68 page)

Branagh had come to fame on the English stage, and then achieved worldwide recognition for his films of
Henry V
and
Much Ado About Nothing
, the latter of which had also made a star of his wife, Emma Thompson. He had tried to crack Hollywood in 1991 with the noirish
Dead Again
and had been rebuffed. But this film, with a $44 million budget, would be a calling card that could not be ignored. It would shoot in England and Switzerland throughout the winter of 1993–94, it would also feature Helena Bonham Carter, Tom Hulce, Aidan Quinn, Ian Holm, and John Cleese, and it would surely prove as big a hit as Coppola’s
Dracula
had.

After a lengthy transatlantic courtship, De Niro agreed to play the role in April 1993, and right away there was trouble. Coppola’s
American Zoetrope studio took out an ad announcing that the film was a go and bearing the legend “It’s alive.” De Niro quickly shot off a letter to Coppola complaining that the ad made the film look “
like a cheesy grade B movie. It’s tacky and I’m deeply offended by it.” (He had an associate producer credit on the picture—though Tribeca did not—so Coppola had at least to make a show of taking such notes seriously.)

Fortunately, in the coming months, De Niro busied himself with other aspects of the production—particularly the makeup. The makeup that Jack P. Pierce had devised for Boris Karloff in James Whale’s 1931 version of
Frankenstein
had become synonymous with the creature but bore little resemblance to Shelley’s description. De Niro—and Branagh and Coppola with him—was intent on creating a monster who was not only viscerally memorable and darkly hideous but also closer to the figure in the novel, in which the creature was created principally out of a single cadaver with various important bits added as needed: “a man made of other men,” as Branagh saw it.

Over the course of several months De Niro traveled regularly to London for long sessions with makeup artist Daniel Parker, fussing over his hairline, his teeth, and a map of scars, burns, and disfigurements all over his body. There were, in essence, multiple characters to build: the original man, a thief who is hung and whose body is stolen for the experiment; the various stages of the creature’s evolution; and the monster itself. De Niro sat patiently for it all, shaving his head, enduring a shower of latex poured all over his body, having prosthetic teeth and contact lenses and such fitted. He had hundreds of Polaroid photos taken of himself throughout the process, and he studied them carefully, sending back feedback to Branagh about what he felt worked and what didn’t. (“The changes we talked about are underway,” Branagh assured him in the summer, as shooting approached.) When the makeup tests finally ended, the snapshots he used as points of reference filled several photo albums as thick as Manhattan phone books.

De Niro got it into his head that he should play the creature as the victim of a cataclysm, and so he read up on survivors of shipwrecks, fires, natural disasters, and the Holocaust, as well as on prisoners of
war and the homeless. He studied the bodies of strongmen of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to give himself a notion of physical bearing. He devised a speaking pattern (Shelley’s monster was far more voluble than almost every film version) based on research into post-stroke speech disorders and other forms of dysphasia. And he peppered his scripts with exactingly phonetic transliterations of the way he wanted to say each line, each word, each syllable. (This was all in stark contrast to what Branagh did, buffing himself with weightlifting to almost comic proportions to play the romantic leading man—while, perhaps not coincidentally, beginning a romantic relationship with Bonham-Carter that would end his marriage to Thompson.)

During his visits to London before production began, and during the shoot, De Niro became friendly with Branagh and Thompson, dining at their home and exchanging Christmas gifts (she sent him fun and friendly notes after each visit, it seemed). He also became chummy with John Cleese, who was cast as Waldman, one of Frankenstein’s fellow doctors, a murder victim whose brain will eventually find new life inside the creature’s skull. (“Remember,” De Niro wrote in his script, “Waldman’s brain.”) He took the opportunity of a break in production to visit Paris and appear in a cameo role in Agnès Varda’s
Les Cent et Une Nuits de Simon Cinéma
, a fairy tale celebrating the centennial of moviemaking; his role required him to laze in a swan boat on a lake with Catherine Deneuve.

He hadn’t made a film in Europe in ten years, and he claimed later that despite the rigors of the shoot—the hours in the makeup trailer, the heavy wardrobe and thick-soled boots he wore—he had fun doing it: “
I had some great times with Ken Branagh … particularly when my character of the Creature had to roll around on the floor. We used gallons of K-Y Jelly, and I could hardly focus. We just fell over laughing.”

That wasn’t how it played for other people. The initial previews went badly: audiences found it turgid, bloody, and strange. Coppola’s
Dracula
was sexy and dark and thrilling. Branagh’s
Frankenstein
wobbled between tones. Coppola sent a lengthy memo to Branagh suggesting many changes to the film, but very few of them were heeded (near the end of his lengthy note, he confessed, “I once did this for Roman Polanski at his request and he never talked to me again”).

The film premiered just
after
Halloween 1994 (that in itself seemed a misstep), and it disappointed commercially: grossing barely half of what
Dracula
had worldwide.

I
N
A
UGUST
1993 De Niro was in New York, putting the finishing touches on
A Bronx Tale
and preparing for his upcoming role in
Frankenstein
, when he got a call from Irwin Winkler inviting him out to dinner at a hot new spot that folks were recommending. Winkler and his wife, Margo, picked him up and brought him to what looked like an unmarked restaurant, and when De Niro walked into the space (actually an empty loft known as the Prop Gallery), he was greeted with shouts of “Surprise!”

It was a fiftieth-birthday party, and even though invitations had gone out months before, everyone had managed to keep it a secret from the guest of honor. His family and near-family were there: Virginia Admiral, Diahnne Abbott, Drena and Raphael, Toukie Smith. Uma Thurman, whom he was dating, was on hand, as were such likely suspects as Martin Scorsese, Harvey Keitel, and Francis Coppola, along with others including Mike Ovitz, Penny Marshall, Robin Williams, Danny DeVito, Raul Julia, Gregory Hines, Kenneth Branagh, and Emma Thompson. Williams stood up to propose a toast and, inevitably, did fifteen minutes of standup, including various riffs on De Niro’s squint-eyed, mumbling offscreen persona. Abbott got a laugh at least as good as any Williams managed by telling the crowd that De Niro was “a lousy husband but a wonderful father.”

T
HE IDEA OF
visiting a hot new restaurant was a perfect way to lure De Niro into a surprise. He had gotten everything he wanted out of the Tribeca Film Center and Tribeca Grill, but there was something that had eluded him from the start: sushi. He may have been associated in the popular imagination with pasta, but his favorite food was sashimi, and he was particularly fond of the fare at Matsuhisa, an exclusive and tiny Beverly Hills sushi bar in which he tried to make a point of dining
whenever he was in Los Angeles.
^*
When they were planning the Tribeca Grill, De Niro urged Drew Nieporent to consider installing a sushi bar, an anomaly considering that the kitchen would be serving American-style cuisine. Nieporent humored De Niro sufficiently to at least take a meeting with the owner of his favored Beverly Hills spot. The sushi master came to New York to inspect the still-under-construction restaurant, but other than handshakes and smiles, nothing was accomplished—in part because the visiting chef spoke almost no English.

Indeed, there really wasn’t an appropriate space in the Tribeca Grill for sushi—either on the menu or in the actual restaurant. But De Niro and Nieporent never lost sight of the idea of importing that great Beverly Hills sushi bar to Manhattan. In 1994, on Hudson Street, just around the corner from their first location, they managed the trick, opening a restaurant that would forever change the image and status of sushi in New York City—and, eventually, around the globe. It was named for the master chef, Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, whom friends and family and regular customers knew as Nobu.

Nobu the man was a classic Japanese master sushi chef, albeit with an unusual pedigree. He had cooked in Lima, Peru, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Anchorage, Alaska, before settling in Los Angeles, first working for other chefs and finally opening his own restaurant in 1987. When he agreed to come to New York, it was with considerable financial resources—as much as $1 million (much of it arranged by De Niro’s former film producer partner, Meir Teper) went into opening Nobu, as the restaurant was named. And it paid off. From virtually the day it opened, Nobu was one of the most celebrated restaurants in New York (“a grand entertainment,” raved Ruth Reichl in the
New York Times
; “something wonderful is always on the horizon”). With only seventy-five seats and a menu featuring items that no other spot in the
city offered, with the cachet of Matsuhisa preceding it and the imprimatur of De Niro and Nieporent on it, with a hip downtown location and imaginative décor by restaurant designer David Rockwell, it was a massive hit, grossing some $6 million per year and forcing ownership to open a second, more casual offshoot, Nobu Next Door, on the same block.

The bit firmly within their teeth, De Niro and Nieporent, under the aegis of the aptly named Myriad Restaurant Group, kept expanding around the neighborhood. In 1995 they opened Layla, a Middle Eastern spot, and TriBakery, which baked goods for various lower Manhattan restaurants and served them on-site. The following year, in the space adjacent to TriBakery, they opened Zeppole, a casual Italian restaurant. Locals began referring to the streets around the Tribeca Film Center as “Bob Row”; everything around them seemed to be owned by De Niro. And there was quality as well as éclat: in 1995, Nieporent’s restaurants won four James Beard Awards, a phenomenal haul of the food world’s equivalent of the Oscars.

They didn’t have an infallibly golden touch: Zeppole lasted barely a year, and an effort by De Niro and Nieporent to restore Harlem’s famed bebop bar Minton’s Playhouse was announced in 1994 and abandoned five years later after they struggled in vain to find funding partners from the neighborhood to help them reach their projected $3.1 million budget. Later, they opened a saloon in Tribeca, Hudson Bar, which stayed open for less than two years. And in 1996, in a scene that seemed more like something out of De Niro’s movies rather than his business affairs, gunmen burst into Nobu and shot the place up, wounding three employees and fleeing with $1,000 before one of them was apprehended hiding behind a nearby Dumpster.

But several of their other spots became staples, such as Rubicon, which they opened together in San Francisco with Francis Coppola and Robin Williams as fellow investors. And Nobu in particular became the seed of an impressive tree of restaurants. A London Nobu would open in 1997 and be awarded a Michelin star the following year; a San Francisco Nobu opened in 1998; by 2001 there were Nobus in Miami, Las Vegas, and Sydney; by 2004, there was one on 57th Street in midtown Manhattan. Eventually there would be more than two
dozen of them, literally all over the world: North America, Central America, Asia, Australia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East. De Niro’s fondness for Nobu’s sashimi, his ceviche-inspired Japanese-Peruvian concoctions, and especially his black cod in miso broth had become a global taste.

A
S RELUCTANT AS HE WAS TO BE INTERVIEWED, HE WAS TRULY
loath to be photographed, particularly when doing the normal business of life, particularly when the paparazzi were involved. An antipathy borne of shyness and thin skin became, over the years, a really visceral hatred. Time and again paparazzi came away from encounters with him slightly the worse for wear.

In the summer of 1991, leaving a restaurant with Joe Pesci, he was alleged to have run up on a photographer, yelling repeatedly, “What do you want?,” then grabbing the fellow’s flash attachment. A criminal mischief/harassment charge was filed, and it was dealt with without fanfare. Three years later, again in Pesci’s presence, he was photographed standing in line to use a pay phone at Elaine’s on the Upper East Side. It was the premiere party for Pesci’s new film,
Jimmy Hollywood
, but it was a low-key affair, and De Niro was surprised and of course annoyed to find flashbulbs popping when he arrived. He managed to sidle past the photographers unmolested, but once he was inside, someone snapped a shot of him, and he lit up: “Don’t you
ever
take a picture of me waiting for the phone,” he yelled. “Don’t you sneak up on me and take a picture.” (As it turned out, the target of his rage hadn’t taken the offending shot.)