De Niro: A Biography. John Baxter

       CHAPTER ONE The Last Actor Alive

      Player (lost): There we were – demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance – and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. (He rounds on them) Don’t you see?! We’re actors – we’re the opposite of people!

      Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

      Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1989.

      From the offices along the Strip of Sunset Boulevard, there’s a classic LA view. No palms, no lawns, no art moderne architecture; leave those to the glitzier residential suburbs closer to the Pacific: Beverly Hills, Westwood, Santa Monica.

      Here, in the DMZ between Beverly Hills and Hollywood, everything is commerce. The very light and air are for sale – perhaps the only things Hollywood has to sell.

      Film interfaces with the record business. The monuments are all to bad taste and the hard sell. Tonight, in Bill Gazzarri’s Rock Club, with its self-aggrandising billboard portrait of its pouchy proprietor on the façade, and his boast of the groups launched here, the Hollywood porn-movie community is having its annual bash to present its Oscars, the Heart-Ons, with awards for Best Anal Love Scene and Best Blow Job.

      But in Hollywood there’s always a gaudier image, a louder voice. Opposite, higher, brighter, more strident, a billboard has been erected for the personal junk-lit industry of Jackie Collins, author of Hollywood Husbands and Once is not Enough. Ten times larger than life, she glares out over her domain. Underneath her image is the rubric of her reign. More than a Hundred Million Sold.

      At Hollywood’s smartest restaurants, Le Dôme and Spago, black stretch limos queue decorously to drop off their clients, then circle back into the dark. The drivers wait in empty parking lots, smoking and listening to the radio until the car phone burrs its summons.

      One white chauffeured Cadillac limousine glides past Le Dôme, moving west on Sunset, heading for the 405 Freeway. LAX. The east.

      In its air-conditioned hush, Robert De Niro takes a last look at Hollywood through smoky yellow glass. When he comes back, it will no longer be the same place.

      It’s said that every performing artist has ten years in which to make his or her mark. By that standard, De Niro had succeeded better than most. From Taxi Driver and his Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for The Godfather II in 1975 to the acclaim for Awakenings in 1987, he’d taken twelve years to create the benchmarks against which every other screen actor of his generation needs to measure himself.

      But now he is turning his back on all that, leaving the febrile society he has always affected to despise, but whose blandishments he can never quite resist.

      He has already passed Tower Records’ gigantic Hollywood outlet, where anything that can be put on disc is for sale. He has passed On the Rox, the disco where he’d spent more than his share of white nights. He has passed below the Xanadu-like silhouette of the Château Marmont Hotel, in the grounds of which his friend John Belushi died.

      As the sun sinks, Sunset comes alive with black leather, Spandex, studs. On Sunset Strip, the sidewalk is jammed with Harleys, and Porsches parked three-deep as, twittering like parakeets, the Valley Girls from Sherman Oaks and Encino, bums and tits compressed into tank tops and jeans tight and hard as lacquer, jostle for attention as they gather for a night of disco. Manes of moussed hair – male and female – shimmer in the streetlights, and down the gutters roll dusty skeins of tape from gutted cassettes. Sunset Tumbleweed.

      Jackie’s billboard ignites, neon outlining the imperious Collins silhouette.

      Showtime.

      De Niro’s limo drives by, its passenger no longer noticing.