De Niro: A Biography. John Baxter
if she could imagine living in a Communist state, she said she’d be happy to, providing it would crown her its queen.
Bobby drifted into classes with Luther James, an African-American director – hardly an obvious choice, given the racial tensions still persisting even in Manhattan. His mother didn’t try to dissuade him from his decision. ‘They were both supportive,’ he says of his parents. ‘They would never tell me, “No.”’
De Niro’s choice of a teacher clearly resonates with his subsequent preference for African-American wives and girlfriends. He’d been impressed by a 1960 Broadway stage version of Kyle Onstott’s trashy sex-and-slavery novel Mandingo. Franchot Tone played opposite the young Dennis Hopper, whom De Niro had seen in Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean. Bobby went backstage to meet him. As the two were introduced for the first time, a beautiful girl came up to Hopper and asked a question about acting. Acting as a way of meeting girls? De Niro had never thought of that.
Bobby returned to the New School in 1960, where Stella Adler was totally in charge. By then, her bête noire was the Actors Studio, where Strasberg was expounding his version of the Method to an increasingly mesmerised acting community. ‘She was always putting down the Actors Studio,’ says De Niro. ‘The Method thing – as opposed to the Conservatory of Acting.’
Unlike the Actors Studio, where people dressed as they liked, Adler’s male students were required to wear white shirts, black trousers and black shoes, while the girls wore skirts, blouses with high collars, shoes with heels, and hair pulled back from their faces. When she entered each day, usually late, dressed in black, made up as if for a stage appearance, and flanked by two assistants, the students stood and recited, ‘Good morning, Miss Adler. We are pleased to meet you and look forward to embarking with you on our journey to discover our art.’ This ritual over, Adler took her place in a leather chair at the centre of the stage, with her assistants on either side, and the class began.
‘She would be inspirational as a teacher for me,’ De Niro said. ‘There was a lot of pomp and splendour with her, but … she was a good teacher. Very good. I always give her credit for having a big effect on me. [She talked a lot about] Stanislavski. Building a Character. I think that that was really very important. I thought it was important for any actor. I couldn’t see how you wouldn’t be made aware of that. [Acting] is not about neurosis; playing on your neuroses. It’s about the character, and about doing that first: the tasks of the character. Not going on about it as if it was all about you and how you would do it. It was more about the character, being faithful to the text, the script.’
Adler cleansed the Method of psychoanalysis. ‘Affective memory’ was used sparingly, and only when the actor could find the character in no other way. Above all, the ‘given circumstances’ of a play, its plot and character, were the actor’s fundamental concerns. Real acting, she stressed, lay in making choices – not in imposing your psychology on the character but finding the character and choosing the way you explored and illuminated that character. ‘The talent is in the choices’ became not only her catchphrase but that of the generations of students she trained.
Between 1960 and 1963, the Conservatory of Acting totally occupied De Niro. He had no right to be there, since he hadn’t graduated from high school, but, subdued and diffident, he was conveniently invisible in the Conservatory’s large classes. Charles Carshon, who taught ‘Sight Reading’, a class in audition techniques which De Niro later singled out as particularly useful, says, ‘While I am very gratified that Robert De Niro remembered me, it is true that he was so self-effacing in those days that I had to confirm with a student with whom I am still in contact that he had indeed studied with me.’ The most memorable thing about De Niro to most people was his habit of getting around town on a bicycle.
‘Stella Adler had a very good script-breakdown-and-analysis class that nobody else was teaching,’ De Niro recalled. ‘It was just a way of making people aware of character, style, period, and so on.’ It appealed particularly to De Niro because it didn’t involve getting up and performing in front of the class, as at the Actors Studio. ‘People could sit down in a classroom as opposed to having to get up and demonstrate it,’ he said.
De Niro loathed being forced to perform in public until he’d totally grasped a character, and reserved a particular distaste for a feature of the Actors Studio curriculum called ‘Private Moment’, when a student was asked to perform some trivial task as if doing so in the privacy of his home and not in front of a critical audience. At its worst, a ‘Private Moment’ could involve removing all one’s clothes. Even at best, it usually made one look foolish.
‘It was hard to get up,’ De Niro said. ‘You had to try to overcome that.’ Teachers like Carshon helped him do so. ‘At the end of the day, you’ve got to get up and do it. And the sooner you get to knowing you’ve got to get up and do it, the quicker you’ll do it. I had this problem, where I was afraid to make a move. “You have to feel it,” and all that. Carshon would say, “You’ve got to, sometimes, just … jump in,” and that was true. If I just jumped in, took the leap, I’d arrive at the place where you thought you’d have to go.’
Echoes of Stella Adler’s teaching ring through De Niro’s work. Writer David Scott Milton, who went through the Conservatory about the same time, recalls, ‘When we were at Stella Adler’s, she had an acting exercise that went like this: she would call on each student and the student would have this line: “Are you talking to me?” She would have each student do it with several different adjustments: “Are you talking to me?” “Are you talking to me?” Not line readings, but adjustments; that is, character attitudes that determined the line reading. When I saw Taxi Driver, the De Niro in the mirror scene, it appeared to me that he was doing a reprise of the Stella Adler exercise, “Are you talking to me?”’
Among the people for whom De Niro auditioned in his last year at the Conservatory was a film student from Sarah Lawrence College casting his first feature. A film with New York actors, not Hollywood imports, was sufficiently novel to attract attention, even if, as was the case with The Wedding Party, both project and film-makers were erratic.
Though Sarah Lawrence was a women’s college, the director was the dark, glowering Brian De Palma. De Palma, whose shark-like smile and aggressive manner telegraphed his inner torments – ‘His sense of outrage is limitless,’ said his mentor, Wilford Leach – came to film late. His first love was physics, but in 1958 he saw Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which transformed his life.
As a student at Columbia, De Palma was accosted on campus by a courteous Southerner who asked if he’d ever thought of acting. Wilford Leach taught drama at Sarah Lawrence, and had come to Columbia looking for males to balance his all-female casts. Leach offered to let De Palma make films to use in his plays if he agreed to come, and De Palma signed up to do an MA at Sarah Lawrence after graduating from Columbia in 1962.
De Palma’s Byronic character and taste for film violence drew many of the college’s students to him, and he used some of them in his films. They included Jennifer Salt, daughter of blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Waldo Salt; a wealthy young woman named Cynthia Munroe; and leggy, neurotic Jill Clayburgh. The product of a wealthy but dysfunctional family, Clayburgh was in psychoanalysis from the age of nine. De Palma also roped in his Columbia roommates Jared Martin and William Finley, and a handsome young blond actor named Gerrit Graham, who would figure in his career for many years.
In 1963, America’s student film-makers were besotted with the nouvelle vague. De Palma suggested making a film à sketches, as some young French directors had done, each contributing a segment. De Palma planned a fantasy called Fairy Tale, while Munroe’s contribution would be a story based on the riotous wedding of De Palma’s friend Jared Martin. ‘Then the whole thing fell apart,’ recalls De Palma. ‘Cynthia’s story was basically the best, and we decided to do that one as a movie all by itself.’ They called it The Wedding Party.
De Palma, Munroe and Leach boosted the screenplay to feature length, though most of it would be improvised. Munroe raised the money – often quoted as $100,000, though, from the look of the film, shot on black-and-white