De Niro: A Biography. John Baxter
the Bear Garden, an all-night restaurant on the Upper East Side run by playwright David Scott Milton.
De Niro became a regular at the Bear Garden, an establishment which, Milton recalls with some pride, ‘attracted a number of strong-arm men, gangsters, whores, junkies. Our luncheon waitress was Jill Clayburgh, dinner waiter Frederick Forrest. Peter Boyle worked for us for a short while. Louise Lasser, who was married to Woody Allen at the time, was our late-night waitress. Waldo Salt, who later wrote Midnight Cowboy, was a regular; his daughter, Jennifer, worked there occasionally. Norman Wexler, screenwriter of Joe and Saturday Night Fever, was also a regular. William Saroyan’s son, Aram, a writer and a poet, also mis-spent much of his youth there.’
Films were so rarely shot in New York that the same actors, including Christopher Walken, Ralph Waite, Allen Garfield and Charles Durning, as well as De Niro and Pacino, often found themselves competing for roles. De Niro auditioned for Jerry Schatzberg’s 1971 Panic in Needle Park, but Pacino won the part, and made his movie debut.
Pacino, devoted to Lee Strasberg both personally and professionally, pressed De Niro to audition for the Actors Studio, about which De Niro had begun to change his mind. Pacino’s experience showed that Studio members got first shot at the best roles. Robert Cordier, then in the Studio’s Directors’ Unit, recalls, ‘Bob was not at the Actors Studio then, but he was trying to get in. He called me a few times and said, “What’s up, what’s going on? I’m trying to get into the Actors Studio.”’
His chance came, indirectly, though Sally Kirkland, who one afternoon at Jimmy Ray’s introduced him to her godmother, Shelley Winters. Winters had passed through Stella Adler’s Conservatory en route to a Hollywood career that culminated in her 1951 Academy Award nomination for A Place in the Sun. She’d hoped for better things after this success, but her subsequent films were largely routine, and following some roles in Britain, she returned to New York, determined to relaunch herself as a stage actress and playwright. In 1955, she found a niche at the Actors Studio.
Strasberg, as part of an infatuation with Hollywood which many Studio members viewed with alarm, now admitted ‘observers’, who could watch but not participate. Paul Newman and Marilyn Monroe attended regularly, as did Charles Laughton, who had a particularly close relationship with Al Pacino. Winters, by virtue of her movie career, was appointed one of the ‘Moderators’ who guided discussions when Strasberg wasn’t present. At the same time, resigning herself to the onset of middle age, she began taking character roles, and even won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 1959 for The Diary of Anne Frank.
De Niro impressed Winters instantly. ‘He was skinny and very gentle, with dark watchful eyes,’ she recalled. ‘He didn’t say much. He had very little money at that point and he used to ride around town on a rickety old bike.’ She later implied a romance between them – almost certainly wishful thinking. Despite his involvements with Kirkland and the actress Susan Tyrrell, De Niro was immature, still living at home and very much under the thumb of the assertive Virginia.
Winters did, however, have an ulterior motive for wanting to meet him. In 1959, in the throes of redefining herself, she had written a play, Gestations of a Weather Man. Not surprisingly, it portrayed three incidents in the life of an Oscar-winning actress. The third section called for a charismatic young actor, and from what Kirkland had told her, De Niro seemed ideal. Pulling strings, she got him into the Studio. ‘She got permission for he and I to work on scenes as working observers,’ recalls Kirkland. ‘She had just made me a member; talked Lee Strasberg into allowing my audition to get me in. Bobby was very good and we worked almost every week for a period of time.’
Though Strasberg would retrospectively claim De Niro as a product of the Studio, and display among his trophies a photograph of the two embracing, Bobby never auditioned for the Studio, and though he spent seven years as occasional observer and performer, remains circumspect about the worth of Strasberg’s teaching, which he calls ‘another thing’ from Stella Adler’s system. Many actors, Pacino among them, accepted the professional value of membership of the Actors Studio without necessarily embracing its ideas, and De Niro, like Pacino, may well have ‘blocked his ears’ to the discussions that followed each student performance; Pacino admitted he would count numbers mentally rather than listen.
‘It was beneficial and helpful,’ De Niro said of his Strasberg experience, choosing his words carefully. ‘What I thought was better was when a director would come up and have a session. Because a director had a mixture of experience and practical doing. A director would get up and say, “We’ll do this and do that.” 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.’
Once her two protégés were established at the Studio, Winters tried to persuade her agency, ICM, to represent them, but it was a bridge too far. Kirkland says, ‘The higher-ups at ICM said, “Who are they?” We both got turned down by ICM in 1968.’ But shortly after, De Niro acquired an agent, in Richard Bauman, who would represent him through the first part of a fast-accelerating career.
CHAPTER SIX Shelley and the Boys
I met a man in filmland, a patron of the arts, He bought my scheme to turn my dream into a peeping art.
From tide song of the film Hi, Mom!
As he approached twenty-five, De Niro felt that his working life hadn’t really begun. He had little commitment to acting as a career. ‘I didn’t want to act for a while,’ he later told Chris Hodenfield of Rolling Stone magazine. ‘I was afraid that I would get wrapped up in it so much that I wouldn’t have time to do what I wanted.’ He still thought he might return to Europe, and spend more time in Paris, where he’d enjoyed the sense of anonymity. For the moment, he did the next best thing, playing in occasional off-Broadway plays, just another obscure fringe performer.
But 1968 marked his definitive decision to take acting seriously. ‘When I was about twenty-four or twenty-five,’ he said, ‘I committed; started to look for stuff, go out on auditions, sent out résumés. The whole thing.’
The change had much to do with Brian De Palma, who, having graduated from Sarah Lawrence, continued to make short films. Their voyeuristic undertone was increasingly obvious, particularly in the 1966 Murder à la Mod, a three-part fantasy with a middle section much influenced by Hitchcock. The film attracted interest, but no distributor, so De Palma used his earnings from working in a Village restaurant to hire the Gate Cinema in the East Village and show it himself.
One person who saw it was Charles Hirsch, who had a vague job scouting new talent for Universal, which was toying with the idea of investing in some low-budget features to cash in on the student audience and the art-house boom. Through Hirsch, De Palma got a small development grant from Universal’s parent company, MCA, but they rejected all his ideas as too radical.
De Palma and Hirsch became friends, however, and sat around Universal’s New York office for days on end, talking movies. ‘Out of that frustration,’ says De Palma, ‘smoking cigarettes and waiting for someone to return our calls, we came up with the idea for Greetings.’
The inspiration was Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine Feminine, a film in fifteen fragments during which Jean-Pierre Léaud moves in with a girl he meets in a café, then spends the rest of the film wandering Paris, quizzing her and her friends about politics and their way of life.
Writing their screenplay, De Palma and Hirsch addressed a similar ragbag of topical issues: marijuana, pornography and censorship, computer dating, the underground press, the new climate of tolerance for homosexuality, the Kennedy assassination; but particularly Vietnam and its manifestations on TV. The three lead characters, Paul, Jon and Lloyd, are all preoccupied with avoiding the draft: the title comes from the preamble of the draft notice – ‘From the President of the United States, Greetings.’
Nobody in Hollywood found the script very funny, so Hirsch offered