De Niro: A Biography. John Baxter
parlour, fully made-up and costumed as Ma. Corman was not to bring her to the location until they needed her.
When she arrived on the set, it was in the grip of a creative jag verging on hysteria. Finding that Herman and Kevin aren’t even there, but out in a boat machine-gunning a famous local alligator (a true incident), she stands at the edge of the water and bellows for them to come and mourn their brother. There follows some desultory grave-digging by Fred and Arthur, watched by Mona, then a hysterical outburst from Ma. Corman tried to rein Winters back, but Robert Walden dissuaded him. ‘Be very careful,’ he warned. ‘She’s in the part. Don’t do anything that might take her out.’ Deferring to someone who knew the needs of the Method, Corman went along. The result was high-adrenalin emoting on the Strasberg model, and hilariously false.
Whatever its limitations, De Niro’s performance is one of the few in the film that aspires to go beyond cliché. Only Diane Varsi as Mona creates anything like the same sense of personality. Her anachronistically curly hair and small breasts with their tweaked nipples, her puzzled confessions of love for Herman and her sense of ‘How did I get into this?’ breathe the perfume of regret that also permeates the films of James Dean. Under a different director and in a better project, she and De Niro could have made beautiful music together, but, one on his way up, the other on her way down, they were destined never to do so.
If Bloody Mama did nothing else, it opened De Niro’s eyes to the possibilities of film acting. Since there was no ‘real’ Lloyd Barker, it had been necessary to invent one, and in doing so he found that Stella Adler’s training prepared him well. Once he had visualised the character completely and understood his motivations, he could make informed choices about Lloyd’s tone of voice, his way of dressing and moving. The technique operated creakily in Bloody Mama, but Lloyd is as recognisable a De Niro character as Vito Corleone in The Godfather II and Max Cady in Cape Fear.
Like the great impersonating actors of the twenties and thirties whom he increasingly resembled, De Niro came to believe that creating a convincing character demanded detailed research and physical effort, even suffering. One had to ‘earn the right’ to play that person. The theory would cause him considerable discomfort, but would produce his best work.
De Niro and Winters returned to New York, Bobby scuffling for the same jobs with Pacino, who was increasingly regarded, with some judicious promotion from his friends at the Actors Studio, as the coming young actor. He had even gone to the Boston Theater Company and scored the success that might have been De Niro’s.
Pacino was then living with Jill Clayburgh, whom he’d met in Boston. They shared a hard-drinking lifestyle. Pacino and De Niro shared something too, since both had been involved with Susan Tyrrell, a minor actress and major party animal who’d appeared in films like Andy Warhol’s Bad, and at the time was Sally Kirkland’s flatmate. Tyrrell, shortly to earn an Academy Award nomination in John Huston’s Fat City, radiated a sensuality that was echoed in her activities off-screen, which she made the subject of a sour one-woman show in 1990 called My Rotten Life. Shelley Winters has described an incident from the period that almost certainly refers to De Niro’s relationship with Tyrrell and its conclusion. ‘I gave a Thanksgiving party. Invited all my theatrical waifs, my babies. Bobby was there, waiting for his date, a young actress he had a crush on. She didn’t show up until dessert. She sort of floated in. “Oh, hi, Bobby …” He went into the bedroom and pounded on the headboard with his fist. He was crying. He never talked to her again.’
Editing on Bloody Mama finished at the end of 1969 but the film didn’t open until March 1970. To reinforce the thirties look, not very well realised, Corman inserted old newsreels, with a voice-over from Winters to remind people when the story was set. By the time it was ready, the Actors Playhouse on 7th Avenue in the Village had accepted Winters’ play for production, and De Niro was headed for another stage role that might, he hoped, launch him into the same orbit as Brando.
Much rewritten, with the injection of more sex and profanity, the piece, originally called ‘Gestations of a Weather Man’, had become One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger. The three one-act plays, each with a different cast, depicted stages in the life of an actress not a million miles from the author. In the first, Sally Kirkland was the actress and Richard Lynch the man who arouses her latent leftist tendencies. Joanna Miles played her in the second segment, located in Paris, against the background of the Korean War and the anti-Communist blacklist. The third and longest section, called Last Stand, took place in the present. The actress was played by Diane Ladd, married to Bruce Dern and even then pregnant with the young Laura Dern.
In the play, Ladd’s character has just won her Academy Award, and meets an arrogant young actor at the celebratory party. He spikes her drink with LSD, and after a dazed candle-lit seduction during which the actor is revealed as a karate fanatic and bisexual, they end up in bed.
Winters pleased De Niro by offering him this role. He learned to splinter planks with his bare hand, and worked diligently with Ladd on developing his character, despite the interference of Winters, who doubled as director, and insisted on De Niro appearing mostly in a pair of abbreviated floral briefs. But the opening on 17 November 1970 became a debacle when Actors’ Equity walked out of seventeen off-Broadway theatres, the Actors Playhouse among them, in a dispute over wages. Winters wept as those few actors in the piece who weren’t old friends refused to appear. The curtain didn’t rise, and stayed down until 30 December, by which time Joanna Miles had taken another job.
The few people who saw the play when it did finally open felt De Niro succeeded in his melodramatic role, though Winters, with her usual hyperbole, said it was ‘like watching sexual lightning on stage. Every night was a different performance.’ Some were more different than others. On one occasion, De Niro, without alerting Ladd, placed additional lighted candles on stage for their love scene. As Ladd got out of bed and began to dress, a sleeve caught fire. An anguished Winters rushed down the aisle, but Ladd had enough presence of mind to snuff the flames out and carry on.
The following morning Ladd abused both De Niro and Winters for their lack of professionalism, but by then catastrophic reviews had condemned the piece to death. One critic found it a ‘foolish and vulgar affair’. Another compared it to ‘an evening of audition material’. To a third, it was ‘a trio of tawdry peepshows’ which ‘makes sex so ugly and dull that even the most ardent voyeur would be turned off’. The Village Voice, in an otherwise negative review, rated De Niro ‘stunning’, but that wasn’t enough to save the play, which closed after seven performances. Winters was in tears. ‘I’ve been clobbered, and I’m in a daze,’ she sobbed. ‘Nobody understands my plays.’
De Niro quickly put the failure of One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger behind him. He continued to make brief stage appearances, mostly off-Broadway or in short repertory seasons, but the action was moving to Hollywood as the best young directors, writers and performers in live TV drama and the stage followed their audience to the movies. In 1967, one film, The Graduate, earned more money than the whole Broadway season combined.
With the New York pond smaller, those actors who remained there had to struggle harder for work. The atmosphere drove De Niro’s already furious ambition. Roy Scheider remembers going up against him for a part on Broadway. ‘I got it,’ he recalled. ‘And a couple of days later I was in Joe Allan’s, and De Niro was at another table. He stared across at me, and I thought, “Wow, this guy really means it.”’
Unable to shake off the characters of Greetings, De Niro started writing a screenplay about a man based on an amalgam of Jon and Lloyd – a young drifter in New York, fascinated with assassinations. He found writing was harder than it looked. Non-verbal, he was non-literate too. Years later, he would admit, ‘I couldn’t sit down and write – I had ideas, I’d always be making notes about things, but I just couldn’t have the discipline to sit down and write. It’s another type of discipline, that’s hard. I could co-write something, collaborate in a certain way, but not really the way you have to in order to come up with a screenplay.’
He would later show what he’d written of this screenplay to Paul Schrader, the eventual screenwriter of Taxi Driver.