De Niro: A Biography. John Baxter
merit. He is returning to New York, where he thinks he belongs. But part of him knows he doesn’t really belong anywhere. Nobody is waiting for him in New York. Nothing is waiting for him – except work.
‘You travel a lot?’ the girl in the bookstore will ask.
‘Yeah,’ he’ll reply.
‘Does it make you lonely?’
‘I am alone,’ he will say mildly. ‘I’m not lonely.’
Sure, Bobby.
The big Cadillac undulates silkily as it rolls over a hump in the shifting surface of the slide area that is Hollywood, and glides into the warm and scented dark.
To talk about ‘performance’ in movies at the beginning of the twenty-first century is to discuss an art as fossilised as Egyptian wall painting. Jack Nicholson has rightly called himself a member of the last generation of film performers. Already, the ‘synthespians’ who will replace him are crowding on camera. Electronics routinely resuscitate actors who die in mid-production, and raise long-dead stars from the grave. Joe Dante’s threat in Gremlins II of an updated Casablanca, ‘in colour, and with a happier ending’, now sounds like next week’s Fox-TV programming. As for the science-fictional proposal that old films might be cleansed of politically incorrect activities like smoking, Steven Spielberg showed the way in 2002 with a sanitised E.T. in which agents’ guns became torches.
As he turns sixty, Robert De Niro, one of the most gifted screen performers of his generation, can be seen as also the last of a line in which he was already a throwback. Born a century too late, he belonged in the barnstorming theatre of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the world of John Barrymore, Emil Jannings, Werner Krauss, Fritz Kortner. No six degrees of separation divide De Niro from a theatre of putty noses and crêpe hair, of rhetoric and speeches from the scaffold. Erwin Piscator of Berlin’s pamphleteering Communist pre-war Volksbühne theatre was a childhood friend, and his teacher, Stella Adler, came from the Theater Guild of the thirties and the nineteenth-century Yiddish theatre.
Born to perform in a theatre that no longer existed, De Niro crammed the djinn of his skill into the constricted bottle of the movies. Watching him writhe and grimace through the glass, audiences imagined they were seeing great acting, when in fact they were watching great acting distorted.
‘These days,’ writes the British playwright and actor Alan Bennett, ‘what the public calls Great Acting is often not even good acting. It’s acting with a line around it, acting in inverted commas, acting which shows. The popular idea of Great Acting is a rhetorical performance (award-winning for choice) at the extremes, preferably the extremes of degradation and despair. Such a performance seems to the public to require all an actor has got. Actors know that this is a false assessment. The limit of an actor’s ability is a spacious and fairly comfortable place to be; such parts require energy rather than judgment. Anything goes.’
At the start by force of circumstances, but later out of a need for reassurance, De Niro became the last star in this ‘anything goes’ school of screen performing. He could have done better by doing less, and by doing less with what he did do. A character actor by birth, he allowed himself to be made a leading man, and, born to play villains, agreed to play the hero; and a hero, moreover, in a medium littered with heroes – which, any actor will tell you, are far easier to play.
Robert Towne, screenwriter of Chinatown and Shampoo, has written, ‘Gifted movie actors affect the most, I believe, not by talking, fighting, fucking, killing, cursing or cross-dressing. They do it by being photographed.
‘It is said of such actors that the camera loves them. Whatever that means, I’ve always felt their features are expressive in a unique way; they seem to register swift and dramatic mood changes with no discernible change of expression … Great movie actors have features that are ruthlessly efficient. Efficiency that’s been touched with a bit of lightning, perhaps. Certainly such actors have this in common with lightning; they can illuminate a moment with shock and scorching clarity. And virtually no dialogue.’
Robert De Niro is such an actor. To see him at his best is to be aware of a new capacity in the art of cinema. His gift is all the greater for the reticence with which it is exercised; like those Japanese painters who work with a heavily inked brush on wet paper, the slightest hesitation brings everything to naught. ‘Great feeling shows itself in silence,’ wrote the poet Marianne Moore – then corrected herself. ‘No, not in silence, but restraint.’
When he chooses to restrain himself, to rely on silence, Robert De Niro is among the finest performers of his generation. That he has chosen so infrequently to exercise that control is his tragedy.
I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, ‘There’s no place like New York. It’s the most exciting city in the world now. That’s the way it is. That’s it.’
Robert De Niro
Actors often come from homes that lack imaginative stimulus; the urge to dress up and play other characters is a form of flight from that environment. Yet De Niro’s parents were both artists, and he grew up surrounded by artists. In that, he resembles Bernardo Bertolucci, who directed him in Novecento. Both are artists over whom an affection-filled childhood with creative parents exercised an ambiguous influence, at once stimulating and stifling.
De Niro’s father, also Robert, was born in 1922 in Tipperary Hill, the predominantly Irish quarter of Syracuse in northern New York state. Robert Sr’s mother, Bobby’s grandmother, was Helen O’Reilly before she married Henry De Niro, a salesman and, later, a health inspector, but Robert Sr inherited the dark good looks and mystical temperament of his Italian father, which he passed on to his own son.
The De Niros came from Campobasso, near Naples, well south of the notional divide which separates the cooler northern Italians from the dark and fiery meridionali. A penchant for argument, depression and rage passed largely undiminished from the first of the De Niro name to arrive in the United States at the turn of the century to those members of the family born on American soil, as did an apparently genetic Italian rhythm of speech which became even more pronounced in adulthood.
Robert Sr started painting at five. ‘Why? I don’t know. I was very isolated,’ he said later. By the time he was eleven he was attending art classes at the Syracuse Museum, and showing such ability that the directors gave him a studio of his own. When adolescence brought the usual soul-searching, he shocked his family by embracing atheism, though, in the best traditions of the lapsed Catholic, religious iconography preoccupied him for most of his life, the Crucifixion and other elements of his discarded faith recurring in his work.
He spent the summer of 1938 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, studying with Ralph Pearson, an artist best known for his landscapes. Pearson held his classes on a coal barge in Gloucester Harbour, which is where De Niro first read the plays of Eugene O’Neill. The grim picture of the emigrant experience in O’Neill’s Anna Christie impressed him so much that he modelled a stage set for a possible production.
After Gloucester, De Niro gravitated to New York, studying by day and waiting tables at night. Much serious art discourse in New York at that time centred on Hans Hofmann, who had arrived from Munich via Paris, trailing an impressive record as a teacher and theoretician. Hofmann opened a school in 1933, and in the summer of 1935 started summer sessions in Provincetown, Rhode Island.
In the winter of 1938–39 Hofmann gave an influential series of six lectures in New York on new movements in European art. They were attended by the best emerging American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, and future critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, all of whom, recognising that Surrealism was waning, were alert for the next new thing, Abstract Expressionism. The following summer, Pollock and some others followed Hofmann to Provincetown. He only accepted twenty-five