De Niro: A Biography. John Baxter
never became disillusioned,’ he said later. ‘I knew that, if I kept at it, I would at least make a decent living. If you are halfway decent at what you do, by the law of averages in five or ten years you will make enough money to do what you want to.’
For evidence of this, he had only to look to his parents. Virginia’s company was flourishing, while Robert had won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968 and now spent summers teaching at colleges all over New York state and in San Francisco, which became a second home.
But Bobby still lived in the $75 a week fourth-floor walk-up apartment on 14th Street, now turned over to him by Virginia, and arrived at auditions by bicycle. Socially, he rivalled his father in elusiveness, avoiding parties, and even when he did turn up, maintaining a reserve that chilled anyone who tried to get close. As one friend put it, ‘He was the only man I ever knew who seemed as if he had to think before he smiled, as if he was saying to himself, “Is that funny? Shall I laugh or what?” His laughter never seemed spontaneous.’
The musical Hair was still causing a sensation on Broadway when Bernard Schwartz, president of Joseph M. Schenck Enterprises, called a press conference to announce he’d just paid $50,000 for the film rights to Heir – not the Ragni and Rado show, he hastened to explain, but a novel by the unknown Roger Simon about two rich and beautiful kids on drugs, one of whom dies young. (Ragni and Rado, on the advice of their guru, refused to sell the film rights to Hair for another decade.) United Artists put up $2 million to make the film, which Schwartz, having milked the coincidence of titles of all possible publicity, rushed into production as Jennifer on my Mind, with director Noel Black.
To script it, he recruited Erich Segal, author of the seminal weepie Love Story – also about two young and beautiful people, one of whom dies young. For Jennifer, Segal made it the story of Marcus (Michael Brandon), rich heir of a Jewish gangster, who meets and falls for the appealing and equally wealthy but oddly disconnected Jenny (Tippy Walker) in Venice, California, and follows her to New Jersey, only to find she’s heavily into drugs. Marijuana gives way to hashish and then heroin, on which she overdoses, with Marcus’s connivance, and dies. A fortuitous car accident disposes of her body, leaving Marcus, sadder and wiser, free to return to California. Jennifer was, in fact, Love Story on heroin. As Kevin Thomas wrote sarcastically in the Los Angeles Times, the film ‘could just as easily have been called Drug Story and been hyped with the slogan, “Love Means Never Having to Ask for a Fix”’.
Black cast De Niro as Madrigian, the driver of an unlicensed ‘gypsy’ cab painted with the truculent message ‘We Are Not Yellow. We Go Anywhere’. Inspired by the character’s Middle Eastern name, Bobby grew a moustache and small pointed beard, and affected vaguely Middle Eastern hand-woven clothing, including a head scarf. He looked good as a cab driver. That wisecracking lawlessness suited his style: you felt he might do and say almost anything. Picking up Brandon, he tells him as he pulls out, ‘Hey man, I think I should warn you – I’m very high.’ Startled, Brandon blurts, ‘I am too.’
Some magazines, including the Hollywood Reporter, singled De Niro out for praise. The camera liked him, and, increasingly, he liked the camera. But the film was panned by its preview audience, and United Artists hastily demanded cuts to remove the dead wood, which included some of De Niro’s scenes. He ended up nineteenth in the acting credits, as lost as the film itself, which was dumped into the desert of double-bills, never to be seen again.
Despite this, the drug cycle still had some time to run, and De Niro was now on the list of young performers who looked convincing in that world. Or so Ivan Passer thought when he gave him the script for what would become Born to Win.
In Czechoslovakia in the early sixties, Passer and Milos Forman had collaborated on the screenplays of Forman’s most successful films, while in 1966 Passer had directed the highly-regarded Intimate Lighting. When the Russians invaded in 1968, both fled to America. Forman joined the queue of people who wanted to film Hair, but, like the rest, floundered in the swamp of hippie mysticism surrounding its creators. Shelving the project for a decade, he made Taking Off, the kind of social comedy with which he’d built his reputation back in the Old Country.
Re-enter David Scott Milton, proprietor of the Bear Garden, who had developed a play, ‘Scraping Bottom’, based on characters he knew from the restaurant. Ivan Passer liked it, and persuaded United Artists to fund Milton’s sourly comic story of J – for Jerome – a once-successful hairdresser now feeding a $100-a-day heroin habit on the streets of New York.
Just back from eighteen months in jail, J finds that his wife has become a prostitute, and mistress of a smooth dealer, the Geek, for whom J runs errands. Despite everything, he still fosters the optimism symbolised by the tattoo on his arm, ‘Born to Win’. Things look up when he meets Parm, a romantic innocent, but two cops target him to entrap the Geek, and, when he fails, plant drugs on Parm and arrest her. Falling foul of a dealer he’s tried to rob, J is given the choice of being thrown off a building or committing suicide by ‘hot shot’ – an injection of battery acid. Handing him the poisoned dope, the Geek offers him the dubious consolation that it will the best high he’ll ever experience, as well as the last. The film ends with J sitting in a wintry park, knowing that, sooner or later, he’ll use it.
Abandoning ‘Scraping Bottom’ as a title, Passer called the film Born to Win. In a style more common in Europe than America, the film would cynically alternate tragedy with farce. J covers the theft of a safe from a restaurant by engaging the cashier in a long comic conversation about enemas, meets his new girlfriend when he tries to steal her car, escapes from his enemies dressed only in a frilly pink negligée, and, fleeing from a cop and his partner, hides in a clothes drier; amused, the cop puts a coin in the slot and watches J revolve.
Alerted by Milton, De Niro auditioned for Passer, who liked to work improvisationally. ‘He paired Bobby up [as the cop] with Ed Madsen, a former Mafia enforcer turned actor, and the combination worked,’ says Milton.
Once he’d finished casting, Passer began shooting on the streets and in the clubs and restaurants of New York – and almost immediately ran into problems with De Niro. ‘Ivan and George Segal [who was playing J] began to have second thoughts,’ says Milton. ‘Bobby was inventive and imaginative, and because of that a pain in the ass. George and Ivan felt he was trying to make more out of his part than the part called for. They began to talk of replacing him. The fact that he and I had both studied with Stella gave us a common background and vocabulary. I defended him; his passion for what he was doing – he was a real Stella Adler actor, relentlessly pursuing his craft. If he seemed to be making more of his part than they thought was right for the film, it was out of passion, of caring, a real actor’s love of his calling.
‘There was a scene in the film where Bobby and Ed Madsen are interrogating George in their unmarked detective car. They were putting pressure on George’s character to set up a drug dealer, the Geek, played by Hector Elizondo. Bobby had a toothpick in his mouth. Ivan asked him not to move the toothpick from side to side during the scene because it would be impossible to cut away: the toothpick would seem to leap from cut to cut when he went back to Bobby. Bobby agreed with Ivan, but then ignored him, and it became a problem in the editing room. I’m not sure if Bobby did it on purpose or he just couldn’t comply with what Ivan wanted because he was so involved in the scene.
‘At the time, I had the sense that Bobby was very shrewd. He would nod and nod and “Yes, Ivan,” and act as though he knew exactly what Ivan (or George) wanted, but ultimately he would do what he had intended doing from the beginning. Ivan would call him on this and he would play dumb. “Oh, is that what you wanted! Ah. OK. I can do that …” And, again, he would do exactly what he wanted to do.’
De Niro also clashed with Passer on another scene, in which his character has persuaded J to introduce him to the Geek as a potential buyer of a large quantity of heroin. They shot it in the Horn and Hardart Automat restaurant on 57th Street.
‘De Niro arrived dressed like a high-rolling Mafia hood,’ says Milton. ‘Flashy suit, slicked-down hair, fancy shoes. Ivan didn’t like it. It may have had something to do with Bobby bringing undue attention to what was essentially