De Niro: A Life (17 page)

He was more memorable in the far more forgettable
Jennifer on My Mind
, blasting into his single scene in a psychedelically painted purple taxi and greeting his fare with, “I think I should warn you, Mac: I’m pretty high.” Sporting a goatee and wearing a silky bandana on his head (because, as he explains, “it’s a gypsy cab”), he speaks in a nasal, stoned tenor that recalls Dennis Hopper, trying to get his passenger to drop his plans for a ride to Oyster Bay in favor of going back to the cabbie’s house, getting even higher, and maybe having sex with his sister. No dice, comes the reply, provoking De Niro to sigh, “The gypsies lose again.” (As, alas, did anyone who paid money to see the wan and insipid movie.)

Far splashier in all ways proved the release of
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
Even before the release of the film of
The Godfather
, Mafia stories were in vogue, Breslin’s book was well liked, and this was an MGM picture, with a guaranteed big release. Unfortunately, it’s truly tone-deaf as a comedy. Goldstone handles the material cartoonishly, a choice driven home by the movie’s posters and advertising, which were drawn by
Mad
magazine illustrator Jack Davis. The physical humor is leaden and repetitious, the tenor and staging are grotesque, the ethnic touches are offensively broad, the nods toward the hip far too square. Everyone overacts out of his or her shoes: Orbach with his idiotic Kid Sally, Stander with his guttural madman Baccala, the oversized Pierre Cardin executive turned actor Irving Selbst (who also appeared in
Born to Win
, oddly enough), and the dwarfish Villechaize, whose voice is dubbed so deep that if it were a hole he would have vanished in it. It’s cacophonous and wearying. Only Jo Van Fleet, turning Kid Sally’s bloodthirsty grandmother into a Grand Guignol Italian
mammarella
, affords any entertainment, and then chiefly because she’s so insanely distinct from the shambles of a reality around her that she actually seems plausible.

But interspersed through the film is De Niro’s Mario, a vivid, fresh, and thoroughly appealing character—larcenous, insincere, and crooked to the bone, but open-faced, wide-eyed, handsome, and amazingly gallant toward the girl he fancies. Mario steals everything he lays
an eye or a finger upon, but he offers to pay for Angela’s meals and taxi rides, he treats her with gentlemanly courtesy, and at the film’s climax he makes a choice that proves ruinous for him but saves her from injustice at the hands of a desperate district attorney. He comes from poverty, explaining that he eats chipmunks and dandelions back home, and devours what he calls “American food”—pizza and Italian ices—with gusto. With his olive complexion enhanced by a tan, his hair grown out in a Prince Valiant bob, his body slender and springy, and an appreciation of the wonders of America crackling from his eyes, he’s immensely appealing.

And, unlike almost anyone else in the film, he’s comical without being cartoonish. He steals scenes by slipping around the set and literally stealing: ashtrays, peanuts, hotel towels, canapés, a priest’s vestments, statues of saints, and so on. He makes such a lark of larceny that you forget that it’s wrong. He kisses money. He hides things in his pockets that are actually meant to be taken gratis, as if thinking only stolen things have value. And when he poses as a priest and starts seeking donations for a nonexistent church back home, his mockery of sacraments and blessings and clerical manners is impeccable, at once a mirror image and a slight, knowing distortion. His broken English is good, his Neapolitan-accented Italian is fluent, his physicality is lively: he’s easily the highlight of the film. Beside him, Taylor-Young, attempting to sound New Yorkish and feisty, is hapless. The film is De Niro’s, stolen just as surely as Mario steals everything in the coldwater flat he rents.

The critical consensus was the same. The
New York Times
called the film a “tasteless mess”;
Newsweek
moaned about its “lamentable goings-on”; the genteel
Films and Filming
complained about “offensive gags that choke on themselves”; and in
Time
, De Niro’s friend Jay Cocks wrote, “You don’t have to be Italian to hate ‘The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.’ ” But to a one the reviews cited De Niro as a—if not
the
—saving grace of the enterprise: the
Los Angeles Times
praised his “raffish charm,”
Variety
called him “particularly good,” and various other outlets, perhaps taken by De Niro’s impression of being taken with Taylor-Young, praised the young lovers as the film’s highlight.
It didn’t matter, though. Even with the success of Breslin’s novel behind it, the film sank at the box office.

A
T THE END
of the year, De Niro hovered in a strange place professionally and personally. He had made seven films, including one produced by and three released by major studios, receiving good reviews regularly. He had made an impact on the stage in experimental works of increasing visibility and reputation. He continued to network and audition and pitch himself relentlessly, augmenting the efforts of his agent with his own determined careerism. At age twenty-eight, he was supporting himself: living on his own in his childhood home on 14th Street, which had been passed to him by his mother, and finding steady work, no longer thinking of waiting tables, putting in stints at his mom’s print shop, or enduring stretches on unemployment insurance. He had been involved in romances with a number of women, and he had done some traveling.

But he was far from set in his path or his ways, and his acting career in particular still seemed a tenuous thing. He had no reason to think things wouldn’t continue to open up for him—but to date they hadn’t opened up all that wide. Among his peers, he was proving something of a late bloomer.

If this all nagged at him, he didn’t show it. The aspect he wore, particularly professionally, was quiet, focused, pointed. If he ever brooded about his situation, it was camouflaged by his characteristic reticence, so observers saw him chiefly as quiet and shy and not self-absorbed or moody. Besides, he was gradually, genuinely getting somewhere. He may not have been riding the same rocket as Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino, but he was being sought after for work and commanding a little more money each time.

In December, though, he had nothing lined up as he made his way to a Christmas Eve party at the home of his
Kool Aid
co-star Verna Bloom and her husband, Jay Cocks. It was an annual event, with a crowd of film and theater folk always on hand.

Despite the holiday air, De Niro was in no mood to celebrate. He
had been dating another member of the
Kool Aid
cast for a little while, and the two of them arrived at the party under a cloud. “
They must’ve had a fight before getting to our place,” Bloom said, “because he spent the evening not uttering one word—not to her, not to us.”

De Niro knew a good number of folks at the party, none so well as Brian De Palma, who despite his friend’s mood was very keen to introduce him to another guy at the party—another independent filmmaker, another young Turk looking to bust into the business, another native New Yorker, another misfit Italian American, a chum of Jay Cocks’s.

His name was Martin Scorsese.

H
ISTORY AND LEGEND TELL US THAT
J
OHN
F
ORD DISCOVERED
John Wayne running errands on a movie studio lot; that John Waters was introduced to Divine by a mutual friend while they waited for a school bus; that François Truffaut spoke with hundreds of kids before the unknown Jean-Pierre Léaud delivered an audition so good that parts of it wound up, raw, in
The 400 Blows.

And from such a similarly humble instance of kismet came the decades-long relationship between the great director Martin Scorsese and his greatest acting asset and alter ego, Robert De Niro.

At the time, they were only slightly better known to each other than they were to the world at large. Scorsese, a voracious consumer of movies and an ambitious figure in the small world of New York independent film, somehow hadn’t yet caught
Greetings
or
Hi, Mom!
, so he’d never actually seen De Niro act. But a vibe of familiarity fluttered inside him: he knew this guy from somewhere, and that somewhere turned out to be the streets.

De Niro, though, knew Scorsese—or at least his work. He’d seen and enjoyed his first picture, the student film
Who’s That Knocking
at My Door?
, which, like
The Wedding Party
, cost its maker several years of editing, financing, and additional shooting before its public premiere. But even though he acknowledged that he was, indeed, the Bobby Milk whom Scorsese recalled, he didn’t have a similar flash of recognition. “
I didn’t
really
know him,” he said years later. “I’d see him around. We remembered each other. Sometimes when we were kids, we’d meet at the dances at a place on 14th Street.… It was just an Italian American dance place. I saw Marty around there. We knew each other. Friends of his, from his group, sometimes would change over into our group. We had like a crossover of friends.”

They chatted, appreciating their common bond: among all the film and theater people at the party, they were the only ones who’d grown up with some of the dirt of the downtown streets underneath their fingernails. Of course, Scorsese didn’t know at that moment that the cagy, watchful De Niro was more of an observer of neighborhood life than a full-throttle participant in it, that he was an art-world brat, not some tough kid. And De Niro, likewise, didn’t know if the compact fast talker in front of him, who seemed to have the energy to direct ten movies before the night was out, was a genuine Little Italy street guy. They chatted for a bit, then parted, each far too caught up in his own struggle to make headway in his nascent career to think much more of it.

A
FTER THE HOLIDAYS
, De Niro became engrossed in pursuing a particular film role, one for which he wasn’t the fellow you’d first consider: a dimwitted baseball player from Georgia in
Bang the Drum Slowly.
The movie was an adaptation of a 1956 novel by Mark Harris that had been memorably performed as a live teleplay some fifteen years prior. That production had starred Paul Newman as Henry Wiggen, a hotshot pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths, who finds himself saddled with the dumb, earnest catcher Bruce Pearson (played by Albert Salmi) as batterymate and roommate. Wiggen, the protagonist of no fewer than four novels by Harris, has ambitions beyond the baseball field—selling insurance, writing books, squeezing extra money out of the front office—but Pearson, only modestly talented as an athlete, is just happy to be able to play the game, even if his grip on a major
league career is somewhat tenuous. Wiggen considers his teammate a rube, and not without reason: thinking he’s in sync with teammates who tease Wiggen by calling him “Author,” Pearson calls him “Arthur.” But when Pearson reveals in confidence that he’s suffering from Hodgkin’s disease and wants to hide it from the manager so as not to risk his spot in the lineup, Wiggen surprises himself by doing the honorable thing: without asking for recompense or credit of any kind, he supports his catcher professionally and personally until he is too ill to continue playing, and then until his death. Ashamed at the memory of his early treatment of his friend, he ends by declaring, “From here on in, I rag nobody.”

The 1956 broadcast created a stir, and there was immediate talk of bringing the story to the big screen or even the stage. Producer-director Josh Logan announced plans for a film version starring Newman; Broadway impresario David Merrick toyed with the notion of presenting it as a stage drama; and Harold Rome, who’d done the trick with
Destry Rides Again
and
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
, imagined it as a musical. But the opportunity to do something bigger with Harris’s book fell finally to a showbiz neophyte, the Chicago civil rights lawyer Maurice Rosenfield, who along with his wife, Lois, had read and admired the novel and decided to invest their own money, which Rosenfield had made defending, among other clients,
Playboy
magazine and Lenny Bruce.

The Rosenfields were hands-on producers—it
was
their money—and they made choices in their own fashion and their own time. As director, they selected John Hancock, a tall, thirtyish Harvard grad who’d grown up playing football (and violin) in nearby Cicero, Illinois, and was emerging as a stage director and indie filmmaker. He had a low-budget horror movie to his credit—the deliciously titled
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.
But it was his Oscar-nominated live-action short film,
Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet
, about out-of-shape businessmen who play touch football in Central Park, that caught the Rosenfields’ attention when they saw it on TV. They hired him to direct the script that Harris was adapting from his own novel.