De Niro: A Life (29 page)

“W
E
’
VE MISCAST IT
.”

In a Warner Bros. screening room in Burbank in August 1975, director Mike Nichols, screenwriter Neil Simon, and a pair of studio executives were watching rushes from the set of
Bogart Slept Here
, a comedy about an off-Broadway actor who finds himself overwhelmed by good fortune when his very first movie unexpectedly becomes a huge international success. The film had only been shooting for a week, but there were alarms indicating that something was going very wrong.

Marsha Mason, Simon’s actress wife, was playing the actor’s wife, a role written specifically for her. Playing the actor was De Niro. And it was De Niro whose work was worrying the filmmakers.

De Niro had arrived on the Hollywood set of
Bogart
only three days after wrapping
Taxi Driver
, and Simon and the other principals felt extremely lucky to have him. He was a rising star, a box office attraction, the hot new thing. Personally, Simon found him affable and approachable, if shy. “He didn’t say very much,” the writer recalled, “but what he said, you listened to. He spoke softly, nodded and shrugged a lot, and occasionally he gave you a quick smile that caused his eyes to squint.”

But from the start there were troubling signs. De Niro had decided that his character should wear a single earring, and he spent, as Simon remembered, the better part of a day poring over a selection of earrings that the property master rustled up for him. Then there was the matter of acting styles. Mason had performed Simon’s work onstage and was familiar with its blend of spritzing patter and warm sentiment. De Niro hadn’t played such material since his dinner theater days, and
scheduling the shoot so soon after
Taxi Driver
meant that he wouldn’t be able to undertake his normal studying process or get to know the script in a proper rehearsal period. He would be finding his character, in effect, in front of the camera—a dicey prospect.

In fact, it was disastrous. He flailed at Simon’s sensibility, unable to find a pry hole that would allow him to enter the world of the screenplay. And Mason was left to act opposite a cipher, forced to abandon her own instincts about how to play a part that had always been hers in order to find a way to engage with her co-star.

Simon, who’d seen enough theatrical work to know that it could take an actor a bit of time to get into the rhythm of a role, was willing at first to ride it out, to let De Niro find his sea legs. But he was growing concerned. “In the first few days of dailies,” he remembered, “it was clear that any of the humor I had written was going to get lost. It’s not that De Niro is not funny, but his humor comes mostly from his nuances.” The script Simon had written was broader than that, and De Niro’s subtlety was pushing it into a different tenor.

Nichols, who may not even have remembered that he had auditioned De Niro for
The Graduate
almost a decade prior, told Simon that it was going badly, that De Niro was misreading the part. “Well,” said the writer, “maybe it shouldn’t be funny. Maybe it
should
be a more serious picture.”

“That’s not what you wrote,” Nichols replied, “and it’s not what I saw when I read this script. If there’s no humor in the first half of the film, we’re dead.”

So they ran the rushes for the Warner Bros. brass, who agreed that something was wrong. And when they asked Nichols what he thought should be done, he gave them a stunning answer: “Stop the picture.”

“Reshoot what we have?” asked an executive.

“Yes,” Nichols said. “But not with De Niro … 
We’ve miscast it.” They sighed, they huddled, and the next day they called De Niro into an office and, in effect, fired him.

“He was, of course, livid,” Simon recalled. “Luckily I was not in the room when he was told.”
^*1

The word hit the trade papers like a mortar shell; rumors circulated that Nichols had called De Niro “undirectable” and that De Niro had outright walked off the production when Nichols and Mason tried to tell him that he didn’t know what comedy was. His friends, including Shelley Winters, spoke publicly to defend him, but there was sourness in the air. De Niro explained years later, “
It didn’t work, just didn’t work out.” But, he added, “then they tried not to pay me.”

Everyone just wanted the whole sad episode to go away. Warner Bros. halfheartedly looked at a few other actors in the hope that there was a way to save the project, but nobody was deemed appropriate, for any number of reasons. Nichols went back to New York to the stage; he wouldn’t direct another dramatic film until 1983. Simon continued to write smash hits for Broadway and the screen, arguably none bigger than one that grew out of the aborted
Bogart Slept Here.
Among the actors who tested to fill De Niro’s shoes was Richard Dreyfuss, right on the heels of his titanic success in
Jaws
; Dreyfuss wasn’t right for the part, according to Nichols, but Simon liked his rapport with Mason so much that he retooled the material for the pair, resulting two years later in
The Goodbye Girl
, for which Dreyfuss would win an Oscar.
^*2

W
HILE HIS STAR
was getting himself fired from a Neil Simon comedy, Martin Scorsese had come to Hollywood to put the finishing touches on
Taxi Driver
, tweaking the edit to slide the violence past the censors, and adding a score by the legendary Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite composer, the man who wrote the terrifying staccato chords of the shower scene of
Psycho
, among dozens of other works for film and orchestra, including the scores of
Citizen Kane
,
The Day the Earth Stood Still
,
Cape Fear
, and most recently Brian De Palma’s
Sisters.
It was a new situation for Scorsese:
Mean Streets
and, to a lesser extent,
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
, were particularly celebrated for soundtracks built out of the sort of popular music that the characters in them would have listened to. But Travis Bickle, cipher that he was, didn’t listen to music (“I don’t follow music too much,” he confesses on a date. “But I would like to, I really would”). Scorsese needed an original score, and he went for the best.

At first Herrmann wanted nothing to do with the project, based on the proletarian sound of its title alone. Then Scorsese got him to agree at least to read the script, and one thing seemed to sway Hermann to the film: “I like when he poured peach brandy on the cornflakes,” he told Scorsese. “I’ll do it.”

He came to Los Angeles to do his work just before the Christmas holidays, and conducted the recording of the soundtrack himself, right up until the final session, which was held on December 23 and witnessed by Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, who’d been invited to meet the composer. Herrmann finished his work and went back to his hotel for the night. He never woke up, dying in his sleep of a heart condition on Christmas Eve. Not two months later, the first ominous notes of his remarkable score, which would go on to be recognized with an Oscar nomination, would be heard by audiences for the first time, as
Taxi Driver
made its way into the world.

To call the film a sensation would be an understatement. Critics and audiences had never seen anything like it, and the reviews and box office were beyond anything that Paul Schrader, the Phillipses, Scorsese, or De Niro had ever imagined.

H
E IS A
twenty-six-year-old midwesterner, honorably discharged from the Marine Corps two years before, alone in New York with no work, living on a steady diet of junk food, booze, pills, and porn, his life an eddying pool of loneliness, stasis, thoughts turned inward on themselves. He has received only a scattered education, yet he keeps a diary—a quaint affectation—and it reveals an intelligence, a sense of aspiration, an acquaintance with the Bible. You can see pain, fuzziness, skittishness in his eyes, which are often squinched defensively. But in the main he’s a cipher—out of touch, by his own confession,
with music, films, politics, social mores, and most every other aspect of ordinary life.

He drifts into a Manhattan taxi office seeking work, specifically overnight work. He doesn’t make a brilliant first impression. He mutters a little, has trouble making eye contact, and doesn’t understand what it means when he’s asked if he’s “moonlighting”; he makes a joke that lands with a thud, and he apologizes reflexively, though he doesn’t like that he has to do it. Finally he wanders back into the street, sipping from a pint bottle tucked into his military-issue fatigue jacket, so ephemeral a presence that his mere walk along a city block is rendered in a dissociative jump cut.

Like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Lennon’s Nowhere Man, Travis Bickle is an emblem for alienation, disaffection, isolation, an existential antihero whose connection to our world is tenuous and yet who, in his alienation, is meant to be a symbol for the condition of us all. Until this film, De Niro has principally played southerners and Italians or Italian Americans. But there is no ethnicity to Travis Bickle, only the merest hint of a midwestern twang, and there is no backstory as singular as Johnny Boy’s head injury or Vito Corleone’s witnessing the death of his family. He is an invention of the imagination, of the page, of the movie camera, and of De Niro, relying on a foundation provided by Schrader and existing in a milieu created by Scorsese. He is a pure product of the cinema. It’s even possible, given that the film both begins and ends with a close-up of his eyes, that he doesn’t exist at all, that the events depicted in
Taxi Driver
are some lurid fantasy that has bubbled up in his sleepless mind.

He wants to be normal, but he’s just slightly miswired. He swallows pills with a shake of his head like a snake ingesting its prey; he stretches after a long night behind the wheel with his elbows akimbo like a twisted scarecrow. Asked the simplest of questions—“How are you?”—he’s stumped for an answer, seemingly distracted by something but, at the same time, apparently focused on nothing at all.

But of course he is sentient and, as we see as we stay with him, purposeful, if only in an effort to find a purpose for himself. He starts with a girl. He dons his one good jacket—burgundy, made of velvet
or maybe suede—and proffers a surprisingly fluent line of palaver to a pretty girl. (He’s not alone in admiring her: Martin Scorsese himself is depicted seated on a nearby stoop ogling her as she passes by.) Her name is Betsy, a golden, WASPy dream girl, and he takes Betsy on a proper date, for which he shows up in a tie and with a surprise: the movie that he’ll take her to see is porn,
Sometimes Sweet Susan
, starring Harry Reems. Within minutes of their entering the theater, the courtship ends, and somehow Travis is confused that it has gone wrong.

Soon he picks up an apparently ordinary fare who turns out to be intent on doing harm to his cheating wife. Perversely inspired by this encounter, he arms himself with a small arsenal of pistols—$915 worth, including a Magnum that could take down an elephant—and hits upon a new way to connect with the world: through that staple of psychotic self-expression of America in the 1960s and ’70s, a political assassination.

And then another girl catches his eye—a pubescent prostitute who works just a few blocks from the building where De Niro was raised. Her street name is Easy, but, as Travis learns, her real name, which she hates, is Iris. He had dreamed of rescuing Betsy from her loneliness, but Iris, “sweet Iris,” really does need to be rescued. His plan is fixed: self-immolation via the murder of Betsy’s preferred candidate, self-resurrection by leaving his life savings to Iris.

He devotes himself to a regimen of calisthenics, target range practice, working on a quick draw in the mirror (“You talkin’ to me …?”), making dum-dum bullets, fashioning a device that can deliver an automatic pistol to his hand with a jerk of his arm (and that transforms him, cyberpunkishly, into something that’s half man, half weapon). In the gesture that marks his final intent to push through to his fiery demise, he shaves his hair into a Mohawk, fulfilling the script’s direction: “Anyone scanning the crowd would immediately light upon Travis and think, ‘
There
is an assassin.’ ” Of course, he is spotted in the throng by the Secret Service and chased away, precipitating a rampage that leaves him, like Johnny Boy, bleeding from a neck wound, his connections to life and security and the future shredded beyond repair.

The story is singular enough, but what De Niro does with it is truly
without precedent. The cinema has served up psychopaths and sociopaths and even sometimes assassins (the Frank Sinatra double bill of
Suddenly
and
The Manchurian Candidate
leaps to mind), but none of them has ever been drawn in the forefront of a film so purposefully, and no filmmaker and actor have ever before managed to bring an audience so intimately inside the mind, heart, and even metabolism of such a fellow.

Much of this effect is achieved through the eyes: we look into the abyss of Travis’s gaze, and the abyss gazes back at us. De Niro’s stare sometimes fastens on the lights and motion and, very often, the little outbursts of violence and sexuality in the world around him; just as often, though, it attaches itself to nothing, resulting in an almost bittersweet expression of wonder, confusion, and emptiness that makes you want to console him. His body, too, is a subject of fascination: early on, sleepless on his cot, almost sunken into the mattress, De Niro is a stick figure given shape only by his clothing; later, baptizing his fists in a flame on his stovetop in what he and Scorsese referred to jokingly as the Charles Atlas scene, his body is so sinewy and veined and gaunt that he looks like he has emerged from a POW camp. There’s something repellent in his asceticism, but also something that elicits sympathy.