De Niro: A Life (47 page)

All of these Ruperts come together in the remarkable scene in which his weekend visit to Langford’s Long Island estate is revealed to be a bizarre home invasion. Pupkin, per Langford’s butler, “knows everything” about the house—the décor, the routines. He is helping himself piecemeal to the man’s life: he even has the moxie to offer Langford a drink from his own bar when the man shows up, called away from his golf match to deal with the insane situation. For a long time Rupert tries to play the moment light, funny, flippant. But when he sees how angry Langford is, he drops the blithe act and chummy voice and returns to the supplicating tenor he had in their first encounter (and, until now, their only
real
one). He has called Langford “a prince” and he fancies himself “the king,” but really he’s a serf and
he knows it. He’s fortunate to be in the presence of royalty at all, and sometimes that fact becomes clear to him even in his perennial fog.

Watching De Niro through all this, it’s impossible to conceive that we’re looking at the man who, a mere two and a half years earlier, had been in credible fighting trim as Jake LaMotta—or had ballooned up like the older LaMotta, or, indeed, had looked or acted anything like LaMotta at all. In his fifth film with Scorsese in a decade, he looks, sounds, gestures, laughs, behaves, dresses, self-presents, and moves in a fashion unlike anything he’s ever displayed before. Pumping up his image for secretaries whom he seeks to impress with his intimacy with Langford, he’s haughty and slick. Told that his work is not quite ready for TV, he sinks into denial, his head bobbing like a chicken’s, trying to be polite but nearing an edge. Goaded by Masha to insist on seeing Langford, he seems almost ready to explode, but he’s still strangely decorous and in check, able to segue quickly into his veneer of civility when his humiliating ejection becomes public. De Niro had been in business against Marlon Brando all these years for the title of most in-depth and most committed actor in movies; here he seems more like Peter Sellers (or, indeed, Jerry Lewis) in his willingness to deflect vanity and even embrace shame for effect.

As complex as his relationships with Masha and Langford are, the most curious and beguiling encounters Rupert has are with Rita, the barmaid whom he had voted for as Most Beautiful when they were high school classmates (“Mr. Romance,” she remembers). She’s played by Diahnne Abbott with a knowing, world-weary air. “Do I know you?” she asks her estranged real-life husband when he sits at her bar. “I think you might,” he replies. Rita is “a working girl,” in her own words, who, in her mid-thirties, has clearly missed whatever train was going to take her to wherever she dreamed of going. For want of other prospects, she lets Rupert buy her a Chinese dinner and some fruity cocktails, and she endures his displays of childish ego during the meal, laughing along as the stranger behind Rupert mocks him to curry favor with her. Invited to a weekend on Long Island, she dolls herself up quite prettily, then helps herself to a drink, plays records to dance to, and—in a shocking, almost gratuitous little insert shot—steals a tchotchke from Langford’s living room. She seems, in short,
a bit graspy and desperate. But she knows with certainty that Rupert isn’t the answer to her longing. “What do you want, Rupert?” she asks him, almost as if exhausted by the knowledge that he will answer, “You.” It’s a lovely performance.
^*5

The other woman in Rupert’s life, Masha, is played by Sandra Bernhard with an almost punk rock intensity, screaming and sneering and bedeviling and amping up to fury in her frustrated attempts to get close to Langford. She knows how to get almost immediately under Rupert’s skin, and she uses that skill as surely as she does her parents’ money (she dresses in a private-school blazer, throws cash around freely, and drives a Mercedes with her name on the license plate). With Langford she adopts a more balanced, even deferential air, appreciatively sizing up a sweater she’s knitting for him like a doting aunt. And then, in a truly bizarre, stream-of-consciousness seduction scene, she reveals aspects of herself to him that, it would seem, only some well-paid therapists had ever seen before. It’s a terrific performance, and also a dead end: see Bernhard in this role and you can’t imagine her in anything else.

Jerry Lewis is superb as Langford, bringing his own celebrity aura to bear, as no one merely acting the role could, but also getting inside the character. He has the
real
Langford to play, the man whose limo is invaded, who must endure Rupert’s desperate backseat pitch, whose dinner is interrupted by invasive phone calls, whose walk through Manhattan ends with a stranger wishing him cancer and Masha chasing him into his office, who becomes righteously furious when his home is beset by strangers, who is kidnapped and threatened with death. All of that is played with almost transparent naturalness: this isn’t the Jerry Lewis from the movies or even from the TV telethon and talk shows, but it’s something very like Jerry Lewis the flesh-and-blood man. But there’s the
imaginary
Langford as well, the one who befriends Rupert and helps his career and even arranges a secret wedding for him. That kind of glad-handing showbiz Jerry is familiar from talk shows, including
his own briefly lived ones, but it’s nothing that Scorsese or even De Niro could have brought to the film. Perhaps another celebrity could have brought the right energy, power, and vibe to the part, but Lewis is perfect in it.

The film climaxes on Rupert’s monologue, a long, painful litany of self-hate, familial dysfunction, and almost masochistic confession—much of it truly funny, all done in a single excruciating take with De Niro mastering the body language, timing, and vocal inflections of a not-ready-for-prime-time-or-even-late-night stand-up. It’s the big payoff we’ve been anticipating for more than an hour (Scorsese fades into Rupert’s reverie the first time he performs the act, for a tape recorder). The dark, dark inside joke of the whole enterprise is that there really is a germ of talent in the guy—with the emphasis, of course, on
germ.

There are other inside jokes throughout the film: the casting of De Niro’s wife and Scorsese’s parents (his dad, Charlie, is watching TV at Rita’s bar when Rupert changes channels on him); Margo Winkler, the wife of
Raging Bull
producer Irwin Winkler, as Langford’s cheerful receptionist; various punk rock stars of the day (including most of the Clash) milling about on the streets of Times Square; De Niro’s agent, Harry Ufland, playing Langford’s agent; Shelley Winters announced as a guest on the Langford show the night of Rupert’s appearance; and Scorsese himself playing the director of the Langford show (Tony Randall even tells him, “You’re the director,” in case anyone didn’t recognize him). It’s a regular old-home week.

But it’s also chillingly new and prophetic and unsettled and unsettling. Rupert Pupkin is a clown, but how far removed is he from the likes of John W. Hinckley or Mark David Chapman, other disturbed loners whose guns were as real as their obsessions and who killed, or tried to, partly as a means of making their name? Like them, Rupert becomes famous (or, if you prefer, infamous), and he’s rewarded for his audacity and psychosis with a real career. (Or is he? The final scene, in which Rupert presides over his own TV show, is so stylized and attenuated as to perhaps be another fantasy—much like the coda to
Taxi Driver.
) Throughout the film the subject of Rupert’s name continually arises: how to pronounce it, whether it’s real, how widely it will soon be known. In the end, even though the film wasn’t a hit, it has become a
synecdoche for a kind of undeserved celebrity, a figure for the power of the media to draw attention to freaks and outcasts and turn them into pop heroes. Rupert is more than famous and for more than fifteen minutes. He may not be a king, but he wears a crown of some kind, and he is finally impossible to ignore.

Reviewers didn’t know what to think. Once again, Scorsese and De Niro polarized their critics. Some—like Pauline Kael, at great length—found the whole enterprise abhorrent and flawed. Some had mixed feelings but were willing to praise De Niro individually. A very few, such as Vincent Canby in the
New York Times
, appreciated it more or less without qualm (“It’s not an absolute joy by a long shot,” he wrote, “but, in the way of a film that uses all of its talents to their fullest, it’s exhilarating”).

The double edge of the film, and of De Niro’s performance, made even experienced film watchers uneasy. “De Niro’s Rupert has a cheerfully deranged imperviousness … that makes you laugh even as it makes you cringe,” noted Richard Schickel in
Time
. “De Niro doesn’t provide the key to the inner Pupkin,” lamented Michael Sragow in
Rolling Stone.
“There’s no fanatical gleam in his eye. His grin is shiftless.” “He’s not just mediocre,” observed David Denby in
New York
, “he’s
demonically
mediocre—a De Niro character after all.”

Stanley Kauffmann of the
New Republic
, who had a long and troubled history with De Niro’s work, found moments of brilliance in the performance, and in a notable turn called De Niro “one of our best film actors.” But Kael was particularly enraged by the film and its star:

King of Comedy
appeared in competition at the Cannes Film Festival that May, and De Niro, Abbott, Scorsese, Bernhard, and Lewis attended the premiere, De Niro honoring his host country by sporting a beret. As back home, it was shut out of prizes (the screenplay, credited to Zimmerman, did win a BAFTA award the following winter). But its legend grew considerably over the years, particularly as the idea of a media generating celebrities out of sheer self-reflection became less a matter of fictional hypothesis and increasingly the stuff of daily life. It was embraced by, among others, Marlon Brando, who had never met De Niro or Scorsese but invited them to his South Pacific island home after seeing the film; they finally made the trip in 1987, spending a couple of weeks lolling, reading, and talking—not so much about acting or the movie business as about life.

And, having done five films together in a decade, De Niro and Scorsese decided, after
King of Comedy
, to take a little break from working together. “
We needed to go our separate ways,” Scorsese said. “We needed to work with other people. We had worked so intensively for so many years.” It wasn’t, he insisted, a vote of no confidence in the film. “I think it’s De Niro’s best performance,” he explained. It was just that “we couldn’t go any further at that time.”

In fact, despite the hundreds of offers fielded by De Niro’s agents weekly, despite the director’s intention to make a few films he’d already identified, Scorsese already had another collaboration in mind. He intended to follow
King of Comedy
with an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s theologically challenging novel
The Last Temptation of Christ
, and he wanted De Niro for the role of Jesus.

S
INCE BEING INTRODUCED
to the novel by the actress Barbara Hershey on the set of
Boxcar Bertha
, Scorsese had harbored an ambition to film
Last Temptation
, a remarkable novel by the Greek novelist and philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis. Written in a kind of cerebral, abstract style that recalled Kafka more than it did Kazantzakis’s worldwide
bestseller
Zorba the Greek
, it tells the story of an adult Jesus who is trying to come to terms with the idea—which seems to emerge from inside his head like a demonic hallucination—that he is both mortal and divine, that he is the messiah, that he is
God.
It follows all the traditional episodes of the life of Christ, but it does so through the lens of his human side, imagining what it would be like to be an ordinary man of thirty-three years of age who embraced the call to leave home, evangelize, and die. Published in 1953 (and translated into English seven years later), it was such volatile material that it nearly got the writer excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox Church. And it would carry an air of controversy ever after.

Scorsese imagined a film that would reconcile the great biblical screen epics that had galvanized him as a boy—The
Robe
,
King of Kings
,
Ben-Hur
—with a vision of a world in which people behaved as they do in ours. It would depict the events of the gospels as real, but occurring on a recognizable earth and not in some golden Bible-story tableau. He got Paul Schrader—for whom the novel’s themes and texture were beguiling, too—to begin adapting a screenplay, and he got Irwin Winkler interested in producing it. Together they constituted a sufficiently formidable force to convince Paramount Pictures to make it. Scorsese went off to Israel to scout locations. And in the spring of 1983, as he traveled between that work and the publicity duties attendant on the global release of
The King of Comedy
, he stopped in Paris, where De Niro was spending some time during a lull in production in
Once Upon a Time in America
, to ask him if he would be willing to play Jesus in the film—which, if he agreed, would have marked their sixth collaboration in a span of eleven years.

De Niro felt immediately that he was wrong for the part. He could never adequately immerse himself in the role using the methods he preferred. There was too much baggage associated with playing Jesus (he repeatedly compared it to playing Hamlet). And he felt that he was entirely ill-suited to a biblical drama. He repeatedly reminded Scorsese of
The Silver Chalice
, a film about early Christianity that was so badly received that it almost killed the career of its debuting leading man, Paul Newman, before it started.