De Niro: A Life (71 page)

When the pair finally sit down together, it’s a mite anticlimactic. They’re two dedicated professionals, two men cut from the same old-fashioned cloth, as true to themselves and their ethical codes as any of the heroes John Ford or Howard Hawks ever conceived, and if they’d met in other lives they could be best friends, colleagues, or, perversely, each other. They recognize as much. Hanna calls McCauley “brother” (as in “Brother, you are going down”), and McCauley sees something of a mirror image of himself in the cop who’s chasing him (“There’s a flip side to that coin” is how he phrases it). Each surveils the other, analyzes the other, stares the other down, respects the other, challenges the other to bring his best game, and, though neither would ever admit it, fears the other. Even if the scene is something of a letdown—if only because we’ve been waiting for it for a quarter century (how is it possible that that was allowed to happen, by the way?), there’s still great resonance to it and pleasure in it.

You want the encounter to go on, but how could it possibly? This isn’t a James Bond movie or a hostage drama; the antagonists don’t parley at great, sporting length. This is a story about work, and even though the film is three hours long, work demands that these two truly meet only once, and briefly, however memorably. Particularly if you’re susceptible to Mann’s characteristically deliberate stylishness, elliptical storytelling technique, and fascination with male professionalism, the necessary brevity of their encounter is almost emotional. Almost.

And it similarly missed out on being lucrative. The film drew a lot
of attention, both for the big shootout scene and for the big De Niro/Pacino showdown, and it translated into $67 million in ticket sales. But Mann had spent nearly that much to make it.
Heat
would be remembered for its high level of craftsmanship and its macho vibe, but nobody was hurrying to get its stars back together anytime soon—not at those prices, anyhow.

W
HEN HE SPLIT WITH
T
OUKIE
S
MITH
, D
E
N
IRO
’
S MIND
was so far from thoughts of marriage that not even the birth of the twins changed it. However, a few years along into his fifties he did seem to be thinking about tying the knot again. At the time, he was seen around with Anne-Marie Fox, a onetime
Playboy
playmate who was just beginning a career as a publicity photographer on film sets; her first credited work along those lines, in fact, would be behind-the-scene shots from the making of
Frankenstein
, including many photos of De Niro at various stages of applying and removing his Creature makeup. In late 1995, New York newspapers reported that De Niro had bought a loft for Fox, who—younger than he, and African American—fit the profile of virtually every significant woman in his romantic life, and that marriage was in the air.

It wasn’t, though, nor was it the following year when, once again, a New York paper said that he’d be getting married the following week at Don Rickles’s house in Los Angeles. De Niro denied it and the paper retracted, but they insisted that De Niro had been discussing a wedding and had introduced people to a woman whom he’d identified as his fiancée. It wasn’t Fox, though. It was Grace Hightower.

De Niro and Hightower didn’t marry at the Rickles residence in 1996, but she did move into his Tribeca home with him—displacing Fox, in fact. De Niro and Hightower had known each other for nearly a decade at that point, since 1987, when he’d spotted her working at the New York restaurant Mr. Chow and passed a note to the owner asking if he could meet her.

She turned out to be an unlikely individual indeed. Born in 1955
as one of three girls in a family of ten children in Kilmichael, Mississippi (“a dot on the map 100 miles north of Jackson,” she explained), she was of African American and Blackfoot Indian heritage, at a time and a place when being a girl with those bloodlines was to have three strikes against you. Her parents were hardworking and instilled in their children a powerful ethic of self-reliance, resourcefulness, duty, pride, and honor. “
We lived on a farm,” Hightower said years later, “of modest means, producing and eating nearly all that we ate. In fact, the only time we visited the supermarket was when we bought sugar. We worked the land, ate from the land, and became connected to the land.” Her dad, she recalled, taught her a singularly important lesson: “Never go to bed without paying your debts.”

But he also instilled in her a thirst to experience the world beyond the farm. She and her brothers used to thumb through an encyclopedia, dreaming of travel, and as soon as she was able she got out into the world to work and make fulfilling that dream possible. “
I did everything,” she remembered. “I worked at S. S. Kresge, the five-and-dime. I worked in a mailroom. I worked processing insurance claims.”

By 1980, in her mid-twenties, she had managed to land a job as a flight attendant for TWA, based in New York. In that capacity, she was noticed by a pair of public relations executives for Saks Fifth Avenue, who hired her as a model. In 1982, she was among a group of young black men and women working in the airline industry to be profiled in
Ebony.
Soon after that, she changed her home base to Paris, living at the Hôtel de Suez on the Left Bank, taking French lessons, and trying to get started as, among other things, a mutual funds trader. When that line of work didn’t pan out, she came back to the States, winding up at Mr. Chow.

The first time she met De Niro, he didn’t, unusually, try to make a move on her; in fact, she had to tell him that his reservation had been lost. The following year, though, he did ask her out, and they began to see each other as he passed through London to work. “
It was an ease-in,” Hightower explained. “It wasn’t a whirlwind.” Finally, in late 1995 she agreed to move back to New York and live with him.

The talk of De Niro and Hightower marrying came at almost the same time that he was quarreling in court with Toukie Smith over
the care and custody of their twin sons. In the ensuing gossip conflagration, it was rumored that De Niro and Hightower (who had taken a hand in helping him parent the twins when they were in his care) wanted to start a family of their own. She was a good candidate, said De Niro’s chum Chuck Low, who called her “
the most stable of [Bob’s] girlfriends.” But even though she was wearing a ten-carat emerald-cut diamond that was said to cost six figures and there were whispers that they had been working on a prenuptial agreement with their lawyers, they didn’t seem ready to pull the trigger.

Then in June 1997 Hightower phoned the Depuy Canal House restaurant in High Falls, New York, and made reservations for a large party on Tuesday the seventeenth. She ordered a five-course meal that included wakame and lobster in rice paper and poussin breast with cranberry quince stuffing, and she asked that the restaurant print up special menus that would read “Love, Bob and Grace.”

On the given day, De Niro and Hightower showed up at the restaurant at the appointed time, having been married a few hours earlier in a civil ceremony “somewhere in New York State,” according to his spokesman. The party, numbering around a dozen, included Joe Pesci, who had stood as best man, and Harvey Keitel. It was a week before word of the wedding trickled into New York City, taking many of De Niro’s closest associates by surprise. “
He’s great at keeping details from his best friends,” Drew Nieporent told the New York
Daily News.

Ten months later, almost as if it had been spelled out in their legal agreement, they welcomed a baby boy, Elliot, on March 18, 1998. De Niro was almost fifty-five; Hightower, who had taken the name De Niro, was forty-four. He now had five children (one adopted) by three women, and it looked for all the world as if his life and ways were finally settled.

M
EANWHILE, PERHAPS INVESTED
with a sense of urgency by a second marriage and growing brood of offspring, he ramped up his moviemaking work considerably—which was only possible, of course, if he put concerns about quality aside.

In the winter of 1994–95, with
Casino
and
Heat
coming into
theaters, he was in Los Angeles and the Bay Area to make a new film,
The Fan
, based on a novel by Peter Abrahams about a baseball fan whose connection to a star player for the San Francisco Giants becomes obsessive and, finally, deadly. De Niro played the title character, a traveling knife salesman named Gil Renard whose broken marriage has left him with only baseball as a means to connect with his son. When their favorite player, Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes), falls into a slump that threatens his spot in the lineup, Renard executes Rayburn’s would-be replacement (Benicio Del Toro) and then finally, completely psychotic, goes after Rayburn himself. On hand as well would be John Leguizamo as Rayburn’s agent and Ellen Barkin as a sharp-tongued talk radio host whose criticism of Rayburn incurs Renard’s wrath. Directing was Tony Scott, the hard-living, brassy visualist behind such commercial smashes as
Top Gun
,
The Last Boy Scout
, and
Crimson Tide.

This was high-concept moviemaking, and De Niro was in it to get paid. Oh, he worked: he spent time going over the script carefully with Scott, recording their sessions, and suggesting changes to the character over a pile of transcriptions that ran to hundreds of pages; he interviewed cops and bodyguards about the phenomenon of stalkers; he spoke to a traveling knife salesman about the practices of his trade; he tapped his own experiences of being approached inappropriately by fans; he read up on Jeffrey Dahmer, David Berkowitz, Mark David Chapman, and various notorious celebrity stalkers; he even learned a little bit of knife throwing. But he was hardly stretching himself, merely reheating some bits of Travis Bickle and Max Cady.

There was a single memorable incident during production. A San Francisco cop stumbled across the set and, noticing the crew occupying a section of railroad line, interrupted shooting and ordered them off the tracks. De Niro, agitated, jumped behind the wheel of a Humvee that was part of the scene and gunned it around the traffic barricade, slamming to a stop just feet away from a passing train, then storming off to his trailer. When the cop declared that he was going to cite him for recklessness, De Niro sent his stunt double out to sign the ticket (the fine was $104), then emerged a few minutes later, shouting, “You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing!” at the officer.

Had anyone filmed that little bit of drama, it might’ve made for the most memorable thing in
The Fan.

L
ORENZO
C
ARCATERRA
’
S BOOK
Sleepers
seemed to many readers to be like a movie as soon as it was published in 1995. But that wasn’t necessarily a compliment: they were comparing it to a film because it seemed, frankly,
fake.

Carcaterra, a reporter for the New York
Daily News
, had written a memoir of a harrowing passage of his youth, when, he said, he and three friends from the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan were sentenced harshly for a prank gone bad and sent to an upstate New York reformatory, where they were brutalized and sexually abused by guards. Years later, Carcaterra and another of his chums had turned out well: a newspaperman and an assistant district attorney, respectively. But the other two had become criminals, and when they unexpectedly encountered the guard who’d been their chief tormentor in reform school, they killed him. The subsequent murder trial, Carcaterra said, had been manipulated by the defendants’ friends—the writer and the prosecutor—with the help of a parish priest who willingly perjured himself to help acquit the killers.

Ballantine Books published
Sleepers
as nonfiction, and it was a bestseller, but virtually from the start its veracity was attacked by prison authorities, the Manhattan DA’s office, the Catholic Church, and other reporters, who could find little or no evidence of any incidents that matched Carcaterra’s story. Carcaterra and his editors stood behind the book, saying that many details of date, place, name, and even incident had been altered to protect people but that the story was true in its contours and its themes. That may have been the case, but such incidents deeply dented the book’s credibility, and the author’s reputation never fully recovered.

None of that, of course, meant a thing to Hollywood:
Sleepers
was a sensational tale with an ensemble full of meaty roles, and Warner Bros. paid $2 million for the film rights after a bidding war. Barry Levinson was brought in to adapt the book and direct, and his cast included Brad Pitt as the young prosecutor, Jason Patric as the writer, Billy Crudup
and Ron Eldard as the killers, Kevin Bacon as their torturer/victim, Dustin Hoffman as a boozy defense attorney, and, as the priest willing to perjure himself because he had known the quartet of boys when they were young, De Niro.

He had only a few scenes, but he took them seriously, studiously comparing the script to the book and trying to create a character who was partly fun-loving but essentially sober and unimpeachably decent. As he knew, “
priests are not supposed to violate certain rules or certain laws, even if they are unspoken. But that does not mean that they can’t be broken if the priest feels it is morally right.” He accepted that Carcaterra’s account might have been fabricated: “It was hard to believe that the guards were so vile,” he said. But it didn’t finally matter. “I’m afraid I do believe it, because there are people like that.… If the abuse did not happen in this particular case, then it sure has elsewhere at some point.”