De Niro: A Life (86 page)

O
NCE AGAIN
, the murmurs rose: What had happened to Robert De Niro? Why was the man so widely regarded as the greatest American screen actor of the latter half of the twentieth century so willing to make so many movies of so little worth?

One obvious answer might be money, but how much could a fellow earn for an Italian film with no U.S. release, or in a direct-to-home-viewing thriller, or in films with entire budgets smaller than his individual paycheck for appearing in
Analyze That
or the
Fockers
sequels? No, not only was he working easy, he was apparently working cheap. He loved to quote Stella Adler’s dictum “Your talent lies in your choices”; what did the choices he made in his sixties and beyond say about his own impression of his talent at that late moment in his life and career? Why was he working so much—and so seemingly indifferently?

The answer may have lain in the very word
work.
For De Niro, work seemed to be an end in itself—not so much something he liked to do as something he was fulfilled by doing and saw as a point of life. There were pleasures in the world—women, food, travel, exercise, booze (and, decades earlier, drugs)—and there was work, and it was almost as if he had some sense that one could not fully enjoy the former unless one had truly engaged with the latter. It was a product, perhaps, of a childhood spent watching two adults work hard at divergent fields of endeavor: Robert De Niro Sr. struggling to make art that satisfied his own high standards, even if the world wouldn’t recognize or compensate him for it, and Virginia Admiral building a business and then a small real estate empire out of dogged determination.

In his earliest acting days, even before
Greetings
and
Hi, Mom!
, De Niro impressed student directors and fellow performers with his professionalism, his seriousness, his drive—not careerism, exactly, but complete application to the task of becoming an actor. This was the fellow who wrote letters to college newspapers to get tear sheets of their reviews of his work, who traveled on his own dime to learn accents and spent his own money on pieces of wardrobe even when he was
working in films financed by major studios, who floored Elia Kazan with requests to work through the weekend, who learned to play the saxophone and to box at the same time. He poured himself wholly into his work in ways that almost no American actor of his stature ever had.

That determination to delve thoroughly into his own resources and into the contours of a character—whether wholly imagined or based on a real-life original—stuck with him well into the 1990s. His work on
Goodfellas
,
Awakenings
,
Backdraft
,
Cape Fear
,
This Boy’s Life
,
Frankenstein
,
Casino
,
Heat
, and
Flawless
was, no matter what you thought of the films or even his performances, earnest and engaged. Sometime after making
Meet the Parents
, though, after achieving his greatest payday to date, his technique and especially his application slackened. He began to skim through roles more frequently than dive into them, to do minimal research if any, to repeat himself by rote. For the first time in his acting career, he seemed not to care what he was in, what he was playing, who was making it, what the truth underneath it all was, or how best to convey it.

He was not, however, lazy. As he ratcheted back on his effort in each film that he made, he still behaved as if the work-focused machinery inside him needed to achieve full expression. So, rather than pour himself wholly into individual roles as he so often had in the 1970s, ’80s, and even ’90s, digging deep and filling the spaces created by his excavations with the raw material of his talent and research, he began to expend the same amount of total energy, more or less, on a greater number of films, aiming for breadth rather than depth. It was almost as if he had a certain amount of time, strength, passion, and interest for his work, and instead of dedicating it to one film at a time he was meting it out widely all at once—and, far too often, less than discriminatingly.

Of course, once an actor decides that he will increase his workload, the paucity of worthy material becomes increasingly evident. The American movie industry has always been a factory, churning out products aimed chiefly at selling tickets, following fashions and trends, eyes always on the bottom line; only when attention is pointed its way and it is wearing its finest tuxedoes and gowns does it focus on art. Still, for all the wildcatting energy in the early days of the system, under the imperial powers of the movie studios, or in the renegade days of the 1970s
or even the 1990s, there was no time when the sheer output of feature movies was greater than the twenty-first century. In the film exhibition capitals of America, New York and Los Angeles, it was possible to go to theaters and see nearly one thousand new films a year by 2010—and to watch perhaps that many premieres again, if not more, on home media. In such a climate, audiences weren’t the only ones puzzled by the multiplicity of choices; filmmakers were as well. Which scripts to read, which to fund, which to distribute, and, in De Niro’s case, which to appear in: none of it seemed terribly clear.

Somewhere in his brain—maybe even consciously—a switch had flipped, and he had begun to take a different attitude toward work. And he had chosen to do so at a ruinous time for his art and his legacy. Decades before, at the dawn of his career, when the sheer magnitude of his talent was beginning fully to emerge, he had said, “People now tell me if I will consent to a project, they can get the deal going. But what should I commit myself to?” Now that same conundrum faced him again: there were too many films to choose among, many of them needing only his approval to get made. And far too often after 2001 or so, for reasons that were genuinely unclear and even troubling, he chose wrongly. Once his talent had seemed like vintage wine, carefully decanted drop by painstaking drop into the finest crystal. Now he was pouring it sloppily into so many paper cups as if it were the cheapest, most indifferently made plonk. He couldn’t even point to eye-popping box office or massive personal gains as excuses for his choices. His need to work had always bordered on a pathology, but whereas it once produced magical alchemy, now it left little spills that nobody could be bothered to mop up.
^*5

A
LONG WITH BECOMING
a legitimate business force, Raphael De Niro had become a family man. In March 2008 he wed Claudine DeMatos,
the daughter of a Brazilian restaurateur and travel agent, whom he met when she was working for his dad’s old squeeze Naomi Campbell, at the time that he was finding an apartment for the supermodel. Raphael convinced Claudine to come work with him at Prudential Douglas Elliman, and they dated and were finally married at a private home in the Bahamas. The two hundred guests included Harvey Keitel, Chazz Palminteri, magician David Blaine (a Raphael De Niro client, who performed some illusions at the party), and, in a detail that delighted tabloid gossips, all three women with whom De Niro had children: Diahnne Abbott, the mother of the groom, of course (by then married to the artist Noel Copeland); Toukie Smith; and Grace Hightower. Within three years, the young couple, who lived in a $3 million condo on Greenwich Street, just up the block from the Tribeca Film Center, had two children, a boy, Nicholas, born in May 2009, and a girl, Alexandria, born in March 2011.

Alexandria wasn’t the only De Niro baby of the year. In December 2011 the world was briefly startled by the news that De Niro and Hightower, sixty-eight and fifty-six, respectively, were new parents. Helen Grace (her name a variation on that of her mother, Grace Helen, as well as a nod to De Niro’s paternal grandmother, Helen O’Reilly De Niro, who died in 1999, just months shy of her hundredth birthday) was, like her twin half brothers Aaron and Julian, born to a surrogate. The couple’s son, Elliot, was thirteen, and their marital difficulties were a decade or so behind them. The decision to bring a new baby into the family at their ages seemed puzzling, but it was a significant affirmation that their bond was strong and all of the fractures in it had fully healed.

The following year, with De Niro taking on a busier workload than ever before, Hightower started to make headlines with a business venture. Like most Americans, she was only partially informed about the effects of civil war and genocide on the people of Rwanda, but in 2011 she met the country’s president, Paul Kagame, at an evening hosted by Jane Rosenthal. Inspired by the president’s statement that his country needed “trade, not aid,” Hightower, who had a history of working on the sort of charitable endeavors commonly supported by New York socialites, began to look into what sort of businesses she could help foster
in the impoverished African nation, and she hit on coffee. In 2012 she started a business named, a mite inelegantly, Grace Hightower and Coffees of Rwanda, a fair-trade brand of gourmet coffee beans grown in Africa, roasted in Connecticut, and sold at upscale markets in New York City and online. The company was designed to funnel the profits back to local Rwandan coffee farmers, but by 2013 it was robust enough that Hightower was considering opening a storefront to sell the coffee—in bulk and to drink on the spot—in, where else, Tribeca.

I
N THE SPRING OF 2011
, D
E
N
IRO JOURNEYED ONCE AGAIN TO
the French Riviera, this time to serve as the president of the jury for the sixty-fourth edition of the Cannes Film Festival. He had been coming to the festival regularly since the 1970s, with films in and out of competition, and two of them had taken its top prize, the Palme d’Or:
Taxi Driver
in 1976 and
The Mission
ten years later. His fellow jurors included the actors Jude Law, Uma Thurman, and Linn Ullmann and the directors Olivier Assayas and Johnnie To, and the films they had to choose among included
The Skin I Live In
,
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
,
The Artist
,
Melancholia
,
We Need to Talk About Kevin
,
Drive
, and the eventual winner,
The Tree of Life.
To enhance the De Niro–ness of the festival, there were events honoring two key directors from his past, Roger Corman and Bernardo Bertolucci, a retrospective screening of
A Bronx Tale
, and a gala dinner to fete De Niro himself, at which Gilles Jacob, the president of the festival, and Frédéric Mitterrand, France’s minister of culture, spoke about De Niro’s artistic and cultural achievements. De Niro, who had uttered a few words of fractured French at the opening festivities, responded to these accolades by declaring, “You’re going to make me cry.” But he muddled through, and he returned the following year to introduce a restored version of
Once Upon a Time in America
, the film that he, Sergio Leone, and James Woods had brought to Cannes almost three decades prior.

D
URING NEGOTIATIONS TO
direct
Little Fockers
, Paul Weitz told De Niro about another project he was interested in making, an adaptation
of the 2004 memoir
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
by the poet Nick Flynn. The book told the story of Flynn’s struggle to become a writer and to live with the burden of the legacy of his father, Jonathan, an alcoholic, never-published novelist. The elder Flynn had always proclaimed his own literary greatness and his dedication to true art, and he lived on the margins of society, doing any kind of work to keep a roof over his head and even living on the streets at a time when his son was working as a nighttime attendant at a homeless shelter. Like his father, Flynn was prone to substance abuse, to failed relationships with women, to losing jobs and gigs because he was so antagonistic toward the people around him.