The budget didn’t allow for the best actors, so De Palma advertised in Billboard and Variety. Among those who turned up to audition was De Niro.
‘He was very mild, very shy and very self-effacing,’ De Palma recalls. ‘Nobody knew him, he was only a kid of about nineteen. [He] came in about nine or ten at night. We gave him some material to read. He did it well and then we asked him to improvise, and he was extraordinary. Then he said he had something else he wanted to show us, something he was working on. He left the room and was gone about twenty minutes. We thought he’d changed his mind and gone home. Then the door flies open and he bursts in from nowhere and he does a scene from a play by Clifford Odets. It was like watching Lee J. Cobb. Personally De Niro may be shy and soft-spoken, but in character he could be anybody.’
The Odets monologue came from Waiting for Lefty. As cabbies at a union meeting argue and wait for their leader, Lefty, news comes that he’s been murdered by management goons. Periodically, the narrative flashes away to examples of class oppression, including one manifestation of it that Odets knew well from his days on Broadway – a young actor auditioning for an indifferent producer. De Niro knew the play, since Stella Adler insisted her students study it. She’d starred in the Group Theater’s production, of which Harold Clurman said ecstatically, ‘It was the birth cry of the thirties. Our youth had found its voice.’ De Niro too found his voice in Odets’ words. De Palma was instantly convinced, and offered him the part for $50 – not, as De Niro assumed, $50 a week, but, as his mother confirmed when she read the contract, $50 for the entire role. The contract also promised a percentage of the profits, but as usual there were none.
The Wedding Party started shooting in the spring of 1963, on an estate on Shelter Island, at the eastern end of Long Island. The plot resembles Meet the Parents, in which De Niro was to have a hit almost forty years later. Charlie (Charles Pfluger), a Harvard student about to marry his rich fiancée Josephine Fish (Jill Clayburgh), arrives at her estate by ferry with his two friends, Cecil (De Niro) and Baker (John Quinn), who will act as ushers at the wedding.
Neither can understand why the tomcatting Charlie wants to get married, and one look at his prospective in-laws, a horde of elderly ladies in unfortunate hats, has Charlie doubting too. Invading Josephine’s bedroom on the first night, he discovers her in neck-to-ankle flannel. When he suggests she slip into something lacy, she tells him, ‘If you want lace, I’ll give you a hankie.’ Interruptions by an aged nanny also ruin the mood.
Half-convinced now that his friends are right, Charlie tries to sneak off the island, and when one of Josephine’s old lovers, a wealthy Indian with a penchant for sail-planing, turns up, coaxes him to take her off his hands, even at the cost of going gliding with him. When this fails, he makes a drunken pass at a pretty cousin, but gets cold feet when she responds with enthusiasm. Finally, after being chased all over the island by his friends, he gives up and says yes.
As Munroe finished writing each scene, she and De Palma recorded it on tape. The actors used the tapes as the basis for improvisation, then passed back their versions for her to rewrite. When she wasn’t writing, Munroe cooked the team’s meals. De Palma doubled as runner, calling up people in his capacity as producer, then putting on a cap and mounting a motorbike to collect the item he’d demanded. The cast were asked to supply their own clothing, and even props. Neither Clayburgh nor Salt minded, but De Niro felt exploited, particularly when one such prop, a new suitcase, fell off the top of a car as it pulled into the mansion, and was damaged.
Leach and De Palma directed, with Leach having the deciding vote, usually after argument from the combative De Palma. Leach, later highly successful on Broadway with an updated version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance and his productions of Shakespeare, strove for high production values, which the amateur crew and inexperienced cast could seldom achieve. De Palma felt Pfluger played Charlie in a superficial manner. For his part, Leach disliked the occasional references to movies, from Singin’ in the Rain to Psycho, and the decision to introduce each segment with a silent-movie-style title card quoting from an imaginary marriage guide, ‘The Compleat Bridegroom’. He also disliked De Palma’s decision to undercrank the camera in the chase and driving scenes, giving the movie a Keystone Kops jerkiness.
As Cecil, comic relief of the trio of friends, De Niro had little to do. Arriving on the island struggling with a pile of sporting equipment, he bumbles about in the background, periodically taking part in rambling improvised conversations in which he and Baker first try to talk Charlie out of marriage, then into it. A drunken speech at the pre-wedding banquet that might have been his chance to shine is so badly post-synched that his words are mostly inaudible.
Periodically, production stopped as Leach returned to teaching. In one such break, in the summer of 1964, De Niro made another trip to Europe to see his father. De Niro Sr hadn’t lingered in Paris, but had moved to Gravigny, west of the city, then to Saint-Just-en-Chevalet, in the centre of France, near Clermont-Ferrand, and finally to Baren, above the resort of Luchon, near the Spanish border, his base for excursions into Spain and to North Africa. But France hadn’t proved the stimulant he’d hoped for, and Virginia could tell from his infrequent letters that her ex-husband was in trouble. She financed Bobby’s trip, with the idea that he would bring him back.
Bobby spent an enjoyable few weeks in Paris, where he could lose himself in the small hotels of the Left Bank around the Odeon and the Quartier Latin. He took language classes at the Alliance Française and met his share of local expatriates, but had little success with the French, whose reserve almost equalled his own.
Convincing his father to return to New York was an uphill task. Though Robert had been shipping his canvases back to American galleries, sales were meagre. Bobby urged him to look for a gallery in Paris, but his father refused; the market for his work, he insisted, was in New York.
After that, Bobby took off on an extended search for his roots. He hitchhiked around Ireland for a fortnight, looking for his mother’s family, but the country was thick with O’Reillys and he had no luck. Italy proved more fruitful, and he found cousins in Campobasso, sixty miles north-east of Naples. He also penetrated the Iron Curtain to visit Erwin and Marie Ley Piscator in East Berlin. When he returned to New York, it was with his father reluctantly in tow. Of that aspect of the trip, Bobby later told a friend, ‘It was an absolute nightmare.’
CHAPTER FIVE Sally, Candy, Andy and the Others
He can’t do Shakespeare and he can’t do comedy. How can you even begin to compare him with Brando?
Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, on De Niro’s acting ability
Editing The Wedding Party took years. Cynthia Munroe died, bequeathing the uncompleted film to Wilford Leach. Despite the delay, De Palma and De Niro remained friendly, even though De Niro was reticent, withdrawn, while De Palma, loud, sarcastic, with a genius for undiplomatic remarks, was the opposite.
Both came from Italian Catholic families but were raised in another faith, in De Palma’s case Presbyterian. Both fell under the influence of charismatic fathers, in De Palma’s case an orthopaedic surgeon. Just as De Niro had spent many hours watching his father work, De Palma sat in on his father’s operations, establishing a lifelong preoccupation with blood and flesh. In both cases, the marriage of their parents collapsed, though De Palma’s reaction to the break-up was characteristically extreme. He stalked his father, observing and recording his assignations with his mistress – an episode that appeared in his 1980 film Dressed to Kill.
In 1965 De Niro scored a role in a film which, though he is barely visible in his one scene, and the film was shown almost entirely in France, would reach the screen quickly, giving him his first official movie appearance.
Marcel Carné’s great days had been in the thirties and during World War II, near the end of which he had made Les Enfants du Paradis. In 1965, with his career running down, he was happy to take on an adaptation of Georges Simenon’s 1946 novel