Just how much costume and make-up meant to De Niro emerged more than thirty years later, when he revealed that he’d hoarded every major item of wardrobe from all his films, a collection that, in the year 2000, comprised 2600 costumes and five hundred items of make-up and props.
To find inspiration in a costume isn’t in itself odd, but to hoard them distinguishes De Niro from the majority of movie actors, who attempt to remove barriers between themselves and the audience rather than erecting them. Once again, it’s behaviour one would expect from actors of an earlier tradition, like Chaney, Muni and such character comics as Bert Lahr. John Lahr wrote of his father, ‘Our small, sunless 5th Avenue apartment was full of Dad’s disguises, which he’d first used onstage and in which he now occasionally appeared on TV. The closet contained a woodsman’s props (axe, jodhpurs, and boots); a policeman’s suit and baton; a New York Giants baseball outfit, with cap and cleats. The drawers of an apothecary’s cabinet, which served as a wall-length bedroom bureau, held his toupees, starting pistol, monocle, putty noses, and make-up.’ In an odd coincidence, De Niro’s first acting role was also the one that made Lahr famous – the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.
De Niro’s interest in costumes and transformation, as well as demonstrating again his roots in nineteenth-century theatre and the Hollywood of the thirties, shows how much, despite his many friends at the Actors Studio, his sympathy lay with Adler’s theory, not Strasberg’s. Strasberg performers shunned costumes. Nor did his Method stress physical transformation. Marlon Brando, whether playing the Emperor Napoleon or a beat-up-boxer-turned-dockworker, was always recognisably Brando.
Actors Studio performers spoke of their body as their ‘instrument’ – a device which, though capable of many tunes, remained physically untransformed. De Niro, by contrast, thrived on transformation. None of his outfits, however, were costumes that might be used in classical roles: no doublets, no cloaks, no togas. Except for the reformed eighteenth-century slaver Mendoza in The Mission, De Niro has never played a period role. Even Martin Scorsese couldn’t persuade him to play Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, De Niro explaining that he would always feel uncomfortable in robes.
In his early twenties, De Niro spent some time in psychoanalysis, the better to understand his conflicted attitude to his parents and his need to hide himself in invented characters. He was also helped by Kirkland to deal with his anger. ‘I taught him yoga,’ she said, ‘even though I have no idea if he ever practised it again. We had a group of actors, sort of an actors’ co-op group, with him, Raul Julia, James Keach, myself; we all hung out at Raul’s house with his wife in the late sixties.’ Many years later, when Kirkland joined the West Coast branch of the Actors Studio in Los Angeles as a teacher, De Niro appeared as a guest speaker. A student asked, ‘Mr De Niro, how do you relax?’, and De Niro pointed to Kirkland and said, ‘Talk to her.’ But Bobby was seldom relaxed. When Kirkland asked Virginia what drove her son, she was in no doubt. ‘Will,’ she said shortly. ‘Force of will.’
Despite his success in Glory, Glamour and Gold, De Niro didn’t find it any easier to get parts. He went on the road through the Southern states in ‘dinner theatre’, where the audience sat at tables and ate a meal before the show, with the performers acting as waiters and, also like waiters, dividing up their tips. De Niro always passed this off as ‘good experience’, but it must have galled him, as it galled most actors.
French actor/director/writer Robert Cordier met De Niro through Barry Primus, another New York actor, a few years older than De Niro, who became, and has remained, one of Bobby’s closest friends. Cordier was casting an off-Broadway play. ‘I had a friend called Steve McQueen,’ he says, ‘who had been unknown in Greenwich Village, and I thought he would be great to play the lead. I went to parties with Steve. He wangled himself into the Actors Studio. Then somebody said, “There’s this kid. He’s wonderful. He takes classes with Stella Adler. He’s the son of this painter Bob De Niro, and he’s quite a comer.” I was seeing actors, and Barry Primus took an audition. Then he said, “I have this friend, Bob De Niro, do you want to see him too?”’
Cordier didn’t audition De Niro on that occasion. ‘I had done the play,’ he says. ‘It had gotten good reviews and Barry had been noticed and signed up for the lead in The Changeling at Lincoln Center. I was at Max’s Kansas City and this guy came and tapped on my shoulder and said, “You never called me for the play that Barry was in.” It was Bob De Niro, and he said, “I’m gonna give you my phone number and I want you to call me the next time there’s something.”’
Well-known Living Theater actor Warren Finidy initially played the lead in Cordier’s play, but Cordier fired him for drinking, despite the fact that he’d appeared in Jack Gelber’s The Connection, to considerable acclaim. ‘Bob thought it was funny that I had fired the actor of the year, a year after his award,’ says Cordier. ‘Then Warren walked up and said, “Hey Bob, Robert!”, and Bob said, “Well, you guys are still on very good terms.” I think he was impressed, and he said “Let’s work together sometime.”’
De Niro cultivated Cordier, as he did anybody who might push his career. ‘He used to call me to ask what was up. We went to parties; you know, kicking around at parties, but the main social life was going to cafés, bars and restaurants. We all went practically every night either to the Cedar Bar, to Bradley or to Max’s Kansas City, or Elaine’s uptown, you know, we went to these few places.’
Meanwhile, De Niro won another film role in a New York independent production, but Sam’s Song was to haunt him for the next twenty years, and provide, through no fault of his, one of his least distinguished credits. Directed by editor and underground film-maker Jordan Leondopoulos, it was shot, very professionally and in colour, by Alex Phillips Jr, who would go on to light Sam Peckinpah’s Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. The film was meant as a ‘calling card’, intended, like Steven Spielberg’s Amblin’, to win the director a job in features, though, by scattering fashionable hommages to the nouvelle vague, Leondopoulos also hoped for an art-house release.
Most of the action takes place in the grounds of a Long Island mansion like the one in The Wedding Party, with a further sequence at sea on a cabin cruiser. Young film-maker Sam (De Niro) is invited to join a house party thrown by friends of the wealthy Erica (Jennifer Warren) and Andrew (Jarred Mickey). The three drive up in the couple’s convertible, Sam reading Andre Bazin’s film criticism and Erica quoting from the book by Louis Ferdinand Céline which she’s translating.
When they arrive, they find their hosts have invited some people to an impromptu birthday party. They include the glamorous and very available Carol (Terrayne Crawford), who, to the chagrin of Erica and the envy of Andrew, sneaks off with Sam to have sex. When the party transfers to a boat, Carol disappears into a cabin, this time with Andrew, and a furious Erica asks to be taken back to shore on a conveniently passing launch. Sam joins her. Back on the beach, they act out their own version of a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, an imaginary gunfight using pointed fingers, with Sam improvising a series of facetious slow-motion death scenes.
De Niro, behind a heavy moustache, makes a believable New York movie-maker, and Jennifer Warren, who later had a solid career in films (Night Moves), TV and, more recently, as a director (Partners in Crime), is equally convincing, if dressed unflatteringly and forced to deliver some ridiculous lines. At the time, however, nobody saw either of them, since the film had almost no release, and would languish in a New York warehouse for more than a decade.
In 1969, De Palma’s The Wedding Party finally screened in a single small cinema downtown, drawing little attention. To De Niro’s irritation, the credits mis-spelled his name ‘DeNero’. Small as his role was, however, it admitted him to the select group of young New York actors with feature-film experience.
Another of these was a short, intense Actors Studio alumnus named Al Pacino. ‘I had seen Robert in The Wedding Party,’ Pacino said later, ‘and was very impressed by him.’ In Pacino’s version of their first meeting, he stopped De Niro on 14th Street and introduced himself. It’s more likely, however, that they met at Jimmy Ray’s,