Two old ladies commenting on homosexuals in Joel Schumacher’s screenplay for his film Flawless (1999), in which De Niro starred
As tensions increased in their marriage, Robert and Virginia began seeing a Freudian therapist. ‘Many artists who knew Hans Hofmann,’ recalls Barbara Guest, ‘went to a particular shrink whose patients (eventually) had terrible crises and breakdowns. But he couldn’t help them. He was a frustrated man – a failed artist, who meddled.’
The therapist may have been Dr Lawrence Kubie, who claimed to ‘cure’ homosexuals, and whose patients included such showbiz figures as bisexual playwright and director Moss Hart. Following their ‘treatment’, the De Niros agreed to separate, though since adultery still represented the main grounds for divorce, they decided, rather than air their sexual incompatibility in the courts, to delay a formal dissolution of the marriage.
While his parents worked out new domestic arrangements, Bobby was sent to his father’s parents in Syracuse, where, despite Robert’s hostility towards Catholicism, Bobby’s grandparents had him baptised. Though Robert was furious, the gesture had little real effect, since Bobby was almost immediately returned to New York, and to his mother. Nevertheless, being ‘officially’ Catholic would cement him even more firmly into the Italo-American culture.
Robert moved into a Greenwich Village studio, and immersed himself in the principles of Abstract Expressionism. What those principles were depended on who taught them. Art historian Lee Hall calls Abstract Expressionism ‘an attitude, if not a proper philosophy, of art [which] pits the lonely and searching individual against the unknown (possibly unknowable) first forces of the universe, casting the painter in the role of voyager and seeker after truth. By courting accidents resulting from the manipulated collision of materials, by taking risks with the surprising imagery that results, and by exploring that imagery to discover new vision, the painter creates an order that embodies his or her quest. To the Abstract Expressionist, the process of painting is more valued than the product, the finished painting.’ As an actor, Bobby would also conceive himself as a ‘voyager and seeker after truth’ whose work embodied the ‘manipulated collision of materials’ to achieve ‘surprising imagery’.
Always a slow worker, Robert became slower still. For every canvas completed, he threw out a hundred, then reworked the survivors, often erasing the entire design before starting over. Despite this, his work changed little over the years. He shared Matisse’s enthusiasm for North African subjects, and, when a magazine photograph of Moorish women posed in an elaborate interior caught his eye, began painting his own versions of it – but, with characteristic obsessiveness, continued to do so for twenty years. A driven search for ‘perfect’ colours gradually made his pictures brighter, but his canvases of the late forties feature the same roughly painted figures as those he exhibited four decades later.
‘He had a few friends,’ says Barbara Guest, ‘but mostly was alone in the tremendously cluttered place in which he painted. Sometimes I saw him out walking, and a scene plays across the screen of my mind of the day I saw him, standing on the sidewalk, talking to a woman friend while he held his mongrel dog on a leash. It was a typical encounter, a repeated scene in his life. There was no social life of dinners etc. There were many parties he did not attend, or at which he showed up as if out walking the dog.’ When he did arrive at a party, he was seldom a social asset. ‘He was given to acid comments about the art scene,’ says Guest. ‘He preferred provocative conversations.’ If he found a subject uninteresting, half-finished sentences would tail off into silence.
Virginia and Bobby remained in the Bleecker Street apartment. As long as Bobby was too young for nursery school, she took paying work she could do at home. For a while, she framed pictures at $1.25 an hour – not enough to maintain the loft, which in any event was about to be taken over by The Little Red Schoolhouse, an elementary school launched to give the children of Greenwich Village the sort of education demanded by radical parents. Virginia moved to a smaller apartment, at 521 Hudson Street, a building mostly of studios, where many painter friends rented space. She stayed there until she found a better place at 219 West 14th Street. The rent was high, at $50 a month, but the two-room apartment with its parquet floors and central heating was too tempting. Bobby would grow up and live most of his young adult life here.
When he was old enough, Virginia placed Bobby in the nursery school attached to Greenwich House on Barrow Street. Set up to provide arts training and a social centre to the downtown area, Greenwich House included music and pottery schools, as well as its kindergarten, which charged working mothers only $1.25 a month.
Starting at the nursery brought De Niro into contact for the first time with the Ethical Culture Movement, which ran a free kindergarten and various humanitarian projects in and around New York. Founded by Felix Adler in 1876, Ethical Culture offered a substitute for organised religion, founded on ethics and morality rather than dogma. Adler spelled out its four principles: ‘1. Every person has inherent worth; each person is unique. 2. It is our responsibility to improve the quality of life for ourselves and others. 3. Ethics are derived from human experience. 4. Life is sacred, interrelated and interdependent.’ Though never particularly religious, De Niro, with Virginia’s encouragement, would grow away from his grandparents’ Catholicism towards the principles of Ethical Culture. When he married in 1976, it would be at the group’s New York headquarters, and he remains an enthusiastic supporter of its activities.
Able to get out of the house for the first time since her separation from Robert, Virginia applied for work through the welfare system. Since employment offices routinely directed out-of-work artists to any job which, under the loosest possible definition, involved painting, she found herself decorating fabrics and assembling jewellery. Before she was married she had made pin money typing, and now she started again, typing manuscripts for writers, and editing and typing theses for students at the New School for Social Research, just around the corner on 12th Street.
With its left-wing ideology and funding from wealthy liberals like the Rockefellers, the New School was a haven for European intellectuals fleeing Hitler. Its University in Exile, founded in 1934, accommodated four hundred of them, including German theatre director Erwin Piscator and his wife, the Viennese dancer Maria Ley.
In Berlin, Piscator had directed the Volksbühne theatre, supported by the labour unions. His productions of Meyerhold and Brecht, often using a bare stage, or a few sets in the Constructivist style pioneered in Soviet Russia, with the addition of film or projected images, attracted much attention, not least from the Nazis, who dubbed his work ‘degenerate’. (Piscator always claimed this charge, plus his Communism, led to his exile from Germany, though in fact the impetus was a paternity suit he looked certain to lose.)
Alvin Johnson, director of the New School, invited the couple to launch a programme of drama. Piscator immediately began hiring teachers, while his wife started dancing classes and a Saturday-morning theatre course for children.
Piscator was in his element at the New School. Dressed always in the most expensive silk and cashmere, white hair swept back to emphasise his leonine profile, he ruled the theatre department like a duke. Mel Brooks, later one of his students, parodied him in his film The Producers as the manic Nazi composer of the musical Springtime for Hitler.
Herbert Berghof, one of Max Reinhardt’s actors who’d arrived in America during the thirties and worked with the Theater Guild, managed the acting course. Other teachers included theatre historian John Gassner, editor of the Best Plays of the Year anthologies, Leo Kertz, Lisa Jalowitz, Theresa Helburn, James Light and, most notably, Stella Adler, who would become the most powerful influence on the young De Niro when he decided to become an actor.
When Piscator, under investigation in America for his Communist sympathies, returned to Germany in 1946, Maria Ley Piscator ran the New School’s drama workshop until 1949. Virginia typed her manuscripts and, through her, got similar work from other foreign writers, notably military historian Ladislas Farago. She also found time to paint, and, like Robert, had a solo show at Art of This Century in 1946. Peggy Guggenheim also included some of Virginia’s work at the 1947 Biennale in Venice, where she would