Detective World and Underworld Detective were edited by Lionel White, who wrote Clean Break, the novel on which Stanley Kubrick would base his first major success, The Killing, in 1956. (White’s pseudonymous contributors included hard-boiled crime novelist Jim Thompson, who scripted Kubrick’s film.) A typical Detective World article began: ‘It was Wednesday, October 2, and deep autumnal tints were already visible in the foliage surrounding Harrison’s aged courthouse.’ This line, in fact, comes from ‘Who Killed the 2 Sisters?’ in Detective World for April 1952, credited to one ‘Virgil E. La Marre’, a near-anagram for ‘Virginia Admiral’.
Robert’s first solo show in May 1946 at Art of This Century attracted critical attention, and he even sold some paintings, though insisting the proceeds go straight to Virginia. Not that there was much, since he refused to sell to people whom he felt wouldn’t appreciate his pictures. As late as 1989, when his son wanted to give Francis Coppola two canvases for his fiftieth birthday, Robert quizzed him at length about Coppola’s character. ‘You give it to someone, they put it in a closet,’ he grumbled before relinquishing the pictures, which Coppola hung in the hotel suite he maintained permanently at New York’s Plaza Hotel.
Virginia insisted that father and son spend as much time together as they wished. By osmosis, Bobby acquired many of his father’s traits, including the tendency to leave sentences dangling, or to descend into moody silence. Neither set much store by what he wore, where he lived or how he behaved. And watching his father discard version after version of a composition instilled Bobby’s conviction that ‘near enough’ was never good enough.
Years later, talking about her friendship with De Niro, Shelley Winters would create something of a furore by telling the New York Times, ‘Bobby will never talk about what made him the way he is, but I suspect he must have been a lonely kid, that somewhere along the line he was brutalised.’ If any psychological damage was inflicted on the young Bobby, his father’s sexuality and depression must have played a central part in it. Acting may well have been a form of self-therapy, as well as an attempt to come to terms with his ambivalent feelings towards Robert.
‘His father was important to him,’ says French actor and director Robert Cordier, who knew the young De Niro, ‘and his father was not recognised, and I think Bob got to thinking, “I owe him one.” I think becoming famous was very important to him to pay back his father. That has a lot to do with his drive. I think that has a lot to do with Bob’s will to succeed.’
Asked as an adult if he was close to his father, De Niro said, ‘Close? In some ways I was very close to him, but then …’ He was unable to go on, and his eyes filled with tears. When Robert died, Bobby preserved his studio as a shrine, in exactly the same disorder as when his father was working there. He still visits it from time to time. De Niro also dedicated his first film as director, A Bronx Tale, to his father, who died in 1993, the year it was released.
Uninterested in comfort, Robert moved frequently as space became vacant north and south of Houston Street, on Great Jones Street, West Broadway or Bleecker. ‘He had these dank lofts in NoHo and SoHo at a time when nobody wanted to live in those areas,’ says his son. ‘Often he was the only tenant who wanted to live in the building.’
Bobby got used to being sent out to Washington Square with a book if his father wanted to work. On occasion he’d take him along if he was teaching; his students were sometimes Wall Street brokers, and the class took place in a loft in the business district. On such occasions, he’d give Bobby paints and brushes. ‘He’d paint,’ said Robert shortly. ‘He had a good sense of colour.’ From time to time he’d ask him to pose – ‘but when you’re a kid,’ recalled Bobby, ‘the last thing you want to do is sit still for a long time.’ Rigorous even about pictures of his own son, Robert preserved only one image of Bobby, a superficially casual charcoal sketch.
When they did go out together, it was often to Washington Square, where they would rollerskate or play ball games. But Robert’s real enthusiasm emerged when the two went to the movies. First-run cinemas were too expensive, so they generally saw films at Variety Photoplay in the East Village, Loew’s Commodore at 6th Street and 2nd Avenue, or the Academy of Music on 14th Street – all second-run and revival houses offering two features for only fifty cents. Camille or Ninotchka was usually showing in at least one of them, and Bobby got to see these and other Garbo performances a number of times. Back home, he acted out his favourite scenes for his mother.
Camille fascinated Robert – not the first gay artist to find it inspirational: Jean Cocteau called it ‘a bad film raised to the heights by the extraordinary presence of Miss Greta Garbo’. To Robert, its impassive star embodied a spiritual purity. She was like a secular version of the Madonna he’d rejected with his abandonment of Catholicism. He made sculptures of Garbo, and devoted a series of canvases to her first sound film, Anna Christie, while lines from Camille inspired a dozen poems, and stills from the same film a decade of drawings.
Later, Bobby acknowledged that his idea of great acting derived from watching performers like Robert Mitchum and particularly Montgomery Clift, while his influences for comedy were knockabout ex-vaudeville comics Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. He admired Walter Huston, particularly as the half-crazy old prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, though he disliked Humphrey Bogart, in that film and almost everything else; always playing himself, Bogart seemed the antithesis of everything Bobby thought an actor should be.
Instead, De Niro followed the path of those protean Hollywood stars of the thirties who won their reputations, and their Oscars, by transforming themselves for each role, losing themselves behind heavy accents, crêpe whiskers, wigs, tattoos, scars, false noses, heavy glasses, a shuffle, a limp, a stoop.
Every generation throws up one or two of these performers. Lon Chaney fulfilled this role for Hollywood in the twenties. Christened ‘The Man of a Thousand Faces’, he created definitive versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, and a gallery of scarred pirates, grinning Asians, clowns, crooks and cripples. ‘Don’t tread on a spider!’ ran one Hollywood slogan. ‘It might be Lon Chaney.’
De Niro probably never saw Chaney. He did, however, see Muni Weisenfreund, alias Paul Muni, the graduate from New York’s Yiddish theatre who could play an Italian emigrant gangster in Scarface, a gaudy Chicano club-owner in Bordertown and a crusading miner in Black Legion, but just as easily transform himself into a French author for The Life of Emile Zola or Benito Juarez, the politician of Indian descent who founded the modern Mexican state, for Juarez.
Once De Niro became an actor, he scorned Muni, calling his performance in Howard Hawks’ 1932 Scarface ‘awful. He’s the biggest ham. It was so hammy. You could say he was possibly a great stage actor, but a lot of his movies were over the top. Like I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.’ Yet Muni remains the thirties screen actor whom De Niro resembles most.
Like Chaney and Muni, De Niro would always avoid period pictures or the great classical roles. To play Othello or Don Juan would be like putting on a costume thousands had worn before. But to transform yourself into someone entirely new – that was genius. Chaney’s insistence on strapping his calf to the back of a thigh to simulate amputation, on duplicating blindness by pressing the membrane of an egg to his eyeball, or screwing wire rings into his eye sockets to create the crazy glare of a burned face in The Phantom of the Opera, would all find resonances in De Niro’s work. His Jake La Motta in Raging Bull is a Chaney performance. And the comment a contemporary writer made of Chaney, ‘To endure pain for his art gave him a strange pleasure,’ applies equally well to De Niro.
‘He developed a thick-muscled neck and a fighter’s body,’ Pauline Kael wrote of De Niro in Raging Bull, ‘and for the scenes of the broken, drunken La Motta he put on so much weight that he seems