As he entered adolescence and shed his childish plumpness, other aspects of life in Greenwich Village attracted Bobby’s attention. The area was changing. In particular, Italians moving in from the West Side were squeezing the Anglo community of the downtown area, just as they, in turn, would be squeezed by the invading Chinese two decades later.
Despite a solitary nature, Bobby was drawn to the Italian and Sicilian youth gangs now appearing on the streets. Though his skin was pale, he could have been one of them. The gangs also radiated superiority and power. Being in the headlines made the street kids bolder. Knives and guns became more evident, the swagger more pronounced.
De Niro affected the gang members’ silk shirts, their slim-cut leather jackets, the hat tilted on the back of the head. His friends nicknamed him ‘Bobby Milk’ because of his pallor. At seventeen, he was recognisably a cadet version of Johnny Boy, the street punk he would play in Mean Streets.
Johnny Boy likes explosions. He blows up a mailbox, and throws dynamite from the rooftops. As a kid, Bobby acted as a ‘steerer’ for one of the Chinese firecracker vendors across Mott Street. Kids in the Village preyed on boys who turned up from the suburbs in search of the giant cherry bombs and other dangerously large fireworks employed by the Chinese at their festivals. In Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese would show two of these innocents being ripped off by a couple of streetwise Village guys.
On Christmas Day 1970, when Brian De Palma introduced De Niro to Scorsese, each would recognise the other from his teenage gang affiliations. But De Niro was never part of a gang, any more than was Scorsese, who only moved to the Lower East Side in 1949, when his garment-maker father went broke, and who, as a lifelong asthmatic, observed street life mainly from his bedroom window.
That said, both recognised and respected the reality of street crime. When he made Sleepers in 1996, De Niro still recalled Hell’s Kitchen, the tough area near the intersection of 42nd Street and Broadway: ‘It was Italian, Irish, Latin, Puerto Rican. When I was growing up downtown, it was a neighbourhood where you would get hassled, where you wouldn’t go.’ Both he and Scorsese were accustomed to being beaten up, and knew better than to complain to the law. Only by enduring punishment and saying nothing could they earn the respect of the tough guys who ran the streets.
As a kind of protective coloration, De Niro began going to Sunday mass with his new friends at the old St Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street. For the new generation of Italian-Americans, that church had a special significance, reflected in the way their film-makers would adopt it as a location. Scorsese, who served there as altar boy, used it for the climax of his first film, Who’s that Knocking at my Door?, as did Francis Coppola for the christening that closes The Godfather.
It incensed Robert to see his son embracing both the religion he’d abandoned and a lifestyle he thought dangerous. ‘When I was about thirteen,’ recalled Bobby, ‘we ran into each other in Washington Square Park. I was with a group of street kids, and he got fairly worked up, going on and on about bad influences.’
De Niro relived the moment years later when he made his debut as director with A Bronx Tale, about a man trying to prevent his young son idolising a career criminal. As Ray Vitti, the gang boss in Analyze This, he also cites a similar event from his own fictitious childhood.
As if to prove that her artistic ambitions had never been more than infatuation with Greenwich Village bohemia, Virginia thrived as a businesswoman. She started a small service, called Academy, which turned manuscripts into camera-ready copy for printers. Half of the 14th Street apartment became her office, where she installed a couple of typewriters and a Varitype machine. Before long, she had a staff of ten, most of whom, in defiance of the lease, worked in the apartment. Bobby became so angry with the noise of the machines that he threatened to throw them out the window. Virginia took the hint, and in 1957 moved everything into an office at 68 7th Street.
In 1953, the De Niros finally divorced. Bobby continued to spend time in Robert’s studio, but, inevitably, both recognised a growing gap. At this time they sometimes browsed Village bookshops, like Robert Wilson’s Phoenix Bookstore on Cornelia Street, which specialised in literary first editions. Wilson, a friend of W.H. Auden and the bibliographer of Gertrude Stein, was a congenial conversationalist, and De Niro Sr relaxed in his company, even drawing a cover for one of Wilson’s catalogues.
‘I saw him often,’ recalls Wilson. ‘He was shy more than antisocial. He came into the shop often, at least once with the teenage son. He was gay, and came in quite often, mainly, I think, because he had an obvious crush on my then-assistant Marshall Clements. He was not a collector of rare books, but was a reader of Gertrude Stein’s works, and often bought one of her books for reading purposes.’
Marshall Clements too remembers De Niro Sr well. ‘I first met Bob Sr and Virginia Admiral in 1960 or ‘61, along with others of their circle, through the painter, Nell Blaine, who often gave parties for her old friends, mostly fellow painters. So by the time I started working at the Phoenix Book Shop with Bob Wilson in 1968, Bob De Niro and I were old acquaintances. He lived nearby in the Village, and when he found out I was working at the shop, he frequently stopped by to visit.
‘Bob Wilson always thought this was because of some sexual interest in me, but I doubt this. What he was interested in, other than simply friendly chat, was using me as a model. I had been a dancer in the years 1950–1960 and was still in pretty good physical shape. I admired his work and found him a very pleasant, gentle and intelligent man, one completely focused on his painting. If he had any problems with his sexuality, they were never evident to me, and though we were both gay and obviously knew this about one another, the subject never came up in our conversations. He also had a wonderfully subtle wit and was childishly pleased when one “got” it and laughed. There was an air of sadness about him, and as far as I know, he was a lonely man, which I believe was also a reason for his frequent visits to the bookshop.’
Through the early fifties, Robert came to feel he’d reached an impasse in his work. Though the Charles Egan Gallery in New York City gave him one-man shows in 1952, 1953 and 1954, after which he switched to the Poindexter Gallery, which showed him in 1954, 1955 and 1956, he became convinced his career was marking time. He needed fresh inspiration, and friends like Tennessee Williams urged him to look for it in Europe.
Paris exercised a special attraction for De Niro. During his friendship with Anaïs Nin, he’d pumped her for information about the French capital and her meetings with artists like Picasso. In the spring of 1959, he arrived at the apartment of his friend Barbara Guest with a box of books, mostly French poetry. He was going to Paris, he explained, and wanted her to take care of them until he returned. Something final in his tone convinced her, however, that he believed the move to be permanent. Before his departure, friends threw a party on the boat that took him to France in April 1959, and Bobby attended – with what feelings one can imagine.
Bobby’s grades at Elizabeth Irwin weren’t good enough to keep him there, but since he showed some artistic talent, and had spent some months in the Piscator Workshop, the faculty suggested he apply for a scholarship to New York’s High School of Music and Art. Students were required to submit some example of their creativity, and De Niro got in on his acting ability, but stayed only one sparsely-attended semester in 1959. He claimed that the phoniness of his fellow students, ‘wearing sandals and playing guitars in Washington Square Park’, repelled him. But such people can hardly have been strange to a kid born and raised in Greenwich Village. Probably he disliked having to travel uptown to school when all his life he’d been able to walk. He would also have found it demanding to take classes both in academic subjects and one’s chosen creative area. After that, De Niro spent one semester at the Rhodes School on West 54th Street, but passed only three subjects then dropped out, his only explanation that ‘it was a bad scene’.
After the High School of Music and Art, Virginia