The most memorable thing about De Niro to most people was his habit of getting around town on a bicycle.
‘Stella Adler had a very good script-breakdown-and-analysis class that nobody else was teaching,’ De Niro recalled. ‘It was just a way of making people aware of character, style, period, and so on.’ It appealed particularly to De Niro because it didn’t involve getting up and performing in front of the class, as at the Actors Studio. ‘People could sit down in a classroom as opposed to having to get up and demonstrate it,’ he said.
De Niro loathed being forced to perform in public until he’d totally grasped a character, and reserved a particular distaste for a feature of the Actors Studio curriculum called ‘Private Moment’, when a student was asked to perform some trivial task as if doing so in the privacy of his home and not in front of a critical audience. At its worst, a ‘Private Moment’ could involve removing all one’s clothes. Even at best, it usually made one look foolish.
‘It was hard to get up,’ De Niro said. ‘You had to try to overcome that.’ Teachers like Carshon helped him do so. ‘At the end of the day, you’ve got to get up and do it. And the sooner you get to knowing you’ve got to get up and do it, the quicker you’ll do it. I had this problem, where I was afraid to make a move. “You have to feel it,” and all that. Carshon would say, “You’ve got to, sometimes, just … jump in,” and that was true. If I just jumped in, took the leap, I’d arrive at the place where you thought you’d have to go.’
Echoes of Stella Adler’s teaching ring through De Niro’s work. Writer David Scott Milton, who went through the Conservatory about the same time, recalls, ‘When we were at Stella Adler’s, she had an acting exercise that went like this: she would call on each student and the student would have this line: “Are you talking to me?” She would have each student do it with several different adjustments: “Are you talking to me?” “Are you talking to me?” Not line readings, but adjustments; that is, character attitudes that determined the line reading. When I saw Taxi Driver, the De Niro in the mirror scene, it appeared to me that he was doing a reprise of the Stella Adler exercise, “Are you talking to me?”’
Among the people for whom De Niro auditioned in his last year at the Conservatory was a film student from Sarah Lawrence College casting his first feature. A film with New York actors, not Hollywood imports, was sufficiently novel to attract attention, even if, as was the case with The Wedding Party, both project and film-makers were erratic.
Though Sarah Lawrence was a women’s college, the director was the dark, glowering Brian De Palma. De Palma, whose shark-like smile and aggressive manner telegraphed his inner torments – ‘His sense of outrage is limitless,’ said his mentor, Wilford Leach – came to film late. His first love was physics, but in 1958 he saw Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which transformed his life.
As a student at Columbia, De Palma was accosted on campus by a courteous Southerner who asked if he’d ever thought of acting. Wilford Leach taught drama at Sarah Lawrence, and had come to Columbia looking for males to balance his all-female casts. Leach offered to let De Palma make films to use in his plays if he agreed to come, and De Palma signed up to do an MA at Sarah Lawrence after graduating from Columbia in 1962.
De Palma’s Byronic character and taste for film violence drew many of the college’s students to him, and he used some of them in his films. They included Jennifer Salt, daughter of blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Waldo Salt; a wealthy young woman named Cynthia Munroe; and leggy, neurotic Jill Clayburgh. The product of a wealthy but dysfunctional family, Clayburgh was in psychoanalysis from the age of nine. De Palma also roped in his Columbia roommates Jared Martin and William Finley, and a handsome young blond actor named Gerrit Graham, who would figure in his career for many years.
In 1963, America’s student film-makers were besotted with the nouvelle vague. De Palma suggested making a film à sketches, as some young French directors had done, each contributing a segment. De Palma planned a fantasy called Fairy Tale, while Munroe’s contribution would be a story based on the riotous wedding of De Palma’s friend Jared Martin. ‘Then the whole thing fell apart,’ recalls De Palma. ‘Cynthia’s story was basically the best, and we decided to do that one as a movie all by itself.’ They called it The Wedding Party.
De Palma, Munroe and Leach boosted the screenplay to feature length, though most of it would be improvised. Munroe raised the money – often quoted as $100,000, though, from the look of the film, shot on black-and-white 16mm with a hand-held camera, a small cast and almost no crew, the real figure was probably a tenth of that.
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
