but De Niro felt exploited, particularly when one such prop, a new suitcase, fell off the top of a car as it pulled into the mansion, and was damaged.
Leach and De Palma directed, with Leach having the deciding vote, usually after argument from the combative De Palma. Leach, later highly successful on Broadway with an updated version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance and his productions of Shakespeare, strove for high production values, which the amateur crew and inexperienced cast could seldom achieve. De Palma felt Pfluger played Charlie in a superficial manner. For his part, Leach disliked the occasional references to movies, from Singin’ in the Rain to Psycho, and the decision to introduce each segment with a silent-movie-style title card quoting from an imaginary marriage guide, ‘The Compleat Bridegroom’. He also disliked De Palma’s decision to undercrank the camera in the chase and driving scenes, giving the movie a Keystone Kops jerkiness.
As Cecil, comic relief of the trio of friends, De Niro had little to do. Arriving on the island struggling with a pile of sporting equipment, he bumbles about in the background, periodically taking part in rambling improvised conversations in which he and Baker first try to talk Charlie out of marriage, then into it. A drunken speech at the pre-wedding banquet that might have been his chance to shine is so badly post-synched that his words are mostly inaudible.
Periodically, production stopped as Leach returned to teaching. In one such break, in the summer of 1964, De Niro made another trip to Europe to see his father. De Niro Sr hadn’t lingered in Paris, but had moved to Gravigny, west of the city, then to Saint-Just-en-Chevalet, in the centre of France, near Clermont-Ferrand, and finally to Baren, above the resort of Luchon, near the Spanish border, his base for excursions into Spain and to North Africa. But France hadn’t proved the stimulant he’d hoped for, and Virginia could tell from his infrequent letters that her ex-husband was in trouble. She financed Bobby’s trip, with the idea that he would bring him back.
Bobby spent an enjoyable few weeks in Paris, where he could lose himself in the small hotels of the Left Bank around the Odeon and the Quartier Latin. He took language classes at the Alliance Française and met his share of local expatriates, but had little success with the French, whose reserve almost equalled his own.
Convincing his father to return to New York was an uphill task. Though Robert had been shipping his canvases back to American galleries, sales were meagre. Bobby urged him to look for a gallery in Paris, but his father refused; the market for his work, he insisted, was in New York.
After that, Bobby took off on an extended search for his roots. He hitchhiked around Ireland for a fortnight, looking for his mother’s family, but the country was thick with O’Reillys and he had no luck. Italy proved more fruitful, and he found cousins in Campobasso, sixty miles north-east of Naples. He also penetrated the Iron Curtain to visit Erwin and Marie Ley Piscator in East Berlin. When he returned to New York, it was with his father reluctantly in tow. Of that aspect of the trip, Bobby later told a friend, ‘It was an absolute nightmare.’
CHAPTER FIVE Sally, Candy, Andy and the Others
He can’t do Shakespeare and he can’t do comedy. How can you even begin to compare him with Brando?
Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, on De Niro’s acting ability
Editing The Wedding Party took years. Cynthia Munroe died, bequeathing the uncompleted film to Wilford Leach. Despite the delay, De Palma and De Niro remained friendly, even though De Niro was reticent, withdrawn, while De Palma, loud, sarcastic, with a genius for undiplomatic remarks, was the opposite.
Both came from Italian Catholic families but were raised in another faith, in De Palma’s case Presbyterian. Both fell under the influence of charismatic fathers, in De Palma’s case an orthopaedic surgeon. Just as De Niro had spent many hours watching his father work, De Palma sat in on his father’s operations, establishing a lifelong preoccupation with blood and flesh. In both cases, the marriage of their parents collapsed, though De Palma’s reaction to the break-up was characteristically extreme. He stalked his father, observing and recording his assignations with his mistress – an episode that appeared in his 1980 film Dressed to Kill.
In 1965 De Niro scored a role in a film which, though he is barely visible in his one scene, and the film was shown almost entirely in France, would reach the screen quickly, giving him his first official movie appearance.
Marcel Carné’s great days had been in the thirties and during World War II, near the end of which he had made Les Enfants du Paradis. In 1965, with his career running down, he was happy to take on an adaptation of Georges Simenon’s 1946 novel Trois chambres à Manhattan, which Jean Renoir had just abandoned after working at it, on and off, for a decade. Its hero, François, an actor, goes to New York to work on a television film after breaking up with his wife. In a bar he meets Kay, another lost soul whose flatmate has just left her. François and Kay start an affair. Maurice Ronet played François and Annie Girardot Kay.
Carné was given a week in New York to film some exteriors and ‘atmosphere’, including a scene in a Greenwich Village bar. Among the extras hired for a day was De Niro. It was not a particularly agreeable experience. ‘I remember a bunch of other young actors hanging around,’ he said, ‘moaning and bitching, all made-up, with pieces of tissue in their collars; it was the kind of thing you always hear about actors – where they’re just silly or vain, complaining back and forth, walking around primping, not wanting to get the make-up on their suits.’
But something about De Niro caught Girardot’s eye. ‘We chatted a little,’ says the actress. ‘And later, someone else on the film told me he had said I was “a good little guy”. Years later, I was surprised when I met him at a party in Paris, and he reminded me that we knew each other already, from Trois chambres.’
In 1963, seventeen-year-old Jimmy Slattery from Massapequa Park, Long Island, began a course of hormone shots that would turn him into a woman. Taking the name Hope Slattery, he began haunting Manhattan’s gay bars, and fell for Jackie Curtis, who, despite his cross-dressing, insisted truculently, ‘I got balls under my ballgown and I don’t care who knows it.’ Curtis completed Jimmy’s make-over with a new name, Candy Darling.
In 1968 Candy played a bit part in Andy Warhol’s Flesh, then starred in Women in Revolt, contributing the unforgettable line, ‘I’m young, I’m rich, I’m beautiful. Why shouldn’t I sleep with my brother?’
Lou Reed immortalised Candy in his anthem of the Warhol years, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, and Jackie, recognising star quality, volunteered to create a vehicle for her. Working day and night for a week, high on amphetamines, and inspired by the Hollywood stars of the forties whom Candy revered, in particular Lana Turner, he wrote a high-camp musical satire called Glory, Glamour and Gold, subtitled ‘The Life and Legend of Nola Noonan, Goddess and Star’. Candy would play Nola, enduring every indignity men could inflict, including rape. Curtis also wrote parts for prominent drag queens like Holly Woodlawn, another graduate of the Andy Warhol atelier.
Ten men contributed to Nola’s rise and fall, but nobody thought all of them could be played by the same actor until Bobby De Niro volunteered. Curtis claimed he ‘begged’ to be cast. ‘He came over to the director’s apartment where Candy, Holly Woodlawn and I were sitting around, and you would have thought he was crazy – we did.
“‘I gotta be in the play! I gotta be in the play! Please! I’ll do anything!’” he kept pleading.
‘I said to him, “Ten roles?”
