play perfectly suited a chameleon like De Niro. Curtis and Candy persuaded Warhol and his entourage to attend the opening at the tiny Bastiano’s Cellar Studio in Greenwich Village on 7 August 1968. Andy called De Niro’s performance ‘a tour de force’. The Village Voice would write, ‘De Niro made clean, distinct character statements in a series of parts which many actors would have fused into a general mush. De Niro is new on the scene and deserves to be welcomed.’
Actress Sally Kirkland was in Warhol’s group at the opening, and went backstage to compliment De Niro. ‘Do you know that you are going to be the most incredible star?’ she told him.
To De Niro, Kirkland, tall, busty and blonde, seemed to live in the headlines. She’d just become the first actress to appear totally nude in a ‘legitimate’ play, the off-Broadway production of Sweet Eros by Terrence McNally. With ‘Yippies’ Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, she’d invaded the New York Stock Exchange and showered incredulous brokers with dollar bills. She also appeared naked on the cover of Screw magazine, riding a pig. Later, she moved to California, was ordained as a minister of the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, and started teaching acting and relaxation technique, as well as playing occasional small roles in movies.
‘He was unbelievably shy,’ Kirkland says of De Niro. ‘I thought perhaps I was embarrassing him. But I could tell that, more than anything, he wanted to believe it.’ De Niro was still reticent with women. Traditionally, 85 per cent of theatre students are female, a fact which his most distinguished predecessor at the Conservatory, Marlon Brando, had exploited without scruple, but De Niro felt uncomfortable around his fellow students, and had no regular girlfriends. All his energy was directed towards performance. As one friend of the time, Diane Ladd, remarked, ‘Bobby was hell-bent on being a success but not just a movie star. He didn’t want to be a star. He wanted to be an actor.’
But Kirkland’s compliments fell on fertile ground. Thereafter, De Niro would ring up and ask her, ‘Do you really think I’m any good? Do you really?’ His naked need for reassurance shocked some friends. A few years later, when his mentor Shelley Winters confessed she hadn’t seen a preview of his film Bang the Drum Slowly, De Niro hung up on her.
The acquaintance with Kirkland ripened into a friendship that would influence De Niro’s career. ‘We were very, very close friends then in that whole time frame,’ Kirkland says. ‘I think he liked me because I had always been very social and he was always shy. I really thought he was a genius and I told everyone. I was always telling people, “Hire Robert De Niro.” He was always very intense. If you pushed his buttons, you’d know it. He’s Italian. He has that caution. He seemed to know that because of my work with Strasberg and Shelley Winters, I could match his intensity, and I was forgiving of it.’
Both ambitious, they spent hours in the De Niros’ 14th Street apartment rehearsing, mostly in the kitchen. Kirkland’s eccentricity resonated with the fury on which De Niro drew for his best work. ‘We had so much rage and energy in us,’ she says. ‘We would go at each other, have knockdown fights – kitchen-sink-drama-style.’
Already De Niro had formulated his theory that one had to ‘earn the right’ to play a role, either by detailed research or by transforming one’s appearance. When a scene demanded a costume, he had plenty to choose from. ‘Bobby had this walk-in closet,’ says Kirkland. ‘It was like going into a costume room backstage of a theatre. He had every conceivable kind of get-up imaginable – and the hats! Derbies, straw hats, caps, homburgs.’
Well into the eighties, De Niro browsed the flea markets and thrift shops of the Lower East Side, collecting all sorts of clothing – because ‘costumes can look too created’. It was to pay off -notably on Raging Bull, where a cheap two-toned jacket gave him the clue to the character of Jake La Motta.
De Niro got interested in photography, and offered to make a photographic record of his father’s canvases. He also took a professional interest in his own portraits. ‘Bobby had this composite [photograph] he’d carry around with him to auditions,’ recalls Sally Kirkland. ‘Twenty-five pictures of himself in various disguises. In one, he was like this IBM executive, in another, a professor with glasses and a goatee, in another a cab driver – to prove to casting directors he wasn’t an exotic. And he’d always have a stack of paperback novels with him too – ideas for characters he might play, might turn into screenplays for himself. He was totally focused on his work.’
Casting director Marion Dougherty, a friend of many years, also remembers De Niro’s portfolio of pictures. ‘One of them, I remember, was particularly striking. He was made-up as an eighty-year-old man. In other shots, he was wearing costumes of all kinds. I had never seen anything like that in any of the portfolios young actors carry around, which are for the most part glamour shots.’
De Niro’s degree of preparation went well beyond simply putting on costume and make-up to have his portrait taken. David Scott Milton, who created the original material for the 1971 film Born to Win, in which De Niro had a small part, remembered how he turned up for his first interview with a thick ‘character’ book, an album of pictures showing him in various make-ups and outfits.
‘Now, it was common practice for actors in those days – as it’s done even today – to work up a series of character photos. But Bobby had done more than that: he had actually worked on the characters. He told me he had done this for Stella Adler’s classes, worked up fully-drawn characters, not just character photos: dozens of them.’
Just how much costume and make-up meant to De Niro emerged more than thirty years later, when he revealed that he’d hoarded every major item of wardrobe from all his films, a collection that, in the year 2000, comprised 2600 costumes and five hundred items of make-up and props.
To find inspiration in a costume isn’t in itself odd, but to hoard them distinguishes De Niro from the majority of movie actors, who attempt to remove barriers between themselves and the audience rather than erecting them. Once again, it’s behaviour one would expect from actors of an earlier tradition, like Chaney, Muni and such character comics as Bert Lahr. John Lahr wrote of his father, ‘Our small, sunless 5th Avenue apartment was full of Dad’s disguises, which he’d first used onstage and in which he now occasionally appeared on TV. The closet contained a woodsman’s props (axe, jodhpurs, and boots); a policeman’s suit and baton; a New York Giants baseball outfit, with cap and cleats. The drawers of an apothecary’s cabinet, which served as a wall-length bedroom bureau, held his toupees, starting pistol, monocle, putty noses, and make-up.’ In an odd coincidence, De Niro’s first acting role was also the one that made Lahr famous – the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.
De Niro’s interest in costumes and transformation, as well as demonstrating again his roots in nineteenth-century theatre and the Hollywood of the thirties, shows how much, despite his many friends at the Actors Studio, his sympathy lay with Adler’s theory, not Strasberg’s. Strasberg performers shunned costumes. Nor did his Method stress physical transformation. Marlon Brando, whether playing the Emperor Napoleon or a beat-up-boxer-turned-dockworker, was always recognisably Brando.
Actors Studio performers spoke of their body as their ‘instrument’ – a device which, though capable of many tunes, remained physically untransformed. De Niro, by contrast, thrived on transformation. None of his outfits, however, were costumes that might be used in classical roles: no doublets, no cloaks, no togas. Except for the reformed eighteenth-century slaver Mendoza in The Mission, De Niro has never played a period role. Even Martin Scorsese couldn’t persuade him to play Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, De Niro explaining that he would always feel uncomfortable in robes.
In his early twenties, De Niro spent some time in psychoanalysis, the better to understand his conflicted attitude to his parents and his need to hide himself in invented characters.
