attended regularly, as did Charles Laughton, who had a particularly close relationship with Al Pacino. Winters, by virtue of her movie career, was appointed one of the ‘Moderators’ who guided discussions when Strasberg wasn’t present. At the same time, resigning herself to the onset of middle age, she began taking character roles, and even won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 1959 for The Diary of Anne Frank.
De Niro impressed Winters instantly. ‘He was skinny and very gentle, with dark watchful eyes,’ she recalled. ‘He didn’t say much. He had very little money at that point and he used to ride around town on a rickety old bike.’ She later implied a romance between them – almost certainly wishful thinking. Despite his involvements with Kirkland and the actress Susan Tyrrell, De Niro was immature, still living at home and very much under the thumb of the assertive Virginia.
Winters did, however, have an ulterior motive for wanting to meet him. In 1959, in the throes of redefining herself, she had written a play, Gestations of a Weather Man. Not surprisingly, it portrayed three incidents in the life of an Oscar-winning actress. The third section called for a charismatic young actor, and from what Kirkland had told her, De Niro seemed ideal. Pulling strings, she got him into the Studio. ‘She got permission for he and I to work on scenes as working observers,’ recalls Kirkland. ‘She had just made me a member; talked Lee Strasberg into allowing my audition to get me in. Bobby was very good and we worked almost every week for a period of time.’
Though Strasberg would retrospectively claim De Niro as a product of the Studio, and display among his trophies a photograph of the two embracing, Bobby never auditioned for the Studio, and though he spent seven years as occasional observer and performer, remains circumspect about the worth of Strasberg’s teaching, which he calls ‘another thing’ from Stella Adler’s system. Many actors, Pacino among them, accepted the professional value of membership of the Actors Studio without necessarily embracing its ideas, and De Niro, like Pacino, may well have ‘blocked his ears’ to the discussions that followed each student performance; Pacino admitted he would count numbers mentally rather than listen.
‘It was beneficial and helpful,’ De Niro said of his Strasberg experience, choosing his words carefully. ‘What I thought was better was when a director would come up and have a session. Because a director had a mixture of experience and practical doing. A director would get up and say, “We’ll do this and do that.” 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.’
Once her two protégés were established at the Studio, Winters tried to persuade her agency, ICM, to represent them, but it was a bridge too far. Kirkland says, ‘The higher-ups at ICM said, “Who are they?” We both got turned down by ICM in 1968.’ But shortly after, De Niro acquired an agent, in Richard Bauman, who would represent him through the first part of a fast-accelerating career.
CHAPTER SIX Shelley and the Boys
I met a man in filmland, a patron of the arts, He bought my scheme to turn my dream into a peeping art.
From tide song of the film Hi, Mom!
As he approached twenty-five, De Niro felt that his working life hadn’t really begun. He had little commitment to acting as a career. ‘I didn’t want to act for a while,’ he later told Chris Hodenfield of Rolling Stone magazine. ‘I was afraid that I would get wrapped up in it so much that I wouldn’t have time to do what I wanted.’ He still thought he might return to Europe, and spend more time in Paris, where he’d enjoyed the sense of anonymity. For the moment, he did the next best thing, playing in occasional off-Broadway plays, just another obscure fringe performer.
But 1968 marked his definitive decision to take acting seriously. ‘When I was about twenty-four or twenty-five,’ he said, ‘I committed; started to look for stuff, go out on auditions, sent out résumés. The whole thing.’
The change had much to do with Brian De Palma, who, having graduated from Sarah Lawrence, continued to make short films. Their voyeuristic undertone was increasingly obvious, particularly in the 1966 Murder à la Mod, a three-part fantasy with a middle section much influenced by Hitchcock. The film attracted interest, but no distributor, so De Palma used his earnings from working in a Village restaurant to hire the Gate Cinema in the East Village and show it himself.
One person who saw it was Charles Hirsch, who had a vague job scouting new talent for Universal, which was toying with the idea of investing in some low-budget features to cash in on the student audience and the art-house boom. Through Hirsch, De Palma got a small development grant from Universal’s parent company, MCA, but they rejected all his ideas as too radical.
De Palma and Hirsch became friends, however, and sat around Universal’s New York office for days on end, talking movies. ‘Out of that frustration,’ says De Palma, ‘smoking cigarettes and waiting for someone to return our calls, we came up with the idea for Greetings.’
The inspiration was Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine Feminine, a film in fifteen fragments during which Jean-Pierre Léaud moves in with a girl he meets in a café, then spends the rest of the film wandering Paris, quizzing her and her friends about politics and their way of life.
Writing their screenplay, De Palma and Hirsch addressed a similar ragbag of topical issues: marijuana, pornography and censorship, computer dating, the underground press, the new climate of tolerance for homosexuality, the Kennedy assassination; but particularly Vietnam and its manifestations on TV. The three lead characters, Paul, Jon and Lloyd, are all preoccupied with avoiding the draft: the title comes from the preamble of the draft notice – ‘From the President of the United States, Greetings.’
Nobody in Hollywood found the script very funny, so Hirsch offered to produce it, finding the $43,000 budget himself. De Palma rounded up a cast, mostly of old friends prepared to work for little or nothing. Gerrit Graham played Lloyd, the conspiracy theorist, and De Niro, with nothing particular on the horizon, agreed to be the voyeur and De Palma alter ego Jon Rubin. Not yet confident enough to leave his day job, Hirsch waited until his paid vacation, during the thirteen days of which he and De Palma shot the film.
Greetings announced its topicality from the first scene. Audiences accustomed to the kneejerk patriotism of films like The Green Berets hooted as Paul, hoping to be so badly beaten up the army won’t accept him, walks into a tough bar and demands, ‘Which one of you niggers wants to take me on?’ He escapes with only a few cuts and bruises, however, and Lloyd and Jon urge him to think more imaginatively – pretending, for instance, to be homosexual, or part of the fascist underground.
In any event, they decide he should arrive at the recruitment office exhausted, to which end they keep him awake for two nights, dragging him around New York city and involving him in their own obsessions, in Lloyd’s case the Kennedy killing and in Jon’s sex, in particular voyeurism. Lloyd chats with an artist about the way in which photographs, enlarged, can reveal unexpected truths, and even uses the nude body of a girl to mark Kennedy’s wounds and argue that a single bullet couldn’t have caused them. Another conspiracy freak contacts him in the bookshop where he and Jon work, warning him that shadowy forces threaten any who discover The Truth. In the end, a sniper’s bullet makes Lloyd the eighteenth victim of the Kennedy conspiracy.
Meanwhile, Paul tries dating by computer, which matches him with a series of unsatisfactory partners. Jon follows women around New York, filming them. Trailing one to the Whitney Museum, he’s sold a 16mm porn film by a man in the forecourt, who assures him it’s a work of art. He also picks up a shoplifter and persuades her to undress while he films
