De Niro: A Biography. John Baxter

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but the hallways and lofts are big and high-ceilinged and the only place possible and available to a painter. There is space for easels, canvases of any size. There is a lavatory outside, running water and washstand inside, and that is all. On weekends, the heat is turned off. The enormous windows which give on the deafening traffic noise of 14th St have to be kept closed. There are nails on the walls for clothes, a Sterno burner for making coffee. We drink sour wine out of paper cups. There Virginia and Janet paint, study acting and dancing, type when they need money.’ This was the environment in which the young Robert Jr would be raised.

      Surprisingly to Nin, given their apparent naïveté, Virginia and her friends were all in psychoanalysis. As émigrés flooded into America from Austria and Germany, New York had become a centre of psychotherapy. Most creative people regarded analysis as essential to their intellectual growth, not to mention, in the cases of gays or bisexuals like Robert Duncan and Jackson Pollock, a quick route to military deferment. The fact that Nin kept a journal attracted instant interest, and everybody started one. Their analyst sent her a letter of thanks, saying it made his work much easier.

      Admiral’s work impressed Hans Hofmann sufficiently for him to accept her as a student, and in the summer of 1941 she arrived in Provincetown, where she met the young Robert De Niro, back for his second year. Hofmann had appointed him class monitor, and she and the dramatically handsome young man instantly struck sparks.

      Six years older than De Niro, Virginia was more sophisticated sexually, socially and politically. Though homosexuality would prove De Niro’s lifetime sexual choice, he remained, for the moment, bisexual. Telling her nothing of his homosexual inclinations, he became Admiral’s lover.

      For a while, they enjoyed a bohemian existence, living in a shack on the dunes, picking blueberries for pocket money, painting by day and partying by night, often at an illegal bar run by legendary Berlin dancer, choreographer and actress Valeska Gert.

      In 1925 Gert had appeared with Garbo in G.W. Pabst’s Joyless Street, and she acted in a number of other movies in the course of a sensational career. When the Nazis came to power, Gert, damned three times over as a lesbian, a Communist and a Jew, divorced her gay husband, married a young English admirer, also gay, in order to get a British passport, and, when the Germans threatened to invade Britain, fled to America. Washing ashore in Provincetown, she ran her bar, queened it over the local gays, and modelled nude for Hofmann’s classes, striking the eccentric poses from her Berlin cabaret act.

      After summer school ended, De Niro and Admiral stayed on, Robert getting work in the local fish cannery. Robert Duncan and Anaïs Nin visited, Nin confessing that she was supporting herself by writing pornography for Oklahoma oil millionaire Roy M. Johnson, who paid $1 a page. She’d recruited Henry Miller and one-time Paris publisher Caresse Crosby to help, and De Niro too joined the round-robin of writers. ‘Everyone is writing of their sexual experiences,’ Nin wrote. ‘Invented, overheard, researched from Krafft-Ebing and medical books. We have comical conversations. We tell a story and the rest of us have to decide whether it is true or false. Or plausible. Robert [Duncan] would offer to experiment, to test our inventions, to confirm or negate our fantasies.’ De Niro didn’t have the stamina of Nin, Duncan or Miller, however, nor the imagination. ‘It was very hard work,’ he recalled, ‘so eventually I went back to the fishery.’

      By the summer of 1941, he and Virginia had returned to New York and were sharing the 14th Street loft. Robert Duncan was a frequent visitor. Disinherited by his adoptive father, architect Edwin Joseph Symmes, he’d become a homosexual hustler. As he explained to one friend, ‘the ideal evening was to find a Scarsdale or Westchester husband who wanted a quick, anonymous fling before returning home to the wife and kids, and who would rent a hotel room in which you could spend the remainder of the night’.

      If he had no luck, Duncan would sometimes ‘crash’ at De Niro and Virginia’s loft. That he would seduce Robert was inevitable. They began having sex during one of Virginia’s brief absences and continued to do so secretly until Duncan was drafted at the end of 1941.

      Once he’d left, De Niro confessed everything to Virginia. The double betrayal enraged and astonished her. They argued through the night, forgetting the thinness of the partitions dividing their space from others on that floor. Suddenly, in a pause, they heard a voice through the wall from a neighbouring studio. ‘I have been listening to you,’ it said. ‘I have been weighing all your arguments. I think that Virginia is absolutely fair and right, and the behaviour of Bob and Robert treacherous and ugly.’

      Bob bolted out of the apartment and hammered on the nearest doors. There was no response from the three painters who lived there. For days, aghast that his secret was out, he ‘walked’, according to Anaïs Nin, ‘with shoulders bowed. He was silent. He looked haunted.’

      Duncan endured only six weeks in boot camp in San Antonio before declaring his homosexuality and winning a discharge on psychological grounds. ‘I am an officially certified fag now,’ he announced proudly when he arrived back in New York. Unaware of Robert’s confession, he turned up at the 14th Street loft, only to be ordered out by a furious Virginia while a much-chastened De Niro looked on helplessly.

      Like the rest of the ‘wash-ashores’, Valeska Gert also left Provincetown when the weather turned cold. In a basement at the corner of Morton and Bleecker Streets in Greenwich Village, she opened Beggars’ Bar, which, despite having no liquor licence, became a hangout for gays, radicals and the criminal fringe. Show people from uptown often turned up there to see Gert perform, or to watch visiting artists like dancer Kadidja Wedekind, whose father Frank wrote Lulu. Judy Garland, a regular, called Beggars’ Bar ‘the only cabaret in New York worth visiting’.

      De Niro waited tables there. So did Tennessee Williams. Williams doesn’t refer to De Niro by name in his Memoirs, though one incident does offer glimpses of the lifestyle they shared.

      ‘Towards the end of 1941,’ writes Williams, ‘I was companion to an abstract painter in the warehouse district of the West Village. The friend was, nervously speaking, a basket case. I mean he was a real freak-out before it was fashionable to be one.’

      One night Gert announced that, henceforth, the waiters would have to pool their tips, and share them with her. In the resulting fracas, the painter began hurling beer bottles. Gert went to hospital with a head wound, and Williams was out of a job. He moved in with the painter, who demanded that Williams cruise the streets for ‘carefully specified kinds of visitors’ as sex partners. Williams did so, helped by another friend, whom he identifies only as ‘the pilot fish’. The arrangement continued until some of the ‘visitors’ left with the painter’s valuables, and Williams was evicted.

      Whatever his part in these events, De Niro was already committed to the gay lifestyle represented by Gert, Williams and their friends. He remained, however, attached to Virginia, even besotted by her.

      Of the poems he wrote in this period, he chose to publish only six, all from ‘about 1941’. Floridly sensual, they’re reminiscent of Hart Crane (who committed suicide over his homosexuality) and Oscar Wilde.

      Light powdered her eyelashes, gilded her teeth

      lustered her hair

      but she refused to enter

      leaving in the doorway a pool from her milky body …

      Two nuns brought incense to cover

      the ends of her breasts

      Strange peacocks bloomed upon her thighs

      as only angels can …

      The ‘her’ in De Niro’s verse

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