Garbo. But the sense of erotic fascination is palpable.
In December 1941, Robert and Virginia took the unexpected decision to marry. America’s entry into the war that month may have played a part, since De Niro was of draft age, but the decision was probably more quixotic. In their circle, marriages between sexually mismatched partners were almost the norm. Jackson Pollock entered a stormy marriage with fellow artist Lee Krasner, and even Robert Duncan took a wife – Marjorie McKee, the first, and probably only, woman with whom he had sex. They divorced a few months later, after an early pregnancy and abortion – a pattern not far from that which the De Niros would follow.
Three people effectively ran contemporary art in New York in 1942. They alone had the funds to buy and show new work. One was Alfred Barr, head of the Museum of Modern Art. The other two were an uncle and niece, who, far from enjoying any family feeling, were usually at each other’s throats.
Marguerite ‘Peggy’ Guggenheim had expected to inherit millions when her father died in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Instead the money went mostly to her uncles. She received only $450,000, which was held in trust. Although still a fortune, her comparatively meagre inheritance influenced Peggy to hoard every dime, and earned her, over the years, a reputation for cheapness. Her friend David Hare called her ‘avaricious to the point of comedy: the kind of person who goes from place to place, looking for the cheapest bottle of milk, and argues about who pays for the coffee’.
Drawn to the art world, Peggy moved to Europe and plunged into the bohemia of Paris and London. In London, at the urging of her friend Marcel Duchamp, she opened a gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, which showcased mostly Surrealist art. Few of its shows made money, but Peggy insisted artists sign a contract agreeing to let her buy any unsold pictures at $100 each – supposedly to encourage the artists but actually to build up a collection cheap.
In 1939 she fled to New York, towing the painter Max Ernst, whom she later married. Providently, she’d sent ahead her collection, part of which she put on show in 1942 at the gallery called Art of This Century which she’d had built on West 57th Street. Art of This Century had curved wooden walls, and lighting of startling originality. The paintings, unframed, hung on metal cantilever arms, each surmounted with a photograph of the eyes of the artist. Other canvases circulated on a conveyor belt, popping into sight for a few moments only.
Only a few blocks away, at 24 East 54th Street, Peggy’s uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim, had established the Guggenheim Foundation. It, and Guggenheim himself, were dominated by the Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwisen, his mistress.
Thirty years younger than he, Rebay relished the power conferred by her lover’s wealth. Dressed like a Hollywood columnist in amazing hats and outfits that were like theatrical costumes, Hilla Rebay queened it over the Foundation and its shows, which mostly exhibited her own work and that of her friends. It was also Rebay’s idea to christen their New York headquarters ‘The Museum of Non-Objective Painting’, a reproof to the Museum of Modern Art, which was just round the corner.
Shrewd artists played Barr, Rebay and Peggy Guggenheim against one another. Peggy could present shows, recommend artists to other gallery-owners, and even buy paintings – Jackson Pollock painted a mural for her Manhattan home – but she was notoriously slow to spend actual money. Rebay, on the other hand, had none of Peggy’s taste, but offered cash to anyone who pledged allegiance to the Guggenheim Foundation. She funded the school set up on 8th Street by Hans Hofmann, who made no secret of his scorn for Peggy’s speciality, Surrealism.
Rebay also disbursed monthly grants of $15 a head to Hofmann’s best students, including De Niro and Admiral, for canvas and paints. The sum seems derisory today, but few modern artists in New York then made any money at all. Max Ernst’s son Jim was considered lucky to be earning $25 a week in the Museum of Modern Art’s stock room. Clement Greenberg, the country’s most perceptive critic of emerging art, worked as a postal clerk, and wrote in his spare time. Jackson Pollock dressed department-store windows, silk-screened designs on scarves and umbrellas, and painted dials for aircraft instruments (with Elaine, the wife of Willem de Kooning, working next to him).
In 1942, Rebay offered both Pollock and De Niro full-time work at the Foundation, answering queries from the public. She even paid for the black suits the job required. The men sometimes had to sleep in the poorly-secured building overnight, but both were glad of the $35 a week.
Even aside from their sexual disparity, Robert and Virginia, each at the start of a career, and with little in common socially, politically or intellectually, were hardly credible as husband and wife, and even less likely parents. But towards the end of 1942 Virginia briefly took care of an infant cousin, and the experience, she explained later, stirred a maternal impulse she’d never suspected. Gripped briefly by this urge, she became pregnant, and on 17 August 1943 her first and only child, Robert Jr, was born. To avoid confusion with his father, he soon became ‘Bobby’, and carried that name all his life.
The 14th Street studio was no place to bring up a baby, so the De Niros found another loft at 220 Bleecker Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village, between McDougal Street and 6th Avenue. It occupied the entire top floor and, once a wall was knocked out to create two big studio spaces and a bedroom, made a comfortable, if draughty home. Scavenged radiators softened the chill. Baths were taken in a tin tub in the kitchen.
Young Bobby became used to being picked up, played with, but put down as the novelty palled. Family friends remember a child who was ‘never coddled’. He was already marking out his own territory. There was plenty for him to discover in the cavernous space, and, left to his own devices, he probed every cranny. Curiosity became his strongest motivation. It would make him, in adulthood, supremely inquisitive, ready to spend months probing, observing, imitating.
Bobby never lost his enthusiasm for his parents’ style of life, nor for the district where they raised him. He lives in a loft himself, and in 1997 boasted of his parents’ prescience. ‘They were aware of lofts, of industrial … whatever ya wanna call it; culture, blah blah … way before they became fashionable. SoHo was a lot different [then]. It was just a total industrial area that nobody thought of as a place to live. Warehouses, factories; stuff like that.’
Whatever the material drawbacks, the Village and its environs was the place to live if you were involved in the arts. ‘Except for the museums, theatres and opera,’ wrote the critic Lionel Abel, ‘all that was humanly essential to the city was bounded by Bleecker and 14th Streets, by 2nd Avenue and Greenwich Street. There was no other residential section in New York.’
Bobby absorbed the same belief. Accepting the 1997 Municipal Art Society’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Medal for his efforts to help revive TriBeCa, the downtown Manhattan neighbourhood where he’d opened a pair of restaurants and established a film centre, De Niro told the audience, ‘I just want to thank the Municipal Art Society for holding this downtown, because I really don’t like to go above 14th Street.’
It’s surprising that the marriage of the De Niros lasted as long as it did. On top of his sexual incompatibility with Virginia, Robert could be a trying companion. ‘“Affability” is not a word that applies to Bob,’ said his friend Barbara Guest, ‘nor is “social”.’ Art critic Thomas Hess remembers him as ‘tall, saturnine, given to black trenchcoats, his face sharp as a switchblade, with a temperament to match’. His moods swung between elation and black depression. ‘Since I was a child,’ he confessed later, ‘I have felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.’
Admiral, though equally intense, was more social. Friends, both artistic and political, thronged the apartment day and night, arguing, gossiping, flirting, plotting. She attracted men, in particular writers Manny Farber and Clement Greenberg. The most authoritative voice in American cinema criticism, Farber was always dropping in, since he was writing a screenplay
