to get out of the house for the first time since her separation from Robert, Virginia applied for work through the welfare system. Since employment offices routinely directed out-of-work artists to any job which, under the loosest possible definition, involved painting, she found herself decorating fabrics and assembling jewellery. Before she was married she had made pin money typing, and now she started again, typing manuscripts for writers, and editing and typing theses for students at the New School for Social Research, just around the corner on 12th Street.
With its left-wing ideology and funding from wealthy liberals like the Rockefellers, the New School was a haven for European intellectuals fleeing Hitler. Its University in Exile, founded in 1934, accommodated four hundred of them, including German theatre director Erwin Piscator and his wife, the Viennese dancer Maria Ley.
In Berlin, Piscator had directed the Volksbühne theatre, supported by the labour unions. His productions of Meyerhold and Brecht, often using a bare stage, or a few sets in the Constructivist style pioneered in Soviet Russia, with the addition of film or projected images, attracted much attention, not least from the Nazis, who dubbed his work ‘degenerate’. (Piscator always claimed this charge, plus his Communism, led to his exile from Germany, though in fact the impetus was a paternity suit he looked certain to lose.)
Alvin Johnson, director of the New School, invited the couple to launch a programme of drama. Piscator immediately began hiring teachers, while his wife started dancing classes and a Saturday-morning theatre course for children.
Piscator was in his element at the New School. Dressed always in the most expensive silk and cashmere, white hair swept back to emphasise his leonine profile, he ruled the theatre department like a duke. Mel Brooks, later one of his students, parodied him in his film The Producers as the manic Nazi composer of the musical Springtime for Hitler.
Herbert Berghof, one of Max Reinhardt’s actors who’d arrived in America during the thirties and worked with the Theater Guild, managed the acting course. Other teachers included theatre historian John Gassner, editor of the Best Plays of the Year anthologies, Leo Kertz, Lisa Jalowitz, Theresa Helburn, James Light and, most notably, Stella Adler, who would become the most powerful influence on the young De Niro when he decided to become an actor.
When Piscator, under investigation in America for his Communist sympathies, returned to Germany in 1946, Maria Ley Piscator ran the New School’s drama workshop until 1949. Virginia typed her manuscripts and, through her, got similar work from other foreign writers, notably military historian Ladislas Farago. She also found time to paint, and, like Robert, had a solo show at Art of This Century in 1946. Peggy Guggenheim also included some of Virginia’s work at the 1947 Biennale in Venice, where she would shortly relocate permanently, along with her collection.
There was no money in art, however, and Virginia turned increasingly to writing. Her market was the most accessible one, the ‘true detective’ magazines. Lurid monthlies that filled the vacuum created by the demise of the old pulp crime magazines, they published accounts of real crimes, illustrated with original police photographs, augmented with gaudy art or posed photos, usually of terrified girls.
Detective World and Underworld Detective were edited by Lionel White, who wrote Clean Break, the novel on which Stanley Kubrick would base his first major success, The Killing, in 1956. (White’s pseudonymous contributors included hard-boiled crime novelist Jim Thompson, who scripted Kubrick’s film.) A typical Detective World article began: ‘It was Wednesday, October 2, and deep autumnal tints were already visible in the foliage surrounding Harrison’s aged courthouse.’ This line, in fact, comes from ‘Who Killed the 2 Sisters?’ in Detective World for April 1952, credited to one ‘Virgil E. La Marre’, a near-anagram for ‘Virginia Admiral’.
Robert’s first solo show in May 1946 at Art of This Century attracted critical attention, and he even sold some paintings, though insisting the proceeds go straight to Virginia. Not that there was much, since he refused to sell to people whom he felt wouldn’t appreciate his pictures. As late as 1989, when his son wanted to give Francis Coppola two canvases for his fiftieth birthday, Robert quizzed him at length about Coppola’s character. ‘You give it to someone, they put it in a closet,’ he grumbled before relinquishing the pictures, which Coppola hung in the hotel suite he maintained permanently at New York’s Plaza Hotel.
Virginia insisted that father and son spend as much time together as they wished. By osmosis, Bobby acquired many of his father’s traits, including the tendency to leave sentences dangling, or to descend into moody silence. Neither set much store by what he wore, where he lived or how he behaved. And watching his father discard version after version of a composition instilled Bobby’s conviction that ‘near enough’ was never good enough.
Years later, talking about her friendship with De Niro, Shelley Winters would create something of a furore by telling the New York Times, ‘Bobby will never talk about what made him the way he is, but I suspect he must have been a lonely kid, that somewhere along the line he was brutalised.’ If any psychological damage was inflicted on the young Bobby, his father’s sexuality and depression must have played a central part in it. Acting may well have been a form of self-therapy, as well as an attempt to come to terms with his ambivalent feelings towards Robert.
‘His father was important to him,’ says French actor and director Robert Cordier, who knew the young De Niro, ‘and his father was not recognised, and I think Bob got to thinking, “I owe him one.” I think becoming famous was very important to him to pay back his father. That has a lot to do with his drive. I think that has a lot to do with Bob’s will to succeed.’
Asked as an adult if he was close to his father, De Niro said, ‘Close? In some ways I was very close to him, but then …’ He was unable to go on, and his eyes filled with tears. When Robert died, Bobby preserved his studio as a shrine, in exactly the same disorder as when his father was working there. He still visits it from time to time. De Niro also dedicated his first film as director, A Bronx Tale, to his father, who died in 1993, the year it was released.
Uninterested in comfort, Robert moved frequently as space became vacant north and south of Houston Street, on Great Jones Street, West Broadway or Bleecker. ‘He had these dank lofts in NoHo and SoHo at a time when nobody wanted to live in those areas,’ says his son. ‘Often he was the only tenant who wanted to live in the building.’
Bobby got used to being sent out to Washington Square with a book if his father wanted to work. On occasion he’d take him along if he was teaching; his students were sometimes Wall Street brokers, and the class took place in a loft in the business district. On such occasions, he’d give Bobby paints and brushes. ‘He’d paint,’ said Robert shortly. ‘He had a good sense of colour.’ From time to time he’d ask him to pose – ‘but when you’re a kid,’ recalled Bobby, ‘the last thing you want to do is sit still for a long time.’ Rigorous even about pictures of his own son, Robert preserved only one image of Bobby, a superficially casual charcoal sketch.
When they did go out together, it was often to Washington Square, where they would rollerskate or play ball games. But Robert’s real enthusiasm emerged when the two went to the movies. First-run cinemas were too expensive, so they generally saw films at Variety Photoplay in the East Village, Loew’s Commodore at 6th Street and 2nd Avenue, or the Academy of Music on 14th Street – all second-run and revival houses offering two features for only fifty cents. Camille or Ninotchka was usually showing in at least one of them, and Bobby got to see these and other Garbo performances a number of times. Back home, he acted out his favourite scenes for his mother.
Camille fascinated Robert – not the first gay artist to find it inspirational: Jean Cocteau called it ‘a bad film raised to the heights by the extraordinary presence of Miss Greta Garbo’. To Robert, its impassive star embodied
