De Niro: A Biography

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 is usually ambiguous. Later, in a series inspired by George Cukor’s Camille, he would write in the voice of Greta 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 with James Agee, who had a fourth-floor walk-up apartment at 172 Bleecker Street.

In 1942, Peggy Guggenheim included some of Admiral’s work in the Spring Salon for Young Artists at Art of This Century, and Alfred Barr bought one of her canvases, Composition, for the Museum of Modern Art. He only paid $100, but nobody else in her group had sold anything at all. Though Jackson Pollock was widely acknowledged as the brightest of the emerging New York School, it would be 1944 before Barr bought anything by him.

Virginia’s success, coming at a time when Robert had sold nothing himself, strained the marriage still more. He succumbed increasingly to depression. On the wall of his studio, he scribbled two lines from a poem by nineteenth-century poet and photographer Charles Cros, friend of Rimbaud and Verlaine: ‘Je suis un homme mort depuis plusiers années/Mes os sont recouvert par les roses fanées’ (‘I have been a dead man many years/My bones are clothed in faded roses’).

His resentment grew as it became clear that, despite her sale to MoMA, Virginia didn’t seriously contemplate a career in art. After the birth of Bobby, she concentrated on making a living. Robert had no such concerns. He lived for painting, unworried whether he sold his canvases or not. He wouldn’t achieve any kind of reputation until 1946, when Peggy Guggenheim gave him his first one-man show at Art of This Century, and another didn’t come along until 1950.

As if the social and sexual differences between Robert and Virginia were not enough, they also faced the classic artistic gulf between the figurative and the abstract. ‘For virtually his entire career,’ wrote critic Peter Frank, ‘Robert De Niro Sr painted recognisable images; still life objects, interiors, landscapes, the occasional religious subject, and, above all, figures.’ Composition and the rest of Admiral’s work was entirely abstract, and, given the prevailing movement away from Surrealism, more fashionable.

Being figurative placed De Niro, as one friend remarked, ‘on the wrong side of the commercial divide’. In 1949, Clement Greenberg would list De Niro, Pollock, de Kooning and Robert Motherwell as artists who ‘must still waste valuable energy in the effort to survive as working artists in the face of a public whose indifference consigns them to neglect and poverty’. By then, however, Robert’s finances were of less concern to Virginia, and to Bobby, because the De Niros were no longer living together.

CHAPTER THREE My Father’s Business

They are not girls. They are not boys. They can’t help it. They was born that way. Something in de throat.

Two old ladies commenting on homosexuals in Joel Schumacher’s screenplay for his film Flawless (1999), in which De Niro starred

As tensions increased in their marriage, Robert and Virginia began seeing a Freudian therapist. ‘Many artists who knew Hans Hofmann,’ recalls Barbara Guest, ‘went to a particular shrink whose patients (eventually) had terrible crises and breakdowns. But he couldn’t help them. He was a frustrated man – a failed artist, who meddled.’

The therapist may have been Dr Lawrence Kubie, who claimed to ‘cure’ homosexuals, and whose patients included such showbiz figures as bisexual playwright and director Moss Hart. Following their ‘treatment’, the De Niros agreed to separate, though since adultery still represented the main grounds for divorce, they decided, rather than air their sexual incompatibility in the courts, to delay a formal dissolution of the marriage.

While his parents worked out new domestic arrangements, Bobby was sent to his father’s parents in Syracuse, where, despite Robert’s hostility towards Catholicism, Bobby’s grandparents had him baptised. Though Robert was furious, the gesture had little real effect, since Bobby was almost immediately returned to New York, and to his mother. Nevertheless, being ‘officially’ Catholic would cement him even more firmly into the Italo-American culture.

Robert moved into a Greenwich Village studio, and immersed himself in the principles of Abstract Expressionism. What those principles were depended on who taught them. Art historian Lee Hall calls Abstract Expressionism ‘an attitude, if not a proper philosophy, of art [which] pits the lonely and searching individual against the unknown (possibly unknowable) first forces of the universe, casting the painter in the role of voyager and seeker after truth. By courting accidents resulting from the manipulated collision of materials, by taking risks with the surprising imagery that results, and by exploring that imagery to discover new vision, the painter creates an order that embodies his or her quest. To the Abstract Expressionist, the process of painting is more valued than the product, the finished painting.’ As an actor, Bobby would also conceive himself as a ‘voyager and seeker after truth’ whose work embodied the ‘manipulated collision of materials’ to achieve ‘surprising imagery’.

Always a slow worker, Robert became slower still. For every canvas completed, he threw out a hundred, then reworked the survivors, often erasing the entire design before starting over. Despite this, his work changed little over the years. He shared Matisse’s enthusiasm for North African subjects, and, when a magazine photograph of Moorish women posed in an elaborate interior caught his eye, began painting his own versions of it – but, with characteristic obsessiveness, continued to do so for twenty years. A driven search for ‘perfect’ colours gradually made his pictures brighter, but his canvases of the late forties feature the same roughly painted figures as those he exhibited four decades later.

‘He had a few friends,’ says Barbara Guest, ‘but mostly was alone in the tremendously cluttered place in which he painted. Sometimes I saw him out walking, and a scene plays across the screen of my mind of the day I saw him, standing on the sidewalk, talking to a woman friend while he held his mongrel dog on a leash. It was a typical encounter, a repeated scene in his life. There was no social life of dinners etc. There were many parties he did not attend, or at which he showed up as if out walking the dog.’ When he did arrive at a party, he was seldom a social asset. ‘He was given to acid comments about the art scene,’ says Guest. ‘He preferred provocative conversations.’ If he found a subject uninteresting, half-finished sentences would tail off into silence.

Virginia and Bobby remained in the Bleecker Street apartment. As long as Bobby was too young for nursery school, she took paying work she could do at home. For a while, she framed pictures at $1.25 an hour – not enough to maintain the loft, which in any event was about to be taken over by The Little Red Schoolhouse, an elementary school launched to give the children of Greenwich Village the sort of education demanded by radical parents. Virginia moved to a smaller apartment, at 521 Hudson Street, a building mostly of studios, where many painter friends rented space. She stayed there until she found a better place at 219 West 14th Street. The rent was high, at $50 a month, but the two-room apartment with its parquet floors and central heating was too tempting. Bobby would grow up and live most of his young adult life here.

When he was old enough, Virginia placed Bobby in the nursery school attached to Greenwich House on Barrow Street. Set up to provide arts training and a social centre to the downtown area, Greenwich House included music and pottery schools, as well as its kindergarten, which charged working mothers only $1.25 a month.

Starting at the nursery brought De Niro into contact for the first time with the Ethical Culture Movement, which ran a free kindergarten and various humanitarian projects in and around New York. Founded by Felix Adler in 1876, Ethical Culture offered a substitute for organised religion, founded on ethics and morality rather than dogma. Adler spelled out its four principles: ‘1. Every person has inherent worth; each person is unique. 2. It is our responsibility to improve the quality of life for ourselves and others. 3. Ethics are derived from human experience. 4. Life is sacred, interrelated and interdependent.’ Though never particularly religious, De Niro, with Virginia’s encouragement, would grow away from his grandparents’ Catholicism towards the principles of Ethical Culture. When he married in 1976, it would be at the group’s New York headquarters, and he remains an enthusiastic supporter of its activities.

Able 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.