September 26, 1993 | For a superstar who’s long been notorious as a press-shy recluse, Robert De Niro certainly has been conspicuously visible in recent weeks.
There he is in the current issue of Vogue, offering quotes and cracking wise for an obviously awestruck interviewer. There he is in Toronto, hosting a press conference and granting private audiences during the Festival of Festivals.
And now, here is in a Manhattan hotel suite, spending time with a journalist who has just been whisked up to his room with all the secrecy and security-consciousness one might expect as prelude to meeting the President.
And if all that’s not enough, consider this: Next week, De Niro reportedly will host Saturday Night Live. Cowabunga!
Don’t worry, though: The most respected and influential actor of his generation hasn’t gone all Hollywood flash-and-trash. Rather, he’s gamely (if gingerly) going through the multi-media motions to promote A Bronx Tale, his debut as a feature film director.
This afternoon, he is meeting the press in khaki slacks, black shirt and a tweed jacket that appears to be the color of coffee that was left on the burner too long, then laced with an inadequate amount of milk. His graying dark hair is pulled into the beginnings of a ponytail. He is soft-spoken, polite, intently focused on any question directed his way — and, surprisingly, completely unintimidating. In fact, he’s actually — no kidding — personable.
And it’s all in a good cause, because A Bronx Tale — the funny and affecting story of a young man torn between two very different mentors, his bus-driver father (De Niro) and the neighborhood Wise Guy, Sonny (Chazz Palminteri) — is exceptional enough to be worth a few brief invasions of obsessively maintained privacy.
Not that De Niro will allow the invasions to go too far. A major theme in A Bronx Tale is the inevitability of rebellion by sons against the influence of their fathers. But when he’s asked about his fondest recollections of Robert De Niro Sr. — the noted Abstract Expressionist painter who died earlier this year, and whose memory is honored in the Bronx Tale closing credits — Robert De Niro Jr. turns typically taciturn.
“I’ve forgotten some things, consciously,” the actor responds to the question about his father, forming his words slowly, deliberately. “I can’t remember…”
A pregnant pause follows. Then, as though sensing his visitor is willing to wait as long as he will to break the silence, he continues.
“He did expound a lot,” De Niro allows. “Not in a preachy way. But he always had a very clear idea about art, and what he felt. And he had a lot of integrity about what he felt an artist should do. He was very traditional in that sense. He wasn’t part of what’s going on today, he was always into his own thing. At least, that was always my own impression.”
De Niro’s parents divorced when he was 2 years old. (De Niro’s mother, artist Virginia Admiral, later allowed her boyfriend, irascible film critic Manny Farber, to briefly share an apartment with her and young Robert — which, come to think of it, may partially account for De Niro’s aversion to journalists.) Still, De Niro admits the artist “was an influence, obviously, because he’s my father. There’s some connection…”
And a rebellion?
“Well, I wasn’t interested in painting,” De Niro admits. “Part of it is a rebellion, I guess, in that I never had any interest in painting. But his work — I love his stuff. And I’m very proud of it. But I was never interested in being an artist, really. I think my son is probably the same way. I don’t know what he’ll do.”
For the record: De Niro, 50, is the divorced father of two children: Drina, 26, whom he adopted during his marriage to her mother, actress Diana Abbott; and Raphael, his and Abbott’s 16-year-old son.
Does De Niro remember how he explained to them just what daddy does for a living?
“I never really explained what I do to them,” De Niro says, as though he found the question somehow mystifying. “It was sort of a given. Their mother may have, but I didn’t say anything.”
Not surprisingly, De Niro is a good deal more forthcoming — and, yes, a great deal more comfortable — when the conversation sticks to the film rather than the filmmaker.
He was drawn to A Bronx Tale after seeing actor-writer Chazz Palminteri perform it as a one-man stage play in Los Angeles. The show attracted several other would-be adaptors, but De Niro was the only one who agreed to let Palminteri play Sonny in the film version. So it was De Niro who landed the rights to the unlikely hot property.
“What I liked about the story is, it had a lot of heart,” De Niro says. “I loved the characters, and it was a real story with a real structure — a beginning, a middle and an end. And I thought I could do something with this.”
At some point during three years of on-again, off-again pre-production, “I decided it was probably better if I play the father,” De Niro says, “because it’d help the movie get made more easily. It was a good part for me to play, because I’d never done that type of thing. You always expect me to do the part that Chazz is playing.
“Also, I wasn’t in it all the time, so I wouldn’t have that pressure of carrying a movie. So I could reasonably feel I could direct myself.”
De Niro agrees that, in showing how a mobster’ s life might seem alluring to an impressionable youngster, he’s covering some of the same ground as GoodFellas and Mean Streets, movies he made with another living legend, director Martin Scorsese.
“But Chazz wrote something so specific. And I know he knew what he was writing about. And I knew it had nothing to do with the other movies.
“And it had its own right to be told.”
