of public education with truancy, inattention and a threat to strike a teacher. ‘His idea of school,’ his mother later complained, ‘was just not to show up.’
She switched him to the fee-paying McBurney School on 23rd Street, attached, improbably, to the YMCA. Run like a British prep school, McBurney had an excellent reputation, but its curriculum and discipline didn’t suit everyone. (Among those who’d found it uncongenial was J.D. Salinger, who flunked out of McBurney just before World War II. His experience there would find its way into The Catcher in the Rye.)
Having lagged behind, De Niro found himself in a class of younger kids, which made him feel even more of an outsider. When summer arrived, and he was told to attend a catch-up school if he wanted to come back in 1960, he rebelled. Instead, he told his mother, he wanted to spend summer in Europe, visiting his father. On his return, he promised, he would tell her what he’d decided to do with his life. She would not, he assured her, be disappointed.
Before he left, Bobby set the pattern of his future life when he made a brief appearance in television drama, his first experience of the media that were to fill his adult life. The soap opera Search for Tomorrow was broadcast live from New York, and the sixteen-year-old De Niro became one of many kids who had bit parts and walk-ons that season.
De Niro spent four months hitching around Europe, starting in Paris. His father painted him a sign in English and Italian: ‘Student Wants Ride’. The sign, and his charm, took him to Venice, Rome and Capri, where he met French actress Michele Morgan. Bobby told her his father was a famous artist in Paris who was eager to paint her portrait, but De Niro Sr gruffly turned down the job: ‘I wasn’t interested in doing her portrait, or anyone else’s.’
Back in New York in March 1960, Bobby saw the Cole Porter/Frank Sinatra musical Can Can with a friend. As they left the cinema, De Niro surprised his companion by telling him, ‘I’m going to do that.’
‘What?’ his friend asked.
‘Act in the movies.’
The friend laughed, and thought nothing of it. But, months earlier, when Bobby returned from Europe, he’d surprised Virginia with the news that, rather than going to college or even graduating from high school, he had decided to train as an actor instead.
I’ve never been one of those actors who has touted myself as a fascinating human being. I had to decide early on whether I was to be an actor or a personality.
Robert De Niro
Why did De Niro decide at the age of seventeen to become an actor?
Withdrawn, ill-educated, physically unremarkable, he was nobody’s idea of a stage or screen star. And it’s perhaps there that the answer lies. How does a timid person express himself except by taking on another personality? Lon Chaney’s parents were deaf-mutes, with whom he could communicate only via sign language – a situation analogous to De Niro’s upbringing by two people preoccupied with their own agendas.
Theatre was undergoing drastic redefinition when De Niro entered it. Acting and writing, regarded as professions before World War II, with formal structures, standards and requirements, were being invaded by people stronger on feeling than technique. The new writers, in the words of Jack Kerouac to Truman Capote, ‘didn’t want to get it right; just get it written’. Capote’s scornful response, ‘That’s not writing, Jack. That’s type writing,’ summed up the horror of classical stylists at such ad hoc creativity; but they were in the minority. By the early fifties, anyone who felt they’d like to try acting, singing or writing could usually find a platform.
Performance in particular became a magnet to the maladjusted. The actor was no longer the rock-jawed hero of Victorian melodrama, but a human being, weak and fallible. Producers and writers began to speak of ‘American’ and ‘European’ acting. American acting stressed flair and feeling, European acting text and technique. ‘The big difference is that in England we have a great tradition of theatre,’ says Kenneth Branagh, who in 1993 directed, produced and acted with De Niro in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. ‘Most actors work through many different styles, from Shakespeare to Noël Coward to Harold Pinter, so you learn technique. The Americans are wonderful at being ordinary, at being real and gritty, and yet they have difficulty when technique is required. You ask an American actor to immediately turn on the tears and play a very emotional scene, and he will find it difficult.’
Working at the Moscow Art Theatre through the 1920s, Konstantin Stanislavski developed a system of mental exercises and games for actors to help them access the feelings that paralleled the emotions of the characters they played. Books like Building a Character elaborated his system. It never had a formal name, but came to be called in theatre circles just ‘the Method’.
Until 1949, while the Piscators remained in charge at the New School, two of his teachers were edgy, vivacious Stella Adler, daughter of a distinguished family in the Yiddish theatre, and an irascible and opinionated little man named Lee Strasberg. Adler and Strasberg shared a rivalry that went back to 1931, when three producer/directors, Strasberg, Howard Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, broke away from New York’s conservative Theater Guild to launch the Group Theater. The Group Theater presented plays in repertory, like European companies, playing them in rotation with the same company of actors who, as in Europe, worked to achieve a unified style of performance. Stella Adler, who married its co-founder Howard Clurman, became a star with the Group, of which Lee Strasberg was the acting ideologue.
In Strasberg’s version of the Method, the performer built up a role by ‘affective memory’, tapping deep emotions and ‘sense memories’, which he or she used to create the character. To play comedy, one accessed happy memories; for tragedy, childhood traumas. Not everyone in the Group cared for this self-analysis. An actor in the grip of a primal Oedipal conflict, they argued, could hardly be expected to give a sensitive portrayal of Hamlet.
Convinced that Strasberg had got it wrong, Adler went to Paris in 1934 to study under Stanislavski. Her description of Strasberg’s system surprised him. This was a version of the Method he’d long since abandoned. ‘Affective memory’, he explained, endangered both the mental health of the actor and the validity of the performance. Adler returned to New York in triumph with the news, but Strasberg shrugged. ‘I don’t teach the Stanislavski Method,’ he said. ‘I teach the Strasberg Method.’
In 1947, Cheryl Crawford, with director Elia Kazan and producer Robert Lewis, bought a converted Orthodox church on West 44th Street and opened the Actors Studio, where performers could practise ‘American acting’. Here, with an audience of professional colleagues, they could try new things, and, probably, fail. But in the process of failure they would learn and grow. It was exactly the milieu Strasberg needed, and he jumped at the chance to become the Actors Studio’s director.
From the start, Strasberg imposed a strict regime. Only performers could attend. It would be years before producers and directors were allowed in as guests. Doors were ritually locked before each session. All applicants had to audition, and most didn’t make it. In 1955, out of the two thousand who tried, only two were admitted: Martin Landau and Steve McQueen. Once in, however, membership was for life, and the eight hundred ‘anointed’ members were regarded as a theatrical elite.
Adler set up in opposition at the New School, where she taught her version of the Method. Tennessee Williams was a student. So were Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Ben Gazzara and Marlon Brando, who became Adler’s lover, as he had been the lover of almost every other woman in the school.
While Piscator remained, he preached Expressionism: exaggerated gestures, symbolic poses, movements that externalised emotion – ‘Be big!’. Meanwhile, Stella in the basement was screaming at her students, ‘Don’t act! Stop acting!’ But once Piscator returned to East Germany, Adler inherited undisputed control, pointedly renaming the school ‘The Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting’. Her pronouncements became more