narcotics officer, sided with Passer. De Niro changed his clothes for something less flamboyant. ‘I thought Bobby’s approach was right, logically and theatrically,’ says Milton. ‘Ivan’s concern was that this subsidiary part not become so interesting that it overshadowed the main thrust of the film. Bobby couldn’t think this way. To him every part was a lead part.’
In time, Born to Win, re-released first as Born to Lose and later as The Addict, would earn grudging respect, though, ironically, the factor that put it back into circulation was the growing reputation of De Niro, whose role could have been played by anyone. As J, George Segal gave a career-best performance. The film also launched Karen Black, who played Parm, to the eventual Hollywood heights of Airplane. De Niro, long-haired and looking too young for the role, had four scenes as one of the cops. Even had the part been bigger, it would have done him little good, since an appalled United Artists first recut Born to Win to emphasise its comic elements, then barely released it. ‘They didn’t open it,’ said Pauline Kael. ‘They just let it out.’
Of fifty-six Broadway shows that opened in the 1970–71 season, only four – Home, Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, Oh! Calcutta! and Sleuth – earned back their costs. Off-Broadway fared little better. Theatregoers, facing the prospect of being mugged, having their car stolen and being accosted by drug dealers or whores, preferred staying home in front of the television, which was booming with the launching of series like All in the Family and Columbo. Hollywood didn’t help. The three major movies with New York settings, The French Connection, Klute and Shaft, showed the city as a sewer of drugs and crime, while a fourth, The Hospital, suggested that, if you survived a mugging or shooting, you might not live through the medical treatment.
With growing alarm, De Niro watched other New York actors, only a few years older than him, like Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, make their reputations and go on to major careers in movies. What was worse, actors of his own age like Christopher Walken were edging into the limelight. He sensed a real risk that he would be left behind. The lesson was driven home when his major competitor, Al Pacino, won a big role in the film of Mario Puzo’s Mafia epic The Godfather.
In retrospect, The Godfather was the film De Niro had been waiting for. A crime story with an Italian-American background, it invited the sort of operatic performance of which he was uniquely capable. When the project passed to Francis Ford Coppola to direct, it looked even more promising. An Italian-American himself, with New York roots, Coppola announced early that he would shoot the film in and around the city, and with local performers, ideally Italian-American.
Behind the scenes, however, the project was already in trouble. A dozen directors, including Arthur Penn, Fred Zinnemann, Sidney Furie, Peter Yates, Richard Brooks and Constantin Costa Gavras, turned it down before it arrived on the desk of Coppola, a director with a couple of flops on his record who had, however, just scripted Patton, already $9 million into profit after nine months. Paramount were desperate enough to send executive Peter Bart to San Francisco to beg Coppola to both write and direct The Godfather, but he did so reluctantly, seeing it as just another potboiler, cashing in on a best-selling novel.
Almost immediately, Coppola clashed with Paramount over locations and casting. The studio preferred that he shoot in Hollywood, not New York, and with well-known actors, not the unknowns he auditioned in Manhattan through the spring and summer of 1971.
Ethnicity became a big issue in The Godfather’s casting. ‘What about Robert Redford for the character of Michael Corleone?’ the studio suggested. Coppola responded that, among other things, Redford was blond. ‘He could be from northern Italy,’ they coaxed.
Both Coppola and producer Al Ruddy wanted the glowering Al Pacino to play Michael Corleone, but Paramount’s head of production Robert Evans vetoed him. Anyone, drawled the WASP executive, would be better than this short, muttering, impassive, ethnic unknown. Wearily, Coppola filmed tests for Michael with Martin Sheen and his old friend James Caan, already pencilled in to play Michael’s quick-tempered elder brother Sonny. With black wigs and dark Sicilian make-up, both looked ridiculous. Marcia Lucas, wife of George Lucas, was cutting the tests. ‘Use Pacino,’ she urged Coppola. ‘He’s the only one whose eyes address the camera.’
Coppola agreed, but he still had to kowtow to Evans. Thinking two moves ahead, he started testing other actors for the role of Sonny, just in case Caan had to take over from Pacino. Among them was De Niro.
Sally Kirkland takes credit for suggesting Bobby, though he was far from the only person up for the part. ‘I was one of the four hundred … well, more like four thousand, who tested,’ said De Niro. ‘They were all over the place, sitting on the cement floor … Foreigners, amateurs, guys who spoke like “deez and doze” …’
As an audition piece, Coppola asked everyone to do the scene where Sonny mocks Michael for offering to assassinate a crooked cop and his gangster confederate. The war hero who didn’t want any part in the family business now proposes to kill two men at point-blank range. ‘It isn’t like the war,’ sneers Sonny. ‘You don’t shoot people from a hundred yards away. You put the gun against their head and get brains on your nice new suit.’
For his test, De Niro tucked back his long hair with a woman’s hairclip and selected a hat from his collection, narrow-brimmed and faintly comic. He looked, in fact, like Gene Hackman’s ‘Popeye’ Doyle in The French Connection. His reading of Sonny was equally eccentric – mocking but manic. Coppola called the test ‘electric’, but De Niro’s concept didn’t fit the part. ‘This was Sonny as a killer,’ said Coppola. ‘It wasn’t anything you could sell. But I never forgot it, and when I did Godfather II, I thought he could play the young Brando.’
Reluctantly, Evans accepted Pacino. ‘$400,000 spent on tests,’ says Caan sarcastically, ‘and Paramount ends up with four corned-beef sandwiches.’ To complicate matters, Pacino, assured by Al Ruddy that he had no chance of being in The Godfather, had signed to appear in MGM’s The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight, about to begin filming across the river in the Redhook district of Brooklyn. Even worse for Paramount, MGM refused to cancel Pacino’s contract. Evans claims he had to pull strings with his criminal contacts inside the construction unions to get MGM to release Pacino, and even then had to hand over the screen rights to one of Harold Robbins’ novels as well.
Coppola, meanwhile, hoping to hang onto De Niro, signed him for a small role. Coppola remembers it as that of Carlo Rizzi, the handsome turncoat whose marriage to Connie, the only Corleone daughter, opens the film. Others claim it was Paulie Gatto, the young driver who also betrays the family and ends up dead on the New Jersey flatlands, a bullet in the back of his head. Neither character had more than a few minutes on screen, though one of Rizzi’s scenes looks like a refined version of De Niro’s cop audition in Hi, Mom! To lure Sonny out of his hideout, Carlo thrashes the pregnant Connie around their apartment with his belt, leaving a trail of broken china and smashed furniture.
Whichever role he was offered, De Niro took it, even though each had only two or three brief scenes, but kept his eye out for something better. He found it, paradoxically, in The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight, which Pacino had abandoned to make Godfather. Director James Goldstone needed a convincing Italian-American actor to take over, and De Niro was ready and willing.
Based on a novel by the columnist and humorist Jimmy Breslin, the story was latter-day Damon Runyon, with comic mobsters in bad suits and worse accents squabbling over territory. Breslin simply fictionalised the shenanigans of ‘Crazy’ Joey Gallo, the not-very-bright capo of a Brooklyn family which hoped to take over the territory of the much more powerful Colombo family.
Breslin’s gangsters, including ‘Kid Sally’ Palumbo, the Gallo character, are small-time businessmen with the brains of turtles. To make some quick money, one gang stages a lottery based on the outcome of a six-day bicycle race, for which they import a group of Italian riders. These include Mario Trantino (De Niro), a handsome but kleptomaniac young Calabrian more interested in staying in the United States than in competing; but so strong is his urge to steal that, even at the reception held in the riders’