He’s the greatest movie actor of his generation, but he remains a mystery—to the public, to the industry, even to his closest friends. Is he pulling a Brando? Or is the secret that he has no secret?
At auditions, Bobby would show his father’s sketches to casting directors. “I’m Bob De Niro, and I’m sure you’ve heard of my father.”
So it is Trixie who cancels business appointments for De Niro, then reschedules them, only to cancel them again. Stars can be imperious. It is Trixie, on this occasion, who finally reveals to De Niro’s own manager, Jay Julien, “Bobby’s in South America,” after Julien pleads that he must get through to him.
He despises interviews and rarely gives them. “After I give an interview I spend all my time trying to explain what I meant,” he said to Time in 1977. “After my first movies I gave interviews . . .
then I thought what’s so important about where I went to school and hobbies? What does any of that have to do with acting, with my own head? Nothing.”
And when he has talked, he has limited his remarks to his work. Even gossip items focus on his career, like this one from the New York Daily News: “Flash: Look for Bobby De Niro’s next project to be the film version of David Mamet’s Pulitzer prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross.”
Always De Niro has categorically refused to speak about his private life.
So only his close friends know that his black girlfriend, Toukie Smith, has dyed blond hair and runs a catering service; or that he is the only son of two artists; or that Madonna and Sean Penn and Bob Dylan were among the guests at the birthday party he threw for himself in his New York loft last year.
De Niro’s friends accept his need to be private and deny that his reclusive-ness is some sort of deliberate star trip.
“He does simply not show business,” said Charles Maryan, who directed him at the American Place Theatre in Billy Bailey and The Great American Refrigerator in 1972. “People who don’t know him think he’s somewhere else, but he is very much there—soaking up new characters, new situations. He is always watching, observing.”
Burt Young, his co-star last year in the play Cuba and His Teddy Bear, said, “We’d leave the theater together, see? And the fans would rush up for my autograph, and then they’d ask, ‘When’s Robert De Niro coming out?’ And the sweet sucker’s standin’ right next to me!” Young defends De Niro’s need to be invisible in public:
“He’s gotta be. This guy is so sensitive—he has antennae out for everybody. If he’d let himself, he’d be eaten alive by people. He’s that giving.”
De Niro was actually more visible by far this summer than he usually is. He appeared at the party following the premiere of The Untouchables in New York, and several weeks later I saw him speak briefly at a presentation honoring Martin Scorsese given by Mayor Koch in the garden of Gracie Mansion.
He was in Russia in July, serving as jury president at the Fifteenth International Moscow Film Festival. But he was not giving interviews.
