to go to acting school, so in exchange for [her] work, I began going on Saturdays. It was the biggest acting school in the city at that time.” In fact, Admiral did work out a deal, trading tuition for typing and printing, and so in his tenth year, the young Robert De Niro was first exposed to the study of acting and took the stage in his very first role: the Cowardly Lion in a production of
The Wizard of Oz.
“I was very nervous,” De Niro remembered of that debut years later. “It was very exciting. I was a kid.” But at that tender age, the urge to perform didn’t stick. In the coming years, in fact, young De Niro wasattracted less by life on the stage than by life on the streets. He wasn’t a juvenile delinquent, exactly, but he had his moments. Some of it was just the usual reckless boyhood thrills: “We used to roller-skate,” he remembered. “Not like these souped-up Rollerblades they have today. Roller skates with ball bearings. We’d hang on to the back of a truck and go for a ride for a couple of blocks until the streetlight turned red and the truck stopped. Then one day they changed the lights to a stagger system. Only we didn’t know. All the lights changed up an avenue at intervals so you could go twenty or thirty blocks without stopping. Suddenly, I’m stuck on the back of one of these trucks, and after four blocks I’m realizing that the next light isn’t going to turn red. The driver doesn’t know you’re on the back. You have no choice but to keep hanging on till he stops.”
There were other, less dangerous kicks, like comic books and illicit cigarettes. And very rarely there were the sorts of things that could genuinely get you in hot water with the law, such as the time he was pinched for scrawling graffiti on a subway car at age fifteen. He would claim later on that he was only experimenting: “It wasn’t anything serious with me. If I had continued in a certain way, it might have been, but that’s not what I intended to do with my life.”
Still, there was a certain comfort to be taken, surely, in belonging to some kind of group. With the benefit of his Italian surname, De Niro was able to blend in with a group of schoolmates from Little Italy—Kenmare Street, specifically—who promptly dubbed him “Bobby Milk” because of his pale complexion. He affected the clothing and behavior that his new pals favored, even starting to attend church with them, despite his parents’ admonitions. These kids weren’t actual criminals, but they liked to present themselves as such, and De Niro grew so familiar with their ways that a friend of Admiral’s asked him to pose as a street thug for a
Glamour
magazine photo spread about wild youth; chubby, disheveled, and self-conscious, he wore jeans and a leather jacket and looked for all the world like a tiny Marlon Brando manqué.
One day, hanging around with his throng of wannabe tough guys in Washington Square Park, De Niro was surprised by the sudden appearance of his father, who assessed his son’s peers and then declared out loud, “Get away from these hoods”—a cringe-inducing encounterin innumerable ways, not least of which was fear, as some of his pals were genuinely hard cases. (At the dawn of his fame, De Niro was extremely reticent about the company he kept as a young teen: “You better not say anything about that because those guys are still around and I wouldn’t want to embarrass them,” he told the
New York Times
; years later, he elaborated, “Some of them are no longer around. Some of them were killed. Some of them went into legitimate stuff: policeman, fireman. Just living their lives, y’know?”)
To that point, father and son had enjoyed a comfortable if slightly remote relationship. “I would see him every few weeks,” De Niro remembered, “or sometimes I’d run into him in the street and we’d talk. We had a connection, but it was not one of going out and playing baseball together.” (As he put it another
The Wizard of Oz.
“I was very nervous,” De Niro remembered of that debut years later. “It was very exciting. I was a kid.” But at that tender age, the urge to perform didn’t stick. In the coming years, in fact, young De Niro wasattracted less by life on the stage than by life on the streets. He wasn’t a juvenile delinquent, exactly, but he had his moments. Some of it was just the usual reckless boyhood thrills: “We used to roller-skate,” he remembered. “Not like these souped-up Rollerblades they have today. Roller skates with ball bearings. We’d hang on to the back of a truck and go for a ride for a couple of blocks until the streetlight turned red and the truck stopped. Then one day they changed the lights to a stagger system. Only we didn’t know. All the lights changed up an avenue at intervals so you could go twenty or thirty blocks without stopping. Suddenly, I’m stuck on the back of one of these trucks, and after four blocks I’m realizing that the next light isn’t going to turn red. The driver doesn’t know you’re on the back. You have no choice but to keep hanging on till he stops.”
There were other, less dangerous kicks, like comic books and illicit cigarettes. And very rarely there were the sorts of things that could genuinely get you in hot water with the law, such as the time he was pinched for scrawling graffiti on a subway car at age fifteen. He would claim later on that he was only experimenting: “It wasn’t anything serious with me. If I had continued in a certain way, it might have been, but that’s not what I intended to do with my life.”
Still, there was a certain comfort to be taken, surely, in belonging to some kind of group. With the benefit of his Italian surname, De Niro was able to blend in with a group of schoolmates from Little Italy—Kenmare Street, specifically—who promptly dubbed him “Bobby Milk” because of his pale complexion. He affected the clothing and behavior that his new pals favored, even starting to attend church with them, despite his parents’ admonitions. These kids weren’t actual criminals, but they liked to present themselves as such, and De Niro grew so familiar with their ways that a friend of Admiral’s asked him to pose as a street thug for a
Glamour
magazine photo spread about wild youth; chubby, disheveled, and self-conscious, he wore jeans and a leather jacket and looked for all the world like a tiny Marlon Brando manqué.
One day, hanging around with his throng of wannabe tough guys in Washington Square Park, De Niro was surprised by the sudden appearance of his father, who assessed his son’s peers and then declared out loud, “Get away from these hoods”—a cringe-inducing encounterin innumerable ways, not least of which was fear, as some of his pals were genuinely hard cases. (At the dawn of his fame, De Niro was extremely reticent about the company he kept as a young teen: “You better not say anything about that because those guys are still around and I wouldn’t want to embarrass them,” he told the
New York Times
; years later, he elaborated, “Some of them are no longer around. Some of them were killed. Some of them went into legitimate stuff: policeman, fireman. Just living their lives, y’know?”)
To that point, father and son had enjoyed a comfortable if slightly remote relationship. “I would see him every few weeks,” De Niro remembered, “or sometimes I’d run into him in the street and we’d talk. We had a connection, but it was not one of going out and playing baseball together.” (As he put it another
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