yourself!’ And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it. That’s right.’ ”
He stayed at the school for a year, more or less. He picked up some very good habits there, such as a taste for reading, particularly books that might have some potential acting roles in them, whether in the form of monologues he might learn or actual parts he dreamed about one day playing. And he began a lifelong habit of acquiring pieces of wardrobe—hats, coats, props—that he would hold on to, in some cases, for decades, turning the 14th Street apartment he shared with his mother into a makeshift theatrical costume house. Having observed his father’s affection for the tools of his trade and his mother’s careful accumulation and operation of typewriters and printing presses in her business, he naturally appreciated the place of such objects as props and pieces of wardrobe in the acting trade.
But he still wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of being an actor, of getting up in the morning, putting on makeup and a costume, and pretending to be someone else, often someone radically different—emotional, vulnerable, complex. At the Dramatic Workshop, there was an emphasis on performance that left him, one of the youngest members of the class, feeling particularly uneasy: “They had so many students in the class,” he reflected later, “it was hard to get up; you had to try to overcome that.” He was especially intimidated by the public performance aspect of acting. His Bobby Milk days weren’t that far behind him, and the idea that some of the gang he’d briefly run with would perhaps see him onstage was mortifying. “You figured the kids would make fun if they came to a play that you were in,” he confessed years later, “so I would never even think of having them come.”
In time, his devotion to his classes waned, and he stopped attending the Dramatic Workshop altogether. But then he had an epiphany, or at least a bug landed in his ear, and he began to develop a new attitudetoward acting. “When I was around 18,” he remembered, “I was looking at a TV show—a soap opera or some weekly western—and I said if these actors are making a living at it, and they’re not really that good, I can’t do any worse than them. I wasn’t thinking of getting a job on a western or any of that. When I got into it more seriously, I saw how far I could go, what you could do. That it wasn’t what I thought it was when I was younger. But I remember saying that to myself, watching those black-and-white TV shows.”
Somehow it clicked: acting was work, like painting or typing, and you could do it and make it pay and maybe even learn how to be good at it. The question that remained unanswered in his mind—and maybe even unasked—was how to get there from where he was.
----
* That Robert De Niro should be raised by a woman who was a kind of inspiration to the young Pauline Kael and have, for a time, Manny Farber as a principal male figure in his household is a truly astounding realization, especially given the significant praise with which each writer would greet the actor’s early work. De Niro may have formed ambivalent relations with film critics later on, but two of the most famous and influential people ever to have that job figured, if only obliquely, in his family history and his youth.
I N A PRIL 1961 SEVENTEEN - YEAR - OLD B OBBY D E N IRO MADE HIS way to Manhattan’s Pier 90, at West 50th Street, where the fabled
Queen Mary
was docked and preparing to sail for Cherbourg and Southampton. In a cabin aboard the ship, friends were throwing a going-away party for his father. Bobby “Verlaine” De Niro, the Fauvist boulevardier from Syracuse, New York, the wunderkind of Provincetown and Black Mountain, was finally going to visit the land of Matisse and Rimbaud, heading to France with only a one-way ticket.
The mid-to-late 1950s had been relatively prosperous for the painter. His work wasn’t selling for anything like the
He stayed at the school for a year, more or less. He picked up some very good habits there, such as a taste for reading, particularly books that might have some potential acting roles in them, whether in the form of monologues he might learn or actual parts he dreamed about one day playing. And he began a lifelong habit of acquiring pieces of wardrobe—hats, coats, props—that he would hold on to, in some cases, for decades, turning the 14th Street apartment he shared with his mother into a makeshift theatrical costume house. Having observed his father’s affection for the tools of his trade and his mother’s careful accumulation and operation of typewriters and printing presses in her business, he naturally appreciated the place of such objects as props and pieces of wardrobe in the acting trade.
But he still wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of being an actor, of getting up in the morning, putting on makeup and a costume, and pretending to be someone else, often someone radically different—emotional, vulnerable, complex. At the Dramatic Workshop, there was an emphasis on performance that left him, one of the youngest members of the class, feeling particularly uneasy: “They had so many students in the class,” he reflected later, “it was hard to get up; you had to try to overcome that.” He was especially intimidated by the public performance aspect of acting. His Bobby Milk days weren’t that far behind him, and the idea that some of the gang he’d briefly run with would perhaps see him onstage was mortifying. “You figured the kids would make fun if they came to a play that you were in,” he confessed years later, “so I would never even think of having them come.”
In time, his devotion to his classes waned, and he stopped attending the Dramatic Workshop altogether. But then he had an epiphany, or at least a bug landed in his ear, and he began to develop a new attitudetoward acting. “When I was around 18,” he remembered, “I was looking at a TV show—a soap opera or some weekly western—and I said if these actors are making a living at it, and they’re not really that good, I can’t do any worse than them. I wasn’t thinking of getting a job on a western or any of that. When I got into it more seriously, I saw how far I could go, what you could do. That it wasn’t what I thought it was when I was younger. But I remember saying that to myself, watching those black-and-white TV shows.”
Somehow it clicked: acting was work, like painting or typing, and you could do it and make it pay and maybe even learn how to be good at it. The question that remained unanswered in his mind—and maybe even unasked—was how to get there from where he was.
----
* That Robert De Niro should be raised by a woman who was a kind of inspiration to the young Pauline Kael and have, for a time, Manny Farber as a principal male figure in his household is a truly astounding realization, especially given the significant praise with which each writer would greet the actor’s early work. De Niro may have formed ambivalent relations with film critics later on, but two of the most famous and influential people ever to have that job figured, if only obliquely, in his family history and his youth.
I N A PRIL 1961 SEVENTEEN - YEAR - OLD B OBBY D E N IRO MADE HIS way to Manhattan’s Pier 90, at West 50th Street, where the fabled
Queen Mary
was docked and preparing to sail for Cherbourg and Southampton. In a cabin aboard the ship, friends were throwing a going-away party for his father. Bobby “Verlaine” De Niro, the Fauvist boulevardier from Syracuse, New York, the wunderkind of Provincetown and Black Mountain, was finally going to visit the land of Matisse and Rimbaud, heading to France with only a one-way ticket.
The mid-to-late 1950s had been relatively prosperous for the painter. His work wasn’t selling for anything like the
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