De Niro: The Phantom of the Cinema

College students cluster in the lobby of a Pittsburgh Holiday Inn, taking a break from workshop sessions on how to sell textbooks in the summertime. Only the aberrant lounger among them would admit to not being a moviegoer. The students' age and educational bracket put them squarely in one of Hollywood's most devoted and tuned-in markets. Robert Redford or Jack Nicholson or Al Pacino could not walk through this crowd unrecognized; Brando might provoke understated pandemonium. Suddenly, the hottest actor now at work in films appears in the lobby and passes through. No one notices. Robert De Niro, the phantom of the cinema, strikes again.

How does he escape molestation?

Well, he sports a beard and lightened hair for his role as a young steelworker in The Deer Hunter, now being shot on location near Pittsburgh. That must be it: De Niro does not look like De Niro. But then neither did the flat-out dumb baseball catcher in Bang the Drum Slowly, the moody aristocrat in 1900, the murderous psychopath in Taxi Driver, the elegantly upholstered movie mogul in The Last Tycoon, or the jazzed-up saxophone player in the newly released New York, New York. For that matter, none of these characters looked much like another--except for the aura of intensity under tight control that they share with their creator. De Niro's eerie ability to fine-tune his diverse screen appearances while blurring his own may have added to his undeserved reputation as a Garboesque recluse. De Niro does not avoid the public; the public generally does not recognize him.

Bankable Commodity. Many actors would be crushed at such a lack of response. De Niro gets edgy when it goes the other way. "I feel uncomfortable at parties when people look at me," he told TIME Correspondent Jean Vallely. And growing numbers of people these days are looking at him and for him. In tandem with the release of New York, New York, De Niro (disguised as Saxophonist Jimmy Doyle) appeared on the covers of a couple of national magazines. This blitz may not have blown De Niro's cover, but Doyle had better be careful when he goes out. De Niro receives ten scripts per week from agents and producers, who know a bankable commodity when they see one. He is booked up solid for the next two years and could go for six just by saying yes often enough. "Sometimes I feel like I'm in Fellini's 8 1/2," he says, throwing his hands in the air like a frantic juggler. "What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?" He adds quickly: "I'm in control. I am busy because I want to be busy."

De Niro means "busy" as in "workaholic." Well before shooting The Deer Hunter, he was doing roadwork and punching bags in preparation for his role in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, a film about Fighter Jake La Motta to be shot next year. For The Deer Hunter, the story of a friendship among five steelworkers that is interrupted by the Viet Nam War, he spent six weeks tramping about in the Ohio River Valley, talking with mill hands and recording their speech patterns, drinking with them in bars and eating dinner in their homes. If it were possible, De Niro would probably arrange to be born and raised in the region.

Obsessive Labor. There may be a touch of madness in this method, but De Niro has never really tried any other. Given the results, he would obviously be crazy to stop now. The son of two Greenwich Village artists, De Niro was only 16 when he snared his first serious acting jobs. Some 14 lean years and much obsessive labor followed before he gained wide recognition in Bang the Drum Slowly. Only two years later, in 1975, he won an Academy Award for his role as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II. "I wasn't what you call an attractive person,"

De Niro says, looking back on his apprenticeship. "I wasn't snatched up for certain roles in movies. Therefore I had to work harder."

Having arrived, in De Niro's view, means the chance to work harder still.

"The more you become a star," he says, "the less preparation, hard work seem necessary. There is more temptation not to do right by what you do. But a star really has more responsibility." Hence all the energy he devoted to learning to play the saxophone for New York, New York, even though the sound of his mu sic in the movie was dubbed. Says he:

"I wanted it to look like my horn--that it belonged to me. I didn't want to look like some shmuck up there. You can do that, you can get away with that. But what's the point?"

For many actors, not looking like a shmuck is a 9-to-5 job. De Niro clearly wants much more than that--not just to convince an audience that he grew up holding a sax, or living in Sicily, or playing baseball, but to convince him self. "If only there had been more time" is a constant De Niro refrain.

Sweet and Guarded. Such perfectionism does not mean that De Niro is all work and no play, though it is some times a close thing. He is married to Actress Diahnne Abbott, whose torchy ren dition of Honeysuckle Rose in New York, New York upstages Liza Minnelli's belting. He is the demonstrably proud fa ther of chubby, seven-month-old Raphael (notes Papa earnestly: "He's been laughing since he was a month old").

The De Niros have just moved into a sprawling, comfortable ranch house in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles.

They also have a brownstone in New York's Greenwich Village. In both cities De Niro knows all the joints that are off the map, small Italian restaurants and bars where he orders Black Russians. Several of his friends are people who have come to prominence in Hollywood in the past few years: Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Barry Primus. De Niro is a superior stunt man (pratfall division), and he can put anyone away with a moment of devastating mimicry.

Still he is always the listener and the ob server. Says an old friend: "Acting is the way he deals with life, but he is as sweet as he is guarded."

When De Niro does make the Hollywood scene, he has a cool, humorous sense of who he is. He enjoys going to the Roxy, L.A.'s top rock hangout, and likes to drop in at On the Rox, the club upstairs that is the last word in Hollywood exclusivity. As he was buzzed on through not long ago, a guest asked if he was a member. "No," said De Niro, "but they let me use the place."

If reports of his reclusiveness are false, it is true that he has remained mostly inaccessible to those who ask for time that he does not want to subtract from his work: "After I give an interview, I spend all my time explaining to people what I meant--or not explaining." He can be remote on a set: "I don't socialize with the actors or the leading lady. It is better to keep a certain sensitivity, that delicate illusion."

Above all he refuses to gossip or discuss personalities, although he volubly praises his past directors, including Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Bernardo Bertolucci. Says he: "The young directors seem to take more chances. They seem to have fewer formulas to work with." De Niro also admires Elia Kazan, with whom he worked on the disappointing Last Tycoon. "I sometimes see him as a parent who doesn't quite approve of his children or what they're doing. He can't relate to it, but he still loves them." After reading Kazan's pamphlet on directing, De Niro got autographed copies to give to his wife and friends.

He is not likely to write such a book himself. Questions about his acting methods often elicit stammers and shrugs. "There is a certain combination of anarchy and discipline in the way I work," he says, with the understanding that anarchy formulated is not anarchy any more. But De Niro thinks incessantly about acting, and can comment shrewdly about it. "Something that helps me," he says, "is the physical feeling of the character, the props, costumes, the way he stands, gestures. I am aware of the physical. It is important. Sometimes it is easier to distinguish a character physically. You make a choice and develop it."

He adds: "It is important not to indicate. People don't indicate. When they tell you about their traumas, they tell it pretty much flat out. People don't try to show you their feelings, they try to hide them. It is important to keep it fresh and simple."

Demonic Guilt. Freshness and simplicity have a way of disappearing between the clauses of million-dollar contracts. De Niro worries about losing the demonic single-mindedness that has propelled his career thus far. "You know what I wonder about?" he asks. "Indecision. I think about it. There are so many alternatives one can take in life. I think about guilt. I wonder why people feel guilty about things they have nothing to do with. If I do something out of weakness, I feel guilty. If it turns out bad, I feel guilty. If it turns out good, I feel guilty."

In such moods, De Niro is likely to hop quickly down the rabbit hole of self. Still visible to those around him, he is nowhere to be seen. On location with The Deer Hunter in Follansbee, W. Va., last week, the actor stepped inside the fac,ade of a motel room (a front, one wall and nothing else) that had been set up for the scene. He sat down in a director's chair, with his back to the crew, and gazed out at the Ohio River. Time crept by; De Niro did not move. More time, and the scene resolved itself into a frieze of De Niro's world: a fake room and a real river and an actor brooding between them.

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