De Niro: A Biography. John Baxter

falls in love with Angela, Kid Sally’s sister.

      An early project of Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, later the producers of the Rocky series, The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight had all the hallmarks of a quick money-maker: Breslin’s laconic newspaper pieces had won him a national following; New York crime was hot; Waldo Salt, the screenwriter, had just had a hit with his adaptation of Midnight Cowboy; and MGM had an option on the services of Italian star Marcello Mastroianni to make his first American film.

      The film hit its first snag when Pacino left. Then Mastroianni, pencilled in to play Kid Sally, confessed he couldn’t speak English and was too busy to learn. He was replaced by little-known New York actor Jerry Orbach. Veteran Jo Van Fleet played Sally’s black-clad mother, full of Sicilian imprecations, and Lionel Stander rival gang boss Baccala. All were grossly miscast, though not so spectacularly as Hervé Villechaize, the 119cm French midget who was revoiced in Brooklyn-ese throughout. The only performer with anything like star quality was the lion which Kid Sally keeps in his cellar as a pet. Its occasional eruptions into the action are handled with considerable flair, which may have inspired Martin Scorsese to introduce two tiger cubs into his movie Mean Streets a few years later.

      De Niro’s agent Richard Bauman cut a reasonable deal for De Niro, though he had to give MGM and Chartoff/Winkler an option to make two more films with him over the next two years. They did, however, persuade the Screen Actors’ Guild to waive its usual restrictions on non-members. With memories of the starvation conditions under which he’d made Bloody Mama, De Niro also had them agree in writing to provide him with reasonable accommodation while he was working away from home.

      De Niro was enough of a newcomer to be impressed by big-time studio film-making. Years later, he was still calling The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight ‘my first big-deal movie’. For the first time, he was lit in Hollywood style: to director of photography Owen Roizman went the honour of shooting the first real close-ups of De Niro, who didn’t protest when Goldstone suggested he grow his hair long, and let it hang in a fringe over his forehead. The look transformed him into something closer to the standard Hollywood jeune premier – a near-clone of eighties leading man James Spader.

      Leigh Taylor-Young, once a star in the TV soap Peyton Place, had abandoned showbiz entirely after the collapse of her marriage to Ryan O’Neal, and was living in New Mexico when her agent offered her the role of Angela. Busty, tall and red-headed, she was hardly obvious casting for a Sicilian teenager. ‘I took the job on faith, to keep myself busy,’ she says.

      Goldstone, like many directors, rehearsed the film at New York’s Stanhope Hotel. ‘They asked me to gain fifteen pounds, dye my hair black, and learn the accent “fluently”,’ says Taylor-Young. ‘This panicked me. I had a good ear for sound, but no confidence with accents.’ It was worse when she met De Niro. ‘Bobby’s Italian accent was impeccable almost immediately.’ No wonder, since between auditioning for The Godfather and taking the role of Mario, he’d made a quick trip to Sicily. The visit was supposedly to polish up his accent for Gang, but since Mario is Calabrian, not Sicilian, and anyway speaks broken English throughout the film, it’s more likely that De Niro was preparing for a possible Godfather call-back.

      ‘He came into rehearsal seemingly very ordinary,’ recalls Taylor-Young, ‘quiet and “mumbly” and with a very endearing sweet, shy way about him. His eyes didn’t make direct contact for very long.’

      After a week of grappling with the accent, Goldstone sent them on an excursion. They were to spend the day, in character, exploring New York, during which Taylor-Young, pretending to be Angela and speaking in a Brooklyn accent, would introduce De Niro to New York as if he were the newly arrived Mario. ‘We were to be spontaneous,’ says Taylor-Young, ‘take the bus, and go wherever, as long as we never stepped out of character. I was a bit horrified, because I was now aware I was working with a great talent who had a perfect accent, and I felt I didn’t have a clue yet about my character, let alone a proper Brooklyn accent.

      ‘Off we went on the 5th Avenue bus. We got off near the Empire State Building. I was stone silent for almost the whole ride, for fear of demonstrating my ineptitude. Slowly as we walked west toward Macy’s I plunged into behaviour that began to feed my sense of this girl, and my terror eased.’ Not for long. As they left the department store, Young felt a hand on her arm. A large man had grabbed her with one hand and De Niro with the other. De Niro’s jacket fell open and two shirts fell out; taking Goldstone’s directions literally, he’d given in to Mario’s kleptomania.

      ‘We were pushed back into Macy’s,’ says Taylor-Young, ‘up the elevator to a floor that was nothing but a jail! [The detective] was not at all interested in the fact that we were actors rehearsing a film. As far as he was concerned we were partners in crime and he arrested us. I was amazed to see Bobby’s response to all of this, with him being a true New Yorker. He was scared.’

      Finally a cop recognised Taylor-Young from Peyton Place and accepted that she and De Niro were just creating characters. The experience broke the ice between the two, and during the film they enjoyed, in Taylor-Young’s words, ‘a tempestuous love affair’.

      With her showgirl body and long legs, Taylor-Young was the sort of trophy companion De Niro would increasingly prefer. Statuesque, even stately, with heels higher than their IQs, these women held his interest until the pursuit ended, after which the relationship descended into public bickering, then indifference.

      If De Niro or Goldstone hoped the affair would improve Taylor-Young’s performance, they were disappointed. She never did manage a Brooklyn accent, or any accent at all, and her newly-assumed fifteen pounds, accentuated by unflatteringly short skirts, merely made her look dumpy. Every critic trashed the film, though one person at least liked it. Just stupid enough to take Jerry Orbach’s characterisation as a compliment, ‘Crazy’ Joey Gallo befriended the actor, who was partying with him at Umberto’s Clam House in Greenwich Village in 1972 when an anonymous assassin shot the gangster dead.

       CHAPTER EIGHT Boyz of the ’Hood

       You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the street. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit, and you know it.

      Charlie in Mean Streets. Script by Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin

      While De Niro was launching his film career, Martin Scorsese, his neighbour from the Village, had been making a niche for himself on the other side of the camera. Like all the New York film directors and actors, he’d headed for Hollywood, where he found work as an editor on films like Michael Wadleigh’s documentary Woodstock. He also acquired a girlfriend, Sandy Weintraub, whose father was one of the triumvirate running a re-energised Warner Brothers under the suave and devious Steve Ross.

      A company town, Hollywood was accustomed to burying its failures, suppressing its scandals and showing a bland face to the world. The new arrivals from New York stampeded into this orderly culture like bank robbers. Brian De Palma with his new pal Steven Spielberg would turn up to double-date a couple of starlets carrying one of the new portable video cameras on his shoulder, and record everything that followed. Screenwriter John Milius, preoccupied with weaponry, took payment in antique guns for screenplays like Jeremiah Johnson, and ritually exchanged a weapon with his director on any new film. Most of the newcomers learned to enjoy cocaine, then to rely on it.

      Even in this dysfunctional group Scorsese stood out, in that it often looked as if he wouldn’t survive the Sunshine State. ‘Stress would disable him,’ said one-time girlfriend, producer Dawn Steel. ‘Smog would disable him. Cigarette smoke would cripple him. I would hear Marty downstairs at three o’clock in the morning, wheezing, hacking, barely able to breathe.’

      Many of these newcomers to Hollywood could trace their dysfunction to childhood traumas, often religious in nature, and Scorsese was no exception. He brought to Los Angeles an impressive portfolio of obsessive behaviour. Terrified of flying, he clutched a crucifix every moment he