A TALE OF TWO BOBS

Watching Robert De Niro at his recent AFI award dinner, I couldn’t help but marvel at his eloquence in discussing some of the memorable characters he’s played.

Could this be the same Robert De Niro who could barely finish a sentence when I first interviewed him fifteen years ago?

It was considered a coup to get him on camera when Midnight Run came out in 1988.  He had only done one television interview before, on the Today show, and that was with Martin Scorsese at his side.  My “exclusive” came about because I’d met him, casually, at a party for his longtime friend Sally Kirkland when she was campaigning for an Oscar.  That brief conversation became the building block for a drive to get an interview with him for Entertainment Tonight.  Major executives at Universal Pictures wanted this to happen.  Highly-paid publicists wanted this to happen.  But nothing was set when I boarded a plane for New York, where he was doing some print interviews for the film one Sunday afternoon.

After two hours of pacing, a breathless publicity exec came to me and said, “He’s in the next room, and he says he remembers talking to you...so go in there and ask if he’ll do the interview.” 

Absurd as it may sound, I had to stroll next door at the Plaza Hotel and pretend that I just happened to be there, with a six-man crew on hand, if he wouldn’t mind spending a few minutes with me.  He was willing, so long as his director, Martin Brest, could sit at his side.  I soon discovered why.

One of the world’s finest actors was paralyzed by the prospect of speaking extemporaneously in front of a camera! 

I did my best to relax him, and even got him to chuckle at one point, but he could barely make it through a sentence without petering out, or coaxing Brest to complete his thought.  After ten minutes, I decided to bring his torture to an end, for which he was grateful.

That experience led to several other interviews in the years that followed.  Each time was a little bit better, but he was never an especially good subject.  (There is an inherent absurdity in this:  it isn’t enough to be one of the world’s greatest artists.  You must be able to give good sound bites, too!)

Eventually, he succumbed to the demands of his studios to participate in press junkets, where he had to conduct not one but scores of interviews over a two-day period.  When I saw him during the Awakenings junket he seemed to be in pain as he valiantly attempted to play the game.

Why, I wondered, didn’t someone he trusted sit down with him and encourage him to memorize some anecdotes and stock answers to TV interview questions?  If he approached the task as an actor, perhaps he could get through it more easily.

It was also clear that he was intelligent, and I suspected that if I had the chance to chat with him away from the cameras I might get a very different result, as some magazine writers had. 

By the time Heat came out, I had enough of a relationship with him and his representatives that he agreed to talk to me alongside his costar and longtime friend Al Pacino—another exclusive that turned out to be one of the best interviews I’ve ever had. 

At the end, I asked an E.T. intern to take a quick snapshot of the three of us, and I stood behind the two actors, who were still seated.  After one shot, I urged the intern to snap another, and just before he pressed the shutter, De Niro muttered, “Cheese!”  We all cracked up, and the resulting photo was a gem. 

Back in 1986, I spent an afternoon conducting another interview, and when I came home I told my wife, “That was the most candid and interesting conversation I’ve ever had with an actor.”

The actor in question was Robert Young.

Like millions of others, I grew up watching him on television.  Father Knows Best was a

Robert Young as most people remember him; on the set of Father Knows Best in 1955

virtual institution that transformed Young from a familiar actor to an American icon.  Marcus Welby, M.D. further cemented his image as a wise father figure.

But I was curious to ask him about his movie career, which had so many interesting twists and turns—a trip to England in the mid-1930s to work with Alfred Hitchcock and musical star Jessie Matthews, a sudden change to more serious parts in the late 1940s, etc.

A mutual friend gave me his telephone number in Westlake Village, and when I got him on the phone he expressed reluctance.  “After all, I’m retired,” he told me. “Usually you do this sort of thing when you have a movie or a TV show to promote.”  He listed other reasons why he didn’t want to talk about his career, but I kept my mouth shut, and before long he said he supposed if I really wanted to, I could come out to see him.

He and his wife Betty couldn’t have been more gracious, although I will admit he was crustier than I expected.  It didn’t take long for me to see that he had harbored deep insecurities throughout his career. I asked if it was exciting to travel to England to make films in the mid-1930s and he responded that he thought he was being exiled.  He told me

Young in one of his last performances, a TV movie called Conspiracy of Love (1987), opposite a young Drew Barrymore

how he sweated out the annual pickup of his contract at MGM—for fifteen years—always certain that he was going to be dropped. (After a number of years, he finally asked studio executive Eddie Mannix why they prolonged his agony by waiting until the last night of the year to send notice of his renewal. Mannix said, in all seriousness, that if they didn’t protect themselves that way, they could be left holding the bag if an actor got into some sort of scandal during those last few weeks!)

He had already “gone public” about his longtime battle with alcoholism, which seemed to dovetail with the self-doubts he discussed in our interview.  It was some years later that he spoke about his bouts of depression, and the chemical imbalance that led to a suicide attempt in 1991.

None of that was on my agenda:  I wanted to seize the opportunity to talk about his career, which he’d rarely discussed in any detail. His wife Betty not only participated in on our conversation; she asked more questions than I did!  She enjoyed drawing him out on

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certain subjects, and correcting some of the details in his stories.  They had met in high school, and were married fifty-three years at the time of our meeting.

Incidentally, Young did not spend the rest of his days in retirement.  He made several movies for television, including Mercy or Murder? (1987), in which he played Roswell Gilbert, a real-life senior citizen who put his wife out of her suffering and stood trial for murder as a result.  It was exactly the kind of meaty, three-dimensional dramatic role he coveted for so much of his career. 

Our conversation consumed several hours’ time, yet only began to scratch the surface of his résumé.  I wish I’d had a chance to go back and ask about the many films we didn’t get to discuss.  But in the famous words of Spencer Tracy in Pat and Mike, “what’s there is cherce.”  (The first portion of our conversation appears in the newest issue of my newsletter, Leonard Maltin’s Movie Crazy.)