I Blame Dennis Hopper (17 page)

The next time I saw Robert De Niro was on the set of
Goodfellas.
I became a fixture on set, sitting quietly behind or near Marty absorbing everything that happened on what is often called the best film of the '90s. I was afraid not to go, because I would miss something. One day they were shooting at the Copacabana, which was near my apartment, and Marty said, “We're doing something pretty interesting today. You should come down and see it.”

It was of course the famous Steadicam shot entering from the back of the restaurant. Another day we were jammed into the Hawaii Kai on Broadway. It was ancient, and inside everything was made of straw and grass. Marty said, “Careful, this place has fleas”—and let me tell you, it did. I was at a booth watching Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta act the “But I'm funny how? Funny like a clown?” scene. And then there was Mr. De Niro. Word was spreading about
Goodfellas,
and actors, mobsters, you name it were requesting if they, too, could come down just to get a glimpse of Robert De Niro. In some neighborhoods a carnival-like atmosphere developed and folks were having cookouts and sitting in lawn chairs outside places where they were shooting. It was like they were a part of the atmosphere and Marty harnessed that energy and put it into the film.

It's hard to explain the impact of Robert De Niro at the time he and Marty were making
Goodfellas
. He was a god in New York. I mean, there were actors—Vincent Gallo, for one—who had agreed to be extras just to brag that they were in
Goodfellas
with him. I had just been watching and had been happy with that, but now I was going to be in a few scenes with him. In one scene, I was going to have a line right before his. Elias was right. How did I end up with his life?

Marty created an atmosphere on the set that was fun and homey, like a large Italian family, but the scenes with De Niro always changed that dynamic. His presence brought a tension and energy that I had never experienced before or have since. When he walked on set everyone stopped talking, and it was like, boom, something important is about to happen. We were shooting the famous Christmas scene in the bar where Robert De Niro chews out Johnny Roastbeef for having bought a new Cadillac. All of Brooklyn was outside cheering—as I've said, people were having barbecues and drinking wine and applauding every time an actor walked into or out of the bar. It was past midnight, but nobody wanted to leave. When they were shooting that scene and De Niro opened the door and revealed the Cadillac there were hundreds of people to the side that the camera had to avoid. Inside I had a front-row seat watching Robert De Niro. Enough time to get pretty nervous because my first line in
Goodfellas
was coming up. We had been shooting in the bar a few days, and there was going to be this very long, complicated tracking shot, with most of the cast involved, and I had a line during it to Julie Garfield, which was “If I even look at anyone else, he'll kill me.” The camera then holds for our reaction, and then moves on to De Niro and Joe Pesci, and the scene continues. It was like an eight-minute shot. We rehearsed it almost all day. Finally Marty said they were ready to shoot. And even though I had told myself, Don't screw this shot up. Don't do anything phony. Don't do anything that makes Robert De Niro go over to Marty and say, “How did that bad actor get in my movie?” I didn't quite pull it off. The first stupid thing I did was to try to get a laugh. I thought, Let me goose my one line in the scene like a bad actor. So the camera is tracking along, there are twenty people in the frame, all these actions. Out of the corner of my eye I see the camera getting to me, and all of a sudden I become Eve Arden. “If he catches me with
anyone,
he'll
kill
me!” then I downed a glass of wine to button it. It was dreadful, of course, awful and hammy. I knew it immediately, and so did Marty. He yelled out, “Cut. Cut. Technical difficulties.” Everyone started groaning. Everyone else had been brilliant. Marty came over to me and whispered into my ear so no one could hear it but me: “Don't do that again.” Then he laughed, “Sorry, everyone, sorry,” running back to the camera, “Our fault. Our fault. Technical problems.” Twenty-thousand-dollar mistake, Marty later told me. He never let anyone know but me, but he cared enough that he wanted every actor in the frame to be perfect.

People always ask me, what did you learn from Marty? A thousand things. That was one. Sensitivity. A love for actors and their processes. I did it right the next time. Wait, the next hundred times, because we continued to shoot the same scene for the next fourteen hours!

There was a lot of downtime between shots, and this is where I learned the first surprising thing about what it's like to work with Robert De Niro: He's really funny! He loves to laugh. I was in a sketch-comedy group at the time called Manhattan Punch Line, and I dabbled in stand-up. I had a couple routines that Marty was aware of, so in between takes he brought De Niro over to hear them. I used to do a pretty good Shelley Winters impression. She was then a blowsy older actress with a kind of warbly voice who had an association with the Actors Studio. She would make the talk-show rounds babbling about her association with De Niro or Marilyn Monroe. She had this habit of sort of rubbing her rather large breasts and saying, “When Bobby and I were at the Studio with Marilyn, I taught Marilyn how to be sexy.” So I would do that impression for De Niro, adding, “When Bobby and I did
Bloody Mama,
he asked me for advice, and I said, ‘Bobby, don't eat fish off the truck; go with the chicken. Here, have some of my breasts.'”

I had another routine called “Raging Bullwinkle.” Basically, cartoon characters Rocky and Bullwinkle acting out a scene from
Raging Bull
as Jake and Joe LaMotta. So with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci both staring me down, I did my Rocky the Flying Squirrel. “You're nuts! You let this girl ruin your life!”

Then Bullwinkle, “Rocky. Did you fuck my wife?”

Then Squirrel, “How could you ask me that? I'm your brother.”

People ask me if making
Cape Fear
was scary. No. Doing “Raging Bullwinkle” for Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci was much scarier! But I got my laugh. I made Robert De Niro laugh. And if my only interaction with De Niro had been being in
Goodfellas
, watching him work, getting to say a line before him, making him laugh, I would have been content. Little did I know. Irwin Winkler produced
Goodfellas,
and he wanted me to audition for a part in
Guilty by Suspicion,
which he was directing. I didn't get the part for which I had auditioned, but Irwin still wanted me in the movie, because it dealt with the Communist blacklist, and my grandparents, Melvyn and Helen Gahagan Douglas—who was the first Democratic woman elected to Congress from California—had been in the thick of all of that. He offered me the part of Nan, Daryl Zanuck's assistant. It was a small part, but I would have a couple scenes with Robert De Niro, so I said sure. This is where I learned the next interesting thing about what it's like to work with Robert De Niro: It's not so easy. It's like waking up and realizing you're on a tightrope one hundred stories up with the world's greatest tightrope artist and wondering how the hell you got there.

There was an actor in
Guilty by Suspicion
who found himself on the tightrope. He couldn't believe he was acting with Robert De Niro. He just thought, I am not good enough, and it threw him. He was so intimidated that he just froze in De Niro's presence. The scene would begin and he'd start flop-sweating, and it was brutal. He confided in me that he was pretty sure that De Niro thought he was miscast. He kept saying, “I don't know why I'm here.” No amount of my encouraging him could boost his confidence.

I saw this happen on
Goodfellas
a couple of times, too. Actors would “go up” on their lines—they'd forget what they were saying, or suddenly be like I once had been: really, really bad. It happened to me with my only line in the movie! It suddenly occurs to you, Oh, he's like the world's greatest actor. How long is it going to take him to discover that I am a hack? You have to work against this fear that he is judging you in the scene. So, on
Guilty by Suspicion
, every time I was scared or thought I was awful or didn't deserve to be acting with Robert De Niro, I remembered making him laugh on the set of
Goodfellas
. I discovered making him laugh made me less intimidated of him. Pretty soon every time he saw me he expected me to do something funny—and now I couldn't wait to see him. It almost got me into trouble.

One day we were shooting a scene, and I only had one line in it, something like “He's not in,” and
that
was the day that Steven Spielberg and Mike Ovitz, the head of Creative Artists Agency, decided to visit the set. Imagine you're doing a scene with the world's greatest director and world's greatest talent agent watching you and you have one line in it. Pitiful. Now, I knew Bob's next movie was going to be the remake of
Cape Fear
, and Steven at the time was possibly going to be directing it. So we're doing the scene, and De Niro walks up to my desk, looking for Daryl Zanuck in the movie, and says, “Is he in?” And I have to say very solemnly, “He's not in.” Well, De Niro turned to walk away, and I gave it a couple beats and then yelled out to Ovitz, “What do you think, Mike? Have you seen enough? Ready to sign me? When do we start
Cape Fear
, Steven?”

It was pretty ballsy—we were still shooting the scene—but being a comedian at heart, I went for the joke. Luckily for me, Bob busted up, so everyone else followed.

There was a poster shop on Hollywood Boulevard—sadly, it's no longer there—that I went to because I wanted to give Bob a thank-you gift after filming ended. I had this small part in
Guilty by Suspicion,
yet he went out of his way to be gracious to me, and I really appreciated it. So I was in there, looking around this dusty shop, and I actually found lobby cards from the original
Cape Fear
, so I gave them to Bob as a wrap gift. We were standing outside on the old Goldwyn lot where my grandfather had once been under contract. I remember De Niro's tearing the paper off and smiling that wonderful, iconic smile as he looked at the cards. Back-to-back movies with Robert De Niro. Not bad.

I went home to New York, and things had changed—now Marty is directing
Cape Fear
. He tells me that there is a part that I'm right for, but that it's not up to him. I will have to audition for Robert De Niro. If Bob doesn't think I'm right, I won't get it. I watched the original movie, with Barrie Chase playing the part of the drifter Diane Taylor, which in the version Marty was directing would be Lori, an attorney who gets involved with Nick Nolte. Again the casting was top secret, but I knew I could do this part if I got the chance. I auditioned first for the same casting director from
New York Stories
, Ellen Lewis, and then it was time for De Niro to approve me. There wasn't really a script at that point so we improvised some scenes, specifically the bar scene, and I was cast in the movie. I remember everything about that audition, including what I wore. It was a white shirt with a Peter Pan collar and a short black skirt. The only thing that changed when we filmed the scene was the color of the skirt. Marty liked the Peter Pan collar because he thought it made me look like a nice Catholic girl, which I was. Still am!

Because of Robert De Niro and
Cape Fear
, people know my name. And if they don't know my name they always recognize my face—probably because of the harrowing and controversial rape scene that we shot, where part of my face is bitten off. A lot of folks thought the scene was gratuitously violent. I can only say, sadly, that it was based on actual events Bob had researched. To make it truthful, I also spent time with a criminal attorney in Florida's Broward County Courthouse doing my own research to prepare for the scene and its aftermath. After a seventeen-hour day and fourteen hours of shooting that scene, Bob went over to Marty and said, “I think she's done.” I went back to my hotel room and cried. I had gone to places I didn't know I was capable of. On the second day, the mood on set was so somber that Bob and I lightened things up by doing Three Stooges routines between takes just to let everyone know I was OK, that we were … acting.

Later, when the musicians were recording the score with Elmer Bernstein, they got to the rape scene, and several of them walked out, saying they should have been warned. It was considered so disturbing it was censored in Sweden.

A week ago, I sat next to a girl in a movie theater. She gasped when she saw me. She said, “My God, that scene in
Cape Fear
. It gave me nightmares for years!” I'm often asked if I was scared. The answer is no. The first scene I shot in
Cape Fear
was the bar scene, and believe me,
that
was a lot scarier.

It was my first big scene in a movie, and I had a lot to prove. I knew instinctively that I was going to be judged as to whether or not I deserved to be there, but I was ready for it. I had decided I was going to do this laughing thing. I knew I would have to play drunk, but I also thought: It's Robert De Niro in the scene, and Marty is the director. I'm in good hands. I just have to listen to whatever these two geniuses tell me to do, and do it.

My journal from the first day reads, “I was watching my Sanford Meisner Documentary at 5:30
A.M
. and getting last minute inspiration. I am dressed like Audrey Hepburn. I am pretending to be Ruth Gordon. Faith. Achievement. Victory. And Oh yes, fasten your seatbelts!”

It's my first day on
Cape Fear,
and I am just excited to be there. I'm walking to the set from my trailer—it's the first time I've had a trailer—and I'm in my costume. I've got my makeup on. My hair looks cute. I'm smiling at folks as I walk, trying to make eye contact with someone as if to say, “I'm in a movie!” but no one knows who the hell I am. I'm still happy. I get to the set, and I'm the first one there. It's a real bar; we have the whole place to ourselves. I sit at the bar waiting, looking around, and the crew is talking. Nobody is talking to me. I thought one person might, you know, mention my cute outfit, or my hair, or something, but nothing. So I think, I know what I'll do. I'll just make myself busy. I ask props if they will make the drink I'm drinking in the scene, a Sea Breeze. It was an inside joke I had with a friend, and I figured this little joke will give me some confidence. I explain to the gruff props guy how to make it—we're in a real bar, after all—and he just looks at me and says, “You're drinking wine. I got the grape juice already poured” and walks away.