Free De Niro: A Life by Shawn Levy

prices that the more famous Abstract Expressionists commanded—the Pollocks and Rothkos and De Koonings and Klines, who had superseded him commercially but still respected him and regarded him as a peer. But he was making a mark. Throughout the latter part of the decade, De Niro exhibited and sold his work regularly on 57th Street, then the heart of Manhattan’s high-end gallery scene, and his paintings were shown at the Whitney Museum, the Jewish Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. He received a handful of foundation grants and prizes, he regularly enjoyed positive reviews in the serious art press (and occasionally, and somewhat less enthusiastically, in the
New York Times
), and he had started to draw a following among private collectors, including Joseph Hirschhorn, who would eventually acquire some forty of his pieces. He wasn’t rich, but since he still chose to live like “the poorest of the poor,” as fellow artist Paul Resika put it, he didn’t need much, and he added to his income by teaching, framing pictures, and taking other jobs, sometimes menial ones. What’s more, with his sondoing exactly what he himself had done a few decades earlier—namely, dropping out of school to pursue an interest in the arts—he felt comfortable leaving New York and living, as he always wanted to, in the land that had produced his favorite poets and painters.
    Before leaving, he carefully divested himself of the physical aspects of his New York life, entrusting his paintings to Admiral and offering other belongings to friends in the manner of bequests. “He showed up at my Village cold-water flat,” writer Barbara Guest remembered, “with a box containing his volumes of French poetry. He was going to Paris, he said, and asked me to take care of his books.”
    De Niro had maintained a good relationship with his son throughout the boy’s teens. They still went to the movies together, and with Bobby attending acting school, their cinematic diet had acquired a new dimension. They took in Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift and James Dean movies whenever they could—Bobby shared teachers with each of them, after all—and they also liked the new wave of kitchen-sink dramas coming out of England, such as
A Taste of Honey
and
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
(They were partial, too, to the Three Stooges and to silent Laurel and Hardy films.) The son may never have felt entirely connected to his father—“there was a certain wall between me and him that I wish had been broken”—but he knew he would miss him.
    Too, as the younger De Niro still hadn’t yet fully committed himself to his studies, he was frankly jealous of his father’s ability to pick up and leave town. “I loved traveling and wanted to go to Europe,” he remembered. “I tried to get a job in the Merchant Marine. But I had no clout, so I was fourth class. I couldn’t move up the ladder.” He finally saved up money and resorted to more mundane means: “I just wound up taking Icelandic Airlines.” He began in Ireland, with an ultimately fruitless search for his roots. “I hitchhiked from Dublin to Galway,” he remembered later, “and took the ferry out to the Aran Islands, and then I went down through the south. Slept in some fields, and people gave me blankets for sleeping outside—the caretakers of an estate. I had breakfast with them in the morning. They were very friendly.”
    He hitchhiked around a bit—it was the heyday of beatnik-style vagabonding throughout the Old World, which was still cheap and exoticby American standards—and he was keen on it. He made his way to Paris, where he caught up with his father, and then, encouraged by the idea that his relations in Campobasso would be easier to find, headed for Italy.
    “I made him a sign in English and Italian: ‘Student wants ride,’ ” his father remembered. “On Capri he met [actress] Michele Morgan and told her I was interested in doing her portrait. Trying to