Show Business: 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 8½," 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.