Show Business: De Niro: The Phantom of the Cinema

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Obsessive Labor. There may be a touch of madness in this method, but De Niro has never really tried any other. Given the results, he would obviously be crazy to stop now. The son of two Greenwich Village artists, De Niro was only 16 when he snared his first serious acting jobs. Some 14 lean years and much obsessive labor followed before he gained wide recognition in Bang the Drum Slowly. Only two years later, in 1975, he won an Academy Award for his role as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II. "I wasn't what you call an attractive person,"

De Niro says, looking back on his apprenticeship. "I wasn't snatched up for certain roles in movies. Therefore I had to work harder."

Having arrived, in De Niro's view, means the chance to work harder still.

"The more you become a star," he says, "the less preparation, hard work seem necessary. There is more temptation not to do right by what you do. But a star really has more responsibility." Hence all the energy he devoted to learning to play the saxophone for New York, New York, even though the sound of his mu sic in the movie was dubbed. Says he:

"I wanted it to look like my horn—that it belonged to me. I didn't want to look like some shmuck up there. You can do that, you can get away with that. But what's the point?"

For many actors, not looking like a shmuck is a 9-to-5 job. De Niro clearly wants much more than that—not just to convince an audience that he grew up holding a sax, or living in Sicily, or playing baseball, but to convince him self. "If only there had been more time" is a constant De Niro refrain.

Sweet and Guarded. Such perfectionism does not mean that De Niro is all work and no play, though it is some times a close thing. He is married to Actress Diahnne Abbott, whose torchy ren dition of Honeysuckle Rose in New York, New York upstages Liza Minnelli's belting. He is the demonstrably proud fa ther of chubby, seven-month-old Raphael (notes Papa earnestly: "He's been laughing since he was a month old").

The De Niros have just moved into a sprawling, comfortable ranch house in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles.

They also have a brownstone in New York's Greenwich Village. In both cities De Niro knows all the joints that are off the map, small Italian restaurants and bars where he orders Black Russians. Several of his friends are people who have come to prominence in Hollywood in the past few years: Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Barry Primus. De Niro is a superior stunt man (pratfall division), and he can put anyone away with a moment of devastating mimicry.

Still he is always the listener and the ob server. Says an old friend: "Acting is the way he deals with life, but he is as sweet as he is guarded."

When De Niro does make the Hollywood scene, he has a cool, humorous sense of who he is. He enjoys going to the Roxy, L.A.'s top rock hangout, and likes to drop in at On the Rox, the club upstairs that is the last word in Hollywood exclusivity. As he was buzzed on through not long ago, a guest asked if he was a member. "No," said De Niro, "but they let me use the place."