‘Mr. De Niro is traveling.”

That’s all the information I could get—by phone, from his secretary—concerning the subject of this profile.

“That is to say, Mr. De Niro is out of the country,” Trixie Bourne continued cheerfully. I asked where, because I’d heard he was in Malibu, and she quickly interrupted: “He was there last week. Now he’s in—” Then she stopped herself. Bourne used to work for Jack Nicholson, and before that for Steve McQueen, so she tries never to give too much away.

I imagined her ensconced in De Niro’s vast TriBeCa loft, complete with roof garden and fully equipped gym, taking phone messages. Apparently she sits there by the hour, putting people off, murmuring, “I’ll have to get back to you” or “We’ll see about that.”

“Bobby never answers his own phone,” says a friend. “And he calls you—you never call him.”

Once, a journalist told me, De Niro picked up the receiver by mistake. “Yeah, hello . . . this is Bob,” he admitted sheepishly. “I’ll put Trixie on.”

At auditions, Bobby would show his father’s sketches to casting directors. “I’m Bob De Niro, and I’m sure you’ve heard of my father.”

So it is Trixie who cancels business appointments for De Niro, then reschedules them, only to cancel them again. Stars can be imperious. It is Trixie, on this occasion, who finally reveals to De Niro’s own manager, Jay Julien, “Bobby’s in South America,” after Julien pleads that he must get through to him.

It is Trixie who then tells me, after weeks of phone calls and letters, “Mr. De Niro will probably never talk to you, but he is giving you permission to talk to his friends.”

I’d been warned from the start that Robert De Niro would not be interviewed. He despises interviews and rarely gives them. “After I give an interview I spend all my time trying to explain what I meant,” he said to Time in 1977. “After my first movies I gave interviews . . . then I thought what’s so important about where I went to school and hobbies? What does any of that have to do with acting, with my own head? Nothing.”

And when he has talked, he has limited his remarks to his work. Even gossip items focus on his career, like this one from the New York Daily News: “Flash: Look for Bobby De Niro’s next project to be the film version of David Mamet’s Pulitzer prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross.”

Always De Niro has categorically refused to speak about his private life. So only his close friends know that his black girlfriend, Toukie Smith, has dyed blond hair and runs a catering service; or that he is the only son of two artists; or that Madonna and Sean Penn and Bob Dylan were among the guests at the birthday party he threw for himself in his New York loft last year.

De Niro’s friends accept his need to be private, and deny that his reclusive-ness is some sort of deliberate star trip. “He is simply not show business,” said Charles Maryan, who directed him at the American Place Theatre in Billy Bailey and The Great American Refrigerator in 1972. “People who don’t know him think he’s somewhere else, but he is very much there—soaking up new characters, new situations. He is always watching, observing.”

Burt Young, his co-star last year in the play Cuba and His Teddy Bear, said, “We’d leave the theater together, see? And the fans would rush up for my autograph, and then they’d ask, ‘When’s Robert De Niro coming out?’ And the sweet sucker’s standin’ right next to me!” Young defends De Niro’s need to be invisible in public: “He’s gotta be. This guy is so sensitive—he has antennae out for everybody. If he’d let himself, he’d be eaten alive by people. He’s that giving.”

De Niro was actually more visible by far this summer than he usually is. He appeared at the party following the premiere of The Untouchables in New York, and several weeks later I saw him speak briefly at a presentation honoring Martin Scorsese given by Mayor Koch in the garden of Gracie Mansion. He was in Russia in July, serving as jury president at the Fifteenth International Moscow Film Festival. But he was not giving interviews.

This article, then, is a shadow portrait of a man who is considered one of the finest film actors in the world but who has also been called a public recluse in the grand tradition of Marlon Brando.

Sometime during the 1970s, Robert De Niro burst forth as the outstanding actor of the decade. His ability to transform himself from a jittery street punk into a wisecracking musician or an elegant tycoon was absolutely magical—all the more so because he hid behind his characters and refused to reveal his own elusive persona.

“Bobby is a goddamn chameleon!” cried Brian De Palma, who directed his extravagant portrayal of Al Capone in The Untouchables.

Soon De Niro became the symbol of the New Hollywood and the favorite of the “movie brats,” that generation of directors—Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Michael Cimino, and De Palma—who emerged from the film schools of the 1960s and took over the old Hollywood system with movies like The Deer Hunter, Mean Streets, and The Godfather.

De Niro’s painstaking preparation for roles became legendary. He practiced on a pistol range for Taxi Driver; he got calluses on his thumb learning to play the saxophone for New York, New York; for his Oscar-winning triumph in Raging Bull he spent a year in the ring, until he could box like Jake La Motta, and then he virtually destroyed the sleek, muscly physique he’d built up by gorging on pasta and ice cream until he’d gained fifty-five pounds in order to play the aging fighter more accurately. “I feel I have to earn the right to play a part,” he said.

Liza Minnelli said she would never forget De Niro’s intensive work on the music for New York, New York. “I’d leave the studio around twelve midnight, and I could hear the wail of a saxophone. As a musician he was fabulous. That’s the way he found the character—through the music. That’s the way he put it together.”

“He never breaks character,” says June Guterman, his assistant on Raging Bull, “even when filming stops.” Comedienne Sandra Bernhard, who improvised with him so brilliantly in King of Comedy, added, “He is totally concentrated, totally absorbed in the role.”

Elia Kazan is the one director who has worked with Marlon Brando, James Dean, and De Niro, whom he directed in The Last Tycoon. I asked him about an interview on the subject he gave to Newsweek’s Jack Kroll ten years ago, and he elaborated for me. “Brando was a rebel and free spirit, rebelling against the bourgeois spirit of the 1940s and ’50s. Dean represented the release of anger against parents—resentment at parents to understand. Jimmy was sulky—unpleasant, actually. I didn’t like him very much. But De Niro—De Niro is a number of things all at once. He’s a street person and yet he’s a highly sensitive man. There are a lot of people in him. He finds release and fulfillment in becoming other people. That is his pleasure, his joy. He’s found his solution for living—in work. I’ve never seen a guy who worked as hard. He’s the only actor I’ve ever known to phone me on Friday and say, ‘Let’s work all weekend together.’ ”

He was born and raised in Greenwich Village. His father, a handsome, curly-haired, passionate man, half Irish, half Italian, is an abstract painter whose name is also Robert De Niro. His mother, Virginia Admiral, strong-looking, husky-voiced, is an artist too. “Virginia sold a painting to the Museum of Modern Art when she was still a student of Hans Hoffman’s in Province-town,” the late critic Gerald Sykes said.

The De Niros were part of a loosely knit artistic community that had begun to flourish in Greenwich Village during the Second World War. It was an underground community bursting with vitality and gossip, with its own celebrations and myths. The De Niros had a kind of salon on Bleecker Street, where art critic Clement Greenberg, film essayist Manny Farber, and artist Margaret McKee, among others, would drop by and discuss Freud, Kierkegaard, Gertrude Stein, or Zen. “Nobody had any money at all,” painter Buffie Johnson said.

In 1946 the De Niros separated amicably, and Virginia Admiral moved to an apartment on West Fourteenth Street with her two-year-old son. She started a typing service to support them. Eventually she started painting again.

Bobby De Niro was thrown out on his own very early. “He was never coddled,” says a family friend.

Already he was a loner, painfully shy and given to retreating into long silences. After school he took to wandering around the streets of Little Italy, past the sleazy bars and pool halls, and he joined a street gang on Kenmare. Gang members nicknamed him Bobby Milk, “because he was pale and strange as milk.”

At P.S. 41 at the age of ten, he played his first role—the Cowardly Lion in a school production of The Wizard of Oz. He decided then and there that he might enjoy being an actor, he has said, “because then I could express myself.” He began going to “lots of movies” with his father.

At sixteen he dropped out of high school and never went back. Instead, he enrolled in Stella Adler’s scene-study class. Years later, in 1975, he tried to explain to Time why he’d become an actor: “At first, being a star was a big part of it. When I got into it, it became more complicated. To totally submerge into another character and experience life through him without having to risk the real-life consequences—well, it’s a cheap way to do things you would never dare to do yourself. ”

He was obsessed about discovering his roots. One summer he hitchhiked from Ireland to Italy, trying to locate relatives. He finally found the De Niro clan in a place called Campobasso, halfway between Naples and Rome. After visiting them, he went to see his father, who was living in France.

De Niro senior was painting and sketching landscapes, nudes, portraits, still lifes—all showing an ironclad control of color, drawing, and composition. But he was struggling to survive. “It was a nightmare,” he told Jerry Tallmer, the New York Post reporter, but he remained committed to his art. “It was a matter of life and death to him,” said one friend.

Bobby was moved by his father’s dedication and urged him to show his work in Paris and New York. He even took color slides of some of the paintings and brought them back to the States.

At auditions, he would often show a portfolio of his father’s sketches to casting directors. “Hello there,” he’d say. “I’m Bob De Niro, and I’m sure you’ve heard of my father.”

As soon as De Niro became a movie star, he reputedly bought both of his parents spacious lofts. Neither has ever remarried. They remain close friends, and they see a great deal of their only child.

During the 1980s, a dark cloud passed over Robert De Niro.

In March 1981, John Hinckley tried to assassinate President Reagan. Later, federal investigators revealed that he’d been inspired by De Niro’s portrayal in Taxi Driver of the crazed loner Travis Bickle, who stalks a presidential candidate. Eventually the movie was screened as evidence for a jury as it sat in judgment on Hinckley. De Niro was horrified by the controversial worldwide publicity Taxi Driver received in the media (“Can a film drive someone to murder?”). For the first time in his career, De Niro was stopped on the street by fans demanding that he recite Bickle’s infamous line: “Ya talkin’ to me?”

“Don’t they realize I’m not that guy?” De Niro kept asking.

“Do not ever bring up the subject of Taxi Driver with Robert,” director Ulu Grosbard warned me. “He gets extremely upset.”

He also gets very upset if people say anything about his friend John Belushi. After the great comic died of cocaine-and-heroin poisoning in March 1982, De Niro broke down in sobs. He had been in Belushi’s room at the Chateau Marmont the night of his death, but he had left almost immediately, feeling that the woman Belushi was with was “trashy.”

Stories began circulating in Hollywood about De Niro and cocaine, particularly when he was filming Falling in Love with Meryl Streep. “But that is preposterous!” the movie’s director, Ulu Grosbard, exclaimed. “I should know. I directed him in every scene.”

However, in late 1982 Judy Belushi, the comedian’s widow, told Bob Woodward that when she had asked De Niro about his cocaine use he replied, “Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.”

After Belushi’s death, De Niro tried detaching himself from the dark side of show business. He made King of Comedy; he traveled to Russia with Michael Powell and Martin Scorsese to work on a film project; he grew his hair shoulder-length and went on location in Colombia, where he played a slave trader turned priest in Roland Joffé’s The Mission.

For sixteen grueling weeks, said Mission co-producer David Puttnam, who is now head of Columbia Pictures, “there were floods, torrential rains, temperatures of 110 degrees. Almost everybody fell ill with dysentery, except Bob. He takes terrific care of his body.” He added, “And Bob’s level of commitment to The Mission was extraordinary. He spent eight weeks with Roland Joffé, reading every actor we cast. He also spent hours with Daniel Berrigan, the maverick Jesuit priest, who was a consultant on the film.”

He was equally committed when he starred in the Off Broadway play Cuba and His Teddy Bear last year. Burt Young said, “After rehearsals, we’d rehearse some more in his loft. He had a floor plan laid out in his living room and everything. He was meticulous. And very patient with Ralph Macchio, who was his son in the show and had never been onstage before. I thought of Bob as our leader. Like when we were invited to play for the prisoners on Rikers Island, Bob called a meeting of the entire cast in his dressing room to discuss it; same with when we moved the production from the Public Theater to Broadway.”

Lately De Niro turned down the lead in Ironweed to play the cameo part of Al Capone in The Untouchables, for which he was paid $2 million for two weeks’ work.

And he’s more protective than ever about his privacy.

“He’s become as paranoid as Marlon,” Shelley Winters mutters when I fly out to California to see her. “Bobby’ll phone to ask if I’ve seen him in Angel Heart—y’know, where he plays the Devil?—and I’ll say no, and he gets mad and hangs up on me. And another thing—I don’t see him no more!”

She recalls that last year when she was teaching a class at the Actors Studio, De Niro was there one day standing beside a pillar and nobody recognized him. He eventually slithered away. “Later he phoned me to ask, ‘Why didn’t you say hi?’ and I told him, ‘I woulda said hi but I didn’t see you! You’re the invisible man.’ Goddamn it! I have known Bob De Niro for over twenty years. I’m his Jewish mama—or is it Italian? Just say we are close, close friends. Bobby used to be there, you know what I mean? He used to talk, give opinions, laugh. He was so sweet. Now . . . well, he just isn’t there anymore. I can’t get over it. Makes me sad.”

Winters met Robert De Niro in the mid-sixties, at Jimmy Ray’s bar on Eighth Avenue in New York. “We were introduced by Sally Kirkland. Bobby was around nineteen—skinny, very gentle, dark watchful eyes. He didn’t say much. He had very little money and he rode around town on a rickety bike.”

Not long after she met him, she and Kirkland saw De Niro in an Off Off Broadway play by transvestite Jackie Curtis called Glamour, Glory, and Gold. He played a wide variety of roles.

Kirkland says, “He was electrifying. Totally different in each part. I went backstage and told him, ‘You are the greatest actor since Brando and you are going to be a huge star.’ And after, Bobby would phone me and ask over and over again, ‘Do you really think I’m any good? Do you really think I’m any good?’ ”

Winters subsequently began taking De Niro around with her to parties and introducing him to her friends, and she arranged for him to be an observer at the Actors Studio. “He would never audition for Lee—he didn’t want to.”

At the Studio, he and Kirkland did a series of scenes for the Playwrights/Directors Unit. They would spend hours rehearsing in the kitchen of De Niro’s walk-up apartment on West Fourteenth Street. “We had so much rage and energy in us. We would go at each other, have knockdown fights—kitchen-sink-drama-style.”

Kirkland adds, “Bobby had this walk-in closet. It was like going into a costume room backstage of a theater. He had every conceivable kind of getup imaginable—and the hats! Derbies, straw hats, caps, homburgs. And Bobby had this composite he’d carry around with him to auditions—twenty-five pictures of himself in various disguises. In one he was like an IBM executive, in another a professor with glasses and a goatee, in another a cabdriver—to prove to casting directors he wasn’t an ethnic. And he’d always have a stack of paperback novels with him too—ideas for characters he might play, might turn into screenplays for himself. He was totally focused on his work.” Once, Kirkland had supper with De Niro’s mother and asked her, “What’s Bobby’s secret for success?” De Niro’s mother answered, “Will. Force of will.”

Kirkland would talk to De Niro for hours about her hopes and dreams, and still does. Although she’s appeared in hundreds of plays and movies, she has sometimes lost a film part even when she believes she’s done a great audition. De Niro once told her, “You are giving away too much. Hold something back. Be mysterious. It’s more seductive.”

De Niro holds back. He is a deeply private person who rarely shows emotion. Shelley Winters recalls once when he did. “At a party I gave for my theatrical waifs—my babies—Bobby was there waiting for some girl he had a crush on. She didn’t arrive until dessert was put on—she had totally forgotten she was supposed to meet him. He walked into my bedroom and pounded the headboard with his fist.”

He could be equally intense when he wanted a part. During the mid-sixties he auditioned for Brian De Palma, then a struggling young film director. “Bobby was shy and withdrawn at first when he read. Then he asked if he could do something else for me, and I said sure. He went outside to prepare; he took a long, long time. Then he burst into the room and performed the rabble-rousing monologue from Waiting for Lefty. He was absolutely sensational.”

De Niro subsequently appeared in three of De Palma’s earliest films, The Wedding Party (in which his co-star was Jill Clayburgh), Greetings, and Hi, Mom! In the latter two he played a young voyeur who becomes a demoralized Vietnam vet and falls into pornography and urban warfare. His salary for each film was fifty dollars.

He and De Palma became friends. “We spent a lot of time together in New York and L.A. We were always looking for projects to do.” De Palma recommended Paul Schrader’s script of Taxi Driver to De Niro. “It was the strongest stuff I had ever read. I didn’t think the movie would ever be made. But if anybody could do it, it would be Bobby.”

At the time, De Niro had been writing his own screenplay, about a would-be assassin, but he didn’t tell De Palma. “It takes years to know Bobby, because he spends so much time in silence.”

Oddly enough, the roles he was starting to play Off Broadway were nonstop talkers. These included a weird standup comic in Billy Bailey at the American Place Theatre and a karate-chopping bisexual hippie in love with an over-the-hill movie star in Shelley Winters’s One-Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger. De Niro was supposed to chop a board in half in the play, so he studied karate until he could perform the feat nightly.

Earlier, Winters had got him cast in the movie Bloody Mama, about the legendary criminal Ma Barker and her four psychopathic sons, who terrorized the South during the 1930s. De Niro was Lloyd Barker, a sadistic, morphine-addicted killer who eventually dies of an overdose.

Winters says, “Bobby left for the Ozarks early so he could tape accents. Get into character.” He and Winters fought, she remembers. “I thought he was concentrating too much on externals—I mean, the things he did to his body! He is a wizard, though. He can blush or turn white like that! But he broke out in sores. He refused to eat and drank only water—he must’ve lost thirty pounds. Just to look like an addict. Oh, and he almost got us killed. In one scene he had to drive us in this car. The cameras roll. Suddenly we’re careening around this field, and it’s like he’s out of control at the wheel. I whispered, ‘Bobby, do you know how to drive?’ and he grinned. ‘Are you kidding? I’m from New York. Why would I know how to drive?’ I started screaming. Afterward Roger Corman wanted to shoot another take, but I took him aside and explained that if we did he might lose two important members of the cast.”

She and De Niro were linked romantically then, although she now denies it. “Call him the son I never had, call him . . . Listen, he needed to be taken care of. Yeah, I guess Bobby looked up to me in those days. I was with him a lot and with his girlfriend Diahnne Abbott, who he later married. We spent wonderful weekends together. I remember we used to lug big bags of cracked crab and iced white wine out to this funky beach—we called it Doggy Beach—out in California. I had a shack there aside from my apartment in Beverly Hills, and my daughter, Victoria, was with me. She was very little then. I used to feed hordes of actors. This was around the time of The Godfather. ”

Winters still cooks Thanksgiving dinner for Al Pacino and De Niro when they’re free.

De Niro’s career ascended rapidly. In 1973 his performance as Johnny Boy in Scorsese’s Mean Streets “exploded like a shotgun blast,” wrote one critic. Then in 1975 he won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for his mesmerizing portrayal of the young Corleone in The Godfather, Part II.

In the film he spoke only eight words of English. The rest he spoke in impeccable Sicilian dialect, which he’d mastered. Also in preparation for the role, he watched a videotape of Brando’s performance as the aging godfather fifty times. He reportedly shocked Godfather director Francis Coppola by hammering questions about the character at him all during the shooting. “I didn’t want to do an imitation of Brando,” De Niro explained, “but I wanted to make it believable that I could be him as a young man. It was like a mathematical problem.”

Of this performance, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael wrote, “De Niro has the physical audacity, the grace, and the instinct to become a great actor—perhaps as great as Brando.”

“I doubt if he knows how good he is,” said Marlon Brando.

Lee Strasberg was very proud of De Niro. They had both acted in Godfather II, and they had both been nominated for Oscars. “But Lee said, ‘Bobby deserves it, and he’ll get it,’ ” Strasberg’s widow, Anna, recalled. When De Niro won, Strasberg immediately asked him to become a member of the Actors Studio.

From then on, De Niro worked nonstop. He would film a picture like Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon back-to-back with Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic 1900, in which he played an Italian aristocrat.

In between he’d fly home to New York, where he still kept his cheap West Fourteenth Street flat, or he’d hide out in Malibu with a group that included Brian De Palma, actress Margot Kidder, and Julia and Michael Phillips, the producers of Taxi Driver. “I remember we used to have some intense political arguments,” De Palma recalled.

In 1976 De Niro married his longtime girlfriend, Diahnne Abbott. He adopted Drina, her little daughter from her first marriage, and in 1977 he and Abbott had a son, Raphael.

Abbott, a stunning black actress and model who sports a butterfly tattoo on her upper back, appeared with De Niro in three films, Taxi Driver, King of Comedy, and New York, New York.

They lived for a time in a rented Bel Air house, which they filled with friends and pets, including a green parrot. When they moved, their landlord sued them for $10,000 and told the New York Times, “The number of cats De Niro and his wife had soiled the house, clawed at the rugs, the drapes, the furniture.”

De Niro was starting to get rich, but he seemed to have little interest in money, or knowledge of how to handle his newfound wealth. “By now we had the same business manager—Jay Julien,” Shelley Winters recalled. “One day Jay told us he was investing some of our money in silver. We left the office and walked in silence down the street. Suddenly Bobby turns to me and asks, ‘What does Jay mean by silver, Shel? If it’s bags of silver, they’ll be so heavy we won’t be able to carry them into our apartments.’ We couldn’t figure this out, so we ran back to the office and Jay explained very carefully exactly what he’d meant by investing in silver.”

Today De Niro’s investments include part interest (with Mikhail Baryshnikov) in the Columbus Café in Manhattan, an apartment in Rome, a house in Bel Air, a Greenwich Village brownstone, a Montauk beach house, and a lavish loft in TriBeCa, which is only a few blocks away from Martin Scorsese’s loft.

He and Scorsese have one of the most creative actor-director alliances in Hollywood history. They have made five movies together.

It was De Niro who brought Paul Zimmerman’s biting King of Comedy script to Scorsese, as well as Jake La Motta’s autobiography. It was De Niro who convinced Scorsese that they must do Taxi Driver together, at a time when they were both being pressured to do something more commercial.

“Bobby and I were close as Siamese twins emotionally,” Scorsese said recently. “We were tied together for the good and the bad—for everything.” He would not elaborate.

Scorsese, the son of immigrants, was raised in New York’s Little Italy. He met De Niro at a 1971 Christmas party given by the journalist Jay Cocks and his wife, actress Verna Bloom. “I said to him, ‘Hey! Didn’t you use to hang around Hester Street?’ Bobby didn’t answer, just stared at me—he does not look at you, he considers you—so I stared back. Then I remembered: ‘It was Kenmare Street—the Kenmare gang.’ And Bobby goes, ‘Heh heh!’ I hadn’t seen him in fourteen years.”

The two men hit it off right away. “We were both guys who’d grown up on the street.” They instinctively trusted each other’s judgment. But in the beginning, Scorsese says, “Bobby hardly talked to me at all. I might be rambling on, and suddenly I’d notice that Bobby had fallen fast asleep!”

Bit by bit, he says, “we found that we could improvise on anything” and that “Bobby was quite a clown.” Later on, when they began promoting their movies together on TV, “we’d improvise the questions Gene Shalit might ask us on the Today show and we’d die laughing.”

Julia Cameron, Scorsese’s second wife, has said, “In Marty, Bobby found the one person who can talk for fifteen minutes on how a character ties a knot! I’ve seen them go for ten hours at a stretch.” (At one point De Niro turned down a million dollars for a small role in A Bridge Too Far because, he told friends, the director would not sit down and talk to him about the role he was offering.)

Scorsese has said that when he and Bobby work together, “we see things in a character that we relate to ourselves.” In New York, New York, for instance, the character De Niro played opposite Liza Minnelli—the wisecracking musician Jimmy Doyle—freaks out when his wife gets pregnant. Both De Niro’s and Scorsese’s wives were pregnant at the time. “We talked a lot about that and how it was affecting us.”

By the time they filmed Raging Bull they had developed a kind of verbal shorthand on the set—communicating in shrugs and whispers. When asked what they talked about, Scorsese replied, “The real stuff between me and Bob is private. Bob talks to me private.”

Scorsese continued, “We have worked together so intimately—how can I say this right?—there are certain things we relate to emotionally that cannot be explained. Yeah, Mean Streets was about a neighborhood and about guys coming of age, but it was more than that, just like Raging Bull was more than just a boxing picture. It was concerned with very elemental things —about a kind of brutality that could occur not only in a ring but in an office or a bedroom.”

Was it possible that their last film together, King of Comedy—about a lunatic fan, played by De Niro, kidnapping a celebrity host, played by Jerry Lewis—expressed their mutual views of the dangers of celebrity?

“Being famous isn’t fun,” Scorsese said. “But you don’t know that until you experience it.” He admitted that after they’d finished King of Comedy he was afraid someone might kidnap him. “Or Bob. I didn’t go out for a while,” he said.

Scorsese did not want to talk about John Hinckley, who saw Taxi Driver fifteen times before shooting President Reagan. (Three psychiatrists testified that Hinckley identified so strongly with the film that he almost thought he was Travis Bickle, the character De Niro played.) After the attempted assassination, Scorsese said, “I refused to comment for six months. I didn’t feel like making another film for a while, and I’d never felt that way before.” But he added, “I do not regret I made Taxi Driver. It was not an irresponsible act—it was a responsible one. Bob and I both thought so at the time. We both thought, This is something we’re attracted to—let’s go for it! Movies don’t kill people. People kill people.”

He believes that “part of Bob’s great gift is his ability to play a character like Rupert Pupkin [the crazy fan in King of Comedy] and bring out sympathetic, even vulnerable qualities. The same was true of his portrayal of Travis in Taxi Driver. You saw, experienced, his isolation and understood why he acts irrationally and with violence.”

As for De Niro’s increasing reclusiveness after the Taxi Driver controversy, Scorsese maintained, “Bob and I never discuss such things. He is very complex and, yes, he is mysterious. He never talks about his personal life. I didn’t know for years that his father was a painter.”

After The Deer Hunter opened, more and more strangers started approaching De Niro on the street and asking for his autograph.

By 1977 he’d starred in eleven movies. He was a major star. That year he gave lengthy interviews to many magazines, but then he stopped, and with the exception of an uncomfortable but extremely revealing exchange with Barbara Goldsmith in Parade in 1984 he has not talked at length to the press again.

Goldsmith comments, “De Niro agreed to be interviewed by me after he read an essay I’d written on celebrity for the New York Times. He thought I understood the phenomenon of celebrity in our culture.”

She says he set the time and place—three in the afternoon in a restaurant outside Amagansett. He wanted the setting to be anonymous. During the interview he kept worrying that someone would recognize him, but nobody did. They talked for three hours about his work and about his attitude regarding his public persona, “which he said was an illusion.” He finished with a funny story about his eighty-four-year-old grandmother fighting with his eight-year-old son. And then he left. Subsequently he phoned Goldsmith to make sure that she would not reveal where he lived. When the piece was published, he phoned to say he regretted having given the interview.

Later Goldsmith decided that she had been lucky to catch De Niro in a good mood. He was still in character for Falling in Love, in which he played a romantic hero, a charming, accessible guy. If it had been Raging Bull, Goldsmith might have been confronted by a brute force, an angry, hostile De Niro. Apparently during much of the filming of that movie, he was in a very volatile state.

Before Raging Bull was finished, De Niro and his wife separated. One of the reasons given, according to a friend, was that Diahnne wanted the celebrity life—to be in the spotlight—and Bob did not.

About that time he began seeing a stunning black show model named Toukie Smith. Toukie, née Doris, is the younger sister of fashion designer Willi Smith, who died of AIDS in April. De Niro attended the funeral. Smith’s kooky, outsize “street couture” was not only popular but hugely successful. Willi Wear did $30 million worth of business in 1984.

And Toukie was in part responsible for the excitement surrounding her brother’s work. “Toukie—a cyclone of dizzy charm,” Esquire called her. Toukie and Willi were inseparable when they moved to New York from Philadelphia, their hometown, in the late 1960s. They even lived in the same West Village apartment building, he in an art-filled penthouse, she in all-red rooms below him.

“Toukie is my total inspiration,” Willi Smith said. “She has enough energy to light up the World Trade Center.” Toukie was the star of Smith’s first shows, exuberantly modeling his gritty, irreverent designs. She helped manage his business in the early years, and she designed shoes. She also modeled for other fashion designers, both in France and New York.

Today she still models on occasion, but mostly she runs Toukie’s Taste, a catering service, and she is De Niro’s constant companion. Although they do not live together (she has apartments in New York and Paris), they are considered a couple in their small, tight circle. She appeared with De Niro at the premiere party for The Untouchables, and she usually accompanies him when he travels.

“Of course Bob likes to relax!” said actor Barry Primus, who has known him since the 1960s. “And he has fun,” he added. Primus and his wife often travel to the Caribbean with De Niro. “We’ve gone to this island that has just one house on it. Bob loves to swim and sail there. He needs to relax after what he puts himself through artistically. He travels all the time. I gotta say this about him—as a friend: He is the best. The most loyal. The sweetest. Never forgets birthdays or holidays—loves those rituals—and he’s kept all his old friends: Shelley, Sally, Harvey Keitel, Marty, Brian, Harry Dean Stanton, Jay Cocks . . . He can sit for hours discussing somebody who interests him, but he also respects people and their strangeness. He never makes a judgment.”

“Bob is extremely close to his family,” said June Guterman, his former assistant. “He’s in constant contact with his grandmother, his parents, nieces and nephews, and he’s a terrific father to his kids.” When his son, Raphael, was still a baby, De Niro carried him on his back into one of his father’s art openings.

Bonnie Timmermann, casting director of NBC’s Miami Vice, said, “Bobby phones me constantly with suggestions for actors I should see. And he will follow up with more phone calls to make sure I’ve contacted these particular performers. He is a generous, considerate, dear friend.”

His friendship with John Belushi was special. And essentially private. He sympathized with Belushi, who was, in 1982, caught up in the immense pressures of being a celebrity. De Niro was then at the height of his fame too; he’d just won the Academy Award as best actor for Raging Bull. Whenever he was in L.A. he spent time with Belushi. Bob Woodward in his biography of Belushi, Wired, speaks of two specific occasions when De Niro took cocaine in the company of Belushi.

He and the comic would go to parties at the Playboy mansion or to On the Rox, a private club on Sunset Boulevard. It was Belushi’s favorite hangout, because there he and his celebrity friends could eat and drink and be free of their clamoring groupies, their needy fans.

De Niro was fascinated by Belushi’s explosive personality and his impulsive, self-destructive rebelliousness. De Niro was more cautious.

Belushi for his part loved “Bobby D,” as he called him. He couldn’t get over De Niro’s public recognition of his debt to Brando at the end of Raging Bull. When he heard De Niro, as the fat, aging Jake La Motta, echo the famous line “I coulda been somebody—I coulda been a contender,” Belushi flipped out, because long ago he himself had memorized every line Brando spoke in On the Waterfront. It was his favorite movie; he had seen it countless times. Brando was Belushi’s idol, had been since he was a kid. One of his most successful skits on Saturday Night Live was playing Brando as the Godfather. He revered Brando’s offbeat humor (“Interviewing is navel picking and then eating it”). There was heroism in Brando’s wild individuality, he thought, in his total send-up of the celebrity trip. Brando hid out in Tahiti, lolling like some huge Buddha on the sand. He had a scraggy gray ponytail, wore kimonos, and had the Sunday New York Times flown in from Hawaii. Belushi dug that a lot.

In the spring of 1982, De Niro saw a great deal of John Belushi. By then everybody, including De Niro, was aware of the comic’s dangerous use of drugs. He seemed to be teetering on the edge of a terrible disaster, but no one could stop him.

Cocaine made Belushi feel powerful. He called it “Hitler’s drug.” You could stay up all night on coke, feeling witty and paranoid or courageous. It made you believe that you would live forever, that you were larger than life.

After Belushi’s death, De Niro withdrew into his penthouse at the Chateau Marmont and he didn’t leave for several days. He sat and watched Belushi’s Saturday Night Live performances on his VCR. He watched them over and over again. He allowed very few friends entrance into his suite, and one person who saw him said he acted “scary but very controlled.” He made phone calls, a great many phone calls.

Eventually he made a statement by phone to the grand jury investigating Belushi’s death, but he refused ever to talk publicly about Belushi, and he would not be interviewed by Bob Woodward for Wired.

Today Robert De Niro is forty-four years old. He has cut off his ponytail. He has never divorced his wife, and he is still with Toukie Smith. It is rumored that he is also dating Whitney Houston. No longer the “young Brando,” he still remains an inspiration to youthful stars like Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke, who are in awe of his technique, his impenetrability.

Lately he’s been talking to Martin Scorsese about doing another project. “Bob and I are trying to find a common link again,” Scorsese said. “After King of Comedy we decided to go our separate ways. We needed to work with other people. We had worked so intensively for so many years. Now we’re actively looking for something—no, I can’t tell you what, but it’s going to be different from anything we did before. We’re older now, we’re interested in different stuff, and it’s not so much the material but how we connect with it emotionally.”

Currently De Niro is basking in the biggest commercial success of his career, in The Untouchables. Industry experts have predicted that it may be the biggest money-maker of the year.

For De Niro the success is ironic, since he is on-screen for only about ten minutes. His Capone is a cameo role, yet he seems to hold the picture together with his malevolent characterization.

As usual, he prepared obsessively for the part. He took three months to study newsreels and movies of the 1930s. He read books, he had his hairline shaved back to change the shape of his face, and he put on twenty-five pounds. He told Newsweek. in an article about the film, “Gaining the weight was very depressing. It’s the last time I’ll ever do that.” He goes regularly now to one of the most famous nutritionists in New York.

Earlier this year he’d appeared in other cameo roles, as the manic plumber in Brazil and as the silky Prince of Darkness in Angel Heart. The latter caused Pauline Kael to complain, “It’s the sort of guest appearance that lazy big actors delight in—they can show up the local talent.”

Brian De Palma wearily defended De Niro’s recent career choices. “Bob was experimenting with those characters. He has every right to do exactly what he wants to do. And I think those experiments worked superbly—certainly in The Untouchables it did. Bob is a great actor, a great artist, but Hollywood doesn’t give a shit about that. You and I may, but out there the bottom line is, Can he bring audiences into the theaters—can he sell the videos? Well, with The Untouchables I think he’s proven that he can. He is the biggest part of the movie’s draw. As far as I’m concerned, we got him cheap. He should have been paid more than two million.”

Liz Smith announced in July that De Niro’s new asking price is $5 million per movie. However, most studio heads don’t see him as a “bankable star.” Certainly he is not in the category of Clint Eastwood or Sylvester Stallone, who commands $12 million per picture. De Niro will never be a “star personality” either. A star personality carries his personality from movie to movie. De Niro transforms himself totally in picture after picture.

Art Linson, the producer of The Untouchables, said, “Bob has never thought about playing financial power games with the executives—like Warren or Dustin. He is not interested.”

And maybe he still isn’t interested. Friends say he is talking about directing a production of Brecht’s Arturo Ui Off Broadway and starring in it. On the other hand, he’s changed agents, leaving Harry Ufland for the powerful, glitzy C.A.A. talent agency. And he withdrew from a sci-fi movie called Big, in which he would have been starring as a little boy trapped in a man’s body (something of an acting challenge even for him). He worked for months on the script with its director, Penny Marshall, but he kept asking for more money. Then when he got the reported $3 million he had been demanding, he abruptly walked away from the project. One recent news item stated that he would soon be starring in a lavish new Steven Spielberg movie to be filmed in Russia. Another said that he hoped to make his directorial debut with a film about child pornography, in which he would also star.

For these and other reasons, I decide to phone De Niro’s secretary, Trixie Bourne, one more time to see if I can get through to him personally. There are so many questions I want to ask him. He is more fascinating and enigmatic than I ever dreamed. But when I reach Bourne, she is not very encouraging. “We’ll see,” she says cheerfully. “We’ll get back to you.”

I am in Beverly Hills, “la-la land,” where cappuccino is served in soup bowls. For three months I’ve been haunting libraries on both coasts and studying De Niro’s films. I’ve talked to nearly fifty of his friends, colleagues, and business associates.

I think I’ve finally discovered one of Robert De Niro’s secrets. I believe he has invented the brooding, reclusive mystique he hides behind—as successfully as he hides behind the characters he plays on-screen. He may even be amused by the confusion this causes. His friends and family are clearly in on the joke—the game playing with press and strangers. With the people he’s close to, he can still be himself—tender, exasperating, rude, generous, sly, macho, and probably anything else he feels like being at the moment. He is an actor, after all.

Before I catch my plane, I go for a manicure.

“What do you do?” the manicurist asks.

I tell her I’m finishing a story on Robert De Niro.

“Oh yeah?” she says. “I saw Bobby yesterday afternoon. I was giving Quincy Jones his weekly pedicure and suddenly Robert De Niro walks into the room.”

“What did he say?”

“I’m not going to divulge that,” she tells me huffily. “I have to admit, though, that actually I didn’t recognize Robert De Niro when he came in. He sat with me for about an hour, and I talked to him, and then Quincy Jones introduced us. I was very surprised.”

“Why?”

“Because Robert De Niro doesn’t act like a movie star. A celebrity. He’s just a polite, quiet, ordinary-looking guy. And he never said much. When you come right down to it, I don’t remember anything he said. I did most of the talking. He sure is a great listener.”