A distant relationship with his homosexual father drove Robert De Niro into acting.

"Bobby will never talk about what made him the way he is, but I suspect he must have been a lonely kid, that somewhere along the line he was brutalised." If any psychological damage was inflicted on the young De Niro, his father's sexuality and depression must have played a central part in it. Acting may well have been a form of self-therapy, as well as an attempt to come to terms with his ambivalent feelings towards his father. 

DeNiro's history is ambiguous, no more so than in his childhood. He's reticent and inarticulate about everything - particularly his father. Asked by one interviewer if they'd been close, De Niro replied, "Close? In some ways I was very close to him, but then..." He was unable to go on, his eyes filled with tears. 

Virginia Admiral, born in Dalles, Oregon, was six years older, and substantially more sexually and socially aware. A communist from her teens, she'd joined the Trotskyite Young People's Socialist League on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, and led its clashes with the Stalinist Young Communist League. When her parents forbade her to go to New York and become a painter, preferring that she train as a teacher, she took the money they offered and enrolled as a teacher - but a teacher of art, which allowed her to paint as much as she pleased.
===========================================================
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER
September 26 2002
The Sun-Herald

When the elder De Niro died, his son preserved his last painting studio as a shrine. 

A distant relationship with his homosexual father drove Robert De Niro into acting. In his new biography, John Baxter tells how the avant-garde lifestyle of the actor's artistic parents affected the young New Yorker's destiny 

Accepting the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Medal in 1996 for helping revive lower Manhattan, Robert De Niro half-jokingly thanked its presenters for holding the ceremony there, "since I don't feel comfortable anywhere north of 14th Street". 

"I am fortunate to live and work in a neighbourhood I love," he went on. It was also the area where he grew up. The son of two painters, Robert De Niro snr and Virginia Admiral, he was born in 1943 in a loft only a few blocks from his Hudson Street penthouse. Nearby is the Tribeca Film Center, a converted eight-storey red brick and limestone coffee warehouse that contains his production company, the office of his latest project, the Tribeca Film Festival, and the first of his many successful restaurants, the Tribeca Grill, decorated with paintings by his father. 

After disaster struck on September 11, the first meals ferried to the rescue workers came from De Niro's kitchens. When CBS TV was looking for someone to front its two-hour prime-time special A Tribute To Heroes, he was the obvious choice. Here, clearly, was the classic Local Boy Made Good.

But do movie people ever really have home towns? In entering films, they seem to pass through a mirror into another reality where their histories don't quite fit. Locals in Modesto, California, don't remember the car culture of 1962 - the way George Lucas shows it in American Graffiti. And women in Arlington, Virginia, who graduated from high school with actor Sandra Bullock, are surprised to find that, according to her official biography, she's three years younger than any of them.

De Niro is no exception. As I found researching his biography, his history is ambiguous, no more so than in his childhood. He's reticent and inarticulate about everything - particularly his father. Asked by one interviewer if they'd been close, De Niro replied, "Close? In some ways I was very close to him, but then..." He was unable to go on, his eyes filled with tears. 
  
Why the secrecy? And the tears? Unravelling the mystery took me from Paris to New York and Hollywood, and involved some of the most flamboyant figures in the history of 20th century arts: Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin; Henry Miller and Jackson Pollock; Valeska Gert and Peggy Guggenheim. At the end, I'd become convinced that De Niro was right to pay tribute to Tribeca. Without it, and particularly without the influence of his father, he would never have become cinema's most protean modern star.

In the late autumn of 1941, with Pearl Harbor still in the future, young painter Robert De Niro and his lover Virginia Admiral lay on a mattress on the floor of a loft in New York's Greenwich Village and argued bitterly about sex.

De Niro, 19 years old, with curly black hair, had the brooding good looks of a movie actor. Many people compared him with Robert Stack, later star of the hit TV series The Untouchables. Admiral, born in Dalles, Oregon, was six years older, and substantially more sexually and socially aware. 

A communist from her teens, she'd joined the Trotskyite Young People's Socialist League on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, and led its clashes with the Stalinist Young Communist League. When her parents forbade her to go to New York and become a painter, preferring that she train as a teacher, she took the money they offered and enrolled as a teacher - but a teacher of art, which allowed her to paint as much as she pleased.

She and the moody De Niro met in the artists' colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the influential European teacher of abstract expressionism Hans Hofmann held a summer school. They soon started a fiery affair. When the other students returned to New York, the couple stayed on, living in a shack in the dunes. Robert worked in the local fish cannery. They picked blueberries for pocket money, painted when they could and partied by night, often at an illegal bar run by the famous Berlin dancer, choreographer and actress Valeska Gert, who had played opposite Garbo in G W Pabst's Joyless Street. 

Condemned three times over by the Nazis as a lesbian, a communist and a Jew, Gert married a young gay English admirer in order to get a British passport, and fled to America. Ending up in Provincetown, she queened it over the local gays and modelled nude for Hofmann's classes, striking the eccentric poses from her Berlin cabaret act. 

Friends of Admiral visited. They included the writer Anais Nin, driven, like Gert, out of her beloved Paris, where she'd been the lover of Henry Miller, who dedicated his sulphurous memoir Tropic Of Cancer to her. Nin was struck by another visitor, one of Admiral's closest friends from California, the poet Robert Duncan, "a strikingly beautiful boy who looked about 17, with regular features, abundant hair, a faunish expression and a slight deviation in one eye, which made him seem to be looking always beyond and around you." 

Duncan made no secret of his homosexuality, and was already supporting himself as a hustler. "The ideal evening," explained a friend, "was to find a Scarsdale or Westchester husband who wanted a quick, anonymous fling, before returning home to the wife and kids, and who would rent a hotel room in which you could spend the remainder of the night."

Nin, too, was making money where she could, writing pornography for an Oklahoma oil millionaire, Roy M Johnson, who paid $1 a page. She'd recruited Henry Miller to help, and De Niro joined the round-robin of writers. "Everyone is writing of their sexual experiences," Nin wrote. "Invented, overheard, researched from [German psychiatrist Richard von] Krafft-Ebing and medical books. We have comical conversations. We tell a story and the rest of us have to decide whether it is true or false. Or plausible. Robert [Duncan] would offer to experiment, to test our inventions, to confirm or negate our fantasies."

De Niro didn't have the stamina of Nin, Duncan or Miller, however, nor the imagination. "It was very hard work," he recalled, "so eventually I went back to the fishery."

Shortly after, Robert and Virginia moved into a loft on 14th Street. "The place is cold, but the hallways and lofts are big and high-ceilinged and the only place possible and available to a painter," Nin recalled. "There is a lavatory outside, running water and washstand inside, and that is all. On weekends, the heat is turned off. The enormous windows which give on the deafening traffic noise of 14th Street have to be kept closed ... We drink sour wine out of paper cups."

When Duncan couldn't find an obliging husband to pay for his hotel, he turned up at 14th Street. If Virginia was waiting tables, the two men spent the evening alone together. Inevitably, Duncan seduced the younger and more impressionable De Niro. De Niro hid this from Virginia for weeks, and confessed only when Duncan was drafted into the army after Pearl Harbor and sent to a training camp in Texas.

Having admitted the affair, De Niro confessed to other homosexual encounters. During his two summers in Provincetown, other semi-permanent residents included the playwright Tennessee Williams and his friend Donald Windham, both of whom had lovers among the floating population of male models, waiters and out-of-work actors. De Niro was also friendly with the painter Jackson Pollock, then going through a spell of bisexual promiscuity, exacerbated by his alcoholism. Any or all of these men, with whom De Niro remained on intimate terms for years, could have been his lovers.

The double betrayal of De Niro having slept with one of her best friends enraged and astonished Virginia. They argued through the night, forgetting the thinness of the walls. Suddenly, in a pause, they heard a voice from next door.

"I have been listening to you," it said. "I have been weighing all your arguments. I think that Virginia is absolutely fair and right, and the behaviour of Bob and Robert treacherous and ugly."

De Niro bolted out of the apartment and hammered on the door of the next loft. There was no response from the three painters who lived there. For days, aghast that his secret was out, he walked, according to Nin, "with shoulders bowed. He was silent. He looked haunted."

Duncan lasted in the army only a few weeks. When he confessed his homosexuality, they hurriedly discharged him on psychological grounds. "I am an officially certified fag now," he announced proudly when he turned up at 14th Street, only to be ordered out by an indignant Virginia. Without Duncan to bolster what would be his lifelong commitment to homosexuality, De Niro briefly accepted a conventional heterosexual life with Admiral. They married in December 1941, in part almost certainly to win an exemption from the draft for De Niro, and in August 1943 had a son - also christened Robert.

Years later, talking about her friendship with Robert jnr, actress Shelley Winters (who gave him his first screen roles) would create a furore by telling The New York Times, "Bobby will never talk about what made him the way he is, but I suspect he must have been a lonely kid, that somewhere along the line he was brutalised." If any psychological damage was inflicted on the young De Niro, his father's sexuality and depression must have played a central part in it. Acting may well have been a form of self-therapy, as well as an attempt to come to terms with his ambivalent feelings towards his father. 

"His father was important to him," says an old friend, French actor and director Robert Cordier, "and his father was not recognised, and I think Bob got to thinking, 'I owe him one.' I think becoming famous was very important to him to pay back his father. That has a lot to do with his drive. I think that has a lot to do with Bob's will to succeed."

De Niro's actions confirm this. When his father died, he preserved his last studio as a shrine. He also dedicated his first film as director, A Bronx Tale, to his father, who died in 1993, the year it was released.

ALmost as soon as Robert jnr was born, his parents realised their marriage was effectively at an end. Once Robert was launched as a painter at the end of the year with his inclusion in the Fall Salon at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery Art Of This Century, they could see fewer reasons than ever to stay together. As tensions increased in their marriage, they'd begun seeing a Freudian therapist together. "Many artists who knew Hans Hofmann," recalls Robert snr's friend Barbara Guest, "went to a particular shrink whose patients [eventually] had terrible crises and breakdowns. But he couldn't help them. He was a frustrated man - a failed artist, who meddled."

Following their "treatment", the De Niros agreed to separate. To support herself and her son, Virginia abandoned painting and took work typing. This developed into a successful office services bureau. Happy to escape the clattering typewriters, Bobby spent all the time he could with his father. "He had these dank lofts in NoHo [north of Houston Street] and SoHo [south of Houston]," Bobby recalled, "at a time when nobody wanted to live in those areas. Often, he was the only tenant who wanted to live in the building."

Bobby grew accustomed to being sent into Washington Square with a book when his father wanted to work. Occasionally, Robert took him along if he was teaching. On such occasions, he'd give Bobby paints and brushes. "He'd paint," Robert said tersely. "He had a good sense of colour." Occasionally, Robert would ask him to pose. "But when you're a kid," Bobby recalled, "the last thing you want to do is sit still for a long time." Rigorous even about pictures of his own son, Robert preserved only one image of Bobby - a superficially casual charcoal sketch. 

His father's real enthusiasm emerged when the two went to the movies. First-run cinemas were too expensive, but plenty of second-run and revival houses offered two features for only 50 cents. Garbo movies like Camille or Ninotchka were usually showing in at least one of them, and Bobby got to see these a number of times. Back home, he acted out his favourite scenes for his mother. Garbo, and particularly Camille, fascinated 

In the name of the father - smh.com.au 
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/25/1032734222540.html