De Niro: A Life by Shawn Levy

Author:Shawn Levy [Levy, Shawn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ScreamQueen, kickass.to
ISBN: 9780307716781
Google: iG2BAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0307716783
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Published: 2014-10-28T05:00:00+00:00

You start with the name, an impossible encumbrance: Rupert Pupkin. “Often misspelled and mispronounced,” he repeatedly says, and before long we hear “Pipkin” and “Pumpkin” and “Pupnik.”

There is the hair, combed to one side like a snowdrift, so big and thick and full that it almost looks like he snaps it on in the morning. The mustache is a dapper touch, and the wardrobe, well … On one hand, he’s impeccable: three-piece suits, ties, polished shoes, always cleaned and pressed and straightened. But the colors can be a bit loud, the cuts a tad out of fashion, the shoes glaringly white beneath dark slacks: the whole thing is off, somehow, but never exactly objectionable. He’s presentable, but within quotation marks, as it were. (Even dressed down to perform a kidnapping, he’s a peacock, in a flame-red and orange aloha shirt, oversized sunglasses, and a Panama hat.) He’s decorous, solicitous, polite. And yet somehow you feel it’s a put-on. There’s nobody actually like this guy, is there? Not in New York in 1982, not on planet Earth, not in real life.

In fact, Rupert Pupkin only partly exists in real life. He lives in New Jersey, commutes to Manhattan to work as the world’s best-dressed messenger, hovers around stage doors to collect autographs (although he insists, “It’s not my whole life”), drinks coffee at Howard Johnson’s, has insane parleys with his frenemy Masha. He’s alive, he’s here, as far as that goes.

But he is truly and most completely alive when he’s not here—when he’s having imaginary conversations with Jerry Langford in his head, dreaming of himself as a guest on Langford’s show, or sitting in his basement on a mock-up of the Langford show set, complete with full-sized cardboard cutouts of Langford and Liza Minnelli (just five years, mind, after New York, New York). In these moments, Rupert chats, schmoozes, argues, exchanges hugs, shares knee-slapping show-biz laughs, and genuinely seems to commune with his celebrity heroes. It’s all in his head, but it’s more real to him than Times Square.

If his ambition ended at reverie, he would be a simple soul—deluded, living at home with his mother, content to be, in his words, a “schmuck for a lifetime.” But his desire for more, for a career in showbiz, for a real spot on the real couch on the real Langford show, leads him into conflicts: with his never-seen mother (voiced, almost inevitably, by Catherine Scorsese), who complains that he’s too loud; with Masha, with whom he gets into wailing, siblinglike arguments in the street; with Langford’s staff, from a receptionist who can’t remember his name and an assistant program director who takes a pass on his material to a security guard who gives him the bum’s rush and a butler who claims he’s “having a heart attack” when Rupert touches things around the Langford’s house; and finally with Langford himself. Conflict, we’re told, reveals the true inner person. If that is the case, the true Rupert Pupkin is a whining, wheedling brat who insists on getting his own way and will stop at nothing until he does.

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