De Niro: A Life Read Online Free PDF

and not, and somewhere along the way he began to explore his sexuality with them. Among his acquaintances was Tennessee Williams, with whom De Niro worked as a waiter at Captain Jack’s restaurant. Williams, older and far more daring than his young coworker, was gay, out, and unabashed, and De Niro surely noticed his fearlessness. Another acquaintance was Valeska Gert, an expatriate German dancer and actress who operated an illicit after-hours saloon and was, like Williams, unconcerned with hiding her sexuality.
    De Niro, a teenager from a traditional working-class Catholic home, may have had a mature confidence in his artistic abilities, but he was reserved and quiet by nature. Though he may have been drawn toward men, his sexual activities, whatever they were, weren’t conducted nearly as brashly and publicly as those of his friends—a lifelong habit, as it happens. He may have experimented with men and women, but he formed no acknowledged romantic attachments.
    And then, like in the movies, he met a girl.
    I N POINT OF fact, Virginia Holton Admiral wasn’t a girl but a young woman of twenty-seven—a full seven years De Niro’s senior. She had been born on February 4, 1915, to Donald Admiral, a descendant of those noble lines of French courtiers and English colonialists (with some Dutch mixed in), who had been born in Danville, Illinois, in 1890, and Alice Groman, who was born to German immigrants in Odebolt, Iowa, in 1887. The couple wed in Danville in 1913 and would have two daughters, Eleanor following Virginia by almost two years. Virginia came into the world in The Dalles, Oregon, a port townalong the Columbia River, because Donald was pursuing work there as a grain dealer. By 1917, when he registered for the military draft (he never served), he had relocated his family back to the Midwest. And by the time the Admiral girls were still in their midteens, Donald and Alice had divorced and were living in separate households in Berkeley, California, where Alice worked as a public school teacher with specialties in English and Latin.
    Virginia, blond, of smallish stature, and with a spunky personality, distinguished herself as a student and especially as an artist. As a teenager she was offered a chance to study painting in Paris but passed, preferring to attend the University of California near her Berkeley home. Even in the mid-1930s, Cal was noted as much for the radicalism of the campus culture as for the quality of education it offered, and Virginia embraced the former avidly, engaging herself in the Young People’s Socialist League, a Trotskyite group that was in regular conflict with the far larger Stalinist organization, the Young Communists League. Along with her political activities, she pursued an interest in avant-garde literature, which brought her into contact with a clique that included the poets Robert Duncan and Mary and Lili Fabilli, sisters who were as ardent about politics and sexual liberty as they were about modern verse. Along with Admiral, the four formed a makeshift bohemian family, sharing housing and fostering each other’s work. Various decisions that any of them made about work, art, love, and life were made in consultation with one another; for example, Duncan, an outlandish and openly gay young man, was apparently talked out of fulfilling his ROTC service by his housemates. *3
    After graduating with a degree in English, Admiral spent a short time studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, only to return to California and work on the Federal Art Project, with which Duncan was also involved, in Oakland. Together, they published a literary review,
Epitaph
, which existed under that name for but a single issue,then reemerged as
Ritual
and later, under different editorship, as
The Experimental Review.
The pair dreamed bigger for themselves and schemed about ways to get to New York and the lives of personal liberation and intellectual stimulation that they imagined awaited them there.