Read De Niro: A Life for Free Online

as Robert felt as he did about her. We were just two kids from Berkeley, and as she took us to parties and fed us, well …”
    There was, in fact, a frankly financial aspect to the relationshipof Nin and Admiral. One of Admiral’s moneymaking enterprises was working as a typist (among her clients was the poet Kenneth Patchen). As Nin was in the process of having her journals transcribed from longhand into typescript, it was natural the two should cut a deal. As Admiral remembered,
    When I first met Anaïs
,
she was having problems with the person typing her journals (at ten cents a page
,
sometimes margin-to-margin
,
on rice paper with a carbon in French
,
but not a bad price at the time). I said I would type some of them for nothing since I wanted to read them anyway. Later
,
when I ran out of money she paid me.… One night a week I would stay up and type one of the journals
,
making ten dollars
,
which was enough for me to live on.… The early journals were rather heartrending
,
but when she seduced John Erskine it seemed unduly unkind. At night
,
the journals that were not out being read or typed were locked in a huge safe.
    In total, Admiral would type a full sixty volumes of Nin’s diaries, the pages of which Nin then edited and returned to Admiral for retyping. After that they were again tucked away in a secure spot, awaiting their publication decades later.
    Admiral told one of Nin’s biographers that she found the material in these pages boring, but Nin claimed (in a later diary, which, like the previously quoted passages, Admiral wouldn’t have seen until they appeared in a published volume),
    Virginia tells me she is enriched and liberated by my writing and our talks. There is an interesting interplay between Virginia and her analyst
,
and his comments on my work and our talks.… Virginia suddenly realized that she had never lived
,
loved
,
suffered or enjoyed.
    It was true, in fact, that Nin inspired Admiral’s circle to examine themselves in new ways, to submit to sessions of psychoanalysis and write about their inner lives. But it wasn’t the only thing they did, andhers wasn’t the only inspiration they heeded or sought. Admiral, for one, was still painting. In the fall of 1941 she enrolled in Hans Hofmann’s New York school. And there she met Robert De Niro.
    O N PAPER THEY had almost nothing in common: a blue-blooded, pre-
Mayflower
Presbyterian spitfire from California and a taciturn second-generation Irish-Italian American from Syracuse. He was considerably taller than her, and she, of course, was considerably older, especially given their relative youth. But in light of his sexual mercuriality and her comfort with a variety of lifestyles, there seemed to be an ease between them. Both were reckoned physically attractive by their peers. And they were among the most accomplished and praised of Hofmann’s students, which surely established a kinship or a kind of sibling rivalry—whether sexual or not. According to a fellow student, painter Nell Blaine,“Virginia and De Niro were considered among the most talented, the most gifted of Hofmann’s students. We talked about them with great respect. They left an aura.” That alone might have formed the basis of their bond. But a photo taken in the 1940s shows Admiral regarding De Niro with evident affection as they sit beside each other at a casual gathering. There was real love there.
    During the latter months of the academic year, De Niro moved in with Admiral, and when summer arrived, they made their way to Hofmann’s Provincetown school together. When Hofmann headed back to New York at season’s end, Admiral and De Niro chose to stay on for a time, and he went to work at a fishery to help keep their little household afloat. But there was another moneymaking scheme in the air: Nin had been in Provincetown as well, and she enlisted the help of her clutch of young bohemian friends in writing pornography that she sold to a private collector who