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A cocaine-fuelled folly: why New York, New York almost killed Martin Scorsese

Liza Minnelli in Martin Scorsese's New York, New York - alamy
Liza Minnelli in Martin Scorsese's New York, New York - alamy

Martin Scorsese was dressed all in white and shaking like the devil himself the morning he showed up on the doorstep of New York fashion designer Roy Halston. It was late 1977 and the 34 year-old director was in the advancing stages of the cocaine addiction that would ultimately put him in hospital with a suspected brain haemorrhage.

Hunched beside Scorsese was Liza Minnelli, the darling of Hollywood song and dance and the married Scorsese’s mistress. They had embarked on a tempestuous affair on the set of Scorsese’s latest movie, New York, New York (which has just opened on Broadway to luke-warm reviews). Minnelli had been cast as small time post-war singer with big dreams opposite Robert De Niro’s smooth – if in hindsight slightly mendacious and predatory – sax player.

New York, New York was an unlikely period musical from the bad boy of new wave American cinema. Scorsese envisaged it as his valentine to Silver Screen Hollywood and to the swinging Manhattan of his youth. But there was little Old Hollywood glamour about the filmmaker and his leading lady as they stood huddled outside Halston’s Upper East Side glass and steel townhouse. They were there for drugs. Despite the early hour, Scorsese was in such a state he couldn’t even speak. So he let his girlfriend do the pleading.

Halston was himself no stranger to Seventies debauchery. But that morning he didn’t happen to have any cocaine to hand. He instead furnished the couple with valium, four joints and Quaaludes, the downer of choice in the decrepit New York Scorsese had so compellingly brought to life the previous year with Taxi Driver.

Scorsese was in no condition to work that morning, so it went for him throughout the late Seventies. The following May, Andy Warhol would take lunch with the director and leave shocked at his condition. “Marty was shaking like crazy,” he wrote in his diary. “I guess from coke.”

Every great Seventies director suffered their moment of self-destruction. Coppola went to the Philippines and had a breakdown filming Apocalypse Now. Friedkin made the unwatchable Sorcerer. Even box-office whisperer Spielberg came unstuck with limp Russians Are Coming “comedy” 1941. New York, New York was as big a disaster as any. Bigger, arguably, given the drug addiction into which Scorsese plunged during the shoot.

“The Minnelli affair of adultery and drug debauchery is one that Scorsese would like to forget,” wrote Vincent LoBrutto in Martin Scorsese: A Biography. “Twenty years later during the planning of a tribute to his directorial achievement, Scorsese asked that Liza Minnelli not be invited, cringing at the thought.”

The director would also be first to admit New York, New York was not a success. Its original cut was four hours. By the time Scorsese had trimmed it to its theatrical release length of 163 minutes, he had lost sight of why he had wanted to make it in the first place. If it has a legacy it is thanks to its blustering theme song – belted out by Minnelli originally but more famously rerecorded by Sinatra in 1979.

Liza Minnelli, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese on the set of New York, New York - alamy
Liza Minnelli, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese on the set of New York, New York - alamy

Scorsese had taken on New York, New York in part because he was eager to distance himself from the subway-level grit with which he became synonymous with Taxi Driver and Mean Streets. He’d read in the Hollywood Reporter that producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler had bought a screenplay to a “revisionist” musical by Earl Mac Rauch and Mardik Martin.

This was before he made Taxi Driver. After his nihilistic masterpiece won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, Scorsese returned to the US feted as America’s greatest living director and presented with his pick of projects. New York, New York was top of the heap. Not only would he show to the world he wasn’t merely the apocalyptic Taxi Driver guy, he had an opportunity to pay homage to the lavish musicals on which he had been raised in Little Italy; in particular those of ground-breaking director Vincente Minnelli.

De Niro was his first choice for the lead. How could he not be after the relationship he and Scorsese had forged making Taxi Driver? For the part of sax man Jimmy Doyle’s lover, Scorsese pursued Liza Minnelli. She was the song and dance star of the hour and still a marquee-draw courtesy of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (though there had been the subsequent disappointment of 1975’s crash-and-burn Lucky Lady). More perfect yet, she was the daughter of Vincente Minnelli and Hollywood’s tragic angel, Judy Garland.

Liza Minnelli in New York, New York - alamy
Liza Minnelli in New York, New York - alamy

Even as his drug use spiralled, Scorsese’s vision for New York, New York was coming into focus. He threw out most of the original script and pitched the relationship between Doyle and Minnelli’s Francine Evans as a riff on A Star is Born – which naturally starred Judy Garland. Minnelli, for her part, was known to have “daddy issues”. So when she and the cocaine-hoovering Scorsese embarked on an affair, the layers of subtext to the relationship ran deep indeed.

Scorsese went to lengths to give New York, New York a heightened sheen – the better to distance himself from the amplified surliness of Taxi Driver. He hired Boris Leven, a veteran of musicals such as West Side Story and the Sound of Music, as art director. And he sought out stylist to the stars Sydney Guilaroff, a confidante of Ava Gardner, Vivien Leigh and – who else? – Judy Garland.

Crowning the old Old Hollywood gloss was Scorsese’s painstaking mimicry of the vintage Technicolour filming process. This he achieved using Eastman Kodak film stock later printed on Technicolour (by 1976 original Technicolour cameras that were essentially museum pieces).

Scorsese being Scorsese, he of course had ambitions beyond mere old school kitsch. New York, New York was to be a post-modern period picture. The ultimately doomed romance between sax player Doyle (De Niro had obviously learned to play the instrument pitch perfect) and Francine would double as a mediation on the thorny dynamics between love and art. Also up for interrogation was the tension that existed within Scorsese, with his clashing passions for New Wave cinema and Old Hollywood.

Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro in New York, New York - alamy
Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro in New York, New York - alamy

With that end in mind, he and De Niro agreed that the film would rely heavily on improvised dialogue. This was catnip to De Niro but a nightmare for Minnelli who had never attempted “Method” acting previously.

It showed. She was visibly jittery in her scenes with her leading man. As the story expanded in every direction during rehearsals, the musical numbers that were supposed to be at the heart of the film were meanwhile rendered increasingly superfluous. Ultimately, this was a musical not terribly interested in the music. Tensions on set were further exacerbated by Scorsese’s semi-estranged wife, Julia Cameron, who reportedly prowled around barking at crew. She was looking for her husband. He was invariably in Minnelli’s trailer “rehearsing dialogue”.

For all the upheaval, New York, New York was nonetheless regarded as a sure thing by the studio and by Scorsese. So there was shock when it flopped and was savaged by critics. Reviews decried the lack of chemistry between the leads and the grand folly of sequences such as Happy Endings. This was Minnelli’s “movie within a movie” show-piece that cost two weeks and $350,000 to shoot and yet did little to advance the central love story.

An unhappy ending didn’t do it any favours either. Scorsese must have occasionally rued not listening to his friend George Lucas, who insisted the film could have been a hit had it ended with Jimmy and Francine strutting into the sunset together. Instead it limped to a $16.4 million box office on a $14 million budget. Scorsese had delivered one extended flubbed note of a musical.

The original poster for New York, New York
The original poster for New York, New York

As the scale of the movie’s failure became clear, Scorsese’s cocaine habit spiralled. At least one press day was cut short owing to the unavailability of the desired stimulants. “No more coke,” he told his press people, “no more interviews.”

It could only end one way – which it did in 1978 when drug abuse, coupled with the side effects of asthma, nearly killed him. Scorsese was rushed to hospital with internal bleeding.

Doctors feared he was about to suffer a fatal brain haemorrhage. He somehow pulled through. One day, as the former wunderkind lay in bed wondering what he was doing with his life and his career, De Niro popped his head around the door.

He had brought Scorsese an autobiography of the boxer Jake LaMotta and asked that he consider turning it into a movie. It wasn’t the first time De Niro suggested a LaMotta biopic. But where the Scorsese who made New York, New York had rejected the suggestion, now he saw the light. Was anyone better qualified to tell the story of an underdog who achieved unexpected success only to throw it all away? He sat up, some of that old lustre flickering in his eyes.

“I couldn’t understand Bob’s obsession with it,” Scorsese recalled later, “until, finally, I went through that rough period of my own. I came out the other side and woke up one day alive… still breathing.”