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Robert De Niro leaves court after testifying against the gallery that had been charged with selling his late father's art.Robert De Niro's appearance in a Manhattan Criminal Court Friday should have been headlined, "Hey, I'm tawkin' to you."
Testifying in a case against gallery director Leigh Morse, who is accused of involvement in swiping two of De Niro's father's paintings to pay off creditors, De Niro said he'd wanted their financial dealings to be "kosher."
But when he said, "Furthermore," Morse's lawyer objected and Judge Michael Obus cut him off.
"But I have an issue with . . ."
De Niro tried.
"Objection sustained, Mr. De Niro."
"But . . ."
"Sustained!"
The Method actor then twisted his face, body, and hands as tight as a butterfly knot, and the jury got the message: He clearly was not happy with the gallery people he once "trusted implicitly" with his� father Robert De Niro Sr.'s paintings.
In this courtroom drama, De Niro felt betrayed.
De Niro so reveres his father that he still keeps the Figurative Expressionist painter's SoHo studio intact, just as it was on the day he died in 1993: paintbrushes in jars, tubes of dried oil paint - even the last newspapers he read.
It's almost like a shrine, as is De Niro's Tribeca Grille restaurant, where the elder De Niro's large, colorful paintings line the walls, all in museum-quality gilt frames.
De Niro had lovingly chosen the frames for more than 1,000 of his father's paintings the Salander O'Reilly Gallery was tasked with selling, testifying, "I spent a lot of time choosing the frames for my father's work."
The gallery, like most others in New York, took the outrageous fee of 50% of the price of De Niro Sr.'s paintings, but balked at splitting the cost of the frames, so De Niro testified he sprang for most of the expense.
De Niro testified he had a gut feeling that something was wrong when the gallery owner flew De Niro and himself to the same gallery opening in Italy in separate private jets.
The case has let us take a peek� into lesser-known aspects of De Niro's childhood.
His father and his mother, Virginia Admiral, were artists who hung out with Jackson Pollack, Tennessee Williams, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Frank O'Hara and other artists and writers, and the young De Niro got to meet all of them and, no doubt, absorb some of their ideas.
An acting teacher his mother knew saw talent in the rough young boy and allowed him to come to her classes even at the age of 10.
Money from art and the typing jobs his mother got was scarce, so De Niro also knew the mean streets. Actor Clem Caserta once told me that as kids, he and De Niro would move out entire apartments in Little Italy for just $5 apiece.
You could hear the two parts of De Niro in his voice yesterday, as he spoke phrases like "it didn't bode well" and "I spoke gingerly with him" in an accent right off the Mulberry St. of yesteryear.
After court ended, he darted past reporters into his car. Too bad. I so wanted to ask him to tawk to us about Figurative Expressionism - whatever that is.
jmolloy@nydailynews.com
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