Would you have the guts to out your father on HBO?

If you were Robert De Niro you would. You would have known from the time you were a kid, when he left the house and your mother to paint and you would have already read in his notebooks that he was troubled by his homosexuality and hapless search for love. Nevertheless, being the international film star you are, you would have felt the need to share his pain and yours and let people know. A lesser man would have kept his father in the closet, like a ghost, until it tore him apart. But not De Niro.

First, Robert De Niro, Sr., had a loveable side to him—despite his penchant for being dismissive of other artists and even his own works. Even though he was shown in many Soho galleries—even major American and even European galleries. You still would also offer to take him to Paris to see what was going on in Europe. You would still also pay his way back to Soho and Cedar Street Tavern, where the new wave of Abstract Expressionists were showing, which shocked Robert De Niro, Sr., even more.

It forced him to go even deeper in creating the kind of 19^th Century French style and coloring of painting that was not quite the vogue, almost forcing him to miss the boat on another era of change in American painting. But he was a strong man in many ways, his son said, especially as his film actor’s career was rising, going international. This while his father’s career seemed in descent, the father doing what had won him only a modicum of fame, enough for him to keep his place in the art world.

He was a moody man; he seemed to never speak. And one could imagine living in his silence, and his fleeting moments of joy. But for Robert De Niro at 70, there were all his images in his studio, intact, and to be kept that way for De Niro, the son, to show his children who their grandfather was and was about. De Niro the Jake LaMotta, De Niro the Godfather II, in which he was cast as the young Vito Corleone, a role for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Along these lines, De Niro’s longtime collaboration with director Martin Scorsese began with Mean Streets, and later earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Jake LaMotta in the 1980 film Raging Bull. He earned Oscar nominations for Taxi Driver in 1976 and Cape Fear in 1991. The list goes on and on . . . And to see his father age into isolation and silence must have been a heartbreaker. And there came a point, De Niro mentions, when his father’s doctor began calling him with warnings of the elder’s nascent prostate cancer. Yet his father did nothing about it. He was afraid of looking at it. And here you hear Robert De Niro’s own grief about taking better care of his father. How you force a well-known painter out of his solitary life, in which he seemed to turn from everything except painting more—and writing in his notebooks the heartbreak of his existential dilemma: of a search for love made impossible by the rejection of his own homosexuality.

A friend of his commented that De Niro, Sr., loved the screen image of Greta Garbo. But one day on his way to a gallery where some of his paintings were being shown, who should walk into the elevator but a gorgeous Greta Garbo. But De Niro, Sr., said nothing to her on the short ride up, and the door opened and Garbo walked out of his life due to his insouciance. How heartbreaking it was for his close friend to see them, and his son to hear it. What was the cause of his pain? And who was the man?

Robert De Niro, Sr., was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1922. He dreamed of becoming a famous painter, but today he may still be best known for his son: Oscar-winning actor Robert De Niro.

in the HBO documentary, “Remembering the Artist: Robert De Niro, Sr.,” the star son follows the Syracuse native’s struggles growing up in Central New York and his private conflicts trying to hide his homosexuality.

“To me, he was always a great artist,” De Niro told Out magazine last month. “He probably was [conflicted about his sexuality] being from that generation, especially from a small town upstate. I was not aware of much of it. I wish we had spoken about it much more.”

De Niro, Sr.—known as “Bob” to friends and family—studied at the Syracuse Museum from age 11 to 15, according to his official biography. He left the Salt City in his late teens to study under abstract painters Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann. In Hoffman’s Provincetown, R.I., school he met fellow artist Virginia Admiral and married her in 1942. Their only child, “Bobby” De Niro, was born a year later in New York City.

All loss is tragic. I had tears in my own eyes watching this brave tale of De Niro the son—and so did he. I think of my own father, once a powerful, self-made man—who left my mother for another woman after twenty years of marriage. A year later she passed. I couldn’t even go to the funeral. My grief was that strong.

But I swore to myself, if anything ever happened to my father, I would not abandon him. Sure enough he came down with Alzheimer’s. And I followed the whole course of his denial, his repetitive questions of where was he, where was his money, repeating the answers endlessly. I saw him to the end pass from a stroke. Several years later I wrote a play about him, My Father’s House, which starred James Farrentino and Len Lesser (from Seinfeld fame). It ran for Seven Weeks in Waterbury, Connecticut. And parts of it appeared, albeit purloined, in The Sopranos. And yes, in that play, thank god. I had the guts to spill out every emotion I had about my father to free myself. Now, my children ask me about him, especially my daughter, and I tell her as much as they want to know.

Thus, De Niro, in reviving his grief, has done a service for all of us who have lost parents under strange circumstances. Unfortunately, De Niro, Sr.’s denial of his illness, led to his death years later. But not before father and son made their peace. The last shot of the movie is a close-up two-shot of them smirking at each other, face to face. Bottom line, “Remember the artist: Robert De Niro, Sr.” will be a permanent tribute to both—and a minor masterpiece for all of us to see.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.