I am the only i columnist to have had personal experience of Robert de Niro’s parenting skills. So, the news that he has become a father for the seventh time at the age of 79, followed by the revelation that his good friend Al Pacino was a month off fathering his fourth child at 83, struck a personal chord. There’s a Private Eye “Pseud’s Corner” introduction for you, but the mockery that their becoming dads again has inspired caused me to get all defensive over these acting legends.
Living in Manhattan in the early 2000s, my elder daughter was in a Battery Park kindergarten class with de Niro’s young twin boys. The school required a security pass key card to enter. One day my ex found herself behind a man patting his pockets in search of his. She exchanged pleasantries with a De Niro lookalike and later that week asked the head teacher was it possibly him? “Yes, Bob is a parent at the school, but we don’t like to tell anyone about it.”
Oops. By then most of our new Manhattan friends were booking slots to accompany us on the school run, but we both gradually became on nodding “greetings” terms with de Niro. We were still surprised our daughter got invited to the boys’ birthday party at Chelsea Piers. De Niro himself – accompanied by the head teacher (for moral support) – greeted us at the door and was enthusiastically hands-on during a typically raucous pizza and balloon fest, enlivened by food for parents from his restaurant Gotham and meeting Uma Thurman collecting goodie bags.
He would have been roughly my age now back then. The idea of having four-year-old twins in my late fifties would fill me with even more horror today than it did at that time, before I knew how late fifties feel. I’m sure affording nannies, housekeepers and other “help” is a balm, but it’s the chaos I could not endure. The mental and physical exhaustion from having two under-fives then would be unpalatable – and De Niro and Pacino are 79 and 83 respectively, not 58!
Despite all the headlines about both men and women having babies later in life, it’s not as dramatic a change among over forties and fifties as you might think, more of a gradual change from our twenties into our thirties. Only one per cent of babies are born to first-time fathers over 50. The oldest first-time mum I’ve known was 47. Dads? I don’t know any really “older” dads other than a couple of my daughters’ friends. I can only look to celebrities like Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood.
Having lost my real dad at 15 months and my lovely step-dad at 13 years old, I would have given anything to have had a father, of any age. The jokes can jar. I recall other parents quietly mocking De Niro – behind his back, of course: they still came to the party. But, having lost a father who was aged 41, I can attest it’s not about the prospect of dying that matters, but their presence while alive. Will that father be an active, loving presence in the child’s life? If De Niro, Pacino and other older parents can do that, then they and their children will have the last laugh on the sniggerers.
