copyright

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Copyright © Marshall Fine 1997

Marshall Fine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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dedication

To my brother and sister, Richard and Julie

contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Prologue

Harvey Keitel: The Art of Darkness

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Harvey Keitel Filmography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

introduction

Harvey Keitel is a tough interview. Ask anyone who’s tried it. It’s not that he won’t talk to you. It’s just that, for the most part, he will only talk about what he wants to talk about, no matter what you ask him.

The first time I met him, in October 1994, he started by telling me why he didn’t want to discuss the character he played in the film he was there to promote because ‘I’d like your readers to see the film with their own hearts, to see it without my influence.’

Neither did he want to discuss his work methods or his personal life. Nor would he talk about the taboos on male frontal nudity in films – ‘I wouldn’t know because I’ve never done a nude scene.’ All evidence to the contrary.

Instead, he wanted to discuss how he had discovered the joys of reading as a young man in the Marines, when, out of boredom, he picked up a book of Greek mythology and transformed his life. And to complain that ‘we’ve lost the art of story-telling for the most part. We’ve lost the art of sitting around the table and sharing stories about life. We’ve lost the art of the caveman who painted on walls to express his own fears and desires.’

Most of all, he wanted to discuss the journey inward, the journey to self-knowledge that drives him onward as an actor and as a man. It was the kind of discussion that could have sounded pretentious; well, actually, it did sound pretentious. But Keitel also made it sound heartfelt:

I still struggle at times not to escape from the inward journey. I can never weigh for you how hard that is, the temptation away from doing what is right. The problem is we give short shrift too often to the devil in us. We shun it instead of making its voice divine and accepting our goodness. The problem is in accepting the dark side. People don’t understand that they can accept it – but they don’t have to act on it. There are ways of expressing the dark side without hurting anyone. It can take a lifetime to learn – but it doesn’t have to.

Harvey Keitel’s journey to self-knowledge and his career as an actor have both been bumpy, sometimes frustrating trips, that eventually led to creative breakthroughs and newfound success in the 1990s.

He came to acting late – in his mid twenties – and was already in his thirties when he had his first burst of fame in Mean Streets. But subsequently he couldn’t find parts worthy of his talents, playing colorful but small character roles before suffering a kind of career meltdown in the late 1970s that lasted, more or less, through the 1980s. Then, in 1991 and 1992, Keitel was reborn as the risk-taking king of the American (and, indeed, the international) independent film scene.

When I started this book, I assumed I understood Keitel’s career, having followed it since he emerged in Mean Streets in 1973, the same year I left college and started working professionally as an entertainment writer and critic (after several years of practicing in college). Acting, as it turned out, was an escape from a life so unsatisfying that Keitel had sought refuge in work as a court stenographer, where he could sit without speaking or being spoken to for days at a time. Yet that proved to be the opposite of what he wanted and needed: the ability to explore, understand and express the riot of emotions roiling within him.

To chronicle Keitel’s career required watching close to sixty of his films. Though I’d seen most of them when they originally came out, I doubt that even Harvey has seen all of them; many of the lesser outings – the ones he made in the deep, dark eighties with directors no one will ever hear of – are impossible to find on video in the States.

Watching as many as I did, however, was a revelation and an education. The young Keitel of Mean Streets or Blue Collar was so energized, his potential practically oozing out of his ears, yet with an edge of desperation – he was, after all, almost thirty-five when Mean Streets came out. He was playing characters so feverishly caught up in their own lives that he seemed to give off sparks – he created friction and electricity just by walking through life.

Compare that with the older, sadder, more confident Keitel of Reservoir Dogs or Smoke: here are characters who have lived long enough to know which lines they will and won’t cross – and what each of them costs. That smooth, slightly wolflike face has gained wrinkles and lines, making its planes and valleys a landscape of unexpressed emotion. And his always forceful physique has, if anything, become even more solid and formidable.

I’ve gained what is probably a permanent appreciation for Keitel the actor and the way he has grown and achieved mastery of his craft over the last twenty-plus years. To my mind, there is no one else working today who has the same courage and daring as an actor, the same restless urge to explore uncharted territory of the human soul. No matter how unworthy of his talents a movie might be (and his taste certainly isn’t flawless), you can trust him to bring everything he has to whatever role he’s playing.

To get a better idea about Keitel’s career, I talked to as many of his friends and colleagues as I could, some of whom I can thank by name, some of whom I can’t. But I would like to acknowledge, in no particular order:

Ulu Grosbard, Mike Kusley, Yaphet Kotto, Howard Bershod, Paul Lynch, Gina Richer, John Badham, Anthony Harvey, Chuck Patterson, Stockard Channing, John Sayles, Mike Moder, David Dukes, Michael Dinner, James Gammon, Joel Tuber, Arvin Brown, Tom Reilly, Ian Bryce, John Fiedler, Steve Rotter, Peter Medak, John Pierson, David Proval, Matthew Carlisle, Harry Ufland, Ron Silver, Steve Brenner, Joel Schumacher, Peter Scarlet, Stuart Cotton, Arthur Brook, Giancarlo Esposito, Marc Urman, Ann Wedgworth, Ernie Martin, James Toback, Allen Garfield, Martin Sheen, Ellen Burstyn, Bertrand Tavernier, Tom Davis, David Sosna, Zina Bethune, Jack Mathews, Roger Ebert, Bruce Williamson, Joe Queenan, Harlan Jacobson, Peter Travers, Janet Maslin, Amelia Kassel, Marlin Hopkins, Cynthia Kirk, Andy Shearer, Jeremy Walker, Marian Koltai-Levine, Susan Kaplan, Jennifer Bretton, Marian Billings, Elizabeth Pettit, Scott Siegel, the San Francisco International Film Festival, The Charlie Rose Show, the New York Public Library, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the White Plains Library, and video stores too numerous to mention.

I also want to thank Alan Rudolph, who didn’t ask whether the book was authorized until midway through the interview, and then kept talking provided I mentioned the circumstances.

My gratitude to Dr Emily Stein, my favorite expert.

A big ‘thanks for listening’ to my colleagues Ross Priel, Georgette Gouveia, Barbara Nachman, Mary Dolan, Elaine Gross, Bill Varner and Ed Tagliaferri.

An added thank you to my friends Larry Sutin and Joey Morris, who provided counsel, humor and the occasional advice to ‘Stop whining.’

Finally, all my love and gratitude to my wife, Kim, and my sons, Jacob and Caleb, for giving me their considerable support and understanding while I was writing this book.

‘Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.’

Edward Albee, The Zoo Story

prologue

Step off the Number 4 subway at the Eastern Parkway stop in Brooklyn, climb the stairs out of the station and hang a quick left. Suddenly you’ve escaped out of the crush of New York and into Eden: the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

On this particular Sunday, a week before Father’s Day 1996, the garden is suffering from the greenhouse effect as a gaggle of people elbow each other in heat and humidity that have both hit eighty-five, trying to stake out their little piece of paradise on the garden’s Celebrity Path. Though the weather is sticky as overcooked rice, many of them are dolled up: suits and dresses and pantyhose – the whole Sunday-best rigmarole. They are milling with a certain impatience.

Yes, they’ve already spotted actor Fyvush Finkel among the assembled notables. The sight of jazz legend Max Roach, resplendent in a black suit and shirt and red tie, sends a shudder of recognition through the few African-Americans in the largely white crowd. Everyone perks up a little at the appearance of Daniel Benzali, late of TV’s Murder One, bald head reflecting his blindingly white double-breasted summer suit (worn with white sneakers). But he’s not the one they’re here to see.

Then the crowd parts and Harvey Keitel joins the procession, his ten-year-old daughter Stella in tow. His hair longish and dark, shot through with gray, his face deeply tanned, he looks fit and natty in charcoal and black, his sportcoat and open-neck shirt complemented by sandals and a small gray suede bag with a knit strap.

The power surge through the crowd is almost noticeable. Harvey Keitel is here – the movie star. The Brooklyn movie star.

Suddenly this unmotivated throng has a purpose. Now they’re ready: ‘Welcome Back to Brooklyn’ day can begin.

A few determined members of the public have wormed their way into this invitation-only ceremony, at which Keitel, Roach, Benzali and two others are being inducted into the Celebrity Path in the Botanic Garden. The Celebrity Path, an idyllic trail through shady pines near a lake, consists of flagstones bearing the carved names of prominent Brooklynites.

The press has been invited and has responded with a slightly pushy band of photographers and cameramen, battling for position around the edges of the crowd as the official procession begins up the narrow pathway. Led by a pompous fellow in a bad straw hat and what looks like a shepherd’s crook, the caterpillar-like procession of honorees, their families, the press, and civilians who have slipped past the lax security works its way up the path.

It inches its way along, in part because Mary Tyler Moore, who is being crowned Queen of Brooklyn for the day, is on crutches. But there’s also the matter of stopping at each flagstone for an annual ceremonial reading of the names.

‘Walt Whitman!’ the man with the shepherd’s staff calls out, before taking two baby steps to the next stone. ‘The Ritz Brothers!’ he announces, leaving one to ponder the range of vision possessed by the selection committee.

Holding hands with his daughter, a slim and pretty girl with her father’s piercing eyes (in gimlet), Keitel moves with the crowd, trying not to be bothered by all the cameras, the photographers now snapping pictures of his little girl, the cameras constantly clicking at him. His shirt and pants are black, soaking up heat like solar panels; the only cooling effect comes from the sockless sandals he’s affected for this walk in the park with a few hundred onlookers pressing closely in on him.

Then, with a final flourish – ‘Floyd Patterson!’ – the procession stops at Keitel’s new marker.

‘Harvey Keitel – one of our inductees,’ the man with the shepherd’s crook enunciates and Keitel steps forward. He looks down at his name chiseled in capital letters in the smooth piece of paving.

After a moment of cameras clicking it becomes obvious that he is expected to say something.

‘I’m honored to be included in this walkway,’ he says, not quite meeting the eyes of the circle closing in around him, ‘and I thank you for having me here today.’

There is a smattering of applause and then it’s time to move on to the next stone – ‘Gil Hodges!’ – as Keitel and Stella fade back into the crowd.

As the procession gathers around the stone of another inductee – early sixties New York radio legend ‘Cousin Brucie’ Morrow – Keitel stops at a marker and stoops down. The stone is that of Harry Houdini, whom Keitel is getting ready to play in a film for Paramount, Illumination. He has already begun doing copious homework, sometimes phoning his researcher at midnight with new ideas he’d like to look into. All in preparation for a portrayal of the great escape artist and mama’s boy who spent half his life debunking mediums and spiritualists – and the other half seeking a way to contact his mother in the next world.

He touches the stone, then kisses his hand and offers it with a smile to Stella, for her kiss as well. One stone further and he stops again: ‘Look – Edward Everett Horton!’ he says to his daughter with genuine glee. ‘The Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland!’

The procession ahead of them comes to a conclusion, stranding the crowd on a narrow path on a peninsula in the lake. Everyone must now turn around to return to a small amphitheater overlooking the water.

There, Keitel finds himself perched on a folding chair on the edge of the improvised stage, tapping his foot, waiting for the event to begin. Max Roach comes and sits next to him, and Cousin Brucie, his hairpiece looking distinctly younger than anyone on the stage, sits down next to him.

Cousin Brucie leans over to Keitel and Roach and says, ‘Isn’t it strange to think that that stone will be here after we’re gone?’ as though he had only this second discovered his own mortality.

If anything, for Keitel, the stone symbolized more about how far he had come since he was the kid who’d managed to make himself unwanted at two Brooklyn high schools, the kid whose greatest aspiration was his own stick at the poolroom, the kid who, out of simple macho boredom, quit high school altogether at seventeen and joined the Marines to escape from Brighton Beach.

To be here in Brooklyn was an honor he couldn’t ignore. Still, the photographers are beginning to get on his nerves. Sitting on the folding chair in the cramped amphitheater, he can feel the lenses pointing at him as Stella crawls into his lap and, at age ten, begins sucking her thumb.

Keitel scans the crowd. He spots his older brother, Gerry, and several old friends, who’ve come to keep him company, to celebrate, and to see their friend and brother receive recognition from the borough where he grew up.

Stella leans against him, her thumb still in her mouth, watching with bored eyes as Daniel Benzali gets up to receive the medal signifying his placement in the Celebrity Path from Borough President Howard Golden. Her free hand pinches her father’s ear between thumb and forefinger, as Keitel affects a look of comic pain.

Then Golden begins talking about Keitel and mentions Smoke – the Wayne Wang film in which Keitel plays Auggie Wren, the owner of a Brooklyn smoke shop. The film has been adopted as an official Brooklyn film when, in fact, it is Blue in the Face, Smoke’s rowdier, less self-satisfied companion film, that repeatedly announces its love for all things Brooklyn. Be that as it may, Smoke is the film Keitel is associated with on this day of accolades – because it’s about Brooklyn and because it’s more socially acceptable than, say, Bad Lieutenant or Reservoir Dogs.

‘… Our next honoree, Harvey Keitel.’

Keitel gets up and Golden shakes his hand. There’s the grip-and-grin moment for the cameras, which snap and whir furiously – the two men shaking hands while Golden holds the medal up between them. Then, as he starts to give it to Keitel, the hand-over is muffed and the bronze medal falls to the flagstones with a clang.

‘Ooooh,’ says the assembled group, but Keitel saves the moment, picking up the medal and holding it aloft to show it’s unharmed. Then he kisses it and offers it to God.

‘Remember that?’ he says of the gesture. He smiles broadly. ‘I think of the words of that Sinatra song: “The house that I lived in, the people I knew.” The guy in the poolroom was named Charlie. I remember Mr Levy, the tailor. And my friends, Howie Weinberg and Carl Platt – we joined the Marines together.

‘All those people I grew up with, my buddies, my brother. We carved our names in cement all over Brooklyn, notched it in trees and poolrooms. I’m pleased to be here. Thank you.’

Even as Golden is introducing Max Roach, Keitel is spirited away to the fragrance garden by one of the event’s press flacks for a stand-up interview with New York’s Fox-TV affiliate. As he stands uncomfortably next to a smiling blonde, mouthing the necessary niceties (‘I’ve always loved Brooklyn’), his group of friends have detached themselves from the crowd still watching the induction ceremonies and stand together: Platt, Weinberg, Gerald Keitel, Keitel’s long-time buddy Victor Argo (who appears in many of Keitel’s films), the women attached to each.

When Keitel finishes his TV interview, he and his friends wander back up the hill to the induction ceremony. As Keitel looks through a batch of pictures of one of his friends’ children, an autograph-seeker approaches, obviously prepared for this moment. He offers a color print of Keitel from Reservoir Dogs in a manila folder and Keitel signs it.

‘Can I take a picture with you?’ the fan says and, as Keitel says, ‘Well …’ the thin, T-shirted young man jumps next to Keitel, throws an arm around his shoulder and smiles for a friend, who takes a flash picture.

The flash functions as a signal to the half-dozen or so other fans lurking in the fringe of the crowd near Keitel and his friends. Emboldened, they approach him in twos and threes, asking for an autograph and a picture. He obliges, once, twice – then finally frowns and says to the next request, ‘Look, I think that’s enough of that.’ The frown hits the kid like a bolt and the edge in Keitel’s voice is unmistakable. Time to back off.

Yet, moments later, two aging women, husky and begowned, interrupt his attention to the ceremony for an autograph. Without even asking, one stands next to him while he’s signing and the other quickly snaps a picture. Keitel can’t believe the chutzpah, but all he can do is smile, shrug and look up at the heavens, as if to say, ‘Isn’t anybody listening to me?’

He pointedly turns back to his friends and begins to discuss plans for later. The combination of the heat and the crowd has made everyone edgy; they’d just as soon cut out now and escape from this whole scene to someone’s house where they can kick back and talk about old times.

But obligations must be met. There’s still the coronation ceremony for Mary Tyler Moore as Queen of Brooklyn before several hundred people in the rose garden. Keitel and his new colleagues from the Celebrity Path will be introduced and then spend the rest of the ceremony sitting on a platform under an unseasonably intense sun. The applause for Keitel will be the loudest of the day, louder even than for Queen MTM.

‘I still have to do this other thing – then we can leave,’ Keitel says, taking Stella’s hand as the crowd begins to drift toward the staging area for the rose garden coronation.

Then he weighs the chunky medal in his hand, looks at its image of the Brooklyn Bridge, hears his parents saying to him, ‘Harvey, be a mensch.’ He realizes how ungracious what he’s said might appear and smiles sheepishly. ‘I didn’t mean that like it sounded.’

1

How do you explain a nice Jewish boy from Brighton Beach, scion of an Orthodox Jewish family, quitting high school – turning his back on education – to join the Marines? It simply wasn’t done. As one long-time friend observed, ‘What kind of Jew goes into the Marines? And likes it!’

One seeking to rebel against and distance himself from a background he found oppressive and limiting. One who could see that his current form of rebellion – hanging out in the poolroom with his friends – was a dead end. But one who wound up substituting one rigid system of behavior (that of the United States Marine Corps) for another (Orthodox Judaism).

Keitel’s parents had escaped the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe, emigrating to New York where they settled in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. His father, who was from Poland, worked as a hatmaker and a garment worker, meager wages on which to raise a growing family. His mother, who had come from Romania, supplemented the family income by working at a luncheonette.

When Harvey was born on May 13, 1939, he was the youngest of three children, with an older brother and sister. The family all lived in a small apartment in Brighton Beach on Avenue X and Brighton Beach Avenue.

The second-floor walk-up rattled and shook every time the elevated subway, on tracks twenty feet from the window, screeched by. The apartment was small and dark, but it overlooked a colorful neighborhood of immigrant families staking out second-generation roots. Keitel’s Brighton Beach blended together Jews, Italians, Irish. ‘It was an incredibly colorful place to grow up,’ he said. ‘Brooklyn was a culture unto itself – Italian immigrants, Jewish immigrants, the music, the dances.’

His turf during his boyhood summers was the ocean and the nearby Coney Island amusement park. Swimming, climbing on and fishing off the rocks – what more could a kid ask for? There were fireworks every Tuesday night in the summer and an annual Mardi Gras at Coney Island, where the young Keitel would sell confetti.

The proceeds would go toward stuffing himself with Nathan’s Kosher hot dogs or, occasionally, buying rides on the Steeplechase. Somehow, though, the high-speed ride was never as exciting as the thrill of trying to sneak in without paying or the fear of getting caught. It was never easy.

As Keitel observed, ‘Everything was right there on those streets, in that poolroom. It was limiting only in that we had very few teachers to show us where that elevated train led to. That was our limitation. We didn’t know the avenues of possibilities. Manhattan could have been the moon to us.’

If he had fears as a kid, they were more of the movie-inspired kind. He walked around in a state of mild terror, fearful that he might encounter deadly quicksand or molten lava or some other natural disaster he’d seen at a Saturday matinee.

In fact, the worst thing he was likely to run into during those early days of the Eisenhower administration was the occasional fist fight. The toughest decision he had to make was where to hang out that day: the poolroom or the candy store at Avenue U and East 8th Street, where they would sip egg creams and eat Mello Rolls.

Yet even the tough kids understood certain innate rules of respect and discipline, which they made clear to the young Harvey one day in the luncheonette his mother ran on Avenue X. He had been acting the big shot with the help, while a few boys sat and had coffee and talked among themselves. The final straw was when Keitel’s mother sat down next to him and asked him if he’d be able to help that day.

‘Oh, man,’ Keitel said loudly, upset at being pressed into service.

Before he knew it, he had been swatted across the back of the head by one of the more imposing Avenue X boys, who now loomed over Keitel. ‘Don’t talk that way to your mother,’ he told Keitel, who could only rub his head and nod mutely.

Home life was something else: ‘I’ve had many problems in my life that I’ve had to get through, beginning with being a little boy,’ Keitel observed.

Such as the fact that he began stuttering at the age of six or seven, a problem that carried on into his teens. What is a painful and emotionally challenging period in anyone’s life became excruciating for a young man who stuttered:

It was a huge, huge, deep, deep embarrassment, the object of humiliation by other children. It took years to go away. I still stutter at times. The stutter is something that occurs as the result of something else. It’s sort of a road to your identity. It’s a clue about something, it’s a clue about disturbance.

It was very painful because I was shy to begin with. Confrontation means asserting yourself. Stuttering is an attempt to stop the assertion of the self. I can’t think of anything more frustrating or more detrimental to evolving than not allowing yourself whatever thought comes to mind.

What kind of thoughts? Ones that went against the rigid interpretation of life practiced by his parents, Orthodox Jews in the middle of a secular world exploding with the expanding and engulfing youth culture of movies and rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s not hard to imagine the lectures Keitel must have received from his parents, strict Eastern European people who had escaped annihilation in Europe only to be forced to start all over again – and in a new language. Nor is it difficult to conjure up the grinding combination of Orthodox Judaism and Depression-era economic pressures – which squeezed the neighborhood long after World War II had ended, well into the 1950s, even as the rest of America seemed to be enjoying a much-vaunted post-war prosperity.

‘My mother worked at a luncheonette and my father worked at a factory as a sewing-machine operator and they could barely read or write,’ Keitel recalled. ‘Life demanded of them that they work hard for their family and they did so and I admire them deeply for that.’

Here, however, was Keitel, with all the raging hormones and sexually charged thoughts of a normal teenage boy in the Elvis era, when his peers were rocking and rolling, affecting the hairstyles and attitudes of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Marlon Brando in The Wild One – none of which had penetrated the world of Keitel’s parents.

Undoubtedly the lectures were long and stern: about the forbidden nature of sex and everything else young Harvey deemed most interesting, on the need to remember and honor the old way and resist the temptation of this godless new popular culture. Not to do so was not just wrong – it was punishable. But Harvey found himself irresistibly drawn to what he could see of the outside world and suffered the wrath and disappointment of his parents as a result.

Which may have led to the stuttering, he decided:

Guilt can be insidious, which helps to repress thoughts. You pick it up quickly – in your home, in your neighborhood. Once children are taught guilt, they will stutter in one way or another. If you’re ashamed of one feeling, you’re going to be ashamed of all your feelings. That’s the basis for neurosis. Unfortunately, as a youngster I learned that certain feelings and thoughts were bad. You learn it’s wrong to have a certain thought. As a young man, there were thoughts I had and propensities to do certain things, which I was very ashamed of. So if you have that thought, you say, ‘I’m bad. I must get rid of that thought.’ But how do you get rid of a thought? What do you do as a child? You choke yourself.

A doctor I know said to me, ‘You are allowed any thought. Every thought is a worthwhile thought.’ You are not responsible for your thoughts. One is only responsible for what he does. It took me a long time to learn what that doctor expressed to me.

Self-satisfaction was unknown to me as a young man. That came late in my life. The pain of my journey led me to satisfaction. Avoiding the pain led to strangulation, to self-loathing. By descending into the pain, I learned satisfaction.

Without that kind of repression and longing Keitel might not be the actor he eventually became: ‘I’ve learned over the course of my life,’ he said, ‘that memories I once considered painful have been the greatest source of revelation in my life, so it’s too simple to say they’re positive or negative.’

Obviously, he wasn’t the only Jewish kid from Brighton Beach who argued with his parents about dressing like a hood. Indeed, at Keitel’s bar mitzvah, the rabbi performing the Jewish coming-of-age ritual booted one of Keitel’s young pals out of the synagogue. His crime? Wearing such incipient hipster garb as a checkered cabana-style jacket, peg pants and pointy-toed shoes.

The conflict between Keitel’s need to conform to his parents’ wishes and his urge to create an identity of his own didn’t really come to a head until after his bar mitzvah.

It was a Kosher household, which meant that they followed the Jewish dietary laws prohibiting, among other things, the eating of any pork or shellfish products as well as proscribing milk and meat products at the same meal. Though he moved away from Judaism, the habits of keeping Kosher stuck with Keitel, at least through his stint in the Marines. There, his friends would battle to sit next to him in the mess hall, because he would give away the milk that was invariably served with the meat of the day.

Keitel went to Hebrew school and studied at home with his grandfather, a man whose imposing strictness daunted him: ‘I remember my grandfather sitting at the kitchen table in Brooklyn, making me read from my Hebrew book,’ he recalled. ‘My brother, who is five years older, stuck his head in the kitchen and said, “Aleph bais, gimme a raise, ches tes, kiss mein ess.” Then he ran out, with my grandfather hollering at him. I couldn’t believe my brother had done that. I was scared to death.’

Once the bar mitzvah was past, however, Keitel began to re-evaluate Judaism, losing faith as he looked at the problems that seemed to threaten the world’s very existence in those days of Cold War panic. What kind of God would allow such things to go on?

In his crowd Keitel became known as someone who was willing to put his life on the line and confront God himself: as an act of rebellion, he started spitting on mezuzahs, the little metal sacraments containing a small piece of parchment with writings from the Torah that some Jews attach to the front doorpost. Observant Jews kiss their fingers and touch the mezuzah as they enter and leave their homes.

And Keitel was spitting on them:

I was literally spitting. My friends would say, with great fear, ‘Don’t do that, Harvey!, don’t do that!’ I said, ‘Why? What’s going to happen? Here I am, God – do something!’ I wasn’t ashamed of being a Jew – I had just lost faith. There was so much misery and so much deprivation. I didn’t understand how God fit into that. I thought God was responsible.

Religion meant nothing to me when I was growing up because it was never made clear to me how the stories and myths in the Bible were relevant to my life. We were simply taught to be fearful. It’s a sin religion isn’t taught with more feeling for the beauty of the stories.

Back then, someone said to me, ‘It’s people like you who are the true believers.’ I spat on the mezuzah again. That person was right, though. It’s been a long journey but I’ve come back. I would now say that I am a devout believer in the divinity but for a long time I just adopted Thomas Paine’s credo, that my religion was to do what is right.

His rebellion extended beyond attempts at blasphemy into his efforts to attain juvenile-delinquency status: the duck’s-ass hairstyle, the leather jacket, the peg pants set off by pointy shoes with metal cleats to announce his arrival from a block away. He wanted to be a tough guy because that’s the way the guys were.

Not out-and-out gangsters, of course: just wiseguys who caused a little commotion now and then. According to one classmate of Keitel’s at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brighton Beach,

We were what was called trumbnicks, troublemakers. We were tough but we weren’t bad. By today’s standards, we were angels. We got into fights, local things. We would go to a dance and end up in a brawl. We’d go to the old Manhattan-Brooklyn Jewish Center. We were Ashkenazi Jews and we’d get into fights with the Syrian Jews. We’d talk to their girls or they’d talk to ours and the next thing you know, you’d have fifty guys fighting in the street. But not with guns or knives – just with fists.

As Keitel recalled it, ‘You had to be tough, otherwise you were considered a fag, a sissy. We used to have rock fights with black people. I had some black friends and we’d kid one another. The divisiveness and the rock fights always seemed absurd to us. I threw rocks at them and they threw rocks at me.’

Being tough meant doing things that scared you, things you knew could get you in trouble with the police or worse. Being tough meant never copping to that fear, no matter how overpowering it might become. For Keitel, being tough meant hiding his fear along with all the other unwanted, unwelcome emotions swirling around in his adolescent mind:

I remember being scared to rob pigeon coops, but you couldn’t admit that. There was nothing to be but tough. Now the other kids who were going to school and studying to be something – a doctor, lawyer, an Indian chief – they had a different identity. But the tough guys, their identity was to be tough. It was as if you were living in Africa and you had a tribe. You had to go out and kill animals to survive. Well, in this particular environment, to survive, you had to steal a car, tap a pigeon coop, steal things, wear certain clothing, put on the whole show. Otherwise you would be an outcast.

Which was already an identity Keitel was dealing with in everyday life. As the son of immigrants who resented his ever-more-Americanized worldview, he dealt every day with being an outsider in his own home; outside the house, on the other hand, he knew he would never be the all-American kid. As a Jew, he had grown up with the idea of anti-Semitism, its specter emanating from Europe during the war against Germany. As a teenager, he coped with the mercurial nature of social standing in the ever-shifting world of high school. And the only place he seemed to fit was with the tough guys.

Mark Reiner, a high-school friend, said, ‘Harvey was streetwise and tough, but he was never mean. He knew how to handle himself and while he wouldn’t back off from a fight, he never went looking for trouble either. He did some things I wouldn’t, but he never lost his sense of decency.’ And Keitel acknowledged:

I knew, deep down, that I didn’t belong with that crowd. I was scared and didn’t feel part of it but I couldn’t admit that to myself, much less to them. So I played the game. I was not a real tough guy. The Brighton Beach Sinners were a group of friends of mine. The name was created by the press after a serious incident of vandalism at a neighborhood school. We didn’t consider ourselves great sinners. We were trying to learn what life was about, we were trying to survive life. I saw myself trying to develop the power to live. I didn’t think so much that I could be something as much as I needed to be something.

There was so much energy and talent among those guys. I wish I could have sat down with them and talked about things I was interested in – about feelings, about life, about personal problems. I wanted to do that but I couldn’t. That wasn’t tough. That was soft.

Yet he was a popular kid with his classmates, being elected by his peers as leader of the eighth-grade honor society, much to the chagrin of teacher Edna Dinkel, who took one look at the grinning juvenile-delinquent-in-training and said, ‘I do not consider that an appropriate choice.’ She ordered a new election, with different results and, being the teacher, she got what she ordered.

Meanwhile, Keitel was discovering new paradigms for his notions of toughness – in the movies of Marlon Brando and James Dean. Here, too, were misunderstood young men, at odds with both parents and society, trying simply to find out who they were amid a world of misunderstanding and opposition. The films showed the young Keitel that toughness could be associated with emotional honesty and not simply a readiness to be quick with the fists:

I related to James Dean because he was in situations that we were in. I never related to his tough guy side. It was always his sensitivity and yet that’s exactly what I couldn’t be. I always buried it.

My comrades and I didn’t know about being nourished and we didn’t have the courage to love somebody. That wasn’t something we pursued. We weren’t brought up to nourish one another’s thoughts, to discuss our deep conflicts. Who the hell ever walked over to someone back then and said, ‘Uh, listen, I really feel very lonely’, or ‘I feel very scared’ or ‘I’m not sure where I’m at.’ We never spoke like that.

I began to get a sense that courage was something other than what I thought it was. I saw people such as Dean, Brando and John Cassavetes as being heroic. As growing up has its difficulties, we look for heroes to help us through that shadowy forest. The work these people did represented a struggle to cope with the difficulty of being that stimulated and gave hope to me and my friends.

They began to take the place of these warrior-like gods who had been my heroes. Somewhere along the line I have the sense that I was pursuing being tough in the wrong fashion. I wasn’t really becoming tough. I was building a stronger facade because now I see tough as being a whole different animal, as being someone who can face problems, who can try to solve them without a baseball bat. All those guys back in the old days I used to call fags were tougher than anybody because they knew how to be scared.

I began to want to be less of a war hero and more of what those men were. They gave me courage, they gave me hope. The courage to express their feelings, their emotions, their thoughts. That was stunning. Frightening. It took more courage than I ever imagined, much more courage than picking up a gun.

And part of that courage had to do with facing his own fears, something Keitel was not ready to do: ‘I never thought I could do what [Dean and Brando] did,’ he noted. ‘I was just glad someone was doing it – the “it” being something so personal and so revealing that it gave me some hope of understanding myself at a time when I was lying to myself with such ferocity. They somehow penetrated my defense, stirred things up.’

2

The sense of hope he gained from watching Dean and Brando act – the realization that men could actually reveal their anguish, anxiety and insecurity without compromising their sense of masculinity – was yet another emotion Keitel hid away as he coped with the pressures of family life and high school.

He entered Abraham Lincoln High School in September 1954, a short, rather young-looking freshman in a school full of lower-middle-class Jewish and Italian kids from the Brighton Beach and Coney Island neighborhoods.

The school had no metal detectors, no security forces, none of the stripped-down, urban-siege quality it possesses today. In this sunny era, the worst kids smoked cigarettes (with an occasional puff of marijuana by the really bad guys) as they hung out at the sweet shop across the street from Lincoln (long since replaced by the imposing edifices that comprise Trump Village housing development).

The school was home to the budding musical talents of Neil Diamond and Neil Sedaka, who both sang in the choir during Keitel’s years there. The Tokens, who would have a hit with ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight,’ also walked Lincoln’s halls.

Gangs were not a problem; the biggest concern of principal Abraham Lass were the intramural scuffles between members of rival cellar clubs, local dance haunts. Keitel and his friends frequented a club called the Raleighs; they wore sharp red-and-black jackets with an image of Sir Walter Raleigh on the back. So Lass finally banned the wearing of club jackets to school to stem the spate of scuffles they seemed to invite.

For most teenagers at Lincoln, the biggest concerns were social: having dances and meeting girls; hanging out at the beach and Coney Island. None of which did much for the confused existence of Harvey Keitel, as he explained:

Growing up, success for us was what? Money. Very simply: Money. Whoever had the most money at the end of the day was the most successful person. We grew up believing that, because that was the message given to us – and to our parents, and through our parents to us – and directly to us from the movies we saw and the television we watched.

There was a huge concern over material things. Having a car, a new car. Buying a girl a diamond engagement ring. A friend of mine would buy a new car and I would immediately spit on it. I would say, ‘Why are you so caught up in this? It’s only a piece of machinery.’ The same thing I thought about buying a diamond engagement ring. Guys were like humiliated that they couldn’t afford a carat ring or a carat-and-a-half diamond ring for an engagement. And something about that struck me as wrong, that people were being judged by the amount of money they had, as opposed to who they were.

Keitel, who had good enough grades to be a member of the honor society in middle school, suddenly found himself struggling in the face of high school’s educational demands. He wouldn’t pay attention even to the work in front of him. Outside of school, he was rebelling against his family’s demands for better performance, running with his friends to the poolroom rather than keeping up with his homework.

‘I didn’t like anything except hanging out with my friends,’ Keitel remembered. ‘I didn’t want to read. I didn’t want to study. I didn’t have the concentration, I didn’t have the focus. I was just upset, upset with those familiar things that perhaps any young person would have been upset about. And being upset doesn’t afford one the patience necessary to learn anything. I failed everything but I thought I was a great student.’

He hid that emotional turbulence behind bravado, behind the tough-guy, wiseguy persona. Yet there was also something straightforward and ingenuous about the bantam Keitel, as Principal Lass found out on his first day at Lincoln, in the fall of 1955. Patrolling the halls, looking for stragglers after the first bell, Lass ran across a diminutive sophomore, peg pants stopping just short of his pointy, shiny black shoes, metal taps scraping restlessly on the floor. And, when asked, the underclassman couldn’t produce a hall pass.

‘What are you doing here, young man?’ Lass asked, giving Keitel a baleful look.

‘I’m waiting to see what our new principal looks like,’ came the reply.

Lass fixed Keitel with a no-nonsense look. ‘I’m your new principal.’

‘How do you do?’ the young man said, extending his hand seriously. ‘I’m Harvey Keitel. I’m your new student.’

He lost interest in the classroom, falling further and further behind, barely scraping by. Outgoing and funny with his friends, he became withdrawn and unresponsive in class. Thirty years later, visited by a high-school classmate backstage during the Broadway run of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, Keitel found himself confronted by a woman who asked him, ‘Harvey, what happened to you? You were so quiet.’

‘Who’s really quiet?’ he replied.

None of the things that would prove to be his salvation later in life – literature, the arts – seemed available to Keitel and his friends. Movies? Sure, they went to westerns, horror films, gangster movies. The theater? Reading a book? Fuhgeddaboutit: ‘There was no involvement in the arts at all. Zero,’ Keitel said. ‘We were taught we could not be something different. They’d say, “How could I be anything but what my father was?” In Brighton Beach, I mainly tried to look tough and having a book under one’s arm doesn’t make you look tough.’

Nor was there anyone to take the young Keitel in hand and say, ‘I see potential in you. Let me help you.’ A young man desperately searching for a mentor, Keitel couldn’t look to his father for advice:

The important things to a man like my father were having food to eat and a roof over your head – with good cause, because he had mouths to feed for twenty years. I had trouble in high school. I was disoriented and I didn’t know who I was. I needed guidance and I didn’t get it. Here I was, so choked with internal conflict that I had a serious stuttering problem and there was nobody I could talk to. I had potential; my marks showed that. But there was nobody to say, ‘Hey, it’s alright to have these feelings and thoughts.’

What were my fears? Fear. Fear of us talking, fear of what’s going to happen later, fear of tomorrow, fear of death, fear of not succeeding.

In desperation, after his sophomore year he changed schools, moving from Lincoln in Brighton Beach to Alexander Hamilton High School in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant area. He did it, he said, ‘seeking another road. I wasn’t doing well at Lincoln and I thought maybe if I changed my physical circumstances, I would do better. I wanted to do better. So I went to vocational school.’

As a vocational school, Hamilton was hardly an academic hotbed. Keitel wasn’t interested in being channeled into a manual vocation that offered him the same life of tedium and stress he’d seen in his own father. He found the curriculum dull and unchallenging.

When he tried to re-enroll at Lincoln, however, officials there found a technicality to deny him admittance: ‘I was seventeen,’ Keitel said, ‘and the irresponsible idiot of a dean said I was too old.’ Rather than return to Hamilton, he chose the poolroom over the schoolroom. His chronic absenteeism eventually caught up with him near the end of his junior year:

I had a very good average but I was absent too many days. I just lost the desire to do anything. They called me down and told me they were going to throw me out. This history teacher went to bat for me. But he couldn’t do a thing about it. There was some law about truancy, and they put me out. The dean at the time was a jerk, because he didn’t pay attention to what was going on with his students’ lives – one student being me. To this day, it’s something that irks me.

3

It was 1956, a year when the hated Yankees beat the beloved Dodgers in seven World Series games, including a perfect one pitched by Don Larsen – and still more than a year before the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn for sunnier climes. Elvis Presley was exploding out of the South and into American homes. Peyton Place was top in the ratings. An oral polio vaccine was making America breathe easier. Even as Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were once again turning Adlai Stevenson into a sacrificial Democrat in the race for the American presidency, a young senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy was topping the best-seller lists with Profiles in Courage, which would win him the Pulitzer Prize in history the following year.

In 1956, Harvey Keitel was seventeen, unemployed and broke, with an incomplete education and limited job prospects.

From that vantage point, the military looked like a highly viable option: a job with training and travel – not to mention getting away from Brighton Beach and Brooklyn and being on his own for the first time in his life. He had, after all, just been expelled from one high school for repeated truancy – after being denied admittance to another.

In a moment of clarity, Keitel realized that he couldn’t just spend the rest of his life hanging out in the poolroom. If he wanted a future, he needed a fresh start – and the military provided that. ‘For me at that time it was a good move,’ he remembers. ‘It broke the roll I was on, the roll of the neighborhood poolroom, family; it cut the cord. When I went away, I was on my own, completely on my own.’

The only question was: which branch? With his best friends, ‘Pittsburgh’ Carl Platt and Howie ‘the Moose’ Weinberg, he decided to join the Navy: ‘We were three young men in search of an identity, in search of heroes, trying to become our own heroes. There’s that great line in Dickens’s David Copperfield: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”’

Before they could actually enlist, they ran into Joey Brodowski, a guy from the neighborhood a year or two older, who came into the poolroom at Brighton Beach and 5th Street in his Marine Corps uniform.

‘Hey, Joey,’ the trio told him eagerly, ‘we’re gonna join the Navy. What do you think about that?’

He looked straight at them and said, ‘Nothing, if what you wanna be is the Marine Corps’ little sisters.’

And so Harvey Keitel of the Avenue X Boys and the Brighton Beach Sinners became Private Harvey Keitel, USMC: ‘When my friends and I joined, it was to play some war. What do seventeen-year-olds know about war? Nothing. About starving and dying children? Nothing. But we knew about the quality of being a Marine because we had heard about and read about it.’

What he found instead was discipline, both physical and mental. The Marines gave him a physical regimen that built his short, wiry physique into something well-muscled and impressive, despite his compact size. He gained a new sense of confidence from the training itself. Here was little Harvey Keitel from Brooklyn, shooting guns, learning hand-to-hand combat – and both enjoying and excelling at it. ‘As a young Marine, I was more than willing to kill for my country and die,’ he recalled. ‘At times, I believe that’s very worthwhile to stand up for what you believe in. If I had been a young Marine at Kent State, I would have fired had I been ordered to fire. I would have fired upon those students myself. Back then, I was an ignorant young man.’

That, in turn, gave him the courage to give education another try. After basic training, he began studying and taking classes, in pursuit of the high-school degree he had abandoned when it had abandoned him. And, before he left the Marines, he had earned it: ‘I learned things there that were the beginning of a spiritual journey. In the Marines, I learned that the guys who were really tough were not necessarily the best fighters or the biggest bullies. They were the guys who would endure, who would be there when you needed them and who were not afraid to admit they were scared.’

The night that changed Keitel’s young life forever came with no forewarning of its importance. Before it was over, however, his entire view of the world, himself and everything he faced in his life would be different. He gained an insight that would prove crucial to his way of thinking – and to his way of delving into the world of the characters he played as an actor – forever.

If Harvey Keitel has gained a reputation as an actor who is willing to confront his own darkness at its most stark and penetrating – to take his most frighteningly human fears and impulses and turn them into art – he gained the keys to that kingdom on a moonless night in 1956 near Jacksonville, NC, at Camp Lejeune, where he was a private in the Marines.

The incident, as he would later recount, was one of two lightning-bolt moments that would affect everything that came after. A direct line could be drawn from that particular night in 1956 and his breakthrough performances thirty-six years later in Reservoir Dogs and Bad Lieutenant. Indeed, an entire career may have been shaped by one night-combat class in the Marines. The Keitel persona can be traced to that exercise: the edgy young (or middle-aged) man, whose way of dealing with the world is to lash out at it in spasms of violence – or worse. The good man confronted with his own attraction to what is forbidden – or coping with guilt at his inability to resist temptation.

When Lt, the character he plays in Bad Lieutenant, stares into an abyss of drugs, sex and numerous forms of spiritual corruption and faces his own pitiable disintegration, he is looking through Harvey Keitel’s eyes. And those eyes say, ‘I know these thoughts. I understand this way of thinking.’

The comprehension dawned on that dark night in North Carolina when the young Keitel, barely seventeen and newly sprung from basic training, showed up for night-combat training. It was an inky night and Keitel was nervous and skittish. He had played the tough guy for years, learning it early on the streets of Brooklyn. But this was the Marines – and he was hardly the only tough guy who wanted to prove just how tough he was by joining the Marines.

He had the kind of approachable hard-boiled quality of a young John Garfield. Mixing for the first time with people from all parts of the country, he’d found other Brooklynites and hung out with them, if anything emphasizing his own Brooklyn origins.

But this was different: even though it was peacetime, even though he was armed and wearing combat gear, even though it was only an exercise and not actual combat conditions, standing out here in the dark was creepy. He was a Brooklynite through and through, used to corners with streetlamps and traffic and people. This was darkness one can only find far from city lights, darkness like he’d never experienced except, perhaps, while hiding in a closet as a child: ‘It was pitch-black out. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. We were sitting in the darkness, me and hundreds of other Marines, huddled together, about to go through this course in night combat. And I was scared. And I didn’t want to tell any of my fellow Marines that I was scared. But I was scared.’

Then, out of the darkness came a voice: calm, reasonable, all-knowing. It was the voice of the instructor, an aged veteran of, perhaps, twenty-five or twenty-six who seemed like a mystic ancient to this still-raw batch of shaven-headed seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. ‘You’re all afraid of the dark,’ he said, without judgment, ‘because you’re all afraid of what you don’t know. I’m going to teach you to know the darkness, so that you’re no longer afraid of it. So that you learn how to live in it.’

‘My introduction to mythology and philosophy,’ Keitel called it. ‘In the years that came, that is one of the essences of all the mythology and philosophy I have read. He could tell us those words because he had experienced the darkness. He had experienced that terror in a war. But that was the first time I had heard words like that.’

That notion – of dealing with fear by confronting it and learning about it – struck a chord that resonated with the seemingly easy-going Keitel. It remained with him and became a credo of sorts: to explore the darkness in order to better understand the light, to examine wrong in order to better know what is right. It became the source of Keitel’s journey as an actor – the inner journey to explore his own darkest, least-acceptable feelings and ideas, then using that self-knowledge while creating his film and stage characters – to plumb his own pain for his characters’ reality:

That is probably the most important philosophical question to ask oneself. What is the darkness? How do I learn to live with it? I heard that when I was seventeen years old and I never forgot it. It appealed to me. I wanted to learn to live with the darkness. What the Marine was teaching – it’s not that you are not scared in the night time. It’s that you learn about your fear and the darkness. That fear becomes different and you can work with it.

At that time I didn’t know what the extension of that idea was. I know now. It took me years to understand it, but I sensed it.

Eventually, Keitel would find the same thought echoed in the Gospel of Thomas, as he researched the role of Judas in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’

‘There,’ Keitel said, ‘is the whole foundation of self-analysis.’

4

Keitel was more excited and curious than scared when America decided to intervene in Lebanon in 1957, to provide a peacekeeping presence while American and Soviet diplomats conferred and tried to resolve the dispute between Lebanon and the Soviet-backed forces in the region. ‘Jews weren’t normally allowed to be sent to the Middle East then,’ he said, ‘but it was an emergency situation – the threat that some Arab states were going to invade Lebanon – so they didn’t separate me from my unit.’

Once they got to Lebanon, they carried rifles in the name of their country when they were on duty and, when off duty, explored Beirut, where they were stationed, as much as the politics of the moment would allow. Keitel was fascinated by Beirut’s blend of the modern and the biblical, but appalled by the poverty that he saw. American Marines always drew a crowd of children; Keitel found himself moved by the squalid conditions in which they existed. Though it was against regulations, he and his friends began filching rations in order to give them to the children they encountered.

As he patrolled Beirut, Keitel – who only a couple of years earlier was spitting on the mezuzah at every opportunity – began wearing a Star of David on a chain around his neck, in plain view, as a note of defiance aimed at the people he was there to protect, people he knew would wipe out him and all the Jews in Israel, given the opportunity.

Inevitably, it led one day to an encounter with a Lebanese civilian, who dropped a remark in passing – along the lines of ‘Jewish dog’ – that Keitel wouldn’t let pass. Springing suddenly into action, the nineteen-year-old Marine, eager for combat, grabbed the transgressor by the throat and applied a choke-hold long enough to make it clear that he disapproved of the remark. Keitel walked away, satisfied that the young man would keep future opinions about Jewish jewelry to himself.

It wasn’t Keitel’s first run-in with anti-Semitism in the Marines. Still, the prejudice he’d found in the Marine Corps had a somewhat less emotionally charged context: ‘I was called a kike once by a sergeant when we were alone. I called him a guinea. He said, “Don’t call me that.” I said, “Don’t call me a kike.” He never said it again and we were OK.’

His three years in the Marines remain a touchstone of his life, from his lifelong devotion to working out to the sense of self-esteem it instilled:

That was the first time I had a real sense of pride about myself, a sense of belonging to a group that’s special. To this day, I’m proud of being a Marine.

There was a spirit. We were on a journey, albeit the creativity was directed to a place none of us wanted to go to – war. But you understand, if you are in the middle of that, why the group is unstoppable. There is a spirit at work there, a support system, where you know you will never get left behind. I’m talking about being there for someone. Semper fidelis. That says it all. Always faithful. It means you’ll never let the other guy down. It means if he needs you, you will be there. Every experience I have affects my choices in life and the Marines was one of those experiences. Certainly the elevation of spirit that I encountered in the Marine Corps influenced me.

Yet what he came away with – that pride in being a Marine – was hardly what he had gone looking for:

I volunteered because I was looking for a war. And in retrospect, I see that it was all because of my inability to suffer, to be sad, to be lonely. I ended up being a Marine for three years and I know now that it’s easier to go to war than it is to face your own inner violence.

I think I was probably looking to be tough, to be part of something where I could say, ‘I’m not afraid of anything.’ To hide the fear. But now I know where that’s at. The only way to protect yourself is to know fear and to accept it.

It was on the return boat from Beirut to the United States that Keitel had the second revelation that changed his life forever.

Bored and restless, having exhausted the ship’s supply of magazines and other forms of recreation, Keitel turned as a means of last resort to something he had studiously avoided for much of his life:

He picked up a book and started to read.

‘I read a book for the first time. I wasn’t exposed to literature as a young boy. I’m not well-educated. I left school when I was seventeen. I went into the Marine Corps and I hadn’t read a book in my life. I was slow to come to it. It took me many years before I became something of a reader.’

It is fitting that the book Keitel wound up with in his hand was about mythology, in which the stories provide moral lessons about the most basic sins: hubris, greed, jealousy, treachery, betrayal. Keitel seems to have built his entire career around telling stories – creating modern myths – dealing in the same issues that have attracted story-tellers from the most primal mythology to the most sophisticated: man’s quest to discern right from wrong, to resist evil even when doing good involves deep sacrifice, to learn the penalty – both internal and external – of embracing the dark path.

I was aboard ship and somehow I picked up a book of Greek mythology and began reading. I had a desire to understand this chaos that I was experiencing in my body. And books were a guide. I don’t find that my reading has given me something I didn’t know so much as it’s made me more aware of what I do know but hadn’t permitted to enter my consciousness. Sometimes reading makes something clear to me. I’m reading Dostoyevsky, say, and I read a thought, and I say, ‘I know that thought; that thought is already in me and he just uncovered it.’

I can think of no more important endeavor than reading. To be a little dramatic, it’s saved my life in many ways.

5

Keitel returned to Brooklyn from the Marines in 1959, facing an uncertain future. He had no discernible job skills but now was equipped with a high-school equivalency diploma and an honorable discharge.

For a while, he tried living at home. Pressured by his parents, he began working for them at an Atlantic Beach concession stand they now ran. But, after the relative freedom of the Marines, after being on his own for three years, the confines of the old apartment and the close quarters of working at the concession stand quickly began to chafe.

He hooked up with an old friend from the neighborhood, Mark Reiner, and the two of them found an apartment in Brooklyn. After a brief employment search, Keitel took a job on 34th Street in Manhattan, selling shoes. But he didn’t like the work; given his shyness, he found it excruciating to put on the phony salesman’s smile and try to sell people shoes. The monotony and mundanity rapidly drove him wild. ‘I thought I did not want to be what I was,’ he recalled.

Yet what else was there for him to do? He had no training in anything other than carrying a rifle and, now, measuring and trying shoes on people.

Then someone from the neighborhood suggested court reporting. It was well-paid, steady work that offered variety on a daily basis, but without the need to interact with anyone. All you had to do was listen and transcribe to the stenotype machine. Keitel saved money from being a shoe dog and enrolled on a course to learn to be a court stenographer. ‘To learn it is easy,’ he said. ‘To get your speed up is difficult. I was good.’

He landed a job in Manhattan Criminal Court, an imposingly tomblike building at 100 Center Street, near City Hall. It suddenly offered him a chance to be invisible.

To Keitel, a young man still unsure of how and where he should fit into the life that swirled around him, the job promised a particularly clever way to elude the world while seemingly being a part of it. Working as a court reporter meant being present without ever being called upon to participate, except in the most passive way possible: listening and transcribing.

‘It’s solitary,’ Keitel said. ‘Something about the aloneness of it attracted me. You’re silent all day. It seemed to appeal to me because I didn’t have to talk. I was just looking to be left alone, really. I could just be quiet and type. Even now, I have this fantasy when I pass office buildings at night or banks and see a solitary worker in there. I feel it’s a job I might like to have.’

Sometimes, the job provided unexpected reunions with faces from the past. One day, during a massive arraignment of drug defendants (mostly for heroin), Keitel looked up from the flow of transcribing and recognized one of those charged with a crime. He knew the young black man from Marine basic training. They’d been friends, part of a group of friends. It had been Keitel’s introduction to the state of American racial relations, hanging out with a black Marine in the South Carolina of the mid 1950s. They would travel around off-base together, where Keitel saw, for the first time, public facilities marked “WHITE ONLY”. He was incredulous when, accompanying his friend into a “BLACK ONLY” coffee shop, he was told that he wasn’t allowed in. As he put it, ‘We laughed, because we were from Brooklyn and we didn’t know what the hell all of this was.’

And now his fellow Leatherneck and he connected again under these circumstances: ‘Here’s this guy, years later, busted on a drug rap. We just looked at each other and he smiled and shook his head, as if to say, “Wow, this is what you’re doing.” I couldn’t talk to him because I was up there working. Then they took him to the holding pen. On the break, I went back to see him but he was gone. Gone.’

The job held its satisfaction for a while – until about year three, out of what would prove to be an eight-year career.

After the confusion of adolescence and the strictly organized Marine lifestyle, he’d thrown himself into a job in which he sat as a silent spectator to other people’s misfortunes, whether the crime was committed by them or against them. He could never comment on the misery and venality he saw, never offer an interpretation or connect it to the larger picture. As he’d continued to read and work, he could feel a need to express the increasingly powerful feelings he had no place to sublimate or exorcise. Hiding in his job no longer offered the kind of solitary satisfaction it once did, a feeling that lasted ‘only a short time, a couple of years, before I felt the need to speak.’

Even though he had attained civil-service tenure as a court stenographer – giving him, essentially, lifetime job security – Keitel grew so unhappy at how bad things were that he found himself standing in front of a local Marine recruiting center, poised to re-enlist.

Here was the answer to his dilemma. It wouldn’t be like he was quitting a new job but returning to an old one, one he already knew and was comfortable with.

Suddenly he also remembered clearly the tedium of drilling and working at the base all day, when there was nothing else to do but clean and reclean every inch of a barracks, of the rank and the routine and the rigidity.

And he turned round and walked away.

6

Then, one day in 1962, one of his colleagues in the court-reporter pool – of all unlikely sources – offered Keitel an invitation he didn’t know he’d been waiting for.

A co-worker asked if he wanted to take acting classes, just as a kick, as something to do in their spare time. The idea, though it had occurred to Keitel, had been squashed and banished, like all the other inappropriate ideas he’d managed to squeeze away into his subconscious. In fact, the friend had to talk him into it.

Keitel didn’t believe he fit the picture of an actor. He was self-conscious about his lack of a college education and worried that he might not be smart enough, that he lacked the polish to make himself believable as an actor: ‘I had it drilled into my head that a guy like me couldn’t be an actor. Someone who came from a lower-middle-class family, who wasn’t well-educated, well, this wasn’t something they could do.’

He finally agreed to attend the class, though he was nervous that his friends in Brooklyn might find out he was taking it. They might surmise that he harbored secret dreams of being an actor which, when he was honest with himself, was in fact true. He did want to be an actor.

Until he went to his first acting class, he never knew just how much. Keitel stayed; the friend who invited him went back to the world of court stenography.

So, for that matter, did Keitel. It took him several more years – court reporter by day, actor by night – before he finally gave up court reporting for good.

He knew he’d found something he wanted for himself: ‘I was attracted to these people who were creating stories and telling them,’ he said. ‘A powerful dynamic was going on that I didn’t know anything about. I had never even seen a play. There was something about acting that put me in touch with forces that I felt aligned to and were important to me to know, to own. It gave me hope that I could become a member of a group of people who know themselves, people like Dean, Brando, Kazan.’

Suddenly here was something that seemed to tap directly into his need to express himself, to externalize feelings that he had no outlet for. He no longer had to sit silently in court, transcribing pain and unhappiness without being able to work it out in another way:

The reason I became an actor was to get closer to the mystery of understanding myself. Acting lessons filled a need; I had no idea of anything except a need. A need to do it. I was stiff and rigid; I had great doubts that I could do this. But the need was there. I wanted to be an actor out of a whole desire to get the inside out, to express myself.

When my friends would call me ‘Hollywood,’ I’d laugh along with them because I didn’t want to reveal how much I liked it and wanted it and feared that I wouldn’t be good enough for it.

Granted, up to that point, Keitel had never set foot in a theater to see a play. But he had studied the acting of Brando, Dean, Cassavetes and others at the movies. If he’d never seen live stagecraft, he had seen Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire – and East of Eden and On the Waterfront. They all made an impression, shaping the kind of actor Keitel wanted to be. He knew there were untapped, volcanic emotions inside him, feelings that had been stored away for years, just waiting for the moment to make themselves useful – or to drive him crazy. Acting was a way to go a little crazy without ever straying outside of society’s boundaries of acceptable behavior.

He began taking classes with Frank Corsaro and studying at the Actors Studio (though he wouldn’t pass his audition for membership until after he made Mean Streets, almost a decade later). As a novice actor in this Mecca of serious method acting, as someone who was unsure of his ability to measure up before the gurus of the acting craft, Keitel approached each class with determination, willing himself to overcome his fears as he attempted to be, rather than to act, in his scenework for Corsaro:

I was petrified. I didn’t get up on the stage for months. Later, I used to stand outside the Actors Stage on East Fourth Street before I had to do a scene. And I used to tell myself, ‘Now all I’m trying to do is get what I feel here, on the street, in through that door, walk up the stairs and go on the stage and do it, as real as I am here.’ That was my preparation: Go out on the street and try to bring this human being in from the street on to the stage. Well, it wasn’t easy. I realized this was going to take time and patience, which I didn’t have much of.

It was a struggle. It was the same with my reading. I had the desire to learn, but I didn’t have the patience. I remember reading, ‘The reward of patience is patience.’ I wanted to tear that page up, because I didn’t have the patience to even contemplate those words. I was in a hurry to run away from the suffering that was required to sit still. I was lucky to meet a teacher like Frank Corsaro, because he was such a nurturing man; he nurtured what I had to offer.

Gradually, he began auditioning and finding work, in tiny off-off-Broadway venues. He read the show-business dailies, working as many auditions as he could into and around his work schedule. ‘Acting was remote to me and to my upbringing, my environment in Brooklyn,’ he said, ‘It was something I came to very slowly and very painstakingly, with great uncertainty and fear.’

For one thing, there didn’t seem to be any money in it. As he started being cast in small roles in one-acts at Café LaMama and Café Cino, places where the off-off-Broadway theatrical revolution of the 1960s was taking place, he still had to work full-time to pay for the rest of his life. You simply couldn’t make a living as an actor by working on the off- and off-off-Broadway stages.

According to actor and teacher Allen Garfield, a friend from those scuffling days of the 1960s who appeared with him in two films, ‘It was a gritty, very self-sacrificing time because none of us had too many bucks financially. How much did you get paid if you did an off-off-Broadway play? Zero. It would cost you money because of car fare and food. But it was our training ground. You’d have fifty plays happening at the same time. You were being seen while you were emerging.’

Keitel made his official debut in summer stock in Nantucket, where he apprenticed and appeared in Edward Albee’s The American Dream: ‘I was doing everything from acting to cleaning toilets – in other words, I hadn’t gotten paid. I acted in places that didn’t even have a name. A lot of them didn’t even have a ceiling.’

Summer stock was an American theatrical tradition. They were small theaters, usually in resort towns up and down America’s East Coast, which paid scale and sometimes provided barracks or summer-camp-like lodgings for its actors. In return for a summer of work – doing mostly light comedy, musical comedy or melodrama, with a new show opening virtually every week or every other week – the actors often pulled double and triple duty, as Keitel did: building and painting the scenery, cleaning the theater, taking care of their own costumes and make-up.

But there was also a romance to it: working in the theater, living in a resort town. Here was Keitel, actually being paid to be an actor. Not much, to be sure, but enough to live on. And he was in close proximity to young women, also caught up in the romance of the experience, as well as the headiness of summer. According to friends of the time, Keitel cut a wide swath.

Returning to New York, he opened off-Broadway, at the Cherry Lane Theater in Sam Shepard’s Up to Thursday, in February 1965. He also developed a fascination with and appreciation for the films of John Cassavetes, whose raw, improvised style and independent spirit attracted him. He’d been particularly struck by the blunt, cinema-vérité quality of Cassavetes’ film Shadows and by a scene in the film in which one member of a group of friends has the self-confidence to admit that he likes abstract sculpture, to say that ‘It is whatever it is to you. And that to me is art.’

‘I know what that scene was about, because I was the kind of guy afraid to venture an opinion,’ Keitel said. ‘From lack of self-worth. But after that I had to know what this was all about. One little comment like that in a Cassavetes movie opened an avenue of thinking to me that was closed before.’ Cassavetes was ‘a guy who sustained me for a long time – not personally, but his work did. I used to look forward to his work. He influenced us all. He inspired me and moved me a great deal into wanting to be an actor.’

Steve Brenner, a friend from that period (whose father would distribute Keitel’s first film), recalled running into Keitel one Saturday night in late 1968, at a place called the Third Avenue El on East 59th Street in New York. Brenner and his date began telling Keitel and his date about an awful movie they’d just seen. Keitel was almost equally vociferous in praising the film he had just come from. It turned out they had both seen the same film: Cassavetes’ Faces.

Keitel finally met the director a number of years later when he was invited to accompany Martin Scorsese to visit Cassavetes at his home in Los Angeles, after Mean Streets. Cassavetes regaled them with descriptions of scenes from Minnie and Moskowitz, a film he’d made a couple of years earlier starring his wife, Gena Rowlands, and Seymour Cassel. ‘He was laughing hysterically,’ Keitel remembered. ‘My cheeks were hurting me because I was so nervous, I was trying to smile because he was laughing so much. I could not laugh for the life of me.’

As Keitel continued to pursue roles and take classes, he found a theater community in Greenwich Village that was vital, providing fertile ground for the burgeoning off- and off-off-Broadway scenes that had exploded a few years earlier. Keitel would make the rounds of auditions, while taking classes at the Actors Studio. When he wasn’t working or acting, he was talking about acting with other actors.

Yaphet Kotto, Keitel’s co-star in Blue Collar, recalled, ‘I used to pass him in the street in lower Manhattan when we were all struggling to be somebody. He and James Earl Jones had a working-actor reputation.’

‘We would all talk about our dreams,’ Garfield remembered, ‘and about how much acting meant to us. The sixties were a lively, intense time. I remember walking the streets late, talking about theater. We had no thought of doing film or leaving New York. It was a real, exciting, passionate time in the off-off-Broadway movement. It was the most thrilling time to be an actor.’

7

Meeting Martin Scorsese was like encountering a soulmate Keitel knew and understood instantly, though they’d never met and shared different ethnic backgrounds. The chemistry was instantaneous and, seemingly, lifelong. They would make five films together over the next twenty years and their names would forever be associated with each other. According to Keitel:

When Marty and I met, it was like two comrades meeting on the way somewhere. I asked him where he was going and we discovered we were trying to get to the same place, so we held hands and got scared and walked along together. Marty and I discovered when we met and became friends that we shared a very similar life. It didn’t matter that I was raised Jewish and that Marty was raised Catholic – our place was beyond local religion.

I think it’s no different than when a man sees a woman or a woman sees a man and all of a sudden you’re taken by that person. You sense something. Then no matter what happens in the years that follow, you remain family forever, because you’re bound by some inexplicable things that no action can destroy.

Scorsese, small, asthmatic and hyperactive, saw a surprising doppelganger in the bristling young ex-Marine from Brooklyn: ‘I found him to be very much like me, even though he is a Polish Jew from Brooklyn. We became friends and found we had the same feelings about the same problems. Both our families expected us to achieve some sort of respectability.’

The meeting took place one day late in 1965. While reading the casting notices in the trade papers – Backstage, Show Business – Keitel came across an ad seeking actors for a student film at New York University. Assuming that any film experience would look good on his still woefully brief acting résumé, Keitel turned up for the casting call.

The director was a fast-talking young Italian-American, short on stature but in all other ways indefatigable. Scorsese, then a film graduate student at NYU, had put together funding to make a student film, which would eventually grow into his first feature release, Who’s That Knocking at My Door? He asked Keitel back to read for the role a second time, then called him back a third time, before finally casting him as the lead in his film.

The role, J.R., was an alter-ego for Scorsese: a young man in Little Italy trying to find direction in his life, even as he kindles a romance with a young woman he meets (known only as ‘the Girl’ and played by Zina Bethune) by earnestly explaining his love of John Wayne. They become romantically involved, but he cannot bring himself to have sex with her. When she confides to him that she had, a short time earlier, been the victim of date rape, he is disgusted. To J.R., the fact that she’s not a virgin makes her unacceptable; he must wrestle with his confused and conflicting feelings about her and about women in general.

It was like tumblers clicking into place in a safe: the combination of the passionate young director with a highly personal film vision, the passionate young actor looking for the key to an acting career – and a passionate time, when movies and acting had suddenly become a vehicle through which one could comment on society as a whole. For Keitel, mightily frustrated by the limitations of court stenography, the chance to make a movie seemed like his ticket to the big-time. ‘He was working with some friends on a student film and it was the most glorious thing to him,’ Garfield recalled. ‘Harvey was on top of the world because of being in a film and working with a young director that he was so excited about.’

In the film Keitel looks so impossibly boyish, so positively Christian Slater-like, that it’s easy to forget he was almost thirty when he made it. Although one can see the dark, brooding Keitel of the future lurking beneath the surface, this is still a relatively happy-go-lucky Harvey in the early scenes: easy to laugh, easy to joke, just plain easy to be, still unaware of or unable to tap into the inner torment that would mark so many of his roles. His anguish at finding out that the Girl is not a virgin is painfully self-centered: How could she do this to him? Keitel brings brilliant opaqueness to the film’s key moment, when he decides he can live with her past and tells her so by saying, ‘I forgive you and am willing to marry you anyway.’

This precursor to Mean Streets has Keitel playing J.R. like the younger, more callow brother of Charlie Cappa: coping with feelings he can’t quite express or understand even while trying to ignore them. He doesn’t have as much on his mind as Charlie but he’s similarly confused and willing to exist in a state of denial. The film also contains Keitel’s first nude scene, though without frontal nudity on his part.

For Keitel, part of the pleasure lay in his ability to plug in so completely, almost automatically, to Scorsese’s vision:

It was right there when we met: a recognition of a sameness of purpose, of a need to discover and explore what’s meaningful to us and hopefully to become better men. I was asking myself the same questions he was: What is courage? What is fear? The ultimate fear is of being adrift, abandoned and not being able to cope with it. One’s ability to cope with these darker elements will determine the heights one will reach.

The heights for Who’s That Knocking … ? included frequent trips to the depths as well, as funding for the film came and went. Everyone had other jobs, so shooting was done on weekends. Even then, given weather, schedule conflicts and the ebb and flow of funding, momentum was hard to build. ‘Harvey was very upset because he was working as a court stenographer and we were wasting his time,’ Scorsese recalled. ‘He kept having his hair cut at inappropriate times, so the scenes we shot never matched. I would say, “Harvey, how can you do this?” and back came the answer, “But I have a life, too.”’

According to Zina Bethune, ‘The story was supposed to take place over the space of three weeks. But Harvey looks different throughout the film. He laughed about the fact that he looked like he had aged quite a bit during the course of the film.’

Bethune, who was nineteen at the time, had been working as an actress since childhood, most successfully on the TV series The Nurses when she was fourteen. Her agent, Harry Ufland, who was at William Morris and had just begun to represent Scorsese (and who would later represent both Keitel and Robert De Niro), persuaded her to take the role in the up-and-coming director’s film.

She met Keitel at a screen test and found him a little shy. As she got to know him, however, she said, ‘He struck me as a very sweet individual, a very dear person. That always amused me because most of the characters he’s played are anything but sweet. He has an interesting edge on camera that’s anything but sweet.’

The film was shot during the frigid 1966 winter: ‘I remember we started shooting in January or February,’ Bethune said. ‘It was bitter cold and there was a lot of outdoor shooting. I don’t ever remember being warm.’

Scorsese had written the script as the second in a trilogy of films about young Italian-American men (the first, a script called Jerusalem, Jerusalem, was never made; the finale, a script Scorsese called Season of the Witch, was later rewritten and retitled Mean Streets). But this script was sketchy, full of ideas for scenes with suggestions, but in which improvised dialogue was encouraged. As Bethune recalled,

I kept asking Harvey, ‘What do you think this will mean? How do you think this will finally play out?’ A lot of times he didn’t really answer and I’d have to wait and see how it evolved. A lot of Martin’s direction is through the lens and in the editing room. He creates an environment and lets it evolve and Harvey seemed more used to that. He was always very willing to try whatever Marty wanted. I couldn’t tell what he felt about that.

Harvey had a kind of unsureness that worked for the character. The character is totally unsure and not able to come to terms with anything because everything doesn’t fit in his puzzle, which is what the character is about. Harvey had those qualities sitting right on him.

That whole first scene, with the discussion of the magazine and John Wayne, was totally improvised. There was no script. Martin created an environment and a scenario and wanted it to evolve. Harvey seemed to go with that mode and never questioned it. After a while, I started understanding how they devised the scenes and let the art happen. It was exciting but unnerving.

Scorsese was excited to have found in Keitel an actor who was willing to go for it, to reach for the kind of emotions few actors are capable of: ‘Harvey travels into very forbidding regions of his soul for his work and he’s able to have the experience and put it on the screen in an absolutely genuine way I find very touching,’ he said.

Keitel’s connection with Scorsese made him believe in the scrappy young director: ‘I always knew Who’s That Knocking … ? would get done. I vividly recall sitting down together to watch a scene that had been cut. It was inside the church, when the title song is played and I was aware of being in the midst of some extraordinary experience. I was deeply stirred by a whole cacophony of emotions and I felt I was in the right place. I knew that I was with somebody special.’

According to Scorsese, ‘What struck me about Harvey was his tremendous passion and that’s the quality that’s carried me through with him on each of the five films we’ve done together. He pays scrupulous attention to the smallest detail of a role and is always intensely supportive of the project as a whole.’

Between the pauses in filming and the extended process of editing and then selling the film, it was 1968 before Who’s That Knocking at My Door? saw the light of day at the Carnegie Cinema, after drawing a strong review from Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times when it was shown at the Chicago Film Festival.

Scorsese had found Joseph Brenner, a distributor of skin films, through his mentor Haig Manoogian, who was a friend of Brenner’s from their Army days. Brenner had agreed to distribute the film on one condition: Scorsese had to insert a nude scene. Scorsese, who was working in Amsterdam when Brenner’s offer came through, flew Keitel over and shot a dream sequence involving J.R. and several fantasy girls, with whom he is having sex. Brenner booked the Carnegie Cinema.

The opening at the Carnegie was delayed by the extended run of The World of Laurel and Hardy, recalled Steve Brenner, who worked for his father and was a friend of Keitel’s. And, unexpectedly, Laurel and Hardy was doing enough business to keep extending the run. When the film finally did open, Keitel, Scorsese and Steve Brenner were out on the street, distributing handbills.

The audience, however, was small for this gritty black-and-white story of a confused young man in New York: ‘It was not that successful,’ Bethune remembered. ‘It played arthouses but didn’t go a heckuva lot further. Now it’s this cult classic that’s on cable all the time.’

Brenner said, ‘Harvey was excited. We were all excited when it opened. But we were disappointed because we expected a lot more than it delivered. It had good runs in certain parts of the country. But when you’re not Warner Bros, without all that money behind you, you have to take pictures and release them independently.’

Which left Keitel exactly where he had started: as an actor forced to support his art by working as a court stenographer. But he felt compelled to make a choice once and for all, to follow acting as the journey he wanted to commit his life to. ‘Being a stenographer was something he really didn’t talk about,’ Bethune recalled. ‘He’d just say, “Yeah, well, that’s what I’m doing right now.”’

He’d already taken some steps toward creating this new life. Rufus Collins, a black actor with whom he had studied, had told him, ‘Harvey, you’ll never be an actor unless you leave Brooklyn.’ So he’d moved into a Greenwich Village apartment on Bedford Street, which he later traded for a tiny apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

But Keitel still needed to make the separation from the courtroom job, which had become both a lifejacket and an anchor in his life. ‘It took me five years to really commit myself to be an actor,’ he said. ‘It was a little bit of a joke to the guys on the block and it really took me a long time before I said, “Well, the hell with all of them and what they say. I’m going to do it.” And that’s when I quit my job and went to summer stock.’

8

Even though Keitel had resigned from his civil-service job, he found he still had to take on free-lance court-reporting jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table. For a time he took assignments from the Doyle Reporting Co., transcribing depositions while barely containing his impatience with the job.

‘He appeared to be one of those stage actors who was never going to make it,’ recalled attorney Stuart Cotton, who was a young associate at a law firm where Keitel was occasionally assigned. ‘During cigarette breaks, he’d talk about how he was pursuing acting and was being a court reporter to make money.’

Arthur Brook, an associate at the same firm, remembered, ‘He would say, “I’m an actor, I’m doing movies,” and we’d figure, “Yeah, right.” It’s like every waiter and waitress in New York is actually an actor. When he worked as a court reporter, he was very good. But it was obvious he didn’t enjoy what he was doing. He was always very dour.’

An old girlfriend, Gina Richer, put it more succinctly in remembering Keitel’s on-going frustration about not being able to put court stenography in his past: ‘Who would have thought he’d actually make it as an actor? He was working as a court stenographer and living in this tiny apartment in Hell’s Kitchen,’ she said. ‘This was a man with a lot of rage.’

Yet he did manage to find work as an actor on an increasingly regular basis, working summer stock, finding extra work in films. He recalled landing a spot among hundreds of extras playing a soldier in John Huston’s overwrought adaptation of Carson McCullers’s sexually ambiguous Reflections in a Golden Eye, which starred one of his idols, Marlon Brando. He even worked up the nerve to approach the bewildered star and tell him he was about to have his audition for the Actors Studio, to which Brando could only say, ‘Hmm,’ and shake his hand.

He also began working at regional theaters on the East Coast. Though he was nearing thirty, he was frequently cast in juvenile roles, playing the son in Frank Gilroy’s volatile family drama, The Subject Was Roses, at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in January 1968, and one of the menacing teenagers in Israel Horovitz’s The Indian Wants the Bronx at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., as he was about to turn thirty.

For Arvin Brown, who directed the Long Wharf production, Keitel brought menace to the stage, but also innocence, playing a dangerous young hoodlum who, together with a friend, threatens the life of a lost tourist from India who is trying to use a pay phone:

I had seen it with Al Pacino and it was really quite different with Harvey. Harvey had a lot of the same street quality that Al had, but there was a slightly more ingenuous quality. Al registered street cunning. But for all the repressed violence about his portrayal, there was an innocence in Harvey. As I’ve watched Harvey over the years, that’s the one quality that’s remained a constant. There’s an ingenuousness, no matter how decadent, how violent, how disturbing the world he moves in.

Keitel, Brown found, was very open and still inexperienced, eager for direction. And he was willing to try anything, a trait that would become a trademark. He was an actor in the midst of learning his craft – and of learning the importance of the craft itself. Always an intense presence onstage, he tended to depend on that innate electricity, according to Brown: ‘Back then, he relied on a tremendous natural energy. But he was definitely a driven actor.’

He may have had presence, but he had still not developed his voice for the stage: ‘One of the acting problems he had to combat at the start was that he was limited vocally,’ Brown said. ‘His voice did not have tremendous range or power. That’s why film was a great medium for him from the beginning. By the time I saw him in Hurlyburly [in 1984], his voice was much more flexible and assured.’

Zina Bethune remembered that, during the filming of Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, Keitel seemed to be ‘in a stage of evolving. I got the sense he was searching for what kind of actor he was, searching for an identity.’

For a long time, though he loved the sense of emotional freedom and expression acting gave him, he tried to convince himself that it was merely a seemingly easy route to riches and fame. He would tell his friend Rufus Collins, ‘I just want to be an actor to make money. That’s my only interest: to make money.’

To which Collins would reply, ‘You’re not telling the truth, Harvey.’

Which, of course, he wasn’t. If anything, the opposite was true: here was the thing he’d been seeking all his life, an art into which he could pour all the feelings he had struggled for years to hold in check. If he could convince himself that he was just doing it to make a living, he wouldn’t have to face the fact that it was the most important thing in the world to him. And that, so far, he wasn’t making much of a dent as an actor. Yes, he was working semi-regularly. But he worried endlessly to his friends and numerous girlfriends over every part he didn’t get, agonizing over whether he really did have talent. Had he made a colossal mistake? Was he exposing his most secret self merely to be humiliated?

The apparent proof that he had chosen the wrong direction slapped him in the face every time he had to accept a part-time job as a court reporter. Every time he sat down at a deposition to transcribe the proceedings, he was plunged back into the world of uncertainty: If he was an actor, why was he here? Why couldn’t he support himself with his art? Would he ever be able to escape permanently, out of this drudgery and into the realm where his thoughts and emotions could guide and shape him? Too many days, it seemed as if that would never come, that he had foolishly dreamed and hoped for something that could never be his; that, like Icarus, his wings had melted because he’d dared to fly too close to the sun and would forever be plunged into the dreariness of life that had all but consumed his father.

But he began to feel that all the risks he had taken had been worthwhile when he began studying at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and Ernie Martin, who taught for Strasberg. Working with Strasberg opened his eyes to what acting could be about if you thought about it and applied yourself. According to actor Ron Silver, who shared the Strasberg classes with Keitel:

When Strasberg taught, what he was saying always seemed so simple. Like you almost didn’t know whether to take him at his word. At the same time, he could be very abstract. He’d say, ‘Just be, just exist for a minute. Just have a real moment.’

Some pupils took what he said to an extreme. He was never one for indulgence, never one to dispute a director’s authority. He was never someone who would insist on substituting his own truth for the character for the playwright’s truth. At the same time, you also had to have respect for the actor as the author of the authenticity of the line.

The bulk of the teaching focused on sensory work as it applied to doing scenes. The idea was to work on each of the five senses, to teach the actor to expand on his imagination – to be personal in the work by drawing upon his own experiences to revisit emotions comparable to ones being felt by the character. The emotions, Keitel was taught, were already there; now he had to learn to free them when he did the scene.

It wasn’t the same as planning what to do in the scene; rather, the actor unleashed the emotions and applied them to this character. Keitel was taught to create an imaginary life for the character; the scene was a moment out of that life that was happening now, spontaneously and freely.

Keitel, already consumed by the love of acting, immersed himself in this new way of thinking, discussing it in class and outside, with whomever he could get to talk about it. Martin remembered about his former student:

There’s always been passion for the work. His choices were always big choices. He works to be in the moment and he doesn’t allow other things to interfere with the creative process. He’s always discussing the work, wanting to understand more of it.

In the past twenty-five years, I’ve seen a lot of people go for results, rather than the work, and you can make good money doing that. There are a few, however, who truly, truly have the passion and the love to work and rehearse, who love to go through the process. Some people want to get there as soon as possible. Harvey is one of those people who love the process.

The process: that method by which an actor discovers, develops and comes to embody a character. To Keitel, it became a meticulous regimen involving the various kinds of rehearsal exercises he’d learned, finding a physical key to the person as well as an interior emotional design: ‘This is my way of working, but it’s not as if I made it up myself. It’s part of the way acting is taught now in New York, based on the Stanislavski system. It’s part of the teachings to “fill the part”.’

Doing the homework, for Keitel, means analyzing the script and extrapolating an entire life for that character, a framework in which to set his actions in the script:

Stella Adler, who’s a great teacher, remarked that the analysis of the text is the education of the actor. So you get the script and you dig into it, to discover where the character is coming from, where his background is, what he does, what his desires are, what his fears are, how he lives – analyzing what the author had in mind.

I must know what his mother and father were like together, what his childhood and home life were like. I have to know if he didn’t go to college, or only stayed one year, or graduated. I have to know what his views are about many different things: the actor creates the character’s past. Before you shoot, you have rehearsals, where you find out what the other actors are going to do, what works best. Once the cameras roll, there’s always that little something that is improvisational, spontaneous.

For him, it became part of the spiritual framework of his life: ‘Acting is religious,’ he said. ‘Great acting can be worshipped because it descends into the subconscious, into the soul. And somewhere in there must be God.’

Yet, as much as he loved the work he was doing at the Actors Studio, Keitel remained frustrated in one major pursuit: membership of the prestigious organization, something that could be attained only by auditioning for and being selected by a rigorous membership committee. You were allowed to audition only once a year. But each year from the mid 1960s on, Keitel would find himself passed over for new membership: ‘I kept failing. I was so humiliated, so miserable that I couldn’t get in. It had tradition – something was being passed on. There was a standard that was aspired to.’

Keitel persevered, another quality that would serve him well in the career to come. Finally, in 1974, after he had appeared in Mean Streets, he was accepted as a member of the Actors Studio in his eighth year of auditioning. One of the Studio stalwarts told him later that she’d threatened the committee, saying, ‘Either let him in this time or I’m telling him not to audition again. Don’t put him through this anymore.’

‘It was a great day for me,’ Keitel said, ‘I felt I’d accomplished something I’d always dreamed of.’

In the spring of 1970, anti-war protests on American college campuses resulted in the killings of four Kent State University students by overzealous Ohio National Guardsmen. The event upset Keitel; when he phoned Scorsese, he learned that anti-war forces were taking over the film department at NYU and making short films to be shown on college campuses around the country. So Keitel helped out and even appeared in Street Scenes, the documentary shot that spring during the height of anti-war sentiment. ‘I see the movie we did as more than entertainment,’ Keitel said. ‘I resolved then to try to choose roles that have social meaning.’

By the end of 1970 Scorsese, on the strength of his work as assistant director and editor on the movie Woodstock, had moved to Los Angeles to try to edit Warner Bros.’ mess of a rock-concert film, The Medicine Ball Caravan. Eventually, Keitel followed him out there and lived with him for a while as he looked for work. But the pickings were slim, both in terms of work and women: ‘No one would go out with either of them,’ observed one friend from the period, ‘because the women thought they were a couple of losers.’ By the beginning of 1972 Keitel had moved back to New York, convinced he was going to have to go back to court reporting.

Keitel could barely contain his frustration. Acting had been a kind of salvation, one that lifted him spiritually even as it challenged and nourished him intellectually. But he was getting absolutely no encouragement; he seemed unable to put two paying jobs back to back. The movie he had made had gone nowhere and done nothing for him; nor had he been paid for it.

Then Scorsese called with the news that he had the money and the backing of Warner Bros, to make a movie and would Keitel be interested in playing the lead?

9

Most people chart Harvey Keitel’s career from the release of Mean Streets in October 1973. In fact, by the time it was released, he’d been acting for more than a decade. He was thirty-four years old.

As Charlie Cappa, a would-be wiseguy, he was playing someone years younger than he was. The confused young man was supposed to be ‘the Graduate,’ Mulberry Street-division: a young man about to begin in life, torn between conflicting demands for loyalty, torn by feelings of religion-driven guilt on all fronts.

Keitel looked the part of the feral young climber trying to advance within the crime family, even as he tortured himself with guilt about the morality of what he was doing. The interior life, however, came from the additional years of experience Keitel brought to the role. He understood Charlie so well because he had already lived the life Charlie was struggling with: trying to balance the pull of family expectations with dreams of his own liberation, clambering to gain a foothold in a profession that offered the cold face of rejection significantly more often than one of warm acceptance.

‘Perhaps I got the part of Charlie because Marty sensed that I came from a similar background,’ Keitel ventured. ‘I was new, I was raw, I hadn’t much experience. I don’t think it was my experience at acting that landed me that work, but the experience Marty saw in me. Our neighborhoods said to a young man, “You have a place and you will not go beyond this place because you do not belong anywhere beyond this place.” Marty and I rebelled against it.’

Scorsese maintained, ‘Nobody was better suited for his part and nobody could have played it better, with more honesty, power and sweetness.’

Except that he almost gave it to someone else.

Consider Charlie Cappa: a young Italian-American in Little Italy. Sharp dresser and aspiring operator. Still a deep believer in the powers of God and the devil, as set out by the Catholic Church. Unable to reconcile that with the criminal life he is positioning himself for, running a restaurant for his uncle, a Mob capo. Troubled by his uncle’s demand that he stop spending time with his crazy friend Johnny Boy, equally troubled by Johnny Boy’s penchant for wild behavior that invariably gets him into trouble.

Now imagine the clean-cut, all-American WASP Jon Voight playing the part. ‘Marty approached Jon about playing Charlie in Mean Streets, with Harvey as Johnny Boy,’ remembered actor Richard Romanus, who played Michael. Coming off Oscar nominations for both Midnight Cowboy and Deliverance, Voight was a star. And he was interested in this story of sin and redemption set against the criminal backdrop. To get his film made, Scorsese was willing to swallow hard and cast him.

Then Voight decided to do something else (Conrack) shortly before Scorsese was supposed to start production. Scorsese was in New York to take advantage of the scant two or three days of location shooting in Little Italy that was budgeted for the production. He thought of Keitel and decided that, as he had done in Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, Keitel would serve as his alter ego in Mean Streets. He called Keitel and filmed him walking through the conveniently timed San Gennaro Festival in Little Italy, footage that went into the film.

Even as Scorsese began rehearsing Keitel with de Niro, the casting question remained somewhat up in the air – because de Niro wasn’t sure he wanted to play Johnny Boy.

De Niro had appeared in more than a half-dozen films at that point, including a trio of Brian de Palma’s early efforts (among them Hi Mom! and Greetings, both of which also starred Allen Garfield), as well as working with Shelley Winters in Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama. He’d just completed a supporting part as a doomed catcher in Bang the Drum Slowly – and now he wasn’t sure he should be playing a supporting role again. ‘I ran into Harvey on the street and he was going to play Charlie,’ he remembered. ‘I told him I thought maybe at this stage of my career, I should hold out for something else. I felt the logical part for me was Harvey’s part, but he already had it. But I wanted to work with Marty.’

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