Harvey Keitel

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.