Harvey Keitel

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.