Harvey Keitel

‘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.’

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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.