Harvey Keitel

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 Outgoing and funny with his friends, he became withdrawn and unresponsive in class.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.

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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.’

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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: