Harvey Keitel

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.

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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.

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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.’