Harvey Keitel

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Meeting Martin Scorsese was like encountering a soulmate Keitel knew and understood instantly, though they’d never met and shared different ethnic backgrounds. The chemistry was instantaneous and, seemingly, lifelong. They would make five films together over the next twenty years and their names would forever be associated with each other. According to Keitel:

When Marty and I met, it was like two comrades meeting on the way somewhere. I asked him where he was going and we discovered we were trying to get to the same place, so we held hands and got scared and walked along together. Marty and I discovered when we met and became friends that we shared a very similar life. It didn’t matter that I was raised Jewish and that Marty was raised Catholic – our place was beyond local religion.

I think it’s no different than when a man sees a woman or a woman sees a man and all of a sudden you’re taken by that person. You sense something. Then no matter what happens in the years that follow, you remain family forever, because you’re bound by some inexplicable things that no action can destroy.

Scorsese, small, asthmatic and hyperactive, saw a surprising doppelganger in the bristling young ex-Marine from Brooklyn: ‘I found him to be very much like me, even though he is a Polish Jew from Brooklyn. We became friends and found we had the same feelings about the same problems. Both our families expected us to achieve some sort of respectability.’

The meeting took place one day late in 1965. While reading the casting notices in the trade papers – Backstage, Show Business – Keitel came across an ad seeking actors for a student film at New York University. Assuming that any film experience would look good on his still woefully brief acting résumé, Keitel turned up for the casting call.

The director was a fast-talking young Italian-American, short on stature but in all other ways indefatigable. Scorsese, then a film graduate student at NYU, had put together funding to make a student film, which would eventually grow into his first feature release, Who’s That Knocking at My Door? He asked Keitel back to read for the role a second time, then called him back a third time, before finally casting him as the lead in his film.

The role, J.R., was an alter-ego for Scorsese: a young man in Little Italy trying to find direction in his life, even as he kindles a romance with a young woman he meets (known only as ‘the Girl’ and played by Zina Bethune) by earnestly explaining his love of John Wayne. They become romantically involved, but he cannot bring himself to have sex with her. When she confides to him that she had, a short time earlier, been the victim of date rape, he is disgusted. To J.R., the fact that she’s not a virgin makes her unacceptable; he must wrestle with his confused and conflicting feelings about her and about women in general.

It was like tumblers clicking into place in a safe: the combination of the passionate young director with a highly personal film vision, the passionate young actor looking for the key to an acting career – and a passionate time, when movies and acting had suddenly become a vehicle through which one could comment on society as a whole. For Keitel, mightily frustrated by the limitations of court stenography, the chance to make a movie seemed like his ticket to the big-time. ‘He was working with some friends on a student film and it was the most glorious thing to him,’ Garfield recalled. ‘Harvey was on top of the world because of being in a film and working with a young director that he was so excited about.’

In the film Keitel looks so impossibly boyish, so positively Christian Slater-like, that it’s easy to forget he was almost thirty when he made it. Although one can see the dark, brooding Keitel of the future lurking beneath the surface, this is still a relatively happy-go-lucky Harvey in the early scenes: easy to laugh, easy to joke, just plain easy to be, still unaware of or unable to tap into the inner torment that would mark so many of his roles. His anguish at finding out that the Girl is not a virgin is painfully self-centered: How could she do this to him? Keitel brings brilliant opaqueness to the film’s key moment, when he decides he can live with her past and tells her so by saying, ‘I forgive you and am willing to marry you anyway.’

This precursor to Mean Streets has Keitel playing J.R. like the younger, more callow brother of Charlie Cappa: coping with feelings he can’t quite express or understand even while trying to ignore them. He doesn’t have as much on his mind as Charlie but he’s similarly confused and willing to exist in a state of denial. The film also contains Keitel’s first nude scene, though without frontal nudity on his part.

For Keitel, part of the pleasure lay in his ability to plug in so completely, almost automatically, to Scorsese’s vision:

It was right there when we met: a recognition of a sameness of purpose, of a need to discover and explore what’s meaningful to us and hopefully to become better men. I was asking myself the same questions he was: What is courage? What is fear? The ultimate fear is of being adrift, abandoned and not being able to cope with it. One’s ability to cope with these darker elements will determine the heights one will reach.

The heights for Who’s That Knocking … ? included frequent trips to the depths as well, as funding for the film came and went. Everyone had other jobs, so shooting was done on weekends. Even then, given weather, schedule conflicts and the ebb and flow of funding, momentum was hard to build. ‘Harvey was very upset because he was working as a court stenographer and we were wasting his time,’ Scorsese recalled. ‘He kept having his hair cut at inappropriate times, so the scenes we shot never matched. I would say, “Harvey, how can you do this?” and back came the answer, “But I have a life, too.”’

According to Zina Bethune, ‘The story was supposed to take place over the space of three weeks. But Harvey looks different throughout the film. He laughed about the fact that he looked like he had aged quite a bit during the course of the film.’

Bethune, who was nineteen at the time, had been working as an actress since childhood, most successfully on the TV series The Nurses when she was fourteen. Her agent, Harry Ufland, who was at William Morris and had just begun to represent Scorsese (and who would later represent both Keitel and Robert De Niro), persuaded her to take the role in the up-and-coming director’s film.

She met Keitel at a screen test and found him a little shy. As she got to know him, however, she said, ‘He struck me as a very sweet individual, a very dear person. That always amused me because most of the characters he’s played are anything but sweet. He has an interesting edge on camera that’s anything but sweet.’

The film was shot during the frigid 1966 winter: ‘I remember we started shooting in January or February,’ Bethune said. ‘It was bitter cold and there was a lot of outdoor shooting. I don’t ever remember being warm.’

Scorsese had written the script as the second in a trilogy of films about young Italian-American men (the first, a script called Jerusalem, Jerusalem, was never made; the finale, a script Scorsese called Season of the Witch, was later rewritten and retitled Mean Streets). But this script was sketchy, full of ideas for scenes with suggestions, but in which improvised dialogue was encouraged. As Bethune recalled,

I kept asking Harvey, ‘What do you think this will mean? How do you think this will finally play out?’ A lot of times he didn’t really answer and I’d have to wait and see how it evolved. A lot of Martin’s direction is through the lens and in the editing room. He creates an environment and lets it evolve and Harvey seemed more used to that. He was always very willing to try whatever Marty wanted. I couldn’t tell what he felt about that.

Harvey had a kind of unsureness that worked for the character. The character is totally unsure and not able to come to terms with anything because everything doesn’t fit in his puzzle, which is what the character is about. Harvey had those qualities sitting right on him.

That whole first scene, with the discussion of the magazine and John Wayne, was totally improvised. There was no script. Martin created an environment and a scenario and wanted it to evolve. Harvey seemed to go with that mode and never questioned it. After a while, I started understanding how they devised the scenes and let the art happen. It was exciting but unnerving.

Scorsese was excited to have found in Keitel an actor who was willing to go for it, to reach for the kind of emotions few actors are capable of: ‘Harvey travels into very forbidding regions of his soul for his work and he’s able to have the experience and put it on the screen in an absolutely genuine way I find very touching,’ he said.

Keitel’s connection with Scorsese made him believe in the scrappy young director: ‘I always knew Who’s That Knocking … ? would get done. I vividly recall sitting down together to watch a scene that had been cut. It was inside the church, when the title song is played and I was aware of being in the midst of some extraordinary experience. I was deeply stirred by a whole cacophony of emotions and I felt I was in the right place. I knew that I was with somebody special.’

According to Scorsese, ‘What struck me about Harvey was his tremendous passion and that’s the quality that’s carried me through with him on each of the five films we’ve done together. He pays scrupulous attention to the smallest detail of a role and is always intensely supportive of the project as a whole.’

Between the pauses in filming and the extended process of editing and then selling the film, it was 1968 before Who’s That Knocking at My Door? saw the light of day at the Carnegie Cinema, after drawing a strong review from Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times when it was shown at the Chicago Film Festival.

Scorsese had found Joseph Brenner, a distributor of skin films, through his mentor Haig Manoogian, who was a friend of Brenner’s from their Army days. Brenner had agreed to distribute the film on one condition: Scorsese had to insert a nude scene. Scorsese, who was working in Amsterdam when Brenner’s offer came through, flew Keitel over and shot a dream sequence involving J.R. and several fantasy girls, with whom he is having sex. Brenner booked the Carnegie Cinema.

The opening at the Carnegie was delayed by the extended run of The World of Laurel and Hardy, recalled Steve Brenner, who worked for his father and was a friend of Keitel’s. And, unexpectedly, Laurel and Hardy was doing enough business to keep extending the run. When the film finally did open, Keitel, Scorsese and Steve Brenner were out on the street, distributing handbills.

The audience, however, was small for this gritty black-and-white story of a confused young man in New York: ‘It was not that successful,’ Bethune remembered. ‘It played arthouses but didn’t go a heckuva lot further. Now it’s this cult classic that’s on cable all the time.’

Brenner said, ‘Harvey was excited. We were all excited when it opened. But we were disappointed because we expected a lot more than it delivered. It had good runs in certain parts of the country. But when you’re not Warner Bros, without all that money behind you, you have to take pictures and release them independently.’

Which left Keitel exactly where he had started: as an actor forced to support his art by working as a court stenographer. But he felt compelled to make a choice once and for all, to follow acting as the journey he wanted to commit his life to. ‘Being a stenographer was something he really didn’t talk about,’ Bethune recalled. ‘He’d just say, “Yeah, well, that’s what I’m doing right now.”’

He’d already taken some steps toward creating this new life. Rufus Collins, a black actor with whom he had studied, had told him, ‘Harvey, you’ll never be an actor unless you leave Brooklyn.’ So he’d moved into a Greenwich Village apartment on Bedford Street, which he later traded for a tiny apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

But Keitel still needed to make the separation from the courtroom job, which had become both a lifejacket and an anchor in his life. ‘It took me five years to really commit myself to be an actor,’ he said. ‘It was a little bit of a joke to the guys on the block and it really took me a long time before I said, “Well, the hell with all of them and what they say. I’m going to do it.” And that’s when I quit my job and went to summer stock.’

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Even though Keitel had resigned from his civil-service job, he found he still had to take on free-lance court-reporting jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table. For a time he took assignments from the Doyle Reporting Co., transcribing depositions while barely containing his impatience with the job.

‘He appeared to be one of those stage actors who was never going to make it,’ recalled attorney Stuart Cotton, who was a young associate at a law firm where Keitel was occasionally assigned. ‘During cigarette breaks, he’d talk about how he was pursuing acting and was being a court reporter to make money.’

Arthur Brook, an associate at the same firm, remembered, ‘He would say, “I’m an actor, I’m doing movies,” and we’d figure, “Yeah, right.” It’s like every waiter and waitress in New York is actually an actor. When he worked as a court reporter, he was very good. But it was obvious he didn’t enjoy what he was doing. He was always very dour.’

An old girlfriend, Gina Richer, put it more succinctly in remembering Keitel’s on-going frustration about not being able to put court stenography in his past: ‘Who would have thought he’d actually make it as an actor? He was working as a court stenographer and living in this tiny apartment in Hell’s Kitchen,’ she said. ‘This was a man with a lot of rage.’

Yet he did manage to find work as an actor on an increasingly regular basis, working summer stock, finding extra work in films. He recalled landing a spot among hundreds of extras playing a soldier in John Huston’s overwrought adaptation of Carson McCullers’s sexually ambiguous Reflections in a Golden Eye, which starred one of his idols, Marlon Brando. He even worked up the nerve to approach the bewildered star and tell him he was about to have his audition for the Actors Studio, to which Brando could only say, ‘Hmm,’ and shake his hand.

He also began working at regional theaters on the East Coast. Though he was nearing thirty, he was frequently cast in juvenile roles, playing the son in Frank Gilroy’s volatile family drama, The Subject Was Roses, at the Pittsburgh Playhouse in January 1968, and one of the menacing teenagers in Israel Horovitz’s The Indian Wants the Bronx at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., as he was about to turn thirty.

For Arvin Brown, who directed the Long Wharf production, Keitel brought menace to the stage, but also innocence, playing a dangerous young hoodlum who, together with a friend, threatens the life of a lost tourist from India who is trying to use a pay phone:

I had seen it with Al Pacino and it was really quite different with Harvey. Harvey had a lot of the same street quality that Al had, but there was a slightly more ingenuous quality. Al registered street cunning. But for all the repressed violence about his portrayal, there was an innocence in Harvey. As I’ve watched Harvey over the years, that’s the one quality that’s remained a constant. There’s an ingenuousness, no matter how decadent, how violent, how disturbing the world he moves in.

Keitel, Brown found, was very open and still inexperienced, eager for direction. And he was willing to try anything, a trait that would become a trademark. He was an actor in the midst of learning his craft – and of learning the importance of the craft itself. Always an intense presence onstage, he tended to depend on that innate electricity, according to Brown: ‘Back then, he relied on a tremendous natural energy. But he was definitely a driven actor.’

He may have had presence, but he had still not developed his voice for the stage: ‘One of the acting problems he had to combat at the start was that he was limited vocally,’ Brown said. ‘His voice did not have tremendous range or power. That’s why film was a great medium for him from the beginning. By the time I saw him in Hurlyburly [in 1984], his voice was much more flexible and assured.’

Zina Bethune remembered that, during the filming of Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, Keitel seemed to be ‘in a stage of evolving. I got the sense he was searching for what kind of actor he was, searching for an identity.’

For a long time, though he loved the sense of emotional freedom and expression acting gave him, he tried to convince himself that it was merely a seemingly easy route to riches and fame. He would tell his friend Rufus Collins, ‘I just want to be an actor to make money. That’s my only interest: to make money.’

To which Collins would reply, ‘You’re not telling the truth, Harvey.’

Which, of course, he wasn’t. If anything, the opposite was true: here was the thing he’d been seeking all his life, an art into which he could pour all the feelings he had struggled for years to hold in check. If he could convince himself that he was just doing it to make a living, he wouldn’t have to face the fact that it was the most important thing in the world to him. And that, so far, he wasn’t making much of a dent as an actor. Yes, he was working semi-regularly. But he worried endlessly to his friends and numerous girlfriends over every part he didn’t get, agonizing over whether he really did have talent. Had he made a colossal mistake? Was he exposing his most secret self merely to be humiliated?

The apparent proof that he had chosen the wrong direction slapped him in the face every time he had to accept a part-time job as a court reporter. Every time he sat down at a deposition to transcribe the proceedings, he was plunged back into the world of uncertainty: If he was an actor, why was he here? Why couldn’t he support himself with his art? Would he ever be able to escape permanently, out of this drudgery and into the realm where his thoughts and emotions could guide and shape him? Too many days, it seemed as if that would never come, that he had foolishly dreamed and hoped for something that could never be his; that, like Icarus, his wings had melted because he’d dared to fly too close to the sun and would forever be plunged into the dreariness of life that had all but consumed his father.

But he began to feel that all the risks he had taken had been worthwhile when he began studying at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and Ernie Martin, who taught for Strasberg. Working with Strasberg opened his eyes to what acting could be about if you thought about it and applied yourself. According to actor Ron Silver, who shared the Strasberg classes with Keitel: