Harvey Keitel. Marshall Fine

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.’

8

      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