Harvey Keitel. Marshall Fine

Outgoing and funny with his friends, he became withdrawn and unresponsive in class.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