Harvey Keitel. Marshall Fine

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

6

      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: СКАЧАТЬ