Harvey Keitel. Marshall Fine

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.’

7

      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 СКАЧАТЬ