Harvey Keitel. Marshall Fine

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ