Harvey Keitel. Marshall Fine

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СКАЧАТЬ all things Brooklyn. Be that as it may, Smoke is the film Keitel is associated with on this day of accolades – because it’s about Brooklyn and because it’s more socially acceptable than, say, Bad Lieutenant or Reservoir Dogs.

      ‘… Our next honoree, Harvey Keitel.’

      Keitel gets up and Golden shakes his hand. There’s the grip-and-grin moment for the cameras, which snap and whir furiously – the two men shaking hands while Golden holds the medal up between them. Then, as he starts to give it to Keitel, the hand-over is muffed and the bronze medal falls to the flagstones with a clang.

      ‘Ooooh,’ says the assembled group, but Keitel saves the moment, picking up the medal and holding it aloft to show it’s unharmed. Then he kisses it and offers it to God.

      ‘Remember that?’ he says of the gesture. He smiles broadly. ‘I think of the words of that Sinatra song: “The house that I lived in, the people I knew.” The guy in the poolroom was named Charlie. I remember Mr Levy, the tailor. And my friends, Howie Weinberg and Carl Platt – we joined the Marines together.

      ‘All those people I grew up with, my buddies, my brother. We carved our names in cement all over Brooklyn, notched it in trees and poolrooms. I’m pleased to be here. Thank you.’

      Even as Golden is introducing Max Roach, Keitel is spirited away to the fragrance garden by one of the event’s press flacks for a stand-up interview with New York’s Fox-TV affiliate. As he stands uncomfortably next to a smiling blonde, mouthing the necessary niceties (‘I’ve always loved Brooklyn’), his group of friends have detached themselves from the crowd still watching the induction ceremonies and stand together: Platt, Weinberg, Gerald Keitel, Keitel’s long-time buddy Victor Argo (who appears in many of Keitel’s films), the women attached to each.

      When Keitel finishes his TV interview, he and his friends wander back up the hill to the induction ceremony. As Keitel looks through a batch of pictures of one of his friends’ children, an autograph-seeker approaches, obviously prepared for this moment. He offers a color print of Keitel from Reservoir Dogs in a manila folder and Keitel signs it.

      ‘Can I take a picture with you?’ the fan says and, as Keitel says, ‘Well …’ the thin, T-shirted young man jumps next to Keitel, throws an arm around his shoulder and smiles for a friend, who takes a flash picture.

      The flash functions as a signal to the half-dozen or so other fans lurking in the fringe of the crowd near Keitel and his friends. Emboldened, they approach him in twos and threes, asking for an autograph and a picture. He obliges, once, twice – then finally frowns and says to the next request, ‘Look, I think that’s enough of that.’ The frown hits the kid like a bolt and the edge in Keitel’s voice is unmistakable. Time to back off.

      Yet, moments later, two aging women, husky and begowned, interrupt his attention to the ceremony for an autograph. Without even asking, one stands next to him while he’s signing and the other quickly snaps a picture. Keitel can’t believe the chutzpah, but all he can do is smile, shrug and look up at the heavens, as if to say, ‘Isn’t anybody listening to me?’

      He pointedly turns back to his friends and begins to discuss plans for later. The combination of the heat and the crowd has made everyone edgy; they’d just as soon cut out now and escape from this whole scene to someone’s house where they can kick back and talk about old times.

      But obligations must be met. There’s still the coronation ceremony for Mary Tyler Moore as Queen of Brooklyn before several hundred people in the rose garden. Keitel and his new colleagues from the Celebrity Path will be introduced and then spend the rest of the ceremony sitting on a platform under an unseasonably intense sun. The applause for Keitel will be the loudest of the day, louder even than for Queen MTM.

      ‘I still have to do this other thing – then we can leave,’ Keitel says, taking Stella’s hand as the crowd begins to drift toward the staging area for the rose garden coronation.

      Then he weighs the chunky medal in his hand, looks at its image of the Brooklyn Bridge, hears his parents saying to him, ‘Harvey, be a mensch.’ He realizes how ungracious what he’s said might appear and smiles sheepishly. ‘I didn’t mean that like it sounded.’

1

      How do you explain a nice Jewish boy from Brighton Beach, scion of an Orthodox Jewish family, quitting high school – turning his back on education – to join the Marines? It simply wasn’t done. As one long-time friend observed, ‘What kind of Jew goes into the Marines? And likes it!’

      One seeking to rebel against and distance himself from a background he found oppressive and limiting. One who could see that his current form of rebellion – hanging out in the poolroom with his friends – was a dead end. But one who wound up substituting one rigid system of behavior (that of the United States Marine Corps) for another (Orthodox Judaism).

      Keitel’s parents had escaped the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe, emigrating to New York where they settled in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. His father, who was from Poland, worked as a hatmaker and a garment worker, meager wages on which to raise a growing family. His mother, who had come from Romania, supplemented the family income by working at a luncheonette.

      When Harvey was born on May 13, 1939, he was the youngest of three children, with an older brother and sister. The family all lived in a small apartment in Brighton Beach on Avenue X and Brighton Beach Avenue.

      The second-floor walk-up rattled and shook every time the elevated subway, on tracks twenty feet from the window, screeched by. The apartment was small and dark, but it overlooked a colorful neighborhood of immigrant families staking out second-generation roots. Keitel’s Brighton Beach blended together Jews, Italians, Irish. ‘It was an incredibly colorful place to grow up,’ he said. ‘Brooklyn was a culture unto itself – Italian immigrants, Jewish immigrants, the music, the dances.’

      His turf during his boyhood summers was the ocean and the nearby Coney Island amusement park. Swimming, climbing on and fishing off the rocks – what more could a kid ask for? There were fireworks every Tuesday night in the summer and an annual Mardi Gras at Coney Island, where the young Keitel would sell confetti.

      The proceeds would go toward stuffing himself with Nathan’s Kosher hot dogs or, occasionally, buying rides on the Steeplechase. Somehow, though, the high-speed ride was never as exciting as the thrill of trying to sneak in without paying or the fear of getting caught. It was never easy.

      As Keitel observed, ‘Everything was right there on those streets, in that poolroom. It was limiting only in that we had very few teachers to show us where that elevated train led to. That was our limitation. We didn’t know the avenues of possibilities. Manhattan could have been the moon to us.’

      If he had fears as a kid, they were more of the movie-inspired kind. He walked around in a state of mild terror, fearful that he might encounter deadly quicksand or molten lava or some other natural disaster he’d seen at a Saturday matinee.

      In fact, the worst thing he was likely to run into during those early days of the Eisenhower administration was the occasional fist fight. The toughest decision he had to make was where to hang out that day: the poolroom or the candy store at Avenue U and East 8th Street, where they would sip egg creams and eat Mello Rolls.

      Yet even the tough kids understood certain innate rules of respect and discipline, which they made clear to the young Harvey one day in the luncheonette his mother ran on Avenue X. He had been acting the big shot СКАЧАТЬ