Читать книгу Harvey Keitel - Marshall Fine - Страница 10

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 years later in Reservoir Dogs and Bad Lieutenant. Indeed, an entire career may have been shaped by one night-combat class in the Marines. The Keitel persona can be traced to that exercise: the edgy young (or middle-aged) man, whose way of dealing with the world is to lash out at it in spasms of violence – or worse. The good man confronted with his own attraction to what is forbidden – or coping with guilt at his inability to resist temptation.

When Lt, the character he plays in Bad Lieutenant, stares into an abyss of drugs, sex and numerous forms of spiritual corruption and faces his own pitiable disintegration, he is looking through Harvey Keitel’s eyes. And those eyes say, ‘I know these thoughts. I understand this way of thinking.’

The comprehension dawned on that dark night in North Carolina when the young Keitel, barely seventeen and newly sprung from basic training, showed up for night-combat training. It was an inky night and Keitel was nervous and skittish. He had played the tough guy for years, learning it early on the streets of Brooklyn. But this was the Marines – and he was hardly the only tough guy who wanted to prove just how tough he was by joining the Marines.

He had the kind of approachable hard-boiled quality of a young John Garfield. Mixing for the first time with people from all parts of the country, he’d found other Brooklynites and hung out with them, if anything emphasizing his own Brooklyn origins.

But this was different: even though it was peacetime, even though he was armed and wearing combat gear, even though it was only an exercise and not actual combat conditions, standing out here in the dark was creepy. He was a Brooklynite through and through, used to corners with streetlamps and traffic and people. This was darkness one can only find far from city lights, darkness like he’d never experienced except, perhaps, while hiding in a closet as a child: ‘It was pitch-black out. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. We were sitting in the darkness, me and hundreds of other Marines, huddled together, about to go through this course in night combat. And I was scared. And I didn’t want to tell any of my fellow Marines that I was scared. But I was scared.’

Then, out of the darkness came a voice: calm, reasonable, all-knowing. It was the voice of the instructor, an aged veteran of, perhaps, twenty-five or twenty-six who seemed like a mystic ancient to this still-raw batch of shaven-headed seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. ‘You’re all afraid of the dark,’ he said, without judgment, ‘because you’re all afraid of what you don’t know. I’m going to teach you to know the darkness, so that you’re no longer afraid of it. So that you learn how to live in it.’

‘My introduction to mythology and philosophy,’ Keitel called it. ‘In the years that came, that is one of the essences of all the mythology and philosophy I have read. He could tell us those words because he had experienced the darkness. He had experienced that terror in a war. But that was the first time I had heard words like that.’

That notion – of dealing with fear by confronting it and learning about it – struck a chord that resonated with the seemingly easy-going Keitel. It remained with him and became a credo of sorts: to explore the darkness in order to better understand the light, to examine wrong in order to better know what is right. It became the source of Keitel’s journey as an actor – the inner journey to explore his own darkest, least-acceptable feelings and ideas, then using that self-knowledge while creating his film and stage characters – to plumb his own pain for his characters’ reality:

That is probably the most important philosophical question to ask oneself. What is the darkness? How do I learn to live with it? I heard that when I was seventeen years old and I never forgot it. It appealed to me. I wanted to learn to live with the darkness. What the Marine was teaching – it’s not that you are not scared in the night time. It’s that you learn about your fear and the darkness. That fear becomes different and you can work with it.

At that time I didn’t know what the extension of that idea was. I know now. It took me years to understand it, but I sensed it.

Eventually, Keitel would find the same thought echoed in the Gospel of Thomas, as he researched the role of Judas in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’

‘There,’ Keitel said, ‘is the whole foundation of self-analysis.’