Bracco had been extremely busy from 1989 through 1991, at one point spending seven months on the road making movies, with Harvey at home in the Hudson Street loft (and later at a country house in Sneden’s Landing upstate), essentially minding the kids. His career had always been problematic. He’d been Scorsese’s alter ego in Who’s That Knocking? (1968) and Mean Streets (1973), a tough pretty boy in the John Garfield mode, but strangely, though Mean Streets quickly became a cult classic and made Scorsese and De Niro stars, Keitel had been out of work until Scorsese re-employed him (for $3,000) in 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and for a small part as a pimp in the smash Taxi Driver. Then he worked on and Off Broadway until Francis Ford Coppola took him to the Philippines to do Apocalypse Now. It was the role that was to put him up there with De Niro, but the frat brother Coppola and the Avenue X pool hustler Keitel didn’t get along; Harvey was replaced by Martin Sheen after two weeks’ work.

Through the seventies and into the eighties, Harvey did worthy but marginal films like James Toback’s Fingers and The Pick-Up Artist, and Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar, but he had to go to Europe to make the rent, and in 1980, when Hollywood and the moviegoing public were declaring Scorsese and De Niro’s Raging Bull the greatest American film noir since On the Waterfront, Harvey was gratefully collecting $90,000 for a schlock sci-fi flick (in which his voice was dubbed) called Saturn Three. It wasn’t long after this that he met Lorraine.

Intimates describe their relationship as a Honeymooners version of A Star is Born, if you can imagine Alice as a careerist climber and Ralph with a cocaine jones. During their lower-court custody battle over Stella, both alluded to drug-taking, Harvey presenting a therapist’s report that acknowledged his problem, tying it to chronic depression from an unhappy childhood and to “a period . . . when things weren’t going well for him in terms of work,” but also stated that he’d sought help and had been drug-free after 1991. “The truth is that they did some toot during a time when everyone in the country was into it,” says a longtime acquaintance. “Very big deal . . .”

But Bracco, while acknowledging that she, too, formerly indulged occasionally, largely blamed Keitel’s “binges” for their breakup, although she told the court that cocaine did not incite him to the “verbal” and “physical” violence that sometimes scared the kids: “Cocaine has a very different effect on Mr. Keitel,” Bracco testified. “He gets very introverted and nervous.”

Their main problem, apparently, was career trajectories. While Lorraine was hot after GoodFellas, Harvey’s The Two Jakes, with Jack Nicholson-yet another shot at major stardom (as Mean Streets, Apocalypse, and The Last Temptation of Christ had been)-bombed out in mannered inconsequentiality. With Sean Connery and Michael Douglas (producer of Radio Flyer) ringing Bracco up, Keitel grew furious: “When Michael Douglas was calling . . . me, in my excitement I cut off a phone call for Harvey,” Bracco told the court. “He came flying upstairs, pushed the door open . . . and screamed that I should go and suck Michael Douglas’s dick, and everybody else’s dick in hollywood.”

There were pushing and slapping incidents in Malibu and Sneden’s Landing that predated Bracco’s announcement that she wanted Keitel to move out, but mutual acquaintances also think that after Bracco met Eddie Olmos in Idaho in 1990, where they made Talent for the Game together, she was “trading up.” Of course, once she’d admitted that she’d been having an affair, “there were three years of raging about Eddie,” says Bracco, with Keitel at one point allegedly determined to “tell Stella that I’d lied and was sucking someone else’s dick.”

Olmos, off his signature role as Lieutenant Martin Castillo in the eighties policier Miami Vice, had parlayed his image as a “Pacific Rim man,” part actor, part activist, representing the rising Hispanic-Asian minorities of California, into a hybrid career. Its main dividends in 1991, when he’d literally replaced Keitel in his own home, had been Stand and Deliver, a critical success about an inspirational math teacher in East L.A.’s barrio, and American Me, but he was becoming prominent in Democratic national politics. He presented Bracco with a welcome change from Keitel’s bluesy angst. Where Harvey was chronically upset, Eddie was relentlessly up. He was such a great talker that he’d once persuaded the warden of Folsom prison to let him film inside the walls, using inmates as extras. Clinton invited him (with Bracco) to the 1993 inauguration.

He’d been dividing his time between his Encino home and his life with Bracco about two thirds to one third when the R.G. allegations broke. During custody hearings in 1995, he admitted he’d chosen “the worst of two evils” by opting to pay R.G.’s family and not tell Keitel, but characteristically, he cited good reasons: “Fear” had kept him from facing down R.G.’s charges, he told the court, because he’d wanted to protect his son and because “I knew this young woman had an assistant district attorney from the Bronx her uncle, who negotiated the money settlement with Olmos’s lawyer, Jim Schreiber and the . . . Sex Crimes prosecutor Linda Fairstein defending her sic. I knew it would cost an extraordinary amount . . . to defend myself . . . that the press would be on this and that the truth never catches up to an allegation like this.” Olmos also contended that Bracco had begged him not to tell Keitel, fearing his violent reaction.

So from November 1992 to October 1993, Keitel was unaware of the alleged molestations. During that time, R.G.’s mother, an old friend of both Keitel’s and Bracco’s, had asked Bracco for $75,000 to help set up a catering business. Purportedly, this was before she knew of R.G.’s problems, and Bracco turned her down; then, after the mother received R.G.’s letter, she informed Linda Fairstein. The family originally asked for $750,000 to settle out of court. Although the published amount of the final settlement, in May 1993, was $150,000, a former associate of Olmos’s, in a position to know, maintains the figure was “successful press spin” and that Eddie actually paid $300,000 over a period of time, then “got out ahead of Harvey on damage control” when Keitel went public in October 1993. Keitel was, Olmos told various media, “out of control,” “the real Bad Lieutenant,” “vicious and disturbed,” and didn’t even “want Stella” but was “using the situation to hurt Lorraine and myself.” Later, sources close to the Olmoses told Cindy Adams they had “written documents” to “prove” that Keitel had enlisted De Niro, Scorsese, and Joe Pesci in a “conspiracy” to blacklist Olmos and Bracco in Hollywood.

In fact, Bracco hasn’t been working. “But that,” says Victor Argo, “has to do with her talent, not some conspiracy.” “You ride a kind of surfboard of publicity for a while after you’ve had a hit,” says Peggy Gormley, “but if there’s nothing substantial to keep you afloat, you sink.” “It’s too stupid to discuss,” scoffs Keitel. “Fuhgeddaboutit, all right?”