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Scenes From a Bad Movie Marriage

Fame, at the end of the century, is a resonating chamber of media echoes, some as acute and sharp as Keitel’s performances in Mean Streets and Bad Lieutenant, some as dull and miscast as his romantic aristo in The Duellists or his “noble” Judas in The Last Temptation of Christ. What surprised him and De Niro and Scorsese when they started out together so long ago is that Keitel didn’t “make it” first.

He was the golden boy, a crystallization of Scorsese’s Elizabeth Street fantasies-they even lived together for a while in Hollywood-while De Niro was the geek, the crazy outsider, “Johnny Boy” of Mean Streets. But in the early seventies, geeks became glamorous-Michael J. Pollard, Dennis Hopper, Barbra Streisand-as the culture mutated and transposed standards of talent and attraction; somewhere between the final reels of Mean Streets and his alchemical weight loss for Godfather II, Bobby turned beautiful. And the power dynamic of the three friends altered.

It wasn’t that Scorsese and De Niro abandoned Keitel; they’d just removed to a higher plane. For real working-class artists like them, it was necessary to develop a remorseless sense of their careers-”If I’m not working, I’m nuts,” Scorsese told me while shooting Taxi Driver in 1975. De Niro used to ride around town on a bicycle to audition in order to save money, and Keitel worked for eight years as a court stenographer. The desire to not repeat such experiences is understandably powerful, and the anxiety it causes can warp perception and behavior, especially in the hyper-narcissistic force field of the movies.

And so the strange tales: Scorsese’s calculated distance from the children he’s fathered (they might lessen his concentration), all being raised by ex-wives and girlfriends; De Niro’s “obsessive” portrayals and pathological reluctance to express himself, even with pre-screened, surgically neutered celebrity journalists; Keitel’s one-note fixations on seemingly minor details, like wigs and makeup or the peccadilloes of people he once cared for, that have gained him a “difficult” reputation in Hollywood. “Harvey’s an unbelievable sweetie, very loyal and forgiving,” swears Kerri Courtney, his longtime amanuensis, “but of course he’s had his traumas.”

Despite all of the above, Harvey Keitel’s life, since he broke up with Bracco, has generally improved. He’s been in hit after hit: Mortal Thoughts, with Bruce Willis and Demi Moore; Ridley Scott’s feminist Bonnie & Clyde, Thelma & Louise; Warren Beatty’s Bugsy (for which he was finally nominated for an Academy Award), Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction; and Jane Campion’s The Piano. He’s had a number of romances with young women-Heather Bracken, Toni Welsh, Embeth David-and has overcome his chronic press discomfort long enough to cooperate fitfully with, among others, Playboy, Esquire, Leatherneck (Harvey’s an ex-Marine), and New York. On the street, people stop him constantly, and he seems more gratified than annoyed-”It was a lot worse when no one noticed”-all of this culminating last June in a triumphant appearance on the Bravo channel’s Inside the Actors Studio, where host James Lipton plied him with softball questions designed to mellow Keitel into a sort of punch-drunk beneficence: “Satisfaction was unknown to me as a young man,” the 58-year-old told his rapt student audience. “You could say the pain of my journey led me to satisfaction. By descending into pain instead of trying to avoid it, I learned satisfaction.” and though the effect of such pronouncements from a person like Keitel is startling, like listening to “Crazy Joey” Gallo, the late Colombo-family hit man, quoting Nietzsche, they appear to be true.

He was certainly experiencing satisfaction on Friday, December 12, at Frank’s Steak House on Tenth Avenue, where some retired narcotics agents threw him a celebratory dinner. He was coming off several days’ worth of lurid headlines-fan claims sex attack-in which Olmos’s name had been blackened again, this time for the alleged “sexual assault” of a married 38-year-old South Carolina woman who’d followed him back to his hotel in Rock Hill after Olmos spoke there at Winthrop University on October 18; local police had “investigated” the matter for nearly two months without filing a charge when a leak to Keitel’s press coordinator, a sharp young lawyer on loan from Robert De Niro (who spoke on the condition that he not be named), blew the affair up. But the woman, Patricia Harris, quickly withdrew her complaint, attorneys on both sides characterizing it as “a misunderstanding between adults” and refusing to discuss whether a financial settlement had been reached. Still, damage had been done:

“We’re going to take this into Rockland County for use in the appellate-court appeal,” vowed the sharp young lawyer, who has assisted De Niro (Stella’s godfather) in his ongoing custody fights with former girlfriend Toukie Smith. “I can’t wait to get Eddie on the stand.”

All of this, however, was in marked contrast to Harvey’s mood in early November, when he’d been wrapping Lulu on the Bridge before heading off to Vietnam to make yet another movie. Then Keitel had seemed irredeemably pessimistic about his custody chances in appellate court:

“Did you see those women judges at a petitioner’s panel hearing October 28 in Brooklyn? They weren’t going for me. They were asking about those Academy Award photos Stella took again, and that damned phone tape of Lorraine’s.”

He was referring to a pre-Academy Awards impromptu polaroid session in the Presidential Suite of the Beverly Hills Four Seasons while Harvey and his friends were getting dressed for his Bugsy nomination. Stella, then 6, snapped some shots of Jerry Keitel, Harvey’s older brother, in a towel, and Argo and others in shirts, ties, socks, and shorts, sans tux pants; Harvey insists everyone was “just horsing around, nobody was drunk or indecent-these guys are like my daughter’s extended family,” but Judge Elaine Slobod, the custody jurist who’d ultimately ruled against him, had found the incident showed “poor judgment.” Likewise, a recorded phone message, left by Stella on Bracco’s answering machine while Stella was with Keitel, said: “Hi, Mom-this is a joke . . . don’t get upset. Dad taught me: ‘You bitch, you fucking bastard.’ Bye, Mom. You fucking bastard, fuck you . . . bye-bye.”

“It was a joke, for fuck’s sake! When I was little, older guys in the neighborhood would give me quarters to say curse words,” Keitel had explained.

But the judge had “misinterpreted,” just as she and the law guardian and “everyone else” had misunderstood when Keitel told writer Nick Tosches in 1993: “When my daughter has a problem, how will she cope with it? That is my focus, to discuss ideas with her, to discuss divinity with her, to discuss hell with her, and I mean hell in whatever form it might rear its head, in fucking or coking, in books or in ignorance. . . . Hell has many heads, and it’s such a slight step from here to descending into that hell. . . .”

Based on Keitel’s “frankness,” the law guardian had recommended that Stella remain with her mother because “clearly, this man has no limits. . . .”

In Family Court, Judge Slobod had “misconstrued” a story Keitel told about prodding Stella to go down a dark hallway she was afraid of, and had “tied it up” with his having questioned her “obsessively” about Olmos and Bracco, to the point of tears. After months of this, Stella had “voiced suicidal ideation,” in the court’s infelicitous phrase, and had developed “juvenile rheumatoid arthritis,” a stress-based disease in children. The court had had to restrict Keitel’s conversations to make him stop.

Keitel’s dressers and makeup people had abruptly besieged him in his trailer at 24th Street and Eighth Avenue that November day, and by the time they’d finished and he was trucking toward 25th Street, where he would act a farewell scene with Mira Sorvino, he’d withdrawn perceptibly:

“Harvey, is anything wrong? Am I, like, messing up your concentration?”

He’d flashed me a sidelong look: “I just hope I’m gonna come out the good guy in this story.”

“Well,” I’d joked, “you never know. Do you think, for argument’s sake, that there might be a chance that Olmos didn’t do anything? Or that even if he did, he still might not be a serial molester? I mean, there’s no pattern. . . .”

“I knew it!” he’d exploded. “I shoulda got Jimmy Breslin! He’d have the balls . . .”

“Harvey!” yelled an A.D. “We need you!”

Keitel had stopped, his chin jutting, his shoulders hunched: “What if the kid R.G. is lying,” he’d said angrily. “He’s still a prick! He still paid a young girl a bribe!” His expression had twisted in frustration. His brown eyes were very unhappy, like those of a man who’d long ago recognized something relentless in himself but couldn’t do anything about it.