Photographed by Rebecca Smeyne
SINATRA: MICKEY H. OSTERREICHER/GETTY IMAGES.and Max] and treated her really well,” says
Alan Brewer, 64, one of Harvey’s closest child-
hood friends, now a film and TV producer.
“But when he was growing up, she was the boss,
not him. When Harvey became a force in the
industry and extremely wealthy, that altered
their power dynamics.”
As to the power dynamics of her marriage,
Miriam held the cards. If Max made a regular
thing of taking his sons to the movies, “it
was just as much an escape for him as for the
boys,” says a childhood friend of the brothers.
“Within the family, Miriam had a very loud
voice and a tremendous amount of influence
about what everybody should be doing. My
sense is that the way she treated him is tied to
Harvey’s explosive personality later on.”
How much of his legendary rage can be
linked to her is debatable. But for those who
spent many hours in his household, “there
was a tension,” says Adler. “There was a ten-
sion about going into that apartment.”
A
fter skipping eighth grade (along
with 30 students singled out for their
intelligence), in 1967 Harvey entered
John Bowne High School with about 1,000
classmates and immersed himself in extra-
curricular life, editing the news pages of
the school paper, sitting on the student council
and participating in a radio club. “He wasn’t
particularly athletic, but he was very smart,”
says Brewer.
It was just after the “Summer of Love,” a
time of social upheaval when 100,000 hippies
converged on San Francisco and a message
of “flower power” rippled through the country.
Harvey aligned himself with the countercul-
ture. His friends say he was part of a tight-knit
clique of young men and women that included
Brewer and Adler. “We weren’t in the ‘popu-
lar’ group,” says Brewer. “We were a smaller
community of artsy-fartsy smart kids.”
In school, Harvey discovered he had a gift
for organization: When he heard that Irish
poet Padraic Colum was teaching at Columbia
University, he arranged for him to speak
before his class. “That was the kind of thing
Harvey did,” says Adler. “He could just make
things happen.”
There was a film component in his advanced
history and social studies class, and Harvey
often brought up examples from the movies he
was seeing as he began to venture into the
big city. Classmate Jeff Malek remembers hear-
ing that Harvey “knew the entire cast of every
movie.” To test him, he pressed Harvey about
The Wizard of Oz, and he “proceeded to list the
cast and crew, including gaffers, wardrobe,
etc., by memory,” says Malek. During senior
year, says Adler, Harvey surprised his friends
with an announcement: “I’m going to make
a movie of our lives,” he said, explaining that
he’d already determined which famous actors
would play each friend: Adler would be por-
trayed by Donald Sutherland.
Overtures such as these went over well.
But, pasty-skinned and overweight, Harvey got
nowhere with girls. He suffered from acne
and “was very awkward with women because
he was really hideous,” says Adler. “He usedsarcasm and humor in his friendships, but I
never knew him to have a girlfriend, or even to
date.” Still, neither Adler nor any of Harvey’s
other friends saw anything in his behavior that
would suggest the predator to come.
At the end of his high school years, however,
Harvey wrote a jocular message in a girl’s
yearbook that seems eerie in hindsight. After
writing, “Dear Sheila, we had a blast. Best is
yet to come,” he added a fictitious address:
“New York State Prison 3553333369.”T
hat fall, Harvey enrolled at the
University of Buffalo, as far as he could
get from Queens while still paying in-
state tuition.
There, he met another student, Horace
“Corky” Burger, with whom he began to write
a regular column for the college paper, featur-
ing a fictional character named “Denny the
Hustler,” a womanizing man-about-town who
detailed the local social calendar.
Harvey wouldn’t see his high school friends
again until he was back home the next sum-
mer, when he got together with Adler, who had
also returned from university with his girl-
friend Patti. After a few hours of socializing,1A jocular
yearbook note from
Weinstein (offering a
“prison” number
ending in 69) takes
on new meaning
in light of recent
allegations.