Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  Brando smiled. “Stella’s great, isn’t she?” I said she was amazing, and he grinned. “Yes, she’s pretty amazin’,” he said with an undertone of amusement and a lot of affection. I said I had learned everything from her, and he nodded: “So’ve I.” Then I mentioned being friendly with a friend of his, television producer Joseph Cates (brother of film director Gilbert Cates). “Oh, yeah, how’s Joe?” Brando asked fondly. I told him he was fine, but in my responses I could feel myself starting to fall into my Brando Sayonara impression. Fighting this reflexive impulse, I asked about the widely-read, controversial profile of him which Truman Capote had written and published recently as a long piece (“The Duke in His Domain”) in The New Yorker. Had it bothered him? Since it seemed, I said, “kinda bitchy.”

  Brando looked off out the window in that characteristic way of his, reflecting a moment, then nodding slightly as he said, “Yeah, it was kinda bitchy.” He pursed his lips. “But it doesn’t bother me.” He looked back at me. “I mean, there’s been so much shit hittin’ the fan, what the hell’s a little more?” I started to say something but stopped myself before the Brando-sounding phrase could escape. My mind went blank and then I realized it was probably time to move on. Thanking him for his time, I said something about loving all his movies, reached out for his handshake, which was not that firm, and moved away with a wave. Outside when I passed the shop window again, Brando was still there, talking now to an attractive saleswoman.

  Right afterward, I called Joe Cates to tell him what had happened. Not much later, I saw Joe and he said he’d spoken with Marlon, mentioned me, and that Marlon had remembered the encounter. “Oh, yeah, that crazy kid,” Brando had said. Joe had told him I did a wicked Brando impression and he had responded, “I’d like to see it sometime.” I can’t remember how, but eventually I was given the phone number to his New York apartment and called him after a while. Brando still lived in Manhattan then, in the mid-Fifties on the West Side, with Wally Cox as his roommate. I had become a fan of Cox’s from seeing him with Tony Randall on their Mr. Peepers television series, which seemed to me then a charming, dry and witty delight.

  We spoke a few times over the next year or so but I can’t recall much of what we said, except that he was funny and quite warm. After he moved permanently west I lost touch with him; as I did with Joe Cates, when I moved west. One time, maybe a year after F.A.O. Schwarz, Brando came briefly to a rehearsal of Stella Adler’s off-Broadway production of Johnny Johnson.

  Brando was known to have been the main backer, though he never took credit for it. Stella introduced him to the cast one afternoon and he sat on a table for a while, flipping his hat up and down in one hand, as he said a few words of praise for Stella, and wished us good luck.

  Twenty years later, I was in Brando’s longtime L.A. home on Mulholland Drive helping to celebrate a party he was holding in Stella Adler’s honor. Cybill Shepherd and I were living together at the time, both of us having had a critical and popular success in 1971 with The Last Picture Show. Brando had virtually disappeared as a force by the end of the 1960s, then returned with the spectacular 1972 double-whammy of The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris. I had had two other successes, and Cybill had another on her own. It was the mid-seventies and everything seemed pretty great for all of us at this party for our Stella. I don’t believe Marlon and I said anything to each other the whole night, the place being jammed with people.

  The word on Marlon by this time was that he had virtually no interest or respect for any part of the movie business, or the art of acting, for that matter. I did remember something Stella had said about Brando way back in the late fifties. “When Marlon isn’t acting,” she told her class one afternoon, “it’s Intermission!” Only the need for money to support himself and his ever-widening family (fourteen children) on a decently lavish scale kept him working after the personal and professional debacle of One-Eyed Jacks, released in 1961—only two pictures after Sayonara. (These were the World War II drama The Young Lions, with Brando riveting as a perhaps overly introspective Nazi; and brilliant with Anna Magnani in the Sidney Lumet film of Tennessee Williams’ The Fugitive Kind, based on his play Orpheus Descending.)

  Brando impressions always focused on his 1950s pictures (Streetcar, Zapata, Caesar, Wild One, Waterfront, Guys and Dolls, Sayonara were the most prevalent) and, until The Godfather in 1972 replaced most of these, One-Eyed Jacks was the last movie from which anybody imitated Brando. This was also the single one he had ever directed (and produced)—an unsuccessful and notoriously expensive, but nevertheless memorably original Technicolor Western drama with a terrific title. The two lines most frequently mimicked were both evidently written by the ultra-hip novelist Calder Willingham, one of two credited screenplay writers (Guy Trosper is the other, adapted from Charles Neider’s novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones). When asked why he had shot someone, Marlon’s character replies, “He didn’t give me no selection”; and, exploding at somebody else, he shouts in fury, “YOU scum-sucking pig!” Two uncredited fellows also worked on the script: Sam Peckinpah (before he had become a feature director) and Stanley Kubrick (post-Spartacus), who originally had been hired to direct. During a production conference when Brando supposedly gave everyone exactly three minutes to speak, upon being informed that his time was up, Kubrick told Marlon to “go fuck yourself,” and soon afterward was replaced by the star who, Kubrick always maintained, had wanted to direct it himself all along. Brando was thirty-seven.

  Marlon Brando’s reading of the famous line “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” was surprising since he virtually threw it away as a shouted means of getting the people quiet for Antony’s funeral oration in the film of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1953), directed and adapted by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and with an all-star cast, including James Mason and John Gielgud.

  The shooting of One-Eyed Jacks—along the majestic coastline of the Monterey peninsula and in the Mexican desert (I can’t recall another Western ever shot with views of the ocean)—took considerably longer than scheduled and cost a good deal more than budgeted, so the Paramount front office wasn’t very happy by the time Brando was editing. They were even less happy with the picture they saw, which was three hours long and had an unhappy ending. Arguments ensued, ultimatums came, the conclusion was partially reshot, much was recut, deleted. No one, especially Brando, was really pleased with the compromised final version, which was halfheartedly released to tepid business. Brando’s production company, Pennebaker (after his beloved mother’s maiden name), which had had a great many plans, did only one or two other movies, and Marlon has never directed again.

  Stella and all his other friends said that the experiences on this movie soured him forever on pictures and that the generally lackluster, increasingly less engaged (and not popular) work he did throughout most of the 1960s was the result of his gigantic disappointments with the making of One-Eyed Jacks. His spectacular 1972 twin comebacks on The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris were motivated by financial needs, and he acted in only three other films throughout the rest of the 1970s, two throughout the 1980s; and in the nineties, as he entered his seventies, neither quality nor interest returned, and physical, not emotional, weight took over.

  So One-Eyed Jacks was perhaps the last time Brando acted out of a true commitment, an uncynical passion for the material, and he gives one of his very best performances as the outlaw betrayed by a friend (Karl Malden), seeking vengeance and finding love with the villain’s stepdaughter. His direction is perceptive and effective—all the actors are uniformly excellent—evoking especially fine work from the newcomers, notably Piña Pellicer as the young woman who falls for him. Katy Jurado is fine as her mother; Malden, an old Brando friend and coworker (first in Streetcar, stage and screen), always good, is superbly ambiguous here; and Ben Johnson and Slim Pickens are wonderfully authentic. Ben told me that when Brando interviewed him for the role, he asked only one question: If Ben had been cast in the Jack Palance role (a k
iller who puts on gloves just prior to shooting someone) for George Stevens’ Western, Shane, how would he have played it differently? Ben replied simply that if he were going to shoot somebody, he “sure as hell wouldn’t wait to put on my gloves.” Marlon told him he had the part.

  The film that seems to have broken his heart: Marlon Brando in his own production of the offbeat Western One-Eyed Jacks (1961), the only picture the actor ever directed, and awfully well, too, but without commercial success. Old pal Karl Malden is the object of the Brando character’s quite justifiable desire for revenge.

  At Stella’s party in the mid-seventies, Brando was leaning over the back of his sofa, watching Cybill Shepherd as she walked away from him across the room. Her dress was not tight but it was clingy and therefore clear that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. “Hey, Cybill!” Marlon called to her. She stopped, looked around, took a half-step back toward him and stopped. With a broad smile and a quick glance at me halfway across the room, he said, “Could you please come back here—and then turn around and walk away from me again?” Several people, including Cybill and me, laughed. She waved at him as if to say “silly boy,” turned and continued out of the room, determinedly now weaving her hips (a little like the Lauren Bacall finish of To Have and Have Not). “Go on, hurt me like that,” Brando said, grinning, and glanced at me mischievously again before turning back to the conversation he was having with the people on the couch. In Brando’s own lingo and in how he played it, Cybill and I understood the moment as a compliment (albeit a pretty macho one), both to Cybill and to my taste and good fortune. Which certainly was not the basic vibe either of us usually got about our relationship.

  Only many years later did Cybill tell me that just before this moment, she had been sitting on the couch with Stella and Marlon and that Marlon had said, lifting a beer bottle, “If this girl”—meaning Cybill—“doesn’t shut up, I’m gonna hit her on the head with this bottle.” Cybill then thought, Better get out of here, got up and walked away. At which point, Marlon called out. So it was also an unspoken apology.

  Over the years, his name had come up repeatedly for this or that picture project which I subsequently made or didn’t make, and I always welcomed the idea, but for whatever reasons, it never worked out. In 2000, I was casting The Cat’s Meow, one of the leading roles in which was publisher-producer William Randolph Hearst, and we were talking about the possibility of Brando’s playing it, even though he was fourteen years older than Hearst was at the time the story takes place. We all agreed that he might be worth all the attendant problems that by now were legend in the business: his refusal to learn lines (they could be taped around the set, even on actors’ faces, or piped into his ear via tiny speakers), his argumentativeness, his by now enormous weight and refusal to be shot below the waist. Nevertheless, we all agreed he could be interesting as Hearst; he certainly had Hearst’s high voice. So we investigated through agents: Would Marlon work with Bogdanovich? Yes. Would he like to play William Randolph Hearst? No. With the quote—“please tell Peter” understood—that he didn’t “want to go up against Orson Welles.”

  The reference, of course, was to the supposed performance of Hearst by Welles in Citizen Kane. The irony here was that Orson never really intended Kane to be a factual portrait, or an impersonation, of the real Hearst. In truth, the characterization is virtually nothing like Hearst was, and the actual character of Kane is a composite of a number of press lords, including a Midwestern one named Cyrus McCormick who actually did help found the Chicago Lyric Opera for his girlfriend “singer,” as Kane famously does. Nevertheless, I knew what Brando meant. In the public’s consciousness, he would be taking a look at a personage Welles had already on a certain level immortalized, and so he wanted no part of it.

  Certainly the most influential actor of the last fifty years, Brando was the first star-personality in movies who possessed and exploited acting talent of an enormous versatility and range. Throughout his first decade in films, he challenged himself never to be the same from picture to picture, refusing to become the kind of film star the studio system had invented and thrived upon—the recognizable human commodity each new film was built around. Since his advent, actors labor most to prove their diversity and, with the final collapse of the old studio-contract days—ironically, right around the time of One-Eyed Jacks—the original star system has essentially disappeared, and personality-actors (like Clint Eastwood) are few and far between. The funny thing is that Brando’s charismatic screen persona was vividly apparent despite the multiplicity of his guises. While today’s stars are not ones easily mimicked, Brando always remained recognizable, a star-actor in spite of himself.

  When Marlon died suddenly in the summer of 2004, the world was shocked, though with his enormous girth over the last couple of decades it was amazing he had lived to be eighty. Nevertheless, the loss was palpable; the New York Times front page led national news with the story, its headline referring to Brando as “SCREEN GIANT OF ELECTRIC INTENSITY.” The two photos next to this were from the films of Streetcar and The Godfather. Inside there was a full page and a half obituary with eight photographs, all but one (a small 1990 news shot) from work he had done before the end of the seventies. Other front pages ran shots from The Wild One, Waterfront, Streetcar, and Godfather. Had his death come twenty-five years earlier it felt as though the references about his professional legacy would not have been very different. (Only the tragic events of his family life—son involved in murder, daughter a suicide—would not have existed.) The reports and think pieces had the usual about “unfulfilled promise” as well as “greatest actor of his generation”; everyone agreed that in acting there was Before Brando and After Brando.

  I thought of our first chance encounter exactly a half century before. Streetcar, Wild One, and most of Waterfront were all behind him even then. Over the years he repeatedly talked about how much he hated the acting profession, yet because he was a born actor, in essence wasn’t he hating himself? To be so acclaimed for something you yourself hold in contempt is an unhappy place to live but that seems to have been much of Brando’s life. According to Arthur Miller (see Monroe chapter), film stardom in the old Hollywood system (and Brando was at his peak in its final decade), by its very nature, placed one into “a culture of contempt.” Indeed, Miller cites Brando as a good example of how someone could react, not unlike Monroe, by turning against himself.

  But Marlon fired up actors, and acting, as no one ever has, and continues to, so despite his efforts to the contrary, the artist in him did prevail after all. And those brilliantly charged performances will endure both as inspiration for the art of acting, and as incisively crafted and often moving portraits of humanity.

  Born Marlon Brando, Jr., April 3, 1924, Omaha, NE; died July 1, 2004, Los Angeles, CA.

  Selected starring features (with director):

  1950: The Men (Fred Zinnemann)

  1951: A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan)

  1952: Viva Zapata! (Kazan)

  1953: Julius Caesar (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

  1954: The Wild One (Laslo Benedek); On the Waterfront (Kazan)

  1955: Guys and Dolls (Mankiewicz)

  1956: The Teahouse of the August Moon (Daniel Mann)

  1957: Sayonara (Joshua Logan)

  1958: The Young Lions (Edward Dmytryk)

  1960: The Fugitive Kind (Sidney Lumet)

  1961: One-Eyed Jacks (Marlon Brando)

  1962: Mutiny on the Bounty (Lewis Milestone)

  1963: The Ugly American (George Englund)

  1966: The Chase (Penn)

  1967: A Countess from Hong Kong (Charles Chaplin); Reflections in a Golden Eye (John Huston)

  1969: Burn! (Gillo Pontecorvo)

  1972: The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola); Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci)

  1976: The Missouri Breaks (Penn)

  1979: Apocalypse Now (Coppola)

  1990: The Freshman (Andrew Bergman)

  1995: Don Juan DeMarco (Jer
emy Levin)

  2001: The Score (Frank Oz)

  4

  STELLA ADLER

  Stella Adler wanted to be a movie star—so her oldest friends remember—but she acted only in three films, none of them particularly successful or really representative of the extraordinary presence and talent this amazing woman exhibited on the stage or in life. Ironically, as a teacher, how she taught acting led ultimately to the fall of the personality-star hierarchy to which she had once aspired. Her first movie and only starring vehicle, Love on Toast (1938), directed by E. A. Dupont, is actually quite a likeable little romantic comedy and Stella is brilliant in it. She plays the strong female lead with a knowing light touch, with the authority of a seasoned professional and the self-confidence of an established star. Of course, she had been a star on the New York stage since the late 1920s. When she and her brother Luther Adler opened on Broadway in Success Story, Stella used to say, in her grand mid-Atlantic accent, with very emphatic emphasis: “They said it was genius, darling! Genius! And Luther believed them.” Her landmark portrait of the mother in Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing!, playing a broken-down Jewish New York tenement mother in her late fifties while she was still in her early thirties, is one of the fabled performances of the American theater.

  Not entirely surprising, since Stella came from the famous acting family headed by Jacob Adler, who early in the twentieth century had established, and was the star of, Manhattan’s first (and extremely popular) Yiddish Theater, downtown on Second Avenue. Stella had been in front of audiences since she was two, so to say that the theater was in her blood would be a considerable understatement—the theater was her blood. And she gave it everything she had, in several capacities, essentially altering in the process the way that America, and therefore the world, thought about actors and acting, in the theater and in pictures. As a teacher of acting from the late 1940s into the early 1990s, she left behind her a virtual wake of fine actors, and profoundly influential ones, from Marlon Brando to Warren Beatty to Robert De Niro.