Somebody
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Like many homes of the period, the Brando house had a piano in the parlor. Radio was still in its infancy, and recordings were still only a pale echo of true musical sound. Dodie had received lessons as a child, and she still got more pleasure out of playing than she did out of listening. Solos at the keyboard supplanted group work at the theater. Surrounded by her children—in one of the very few family activities—she played folk airs and popular numbers, from Irving Berlin’s inventive tunes to a list of lesser numbers, including “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover” and “Am I Blue?” To please her, Marlon learned them all. He could never summon up the digits of his Social Security I.D., and there were times when he couldn’t recall his own telephone number. But the music and lyrics from those days around the keyboard never left him. When, at the age of sixty-five, he wrote his autobiography, scores of titles were suggested by friends and publishers, but in the end he settled on Songs My Mother Taught Me.
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When Bud was six, the Calcium Carbonate Corporation offered his father a new job as sales manager. Employment opportunities were few in 1930, the first full year of the Depression. Marlon senior seized the day, even though it meant relocation to Evanston, Illinois. His wife was not so happy with the decision; she still clung to the fading illusion of herself as a stage star, and Evanston had no playhouse and few nonconformists.
Dodie struggled to get her bearings in the new neighborhood. Melancholia settled in like an old acquaintance who had come for a weekend visit and refused to go away. Every day the Chicago Tribune brought bad news, and every week Time magazine summed them up. Breadlines across the country, new bankruptcies. And lynchings; God, those poor people. She sometimes read the stories aloud to the kids, unsure of whether the reports went over their heads or burrowed into their psyches. “All night two hundred men and boys searched for Davie Harris, found him at dawn, cringing in an empty barn. They lugged him up to the levee, mocked his yammerings for mercy. ‘De Lord save me,’ cried Harris as guns cracked about him, shots riddled his body. Deputy Sheriff Dayu arrived ‘too late’ to make arrests. Deputy Sheriff Courtney expected no investigation ‘until next fall.’”
In the back of the publications Dodie read news of live performances in the East. They opened old wounds. Like the rest of the country, Broadway was suffering from financial woes. The year before there had been 233 productions; this year there would be 187, and fewer were scheduled for next year. Vaudeville was reeling; five years before there were fifteen hundred theaters in the circuits. One fifth remained. And yet the Fabulous Invalid went on, as it always did, as it always would. Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory staged Allison’s House, based on the life of Emily Dickinson; it was said to be a shoo-in for the Pulitzer. Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne at the Guild Theatre. Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions was successfully revived at the Liberty. The Gershwins had a new show, Girl Crazy. “I Got Rhythm” was on the radio every night; you couldn’t get away from it. The columnists said that Ethel Merman could hold a note longer than the Chase National Bank. And Harold Arlen had written the score for Earl Carroll’s Vanities. I should have gone east, Dodie would muse aloud. It’s not too late even now.
Then again, that might not be the best move. Three quarters of the New York actors were supposed to be heading for Hollywood. And why not? The studios dominated show business now that sound had come in. Powerful men ran them: Goldwyn, Mayer, the Warners, Zanuck. These dream merchants could read the public like a map. All Quiet on the Western Front and Hell’s Angels were playing everywhere. Who knew that this would be the year to look back at the Great War? They did. Who knew that you could make money with a gangster picture like The Widow from Chicago? Who knew you could make a star of Edward G. Robinson, a little Jewish man with fat lips? They did. Maybe I should have gone west, not middle west, Dodie grumbled. Meantime, the neighbors whispered that Mrs. Brando was the kind of woman who saw the glass as half full. That was because she had drunk the other half.
The rumors were cruel, and they were accurate. Too many afternoons Dodie disappeared into an alcohol-saturated haze, unreachable by her children. Frannie and Tiddy were on the cusp of adolescence and found new friends at the tony Lincoln School. Bud attended the same institution, but retreated into his own fantasies. The most obsessive of these concerned the family housekeeper, a young woman of Danish and Indonesian descent called Ermi. During the day he played card games with her; at night the two often slept in the same bed. She was nude, he remembered—though this might have been a boy’s wishful dream—and a sound sleeper. On his part the attachment was all-consuming; to her it was of no importance whatever. In fact, she never bothered to tell him that she was about to be married. The housekeeper merely informed him one day that she was leaving on a trip and would return soon.
It took several weeks for Bud to realize that Ermi was not coming back. The night he realized she was gone forever, he experienced a foretaste of death. “I felt abandoned,” he said almost five decades later. “My mother had long ago deserted me for her bottle; now Ermi was gone, too.” To Bud this was one of the informing incidents of his childhood. Looking back he decided that Ermi’s defection kept repeating itself in his life. He would seek out a woman who would encourage him up to a point—and then abruptly and permanently exit. According to Marlon, the day Ermi went away “I became estranged from this world.” That summary contained everything a self-dramatizing figure could desire: bittersweet melodrama, unrequited romance, and Freudian insight. It might even have been true.
In her study Adult Children of Alcoholics, Dr. Janet Geringer Woititz lists the characteristics of her subjects when young. They tend to:
Guess what normal behavior is.
Lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth.
Judge themselves without mercy.
Constantly seek approval and affirmation.
Be impulsive. Such behavior would lead to confusion, self-loathing and loss of control.
All these attributes were part of Bud’s emerging temperament. At home, as he saw it, “there was a constant, grinding, unseen miasma of anger.” Infected by the rage around him, he continued to act out his hostilities, burning insects, slashing tires, tiptoeing close to birds—and then plugging them with the BB gun his father had given him as a birthday present. Bud was no happier in the classroom than he was in the house. One morning he took a can of lighter fluid, squirted the word shit on a blackboard and ignited the letters. The incident helped to burnish his bad-boy reputation; he seemed to thrive on that. All the same, after every incident there came a time of remorse and self-reproach.
One day, without warning, neighbors were astonished to see a spontaneous Tom Sawyer turnaround. Bud stopped shooting birds, admonished his friends not to step on ants, ostentatiously helped old people and drunks who had collapsed on the sidewalk. Frances commented on the “new” Marlon junior, scribbling on the back of a photo: “Bud—and he is a grand boy! Sweet and funny, idealistic and oh, so young.” When they were all adults, Tiddy summoned up that period in a conversation with her brother: Not only did he try to save wounded animals and birds, he would also “pick the girl who was cross-eyed or the fattest one because nobody paid attention to her and you wanted her to feel good.”
Chicago was segregated in the early 1930s. Racially restrictive covenants affected 80 percent of the city and most of the surrounding suburbs. Only two black children attended Lincoln. Perhaps because of what Bud had heard and read, perhaps out of a need to identify with the outsider, he made a point of befriending both of them. He delighted in hanging around the house of Asa Lee, an African American boy whose warm, demonstrative mother seemed to be everything that Dodie was not. One afternoon Bud had trouble with a decision and began counting aloud, “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe. Catch a nigger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go. Eeny, meeny, miney, moe.” Asa’s mother bent down and said, “Dahlin’, we don’t use that word in this house.” Curious, the vis
itor asked, “What word?” She told him. “I had no idea what the word meant,” he remembered, “but I could tell from Asa’s expression that it was significant.” The black woman could see the innocence in Bud’s eyes. She gave him a gum ball, patted his head, and said, “You’re a sweet thing.” That incident, he claimed, “was my first experience with a sense of race.” There would be a great many more.
Bud’s first girlfriend fit Tiddy’s description. Eight-year-old Carol Hickock was neither cross-eyed nor overweight, but she suffered from narcolepsy. The blackouts could occur anytime; occasionally she lost consciousness when standing up. One Saturday afternoon the two children went to see a Boris Karloff feature. Sound films had made an enormous impact by 1932, horror movies especially. Frankenstein and Dracula had preceded The Mummy, and Bud hoped that a terrifying scene might drive Carol into his arms. Instead, he was the one overtaken by fear, and fled to the lobby. Later, as they sat on a sofa in her house chatting idly, she suddenly rolled her eyes and fainted. He leaned over and put his mouth on hers—his first kiss.
At about this time Bud acquired a stammer. At first it was just trouble with a few words, but soon he became so tongue-tied that Dodie took him to Northwestern University for speech therapy. He had begun to internalize his wounds, trying somehow to fix the unfixable, to compensate for the misery around him. One of the few people he trusted was the shy, bespectacled Wally Cox, whose mother was also a heavy drinker. The two boys got on; Bud acted as a kind of bodyguard for his smaller friend, though he was not above making Wally a victim when the two were by themselves. One afternoon Bud invented a game in which Wally had to be tied to a tree. Then he wandered off. Several hours later, the Cox family summoned the police, who found Wally and freed him. The prank did nothing to damage the boys’ friendship.
When he could, Bud lost himself in films. In Daniel Boorstin’s meditation The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, the historian makes a provocative assertion. As films took over the center of popular culture, Americans edged ever closer to a “world where fantasy [was] more real than reality.” If conditions persisted, they would be “the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they could live in them.” And in Life: The Movie, film scholar Neal Gabler posits that on the ramp leading up to World War II, “old values and the social order that sustained them were being challenged. In their place had come a feeling, fed by democratic wellsprings and encouraged by these brisk social changes, that one could do anything, be anything, dream anything—including what one saw onscreen.” For adolescents this was a particularly crucial phenomenon. Going to the movies was not merely a method of escape, but a way of defining their lives. In Marlon’s view, for example, the sea adventure Mutiny on the Bounty provided a melodrama of tyrant versus righteous rebels—and a glimpse of South Sea romance as different from his own life as a toucan’s from a sparrow’s. Victor McLaglen, the leathery, valiant sergeant of The Lost Patrol, became an idealized portrait of the father he resented and feared. Manhattan Melodrama showed him New York City as a breeding ground of gangsters—and also as a place where a tough young man might go to find himself.
At night, in the skull cinema, he acted and directed his own drama, in which no one else was permitted a role—not even a cameo. “I had the fantasy,” he said, “that the important people in my life were all dead and were only pretending to be alive. I lay in bed for hours, sweating and looking up at the ceiling, convinced that I was the only one in the whole world who was alive.” The idea that one day he might act in somebody else’s dream didn’t enter the picture.
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In his twelfth year the ceiling changed when Dodie and Marlon senior agreed to separate. She would take the family to live with her mother, Elizabeth “Nana” Myers, in Santa Ana, California. Marlon senior would stay in Chicago. The split was characterized not as a prelude to divorce but as a cooling-off period. Marlon senior could visit as often as he liked, provided that he didn’t stay long. Relocation further distanced Dodie from Broadway fare, but she kept up with the new names in 1935: the bright hope of the New York theater, Clifford Odets, with a pair of plays, Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! God, what she wouldn’t give to see them…. On the other hand, she was now nearly in Hollywood, where there was so much action you couldn’t keep track of it all: David Copperfield, The Informer, Les Misérables, The 39 Steps, Top Hat. The new names: Katharine Hepburn, Errol Flynn—and Henry Fonda in his first three movies. A break here, a break there, she might have been in that company.
Well, the hell with fantasy. No matter how she looked at it, this was a rotten world to bring kids into. A drought forcing an exodus on the farmlands. President Roosevelt describing this nation as ill fed, ill clothed, and ill housed. If you doubted him you could look around and see the breadlines for yourself. The newsreels recording the human cost, and worse to come. The March of Time booming, “The peace of the world daily grows more uncertain.” H. G. Wells pretending to look back: “War was manifestly drawing nearer, in Eastern Asia, in Eastern Europe; it loitered, it advanced, it halted, and no one displayed the vigor or capacity needed to avert the intermittent, unhurrying approach.”
The Depression would lead to a big conflagration somewhere—that you could count on. They were getting ready in Spain, Franco’s troops versus the anti-Fascists and the Communists; in the United States something called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was signing up volunteers to fight there. In Berlin there were demonstrations against the Jews. Italy was already in the hands of Mussolini; his pilots were killing Africans in Abyssinia, raining bombs down on black children. Thank God Marlon senior was too old to be in the military, and Marlon junior too young.
As for the girls, they seemed all right in Dodie’s unfocused eyes. And for the most part she was correct. Frances showed a gift for oil painting and Jocelyn discovered that she had inherited her mother’s performing talent. She won leading parts in the productions at Santa Ana High School and announced her intentions to seek an acting career. Bud had no such fortune. The adults were too busy to give him much notice. As a Christian Science counselor, Nana was preoccupied with her ailing patients. Dodie continued to put away the booze every afternoon, save for a couple of times when Hank Fonda came by for a sentimental visit to recollect the old days in Omaha.
So Junior went his own way, acrimoniously reflecting that he was “always on skinny rations when it came to praise. I never received accolades or adulation, not even encouragement. Nobody ever thought I was good for anything except a few kindly teachers.” One of those instructors was the shop teacher at Julius C. Lathrop Junior High, who handed Bud a piece of metal and asked him to make something of it. His student shaped the iron on a forge and put the creation in wet sand. Then he melted some aluminum and poured it into the makeshift mold. Result: a homemade screwdriver. The teacher praised him for his accomplishment and, according to Bud, “for the first time in my life I had done something of which I was proud.”
But academically he continued to lag, and various members of the faculty implied—or said outright—that he would never amount to anything. The athletic coaches disagreed; the following year Bud won letters in track and football, finished first in the school decathlon, and set a record by doing one thousand straight push-ups. He might have done more, but a teacher, worried that the youth would strain his heart, ordered him to stop. Alternately sullen and boastful, he seemed a lost boy one moment, an ambitious young competitor the next. Biographer Peter Manso, the most avid chronicler of Marlon Brando’s early years, notes that during this time Bud assumed a swagger and a pseudo-mature attitude. In the absence of his father he attempted to act as the man of the house, while “Nana doted, Dodie doted, and his sisters tried to stay out of the way.” The trouble was that Bud lacked the emotional maturity to lead anyone, least of all himself. As Dodie confessed to a friend, “He is a grand kid but living with him is like climbing a greased pole in war-torn Shanghai. And the worst,�
�� she predicted, “won’t come for another two or three years.”
Those years were not spent in Santa Ana. After a prolonged separation, Dodie and Marlon senior reunited. If living together had been miserable, living apart was unendurable. Back the family went to Illinois, but this time to exurbia—Libertyville, population three thousand. Although the little town was only thirty-five miles northwest of Chicago, it might as well have been in Iowa. Locals considered it farm country, and they regarded the Brandos, fresh from Evanston and Santa Ana, as sophisticates.
The family lived in a large rented farmhouse, kept a cow, and maintained a vegetable garden, but they dressed better than their neighbors and carried themselves with a somewhat superior air. Marlon senior was a well-compensated executive—he earned $15,000 a year when the average annual salary was $1,600. Dodie, who squandered a lot of the household money in bars, joined the local dramatic club. Her daughters went out for parts in the high school plays. And Bud, once again, was all attitude and rebellion. He was either in jeans and a T-shirt or in shirts so brightly hued that his classmates accused him of wearing pajama tops to school—anything to be different. After a few months he discovered a talent for drumming and joined the school band. But he couldn’t be bothered with rehearsing. The director’s order, “Get in step, Brando!” became an integral part of the rehearsals, much to the amusement of his fellow musicians. On the athletic fields Bud showed the same distracted approach. He liked competing for trophies, but hated working out. He boxed for a while, then gave that up, bored with the endless sparring, went out for football but horsed around too much to learn the signals or conform to the coach’s discipline. In the end he forsook competitive sports and spent hours lifting free weights. Bud was approaching his full height of five feet, ten inches, broadening out in the chest and shoulders like his father, and proud of his mesomorphic build. Still, the face did not keep up with the body; Bud was slow to develop a beard, and there were times when his soft eyes and sensuous lips lent him an almost feminine aspect.