Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  Marlon was the youngest of the team; outside of the theatrical community few had heard of him. And many in that community knew him only by reputation. He was thought to be greatly gifted, but as devious with colleagues as he was with women. Half the time he just acted weird to throw you off; and the other half he really was weird, self-involved, murmuring his lines indistinctly, a performer from another planet.

  With this as background, the cast began the reading with little spirit or mutual trust. The tragic drama was unlike anything they had ever encountered. It had no hero, no heroine, no “through line” leading to catharsis and redemption. Blanche DuBois visits her married sister, Stella, in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The faded and neurotic beauty is a teacher, thrust on her own after the family’s Mississippi plantation is sold out from under her. To recover from the shock of loss—or so she says—she has obtained a leave of absence from the school. Unhappily, more traumas are under way. Stella’s husband, Stanley, is the polar opposite of the genteel southern tradition. He represents the new immigrant class, a life force, brutal, sensual, wholly uninterested in the past. The introduction of Blanche upsets the delicate balance of the marriage; she is attracted to Stanley, and he to her. Before the final curtain, Blanche, half teasing, half terrified, is raped by Stanley and revealed as a self-deceiving poseur whose exit from the Deep South was prompted by a history of alcoholism and sexual scandal. The truth proves too much for her; the old gives way to the new, and Blanche is taken off to an asylum, exhaling the line that is to go into theatrical history: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

  The cast could recognize the poetic quality of the dialogue, but the drama itself seemed to them jumbled and hard to understand. Yet something uncanny happened after the lunch break, when the cast read Act Two. Williams’s lines abruptly caught fire; sentiments rose to the surface, actors got in character, and by the time Tandy spoke her final words the principals were in tears. Their sniffling was suddenly punctuated by the voice of Gee Gee James, the only African American in the cast: “Hallelujah! I think I’m going to pay the rent!” Nervous laughter greeted her shout, along with mumbles of “From your mouth to God’s ear.”

  Later Kazan was to write that the rest of the rehearsals were “a joy.” His definition of joy differed from some others’, though. Tandy privately considered Marlon “an impossible, psychopathic bastard,” especially when he created long, unscripted silences, forcing the actress to lose her timing. Tandy’s husband, actor Hume Cronyn, dropped by during a run-through. A ruthlessly honest appraiser, he told Kazan: “Jessie can do better.” The director understood: Tandy was giving a performance. In contrast, Marlon was living onstage, riding his emotions wherever they took him. His work was “full of surprises and exceeded what Williams and I had expected. A miracle was in the making.” Unlike Katharine Cornell, Tandy realized that she had been tied down by her training, and that she could be liberated by this play. Her husband was profoundly right, she recognized; a lot could be learned by working with this psychopathic bastard. Together and apart, Cronyn and Kazan urged her to dare to be exceptional, and as the weeks wore on she strained to give Blanche a heartbeat.

  Marlon provided no help at all; he never yielded an inch to her or any of the other players. He was always Stanley, and Stanley was always in the process of happening. As Kim Hunter acknowledged, her colleague could make “terrible choices, but they were always real. That’s why it was such a challenge.” Each day Marlon got closer to the core of his character, trying new and angrier ways to say his lines, becoming increasingly physical, working out with heavy weights at a local gym to gain the muscularity of a manual laborer. In this he was aided by the costumer, who dressed him in well-worn, skintight trousers and a T-shirt carefully ripped to suggest that Stanley might have been tussling violently with Stella.

  Kazan watched the results with mounting satisfaction. For the first time, Marlon seemed happy. The mood was infectious, and the entire cast seemed at ease when Streetcar opened in New Haven, the first tryout en route to New York. Yale undergraduates heard that something special was going on at the Schubert Theater; they filled the place and led the applause. Irene Selznick invited her father, MGM boss Louis B. Mayer, a man stingy with praise. “You don’t have a hit.” The voice of the tough old mogul thrummed with authority. “You have a smash.” That said, he had a few suggestions for Gadge. Once Blanche was hauled off to the loony bin, Stella and Stanley would live happily ever after, right? Well, Williams would have to rewrite the final scene, clarify the happy ending, send the audiences out on a high. “It never occurred to him that Tennessee’s primary sympathy was with Blanche,” Kazan wrote. “Nor did I enlighten him.” Yet in Mayer’s ham-handed way he had recognized a basic flaw. Streetcar was now the Marlon Brando Show. The young man was so compelling he had changed the focus of the play. In a rare moment of self-doubt, the director asked the playwright about Stanley’s attitude toward Blanche. “What should I do? Sometimes the audience laughs when Brando makes fun of her.” Responded Tennessee: “Nothing.” He wanted no moral, no point of view, simply a group of lives observed without flinching. Marlon might be a genius but, given time, Jessica would rise to meet him.

  Tennessee was correct on all counts. By the time of the Boston tryout Tandy and Brando had reached a modus vivendi, and when the show debuted at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York they were peers. Like the rest of the Broadway critics, Brooks Atkinson rushed from the theater on opening night to make his deadline, even before Blanche had spoken of the kindness of strangers. It didn’t matter. The first sentence of his review in the Times guaranteed a box-office landslide and, within months, a Pulitzer Prize: “Tennessee Williams has brought us a superb drama.” In the World-Telegram, William Hawkins singled Marlon out for playing “the blunt and passionate Stanley Kowalski with astonishing authenticity. His stilted speech and swift rages are ingeniously spontaneous, while his deep-rooted simplicity is sustained every second.”

  The other notices, all raves, were read aloud at a party given at the “21” Club by George Cukor. The Hollywood director had nothing to do with Streetcar; he was a front for Irene Selznick, who didn’t want to be perceived as a rich Hollywood doyenne slumming in New York. That evening she suspected something was amiss when Marlon showed up with a well-dressed older couple and identified them as his parents. All through rehearsals Marlon had spoken to her about the traces of Dodie in Blanche and the suggestions of Marlon senior in Stanley. Small wonder, then, that the producer refused to believe these sweet, upright folks were the elder Brandos. “If I fell for it,” Selznick wrote later, “he’d tease me forever. I greeted them pleasantly but very briefly. Then I rushed off to find out if they were genuine, came back full of apologies, and started over.”

  Marlon’s lover at that moment was Ellen Adler, Stella’s daughter, and she remembered the opening night well. “He walked into our apartment at two o’clock in the morning. He was wearing a black turtleneck and jeans, same as always, but I could tell from his stride that his life had changed. But I knew not to mention it to him. You couldn’t say, ‘You were great tonight, Marlon.’ Then you’d be out of the club. It was like a club, or a domain, all the in-people, and he was the president, or the duke, and he made up the rules, like never praising his work or mentioning his fame.”

  The cast of Streetcar settled in for a long run. They grew comfortable in their parts—but never too comfortable to be surprised by the audience reaction. Sitting in the theater one evening, the young actor Walter Matthau amused himself by counting the laughs engendered by Kowalski’s speeches. “There were half a dozen leading men in Broadway comedies that season,” he remembered, “and Brando got more hoots and chortles than all of them.”

  He kept evoking laughter and tears along with the rest of the cast. The difference was that privately they grew in stature with the months, whereas Marlon ran downhill with all deliberate speed. Having moved in with Wally Cox, he lived like a welfare client. Dinner
frequently consisted of peanut butter eaten directly from the jar. When he was not out on a date, he amused himself by running a Lionel electric train acquired from a downtown toy store. Some twenty years later, Jocelyn looked back at this time. “You were a twenty-three-year-old when all the Streetcar stuff hit the fan,” she wrote her brother. “Can anyone remember how insecure it is to be twenty-three and be saddled with the kudos and the notoriety you received? It was embarrassing. You couldn’t think it was deserved. You couldn’t believe you were actually responsible, and Poppa always said you’d never amount to a tinker’s damn.”

  Marlon had been happy shadow-boxing downstairs during rehearsals. Now, in the wake of rave reviews, the contentment vanished. The judgment of the critics should have erased his father’s harsh predictions—but they didn’t. Subconsciously, and sometimes consciously, he thought that Marlon senior had been right all along. This sudden fame was bogus. The critics had been conned. Marlon’s misery grew in reverse proportion to his success, and in an attempt to alleviate the pain, he consulted Gadge. The director referred him to his own therapist. Dr. Bela Mittleman had recently told the director what every egoist wanted to hear—“Your problem is that you’re not selfish enough. You’re always trying to please other people.” Naturally, Kazan thought the world of him. Marlon had no such sentiments. He considered the orthodox Freudian a cold and unresponsive figure. And yet he could never bring himself to leave. During those early years of analysis a murderous anger was unearthed. Marlon grew frightened of his temper on those occasions, but claimed he “had no idea where his rage was coming from.” Anyone who knew about his early childhood could have furnished a working hypothesis, but Mittleman was either unable or unwilling to offer much relief. A Hungarian trained in New York, he sometimes seemed more intrigued by fame than by therapy. Marlon and Gadge gave him entrée into the theater world, furnishing tickets and referrals. In general, the doctor got more out of his patients than they got out of him. Kazan ultimately left the psychiatrist and, in his words, “later saw a very good analyst.” Marlon, for all his protestations, stayed with Mittleman on and off until the psychiatrist’s death a decade later.

  All the same, he knew in his bones that the one person who could rescue Marlon Brando was Marlon Brando. That would have been hard enough for a more mature individual, and the emerging star was, as his sister suggested, emotionally retarded. From childhood on, Marlon continued to provide pop-psych speculators with a rich field. But medical experts also had their say, and their observations seem inarguable. Psychologist Sibyl Baran finds that his conduct in early manhood is illustrative of many pages in the DSM—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. “For one thing,” she says, “he kept replicating his childhood defiance of authority, continually challenging his father in the person of officers, directors—anyone who tried to tell him what to do or how to behave.” The manual categorizes this as oppositional defiant disorder. Marlon also displayed many characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder, an affliction, according to the DSM, that results from an “impairment of the person’s relationship with his parents…. The patient typically comes to believe that he has some defect of personality which makes him unvalued and unwanted.” In addition, observes Dr. Antoinette Lynn, a psychologist who specializes in artists and their difficulties, “Brando clearly had an oral fixation, common to many neglected children. For him, food was compensation as well as nourishment.” The overeating meant little when he was a new and hyperactive performer, interested in bodybuilding and in preserving his image as an attractive man. But with the passage of time, the craving for food would prove to be as destructive as his parents’ hankering for alcohol.

  If Marlon was bad at counting calories, he was totally inept at saving money; it seemed to evaporate before his eyes. Chagrined, he turned the $550 weekly paychecks over to Marlon senior. The elder Brando paid his son’s rent, gave him walking-around money, and invested the rest in a Nebraska farming project. On the other hand, Marlon junior had no trouble attracting and holding on to women. Newly famous, unattached, he radiated an animal magnetism and a carefree attitude that brought gaggles of beautiful girls to his dressing room. When he was in the mood Marlon would choose one candidate from the group. The rejects were welcome to try again, or to date his insecure roommate, Wally. “It was intoxicating,” Marlon remembered. “I loved parties, danced, played the congas, and I loved to fuck women, any woman, anybody’s wife.” He couldn’t handle liquor, though, and on the occasions when he had a couple of drinks, he stopped being a grownup and slid backward to adolescence. At one party he faced the assembled guests, announced, “I can’t stand you people. I’m sick of this life,” stepped out of the open window, and disappeared. They were on the eleventh floor. The gasps were audible. Some of the women began to scream. One of them courageously leaned out and peered at the street below, fully expecting to see a body sprawled on the pavement. That was when she spotted him. Marlon had lowered himself to a six-inch ledge directly below. “Go ahead, drop—see if I care,” she shouted. Sheepishly, he climbed back and joined the others.

  More juvenile behavior followed. Leila Hadley, who would later marry Henry Luce III, was one of several young socialites who collected literary and theatrical celebrities. At a party she met Marlon and found him “too gorgeous to resist”—or so she thought. At one of her own parties Marlon showed up, admired her collection of antique clocks, and about an hour later excused himself and disappeared into the night. When the guests had gone, Leila noticed that several timepieces were missing. She knew Edie Van Cleve well enough to phone her and suggest that Marlon might know where the clocks had gone. That evening she opened the door of her apartment to find the purloined items laid out in the hallway, all ticking, all in a row. An accompanying note read, “Oops!” It was signed anonymously, “A Thief.” All this merely intrigued their owner, who contrived to spend an evening with Marlon. He paid court to her—and then abruptly handed her a chocolate bar. “He suggested places to put it, and I was not about to go there no matter how attractive he was,” she remembered. “I told him, ‘Look, Marlon, why don’t you see my friend Laura? She’s a lot more fun than I am.’ And off he went, out into the evening in search of her.”

  4

  While these frenzied occasions were playing out offstage, another drama had to be performed onstage six nights a week plus matinees. Streetcar had been playing less than two months when Marlon expressed a strong desire to quit. MCA reminded him that the contract was ironbound; he had agreed to stay for a year and a half. Marlon responded as he always did when thwarted. He assumed a subversive attitude. One form of rebellion was to arrive as late as possible, sometimes after curtain time, putting the entire cast on edge. Another was to make Stanley Kowalski an ever-changing character who bore the weight of Marlon’s sentiments on that particular afternoon or evening. Tandy shook her head when she thought about those times. “When he was tired, as he often was, he played the role tired. When he was bored, and he was often bored, he played the role bored.” But Marlon also played the other parts of his own personality—the conflicted soul, the pained artist, the turned-on satyr, the grownup child, the wiseguy, the misfit. The effect could be dazzling, but it always unbalanced the play. Harold Clurman’s early assessment remained true throughout Brando’s run. The actor had “high visibility…his silences, even more than his speech, were completely arresting.” Kowalski’s psychic wounds showed beneath the “muscled, lumpish sensuality, and crude energy” and “make us wonder whether he is not actually suffering deeply.” All along, Williams intended Blanche to be the focus of his most avid attention and most lyrical writing. It was she who was supposed to wring the heart. Yet, thanks to Marlon, Streetcar became “the triumph of Stanley Kowalski with the collusion of the audience, which is no longer on the side of the angels.” There was little anyone could do about it. The others received applause; Marlon got ovations. He was the one audiences had come to see. And so the routine went on, Tandy bit
ter and haughty, returning to her husband every night via chauffeured limousine, Brando grabbing his motorcycle and noisily riding his latest date around the neon city.