Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  What everyone missed, including the psychiatrist, Kazan, actors, Wally Cox, and the innumerable girlfriends, was Marlon’s deep-seated ambivalence toward fame, and much more significant, toward acting itself. Was it an art? A craft? Or was it just another ego trip, a part of the big American publicity machine? He was hostile to journalists, ad-libbing a half-true autobiography while they watched and scribbled. He told them his diet consisted of raw eggs, peanut butter, and pomegranates. “My hobbies are bongo drums, tom-toms, and riding motorcycles through the streets of New York. I like to box and swim in the nude. My reading matter consists entirely of Spinoza. My pet peeves are wearing shoes and giving interviews.” As to his love life: “I can’t talk about something that doesn’t exist.” When Jocelyn landed the sole female role in Mister Roberts, giving journalists two Brandos to consider, Life scheduled a feature. Brother and sister sat for the magazine’s photographer; she had a short haircut and bangs; Marlon wore a suit with a dress handkerchief in the jacket pocket, but his hair was tousled for the occasion. The reporter described Jocelyn as “quiet and domestic,” her brother as “moody and unpredictable. When a lady in Streetcar’s audience a few nights ago became too talkative, he walked to the footlights and told her to keep quiet, which she did.” During a group shot of all three Brando siblings, Frannie and Jocelyn did the talking. Their descriptions of childhood in Nebraska were full of lyricism and sunshine. Marlon just nodded.

  Among all the ironies that were to pursue him throughout his long life, one of the most significant came in April 1949, in the boiler room of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Boxing, as Kazan observed, was a source of considerable pleasure in Marlon’s life. It gave him a chance to work out his aggressions and allowed him to show off the skills he had learned in the gym. The problem was, those skills were minimal. Pugilism is a game of technique as well as strength; for contemporary champions like Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis, quickness was as important as power. They saw an opening, sometimes no more than a nanosecond long, and pounced. So it was with the young stagehand sparring with Marlon.

  That night, Marlon’s friend Carlo Fiore was scheduled to have dinner with him. When the visitor arrived he was told to go to St. Luke’s Hospital. There, speaking from behind a layer of bandages, Marlon explained what had happened. “All of a sudden he winds up and throws a haymaker from the floor. I saw it coming but I couldn’t get out of the way.” He slammed into a pile of crates and suffered a copious nosebleed. Somehow he got through the play, but as soon as the curtain lowered he was rushed to the emergency room. Irene Selznick gave Marlon a week off. His rangy, dangerous-looking understudy, Walter “Jack” Palance, took over.

  When the bandages were removed, everybody got a look at the terrible job done by the surgeon. Their shock could not be hidden from Marlon, who condemned the doctor as “a sadist and a butcher.” Selznick begged him to get his nose broken again and reset. A cosmetic surgeon could repair the damage; she would give him some of the top names in the business. In an instinctive, and very Brandoesque move, Marlon stubbornly refused. “That perfect face,” Tennessee Williams sighed, “those classic looks, would never be the same.” He was correct, and it was the saving of a career. Upon reflection many years later, Selznick admitted, “Luckily for him, Marlon didn’t listen to me. Because I honestly think that broken nose made his fortune. He was too beautiful before.”

  Marlon sought to get away from Kowalski by dropping in every so often at the new Actors Studio, a group recently cofounded by Kazan. Much has been made of the Brando-Studio connection. Actually, he loathed Lee Strasberg, the man who would become its artistic director. Marlon’s appearances there were sporadic and whimsical, and when he sat in on a class he made a point of appearing indifferent, always more attentive to the girl in the next seat than to the lecturer. Moreover, he loudly advertised his disdain for Monty Clift, the one Studio actor whose critical and popular reputation was as high as Marlon’s. The two had first met when Marlon, roaring down Madison Avenue on his bike, recognized a young man window-shopping. He pulled up and asked, “Are you Montgomery Clift?” The man graciously replied, “I am. And you’re Brando. I recognize you.”

  “People tell me I remind them of you.”

  “Oh?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  With that, Marlon kicked the motorcycle into gear and sped off.

  The rivalry of theatrical stars was nothing new to New Yorkers. In the mid-nineteenth century two Shakespearean actors, the roughhewn American Edwin Forrest and the elegant Briton William Charles Macready, were the subjects of a violent riot between nativists and aesthetes. The two men were playing in rival productions of Macbeth when their fans came to blows in Astor Place. The resulting disturbance involved police, soldiers, and civilians and left some sixty people dead or wounded. Less abrasive confrontations occurred more than half a century later in the Yiddish theater. Marlon knew a lot about this one, because it involved Stella Adler’s father, Jacob, and his rivals David Kessler and Boris Thomashefsky. Once and only once, all three were cast in the same production. During a weekend performance Kessler upstaged Thomashefsky, aping the younger man’s broad gestures. His partisans egged him on. Boris’s partisans got into the act, yelling for their man to take revenge. The play called for him to break a plate; he smashed two. David, who was not supposed to touch the crockery, broke four plates. Jacob, in the role of a mild-mannered rabbi, had his own fans to please. He demolished some china on his own. By the end of the act the stage was covered with shards and the fans continued the fight outside on Second Avenue.

  Given these examples, Marlon saw himself as the bearer of a great tradition, and went out of his way to keep the rivalry going. It could hardly have been otherwise. Clift was as introspective in life as he was onstage, stylish, courteous, cool. By contrast, Brando was slovenly, loud, and abrasive. Ellen Adler, Stella’s beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter, was Marlon’s frequent companion during his first days of celebrity. “They were always running into each other,” she said. “In the late 1940s every artist knew every other artist in the city. It was a wide world and yet a small one. The circles of painting, music, theater were concentric. If you knew Marlon you knew Kazan, and if you knew Gadge you knew Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein and Betty Comden and Adolph Green and Judy Holliday and Miles Davis and Willem de Kooning.” At one of the many parties they attended, Marlon regarded Montgomery from across the room. “What’s the matter with your friend?” he asked actor Kevin McCarthy. “He acts like he’s got a Mixmaster up his ass and doesn’t want anyone to know it.” For his part, Monty told intimates that Marlon was “too clownish and a slob.” In her affecting biography of Clift, Patricia Bosworth describes another soirée attended by Brando and Ellen. Clift was already there and pulled the young lady aside and listened to her attentively, offering a light for her cigarette. Marlon watched impatiently, “then came barging over and pulled Ellen away. ‘She’s my Jew, Monty!’ he roared. Monty just grinned and shrugged.”

  Marlon was not always so uncouth. To show the acting community that he, too, could be elegant, he agreed to appear in a one-shot Studio production 180 degrees removed from Streetcar. By now his appearances in Streetcar, still electrifying to audiences, were beginning to bore him stiff. Rehearsals for Robert Sherwood’s Reunion in Vienna came as a relief; he was gratified to lose himself in the part of Archduke Rudolph Maximillian von Habsburg. The images that everyone had in mind were from the twinkling 1933 film starring John Barrymore as the archduke and Diana Wynyard as his former lover, Elena. No one expected Marlon to approach the grace of the Great Profile in this period piece.

  The Habsburg clan, driven out by the anschluss, have fallen on hard times. Rudoph’s tumble has been the most precipitous; he has become a cabbie in Nice. Elena, once Rudoph’s favorite lady of the court, has suffered the least damage; she married a psychiatrist and now lives among the haut monde in the Austrian capital. When a reunion of the old aristocrats takes place, she hesitates to atte
nd. But Elena’s husband encourages her to go, to confront her former lover, and rid herself of a clinging, adolescent passion. Rudolph has other plans: He intends to seduce his beloved one more time.

  Photo Insert

  Image 1

  Eight-year-old Marlon struts in his first Western costume, c. 1932.

  Image 2

  Horsing around with his sisters, Frances (left) and Jocelyn, 1937.

  Image 3

  Several years—and inches—later, with Jocelyn ( left ) and Frances.

  Image 4

  The role that changed the world: Marlon as Stanley Kowalski and Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois in the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947.

  Image 5

  Practicing for his role as a paraplegic in his first film, The Men, 1950.

  Image 6

  “Friends, Romans, countrymen” as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, 1953.

  Image 7

  Setting a style for a generation: the leather-jacketed biker in The Wild One, 1953.

  Image 8

  Rivals and friends: Marlon visits Montgomery Clift on the set of From Here to Eternity, 1953.

  Image 9

  On the Hoboken docks, Elia Kazan directs Marlon in his role as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, 1954.

  Image 10

  Father Barry (Karl Malden) and Edie (Eva Marie Saint) comfort Terry after a horrific beating—the first of many in Brando films.

  Image 11

  Marlon and friend at their Los Angeles home, 1954.

  Image 12

  Two icons at their zenith: Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando attend a Hollywood party, 1955.

  Image 13

  As the Okinawan narrator Sakini in The Teahouse of the August Moon, 1956.

  Image 14

  Wife # 1: the pseudo-exotic Anna Kashfi (née Joan O’Callaghan), 1957.

  Image 15

  As Christian, the controversially “humanized” Nazi officer in The Young Lions, 1958.

  Image 16

  Playing Snakeskin Xavier opposite Anna Magnani, in every sense, in Tennessee Williams’s The Fugitive Kind, 1959.

  Image 17

  As the renegade Rio in One-Eyed Jacks, the only film Marlon ever directed, 1961.

  Image 18

  Wife # 2: Mexican actress Movita Castaneda and husband go formal, 1961.

  Image 19

  Wife # 3: Tahitian actress Tarita Teriipaia on the set of Mutiny on the Bounty, 1961.

  Image 20

  The activist: attending Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., 1963.

  Image 21

  Brando and Chaplin enjoy a rare laugh on the unhappy set of A Countess from Hong Kong, 1966.

  Image 22

  As Sir William Walker, agent provocateur of British imperialism, in Burn! ( Queimada ), 1969.

  Image 23

  Another feline, on the set of The Godfather, 1972.

  Image 24

  Vito Corleone plays with his grandson moments before the old man’s death in The Godfather, 1972.

  Image 25

  Cavorting with Maria Schneider in the smoldering international hit Last Tango in Paris, 1972.

  Image 26

  With his fellow superstar and biggest fan, Jack Nicholson, in The Missouri Breaks, 1976.

  Image 27

  The only two actors to refuse the Oscar, Marlon Brando and George C. Scott, in The Formula, 1980.

  “I want a complete transformation, Marlon,” ordered the director, Bobby Lewis. “The works—full uniform, including a sword, moustache and monocle, long cigarette holder, accent, Habsburg lip, and waltz music offstage.” Marlon dived into the role. Enlisting an old girlfriend, Joan Chandler, to play Elena, he examined Velázquez’s portraits of royalty and rented a hussar’s uniform, complete with glittering epaulets and medallions. He tightened his face to accommodate a monocle, and to accent the pendulous lower lip characteristic of the family, penciled in a narrow black mustache. After a series of nervous delays—he forgot the phonograph record of Viennese music, he couldn’t hold the monocle in his eye, his uniform didn’t fit quite right—Marlon went on in the part. Reunion was staged in February 1949 at the Actors Studio on Fifty-ninth Street. That evening Karl Malden rose before the assembled performers and curious guests and asked them to close their eyes for a moment. When the curtain rose they blinked back at a very different Brando. Gone was the simian Stanley. In his place was a peer of the realm, moving with subtle grace and speaking with flawless Austrian intonation. The reaction was palpable, and Marlon sparked to it. He kept getting laughs as he encircled Elena, peering down her bodice. The dialogue, written years before, seemed to have been composed with him in mind. Rudolph speaks of the many women he has known since their breakup: Europeans, Asians, Africans. Elena’s curiosity is aroused: Has he “known” twins?

  RUDOLPH: No, unfortunately. But I can swear to you, Elena, that all of them were no more than incidents. Whatever enjoyment I’ve had from them—and I’ll be generous and admit that there has been some enjoyment—has been vicarious. Every quivering one of them has been no more than a proxy for you.

  Just then, wrote Lewis, “in that predictable way that was to become his trademark, he suddenly slapped her, grabbed her, kissed her passionately and ad-libbed: ‘How long has it been since you were kissed like that?’” The line was met with a roar of approval, whereupon Marlon improvised again, pouring Champagne down Elena’s poitrine. More cheers. Marlon acknowledged them with a stiff bow, in keeping with the character. If this evening pleased the onlookers, it astonished the star. It had never occurred to him that he could do light sophisticated comedy. “He was like a young Barrymore,” Lewis remembered. In retrospect, others were not so amused. They saw an attempt at humiliation within the comedy—a key to so many Brando performances. “Some of us weren’t sure what Marlon had done to Joan was fair,” commented Malden. “Were we laughing at the situation in the play,” Malden wondered, “or what Marlon had done to her as an actor?”

  Afterward, Marlon did his own wondering. He had just demonstrated an unexpected versatility; he had surprised himself, as well as everyone else, by being elegant, funny, charming. He had shaken the curse of Kowalski. So why wasn’t he gratified? Why wasn’t he filled with energy, ready to seek new work? Why did success continue to leave him depressed and anxious? He had no answers, only questions.

  5

  As the last days of the Streetcar contract approached, Marlon was still at loose ends, the body engaged, the mind treading water. Encouraged by his politically active sister Jocelyn, he signed a roster of sponsors endorsing the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace. This was one of the oddest and most confused assemblies ever to take place in New York, the agora for political schemers, dupes, and oddballs. By March 1949 the Soviet Union had acquired an arsenal of nuclear weaponry. From Moscow came new threats almost every week. Communists and fellow travelers sensed that the Cold War had thoroughly abraded the nerves of Americans. Since Joseph Stalin had once been an ally, they repackaged him as a leader who only wanted peace, but who was stymied by the “warmongering” and “fascistic” U.S. leadership. Held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the conference was covertly backed by the U.S.S.R. and featured endorsements by prominent intellectuals and artists. Some, like the novelist Howard Fast, were members of the Communist party; some, like Lillian Hellman, were enthusiastic fellow travelers; some, like Norman Mailer, were naïve and fond of their own sonorities.

  The stated purpose of the conference was a modus vivendi between Bolshevism and democracy, the hidden agenda a promotion of détente on Stalin’s terms. The good will among attendees was palpable; few were aware that the Russian representative, Dmitry Shostakovich, had been compelled to come to the United States by Comrade Stalin himself—even though the composer’s works had recently been banned in his own country. Asked about intellectuals who had “disappeared” in the U.S.S.R., he looked uncomfortable and remained silent. A tran
slator stepped in: “That leads away from the question of peace.”

  Perhaps the most forthright of the speakers was the fully employed screenwriter Clifford Odets, who declared, “I am proud to reach out and shake the hand of any man or woman who has the courage to appear here. If I speak here Sunday, I may be without a job Monday. The country is a little in the state of unholy terror from coast to coast.” The Brandos applauded vigorously. Marlon wondered aloud about the cause of peace: Clapping hands on the sidelines was not enough. He needed to make a personal antiwar statement.

  The following year, he saw his chance. The Korean conflict was in full sway when a letter arrived from the Selective Service, informing Mr. Marlon Brando that his status had been elevated from 4-F to 1-A. He appeared at the local draft board with fire in his eyes, ready to take on the entire U.S. military-industrial complex. First he filled out a standard autobiographical questionnaire. Under race he wrote, “human.” Under color, “seasonal—oyster white to beige.” After he filled out the form, Marlon entered a cubicle to be interviewed by an army physician. The doctor asked him if he knew any reason he should not enter the armed services. Replied Marlon: “Yes. I’m psychoneurotic.” He was passed down the line to a uniformed psychiatrist. Marlon went though his history of defiance at Shattuck.