Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  The doctor asked whether he was being treated for those difficulties, and if so, who his psychiatrist was. Marlon told him he was seeing Dr. Bela Mittleman.

  “Bela Mittleman! For Chrissake, where is he?”

  Marlon gave him the address.

  “I’ll be goddamned.” As it developed, the two doctors had known each other years ago. The army man wrote on Marlon’s induction papers, “Not suited for military service.” It was the least a colleague could do for an old friend.

  6

  No matter how sullied Marlon’s relationships were with women, parents, or colleagues, he treated one person with solicitude. Wally Cox had turned into more than a crony in New York; he had become Brando’s shadow. Wally was now partner with another metalworker named Dick Loving, who would soon marry Marlon’s sister Frannie. Since the opening of Streetcar, Wally—dubbed “the Walrus” by his sidekick—had acquired a motorcycle and now sported jeans and T-shirt and went unshaven on weekends in sedulous imitation of Marlon. They made an incongruous pair, the mesomorph and his wispy roommate biking around the city, occasioning comment wherever they rode. Their apartment was an extension of two disorganized selves, full of windup toys and dirty laundry, augmented by Marlon’s pet raccoon Russell, sent to him by Dodie in a moment of whimsy. To amuse Marlon, Wally would occasionally perform some improvised living-room routines. Unlike his roommate, he had actually served in the army. His tour lasted for four months, after which the military gave him up as a hopeless misfit and issued an honorable discharge. That brief exposure was all Wally needed to develop an impersonation of his lunkheaded sergeant giving instructions to draftees. Another monologue concerned Dufo, a dumb, daredevil kid he remembered from Omaha. Marlon broke up every time he heard these routines and urged Wally to perform them for various drop-ins, male and female. In each case, they came to see the big star but stayed to applaud the little comedian. Word got around: This shy silversmith was actually a gifted standup monologuist; all he needed was a little exposure to become famous. Marlon pressured some well-connected people to get the Walrus a booking at the Village Vanguard, a hip nightclub in Greenwich Village. Without quite realizing it, Wally had joined a new movement. In standup comedy, as in almost every aspect of postwar American life, a new style was assuming command. The days of Bob Hope’s USO tours were waning. Hope, Marlon said, “will go to the opening of a gas station in Anaheim providing that they have a camera there and three people. Pathetic…a bottomless pit.” He wanted the Walrus to get in on the new edgy style, standup comedy without a set shape, commenting on society, childhood, hypocrisy, absurdity, racism, families, venturing where the careful crowd-pleasers would never dare to go. Unfamiliar names were part of this movement: Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, and other young untried comedians edged toward the center spotlight. Why couldn’t Wally be in their company? Marlon knew the Walrus would be nervous on opening night, so he positioned himself down front to make sure that everyone paid close and quiet attention. The engagement was a smash. Others followed, at the Blue Angel and Café Society clubs. The slight, modest figure was on his way out of metalwork and into show business in 1950. He looked upon the change as liberating. In fact it was to become a prison from which there was no escape—one more resemblance between the Walrus and his best friend.

  1950–1953

  The Illusion Is Complete

  1

  Now that Marlon had fulfilled his Streetcar contract, he was free to consider movie offers. They issued from an unaccustomed place. Once arrogant and peremptory, Hollywood was currently overloaded with angst. A Supreme Court decision had finally broken the biggest monopoly in the history of show business, and just like that, the movies’ Golden Age was over.

  For decades, the major studios had owned and operated every phase of the motion-picture business. Scenarists, directors, performers, and even producers were under contract, well-paid wage slaves, but indentured nonetheless. The majors also owned the film-processing laboratories at one end, and the theaters at the other. “Block booking” guaranteed that main features and B movies would be linked, along with newsreels and cartoons—a package put together by a specific studio. Any films made outside the system had no place to be shown, save for a handful of independent art houses of no financial importance.

  The U.S. Department of Justice had been trying to break the studios’ power since 1938. Each time, powerful lawyers argued for the status quo. For the film industry to operate successfully, they insisted, every aspect of the business had to be controlled by the majors. How else could they turn out products that entertained the entire world, make a profit for the customary “widows and orphans” stockholders, and keep thousands of employees on salary? The legal tactics worked wonders; again and again court decisions got postponed to another day. But in 1948 that day arrived. Writing the majority opinion, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas stated, “The policy of the anti-trust laws is not qualified or conditioned by the convenience of those whose conduct is regulated.” In a pen stroke, block booking was abolished. The studios sold off their theaters in hopes of cracking a new market: television. They were late to the game, and as they tried to muscle into a new phase of show business, another crisis shook their already cracked foundations.

  It had begun with investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee. According to its researchers, Hollywood radicals had been placing subversive messages in films. Film-colony liberals, along with some genuine Communist party members, argued that no such activity was possible: The studio heads, all of them Republicans or mainstream Roosevelt Democrats, controlled the end product. Sam Goldwyn had famously expressed their view of politics in the arts: “Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union.” HUAC members themselves had a great deal of trouble citing examples of left-wing propaganda slipped into mainstream films. The best, and worst, they could mention were films that showed a football coach stating that it was better “to die on your feet than to live on your knees”—a phrase coined by the radical spokeswoman La Pasionaria during the Spanish Civil War; a character whistling the Communist anthem “Internationale” while waiting for an elevator; and the fatuous Mission to Moscow, featuring a smiling, avuncular Stalin. Mission was a Warner Bros. film, one reason Jack Warner went overboard to prove his Americanism. At a HUAC hearing he stated that the real radicalism was not based in California but in New York. On one visit he had seen Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, the drama of a manufacturer whose shoddy procedures caused the death of American pilots. Warner loathed it. “They write about twenty-one-cylinder heads that were broken. They can’t write about the five hundred thousand good airplane motors produced. That play disgusted me. I almost got into a fistfight in the lobby. It was directed by a chap named Elia Kazan who is now at Twentieth Century–Fox as a director.”

  Warner leaned forward. “Can I say something off the record?”

  The answer was no.

  Very well then, he would put his remarks on the record. “This fellow is also one of the mob. I know of him. I pass him by but won’t talk to him.”

  During the same period a group of scenarists and directors refused to discuss their political activities in testimony before HUAC; labeled the Hollywood Ten, they were cited for contempt and given one-year jail sentences. They appealed to higher courts, and to their former employers. Not a chance. Those executives had made themselves crystal clear in a meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria, announcing in a press release, “No Communists or other subversives will be employed by Hollywood.” As for the courts, they, too, could find no sympathy for the defendants. By 1950 the last legal means were exhausted and prison doors opened wide to admit them.

  These conditions were the talk of two towns, Manhattan and Los Angeles, as Marlon mulled over film offers and wondered about himself. Should he be a political activist like Gadge, thumb his nose at the bosses? He loved Kazan’s recent comeback: “They always have to have a pet project in Hollywood, something t
hey’re going to do next year, when the crap they’re doing now is finally finished.” He would have to seek out the director, find out what was really going on out there. If it was as bad as it looked, the hell with the movies. He made sure the press knew where he stood. In an interview Marlon haughtily dismissed the American product. “I do not think anybody connected with the films in the United States has ever made a sincere effort to avail himself of their fullest potential the way they do, say, in France.” Having said that, he proceeded to act out again, sailing for Europe as soon as his Streetcar contract expired. He told his sisters he needed to get away from the tempters in Celluloid City. Besides, he had never been overseas and the Continent seemed to offer the best and most reasonable refuge.

  Once the douaniers stamped his passport he became a completely different personality: calm, self-possessed, full of charm. The notoriety that had clung to him in New York meant little in Paris, and for Marlon the relief was palpable. He had very little French, and the people he saw on the streets and shops had almost no English. For the first few days no one recognized him, asked for his opinion on anything, or requested an autograph. He stayed at a cheap hotel, dropped in at an actors’ cooperative, tried to do a little mime on the streets of the Marais, where amateur clowns and magicians disported. When he smiled at a mademoiselle and she smiled back, it was because of his manner, not his résumé.

  A few highly placed Parisians were aware of his accomplishments. Artist/director Jean Cocteau, on the ascent after the films La Belle et la Bête and Les Parents Terribles, had recently visited friends in New York. There he was taken to see the celebrated Stanley Kowalski at the Ethel Barrymore. Deeply impressed, he exclaimed, “There was a beast onstage!” When someone told him that the beast was in Paris, he arranged a meeting; to his astonishment the American troglodyte turned out to be soft-spoken and deferential. This, he was to observe, “is the only man who can make noise without disturbing anybody.” Marlon was invited to a dinner; that led to more parties and social engagements. Some were ill advised. He went backstage to see the French version of Streetcar, with Arletty, the great star of Les Enfants du Paradis, as Blanche. Marlon arrived at the stage door, only to be met with a withering glance. The actress thought his blue jeans and T-shirt vulgar, unbefitting a performer with his reputation. Marlon later acknowledged that Arletty was a “tough article” and that his casual drop-in was indeed a gaffe. But other meetings went well; he impressed two African American expatriates, James Baldwin and Richard Wright, and hit it off with a group of young achievers, including Christian Marquand, a handsome, ambitious actor who was to become a close friend, and Juliette Gréco, a singer he besieged with flattery and gifts until she succumbed to his blandishments.

  From Paris, Marlon pushed on alone to Italy. Here he made an error of omission that would change his life and career for the worse—and yet he had no notion of its severity then, or for many years to come. Because he was intimidated by Rome he bypassed Cinecittà, center of Italian filmmaking, where Vittorio De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, and others were beginning to make their marks with neorealismo films and larger works of the imagination. Their movies were populated with locals, children as well as untrained adults, rather then professional extras hired for crowd scenes. Some of them, as in De Sica’s Bicycle Thief, played major roles, giving the narrative an authenticity unknown in American features. The style reached out to Europe and beyond; the Indian director Satyajit Ray was inspired to become a filmmaker after he saw De Sica’s movies, and the French New Wave was a direct descendant of films like Rossellini’s stark depiction of postwar Rome, Open City. Yet for all his swagger, Marlon was intimidated by that city. A historic version of Streetcar was playing there, but he declined to buy a ticket, thereby missing Vittorio Gassman as Stanley and Marcello Mastroianni as Mitch.

  Marlon pushed on to the south. Here he encountered a land totally unlike anything he had ever known. The Neapolitan girls, or so he asserted, were more intoxicating than the local wines. On the island of Sicily he wandered alone through a field of flowers, lay down, and woke up to a perfect sunset. Upon reflection many years later, he insisted that this was the only moment of pure, unsullied happiness he had ever experienced. That serenity came with a price tag. Preferring slumber to challenge, he had turned his back on Cinecittà, the one place that could have enriched his talent and taken it to a new level of performance and achievement. Much of his indifference could be ascribed to sloth—but not all. The old feelings of ambivalence about celebrity, about money, about the whole enterprise of show business, continued to haunt him. He could not shake the idea that acting was an elaborate charade. It followed, then, that those who practiced it were nothing more than well-paid pretenders.

  The following week he returned to Paris and recognized an American walking on a street near his hotel. It was Maynard Morris. The MCA man wondered where the hell his old client had fled. Edie Van Cleve had found Marlon Brando’s address and sent wire after wire. None were answered. Had Marlon opened the telegrams? Well, no, he hadn’t. He had been in another country. Would he have the goddamned courtesy to read the messages now? He would. The two men shook hands and parted. As promised, Marlon went upstairs to check through a pile of neglected messages and letters from home. One caught his attention, just as Morris thought it would. The large envelope with the seal of the Stanley Kramer Company included a one-picture offer of $40,000 to play the main role in a feature called Battle Stripe (soon to be retitled The Men) plus a six-page outline of the film, and the offer of a ticket back to the States. Marlon sent back a wire asking MCA how much Montgomery Clift had received for his first film, Red River, made two years before. “I want a dollar more,” he wrote, but the demand was tongue-in-cheek. Forty grand was just fine. Wary of air travel, he bought a one-way ticket on a trans-Atlantic liner and came home to launch his movie career. No wonder he was to look back with such fondness at that Sicilian moment. Already a stage star, he was about to become a product of Hollywood’s celebrity machine. Life would never be pure or unsullied again.

  2

  At thirty-six, with only three films to his credit, Stanley Kramer had given notice that he was the next major film producer. His first independent project, So This Is New York (1948), was a Ring Lardner comedy, called “so-so” even by its star, radio personality Henry Morgan. But Kramer’s second picture—a grim feature based on another Lardner tale—scored with critics, the public, and the National Society of Film Critics. Champion, about the rise and fall of a vicious prizefighter, earned five Oscar nominations and made a star of Kirk Douglas. Kramer’s 1949 film, Home of the Brave, took on racism in the armed forces, and established him as the ideal producer for Hollywood’s socially conscious postwar period.

  The Men was Kramer’s answer to The Best Years of Our Lives, the blockbuster 1946 film about returning G.I.’s and their rough adjustment to civilian life. One of the main roles in that film had been played by a truly disabled war veteran, Harold Russell, whose missing hands were replaced by prostheses. The hero of The Men was intended to be as tragic and noble a figure. Paralyzed below the waist by a sniper’s shot, Ken Wilcheck is assigned to a paraplegic rehab center. Surrounded by veterans with similar afflictions, he rages against them, against his physicians, his fiancée, his fate. He remains one of the wheeling wounded until, with the help of friends and a tough but sympathetic therapist, he becomes reconciled to his condition. Marlon was intrigued by the challenge of the role. Acting from the belt up, he would have to redefine manhood by playing a twenty-five-year-old whose sexual life had been taken from him. He could hardly wait to get started. Then the trouble began.

  It did not originate with Kramer, or with the director, Fred Zinnemann, or with the scenarist, Carl Foreman. It came from the ethos of the industry itself. The era of the blacklist was in full sway, intensified by Soviet agitation in Europe and Asia. Alger Hiss had just been found guilty of perjury about his Communist past. In Lon
don, physicist Klaus Fuchs was imprisoned for conveying British atomic secrets to Russian agents. Seizing the moment, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin gave a speech to a women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia. Offering no proof, he claimed to have a list of more than a hundred “known Communists” employed by the State Department. The Korean War heated up, pitting Communist forces against American and South Korean troops. A pamphlet called “Red Channels” was privately and anonymously published; in it were the names of “subversive” film and television actors, musicians, playwrights, and directors. At a meeting of the Screen Directors Guild, Cecil B. DeMille addressed his colleagues. Deliberately mispronouncing the names of Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and Fred Zinnemann, all of whom had accents, he demanded the ouster of Joseph Mankiewicz for his allegedly leftist associations.

  As if this political agitation were not enough, a new scandal rattled Hollywood. In the spring of 1950, Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado took to the floor of the Senate to denounce the Swedish-born actress Ingrid Bergman as a “free-love cultist” and a “powerful influence for evil.” The actress’s crime was an adulterous affair with Roberto Rossellini. After seeing Open City she had written a fan letter that described her contempt for the commercial features the studios had compelled her to do. Was there a chance she could appear in one of his films? They met, a romance was ignited, and she left her husband. The press made much of the story, Bergman became the butt of jokes at the Academy Awards ceremonies, and she was no longer welcome in American films.

  The swirl of political and sexual scandals missed Marlon, whose devotion to causes was always undercut by ambivalence. But his sister Jocelyn had been much more of an activist, and she was suddenly unable to find work in cinema or television. He was angry about that, but also confused. Would he be painted by the same brush? Should he go back to New York, maybe get into theater again? Everyone knew about the film actor Stanley Prager, who had defied HUAC by refusing to inform on his colleagues. He was immediately struck from the casting lists of movies, radio, and TV, headed to Broadway and began a new career as a musical comedy star. Arthur Miller expressed a particular pride in the theater’s immunity from the blacklist: “I have never been told who I can use or not use. I hire solely on the basis of competence. I would use a man who was in complete disagreement with me politically if he were right for the part.”