Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  The Warner Bros. strategy worked. Time put the film on its Ten Best list, and the Times rated it as the best film of 1951. Streetcar was one of the five biggest money earners that year; grosses topped out at $4.25 million. It was nominated in eight Academy Award categories. Vivien Leigh won for Best Actress in a Leading Role, Karl Malden and Kim Hunter for Best Supporting Actor and Actress. (For months afterward, wrote film historian Sam Staggs, “friends and strangers would stand in the street and yell up ‘Stelllla!’ at [Kim’s] second-floor apartment on Commerce Street.”) Possibly because Kazan’s old political affiliations had just come to light, he lost to George Stevens for his direction of A Place in the Sun, a forceful adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Neither Clift nor Brando could beat the long odds on Humphrey Bogart, the engaging grouch of The African Queen.

  In now-typical Brando style, Marlon affected Oscar indifference. He failed to show up for the ceremonies at the Pantages Theatre and forsook Hollywood for Manhattan. Reporters were told that performing had no magic for him anymore. He was going back to school. “Another Brando put-on,” concluded Wally Cox as soon as he read the interview, and he was correct. Marlon had taken his tone from Ernest Hemingway’s aperçu. Papa stated that “a built-in, shock-proof shit detector” was the radar of all great writers. Actors, too, Marlon decided. The man who was always aware of the insincere and the fraudulent in others had spotted symptoms in himself. How long would it be before friends saw them, and then critics, and then the public? From here on, he decided, no awards, politics, or scandal would affect his life in any way. You had to be difficult in this difficult business, with the congressmen at your past and the paparazzi at your door. Screw the press. Screw the politicians. What did it matter what they wrote or did? You kept your eyes on your work, you stepped over the steaming pile, and you moved on.

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  Brando and Kazan were reunited in Viva Zapata!, John Steinbeck’s biographical story of Emiliano Zapata, a Mexican revolutionary who flourished in the early twentieth century. The story of rebel versus government was not exactly what Hollywood was looking for in 1952. Leo McCarey’s My Son John, being prepared at the same time, seemed more to the point. The Paramount drama concerned a wily young Communist (Robert Walker) who lies to his sainted mother (Helen Hayes) and reviles his upright father (Dean Jagger). That paterfamilias summarizes the theme when he breaks into a xenophobic World War I song:

  If you don’t like the stars in Old Glory,

  If you don’t like the Red, White and Blue,

  Then don’t be like the cur in the story,

  Don’t bite the hand that’s feeding you!

  At the denouement John is shot by Reds and bleeds to death on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The reason for his execution is soon made manifest. Realizing that Dad was right all along, he has taped an anti-Communist confessional. Posthumously broadcast at a college commencement, the voice speaks to potential “useful fools” who might turn left after graduation:

  “I was flattered when I was immediately recognized as an intellect. I was invited into homes where only superior minds communed. It excited my freshman fancy to hear daring thoughts that I wouldn’t have dreamed of when I lived at home—a bold defiance of the only authorities I knew, my Church and my mother and father. I know that many of you have experienced that stimulation—but stimulation leads to narcotics.” Reviled by critics for its crudity, My Son John was nonetheless an indicator of mid-century Hollywood angst. The HUAC and others on the Right had to be appeased. The last thing the town needed was a politically controversial movie. And yet that was precisely what the scenarist and director had in mind.

  Kazan regarded the life of Emiliano Zapata (reconfigured by Steinbeck) as a commentary on 1950s America. The real Zapata came from a family of landowners, and spent his early years amusing himself with a wardrobe of elegant suits and a stable of fine horses. The indulgence was not to last. Moved by the sight of an oppressed peasantry, he joined two other militants, Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco, and led brigades of rebellious peons against the armies of the dictator Porfirio Díaz. After forcing Díaz into exile, Zapata rose to power only to resign his office and go into hiding: He had become convinced that the new men were as corrupt as the ones they had replaced. His instincts did not play him false. A year later Zapata paid the ultimate price for his honor, slain by conniving officers who lured him into the open. Robert Frost commented on the trouble with revolutions: “…it brings the same class up on top / Executives of skillful execution / Will therefore plan to go halfway and stop.” The real Zapata would have understood.

  Gadge intended to portray himself as a latter-day Zapata, a former Communist who had renounced the party and its mendacious leaders, but who had never compromised his principles by going over to the other side. It was a canny move; Kazan was preparing to furnish the HUAC with the names of cell members back in the 1930s, and he knew he would be pilloried for the act. As he planned out the film, he made ready to portray himself as a man made into a martyr by extremists on both sides. “Whenever the Communists stake a claim to any concept or person the people value,” he maintained, “the overanxious Right plays into their hands…. If they would treat the Communist claim to peace, to free speech—and to men like Zapata—with the same good sense that greets the Communist claim to the bicycle, it would make life easier for those who value those things.”

  Because the film had to entertain as well as instruct, Viva Zapata! was written and directed on two levels. Producer Darryl Zanuck always regarded the film as a simple, well-made Mexican oater, punctuated by gunfights and peopled with valorous peasants and squinting bad guys. In Gadge’s private view, Zapata was a metaphor for the power struggle taking place in the United States among three forces: a) the congressional investigators; b) the hard-line Communists; and c) the anti-Communists like himself, wise, experienced observers who took the middle road. It was a bit too much freight for such an elemental story. As Kazan biographer Richard Schickel points out, when, toward the end of the script, Zapata tells his followers, “‘A strong people doesn’t need a strong leader. Strong leaders make a weak people,’ we don’t hear a peasant speaking; we hear well-meaning Yankee ventriloquism. Indeed…there is something overripe in Steinbeck’s dialogue, something a little too self-conscious—‘the people, sí!’—in its diction.”

  Zanuck had lobbied for the handsome “Black Irishman,” Tyrone Power, to play Zapata. Kazan knew better. To dissuade his boss, he filmed a screen test with Marlon and an important young Broadway actress, Julie Harris, in full costume, as Emiliano’s wife, Josefa. Zanuck viewed the footage in his private screening room and pronounced it unacceptable. These two gringos as Latinos? Ludicrous. Harris was definitely out. The mogul conceded that Marlon had presence, but wired Kazan in New York: I DON’T UNDERSTAND A GODDAMNED THING THE SON OF A BITCH SAYS. CAN’T YOU STOP HIM FROM MUMBLING? Kazan guaranteed that audiences would hear every diphthong, and that Marlon would look as Mexican as Pancho Villa by the time the makeup department got through with him. Grudgingly Zanuck went along. But there was a price attached. Jean Peters would play Josefa. This was a nonnegotiable demand. The actress had recently won a beauty contest, she had a dark exotic look, and Fox had big plans for her. Of somewhat greater significance, she was the current love interest of Howard Hughes. Kazan accepted the terms. Zanuck had a cornball idea of ending the film with Zapata’s white horse roaming the hills. Gadge went along with that, too.

  While the tone and tempo of the film were being planned, Marlon did his now-customary preparation, journeying down to Sonora, Mexico, in the company of his pet raccoon, Russell, to observe peasant life for himself. Zapata had been gunned down in 1919; there were plenty of folks around who still remembered him. He was said to be a heaven-sent figure who walked like an ordinary man, a born leader, uneducated but wise in the ways of the world, an appreciator of female beauty, a fine equestrian. Some swore that Emiliano had never di
ed, that on certain nights he could be heard riding his stallion somewhere in the hills. Marlon found those myths irresistible. He immediately identified with the character and returned to the set in Roma, Texas, in a state of jubilation.

  There were additional reasons for his upbeat mood. While in Mexico he had become bedazzled by a dark-skinned, exotic woman named Movita Castaneda. She was at least seven years his senior, an experienced actress who had appeared in the 1935 film Mutiny on the Bounty. Part Indian, part Spanish, Movita had known many men, including the husband she had discarded but not divorced—and, she let it be known, Clark Gable and Errol Flynn. In the ways of love she was extremely sophisticated. In other areas she was a total naïf. Movita believed that inanimate objects had a life of their own; ghosts and angels haunted her world. As superstitious and credulous as a child, she was the one person who believed Marlon’s tale of eating gazelles’ eyes for breakfast. All this attracted and delighted him. Here was the essence of woman, primitive, earthy, as far from vanilla as he could get. He brought Movita north and wangled a walk-on role for her so that she could legitimately hang around the set. Not that this prevented him from seeking other liaisons. Jean Peters came to the set with a duenna who never seemed to leave her side. “Since nothing energized my libido more than a well-guarded target,” Marlon admitted, “I was determined to have her.” He also went after another actress who hung around. At the time Marilyn Monroe was seeing Kazan. When Gadge’s family paid a visit, Marlon took over the role of lover until the coast was clear.

  Once filming began, he stopped showing off and became a consummate professional. In The Men and Streetcar the star had played contemporary figures in modern dress. Viva Zapata! put him in period costume. Some artful work was done on Marlon’s face and hands—skin artificially darkened, eyes slanted a bit, nostrils flared, a dark turned-down mustache stuck on to suggest ferocity. A dialogue coach was brought in to help give his words a slight Spanish intonation, and Gadge supplied a few insights: Emiliano is, au fond, a politician. He would not understand the word romance as Americans think of it. He doesn’t love Señora Zapata, for example; he loves his compadres. The man “has no need for a special woman. Women are to be used, knocked up, and left.” In a word, macho. In two words, typecasting.

  Kazan imparted only enough information to get his star under way. Perhaps he thought minimalism was the way to go on this picture, but it seems more likely that he was preoccupied with surviving. Zanuck knew that his director had been a member of the Communist party; Fox had gone ahead with the project anyway. But Gadge knew he was walking a tightrope: “There was no doubt where I stood—with the business boys, with the movie moguls, with the ‘gonifs,’ [Yiddish for thieves] with the old, unfeeling, insensitive, crass vulgar industry barbarians. I trusted them most because I could rely on one thing: If in an open competition I could make an exciting film that people would want to see, they’d go with me. If they thought they could make a bundle, they wouldn’t knuckle under to censorship—at least not yet.”

  In this, he was to acknowledge, he made a grievous error. The admired barbarians turned out to be the kind of men Groucho Marx had in mind when he cracked, “Those are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.” In his memoir, Kazan said he was “to find out that there were many conspiracies a filmmaker in our country had to deal with—that of the right, that of the left, that of the self-appointed moralists of the Catholic Church, and that of the men who tend the springs of gold.” Gadge placed his trust in the studio chiefs, only to discover that Jack Warner had given confidential information to the Committee: “Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan worked on Broadway where they practiced some sort of subversion.”

  Even without the backstairs intrigues, Kazan had reason to feel apprehensive. And so he might have, save for his wife Molly, who had arrived with the children and taken up residence in a nearby hotel. Zanuck, notorious for sending memos on every conceivable subject, had been bombarding Kazan with directives sent by Western Union. At the beginning, wrote Gadge, “they were laudatory and appreciative.” But all too soon they were hints that the picture was falling behind schedule, “then more than hints, complaints and bitter ones.” Abruptly, the wires stopped. It was a relief not to receive a scolding after long days under the relentless Texas sun. In fact, Zanuck had not ceased his complaints and warnings. They were sent to the hotel, where Molly headed them off and hid them from her husband.

  In a way her decision proved unwise; Gadge, who liked to be in control at all times, was unaware of the hostile climate back home. Yet because of his ignorance, he was free to concentrate on the picture, to get the best from his crew and cast—particularly Marlon. Under his guidance the star vanished into the role. He came across as a peasant with a rough, untutored intellect, at once forceful and intimidated by learned people like his wife, who possessed a formal wisdom beyond his reach. One of the film’s most telling moments occurs on the Zapatas’ wedding night, when the fumbling, uncertain Emilio confides to Josefa that the revolution requires something he cannot give it—knowledge. Once the battle is won, he realizes, “my horse and my rifle won’t help me.”

  Kazan encouraged a friendship between Brando and his costar Anthony Quinn—after all, they had both played Stanley Kowalski on Broadway. But there were enormous gaps between the two. Quinn had been in the movies since the mid-1930s, usually playing swarthy “heavies”—Arabian sheiks, Hawaiian chiefs, Chinese guerrillas, and the like. His career inched forward when he married Cecil B. DeMille’s adopted daughter, Katherine, but the marriage didn’t last nor did the parts get much better. Not without reason, Anthony believed his career had been held back because of his ethnic appearance. Although he was 50 percent Mexican and 50 percent Irish, the Mexican half was dominant in his physiognomy and personality. He had been raised in a Los Angeles barrio, and was proud of the fact that several of his ancestors fought with Pancho Villa. Mexico and its citizens were well known to him; he rode a horse with a confidence that Marlon never gained, and gave convincing authority to the character of Zapata’s brother Eufemio. Marlon, a star with only two pictures under his belt, had to work diligently to present his persona, and was never truly satisfied with his work. Yet in the beginning there was no resentment between the men; onscreen they shared a sense of mission, and at the end of the day’s shooting they enjoyed each other’s company.

  Later in the story, shot more or less in sequence, drink and greed start to erode Eufemio’s character. Then the brothers feud, one harsh and accusatory, the other blustering and defensive. At that juncture, Marlon remembered, Quinn was no longer amicable. “I sensed a bitterness toward me, and if I suggested a drink after work, he either turned me down or else was sullen and said little. Only years later did I learn why.” Quinn, meanwhile, felt that Marlon was standoffish and deliberately remote. He asked some of the actors who knew Brando back in New York, “Is he queer?”

  The reason both men behaved so badly to each other was that the scenes of sibling rivalry needed a white-heat authority: In Gadge’s opinion such emotion could not be faked. In order to get it he drove a wedge between the actors, first favoring one, then the other, creating a jealousy where there had been comradeship. When Quinn suggested that peasants would communicate their anger by banging stones together until the entire group filled the air with that harsh sound, Kazan was quick to use it. He praised Anthony openly and quietly whispered in his ear that Brando had been spreading scurrilous rumors about him. When Quinn took a break, Gadge told Marlon that Anthony described him as an overpraised, cosseted performer. In time the actors realized that they were being manipulated, but it would take decades before they felt thoroughly at ease in each other’s company. They had learned the hard way that every Elia Kazan picture came with a curse—Elia Kazan.

  Most critics focused on the actor rather than the picture; Zapata was considered a Brando film rather than a biographical epic. A few reviewers complained about Marlon’s tendency to speak indistinctly in the romantic epi
sodes. Bosley Crowther called them “clumsy interchanges.” For the most part, though, the Times critic was impressed. “When this dynamic young performer is speaking his anger or his love for a fellow revolutionary, or when he is charging through the land at the head of his rebel-soldiers or walking bravely into the trap of his doom, there is power enough in his portrayal to cause the screen to throb.” Time and Newsweek published raves, and when Oscar time came Marlon received his second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. He knew he wouldn’t get the statuette and, in fact, thought he didn’t deserve it. Watching the picture straight through, Marlon expressed a dislike of his accent and concluded that he was “too soft, too sweet” in the role of Zapata. He packed up Russell the raccoon, took Movita in hand, and returned to New York. Of all the past girlfriends in his life, Marlon bothered to look up only one: Ellen Adler. The reason was sad but simple. His distaste for fakery had been with him since the days of childhood, when he and his sisters smiled and hid their hellish, punitive family life from schoolmates. And by his lights he was still a phony, as bogus as a Hollywood set with a mansion in front and two-by-fours in back where no one could see them. “In all the time we remained friends,” she was to remember, “I observed one rule. I never, ever mentioned his work. Not a word about his performance in any film, no matter how great. Marlon’s unwritten law was that he had other concerns, other things to talk about, and that these were foremost on his mind—mutual friends, politics, racism, history. So we talked of those and only of those. Our relationship was unique for that reason. I respected his feelings, and among all the people he knew, outside of his family we remained the closest friends for over fifty years.”