To Kramer this was a glimpse into the nation’s dark side, a side that had recently been given wide publicity by the FBI. The director, J. Edgar Hoover, reported that “persons under the age of eighteen committed fifty-three percent of all car thefts, forty-nine percent of all burglaries, eighteen percent of all robberies, and sixteen percent of all rapes.” Adult authority seemed to be slipping away, and someone or something had to be blamed. The most obvious target was popular culture. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham accused comic books of glamorizing violence and crime. In his book The Seduction of the Innocent, he declared, “Here is the repetition of violence and sexiness which no Freud, Krafft-Ebing or Havelock Ellis ever dreamed could be offered to children, and in such profusion. Here is one man mugging another and graphic pictures of the white man shooting colored natives as though they were animals. ‘You sure must have treated these beggars rough in that last trip through here!’ And so on.” Publishers mocked Wertham at first, but his agitations ended in a regulatory code for comic books. Film and TV producers, already reeling from financial and political pressures, were painfully aware that censorship was an idea whose time had come around again. They regrouped, attempting to clean up their act without losing their audience.
Kramer used a time-honored way to operate in this cautious new atmosphere. His new picture aimed to satisfy the censorious and the prurient at the same time, detailing the criminal activity—and then deploring it. Lázló Benedek, a Hungarian director who had done an admirable, if financially unsuccessful, job with Death of a Salesman, signed on. Kramer persuaded Marlon to take the lead role: He would get to ride his motorcycle and act at the same time. The offer proved irresistible. Scenarist Ben Maddow, best known for writing the John Huston film noir The Asphalt Jungle, was hired to do the adaptation. In typical Hollywood fashion, several months later Maddow was replaced by another screenwriter, John Paxton, a specialist in thrillers. Things went downhill from there. Harry Cohn, Columbia’s imperious production chief, made certain that everyone knew the extent of his power. He had always been like that. When he learned that his first wife was infertile, he selected a minor actress, had her struck from the payroll, then went to her apartment with an offer that rivaled Rumpelstiltskin’s: “I would like you to have a child by me. On the day you are certified to be pregnant, I will put $75,000 in a bank under your name. On the day the child is delivered to me, our relationship is over.” The proposal was turned down and Cohn never spoke to her again.
Uneducated but proud of his gut feelings, he hired major directors like Frank Capra and George Stevens, and such stars as Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, and Claudette Colbert. Because so many of Columbia’s films were hits, Cohn was convinced he knew more than anyone—particularly writers. He once bawled out his staff for creating an anachronism in an Arabian Nights fantasy. “It’s all through the script, goddammit,” he complained. “You’ve got ’em all saying, ‘Yes, siree.’” The producer read the offending page. “But, Harry,” he explained, “that’s ‘Yes, sire.’” This was not the sort of man who could allow The Cyclists’ Raid to go into production unscathed. First he changed the title to The Wild One, making Marlon the center of the action. Then he learned that the Breen office had examined the script and found it licentious. He agreed. The central part of Johnny, played by Brando, was far too sympathetic. Worse, the bikers’ violent behavior was left unpunished. Cohn ordered a rewrite. Paxton did as he was told. Marlon examined the revisions and threw them across the room. He attempted a version of his own, but it came to nothing. He was locked into his contract, and as one of his friends recalled, “He finally said, ‘What the hell, I’ll ride my bike and drawl some lines. And it’ll be over in a month and then I can quit the business for good.’”
On the set he behaved himself, but let it be known that Paxton’s dialogue was difficult to believe and harder to articulate. The indulgent Benedek allowed him to ad-lib a lot of his speeches, throwing off the film’s love interest, Kathie Bleeker, played by a snub-nosed, twenty-two-year-old starlet named Mary Murphy. In later years she claimed to have been enthralled by Marlon, swiftly adding that her longings went nowhere because “there was always Movita.” Occasional flashes of emotion between Johnny and Kathie were not enough to make their relationship convincing, and Marlon’s biking rival, Chino, played by a craggy Lee Marvin, was one of the most superannuated juveniles in movie history. Offscreen the two men rarely spoke, and when they did it was to exchange witless insults. Brando thought Marvin was a ham; Marvin, a decorated combat veteran, was well aware that Brando had been 4-F during the war. During the last days of filming, he told Marlon, “I’m thinking of changing my name. To Marlow Brandy.” Replied Marlon: “I think I’ll change my name, too. To Lee Moron.” The star’s assets—his brooding sensitivity and screen presence—were offset by the liability of stilted, pseudo-hip dialogue that aged as it was spoken:
KATHIE: Do you just ride around, or do you go on some sort of picnic or something?
JOHNNY: A picnic? Man, you are too square…. You just go. Theidea is to have a ball. Now, if you’re gonna stay cool, you got to wail. You got to put somethin’ down. You got to make some jive.
The Wild One was further hampered by a confused prologue, tacked on to appease the bluenoses. “This is a shocking story,” proclaims an unseen announcer. “It could never take place in most American towns—but it did in this one. It is a public challenge not to let it happen again.” This was followed by Marlon’s voice-over: “It begins here for me on this road…. Mostly, I remember the girl. I—I can’t explain it—sad chick like that. But somethin’ changed in me. She got to me.” Marlon detested the words he was forced to say, and assumed a peculiar and unpersuasive southern accent when he voiced them at a recording studio. Benedek could hardly blame him: He said the actor was secretly communicating to his audience, “This isn’t me talking. It’s someone else. It was his own way of saying to the Breen office, ‘Screw you.’”
The Wild One was marketed in a sordid manner, accentuating its weaknesses. “That Streetcar man has a new desire!” proclaimed one of the Columbia studio’s ads. Others read, “Marlon Brando! driven too far by his own hot blood!” and “Hot feelings hit terrifying heights in a story that really boils over!” The film opened in New York at the Palace Theatre, then featuring two-a-day live performances in what was to be vaudeville’s last gasp. Time’s critic was not deceived by Paxton’s cosmetic revisions. “The effect of the movie,” stated his review, “is not to throw light on a public problem, but to shoot adrenaline through the moviegoer’s veins.” The Daily News said much the same thing: The Wild One failed “to place the responsibility where it obviously belongs, with the gangs and their leaders, who are not juvenile delinquents but thrill-crazy adults.”
In the Times, Bosley Crowther, who had been informed of the Breen office’s demands, administered the coup de grâce: Though the feature is “engrossing” when it examines mob psychology, “Mr. Paxton and Director Lazlo Benedek—or somebody—have pulled it down. They begin by bringing the gang leader, Mr. Brando, into contact with a girl—a good, clean, upright, small-town beauty—who apparently fills him with love. And before you know it, this maiden and her father, the cowardly cop, are pleading forgiveness for the mug. Although it is not clearly stated that the obvious ties of love are going to bind, the mug does ride off into the sunrise, a presumably clean and fine young man.” The picture “tries to grasp an idea, even though its reach falls short. It is too bad that some mutterings in the industry have seemed to deprecate it, and it should turn up as the passing feature on an eight-act vaudeville bill.”
This marked Marlon’s first cinematic failure. However, despite the pans and the meager box-office take, his performance changed a turkey into a cult movie, first in America and then throughout the world. Novelist Parménides García Saldaña watched the phenomenon in Mexico City: “The imitators of Marlon Brando look for that equivalent language, that similar mode of speaking, prohibited and subversive, wh
ich commits an outrage against buenas costumbres [the well dressed.]” Elvis Presley was transfixed by the film. One exchange jumped out from the The Wild One and changed the King’s affect. Soon the words would become a shibboleth of American youth:
LADY: What are you rebelling against, Johnny?
JOHNNY: Whaddya got?
Just as friends were forbidden to mention any aspect of his burgeoning celebrity, Marlon did not permit himself to reflect on the film’s enduring popularity. If anything good had come from this, his fifth movie, it could not have been the result of talent or magnetism; it had to be chance, fortune, coincidence. Reflecting on The Wild One, Marlon wrote, “I simply happened to be at the right place at the right time in the right part—and I also had the appropriate state of mind for the role.” More amused than gratified, he watched from the sidelines as teenagers imitated Johnny’s slouch and sullen attitude, sales of motorcycles boomed, and leather jackets became the adolescent uniform of the day. He said it reminded him of It Happened One Night, “when Clark Gable took his shirt off and revealed that he wasn’t wearing an undershirt, which created a disaster for the garment industry.”
There was more to come. As Updike observes, just about the time Marlon became an icon of American youth, the country’s artists and intellectuals, and soon afterward the young, “felt mostly a sardonic estrangement from a government that extolled business and mediocrity.” President Eisenhower identified what he called “the great problem of America today.” It was “to take that straight road down the middle.” But that road was not where teenagers wanted to go. They preferred a different kind of music, a fresh set of heroes, a new kind of expression. In American Chronicle, Lois and Alan Gordon list the words that came into use in the 1950s, revealing an earthquake taking place beneath the repressive crust of the decade. Among them: apartheid, H-bomb, integration, miniaturization, cool jazz, ponytail, TelePrompTer, drag strip, countdown, discount house, jet stream, captive audience, windfall profit, fallout, greaser, junk mail, Thorazine, stoned, Third World, cop-out, put-on, headshrinker, shook up, funky, beatnik, sex kitten, sick joke, polymorphous perversity.
Quite by accident, Marlon had become a leader of this seismic activity, and it made him uncomfortable. Leadership was never his strong suit; he preferred to be on the outside, watching, copying gestures, cracking wise. The discomfort got so severe that he signed no new contracts and truly considered retiring to the ranch his father managed in Nebraska. Realism caught up with him when he discovered that the property had lost a lot of money—his money—with no hope of recovery. Marlon was at the point of sailing off to Europe with Movita when he learned that some of his old acting pals, among them Carlo Fiore, Janice Mars, and a new friend, William Redfield, were out of work. He organized a summer-stock company and took Shaw’s Arms and the Man on a tour of small towns in New England.
To call this venture a catastrophe would be to flatter it. The others took the play seriously. Not Marlon. “I don’t want to work,” he told Fiore privately. “I want to fuck around. And I want to try comedy for a change. A farce. I want to leer, wear a moustache, make asides to the audience, like Groucho Marx.” He regressed to the old school days, when preparation was a snore. His name was enough to pack the houses, and some nights he got ovations just for showing up. Most of the time, however, audiences left dissatisfied. One ticket holder collared Redfield and asked him to convey a message to Marlon. “We’d like you to tell him that we’re not a bunch of yokels. Does he think we can’t see he’s laughing at us while we sit out there? Does he think we’re deaf and dumb?” The actor dutifully conveyed his words to their target. Replied Marlon: “Man, don’t you get it? This is summer stock!” He clowned his way across Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Cape Cod before finishing up in Framingham, Massachusetts, blowing lines, camping it up onstage, throwing off everyone’s timing for the sake of a cheap laugh. Until the last stop, most reviewers, impressed by the Brando celebrity, went along with the gag. But Elliot Norton, the most important reviewer outside New York, had no intention of indulging a movie star run amok. In The Boston Globe the critic fulminated, “In recent years, no major star, no actor with anything like Brando’s reputation has ever given such a completely ridiculous performance. He strides and struts and overdoes it, suggesting not a man of normal vanity—but a ham actor who just doesn’t know how to play comedy.”
Marlon tried to put a good face on the disaster, clowning around, writing blithe letters home. He fooled no one but himself. The close observer of human behavior, the acute mimic of others, had no self-perception at all. The strategies of survival, operating since childhood, were now being used to block anything that might lead him to confront his shortcomings. Rather than appraise what was happening, he made light of everything—his achievements in drama and his failures in comedy. Nothing mattered to him in the mid-fifties, and he didn’t know why that was so. His live-in, Movita, was of no help. Nor was his therapist, Bela Mittleman. Marlon senior’s early ridicule still rang in his son’s ears, diminishing any sense of real accomplishment; Dodie’s lack of communication, a silence that was interpreted as indifference, further diminished any feelings of self-worth. But to confront the buried child was more than Brando could bear at present, and Mittleman was not about to force the hand of so famous a client. When things went bad, he simply allowed his patient to take the knife out of the critics’ hands and stab himself before they could get around to it. When things went well, he permitted Marlon to ascribe the occasion to a series of happy accidents. The T-word—talent—didn’t enter the picture.
3
The plump, influential Austrian filmmaker Sam Spiegel had always been one jump ahead of his pursuers, whether they were Nazis or creditors. It used to be said of him that if he were dropped stark naked without a dime into any capital city, by the next morning he would be dressed in a Savile Row suit and living in a penthouse. Hollywood provided a fertile field for smooth talkers, and in keeping with the old show-business aphorism “Anyone who calls himself a producer is a producer,” he managed to persuade investors to back several inconsequential movies. Then Spiegel took on the nom de cinéma S. P. Eagle and his luck changed. He had to endure the much-repeated gibe of Herman Mankiewicz “How about Darryl Zanuck as Z. A. Nook? Or Ernst Lubitsch as L. U. Bitch?” But Spiegel received compensation in the forms of profit and prestige when his film The African Queen won an Academy Award for Best Picture. Fresh from this honor, he set his sights on a very different kind of film.
In 1949, scenarist Budd Schulberg came across Malcolm Johnson’s series “Crime on the Waterfront,” published in the New York Sun. Financed by an independent film company, Schulberg acquired the rights to this Pulitzer Prize–winning work, and started on an adaptation. At roughly the same time Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller began collaborating on their own waterfront drama for Columbia Pictures. Schulberg’s company couldn’t come up with the financing, and dropped the project. A little while later, Miller and Kazan hit a wall in their relationship and the playwright quit cold. There were two reasons for his walkout.
First came the order from Harry Cohn: The villains of the piece had to be Communists. Miller knew better; the agitation on the Brooklyn waterfront had to do with racketeers, not Reds. Cohn’s insistence on making the laborers into a Cold War army was an absurd, corrupt demand. The scenarist wired Columbia that he was withdrawing his script. The next morning Miller received a telegram in reply: IT’S INTERESTING HOW THE MINUTE WE TRY TO MAKE THE SCRIPT PRO-AMERICAN YOU PULL OUT. HARRY COHN.
Second came the business of Gadge, the Committee, and the naming of names. Kazan’s ad of April 13, 1952, in The New York Times had slammed the door shut on their relationship.
Then, also in 1952, the last men standing got together. Both Kazan and Schulberg had been “friendly” witnesses at the HUAC hearings; both saw a way to dramatize life on the docks—and, not coincidentally, to show that under certain circumstances informing was morally justifiable. Admitted Gadge, “When critics say
that I put my story and my feelings on the screen, to justify my informing, they are right.” Budd was not so militant, but went along with his partner’s stance. They completed the script for The Hook in a state of exhilaration and took off for Beverly Hills, convinced that Hollywood producers would line up to buy their work. Zanuck put the scenario down in two sentences: “I don’t like a single thing about it. All you’ve got is a lot of sweaty longshoremen.” Warner Bros. turned them down, then Paramount and MGM. Harry Cohn passed, even though Arthur Miller was no longer attached to the venture.
The Hook was hardly the first landmark film to be rejected by the majors. Sunset Boulevard has a winking reference to such errors. When a young reader dismisses a script, the scenarist objects, “You’d have turned down Gone with the Wind.” An executive sighs: “No, that was me. I said: ‘Who wants to see a Civil War picture?’” But holding The Hook at arm’s length was different. It came with impeccable credentials. Schulberg was the son of B. P. Schulberg, onetime head of Paramount. He was a child of Hollywood, a man who knew the film industry well enough to anatomize it in What Makes Sammy Run? The novel’s colorful and aggressive central character, Sammy Glick, had been part of the American vocabulary since 1941. Kazan was the most talked-about film and stage director in the country. The project had received its chorus of refusals not because of American history but because of Hollywood history.
It was 1953, a pivotal year for cinema. In the wake of investigation and scandal, controversy of any kind—political, social, sexual—gave production chiefs the creeps. A blacklist of actors and directors was in full sway, and even this failed to satisfy the most rabid Red-hunters, who flyspecked scripts for “subversive” themes and casting lists for activists they might have overlooked. Movie executives had quite enough worries without the threat of picket lines and newspaper editorials. Yet this was not their principal concern. They were far more troubled by the cycloptic box that had grown from amusing baby to voracious monster. In less than three years the makers of I Love Lucy, CBS’s modest TV sitcom, had risen to become the most powerful couple in show business. By the end of the decade, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz would buy RKO, the studio for which she had once labored. Movie attendance was tumbling, the studio system, in place since the 1920s, was all but gone, replaced by broadcasting companies. Louis B. Mayer had already been forced out of MGM, and Sam Goldwyn was scrambling to stay in the game. Harry Cohn was getting tired and ill. Darryl F. Zanuck, the great survivor, was planning to leave Fox for independent film production. In the movie business, this was equivalent to the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, when the dinosaurs vanished and were replaced by a very different kind of animal. The talk of the town was not about the peccadilloes of film stars but of how to cover the seats with tochuses. The buzzwords were Cinerama, 3-D, VistaVision, CinemaScope. Risk takers were an endangered species in the Celluloid City of the mid-fifties, and getting rarer by the day. Schulberg and Kazan were realists. When they received the last refusal they made ready to leave town, Budd to novelize The Hook, Gadge to revive his career on Broadway.
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