Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  SKY: Nathan, figuring weight for age, all dolls are the same.

  NATHAN: Oh, yeah?

  SKY: Yeah!

  NATHAN: Then how come you ain’t got a doll? How come you’re going to Havana alone without one?

  SKY: I like to travel light, but if I wish to take a doll to Havana there is a large assortment available.

  But onscreen the men Goldwyn and Mankiewicz had considered “ideal casting” delivered their lines in an arch, humor-killing manner. Preoccupied with his battles with Sinatra, worried about his singing—which he privately referred to as “the sound of a yak in heat”—Marlon had overlooked the female star, Jean Simmons. There was not a hint of attraction between Sky Masterson and his love interest, Salvation Army Sergeant Sarah Brown. Time found the picture “false to the original in its feeling.” While the Broadway production was “as intimate as a hot-foot, the Goldwyn movie takes a blowtorch full of Eastman Color and stereophonic sound to get the same reaction.” Both principals were inadequate: Brando “sings in a faraway tenor that sometimes tends to be flat,” and Sinatra “not only acts as if he can’t tell a Greek roll from a bagel; he sings as though his mouth were full of ravioli instead of gefilte fish.” The New Yorker headed its review with a tongue-in-cheek scolding of Goldwyn: “Sam, You Made the Film Too Long.” Sinatra, bitter about the whole experience, went public with his contempt for “Mumbles.” Brando replied with a prophecy: “Frank is the kind of guy, when he dies, he’s going to heaven and give God a hard time for making him bald.”

  The public bought Guys and Dolls anyway. It cost $5.5 million to make and grossed $13 million, boosted by the publicity tours of chorines called the Goldwyn Girls, as well as by the personal appearances of Sinatra and Brando. (Goldwyn, a master salesman, had bribed Marlon with a white Thunderbird convertible.) The worst experience was the first—the New York premiere at the Capitol Theatre. The trauma turned Marlon into a lifelong opponent of film flackery. He and Simmons were driven to Times Square in a stretch limo. As they pulled up to the movie house, fans broke through police lines and charged the limousine. One of its windows broke under the pressure of the crowd, and the panicked driver surged ahead, barely missing a group of nearly hysterical adolescents.

  Six large policemen closed in, opened the door, grabbed Simmons, lifted her high above the crowd, and carried her into the theater. Then it was Marlon’s turn to be conveyed in the same manner. En route, someone got hold of Brando’s tie and nearly garroted him. Ultimately, policemen saw what was happening, broke the choker’s grip, and took Marlon to the lobby. There he sat on a flight of stairs, ashen “and muttering to myself, ‘Jesus Christ, what the hell am I doing here?’” One way or another, he was to keep asking that question for the rest of his life.

  1956–1959

  A Mess Pretty Much

  1

  Until the era of political correctness, Caucasians were frequently cast as Asians. The personification of the Yellow Peril, Dr. Fu Manchu, was represented by Boris Karloff; Peter Lorre made eight films as the Japanese Mr. Moto; Warner Oland and then Sidney Toler played Charlie Chan from 1931 to 1947. In the twenty-first century such casting would be unthinkable, and perhaps should have been by 1955. But sensitive as he was to the feelings of minorities, Marlon wanted to disappear into another race, another skin, another accent, for his next role. Sakini provided the ideal opportunity.

  In 1951, a book about the postwar American occupation of Okinawa made the bestseller list. Two years later, John Patrick adapted The Teahouse of the August Moon for the Broadway stage. It became the hit of the season, starring David Wayne as the play’s Japanese narrator, Sakini. During his sojourns in New York, Marlon saw Teahouse three times. “I laughed so hard,” he asserted, “I almost ended up beating the hat of the lady in front of me.”

  Determined to play Sakini onscreen, he lobbied the powers at MGM as soon as the studio acquired the property, reminding them of his assets. He had recently been named the number one box-office star, ahead of such favorites as John Wayne, James Stewart, and Cary Grant. Every week, some six thousand fan letters to Marlon Brando were received at an official Hollywood address. Edward R. Murrow had featured him on his popular CBS show Person to Person. Marlon had cleaned up his act, sold the motorcycle, abandoned the leather jackets as “yesterday’s news,” released Russell the raccoon in the woods of Libertyville, and remade himself as a businessman/artist establishing his own production company, called Pennebaker in honor of his late mother. Five studios had offered to go into partnership; Marlon chose Paramount.

  He did not go into details about Pennebaker—with good reason. He had given his father an office on the Paramount lot, as well as the title of treasurer. It was not a happy arrangement. Carlo Fiore, Marlon’s old friend from the Studio days, had recently emerged from a new bout of drug addiction. Marlon invited him to drop in. The two were in mid-reminiscence when Marlon senior appeared in the doorway, igniting a battle between father and son.

  Junior had asked Senior for $5,000. The money was to be forwarded to Stella Adler to back her New York stage production of Johnny Johnson. Senior informed him that the cash was unavailable. Nothing was liquid; everything was in securities. This was no time to sell bonds or shares. Besides, backing a play was just about the worst investment he could make; the entire $5,000 might be lost overnight.

  “I’m not investing in a play,” Junior said through clenched teeth. “I’m lending money to a friend.”

  Senior remonstrated; Junior blew up. He ordered his father to make out a check for the whole amount and bring it in for a signature.

  Senior blushed and withdrew.

  It was not in Marlon to apologize, but for some time after that he spoke softly to his father, listened to complaints of loneliness and depression, sent him to his psychiatrist, and said nothing when Senior began to date a woman who reminded them both of Dodie. Life seemed Freudian enough as it was.

  Pennebaker’s declared purpose was to develop feature films that contained “social value and would improve the world.” This lofty goal received quite a few sneers when it was announced; a television come-dienne had Marlon in mind when she came on as a Miss America contestant whose specialties were “baton twirling and world peace.” Nevertheless, Marlon meant what he said, and he viewed Teahouse as an ideal project for his socially responsible agenda.

  In reality, he was pushing on an open door. Of his two main rivals, one was dead and the other in rapid decline. In September 1955 James Dean had perished in a head-on automobile crash in his cherished Porsche. Over the next two years, reported Dean’s biographer Donald Spoto, film magazines would present Dean with more than twenty awards as “the best” in one category or another; he had achieved in death an unimaginable prominence. Frank O’Hara wrote a tribute in Poetry magazine:

  Men cry from the grave while they still live and now I am this dead man’s voice

  Marlon could only look on Dean’s posthumous fame with wonder and resentment. Nevertheless, Jimmy would make no more films, and the only other comparable American figure, Montgomery Clift, had become a deeply troubled, unapproachable man. At least as complicated as Marlon, he had taken to drugs and alcohol and was in no shape to compete. Thus MGM was prepared to grant Brando just about anything and he was ready to demand just about everything. The head of production, Dore Schary, confided to colleagues, “If he had wanted to play Little Eva, I would have let him.”

  As soon as Marlon signed the contract he made plans for a tour of the Orient. There he would soak up the exotic atmosphere and learn Asian mannerisms and dialects. The trip never materialized because he suddenly changed his mind and decided to stay close to home. It was the usual reason: A new woman had entered his life. He was smitten, and couldn’t bear to leave her.

  Her name was Anna Kashfi, she was twenty-two years old, and she had impressed Paramount enough to win a role in The Mountain, alongside Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner. Kashfi’s official bio stated that she was an Anglo-Indian, born in Darj
eeling and educated in a French convent. She displayed all the Brando requisites: lustrous eyes, olive complexion, and a reticent, almost virginal manner. At the beginning of their relationship, Marlon was as decorous as he had been with Eva Marie Saint on the set of Waterfront. His Pennebaker partner, film producer George Englund, actually functioned as chaperone on their first date. In her vindictive memoir, Brando for Breakfast, Kashfi writes of their early dalliance: “I went to bed with Marlon mostly out of curiosity. His seduction technique showed all the subtlety of a guillotine.” The pair were watching television when Marlon abruptly picked up Anna, Rhett Butler–style, and carried her off to the bedroom. Physically, she noted, Marlon was “not well appointed.” He compensated for that deficiency, she said, “by undue devotion to his sex organ. ‘My noble tool.’”

  She was drawn into his orbit anyway, and he into hers. The over-heated affair was interrupted in April 1956, when Marlon was summoned to Japan; filming had begun on The Teahouse of the August Moon.

  From rehearsals onward Marlon was preoccupied and miserable. His costar was the versatile old pro Glenn Ford, newly popular because of his recent successes in Gilda, The Big Heat, and Blackboard Jungle. He was conservative by nature, and Marlon, his social conscience freshly aroused, made their differences a battleground. They argued on the set, giving director Daniel Mann fits, and when Marlon was interviewed by Japanese journalists, he made a point of sticking it to U.S. foreign policy: “Of all the countries in the world that suffer from backwardness, America is first.” He went around quoting Sakini, the narrator of Teahouse, to anyone who would listen—and to many who would not. The narrator’s opening lines describe the island’s subjugation by English missionaries, then Japanese warlords, and now by American marines. With a wry smile, he concludes: “Okinawa very fortunate. Culture brought to us. Not have to leave home for it.”

  Ford faced off with Brando. Did he know that the United States contributed more money and aid to Okinawa than any other nation in the world? And anyway, what was a white guy doing playing a Japanese with that bogus accent?

  Matters and manners grew so hostile that Mann had to step in and growl: “You’re not really doing a scene—you’re doing a show about two actors who are trying to fuck each other.” The actors shaped up for a little while, then went at it again.

  The weather turned foul, the set gloomy. Teahouse’s comic lead, Louis Calhern, had been an elderly cheerleader, insistent that whatever the differences between the stars, this would be “a marvelous picture.” As it developed, he was the most depressed of them all, grieving for a recently failed marriage to a much younger woman, knocking back too much liquor, concerned that his long career was in a tailspin. Marlon had admired Calhern since their Julius Caesar days; he listened sympathetically and tried to match him drink for drink. One rainy evening the old man failed to show up. It was announced an hour later that he had suffered a fatal heart attack. The stunned actors cobbled together a funeral service and tried to carry on, with farceur Paul Ford flown in to take Calhern’s place. Ford learned his lines quickly and filming resumed. But so did the rain. It went on for a month. With no end to the monsoon in sight, the crew and cast packed up and went home. The rest of the picture was shot in Culver City.

  Minutes after he unpacked his luggage, Marlon learned that Anna had been hospitalized with tuberculosis. The shock of the news made him go into reverse gear. Instead of being manipulative, he became solicitous; instead of taking her to his bed, he took himself to her bedside. Shooting resumed within the week, and at the end of each day’s work he stopped by the City of Hope hospital, still wearing his Asian makeup and costume and breaking up the nurses with an atrocious Japanese accent: “Herro, herro. I am Doctor Messhugener Moto. Don’t raff. I don’t ordinariry make house cawrs.” The mock physician and his patient spent hours discussing travel, philosophy, and religion—anything but acting. Anna’s recovery was painful and slow. By now, Marlon watchers expected the romance to fade. Instead it grew more intense. He presented Anna with Dodie’s earrings, her brooch, her favorite pillow. Reflecting on his mother’s last days, he grew solemn. Pain makes man think, he told Anna reflectively, and thinking makes him wise. She learned later that the lines came from The Teahouse of the August Moon.

  Just before Anna was discharged from the hospital in the fall of 1956, Marlon slipped his mother’s engagement ring on her finger and proposed. By now he had acquired a house on Laurel Drive, but issued no invitation to share quarters with his fiancée. With his encouragement and financial help, she rented an apartment in the same building where Marlon senior was living. In this way Marlon junior could keep her at the proper distance—not too far, but not too close, either. The couple spent the Thanksgiving holiday at the California home of Jocelyn and her second husband, the writer Eliot Asinof. Talk of marriage was spirited but kept en famille. There were two reasons: Marlon was wary of the publicity that would surely attend the announcement. And emotionally he had never let go of Movita.

  2

  At an earlier time, Marlon would have turned down the part of Major Lloyd Gruver in Sayonara. He disliked the scenario of a doomed interracial G.I. romance. And he had minimal regard for the work of director Josh Logan, scheduled to do Streetcar until Tennessee Williams had the sense to insist on Elia Kazan. Logan had made a Broadway candy box of James Michener’s austere Tales of the South Pacific, featuring Oscar Hammerstein II’s self-conscious lecture about racism. Marlon thought it was right out of a Sunday-school text, all righteousness and flapdoodle about how children were without racial or ethnic prejudice. Their parents and communities were the guilty parties; the elders were responsible for instructing the young, carefully instructing them to far those “whose skin is a different shade.” In context, the song was effective—one of South Pacific’s subplots concerned an interracial marriage. Outside the theater, though, it was just a lecture set to music.

  Yet his own attempt to dramatize the Asian situation had been just as ungainly. And unlike South Pacific, it had not been greeted with approbation and SRO houses. The star of Teahouse, wrote Marlon’s most indulgent critic, Bosley Crowther, “looks synthetic. A conspicuous make-up of his eyes and a shiny black wig do not imbue him with an oriental cast. And his manner of speaking broken English, as though he had a wad of chewing gum clenched between his teeth, is not only disconcerting but also makes him hard to understand…. His Sakini is less a charming rascal than a calculated clown.”

  Bad reviews notwithstanding, Marlon remained obsessed with Asia. In Sayonara, adapted from another Michener story, he saw a chance to redeem himself, to make a valuable film about America’s blighted racial history. And in the process, to get a $300,000 salary at a time when Pennebaker needed money to underwrite its own productions. But first his demands had to be met: a) the script needed work; and b) Logan had to show him that he was the right man to direct this moral fable. A and b were quickly satisfied. Warner Bros. was delighted to have landed the number one box-office star, and so were Logan, producer William Goetz, and screenwriter Paul Osborn. Marlon derided the ending, where Major Gruver leaves Japan and abandons his adored Japanese girlfriend. He said it smacked of Madame Butterfly. They agreed. Something would be done about that; on Marlon’s orders Sayonara would dare to be different. After all, this was 1956, not 1856. Of course the romance of the major and his beloved had to end at the altar. What a grand idea. Why didn’t we think of that?

  Marlon now wanted the job badly—so badly he convinced himself that Josh Logan was ideal for the assignment. His rationale: During a visit to Logan’s luxurious East Side apartment, Marlon sermonized about the need to treat the Japanese with respect and dignity while Logan gardened on the terrace, tidily pruning leaves from his plants. “Anyone who cares that much about living things,” Marlon deduced, “must be a sensitive person.” It was an example of Lorenz Hart’s lyrical insight about the self-deception that believes the lie.

  In fact, Logan was not an insensitive figure. But he was also drive
n and disturbed, the casualty of serial nervous breakdowns. Never easy to work with, he would test Marlon severely over the coming months. During the early stages, all was smiles. Logan called Brando “the most exciting person I’ve met since Garbo.” At a press conference in Tokyo, Marlon told reporters, “I welcome the invaluable opportunity of working with Josh Logan, a man who can teach me what to do and what not to do.” The director’s statement was probably true; the actor’s was an outright deception. Logan had promised Marlon carte blanche on script revisions. In a letter to Anna, Marlon described the real situation. At first Logan had been warm and accepting. If Marlon was unhappy with any of his speeches, he was free to change them. “I rewrote the whole damn script. And now they’re going to use maybe eight lines.”

  But Logan did give him carte blanche in another matter. In Michener’s novel, Major Gruver hails from Pennsylvania. Marlon insisted on playing the role with a southern accent. To his astonishment, the director responded with delight. He never told Marlon why, but in 1958 the reason became clear. In a three-part confessional in Look magazine, Logan spoke of breakdowns, tracing his feelings of remorse and depression back to Louisiana, where he had been raised by a black servant, “my second mother, the queen who ruled the back areas of the house, those permissive places where I was happiest.” Then came the day when “I was told she couldn’t eat with me or ride in the same railroad car with me. This is the guilty agony that all decent southerners carry inside of them.” So Marlon’s makeover played directly into Logan’s hands. He now saw Sayonara as a way to expiate that guilt. Gruver’s slow change from spoonbread racist to tolerant American would make him a symbol of the Deep South in the 1950s.

  This reworking would have been more effective with a better female lead. Miiko Taka, who played Marlon’s love interest, was an American-born amateur, pretty enough but with faulty teeth, no acting experience, and minimal sex appeal. Brando displayed little patience with her, though he was generous to his other fellow actors, assuring the standup comedian Red Buttons that he could play a straight role, and counseling James Garner that every scene in every film has a cliché. “Try to find that cliché and get as far away from it as you can.”