Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  After taxes, alimony, child support, and various expenses, Marlon was close to broke. Aware that his case would be costly and probably hopeless, he had abandoned the lawsuit against the Post. Joseph Vogel had been sacked by the board of MGM, largely because he had cut Brando too much slack. The failure of Marlon’s last three films thrust him into a deep depression. As he treaded water, the self-styled Dream Factory, the Hollywood of double bills and seven-picture contracts and More Stars Than There Are in Heaven was being dismantled. American International, a new studio with a string of low-budget horror movies to its credit, started working with focus groups. Its aim was simple: to please teenagers with a series of low-budget, high-profit “Beach Blanket” pictures. The all-powerful Production Code, in place since the 1930s, was losing its authority, picture by picture. In 1953, The Moon Is Blue had shocked the country by using the words “virgin” and “seduce,” and since then every scenarist knew the Code’s three general principles by heart:

  1. No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin.

  2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.

  3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

  To articulate those principles ten years later was to engender laughter and disparagement. According to historian Ethan Mordden’s appraisal of 1960s features, a new Ten Commandments made their way into the filmmakers’ credo:

  1. Thou shalt treat with irreverence that great American taboo, religion.

  2. Thou shalt question the fairness of the American political system.

  3. Thou shalt question even the values of that most sacred place of all, Hollywood itself.

  4. Thou shalt despise even war-making.

  5. Thou shalt question the beauty of marriage.

  6. Thou shalt question even the very nature of romance.

  7. Thou shalt be sympathetic to psychotic heroes.

  8. Thou shalt make merry comedies about disgusting people.

  9. Thou shalt deal most honestly with sex in all its varieties.

  10. Thou shalt deconstruct heroism.

  The Hollywood of the 1960s began with Alfred Hitchcock’s perverse black-and-white horror movie Psycho in 1960, followed by Dr. No, the first blondes-and-violence James Bond film, released in 1962, followed by John Frankenheimer’s paranoid thriller The Manchurian Candidate, and the decade’s last well-received and remunerative blockbuster, Lawrence of Arabia. New leading men were on the rise. Paul Newman, an intelligent young actor with some of Marlon’s brooding quality, had taken center stage with Somebody Up There Likes Me and The Hustler; and the open-faced brother of Shirley MacLaine, Warren Beatty, had made a sensational debut in the 1961 film Splendor in the Grass, directed by Elia Kazan. And there was a great buzz about the Englishman Peter O’Toole. In this new firmament—much of it composed of young men who had been riveted by Marlon’s early performances—the Brando star had begun to drop. Scripts stopped coming to the Mulholland Drive mailbox. His bank account was drained by the business, by his father, by his ex-wives. He was overweight again and in poor shape, the barbells and exercise outfits gathering dust in a corner of his bedroom.

  Marlon’s private life was at its most chaotic and ruinous point. He had to support his ex-wife, Anna Kashfi, and their son, Christian, plus the current Mrs. Brando, Movita, the mother of Miko. But he had lost interest in wife number two as well as wife number one and was currently involved with the Tahitian Tarita. The couple planned to wed as soon as he could extricate himself from his current marriage. If Marlon was to jump-start his professional and private lives, he needed a guaranteed cash flow, and he needed it now.

  Kanter was just the man to provide it. In the early 1950s the Anti-Trust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice had forced film studios to divest themselves of movie theaters; in the early 1960s it forced companies like MCA to make a choice. They could be either agents or producers, but not both. MCA chose production. Like most of his fellow ten percenters, Kanter released his clients and opted for an office at Universal Studios, an MCA subsidiary. In that capacity he offered to rescue Pennebaker by purchasing it for $1 million. As added bait he agreed to back a film Pennebaker had optioned three years before, The Ugly American.

  Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer’s 1958 book followed the map laid out by Graham Greene in The Quiet American, published three years earlier. Both novels were indictments of U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia. Greene’s antihero is a well-meaning young American official in Saigon whose idealism becomes responsible for death and chaos. “Innocence always calls mutely for protection,” wrote the author, “when we would be much wiser to guard ourselves against it; innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” The Ugly American takes place in the fictive country of Sarkhan, and throughout, the novel denounces the U.S. State Department’s history of corruption and incompetence. “A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land,” observes a Burmese journalist. “They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They’re loud and ostentatious. Perhaps they’re frightened and defensive, or maybe they’re not properly trained and make mistakes out of ignorance.”

  Marlon had come to much the same conclusions during his own trips overseas. The story of the Ugly American would give him another chance to make a political commentary in the guise of entertainment—if he could find backing and distribution. MCA persuaded Universal that Marlon was still a box-office draw, and that those who read the Book-of-the-Month Club selection and bestseller would turn out for the movie. In due course a contract arrived. Its provisions were not quite what Marlon had in mind: He would get $270,000 in salary, a far cry from his earnings in the halcyon days. But Universal would guarantee a number of other features to be named later. No other offers came close. Backed into a corner, Marlon signed.

  There were no ulterior motives behind the deal. Kanter maintained a fervent belief in his old client. In his eyes Marlon was a misunderstood, first-class talent who simply needed a few good properties to put him back on top. Universal would supply them. The problem, which Kanter failed to realize, was the supplier itself. No matter how high Kanter had risen, he was still a member of the Universal team. All members of that organization were expected to obey two guiding principles:

  1. Films must come in at or below budget.

  2. At all costs, those features must aim to please the largest possible audience.

  In short, an inappropriate place for a maverick actor. “Career-wise,” said a friend, looking back, “Marlon’s contract amounted to a ten-year prison sentence.”

  Not at first, however. Stewart Stern, the scenarist responsible for Rebel Without a Cause, would write the script for the new Brando film, and George Englund, a businessman-turned-producer, would direct. Englund had never directed a movie, but he had financial interests in Pennebaker and Marlon trusted him. Kanter gave the personnel a green light.

  Marlon yearned to make the film entirely on location in the Far East. He settled for a month in Thailand, and the rest of the time in Hollywood, acting on Universal’s soundstages. This time out he made few demands, but one of them was not negotiable. Jocelyn Brando would play a part, no matter how small, in the picture. There was more than family feeling here. His sister had fallen on rocky times. She was a single mother again, with two boys to raise. Except for the first few years, getting work had been difficult for two reasons: She was drinking hard, and she had been on Hollywood’s political blacklist since the late 1950s. Like her brother, she had been a sponsor of the Waldorf Peace Conference, but unlike him, she and her ex-husband Eliot Asinof had been involved with other left-wing causes. When the blacklisters demanded a mea culpa she gave it to them in the form of a letter that stated she was a naïve pa
cifist, not an angry ideologue. In the first years of the Cold War she had gone along with a crowd of better-Red-than-dead activists, and paid the price for her inexperience.

  The declaration seemed to satisfy the HUAC. Still she had trouble finding roles, and Marlon felt he had to do more than send her checks; he had to get Jocelyn back on track. He cast her as the altruistic director of a children’s hospital. Marlon put on his good-brother face, insisting that Jocelyn had “the true talent in our family.” The statement made excellent copy and the film got started in a whirlwind of good publicity. The Ugly American needed all the ink it could get. In Hollywood, the crusty old mogul Samuel Goldwyn, who had stood up to the blacklisters in his day, denounced the film as unpatriotic even before the cameras started to grind. And on the Senate floor, William J. Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, condemned the new Brando project: Just as the book was unworthy of an American publisher, the movie would be unworthy of an American studio.

  Belligerently, Marlon fired off a response. “Halfbright,” as he referred to the senator, ought to be aware that “there are few countries where a film like this could be made. It couldn’t be done in France, the one-time citadel of freedom. Certainly not in Russia. Only America, England, Sweden, and a few other countries would permit such freedom.”

  Righteous as those words were, they made the cast and director uneasy; they were afraid Marlon would bring his irritation onto the set. They were pleasantly surprised to see him reborn as a total professional, arriving early, his lines memorized, his performance polished. To be sure, he called for many retakes, but this was his customary pursuit of perfection and a small price to pay for such gentlemanly deportment. Privately, though, he remained the same old Marlon. Stewart Stern spoke of the many times that groupies came to the set, surrounding him after work. “He would stop and say, ‘Listen, who do you think you’re asking for this autograph? You don’t know me. I don’t know you. It’s an invasion of who I am to expect me to do this. I have no interest in it and don’t know why you have an interest in having an autograph from someone you don’t know. What possible use could it be?’”

  And in an uneasy memoir, George Englund referred to an evening when he visited a business couple and some other guests at their Pasadena home. He thought to bring Marlon along, assuming that the pair would be impressed by a movie star. The initial chatter was convivial. The group was finishing their entrées when Marlon turned to his hostess.

  “What size are your moons?” he inquired. “‘The brown areas around your nipples, what are they, about silver-dollar size?’ He held up a circle with thumb and forefinger as he munched. She flushed. Marlon waited, pleasant.

  “‘Let’s see them,’ he said.

  “Maximum disarray in the room.”

  To crack the tension, Englund tried a little levity. He said that it was unseemly to have the hostess expose herself at the dining table; for that, she needed an arena and a saxophonist to play stripper music in the background. The tactic worked. To everyone’s relief, “Marlon didn’t persist, but he’d gotten the animals moving around—everyone at that table had a mental picture of something he’d have said was preposterous only a moment before.”

  Perhaps it would have been better to have that eccentricity displayed on the set instead of at the dinner table. Playing the WASPish, condescending Harrison Carter MacWhite, journalist-turned-ambassador, Marlon was the embodiment of a government pawn who mistakes himself for a bishop. He was also less than compelling for the first time in his career. The plot was of little help: MacWhite is given the appointment because he got to know Sarkhan during World War II. He begins as a mouthpiece for American business interests, brainwashed into thinking that his old Sarkhanian acquaintance Deong is a Communist bent on taking over the country. In fact Deong is an anti-Communist. He is also anti-imperialist, convinced that both the Marxists and the capitalists, left to their own devices, would destroy his country. In the end, Deong is killed by Red assassins, and MacWhite, made aware of the arrogance and ignorance of the State Department, resigns his post. The Cold War is irrelevant to America’s moral duty, he concludes; regardless of politics, the American people must battle “ignorance, hunger and disease because it’s right.” When he takes his bland, inarguable message back home, he is ignored. When he tries to appeal to the American public on television, they switch off the program. This indifference, on high and down low, will soon consign an entire region to flames.

  These two portraits of ugly and silent Americans were prophetic, but few heeded their dark messages. The Sunday New York Times book reviewer judged Greene’s “caricatures of American types” to be “as crude and trite as those of Jean-Paul Sartre,” and The New Yorker called the book a “nasty little plastic bomb.” By the time Brando’s movie was released, the war in Southeast Asia had heated up, U.S. advisers were on the scene, a young and vigorous president had energized the nation, and negative overviews of American policy, foreign or domestic, were yesterday’s news. Even then, a display of Brando’s force and originality might have given the film a chance. It was nowhere to be seen. Marlon’s ability to compartmentalize, to shut off the disagreeable parts of his life, had vanished. He became an embodiment of the French proverb “I have so much to do I am going to bed.” With all the financial obligations to women, to the island, to employers and employees, he had simply shut off his talent. Even his comrade and director could do nothing to awaken him; Englund called Marlon’s performance in one scene, shot twenty-seven times, “nearly inert” in every take, and he was being friendly. In addition, the star had surrounded himself with a troupe of lesser performers, Jocelyn not excepted. This was the equivalent of a CEO flanked by weak vice presidents who dare not contradict his whims. Such maneuvering rarely works in the private sector, and in film and theater it is almost always catastrophic.

  Before Universal’s publicists could get any traction, a news event displaced gossip about all films and filmmakers. On the night of August 4, 1962, concerned by a hysterical phone message, Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist made a house call. When no sound issued from her bedroom, he broke down the door and found his patient dead of a barbiturate overdose. Conspiracy theorists immediately went to work. It was known that John and Bobby Kennedy had more than a passing interest in the most famous blonde in the world. It was also known that she had just been fired from the film Something’s Got to Give for her habitual lateness and inability to remember lines. Was she killed by the studios or the politicos? Were the rumors correct? Did the FBI confiscate her notebook and phone records? Or was John Huston right when he grumbled, “Marilyn wasn’t killed by Hollywood. The girl was an addict of sleeping tablets and she was made so by the goddamn doctors.”

  Marlon was less shaken by the speculations than by the fact of her sudden death. He and she had never enjoyed more than a brief encounter, but their lives ran along parallel lines. Each was considered the ultimate sexual presence onscreen. Both were known to be trouble on the set, financially improvident, distrustful, victimized by the flaws they had carried with them since their traumatic childhoods. And both were assumed to be supernovas, fading into myth as viewers watched.

  Monroe was not known for shrewd insights, but her brief summary of Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift had been astute: “They don’t plan their careers too well. They’re not ambitious enough for their talents.” Marlon knew of that remark and agreed with it, but never had a chance to tell her how right she was. Now that Marilyn was gone, he felt the need to write about her, and, in a way, to her. When the news of the actress’s demise hit the wires, he remembered, “Everybody stopped work, and you could see all that day the same expressions on their faces, the same thought: ‘How can a girl with success, fame, youth, money, beauty…how could she kill herself?’” They simply couldn’t believe that the ballyhoo and hype wasn’t truly important to Marilyn Monroe, “or that her life was elsewhere.”

  Marlon believed his own life was elsewhere. In the spring of 1963, he and Kaza
n paid a call on Clifford Odets, in the last throes of cancer. The visit was almost unendurable. Afterward, Kazan wrote, Marlon spilled his guts: “Here I am, a balding, middle-aged failure…. I feel a fraud when I act…. I’ve tried everything…fucking, drinking, work. None of them mean anything. Why can’t we just be like—like the Tahitians?” But going back to Tahiti was not an option just then; nor was the secondary life he wanted, a life devoted to social causes. He had a Pennebaker film to sell. Marlon shook off the self-doubt and depression and plugged The Ugly American in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Boston, as well as Japan and Hawaii. He hit the TV talk shows and patiently sat for interviews. “I have kids growing up,” was his rationale for making the hated publicity tour. “The children made me realize I have a duty to perform.” Initially, the cooperative attitude paid off. For if Marlon’s Fletcher Christian had been mercilessly panned, his Harrison Carter MacWhite won a few hearts, including two critics, who endorsed its tepid editorial. In the spring of 1963 the dependable Bosley Crowther reported that “Mr. Brando moves through the whole picture with authority and intelligence, creating an ‘ugly American’ that provokes dismay but sympathy,” and the Daily News found the role of Ambassador MacWhite to be “one of Brando’s best performances.” Theirs were dissenting voices. The general view was expressed by Time: The leading man “attempts an important voice, but most of the time he sounds like a small boy in a bathtub imitating Winston Churchill…. Through the stuffed shirt peeps the T-shirt, and at his most ambassadorial moments Marlon is unmistakably a man who longs to scratch. The customers will probably feel the same. It’s the natural reaction to a lousy picture.”