The Ugly American died at the box office, completely overwhelmed that year by a slew of better films, including The Birds; Tom Jones; From Russia with Love; Hud, starring “the new Marlon Brando,” Paul Newman; and, predictably, Cleopatra. Because of that epic disaster, Fox had been forced to sell off 176 acres—almost the entire back lot—to real estate developers. They would call it Century City; the columnists and fans of old-time films, aware that this was the end of Hollywood’s long line of sword-and-sandal epics, called it heartbreaking.
In Marlon’s private life, pandemonium ruled supreme. Since the marriage with Movita was in name only, she took up with another man. Her legal husband continued to prowl. After one encounter he was accused of fathering yet another child. A laboratory test showed that this time, at least, he was not responsible for the pregnancy. But the newspaper stories made Marlon Brando out to be incorrigibly juvenile and irresponsible. Meanwhile, Anna kept at him in court, labeling him “morally unfit,” and intensifying their custody battle. Tarita’s child was far away in a benign climate and tranquil surroundings. His half brother was not so fortunate. Miko had become a total misfit, anxious to be noticed by a father who was more of an absence than a presence in his life. He was a terror with visitors and babysitters. These included Wally Cox and his wife, who couldn’t stand the boy and said so. They were simultaneously saddened and relieved when Marlon confessed, “I don’t much like him either.” At the same time, observed a friend, Christian had turned into “a little devil.” This was not meant to indicate a mischievous kid out of an Our Gang comedy. The youth was cruel to pets and made angry messes with his food and toys. He seemed beyond discipline—then abruptly morphed into the soul of goodness when his father entered the scene.
There is no sadder summary of that time than George Englund’s. After he was divorced from Cloris Leachman, he saw his second son, Bryan, become fatally drawn to illegal drugs. Attempting to intervene, he found Brando restive and unhelpful. “I think Marlon didn’t like what he perceived as my authoritarian way with Bryan,” Englund ruefully noted; Marlon Brando, Jr., still winced from an “old sensitivity to his own father’s angry authority.”
It was as if nothing had been learned in all the intervening years: Marlon senior’s coldness and brutality had been replaced by Marlon junior’s inattention and self-indulgence. It would be ten years before these shortcomings came back to haunt Brando with a terrible vengeance. But the stage was already set for failed fatherhood.
4
Stanley Shapiro served his apprenticeship in radio and television, where he learned the basics of situation comedy. He made an easy transition to films, establishing himself as a master of well-constructed farce, most notably with the Rock Hudson–Doris Day feature Pillow Talk and two Cary Grant pictures, Operation Petticoat and That Touch of Mink. His new script, Bedtime Story, had great promise: Two cads ply the Riviera looking for rich women. Originally rivals, they unite to steal the fortune of a soap heiress. But she is something of a con artist herself…
Shapiro wanted Cary Grant and Rock Hudson for the roles. Both had other commitments. Marlon read the script and got intrigued with the idea of playing Freddy Benson, an unscrupulous American charmer. David Niven was recruited to impersonate the smooth-talking charlatan Lawrence Jameson. The scenarist was glad to have Niven aboard; the Briton was an accomplished farceur. But Brando came with a lot of baggage. On the first day Shapiro confronted him: “I’ve heard some wild stories about you. I don’t know whether they’re true or not. But when we work together I’d like to have an understanding: one, that you’ll be on the set on time; two, that you’ll know your lines.” Marlon was all bonhomie and assurance: “Look, a lot of what you’ve heard was not true. A lot of what you’ve heard may be true—but I had my reasons. You don’t have to worry.”
That guarantee held. He was motivated to be on his best behavior; for one thing Marlon knew Niven from the early days in Hollywood and wanted to impress him. “Working with David,” he remembered, “was the only time I ever looked forward to filming. I just couldn’t wait to wake up each morning and go to work so he could make me laugh.” For another, he knew that Shapiro and first-time director Ralph Levy were not alone in their concerns about the bad Marlon. Class A scripts would not come his way until he repaired his reputation. Save for a few memory lapses, and a tendency to take the comic pacing a lento instead of con brio, he was the consummate screen actor. For perverse reasons he especially enjoyed a bit in which, to separate a woman from her money, he had to pretend to be paralyzed below the waist. To prove the point, Niven, his partner in crime, belabored Marlon’s legs with a cane while the canee maintained a poker face. The scene was not merely masochistic, it was a cruel comment on his paraplegic role in The Men. Marlon was going the impressionists one better: If they were going to do parody, he would do self-parody and leave them speechless.
In his personal life, the backsliding continued. Unable to curb a ravenous appetite for junk food, Marlon gained twenty pounds during the filming; a beach-front scene had to be excised because his stomach bulged over the waistline of his bathing suit. And on some afternoons, he had a distracted air. Those who suspected drink or drugs were wrong. Marlon was experiencing his latest intoxication—a renewed concern for social justice.
With all the tergiversations of life and career he had never got away from the burdened, guilt-haunted childhood; as Frannie wrote: When you were seven or eight you were constantly bringing home starving animals, sick birds, people you thought were in some kind of distress. Men, women, children were out there suffering, deprived, disenfranchised, and he was in here getting fat and rich for doing…what? Speaking a few lines, making a few gestures. It was time to make other kinds of gestures, speak other sorts of lines. Time to make a difference. He had been sitting around too goddamned long.
The civil rights movement didn’t wait until the 1960s to begin—the desegregation of the armed forces during Harry Truman’s administration and the integration of southern schools under Dwight Eisenhower’s were markers of a new America. Still, it was the election of John F. Kennedy—with crucial support from African American voters in the key states of Illinois and Texas—that energized the nation. Sit-ins took place at segregated lunch counters. As David Halberstam wrote, “The Negro, according to the Southern myth, is content. Even the young ones. The myth has exploded with the sit-ins.” After hundreds were arrested, Halberstam asked what would happen if the undergraduates at Tennessee State were expelled for their part in the sit-ins. “Then we’ll close the school,” replied Willie Stewart, one of the leaders. “We’ll all go out together. If we all stick together they can’t stop us no matter what is handed down from whom.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s advocacy of civil disobedience gave Gandhi’s philosophy an American translation. It was provided impetus by the Justice Department, under the direction of the President’s brother Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. But it moved too slowly to satisfy the radical advocates of black self-determination. New names cropped up—Sonny Carson, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers. Marlon diligently followed their progress. He would sometimes stay in his dressing room for hours chatting with civil rights activists while the rest of the cast waited around. He was determined to get involved somehow, either personally or by means of future films. This new passion brought him into contact with an old classmate at Stella’s studio, the African American singer and actor Harry Belafonte. He and Belafonte attended meetings with Dr. King and other minority leaders—Chicanos pushing for the rights of Hispanic laborers, Native American leaders addressing the country’s long history of broken treaties and false promises.
Marlon wangled a dinner invitation to the White House, where he hoped to present his ideas for a just society. But at mealtime, President Kennedy deliberately kept the conversation away from politics. As Marlon attacked the pasta, Kennedy challenged him: “Marlon, have you gained weight? Looks like you’ve put on a few.”
“Nary an ounc
e.”
Kennedy grinned. “Then the CIA sent up some wrong information.”
Marlon bet the President that JFK weighed more than he did. A bathroom scale was brought to the room. Brando checked in at 187 pounds. Kennedy was eleven pounds lighter.
“Get some food into this man,” Marlon told the other guests. “You can’t lead the country at a hundred seventy-six.”
The presidential laughter put everyone at ease. On another, more appropriate occasion, Marlon figured, he could speak to JFK and his brother Bobby about civil rights and Indian affairs. They were decent, progressive men. The kind he could talk to.
1963–1967
The Snake in Eden
1
Marlon resolved to be an homme engagé, separating himself from those “Bel Aire dissenters,” who rarely left their gated communities except to go on location. He returned to a Pennebaker project that had been in the pipeline for too long. As he envisioned it, Paris Blues would not only be an entertainment, but a political and social statement. It boasted impressive credentials. Martin Ritt, a director who had been blacklisted for his pro-labor stance, was to guide the outstanding cast. The male stars, one black, one white, were Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman; the jazzmen’s respective girlfriends Diahann Carroll and Joanne Woodward. The narrative would follow the Americans as they fled to Paris to find cultural and artistic freedom. So far, so beguiling. But halfway through, these ingredients failed to jell. Poitier’s boilerplate speeches about racism and Newman’s about the meaning of serious music stopped the action cold. No one was convinced by the finale, in which Newman opts to give up his romance to stay in Paris, and Poitier elects to go home to fight the good fight for equality. When the reviews called Paris Blues “well-intentioned,” praised Duke Ellington’s score as better than the acting, and called the direction “uninspired,” Marlon knew that Pennebaker had struck out. “God,” he told a friend, “let no one ever call me ‘well-intentioned’ again. Those are killer words. Nothing can survive them.”
To assure the world that his motives were stronger than his movies, Marlon took the stage of the Apollo Theater in Harlem, helping to raise funds for a march on Washington. That spring he went on to protest segregation in Alabama, walking side by side with black leaders and a handful of like-minded actors, among them Paul Newman and Anthony Franciosa. The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company in Gadsden, Alabama, had been accused of racist hiring policies; Marlon appeared at the factory gates, identifying himself and his colleagues as “devoted and peaceful representatives of goodwill, not as agitators, interlopers or interferers.” A crowd had gathered by this time, and the hecklers drowned out the few who dared to cheer.
In a matter of weeks Marlon was persona non grata throughout Dixie. He expected no less; justice had a cost, and he was quite willing to pay the freight. To deepen his commitment to the black cause, he tried to get close to Dr. King spiritually and physically. The black leadership kept him at arm’s length, but on August 28, 1963, he stood a few feet back from the speaker when King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Marlon repeated the words of the leader, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” painfully aware that a white film star would always be considered an outsider in the movement.
Never mind; there were other groups battling for civil rights. Perhaps, Marlon thought, he could be of greater aid to them. The American Indian Movement, for example. The double-crossing of the tribes was an old, sad story, but you would never know it from the classic oaters. There they were wild-eyed savages, much given to ambushing cowpokes, downing firewater, and talking about how the white man spoke “with forked tongue like snake.” On the set of One-Eyed Jacks he and Ben Johnson used to kick around the idea of a movie about the real Indians and how they really talked and felt and suffered. Johnson was part Cheyenne; he knew American history better than most. Over at Warner Bros. John Ford had a picture in production, Cheyenne Autumn. It was supposed to cover the trek of a defeated people—maybe Ford’s way of acknowledging all those John Wayne films he’d directed where all “Injuns” are murderers and rapists and kidnappers. (“Livin’ with Comanches ain’t bein’ alive,” says the Duke in The Searchers. “A human rides a horse until it dies, then he goes on afoot. Comanch comes along and gets that horse up, rides him twenty more miles, then eats him.”)
Friends on the Left questioned Marlon about his new awareness. After all, he had made a Western and it didn’t do a damn thing for Native Americans. Yes, he conceded, but that was before the sixties, before the freedom rides, the new implacable itch for justice. Maybe the blacks regarded him with mistrust, but the Native American activists seemed okay with a movie star. He would make common cause with Native Americans, be a bridge to the powerful men and women who cared deeply about minority rights. He knew key figures in Hollywood and New York. Come to that, he knew the President.
Three months later, John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas. Like the rest of the country, Marlon went into shock. His recovery was slow, his outlook confused and unfocused. He had trouble dealing with simple things like weight-watching, and complex ones like repairing his troubled vocation.
Studio executives referred to him as “box-office poison,” and not without reason. The last two Brando pictures had bombed, and Bedtime Story was greeted with very mixed reviews. A few critics were kind; Crowther praised “Mr. Brando’s mischievous glee,” but Judith Crist, the Herald Tribune’s full-throated film critic, was closer to the general opinion when she called the film “a vulgar soporific for the little-brained ones.” When Bedtime Story opened in the deepest South in late-summer 1964, because of Marlon’s speeches in Alabama the Brando name was expunged from lobby cards. For all the moviegoers knew they had bought tickets to a David Niven picture. The Brando luster had dimmed, a fact, said a rueful Pennebaker executive, “evident to him as well as everyone else.” Once more Marlon was faced with two choices: fight or flight. And once more he chose to fly. The Native Americans would have to wait. He had to get out of town. Way out of town. To the South Sea islands.
2
Fleeing to Samoa in search of health, the tubercular Robert Louis Stevenson had described his surroundings: “We dine in state—myself usually dressed in a singlet and a pair of trousers—and attended on by servants in a single garment, a kind of kilt—also flowers and leaves—and their hair often powdered with lime. The European who came upon it suddenly would think it was a dream.” Paul Gauguin, abandoning Paris for Tahiti, wrote of his new liberty: “Seen from my bed, by the moonlight that filtered through them, the lines of reeds some distance from my hut looked like a musical instrument. I fell asleep to the sound of that music. Above me the great lofty roof of pandanus leaves, with lizards living in them. In my sleep I could picture the space above my head, the heavenly vault, not a stifling prison. My hut was space, freedom.” In The Moon and Sixpence, Somerset Maugham’s fictive portrait of Gauguin, a retired French captain described his paradisiacal island home: “We are very far from the world—imagine, it takes me four days to come to Tahiti—but we are happy there…. Our life is simple and innocent. We are untouched by ambition, and what pride we have is due only to our contemplation of the work of our hands. Malice cannot touch us, nor envy attack…. I am a happy man.”
Marlon used to envy those men. Now he could go them one better. There was a coral atoll in the region of Tahiti—a dozen small islands called Tetiaroa—and it was for sale at a bargain price. Authorities had no taste for allowing these unspoiled isles to slip into the hands of an American, but he turned on the charm and began a series of long and complex negotiations. While they progressed, he built a small house on a Tahitian shore. Tarita and their son, Simon Teihotu, moved in with him. They went native, beachcombing, swimming, letting go. It was true that Papeete had been overtaken by tourism—the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld called it “Bridgeport with palms.” But the outlying archipelagoes remained as unspoiled as they were in the days of Captain Cook’s
South Sea voyages two centuries before. Historian Alan Moorehead’s description held true: “The bright festoons of coral, yellow, pale heliotrope, pink and blue, and the myriads of fish, brighter and more fantastic even than the coral itself, some with streaming ribbon-like tails, others streaked and colored like butterflies, shoals of minute minnows that advance and retreat in a pale blue cloud, the occasional turtle, the slimy water-snake, crabs that inhabit shells and clams with scarlet and cerulean lips that close upon their prey and never let go.”
A more dangerous snake in this Eden was debt, the reason Marlon had to keep his eye on the clock. From here on, money would take on a variety of meanings. In theory he should not have felt guilty about a large salary: There were three households to support and children to raise. Capital would reduce the sheaf of bills that stuffed his mailbox every month. But he had read voraciously, and was familiar with Freud’s dictum that “in dreams and in neuroses…money is brought into the most intimate relationship with dirt.” It was no wonder that people referred to the “filthy rich,” and, at least on paper, Marlon Brando now belonged in that reviled and envied group. If this was not guilt-producing enough, he also knew, and to some degree concurred with, Marx’s feeling that money was a distorting power, transforming “love into hate,…virtue into vice,…intelligence into idiocy.” Attached to this was a general malaise, a feeling that something had gone wrong in the center of his life. No therapist had been able to turn things around. There were times when he quoted Macbeth to friends: “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,/Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?” At other times he spoke about throwing it all away, the career, the family, everything. But on clear days he acknowledged that the dilemma of money versus freedom, security versus caprice, was insoluble. He guessed it was the same for every man.
And so in the summer of 1964 he flew back to Los Angeles to report for Morituri. Marlon was to play Robert Crain, a wealthy, complacent engineer waiting out World War II in neutral India. Crain’s life there is a fraud: The fugitive has a Swiss passport, but is actually from Germany. His real name is Schroeder, and his ostentatious pacifism is not born of principle but of cowardice. Enter Colonel Statter (Trevor Howard), an officer from MI-5. British intelligence knows Crain’s true identity and presents him with two options. The German can be returned to the fatherland, where he is a marked man. Or he can become a double agent working for the Allies. Crain chooses column B.
Somebody Page 25