Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  On paper the picture had much to recommend it. Morituri’s director was to be Bernhard Wicki, a German who had recently directed the bleak, much-praised film Die Brücke (The Bridge). The drama followed six romantic, doomed German schoolboys drafted into the Wehrmacht in the last days of the war. The youths receive one day’s training before being assigned to defend a small span across an insignificant river. Children who were playing cowboys-and-Indians only a few weeks before are helpless against the lethal onslaught of American tanks and ordnance. Marlon found the director’s antiwar views congenial, and when Wicki agreed to cast William Redfield and Wally Cox in small parts, the deal was sealed.

  Once more Marlon invested his part with personality and considerable depth of feeling. Crain has been a decadent adult; now, following British orders, he must pretend to be a Nazi officer. He boards a cargo ship bound for Germany with one intention: to make sure her cargo of rubber—enough to equip an entire panzer division—never reaches its destination. The ship’s chief officer is one Captain Mueller, played with gusto by Yul Brynner, an actor Hollywood found difficult to cast. Marlon thought he knew the reason after Wally Cox mused, “I wonder what Yul would look like if he ever put his legs together.” That was because the actor was forever posturing as he did on Broadway, playing the Siamese potentate in The King and I. Marlon found Yul’s first scene to be stagy and artificial. But he was astonished to see how effective it turned out to be, thanks to some deft illumination. “I had never paid much attention to lighting,” he remarked, “and it made me realize that the man who sets it up can do a lot for your performance or break your neck if he wants to.”

  Yet with all the technical craft, two strong actors, and a good supporting cast, Morituri was slowed by heavy subplotting. A Jewish girl, Esther (Janet Margolin), is taken aboard from a Japanese submarine, along with several American POWs. Esther is less a person than a symbol of her people, violated in a concentration camp and, now, on this Nazi vessel, endangered once more. Captain Mueller is a career officer, disdainful of the Nazis and proud of his son, also an officer in the German navy. Crain does the work a spy is supposed to do, but has a withering contempt for any combatant: “All war is idiotic.” The crew is composed of degenerates, open-faced recruits, and career seamen, the typical assortment necessary for war pictures since The Big Parade in 1925. Moral ambiguity is the theme of the day. The captain is gratified to hear that his son has sunk a ship—only to find that it was a floating hospital. He falls apart. Esther is gang-raped again, goes mad, and is ultimately slain during a gunfight. All this is too much weight for such a fragile vessel. A pity, because Marlon’s German accent is wholly persuasive, as is his progress from effete poseur to reluctant hero. Crain’s diatribes against war are no less convincing than James Donald’s at the end of The Bridge on the River Kwai (“Madness! Madness!”). On the other hand, that film had strong dialogue, an epic structure, and David Lean’s firm direction. Morituri suffered from a lack of coherence and a dearth of badly needed understatement. Marlon was to liken the making of the movie to “pushing a prune pit with my nose from here to Cucamonga.”

  Part of the pushing was done to satisfy Twentieth Century–Fox’s publicity department. For this assignment Marlon essayed a role he disliked: the Gracious Brando. Just before Morituri opened he sat with unaccustomed calm at the Hampshire House in New York, posing for photographers and affably fielding questions from local and international paparazzi. The documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles were on hand to record the encounters, later released as a twenty-eight-minute short, Meet Marlon Brando. Predictably, Marlon flirts with a female correspondent, flashing his killer smile and inquiring about her background. (“It’s unusual to find somebody as beautiful as you who is also a college graduate and seriously interested in world affairs and studying law.”) A fawning journalist comments on his versatility and popularity and Marlon compares himself to a hula hoop—a fad destined to fade. But when a French reporter asks him a question, Marlon recognizes the accent, grows serious, and replies in fluent Parisian argot—obviously the time with Christian Marquand was not entirely spent in pursuit of romance. When a local radio personality makes a remark in German, Marlon answers him in grammatical Deutsch. Even though he makes it evident that fools will not be suffered gladly, his tone is never less than civil. He presents the image of a thoughtful, if playful gentleman who has read widely and challenges the received wisdom of his time.

  Understandably, Marlon’s fellow actors, particularly those who had recently shared soundstages with him, had trouble reconciling two opposing images. Could this sophisticated and patient interviewee be the same man who insisted on altering scenarios, who used cue cards as if he were subject to chronic memory loss, who wrangled with studios, and who generally made a private and public nuisance of himself? It could indeed. Few, in show business or out of it, recognized that Marlon was still on a search, perhaps an Ahabian one, to act onscreen, in his words, “the way it’s never been done before.” To keep delivering, even in middle age, a fresh, second-by-second realization of character. Like the rest of the young actors, Paul Newman watched in wonder and exasperation: “I’m angry at Marlon. I have to break my ass to do what he can do with his eyes closed.” That was because Brando made it look easy. It was anything but. Marlon’s attempt to live in the moment (and only in the moment) was difficult for colleagues to understand, much less to imitate. His ways sullied male friendships and made normal relationships with women impossible. But by this point he could do nothing else, and even in his worst performances, something of the genius Kazan had spotted so long ago was still hard at work. Elaine Stritch summarized it well: “There was never anyone remotely like Marlon Brando. Thank God.”

  3

  As far as the Puyallup tribe was concerned, Marlon played his greatest role at the spot where Interstate 5 passes over the big river, leading down to Tacoma’s Commencement Bay. In 1964 Washington State game wardens had hardened their stance against the tribe, arresting dozens of members. Their crime: taking salmon out of waters their ancestors had fished for over a century. It was one more instance of the federal government going back on treaties guaranteeing Indians the right to fish and hunt on ancestral lands, rivers, and lakes. According to SuZan Satiacum, wife of the Puyallup chief, “All kinds of authorities were coming down to the river and attacking us. And not just the game wardens, it was anyone with a badge.” Their actions were met with total indifference. “Nobody—the newspapers, TV—nobody would want to hear what the Indians wanted to say.”

  The tribe was shrewd enough to hire a consultant, someone who knew how to reach a wider public. The adviser heard about Marlon Brando’s interest in the plight of the American Indian and managed to get a message through. To the Puyallups’ astonishment, Marlon not only sent money, but turned up in Tacoma, walking the bank of the river with a sympathetic clergyman. They borrowed a rowboat, set out a drift net, and caught a small salmon as part of a “fish-in,” modeled on the sit-ins down south. One catch was all it took. When Marlon returned to the shore he was arrested and taken to the Pierce County jail. Anxious to avoid adverse publicity, the county prosecutor released the celebrity on his own recognizance. But the point had been made. “His appearance kind of gave the Indian people more backbone,” said another member. “When Marlon showed up, then we knew the word was out all over town—and it made us braver.” Their new hero did more than supply money. He gave interviews that left no doubt about where he stood. “Christ almighty,” he told a Newsweek reporter, “look what we did in the name of democracy to the American Indian. We just excised him from the human race. We had four hundred treaties with the Indians and we broke every one of them.” When another Washington tribe, the Nisquallys, staged their own fish-ins, Marlon urged his fellow performers to show up. Comedian Dick Gregory flew to the Northwest to lend support; so did Peter and Jane Fonda.

  The tribes gave Marlon what the black civil rights movement could not. African American leaders had let him k
now that he could only be on the sidelines of their struggle; he was too rich, too famous, too Caucasian to join them at the front. In contrast, the Puyallups, the Nisquallys, and others were grateful for his aid, welcoming this prominent white actor into their company. It was with the American Indians that he developed the strongest connection; they became the focus of his compassion, the antitoxin to his contaminated celebrity.

  4

  In the spring of 1965, Marlon took his new and very temporary girlfriend—a Dutch immigrant named Honey—on a drive to Arizona. Indians were very much on his mind, and they stopped at a Navajo reservation. He sought out a medicine woman and attempted to palaver with her. He could see that she had no idea who he was, and on a whim asked for an appraisal. The old lady ran her eyes over his face and body. Through an interpreter she said that alcohol had played a large part in his life. She added that he was about to be struck by lightning.

  “As she said it,” he remembered, “I felt a strange sensation streak through my nervous system.”

  “Both your parents are dead,” she stated.

  “No, one of them is dead—my mother—but not my father.”

  Within minutes he was summoned to the tribal office; a call had just come through for Mr. Marlon Brando. Fran was on the phone. Marlon senior, who had been suffering from cancer for the past several months, had passed away minutes earlier. “We both laughed,” said Junior, “and I said, ‘And not a moment too soon.’” No one could tell how deeply the death resonated with Brando junior. On the surface, at least, he handled it with characteristic dissembling.

  Marlon and Honey drove straight through to Los Angeles. At the end of the long drive they collapsed in bed. As he drifted off, Junior summoned up an image of Senior walking toward the edge of eternity. Just before the old man disappeared forever, “he stopped and looked back again, turned halfway toward me and, with his eyes downcast, said: I did the best I could, kid.”

  After Marlon senior’s death, Junior paid a forensic accountant to examine his father’s investments. The report was grim: Senior’s secrets had gone with him to the grave. Evidently he had deposited cash in banks under a variety of false names. W. C. Fields had done the same thing a generation before, under the monikers Otis Cribblecobble, Mahatma Kane Jeeves, and who knew how many others. Not a single explanatory note was found in Senior’s papers or belongings. No doubt some of his accounts had gathered a lot of interest over the years, but neither Marlon nor anyone else could cash them in. All but one of his father’s financial ventures had been futile. Some money had been invested in a group of gold mines, and not long after his death the price of gold shot up. Had Marlon senior held on to the shares he would have realized a profit. But a year before, he had panicked and dumped them at a loss. Even after death, the father continued to deplete the son.

  The story of Junior and Senior made a fruitful field for psychiatrists; for years the doctors tried a series of therapies. Yet Marlon probably received more aid from his sisters than from professional counselors. A letter from Fran, for example, got him back on track after Senior’s funeral. She reminded him that their paternal grandfather had been “a mean-spirited, rigid, terrifying martinet of a person who had made life so unbearable for our grandmother that she ran off when Poppa was just four years old. Left him abandoned. Left him to a miserable, loveless and terrified childhood with a self-righteous, loveless disciplinarian instead of a father. That was our father’s wound and terror from which he never recovered. He grew up to be six feet tall, and inside his strong masculine presence was a very complicated, troubled and isolated person at odds with himself and often with the world.”

  Marlon held on to the letter, reading it over and over when the dark moods descended. They were hard to shake; at this moment he felt trapped in the Dark Ages of a career, and his instincts did not play him false. The beaches of Tetiaroa were the sole positive note in a cacophony of misbegotten marriages, bewildered children, and unsuccessful films. Contributing to the sadness was the schadenfreude of journalists who seemed to get a special kick out of his failings.

  There was nothing unique about it; from the early days of silent movies, critics and feature writers had derived great amusement from two points in a film star’s career—the rise, when they competed for interviews and wrote gushing features, and the decline, when they took down the once-famous in excruciating detail. Marlon made no protest when it happened to him. He had done no harm to those journalists who had found pleasure in his performances and who had been at his feet only a few years before. He would have been within his rights to utter some public statement about their perversity and ingratitude. None was forthcoming. As he saw it, the paparazzi were simply amplifying Marlon senior’s evaluation of his son as worthless. If the old man was right, if an actor’s life was essentially a sham—as Marlon junior had been stating all along—what was the point in fighting the truth? Let the Hollywood sharks have their way; he would swim in another sea.

  Turning away from Los Angeles, Marlon renewed his efforts to buy the little chain of islands. In the back of his mind was a plan to turn them into a resort. Every time he visited the region he felt a new vigor and peace; surely there were thousands who would get the same effects, people in need of renewal, people respectful of other cultures and of the ever more fragile Tahitian environment. He saw the benefits to his son Christian when he flew him there in the early 1960s, and he wanted to bring him back. For by 1966 Anna’s instability had worsened, and the parental drama, played out in courtrooms and living rooms, had piled on more misery. The twelve-year-old Christian retreated into himself. A textbook example of the syndrome pediatricians called “failure to thrive,” he was angry, underweight, and manipulative, repeatedly lashing out at classmates and at his mother. Marlon, playing the paternal savior, escaped the anger, and Anna, burdened with physical and psychological problems of her own, allowed him to take Christian off to Tahiti. There the two played in the sun and made life into a vacation. The boy grew tan, filled out, and learned something about self-control.

  It was not to last. When father and son got back to the States, Christian returned to his mother’s house in Los Angeles, and she went back to court to regain full custody. As the judge listened, Marlon acknowledged his own shortcomings. But he predicted that Christian would suffer far more from living with his mother than from being with his father. Anna’s instabilities were well masked; her plea was granted. Marlon furiously denounced the decision as “barbaric” once outside, he repeated the word to reporters.

  Now there were even more bills to be paid and, therefore, more films to be made. Next on the docket was The Chase, a melodrama with an unassailable pedigree. Lillian Hellman had adapted Horton Foote’s stage play for the screen. The producer was Sam Spiegel, three of whose films—On the Waterfront, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Bridge on the River Kwai—had won Academy Awards for Best Picture. The director was Arthur Penn, who had climbed rapidly from television to the legitimate theater. His work on Broadway included a string of hits, some of which were The Miracle Worker, Two for the Seesaw, and Hellman’s own Toys in the Attic. Marlon’s costars included four escalating newcomers—Robert Redford, James Fox, Robert Duvall, and Henry Fonda’s saucy daughter, Jane—abetted by the reliable character actors E. G. Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, and, thanks to Marlon’s lobbying, his sister Jocelyn.

  The first inkling of disorder came from the script. Foote was a local colorist first and a polemicist second. Hellman was all politics all the time. Blacklisted for refusing to give HUAC the names of fellow travelers, she continued to pose as the Joan of Arc of the Left, at once intrepid and mendacious, lashing out at the know-nothing Right but forever covering up her defense of Stalin in the 1930s; advocating free speech, but refusing to acknowledge her attempts to silence Leon Trotsky and his followers when they tried to present their side of the Russian revolution. Customarily, Hellman kept her views apart from her stage and film works, but with The Chase she saw an opportunity to fuse current events w
ith fictive ones. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas three years before; the film represented her delayed reaction to that event. The melodrama took place in a Texas town full of over-drawn bullies and cowards. They were meant as an indictment of the United States in the manner of D. H. Lawrence, who saw the American soul as “harsh, isolate, stoic and a killer.” Marlon was the good man in the center, a drawling, well-intentioned sheriff with a distaste for violence. The plot, like that of High Noon, concerns the return of a local malefactor and his effect on a small town. Bubber Reeves (Redford) escapes from jail and heads home to settle old scores. A lot of folks have reason to fear his return. They had crossed the young man in earlier times, framing him for a crime he didn’t commit. In addition, Bubber’s wife, Anna (Fonda), has been carrying on with Jake Rogers (Fox), son of the plutocratic Val Rogers (Marshall).

  Every corner swarms with caricatures. Fat middle-aged bankers slaver over teenage girls partying next door. Migrant workers are paid off with broken-down TV sets instead of the wages they’ve earned. Lower down on the food chain a group of vigilantes gather, armed to the teeth, spouting racist and loutish comments, determined to gun down Bubber as soon as he shows his face.

  Sheriff Calder is all that stands between evil (95 percent of the citizenry) and the desperate and guileless Bubber, who gets arrested before any trouble can start. Then, in a series of overheated incidents, the townsfolk overwhelm Calder and beat him mercilessly—the requisite massacre in Brando films since On the Waterfront. For lagniappe they also assail a black convict in his prison cell. A killing, deliberately evocative of the Lee Harvey Oswald murder, takes place when the handcuffed Bubber is led off to jail. All along, a Texas-accented Greek chorus—a real estate salesman and his wife, played by Henry Hull and Jocelyn Brando—comment on the procession of violent and/or degenerate incidents.