Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  Undiscouraged, Marlon then took the footage to Jack Valenti, aide to Lyndon Johnson. Valenti assured him that the President would view the film. If he did, nothing came of it. Marlon shopped his work around Hollywood. Everyone was deeply moved; no one offered to lift a finger on behalf of the Biharis. Television networks were next; the reels were screened for a CBS programmer.

  “It’s an effective film,” said the executive, “but we can’t use it.”

  “Why not?” Marlon demanded.

  “Because our news department produces all its own stuff; we don’t requisition or use outside documentaries.”

  “Why not? I was there. What I’m showing you is the truth.”

  “Well, we have policies we have to follow, and we can’t make exceptions.”

  From NBC came an identical response. Marlon thought he knew the reason why. “In the United States,” he resentfully concluded, “we’ve always had our own untouchables—American Indians, blacks, homosexuals. Who knows who will be next?”

  A week after the turndown, an unexpected phone call from Ireland: Marlon had spoken up for blacks and Indians, and John Huston was about to give him an opportunity to represent the third category of the oppressed. The director was holed up at his Hibernian estate, pondering an adaptation of Carson McCullers’s southern-gothic novella Reflections in a Golden Eye. One of the main roles had been cast for over two years. Elizabeth Taylor couldn’t wait to play the spectacularly neurotic female lead, Leonora Penderton. As for the role of her husband, suppressed homosexual Major Weldon Penderton, Huston had a list of candidates: Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, Lee Marvin. They had all refused, and that was just fine with Taylor. Who was more fitting for the role than her closest male friend, Montgomery Clift? Besides, Monty needed a comeback; he had been absent from the screen since Huston’s biographical film Freud in 1962. For the actor had never really recovered from his fateful automobile accident, and since then had slid backward into drug and alcohol abuse. The victim of mood swings, circulatory ailments, and botched plastic surgery, he rarely left his Manhattan town house and avoided all but a few close associates. The lawyers at Warner Bros. knew about Clift’s precarious health; they deemed him too risky to employ. Taylor overrode their objections by writing a personal check for an insurance bond. Her generosity and loyalty were admirable but insufficient. Before negotiations could get under way, Clift suddenly died of a heart attack on July 23, 1966. He was forty-five. Biographer Patricia Bosworth sorrowfully records that the mirror told him what kind friends would not. At the time of Monty’s death, “he looked like an old man.”

  The tragedy spurred Huston on. He was in need of a comeback after the failure of The Bible, his gaudy and tasteless adaptation of the Old Testament, and, starting at the top of his list, he asked Marlon to have a face-to-face chat about the film—just talk, no strings, no commitment. The director would pick up the tab for the round-trip airplane ticket, as well as all other living expenses. Marlon accepted. Huston’s son Tony interpreted this as a yes; what actor would make a five-thousand-mile journey just to refuse a role? His father knew better. Marlon was notorious for quixotic gestures that ended in nothing. The documentary about the untouchables, for instance.

  Few men could be as charming as Huston when he wanted something, and he wanted Marlon. The sixty-two-year-old director put on a mask of paternal benevolence. He appealed to the listener as script adviser, intellectual, fellow artist. Marlon matched the confidence man trick for trick. He made a big show of mulling over Huston’s proposal, taking a long walk in some faraway fields before making his decision. It was particularly rainy that night, even for Ireland. After an hour Tony and his sister, Angelica, drove out looking for him. “We found him two miles away,” Tony reported. “He knew exactly where he was and he wouldn’t get in the car. He was having a wonderful time.” An hour later, having squeezed the last drop of suspense from the situation, Marlon returned, dried off by the heat of a glowing hearth, and announced, “Yes. I want to do it.”

  Filming began at a military installation on Long Island. Huston kept most of the press at bay, but a New York Times reporter managed to get to Marlon, and found, to his surprise, that the actor was open to questions. Asked why he had chosen to play the role of Major Penderton, he cracked, “Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars plus seven and a half percent of the gross receipts if we break even.” The smile vanished as he added, “Then, the attraction of a book by Carson McCullers. As for the part itself, it’s hard for me to be articulate about acting. What can you say about a certain moment or expression? It’s like Chaplin chewing a rose and looking…there at the end of City Lights… or that final cry by Olivier in Oedipus Rex.” The reporter looked for a trace of irony. There was none. In that last sentence, Marlon had let down his guard. Whatever problems he had experienced with Charlie Chaplin, he still held him in awe as a performer, as he did Sir Laurence. There would be no put-ons this time out; Reflections in a Golden Eye had Brando’s full attention.

  Two weeks later he and the rest of the company, including Julie Harris, Brian Keith, and newcomers Robert Forster and Zorro David, were in Italy. The bulk of filming took place at the De Laurentiis studios in Rome. Reflections was an American story, but Taylor had insisted on filming overseas for tax reasons, and no one argued with Liz, the number one box-office draw of her time. However, those who expected her to be self-indulgent in other ways had a surprise coming. Taylor had been in films since the age of ten; this was her thirty-seventh feature, and two of those had won her Academy Awards for Best Actress. Flamboyant romantic adventures notwithstanding, she was a consummate professional. “Elizabeth comes to the set beautifully prepared,” Huston remarked in an awed tone. “If she does a scene six times, there’ll be six renditions that are almost exactly alike. That sort of attention and concentration deserves some attention itself.” Brando’s technique was the polar opposite of Taylor’s. Directing an early scene, Huston noted, “I could have said, ‘That’s it,’ as I often do; but knowing Marlon and the way he works, I said, ‘Let’s do it again.’ We did it three times, and each time was different; any of them could have been used. I’ve never seen any other actor do that.”

  Fireworks should have resulted when these costars faced each other, but that’s not what happened. Early on Taylor did get annoyed with Marlon’s slurred southern accent. She referred to him openly as “Mr. Mumbles.” When that didn’t work she summoned him to her dressing room and, before a startled Richard Burton, stated, “Young man, just remember you are only a replacement for Montgomery Clift.” The criticism stung, but Marlon knew it was the truth. He was a second choice for Major Penderton. Thereafter, he not only behaved himself on the set, but spoke with greater clarity and started to create a pathetic and deeply conflicted character. Aware of Marlon’s womanizing, which far exceeded his own, Burton initially distrusted his wife’s costar. As he watched the film grow before his eyes, he changed his mind. “Marlon’s immorality,” Burton wrote in his diary, “his attitude to it, is honest and clean. He is a genuinely good man I suspect and he is intelligent. He has depth. It’s no accident that he is such a compelling actor. He puts on acts of course and pretends to be vaguer than he is. Very little misses him as I’ve noticed.”

  As the weeks wore on, Huston found that the actors were the least of his difficulties. He had a grand notion of giving the film an odd, unsaturated look until all that the viewer’s eye saw was black, white, and an almost golden-yellow tone. Warner Bros. production chiefs were nervous enough about the project without this additional frippery. They would never have agreed to make the picture except for Huston’s powers of persuasion—plus the credentials of three Oscar-nominated players (Taylor, Brando, and Harris). Even then, a company official kept saying that the plot gave him the willies and it would give audiences the willies, too; no wonder Tennessee Williams was such a McCullers fan.

  The executive could hardly be blamed for his fears. Very few readers were comfort
able with the novel. On its first page, it reads, “There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed. The participants in this tragedy were two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse.” McCullers proceeded to elucidate, and, in the film adaptation, so did Huston. Major Penderton is a heavily closeted gay man married to Leonora, a nymphomaniacal horsewoman. She is carrying on with the major’s superior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Morris Langdon.

  And this is merely the first layer of complications. Langdon’s wife, Alison (Harris), lost a baby some time back, and in a horrific act of self-abnegation cut off her nipples with a garden shears. Alison’s down time is spent with Anacleto, an effeminate Filipino houseboy (David). Amid all this, Penderton suppresses his true desire—for a handsome G.I., Private L. G. Williams (Forster). Unaware, the soldier nourishes a secret lust for Leonora, standing for hours outside the Penderton house at night, and, on occasion, sneaking in to fondle her underwear. Violence, always hovering over these six, breaks out in a series of incidents, some ludicrously symbolic, others poignant, until the deadly finale, when the major discovers the unbearable truth about Williams’s desires—and his own.

  In addition to experimenting with color, Huston built the film out of set pieces: elliptical, threatening conversations; Leonora’s fascination with whips; her mastery of a sexually powerful white stallion—the very horse that so intimidates her husband; an automobile crash in which all eyes turn toward the noise—save for the major’s, which never swerve from the face of Private Williams.

  None of this could hide a central fact: The two leads were miscast. Taylor was far too glamorous and canny to be the airheaded strumpet she was impersonating, and Brando had too much power and guile to play so clueless a figure. Strangely enough, their flawed interpretations gave the film its peculiar strength. Elizabeth worked diligently to make her Leonora credibly repugnant; Marlon became absorbed with his character’s hidden apprehensions and rages, and vanished into the role. His work was subtle, layered, and completely honest, his best effort since the late 1950s. Weldon’s primping before a mirror, for example, applying cold cream to his anxious face in anticipation of a visit from the beloved—while that very figure is headed for the lady in the adjoining bedroom—are moments no other actor would have dared go for in 1967. To Julie Harris, “It was almost as if he was exploring his own sexuality, yet his work was so beautiful and pure there was no telling where it came from.”

  She was profoundly right about his performance. Everyone at Warner Bros. agreed that Reflections did indeed have a ton of star power. But no one at the studio knew how to sell the film. Given its edgy subject matter, the promotion department opted to go down-market with titillating posters: “Most women in her situation would do the very same thing! They just wouldn’t do it as well—or as often!” “In the loosest sense he is her husband…and in the loosest way she is his wife!”

  Nothing worked. Critics were generally dismissive. Time had little use for its “gallery of grotesques.” Newsweek said the movie was “devoid of style and grace.” If Huston expected recognition from the cineastes at Film Quarterly, he was to be bitterly disappointed. The periodical dismissed the “McCullers brand of Southern decadence,” because it “lacked the Mr. Showmanship flamboyance of Tennessee Williams.” As for the “tepid Major-loves-Private plot,” it might “just as easily have happened at Fort Ord, California.” On the Today show, the most popular morning TV program in America, millions of viewers watched Judith Crist’s annihilation: Reflections “has one possible virtue: it will send you right back to the book because one can’t imagine that the perceptive novel had nothing more to offer than nutty people and pseudo pornography…. An embarrassment for all concerned.” Pauline Kael reversed engines here; at a meeting of the New York Film Critics she nominated Brando for Best Actor. The praise came too late. Panicked, Warner Bros. had reissued Reflections in standard Technicolor one week after the regular opening. That further weakened the film’s distinction, and it faded away.

  In a sense, Marlon was vindicated. He had stated for the record that acting was “a bum’s life in that it leads to perfect self-indulgence. You get paid for doing nothing, and it all adds up to nothing.” And here was the proof. He had allowed some long-hidden part of himself to be on exhibit. He had been a pro, studied his lines, given no one any trouble. In every difficult scene he had revealed the vulnerability and confusion beneath his rough pose. And what did it get him? Hoots, snickers, oblivion. Well, let the critics and crowds have their way. If they thought Reflections was kinky, if they believed Brando had touched bottom in his latest film, they had no idea how appalling shund could be. He was about to show them.

  After the fish-ins, few doubted his devotion to the cause of the American Indian. The African American movement was something else entirely. A new group was getting started in Oakland just then: the Black Panthers, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, calling for militant resistance to racism. Heavily influenced by the post-colonial philosopher Frantz Fanon, Newton held that ordinary blacks—“the brothers off the block,” as he put it—were as important to the Panthers as the lumpen proletariat was to Marx.

  “If you didn’t relate to these cats, the power structure would organize those cats against you.” Given this concern with ghetto dwellers, the organization had no time or room for white people, none of whom were deemed trustworthy anyway. This served to make the Panthers more attractive to Marlon; he found something impractical, outrageous, and romantic in their angry declarations, and resolved to learn more. For now, though, he knew an outsider hadn’t a prayer of entering their meetings, let alone their ranks.

  1967–1970

  Eleven Turkeys in a Row

  1

  The upheavals of the 1960s were old news to Marlon. He watched, amused, as an emerging generation rejected the old moralities and proclaimed itself the vanguard of a sexual revolution. Big deal; he had been a sexual revolutionary since his earliest days in New York. The rise of the New Left also failed to move him; he had been agitating for minority rights before these youths were out of their playpens.

  In other ways, though, Marlon saw that he was being outdistanced and made irrelevant. The Vietnam War, begun quietly in 1964, had fatally enlarged. Eighteen-year-olds were being drafted, and the slogan “If you’re old enough to die for your country, you’re old enough to vote” empowered youth in a new way, and drove their parents to argue against America’s role in Southeast Asia. Chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” antiwar protesters drowned out President Lyndon Johnson’s claims that his projects—the Great Society and the civil rights acts—changed the country for the better. Different terms entered the language: the Establishment—an umbrella term meaning anyone in authority; Fascist pigs, a synonym for the police; “tune in, turn on, drop out,” advertising the benefits of illegal hallucinogens. None of this was in Marlon’s lexicon. He felt marginalized, fortysomething at a time when bumper stickers read don’t trust anyone over 30.

  There were two ways around this. One was to do films that addressed the main currents of American thought. The other was to get personally involved in the new politics—those of the Panthers, for instance. He made a list of priorities and took them in order. The career came first; no point in dropping out like some druggie in Haight-Ashbury, or yelling slogans in a crowd of nobodies. Besides, he convinced himself, the money and celebrity could work wonders for the causes that needed help. That needed him.

  Problems attended this decision. For Hollywood was undergoing its own collisions of reality and fantasy just then, and these reflected the ones in the outside world. Paramount had been acquired by Gulf + Western. In 1976’s Silent Movie, Mel Brooks would caricature that company as Engulf + Devour, and it was not much of a stretch. Charles Bluhdorn, the driving force behind G+W, was an acquisitive type-A executive, a shark who could never rest. His company had seven divisions: manufacturing (automobile and airplane parts); distribution (warehouses an
d outlets); metals (zinc mines); agricultural (vegetable and citrus fruit processing); consumer products (Dutch Masters and Muriel cigars); forest and paper products (towels, paper plates); insurance, financing services, and banking (Associates Investment Company, Capital Life). By obtaining Paramount Bluhdorn could create a new division, Leisure Time. As Bernard F. Dick demonstrates in Engulfed, a study of corporate Hollywood, Bluhdorn was both fan and manipulator: “He delighted in visiting a set and posing with a star. Then there was the special kind of power that comes from owning a studio: the power over those who create mass entertainment but lack the autonomy that all filmmakers crave yet rarely achieve. Thus, Bluhdorn could run Paramount on the creative energy of others.” Paraphrasing Lord Acton’s aphorism that power corrupts and “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” critic Kenneth Tynan stated that “power is delightful, and absolute power is absolutely delightful.” So the leaders of conglomerates thought and acted. Taking the example of Gulf + Western, Kinney Services, based around parking lots, grabbed Warner Bros. United Artists merged with the Transamerica Corporation. Traditions washed away in a flood of MBAs and bottom-line accountants.