Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  It was a strained effort and it did nothing to change Farmer’s mind, or to convince another Panther minister, H. Rap Brown, that the speaker was any more than a rich interloper dealing with his Caucasian guilt. Seale was not as hostile, but maintained an emotional distance. Marlon redoubled his efforts. The house on Mulholland became a retreat for radicals who were passing through town. Much talk about revolution occurred in that living room, and the host spoke once again about abandoning show business and joining the liberationists full-time.

  A monograph put him back on the career track. Cleaver’s autobiography, Soul on Ice, states that he “fell in love” with an English translation of the “Catechism of a Revolutionary.” This inflammatory work was written by once notorious, now half-forgotten Mikhail Bakunin, architect of nineteenth-century Russian anarchism. Cleaver had the pamphlet reprinted cheaply, so that all Black Panthers and their supporters could own a copy. It was a tactical blunder: “Catechism” shed plenty of heat but precious little light. Bakunin’s main thrust was an insistence on revolutionary “purity.” If, for example, patricide and matricide were required of an insurrectionist, then without question he should slay his parents for the higher cause. Whether the Panthers were to take this statement literally was arguable. One thing was certain, though: Marlon did. He called Seale and said he “couldn’t roll” with murder. Quite a few agreed with Marlon, but none would speak out against a fellow Black Panther. Some of them made halfhearted attempts to get the actor back in the fold, but essentially Marlon’s association with the organization was at an end. He never went public with his severance from the Panthers, but began to edge closer to the charities and institutions of the late Dr. King. In the process he went on NBC’s Tonight Show to tell Johnny Carson and some forty million viewers of his intention to tithe himself. From now on, 10 percent of his salary would be donated to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. On the spot, Carson made the same pledge.

  This talk of earnings implied that Marlon would soon be back on the screen. And in December 1968 he did indeed take off for South America, where most of Queimada would be filmed. As the journey began, the clown in Brando asserted itself at exactly the wrong time. Bearded and long-haired for the role of Sir William, he posed a question for the flight attendant at Los Angeles International Airport: “Is this the plane for Cuba?” Terrified, she informed the pilot that a hijacker might be on board. He notified the airport police. Marlon was swiftly removed from the aircraft and brought to an interrogation room. There, someone recognized him: “My God, it’s Marlon Brando!” Profuse apologies followed. Chastened, Marlon went home, then quietly took off for Cartagena. He was three days late for his entrance into Hell.

  3

  Gillo Pontecorvo was, in Marlon’s view, “a complete sadist.” He was also a Communist, a fetishist, and a hypocrite. All this would be revealed on a day-by-day basis.

  Cartagena is situated eleven degrees north of the equator. In the winter, the city’s average temperature is about eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, and on many days the thermometer goes higher. When filming began, Marlon and Gillo made an elaborate show of courtesy and deference. As the work proceeded, the politesse evaporated. Tempers lacerated in the unrelenting heat and humidity, and small disputes spiraled into major confrontations. Gillo insisted on multiple takes without explaining what he was after. After the tenth shot of a facial close-up, Marlon strapped a chair to his rear and continued to do the scene his way, then after each take lowered himself to the ground. The director, a doctrinaire Marxist, made a countermove, inserting passages that were straight out of The Communist Manifesto. Marlon found them anachronistic and lumpy. He refused to read them. Gillo insisted. Marlon got hold of a copy of The Wall Street Journal. Every time he sat down he intently perused the editorial page. Gillo, Marlon noted, detested the paper “as a symbol of everything evil. After scores of takes, he finally gave up; I’d worn him out.” The match had many rounds, however, and Gillo won his share of them. Sometimes, Marlon complained, the director wanted “a purple smile.” Instead “I gave him a mauve smile.” Gillo continued to reshoot “until he got exactly what he wanted, even if I got a dislocated jaw in the meantime.”

  Bandits roamed the outskirts of Cartagena and made frequent forays into the city. Nervous crew members acquired firearms. Pontecorvo roamed around with a holster on his belt, the pistol loaded and ready to fire. Marlon didn’t bother with sidearms. He remained on the set or near it, save for weekends, when he was conveyed to the airport by an armed driver. From there, he flew to Miami and then on to Los Angeles for rest and relaxation while everyone else sweltered.

  He was not always so self-centered. As the filming went on, Marlon noticed something peculiar. Gillo had hired a large group of black Colombians to act as slaves and extras in crowd scenes. These men were served different food from the white members of the company.

  “That’s what they like,” Gillo explained. “That’s what they always eat.”

  The answer did not sit well with his star. Marlon nosed around and made an unpleasant discovery. Despite his protestations, Gillo was just trying to save money: Meals for los negros were cheaper to buy and easier to prepare, and the men were afraid to complain. More damning revelations followed: Almost without exception, the white extras were being paid more than their black counterparts. Confronted with the facts, Pontecorvo pleaded guilty. But he insisted that if all were treated equally the Caucasians would walk off the set. Marlon heatedly accused his director of racism. Had he forgotten that Queimada was based on the terrible exploitation of dark-skinned people? “Gillo said he agreed with me,” Marlon remembered, “but he couldn’t back down; in his mind the end justified the means.

  “‘Okay,’ I said, ‘then I’m going home. I won’t be a part of this.’”

  He arranged to be driven to the local airport. As passengers prepared to board the plane, a messenger called out Marlon’s name. The young man presented a letter from Pontecorvo promising to equalize all pay and food. It was the Chaplin capitulation all over again, this time in Spanish.

  Several months down the line Marlon and Gillo went to war again. For thirty-six weeks the set had been plagued by difficulties. Some were circumstantial—petty thievery, unrelenting heat, tropical rashes, dysentery. Some were self-induced, ranging from rampant drug use, especially by the camera crew, to Pontecorvo’s indifference to suffering—provided that it was not his own. The snapping point occurred on a particularly molten morning, when Gillo insisted on forty takes of the same scene. Fuming, Marlon performed them all. At the conclusion, he silently walked off the set and flew home to Los Angeles.

  In a few days Marlon sent word to Alberto Grimaldi, the film’s Italian producer. The star would not return to Colombia under any circumstances. No point in apologizing, wheedling, or threatening; his demand was not negotiable. Find a more habitable workplace or forget about finishing the picture with Brando. The producer and director had no options. They scouted locations with compatible light and background, settled on Morocco, ran the choice by Marlon, and won his grudging approval. Filming resumed, one month behind schedule. Later Pontecorvo admitted that he “shouldn’t have been so stubborn. I should have realized that Marlon was not in the mood and put off the scene for another day.” His obstinacy was to cost the production an additional $700,000, and to virtually guarantee the movie’s unprofitability.

  And yet in those last days there occurred one moment of grace, and it was enough to justify all the skirmishes and miseries. At the denouement, Sir William vainly attempts to persuade Dolores to choose freedom over martyrdom. The scene was overlong and ineffective as written. In a sudden burst of inspiration, Pontecorvo slashed the dialogue. In its place he would use Bach’s mournful partita “Come Sweet Death” to convey the tragic quality of the scene. Without informing Marlon of his decision, he gave the actors their abbreviated dialogue. A recording of the music played as they went through their paces. “Since Brando is like an ultra-sensitive animal,�
�� said the director, “he was so moved by the music that he performed one of the most extraordinary scenes he ever played.” The crew agreed; they burst into applause afterward. Marlon knew that something unprecedented had been filmed that day. He dared to hope that Queimada might do everything he wanted: simultaneously making a moral declaration and restoring his image as a serious and concerned performer.

  Once filming was done, the opponents put on masks of collegiality. Pontecorvo designated Marlon “the greatest actor of the contemporary cinema,” although he followed this with a sly reference to his on-set behavior: Brando is a man who “with one expression covers more than ten pages of dialogue. And he is the only one who can do it. His eyes simultaneously express sadness, irony, skepticism, and the fact that he is tired.”

  Marlon took a lot longer to acknowledge his debt. During the last days he told a Life reporter he “really wanted to kill” Pontecorvo.

  “But why?” inquired the journalist.

  “Because he has no feeling for people.”

  Another question: “Have you ever tried to kill anybody?”

  “I once tried to kill my father. Really.” He stopped to consider his hostility to the director. “I always used to imagine I was killing him by pulling out his corneas.” It took twenty years before resentments had cooled enough for a mellower Marlon to revise his opinion. In his memoir he called the bête noire “one of the most sensitive and meticulous directors I ever worked for.”

  Had the film thrived, Marlon and Gillo might have reconciled. It did not. Released in the United States as Burn!, the film was severely edited—twenty minutes were cut out, resulting in a lapse of coherence and some awkward links in the story. It got a hostile reception. The New York Times’s new movie critic, Vincent Canby, advised readers that Brando was almost always worth watching: “You should enjoy seeing him here, using that Fletcher Christian accent and, towards the end of the film, looking very much like the late Ernest Hemingway, a tired and tragic hero whom life has somehow double-crossed.” A pity the rest of the feature was only “the sort of prole pageant in which characters always seem to be conceptualizing great issues, mostly freedom, as they pass in front of history, as if it were a scenic view, instead of moving in and out of it.”

  In a thoughtful New Yorker piece, Pauline Kael gave with one hand and took away with the other. Marlon’s performance delighted and confused her: “The oppressor as cynical clown is an entertaining idea, and perhaps the audience needs his foppish foolery.” However, “When the role is played with Brando’s bravura, so that Sir William becomes a daring white loner who loved and betrayed the blacks, it’s a muddle, because we simply don’t understand his motives or why he is so zealous in crushing the rebellion.” Other reviewers were generally dismissive, assessing Marlon’s role as “rudderless” and condemning the movie for its Marxism 101 approach to colonial history. The overheated Burn! contrasted harshly with the austere brilliance of The Battle of Algiers. Like too many Brando movies of the 1960s it went away quietly. Pontecorvo never again directed a full-length film, and Marlon described himself as truly “washed up and unemployable.”

  From here on, he decided, all his time, energy, and money would be devoted to making Tetiaroa into an Eden. Settling down with his pregnant wife Tarita, he would oversee a showplace of irreproachable beauty complete with airstrip and lobster farm. Like so many others before him, Marlon made the mistake of believing that serenity and fulfillment worked their way from the beach to the brain. Alas, just the opposite was true. He knew the poems of Wordsworth, and acknowledged later that the Briton had said it best:

  Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,

  Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!

  But in the very world, which is the world

  Of all of us,—the place where in the end

  We find our happiness, or not at all!

  4

  The late sixties had seen the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X; racial disturbances on both coasts; the early seventies, the shooting of Kent State University students protesting the Vietnam War. Violence had become, as H. Rap Brown insisted, “as American as apple pie.” Richard Nixon packaged himself as a counterweight to civil disturbance, and he made his sale. The last year of the decade began with the Republican being sworn in as the thirty-seventh president of the United States. Less than two hours later, groups of demonstrators shouted antiwar slogans and hurled rocks and beer cans at the heavily guarded presidential limousine. The events were emblematic of a nation divided, with the gaps widening month by month. The death of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower underlined the difference between those who had put his vice president in the White House and those who were subject to the army draft and went out in the streets and on the campuses to demonstrate, singing Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” with its ominous lyrics “You don’t need a weather man / To know which way the wind blows.” Popular culture mirrored this conflict of ideas and ages: Smooth, mindless entertainment like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did well; so did Medium Cool, with its footage of police violence during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. In the Broadway theater, the musical 1776 celebrated America’s Founding Fathers—and the revues Oh, Calcutta! and Hair defied the traditional taboo against obscenity and full-frontal nudity in popular mass entertainment. On the nonfiction best-seller list, The Emerging Republican Majority vied with Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. And among the novels were The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, a farce about organized crime, and The Godfather, Puzo’s deadly serious examination of the same subject: “No matter how poor or powerless the supplicant, Don Corleone would take that man’s troubles to his heart. And he would let nothing stand in the way to a solution of that man’s woe. His reward? Friendship, the respecful title of ‘Don’ and sometimes the more affectionate salutation of ‘Godfather.’”

  Unwittingly, Puzo tapped the public’s desperate appetite for rationality and control—even at the hands of criminals. Readers, battered by too much news, too much information about strife at home and abroad, made The Godfather a phenomenal bestseller. It was as if they needed to believe a Vito Corleone existed, that violence made sense if you looked at it a certain way, that, for example, a Mafia don could exact revenge against wrongdoers, seeking his own kind of justice, controlling vast swatches of modern life from his living room. Puzo had served a long apprenticeship as a freelance journalist, writing stories and articles for men’s magazines like Stag and Male, as well as articles for such upmarket publications as Redbook and Holiday. His first three books were well received by critics and ignored by the public. With a gambling habit and four children and a wife to support, he determined to write a work of purely commercial fiction. Though Puzo knew no gangsters personally, he had heard stories about the Cosa Nostra for years, tales of brutality and loyalty, of stone killers who would murder in the evening and attend mass the following day, of felons in high places and senators on the take. Using the central figure of Don Corleone, he constructed a strong Italian family whose business happened to be crime. A world rose up from his typewriter. He filled it with recognizable capos, dons, and hit men, politicians, movie actors, and studio big shots. Puzo emphasized la famiglia’s intense loyalties to children, women, and friends, and its lethal approach to those who would poach on its turf. Nicholas Pileggi, the most intrepid investigator of Italian-American criminals, noted that while The Godfather romanticized and exaggerated the Corleones’ power and their influence on legitimate business, “it humanized rather than condemned them. The Godfather himself, for instance, was shot because he refused to deal in the dirty business of narcotics.” Michael Corleone, Vito’s college-educated, war-hero son, assumed his father’s mantle “not out of greed, but from a sense of responsibility to his father who, for all his illegal activities, was a far more honorable man than all the crooked cops, venal judges, corrupt politicians and perverted businessmen who
peppered the plot.”

  As he described the Godfather, Puzo kept the image of one man before him: Marlon Brando. It was a fantasy, he told himself; Marlon would never go near such a story. And who knew if a movie would ever be made of the book? Still, an author could dream…. All the while Marlon was in his South Seas retreat with wife, son, and new daughter, Cheyenne, with irregular forays to Mulholland Drive to tap into his bank account. He knew what the industry thought of him: If Brando could get work at all, said the smart money, it would be for second-rate directors with third-rate material. Indeed, the only valid script that had come Marlon’s way in the late 1960s was a modified horror film to be directed by Michael Winner. The Briton’s last few movies had been sledgehammer farces like The Jokers and I’ll Never Forget What’s’is-name. The Nightcomers looked to be number twelve on the bomb rack.