The dialogue was recorded in Marlon’s bedroom, as he sat on a couch, using the oxygen tank when he needed it. Along the way Bendetson encountered the two Marlons. “He didn’t want to be treated like an icon. When you dealt with him you had to talk to him like a regular guy—he was very anti-Hollywood. But then the other part of him—he wanted a little gift to be brought. It was Persian caviar, imported cheeses and red wine. He loved it.”
Marlon’s devotion to calories dropped off in the late spring of 2004, when a precipitous weight loss began. It was an extremely difficult time physically and emotionally. So many had passed: family members, colleagues, enemies. The young—Cheyenne, Dag, Miko’s wife, Jiselle—and the not-so-young, like Wally and Stella and Tennessee and his sister Frannie. The rivals: Monty Clift, Jimmy Dean, Burton, Mastroianni. The hostile authors: Truman Capote, Irwin Shaw. The pal turned treacherous, Carlo Fiore—friends don’t write books about friends. The critics, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes hostile: Brooks Atkinson, Vincent Canby, Pauline Kael. Mr. sui generis himself, Elia Kazan. Marlon could never make his mind up about Gadge, and neither could anyone else. No wonder half the crowd applauded and the other half sat on their hands when he got his Lifetime Achievement Oscar. So many more were gone: Rod Steiger, Christian Marquand, Marilyn Monroe, Anna Magnani, John Huston, David Niven, Anthony Quinn. How could a survivor be anything but a recluse at the age of eighty? Holden Caulfield was right: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
He turned his attention back to the script of Brando and Brando. It was hot in Los Angeles in July. Outside, the atmosphere was mephitic; indoors the filtered oxygen made little difference, and he struggled for air. Angela and Vie saw him gesturing and finally acknowledged that a real doctor had to come to the rescue. Angela dialed 911 and asked the operator for help. An ambulance arrived; the EMS crew loaded Marlon onto a stretcher and took him to the UCLA Medical Center. The physicians quickly learned the identity of their patient; they did the requisite tests in an attempt at resuscitation. They discovered that Marlon Brando, age eighty, was suffering from obesity, pulmonary fibrosis, diabetes, cardiac failure, and an enlarged liver that indicated the presence of cancer. They summoned his closest relative, Jocelyn Brando, from her home in Santa Monica. She sat at Marlon’s bedside and on July 1, 2004, at 6:30 p.m., saw him out. “He just took off,” she said. Her brother’s passing was “quick, it was easy—just the way he wanted it.”
Word immediately went out. It was common knowledge that Marlon had been ailing; even so his demise sent shock waves through the show-business community and beyond. The White House issued a rare statement: “America has lost a great actor of the stage and screen. His award-winning performances in films such as On the Waterfront and The Godfather demonstrated his outstanding talent and entertained millions across the country. Marlon Brando was one of the 20th century’s finest actors and will be missed by his many fans and admirers.”
All major newspapers ran lengthy and conflicted obituaries, extolling his finest roles, noting the profound changes he brought to live and film performance—and lamenting the many ways in which he squandered his gifts. The New York Times’s lead was typical: “Marlon Brando, the rebellious prodigy who electrified a generation and forever transformed the art of screen acting but whose obstinacy and eccentricity prevented him from fully realizing the promise of his early genius, died on Thursday at a Los Angeles hospital.” USA Today’s headline was more succinct: BRANDO REMEMBERED AS BRILLIANT, BIZARRE. There were also irresponsible and unfounded reports of Marlon’s indigence. Legal bills for Christian Brando’s defense were still to be paid, it was said; there were ten surviving children to support and all sorts of household expenses. In Britain The Independent reported that Marlon “was by all accounts living in virtual penury. His home was a shabby one-bedroom bungalow in Beverly Hills.” And The Scotsman told its readers that the star “who was credited with reinventing acting for the screen…went from the first man of Hollywood to a highly eccentric and cantankerous recluse forced to live on social security.” Another biography, Brando in Twilight, by Patricia Ruiz, claimed that Marlon owed banks almost $5 million. “So frightened was he of debt collectors,” Ruiz wrote, “that he hid away his Oscar statuette for the 1954 performance in On the Waterfront.”
More incidents occurred the following week. Marlon had asked his business manager, Jo An Corrales, to ease his mind: In the event of his death the corpse would be locked from public view. And then, in another of her boss’s mercurial gestures, she was fired only a few weeks before he was taken to the hospital. Absent her authority, Marlon’s heirs and assigns took over the funeral arrangements, allowing visitors to view the body at a Sherman Oaks funeral home. To have the ultimate private figure exposed in this manner “was appalling,” complained Marlon’s longtime makeup man Philip Rhodes. “That was the last thing Marlon would have wanted, to be put on display like that.” On principle, Rhodes stayed away from the viewing, as did almost all of the Brando cronies. One wish of the deceased did come to pass: In accordance with his instructions, he was cremated. The ashes, along with those of Wally Cox, kept for decades in the Mulholland house, were scattered in Death Valley and Tahiti. During the mourning period a distraught forty-year-old woman named Lisa Warmer suddenly showed up at the front door of the Brando house. “Marlon Brando is my father,” she sobbed. “I found out about him six years ago when my mother [actress Cynthia Lynn] told me. He was always too ill to see me, but now I want to be where I belong, with my siblings.” Security guards turned her away. In contrast to Warmer’s unhappy account, the seventy-seven-year-old Greek actress Irene Papas chose this time to tell a correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera that she and Marlon had enjoyed a long, clandestine love affair. “Perhaps I’m wrong to speak about it,” she said, “now that he’s not around to contradict me, but I’m confessing it precisely because, as of today, he’s in the absolute, far from everybody, belonging to everyone.” Papas was hardly alone in her nostalgia for the lost lover. But almost all the others—and there were scores of them—chose to keep their emotions private. One who did not was Angela Borlaza Magaling, who called herself the “majordomo” of the Brando household in Marlon’s final years. She sued his executors, claiming to be “the victim of fraud, deceit and a broken oral contract with Marlon, who promised to give her a house.” She sought proceeds from the sale of the home, whenever it was bought by a new owner, plus $2 million in punitive damages.
Whatever her other qualifications, Magaling had a much better idea of the Brando fortune than the rumormongers who said that Marlon had died broke. Probate documents filed in Los Angeles court showed that he left an estate valued at over $21 million. Investments alone gave him an annual income of $500,000. Yet the reports were not wrong when they suggested that he had lopsided financial and moral obligations. Marlon’s will identified many surviving children. They included Christian, forty-six, by Anna Kashfi; Miko, forty-three, by Movita Castaneda; Teihotu, forty-one, and Rebecca, thirty-eight, by Tarita Teriipaia (Cheyenne was the third child by this marriage). Also mentioned were three children he had by Maria Ruiz: Ninna, fifteen; Myles, twelve; and Timothy, ten. In addition there were Maimiti and Raiatua Brando, ages twenty-eight and twenty-three, mother unacknowledged. An instance of Marlon’s quixotic kindness and antipathy was also revealed during the reading of the will: In addition to the biological children, he had a daughter by adoption. Petra Brando, thirty-one, was the biological daughter of his onetime assistant Caroline Barrett and James Clavell. The man who had written Shōgun and written and produced The Great Escape was married, and would not leave his wife to marry Barrett. Marlon stepped in, paying the bills for Petra’s education in college and law school, suing Clavell (unsuccessfully), and later setting up Caroline and Petra in London. Petra had flown to his side when news of Cheyenne’s suicide came in. The two were very close until, at the time his income began to dry up, he asked mother and child for repayment. I
t was not forthcoming, and he initiated a lawsuit. The court judgment went against him. Furious, Marlon responded in his last will and testament. Still hurt and bewildered by Cheyenne’s suicide in Tahiti nine years before, he also made certain that Tuki, Cheyenne’s fourteen-year-old son, would not be considered part of the family. “I intentionally, and with full knowledge of the consequences,” read the legal statement, “do not provide in my will or in my living trust for Cheyenne’s issue or for Petra Brando, or for any of Petra’s issue.”
Film historian David Thomson observed that Brando’s millions seemed “like enormous wealth, but in truth it doesn’t eliminate the possibility that Brando was at the end of his rope.” Thomson crunched the numbers. The house was evaluated at $10 million, although repairs and maintenance had been severely neglected. Any new owner had to be prepared to spend seven figures in improvements and restorations. Tetiaroa and the other small islands were probably worth several million, but Marlon had put a lot more than that into their development, only to see it all come to nothing. To the end, his outlay was enormous—taxes, and gifts to activists and their social causes, hangers-on, out-of-luck actors, friends, offspring. The checks in the mailbox, on the other hand, were nowhere near as sizable as they might have been.
On the films that established his reputation—The Men, Streetcar, Viva Zapata!, Julius Caesar, On the Waterfront—Marlon had been paid a flat fee. Those classics had made other people rich. When actors began to get large pieces of the profits, he was not enough of a businessman to negotiate profit-making deals. Mutiny on the Bounty was the one picture that gave him a chance at real participation—10 percent of the gross. But for good and bad reasons it never made a profit and didn’t contribute a cent to his old age. Concluded Thomson, “I do not seek your tears on Brando’s behalf—he was too often his own greatest enemy—so much as understanding. The way in which he became so hostile to the picture business and to acting had to do with his savagely mixed feelings about the money. And that’s how a movie star sitting on a twenty-million-dollar estate could feel himself tricked, exploited and just scraping together the means of existence.”
In Marlon’s final years more was written about what he registered on the scales than what he did on the screen. Scrutinizing the newspaper coverage, Peter Bogdanovich remarked that almost every obit showed photographs from the first six films and The Godfather, barely acknowledging the other thirty-three movies. “Had his death come twenty-five years earlier,” wrote the cineaste, “it felt as though the references about his professional legacy would not have been very different.” Marlon’s was indeed a front-loaded career, with only a handful of noteworthy features after Waterfront. In his wake new and exciting young actors came to attract public attention, different studios were established, and fresh cinematic techniques supplanted the old ones. The public memory is short. Given the examples of so many of Hollywood’s leading men, including John Barrymore, Paul Muni, and, for that matter, Montgomery Clift, his reputation was expected to suffer a posthumous decline. That never occurred—though there were many who tried to bring it down. The Brando image continued to glow despite their efforts. Until July 1, 2004, everyone agreed that Marlon was larger than life. Just then, no one understood that he was also larger than death.
The King Who Would Be Man
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The posthumous slurs began with Tarita Teriipaia’s curious little volume, Marlon, My Love and My Torment. Now that her husband was safely dead, she described the marriage as a living hell. On the basis of a lone entry in the disturbed Cheyenne’s diary, she accused Brando of sexual abuse. Darwin Porter’s larger but equally distasteful Brando Unzipped concentrated on Marlon’s nocturnal prowls. “At Brando’s peak,” ran the publisher’s blurb, the actor’s “list of lovers read like a Who’s Who of the cultural elite”: Bob Dylan, Gore Vidal, Leonard Bernstein, Joan Collins, Faye Dunaway, Bianca Jagger, Kim Stanley, Rita Moreno, Shelley Winters, Tyrone Power, Gloria Vanderbilt. Denials by Brando’s alleged bedmates were useless. (Vidal had an especially tart disclaimer in his memoir Palimpsest.) Having cashed in on the subject’s faults and inadequacies, Porter finished with a flow of crocodile tears. “The kids who had flocked to see The Wild One in the 1950s had grown up and sired rebellious children of their own. Now, they could even scoff at the idol of their teenage years.
“To his new best friend of the 1990s, Michael Jackson (of all people), Marlon confided, ‘My good-bye has been the longest good-bye in the history of show business. My tragedy was I didn’t know enough to get off the stage when the play had ended.’”
This was followed by a stage version of Unzipped at the Minnesota Fringe Festival. Devoted to the relationship between Marlon and Wally Cox, Bud ’n’ Wally was set in Marlon’s hospital room hours before his death. As Brando lamented the loss of his old pal, Cox’s apparition materialized and the two conversed in what a local critic called “tedious whininess.”
On the assertive new medium of the Internet, a chorus of denigrators chimed in. Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout disgorged his long-held malice under the headline non-contender. The New York Times obit, Teachout reminded his readers, claimed that Marlon’s “‘erratic career, obstinate eccentricities and recurring tragedies prevented him from fully realizing the promise of his early genius….’ For what it’s worth I never cared for Brando, not even in A Streetcar Named Desire—I thought he was a self-indulgent, undisciplined ham…it strikes me that his admirers, however fervent, ought to squirm at the use of the word ‘genius’ to describe him.”
Richard Schickel’s biography, written in Marlon’s last years, contrasted two actors. “Paul Newman is almost exactly Brando’s age and he is everything Brando is not. He is fit and attractive. He has endured personal tragedy [the suicide of a son] with dignity and courage. He continues to find serious work that engages and challenges him. He has also found causes that elicit his concern, and he is practical-minded and effective on their behalf. He has, as well, found a way to remain present in the world, and at the same time to maintain his privacy…. One thinks that perhaps, in his sleepless early morninghours, Brando, too, wishes he were Paul Newman. Wishes, that is to say, that he did not have to waste the gains he considered ill-gotten on a stunned and reclusive search for coherence.”
Similarly, at intellectualconservative.com, Nicholas Stix compared Marlon to another performer with a different track record. “In the field of acting, Gene Hackman may not be Brando’s equal in raw talent, and certainly hasn’t had the sort of scripts sent to him that Brando did. Hackman, the plain-looking, balding, quintessential late-bloomer, who as an acting student flunked out of the Pasadena Playhouse, where he was considered the worst student in its history, got his first role after his thirtieth birthday. And yet, Hackman has had the more brilliant career, fully exploiting his own considerable gifts, and making the most of every role he has played.” It was “as if the young Brando had made a deal with the Devil to quickly attain greatness, but Lucifer had now exacted his price, which required that Brando continually disgrace himself and his profession, and become a porcine parody of his formerly handsome self.”
The popular Web site listology.com presented a roster of ten overrated actors. Marlon Brando came in fifth: “His only good role was as Vito Corleone; everything else was self-absorbed, pretentious crap.”
On the Left-leaning buzzle.com, Timothy Sexton castigated the director and star of On the Waterfront. “Having destroyed several lives with his [HUAC] testimony, Kazan came under attack from certain quarters for his cowardly action. His response was a film that is so highly regarded it verges on the nauseating. (I’m not even going to get into the almost campy melodrama and the hysterical acting. I know it verges on a sacrilege to suggest that Marlon Brando was ever anything but brilliant during the 1950s, but in my opinion you won’t see a more affected piece of acting in any other movie released during that decade.)”
On the Right, the Fundamentalist Baptist Information Service used Marlon as
an exemplar of sinful profligacy: “Brando had everything this world has to offer, looks, talent, money, fame, and the means to pursue every whim and pleasure, but he squandered his life on rebellion against Almighty God and rejected salvation through Jesus Christ. He ‘had it all,’ but in reality, he had nothing.”
Among the “all” that Marlon had were his worldly possessions. These went up for auction at Christie’s New York showroom a year after his death. Examining the goods, British journalist Anthony Haden-Guest found the process cringe-making: “Marlon Brando was so uncomfortable as an icon and so reflexively private a man that rummaging through his things made me feel less a reporter than a voyeur.” Among the 320 objects were some knickknacks (Marlon preferred the Yiddish word chotchkes) that could be found in any middle-class suburban home: shell chimes, a Japanese paper fan, a wooden Buddha figurine, a black and white ceramic dolphin. Some parts of the sale seemed a violation of privacy: Brando’s American Express cards, his driver’s license, his Screen Actors Guild membership card, 00003839. Listed in the catalog were a framed photograph of Rita Moreno, nude; doodles idly drawn in pencil; a foosball table; a black Yamaha piano; drums, one bearing a drumhead tensioning device for which he had obtained patent number 6,812,392; letters from family members and colleagues, including one from Karl Malden that obviously meant a great deal to the recipient: “Last night I went to see A Dry White Season and I don’t care if you are five hundred pounds or fifty pounds. You are a fucking genius.”
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