Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  There were medals won in high school for canoeing, boxing, and dancing, and an award for his work in Truckline Café, but no Oscar for his performance in Waterfront. Somewhere along the line, Marlon had lost track of the statuette. There were annotated scripts, books underlined and marked up—above a passage in Eric Hoffer’s In Our Time was the single word “Horseshit!” And there were some surprising videotapes. “Who would have guessed,” mused Haden-Guest, “that the brooding and reticent—except when preachy—man would be so in love with comedy? That he would own wodges of Abbot and Costello, Richard Pryor and The Best of British Comedy, to say nothing of well over three dozen cassettes of Laurel and Hardy?” All this led a Christie’s executive to remark, “It was strange. Just looking around the house, you wouldn’t have been able to guess what his career had been.”

  Marlon’s effects were estimated to be worth, in toto, about $1 million. They brought in more than double that amount. One item, an annotated Godfather script, was sold for $312,000, the highest price ever for a typed scenario. Proceeds from the auction were divided among the children, all of whom had given permission for the sale. Some outsiders objected, to no avail. Biographer Peter Manso spoke for them when he said the auction bordered “on complete tastelessness and Brando would never, ever have wanted this. I can assure you that Marlon is turning over in his grave to think that someone has his driver’s license.”

  The degradation continued; in the same year, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on the sorry state of Tetiaroa. According to Matthew Heller, during Marlon’s decline the island came to be “more like a dystopia than a utopia. Brando, a massively flawed product of the Hollywood dream factory, couldn’t isolate his fantasy island from the storms of his personal life.” Heller quoted George Englund: Cheyenne’s suicide “shattered” her father; “he has never been able to stand on the place where it happened.” Isolated in Beverly Hills, Marlon left the day-today operations to Tarita, who had no administrative or financial experience. “In his absence, the roofs and walls of the hotel bungalows, which should have been replaced every six years, fell apart; garbage, rather than being composted, stacked up where the tourists couldn’t see it; and poachers raided the lagoon, depleting the stock of fish…and the bills kept coming.”

  With Marlon gone, Tetiaroa and the other islands were leased to Richard Bailey, a luxury-resort developer. He promised to keep the area an “eco-resort,” with thirty villas set back from the beach and invisible from the lagoon. But Bailey, Heller wrote, “could build the world’s most environmentally sensitive resort and still wouldn’t satisfy the Brando cohorts, including [his former business manager Jo An] Corrales, who claimed, ‘they are changing the island forever.’” The friends were particularly unhappy with the exploitative name Bailey gave to his Tetiaroa development: The Brando. Grumbled one of them, Marlon “wanted people to go there for Tetiaroa, not because of some movie actor.”

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  While the predators went about their business, popular culture took a very different course. Fan-Tan, the long-abandoned potboiler by Marlon and Donald Cammell, had begun as a screenplay, with Marlon improvising the story and acting out the characters. Cammell then fleshed out the adventures of Anatole Doultry, an amiable middle-aged rogue who sails the South Seas in the company of Chinese pirates. After Cammell’s suicide in 1996, the idea was abandoned. His widow rescued the manuscript and got it to a British publisher. David Thomson adeptly edited the pages and supplied an ending. The prose was reminiscent of a Fu Manchu novel: “Untruth was a violin on which he played like a Paganini of bunkum,” but the plot was rollicking enough to earn some surprisingly good reviews in 2005, among them Joe Queenan’s tongue-in-cheek salute in The New York Times: “To its credit, Fan-Tan never sounds mass-produced or generic; it never has the weary, phoned-in quality of books by Tom Clancy and Stephen King. Instead, it sounds like the boys had a heap of fun cranking out this page turner while throwing back a few hundred martinis. There’s a lot to be said for this approach; if you can’t write a great novel, at least write a peculiar one and have a few laughs along the way.”

  All the while, rockers, who had never lost their admiration for Marlon, kept his name on the charts. Back in 1980 an Australian teenager named Russell Crowe had prophetically written and recorded the song “I Want to Be Like Marlon Brando.” Later there were numbers like Bruce Springsteen’s “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City”:

  I could walk like Brando right into the sun…

  and Jefferson Airplane’s “Madeleine Street”:

  I took an Airplane named Desire,

  I sat next to Marlon Brando…

  and David Bowie’s

  I’m feelin’ tragic like I’m Marlon Brando

  Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” also cited Marlon, as did Elton John’s “Goodbye Marlon Brando,” and the Doobie Brothers’ “8th Avenue Shuffle” and Neil Young’s “Pocahontas”:

  Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me…

  as well as Madonna’s “Super Pop”:

  If I was an actor, I’d be Marlon Brando…

  Finally came numbers like Robbie Williams’s “Advertising Space”:

  I saw you standing at the gates

  When Marlon Brando passed away…

  In the pop pantheon he had been an amalgam of Stanley Kowalski, Terry Malloy, the Wild One, and the Godfather. With his death in 2004 he became one man—the actor Marlon Brando, first among equals. The Establishment, anxious not to be left in the dust, feverishly began working on its own act of rehabilitation.

  3

  Budd Schulberg, scenarist of On the Waterfront, led the reappraisals. In a memoir for Vanity Fair entitled “The King Who Would Be Man,” he wrote of Marlon’s marital conflicts, of the murder and suicide, of the celebrity who had run from fame, who had quested all his life for privacy and peace of mind, and was suddenly dragged into his worst nightmare, a public scandal that became a tabloid dream. “At times,” Schulberg commented, “it seemed to me that some madman was writing Marlon’s story and overdoing it.” In Los Angeles, shortly after Marlon’s death, the author looked up some of Brando’s old friends. All of them mentioned one actor: “Have you talked to Harry Dean Stanton yet? In these last years Harry Dean was closer to Marlon than anyone.”

  Stanton, another “bad boy” resident of Mulholland Drive, was quite forthcoming about his friend. The tall, gaunt character actor, who was something of a searcher himself, spoke of long early-morning conversations the two men had toward the end. Brando “was into poetry, philosophy, and religions. He was curious about everything. We talked about ego from the Buddhist point of view. We talked about Shakespeare. Marlon really knew Shakespeare, and sometimes he would recite whole long monologues from Macbeth, Twelfth Night.”

  Schulberg visualized the two Hollywood seekers of solace, talking from dusk until the first rays of sun entered the room, Harry Dean cast as the misfit and the ailing Marlon “beginning to look like, and think like Buddha.” At one point, said Stanton, Brando caught him off guard. “‘What do you think of me?’ he demanded suddenly. And I said, ‘What do I think of you? I think you are nothing. NOTHING!’ And Marlon began to laugh, and he went on laughing and laughing.”

  Schulberg imagined Marlon happy. “He had finally achieved his goal. Peace, peace at last. What I always wanted to be. Nothing.”

  But it could never be as simple as that, not with Brando. At his memorial on the Mulholland hilltop, with some grown children and a few friends who cared deeply for him, his sister Jocelyn had made a final plea: “It’s over now. Let him be.”

  Concluded Schulberg: “It was a kind and gentle thought. But sorry, Jocelyn. And sorry, Marlon. It’s not your fault. You were just too damned famous. And too damned good. You can turn down those awards all you want. But, like your worst dreams, they’ll keep on coming.”

  The writer was borne out by events. On the American Film Institute’s list of the top fifty stars of the American cinema, Marlon Brando came in fourth
, just behind Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, and James Stewart.

  When the AFI got around to its list of the top one hundred movie quotations, Marlon’s Godfather line “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” was second, just behind Clark Gable’s Gone with the Wind pronouncement “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Brando also had the third most famous quote—Waterfront’s “I coulda been a contender” monologue.

  Time named Marlon Brando one of the one hundred most influential people in the twentieth century; Variety put him on its list of one hundred icons of the century: “Brando elevated acting to such a degree that scores of acolytes emulated his at-times extreme approach to inhabiting a role, from James Dean’s tormented Oedipal thrashing in East of Eden to Robert De Niro gaining forty pounds to pummel his way through Raging Bull. If Stanislavski’s writings became the bible for anyone serious about digging deep for a character’s essence, then Brando became the poster boy for the Method.” The entry for Brando in the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture was no less flattering; it stated that he would remain “unchallenged as the most important actor in modern American Cinema, if not the greatest of all time.”

  Looking back, Francis Ford Coppola spoke of Marlon’s way of working. “He felt that in life you don’t know your lines. So why learn your lines and then try to make people feel as if they’re coming to you spontaneously? He liked to struggle for the lines because that’s a real thinking process.” In 2007 the Turner Classic Movie channel examined that process in a three-hour documentary. The life and times of Marlon Brando were traced from Omaha to Broadway to Hollywood, before going on to Tahiti and the poignant finale. Marlon’s contemporary Martin Landau remembered the classes with Stella Adler. His fellow student “was theatrical without being theatrical. It came out of an honesty, but because of its size and scope, it had a style and [Adler] was smart enough to see it.” Martin Scorsese underlined Marlon’s “understanding of suffering and obsession.” Now was the time, said the director, especially for younger people, to go back and see the Brando films “in the order in which they were made. Mainly because, I think, now they’re too hip to feel those emotions that were exploding on the screen with him. It’s about being human.” The actors who came of age under Marlon’s influence, among them Johnny Depp, Frederic Forrest, John Turturro, Dennis Hopper, and Jane Fonda, delivered awed tributes. Bernardo Bertolucci and Arthur Penn added their own accolades. Several major figures in Marlon’s life were missing from the screen; Jocelyn, who had died at the age of eighty-six in 2005; Coppola, who preferred not to participate; and Jack Nicholson, who had written about his late friend and obviously felt that nothing more need be said.

  “Marlon Brando is one of the great men of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” Nicholson wrote in Rolling Stone, “and we lesser mortals are obligated to cut through the shit and proclaim it. This man has been my idol all of my professional life, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. The impact of movies is enormous, and his impact in the movies was bigger than anyone else’s—ever….

  “I think Marlon knew he was the greatest. I don’t think he dwelled on it, nor did he ever say as much to me. But, come on, there was a reason people expected so much from him right to the end. That’s why people always expected him to be working. And believe me, there were times when he told me he wanted to work and couldn’t. It disturbs me that toward the end, all some people could speak about was his weight.”

  In those hortatory lines, Nicholson encapsulated all that was right and wrong about the film industry—and about too many people on its periphery. Half a century before, that industry had enthusiastically introduced Marlon Brando to the world, and found good work for him to do. As soon as he displayed a temperament as unprecedented as his talent, though, the executives gave up on him. If Marlon had done something romantic and picturesque to himself—smashed a sports car, perhaps, or overdosed on heroin—that they could have dealt with. But his continual challenges to producers, directors, actors, and scenarists were outside their frame of reference. When he began the long period of regression, the withdrawal, the hiding in layers of adipose tissue, they repeated Tennessee Williams’s callous line about Marlon Brando being paid by the pound, and wrote him off. They were not alone. A large percentage of the paparazzi worldwide amused themselves by invading his property and then chiding him for being a hermit, marking him down for the sin of avarice and then hustling their photos to newspapers in hopes of a big return, dilating on every rumor of his sexual exploits and then wagging a finger at his wanton behavior. They repeatedly, and sometimes sadistically, examined his litany of personal flaws and dramatic family sorrows, rarely mentioning the contributions he had made to American cinema. At the time of his death, they were still at it. Dismayed, Diane Keaton commented, “The one thing that has been disturbing to me in the tone in some of the obituaries is that even in death they were never satisfied with him. It was never enough.”

  In the short Penguin Lives book Brando, Patricia Bosworth reports that late in life Marlon “confided to a friend that he had spent a lifetime trying to be less crazy.” In that admission lies the key to all that came before. If there was a “Rosebud” in Brando’s life it was the mental illness that had dogged him for decades, probably from early childhood. So many of the actions he took were not those of a rational man, and the wonder, in the end, is not that he made so few essential films but that he made so many. He knew as much; the only book he published in his lifetime, Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, was dedicated to his sisters, his children, and his psychiatrist. Concluded Marlon, “Thanks to Dr. Harrington, my own efforts, and the simple passage of time, I can finally be the child I never had a chance to be.” In the competition with his great rival Montgomery Clift, he seems to have won the self-destruction contest; Clift’s may not have been the longest suicide in Hollywood after all. Occasions of sanity and sanctity were not unfamiliar to Marlon, but he found them very late in life: meditating in solitude; reading philosophy; speaking to strangers on ham radio; lying out on the sand under the stars; attempting, however inexpertly, to speak up for those who had done wrong, or who had been wronged. He had spent a lot of time in both camps.

  Even in death, Marlon could not stay out of the tabloids. Christian Brando got into more trouble when actor Robert Blake was accused of murdering his wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley. Blake in turn accused Christian, who had been romantically involved with Bonnie, and who Blake believed was the father of her year-old daughter. DNA tests proved otherwise: Blake was the father. Moreover, police determined that Christian’s alibi was sound—he happened to be out of state on the night of the shooting. When Blake was acquitted, Christian’s name receded from the headlines, only to surface one more time at his death in January 2008. He had died, said one of his friends, “from too much living.”

  Marlon’s name never did leave the newspapers for long. Frequently it was in the show-business pages, and once in the real estate section, when Jack Nicholson bought Marlon’s house for $5 million. The place, he remarked sadly, was “derelict,” and “getting the mold out would be difficult. It is more than likely that we’ll take the house down.”

  Marlon’s estate has long since been evaluated, fought over, and dispersed. But he left two bequests that lie beyond the reach of his heirs and assigns. The first is to the public. Five of his early films are indisputable classics of black-and-white cinema: The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, Julius Caesar, and On the Waterfront. The Wild One has made its own place in popular culture. Between those astonishing features and The Godfather there is widely (and incorrectly) supposed to be a desert with only a handful of oases. Marlon took a lot of significant roles between his debut as Ken Wilcheck in 1950 and the Vito Corleone of 1972. Sky Masterson, Major Gruver, Snakeskin Xavier, Rio, Fletcher Christian, Robert Crain, Major Weldon Penderton, Sir William Walker, and Peter Quint are memorable figures that no one else could have played with such convincing passion. Post-Godfather came such indelible
personae as Paul of Last Tango, Robert E. Lee Clayton of The Missouri Breaks, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz of Apocalypse Now, and Ian McKenzie of A Dry White Season. These creations have aged well, even if the motion pictures themselves show the erosions of time.

  The second bequest is to the acting community. John Saxon recalls the first time he saw Brando. The Oscars had recently been given out for Waterfront, and Marlon was a bit wary as he parked near Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Boulevard, a famous hangout for show folk. He had reason to smile a minute later. The thirty-year-old “emerged from his car,” says Saxon, “and I remember an actor saying, ‘Marlon, you did it for us!’ These were not the Tyrone Power kind of good-looking people. ‘You did it for us’ meant you gave us an opportunity to be somebody. It was a break in the system.”

  As things turned out it was more than a break; it was a complete severance. The opportunity to be “somebody,” in Saxon’s phrase, mirrored Terry Malloy’s famous protest in On the Waterfront: “I coulda had class…I coulda been somebody.” By taking chances, by jumping without a net in film after film for more than fifty years, Marlon Brando rewrote the conventions of screen acting. In the process he helped to make somebodies out of performers who, in previous times, would have settled for character parts—if they worked at all. There can be no doubt of James Caan’s observation, made after his hero had passed away: “Anyone of my generation who says he hasn’t ‘done Brando’ is lying.”