Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me

by Marlon Brando

  After I had some success, Lee Strasberg tried to take credit for teaching me how to act. He never taught me anything. He would have claimed credit for the sun and the moon if he believed he could get away with it. He was an ambitious, selfish man who exploited the people who attended the Actors Studio, and he tried to project himself as an acting oracle and guru. Some people worshiped him, but I never knew why. To me he was a tasteless and untalented person whom I didn’t like very much. I sometimes went to the Actors Studio on Saturday mornings because Elia Kazan was teaching, and there were usually a lot of good-looking girls. But Strasberg never taught me acting. Stella did—and later Kazan.

  13

  MY MOTHER followed Frannie, Tiddy and me to New York a few months after I got there; my parents had split up again. She got an apartment on West End Avenue, and the three of us moved in with her, along with Tiddy’s year-old son, Gahan. She promised to stay sober, but she couldn’t manage it, and before long it was like Libertyville and Evanston all over again. She hid bottles under her bed and in the kitchen cabinets and started disappearing again. We tried to get her to stop, and sometimes she did for a few weeks, but then she would go on another bender. For us it was an emotional seesaw.

  During my year at the New School, I was a conscientious student, if unschooled in many aspects of life. Once, during rehearsals for a play, another member of the Dramatic Workshop came over to me and said he wanted to help me. Since I was eager to do my best, I listened intently to him. He said I should play my part with dignity.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “I’m trying to.”

  “But you should stand up a little straighter,” he said. “Put your shoulders back, your chest out, lower your shoulders.”

  I tried to do all that.

  Then he patted my crotch. “Pull this in a little.”

  I was horrified and stood motionless in stunned silence. When he did it again, I was almost paralyzed. Then he said, “What do you like? Men, women or children?”

  Planting my foot for leverage against a scenery board nailed to the floor, I unleashed a punch that sent him sailing across the room and to a hospital with a smashed face. When I was chastised for this by Erwin Piscator, I told him that the man had made sexual advances to me. He replied that hitting people wasn’t the way people in the theater dealt with such matters.

  At the end of the school year, Piscator took our group to Sayville, Long Island, to reprise several productions in summer stock, including Twelfth Night, in which I played Sebastian. A lot of unbridled fornication occurred during that summer of 1944, and I was in the thick of it. One day Piscator lifted up the trapdoor to the loft where I was sleeping above a garage, found me with a girl and said I had to leave because I’d broken the “Rules of Summer Stock.” I was disappointed because I was enjoying myself, but in those days I was like a newspaper blowing down the street in a strong wind: I went this way or that way depending on the gale. As luck would have it, because I was expelled I got my first acting job about three weeks later in I Remember Mama. I simply stepped off one lily pad onto another. It has been that way most of my life. I’ve had lots of problems, but also lots of luck; in many ways I have led a charmed life. Subsequently I learned that one of the ladies in our company had been servicing Piscator all that summer, This tickled me; what an act of hypocrisy it was to send me home!

  It was an agent, Maynard Morris, who suggested me for I Remember Mama, a play by John Van Druten and the first nonmusical produced by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. I was twenty, but he thought I could play Nels, the son of two Norwegian immigrants, who was fourteen during most of the play. He sent me over for an audition at the office of Rodgers and Hammerstein. When I got there, Richard Rodgers looked up at me skeptically with dark, hooded eyes, shirtsleeves rolled up and a nasty expression. It was my first interview for an acting job, and I didn’t know what to say or how to behave.

  Rodgers looked at me impatiently and asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Marlon Brando.”

  “What have you done?”

  “Well, I was in summer stock and played in Twelfth Night and I—”

  “C’mon, what have you done?” he said, raising his voice unpleasantly.

  I said, “Besides that, nothing.”

  After I read for the part, Rodgers told Hammerstein that he hated my audition and didn’t want to use me, but John Van Druten liked me; he prevailed and I got the part.

  I Remember Mama opened October 19, 1944, at the Music Box Theatre and I got a few fair reviews, but nothing special. The play was a hit and ran for two years. I remember it mostly for my fun offstage. On a questionnaire for my biography for Playbill, I made up stories about myself, including my birthplace: Calcutta, India. Later on I told Playbill I’d been born in other places—Bangkok, Thailand, and Mukden, China. I have always enjoyed making up bizarre stories to see if people would believe them. Generally they do.

  Oscar Homolka, who played my father in the play, was a brusque, unpleasant, pompous man, which made him enjoyable to irritate. In one scene, as he got into a car that was pulled across the stage by a wire, he was supposed to blow the horn to summon the rest of the family. As he honked the horn, a prop man was supposed to blow a trumpetlike horn offstage loud enough to be heard in the back of the house. But every so often Homolka honked his horn and the prop man missed his cue and was several seconds late. This made Homolka furious; sometimes he would turn around and shout into the wings at the poor old cricket of a stagehand so loudly that the audience could hear him, and matters became very tense between them. The prop man kept promising to get it right, but one day when he wasn’t looking, I stuffed his horn with Kleenex, and the next time Homolka honked his horn onstage and the prop man, with perfect timing, blew his, there was complete silence. He blew harder and harder. Still no sound. Homolka got red in the face and started bellowing at him from the stage while the prop man reached deeper and deeper into his lungs and blew with all his heart—so hard that he blew his false teeth out of his mouth. It was uproarious to see him fighting to get a grip on his choppers with his lips while still trying to blow the horn, and I almost had apoplexy.

  In another scene Mama’s sister had to say, “You certainly make a wonderful cup of coffee. It’s so delicious I think I’ll have another cup.” On one occasion I poured salt and some Tabasco sauce into the coffee, and she had to drink a cup of this witches’ brew, keep a straight face and ask for another cup.

  Shortly after the play opened, I started stammering again. When I was supposed to say words like “the,” “that,” “there” or “those,” my tongue got stuck on “th” and I couldn’t finish the word. It was sporadic. Some nights I was fine; on others I suddenly started stammering midway through the play. Finally I taught myself how to deal with it: before a word in the play starting with “th” came up, I put my tongue in place so that it was ready. Keeping my tongue in the right place wasn’t as easy as it sounds. It took a lot of concentration to do it without letting the audience know, and sometimes it stayed, sometimes it didn’t.

  I kept a bookcase at the theater, and when I wasn’t onstage, I sat in a corner under a lamp set up by the prop man and studied. One night Richard Rodgers came to the theater, saw me reading in my corner in the short pants I wore onstage, and came over to say hello.

  “Boy, you’ve got a lot of books there,” he said.

  “Hello, Mr. Rodgers,” I said.

  “What are you reading?”

  He leaned over and peered at the book in my hands. It was the Discourses of Epictetus; then he scanned the other titles in the bookcase—Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and books by Thoreau, Gibbon and Rousseau. Then he looked at me with a perplexed expression and walked away without saying another word. He never knew how to say hello to me again.

  Edith Van Cleve, of the New York office of the Music Corporation of America (later MCA, Inc.), was now my agent. After I had been in I Remember Mama about a year, she said that Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were
about to produce a new play and she arranged for me to read for it. When I arrived at the theater, I discovered it was a cattle call. Dozens of young actors were waiting to compete for the same part. Every few minutes the stage manager called one to the stage where he recited a few lines and was then dismissed. When it was my turn, I walked onstage and an invisible voice said, “What is your name?”

  “Marlon Brando.”

  “Have you been in a play recently?”

  “Yes.”

  The lights were on me. It was pitch dark on the other side of the footlights.

  “What play, Mr. Brindel?” the disembodied voice asked.

  “I’m in I Remember Mama.”

  There was a long pause in which I didn’t say anything.

  “Would you mind saying something?”

  I thought the situation utterly stupid and absurd. After a lengthy pause, I said: “Hickory, dickory, dock, the mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one, the mouse ran down, hickory, dickory, dumb.” I accentuated the word dumb.

  There was another long pause, then a lot of muttering in the dark, and finally someone said, “Well, thank you, Mr. er-ah, Brindle, we’ll be in touch with you.”

  That was my career with the Lunts.

  During those early years in New York, I made friendships that would last a lifetime: Janice Mars, William Redfield, Sam Gilman, Maureen Stapleton, Philip and Marie Rhodes, Carlo Fiore and others. Janice, who was from Lincoln, Nebraska, and had the same sense of humor I did, was an extraordinary singer, the host and main performer at a place called the Back Room, and in her view, we were like a family of waifs. “Flouting all the conventions, we were like orphans in rebellion against everything,” she recalled in a letter to me recently. “None of us had emotionally secure family backgrounds, but we gravitated to each other and created a family among ourselves. I’ve never gotten over the feeling of family we had, even if it was all in my imagination. I’m nostalgic for it—that feeling—youth, our mutual support system, uncritical acceptance of each other—foibles, faults and all. Orphans of the storm clinging together.”

  Janice said I preferred women who were older than me, like Estrelita: “You were always looking for a substitute mother. You used to go to her when you got sick. Sometimes she’d come looking for you as if you were a bad boy. You hid from her in our closet.… You also had a perverse need to humiliate, to see just how far a female would go to indulge you. For you, sex had as much significance as eating a Mars bar or taking a pill … your attitude toward women was very ambivalent. I felt your power as a palpable aura, a magnetism you knew how to use manipulatively but also protectively. There was a seductive comfort in your touch. Nobody could hold you, then or now.…”

  • • •

  In a lifetime of making friends, none was ever closer or more important to me than Wally Cox. We had been playmates in Evanston at seven or eight, and we both moved to New York about the same time. He was making a living as a silversmith and craftsman of fine jewelry, but would entertain us with hilarious monologues. We resumed our friendship and it lasted until he died in 1973.

  I’m not sure I will ever forgive Wally for dying. He was more than a friend; he was my brother, closer to me than any human being in my life except my sisters. We were born in the same part of the country, came from the same culture, shared the same values and had the same sense of humor. He was extremely funny and found me amusing, and we had wonderful times. The character he invented, “Mr. Peepers,” was no more like him than he was like Nancy Reagan. Wally probably came closer than anyone I’ve ever known to being a genius. He spoke four or five languages and could talk knowledgeably about botany, history, physics, chemistry, electronics and many more topics. If he had chosen to, he could have been an outstanding scientist. We liked to hike in the woods together and never returned without an interesting rock, a delicate leaf, a gnarled branch or a face full of poison oak. He was as absorbed as I was by human foibles, and was one of my greatest teachers. At twenty, I was untutored and uncertain in my use of language. Almost as if he were leading me by the hand, Wally taught me how to speak and to see in words the melodies of life. When he died, I felt mystified and could not accept it. I took some things that belonged to him, including the pajamas in which he died, and saved them. Even now I have conversations with him; I curse him—“You son of a bitch”—and chastise him for dying. I also laugh at things when I’m alone because I imagine that he is there, laughing with me.

  Not a day goes by when I don’t think of Wally. Sometimes I wander around my house, pick up one of the chestnut walking sticks we brought home from a woodland long ago, think of something funny he said, and laugh. Then I swear at him, because he was an alcoholic who didn’t take care of himself and died from a massive heart attack.

  14

  WHILE I WAS IN I Remember Mama, my mother returned to Libertyville and reconciled with my father. Not long after she left, I had a kind of nervous breakdown that came on gradually, then was severe for several months. I stopped eating, lost ten pounds and felt depressed and vulnerable, but didn’t know why. I still acted every night, but I was in emotional disarray. I never missed a performance, but life made less and less sense to me. I moved into a one-room apartment at Fifty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, and despite bringing a new girl to my bed almost every night, I was often lonely. I couldn’t stand to hear people argue. If I heard anyone quarreling, I felt as if I were being consumed by insects and had to leave. I couldn’t stand loud voices or loud noises. Even the slamming of a door sent me into a panic. Something was frightening me, but I didn’t know what. I couldn’t sleep well, was nervous, and I sometimes thought I was losing my mind. If I was offended in the slightest, I wanted to punch somebody. Nothing I did made sense or made me feel better. I didn’t know what to do. I wandered around the city or went into a Christian Science reading room, sat alone and read for hours. I had never had much religion in my life—neither of my parents were believers—though a few times my mother had encouraged me to look for solace in the faith of my grandmother and Mary Baker Eddy. So I did, searching for anything that could help me understand what was wrong with me and make me feel better. It was the beginning of a difficult period of my life.

  I spent more and more time with Stella Adler’s family, who virtually adopted me after my mother left, and they may have saved my sanity. Stella was the daughter of Sarah and Jacob P. Adler, a great star of the Yiddish stage, and her husband, Harold Clurman, was a prominent and respected writer, producer and critic. Having dinner with them was like spending an evening with the Marx Brothers. In Libertyville I’d only met one or two Jews and never experienced Jewish humor, which is subtle, powerful and hilarious. The Adlers were so funny that I was convulsed every time I went there; jokes flew around the dinner table like bullets, half in Yiddish and half in English, and I laughed so hard that I nearly got a hernia.

  Like all of us, Stella was an imperfect person, and her imperfections sometimes offended others. To some people, she was downright nasty. She would excoriate them in front of others, tear them apart and criticize them in the most vicious way, but she had great integrity as a teacher. During that troubled time of my life, she taught me not only acting, but about life itself. For reasons that I cannot understand, she was very fond of me and I am eternally grateful to her for it. I always sat next to her at dinner, and she was forever holding my hand. Sometimes I went into her bedroom before she went out to dinner and watched her while she was getting dressed. She would be sitting in front of the mirror in her panties and bra and would cover herself as I came in and say, “Oh, Marlon. Please, darling. I’m getting dressed.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” I said, “in order to see that you’re dressed properly.”

  A couple of times I grabbed her breasts in my palms and she would say with a half smile, “Marlon, don’t do that or I’ll slap you.”

  I would look at her and say, “You know you don’t want to do that to me.”

  We had a lot of f
lirtatious exchanges, and I suppose that somewhere not far beyond the horizon there was the possibility of a real encounter, but it never materialized.

  There were three important teachers in my life. Like Duke Wagner and my shop teacher in Santa Ana, Stella gave me emotional strength at a time when I needed it by making me feel I was capable of something. When I was suffering, disjointed and disoriented, experiencing shock and feeling physically and emotionally disordered, she offered me not only her skill and talent as a teacher, but her home, her family, the largess of her personality and her love. She introduced me to her daughter Ellen, who, like Stella, was a beautiful, intelligent woman with a great deal of charm and presence, but who was almost always shorn of individuality by the presence of her mother. She was very photogenic and could have been a great screen personality, but because of conflicts with her mother, she never pursued the acting career that she should have had. After I met Ellen, one thing led to another, and I began a relationship with her that continued, off and on, for many years.

  While I was being given a home and an education by the Jews who befriended me in New York, World War II was ending. The war had been remote from my vantage point of the Adlers’ dinner table and the stage of the Music Box Theatre. No one had any real sense yet of what was happening to the Jews of Europe, and my knowledge of the war came mostly from the Translux Theatre on Forty-seventh Street and Broadway, where I went between shows to watch the pyrotechnics of mortal combat. While others were suffering and dying, to me the war had only meant not always getting the kind of cigarettes or candy I liked, crowded trains, a lot of people in New York wearing uniforms and the USO shows in which we performed. I had a sense that though the world had gone through a cataclysm, little had changed: in Harlem black people were still being treated as less than human, there was still rampant poverty and anti-Semitism and there seemed to be as much injustice as before. I was beginning to hear a voice in my head that said I had a responsibility to do something about it and that acting was not an important vocation in life when the world was still facing so many problems.