Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me

by Marlon Brando

  I went over to my neighbor’s apartment. The woman was Standing with her hands between her breasts, her mouth open, and she looked at me with Eddie Cantor eyes; she was stunned. “Where is he?” I asked, but she couldn’t speak; she raised her entire arm and pointed toward her bathroom. I went in, and there was Russell playing in the toilet. When I called him and his head popped up, I said, “What the hell are you doing?” and he twittered some raccoon reply. He was soaking wet. I gave him my palm, he put his paws in it and I gripped him. I always carried him around this way. As I left the woman’s apartment, I said, “I’m terribly sorry about this. I don’t know how it could have happened.” While I was apologizing, Russell’s tail was dripping toilet water all over her beige rug. She was still aghast, bewildered and silent. As I passed the giant policeman, I said, “I’m awfully sorry, officer, it will never happen again.” I entered my apartment still mumbling apologies, closed the door and waited for that ham-fisted policeman to knock on it with a ticket, but nothing happened. To this day, I cannot understand how Russell got into Mrs. Goldman’s bathroom because both bathroom window ledges were only two inches wide and were separated by a one-foot gap five stories up.

  One of the fondest memories I have of Russell was when my mother was showing him off to a couple of snooty ladies. He was sitting on her shoulder, playing with her beads and sticking a paw in each ear, which provoked a titter from the ladies, as well as a proud “Ain’t he cute” smirk from my mother. Then he reached around and was feeling the crevice of her smile when she made the fatal error of opening her mouth slightly to say, “No, dear.” That’s all he needed. He shot his paw into her mouth and out came her false teeth. She grabbed them and tried to put them back in her mouth, but Russell was sure he had a good thing and wanted to keep them out of her mouth just as much as she wanted to keep them in. Her hat went one way and her dignity went the other. Finally she was able to outwrestle him and recovered her dentures, if not her poise. I had a seizure and had to hold on to the kitchen door to remain erect. It was one of the silliest scenes I have ever witnessed.

  Eventually as Russell matured, he became uncontrollable. He had thrown all the books out of the bookcase, had peed on every record I owned, and the apartment looked as though it had been through a drug raid. It was time to let Russell go. I took him back to the family farm in Illinois in early winter, when his semihibernating instincts would take over. I carried him out to the barn, made him a nest of some hay and left some food there for him. Every couple of hours I would tiptoe through the snow and peek through a crack in the wall to see him all curled up in a ball. I wanted so much to play with him, but I knew I couldn’t. I had a lump in my throat when I turned away.

  When spring came and the sap began to run in the trees, Russell had left the security of the barn for whatever destiny promises a raccoon. He returned every once in a while in hopes of finding a treat in his bowl, but later in the spring his sap was running, too. He must have found some irresistible lady raccoon and begun to raise his family, and I never saw him again. I miss him.

  27

  UNBEKNOWNST TO ME I had been snookered into making a two-picture deal with Darryl Zanuck that would include Viva Zapata! and one other. In those days I never read a contract. I remember that my agent and friend Jay Kantor chased me for quite a while to get me to renew the agency contract. He finally cornered me and told me he was going to lose his job if I didn’t sign it. “Please do this as a favor to me,” he said. So I went into my bedroom, got my special pen and affixed my moniker. I have never seen a man so relieved as Jay when he walked out the door with the contract under his arm. What he didn’t know was that I had signed it with disappearing ink so that when he arrived back at the agency, it would be discovered that there was no signature on it. Finally he called and asked me if I had kept the signed copy. His brain was in a whirl. I said, “Don’t you remember? You took it with you.”

  I suppose the reasons I was averse to signing contracts was because I didn’t want to feel hemmed in. In those days it was even hard for me to make a commitment for the next day. Even now I still put things off, although I’m much better than I used to be. But I still play practical jokes, and when they are played on me, I always laugh the hardest.

  • • •

  When Zanuck insisted that I do The Egyptian, I simply went back to New York and waited for the hit teams from my agency. He had sued me for two million dollars. Sure enough, the designated hitters showed up, Jerry Gershwin and Jay Kantor. At the time my father was telling me that I had run out of money, but I didn’t care. I said, “Let them sue.” The hitters said, “Come on, Marlon, pay the two dollars,” and I said, “Hell, no.”

  Finally Zanuck backed off and came back with the counterproposal that I play the role of Napoleon in a movie called Desirée. It was half a victory. So I accepted the arrangement. The film was directed by Henry Koster. I did all my homework and did the best I could. A kind and pleasant man, Koster was a lightweight who was much more interested in uniforms than in the impact of Napoleon on European history. I had a chance to work with Jean Simmons, who was cast in the role of Josephine. She was winning, charming, beautiful and experienced, and we had fun together. Unfortunately, she was married to Stewart Granger, the great white hunter. By my lights, Desirée was superficial and dismal, and I was astonished when told that it had been a success. H. L. Mencken’s words came to mind; he said, “No one ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American public.” In this case it seemed to have been borne out.

  28

  DURING THE THIRTIES, several members of the Group Theatre, including Gadg, joined the Communist party—largely, I suppose, because of an idealistic belief that it offered a progressive approach to ending the Depression and the increasing economic inequity in the country, confronted racial injustice and stood up to fascism. Many, including Gadg, soon became disenchanted with the party, but they were appealing targets during the hysteria of the McCarthy era.

  The House Un-American Activities Committee was headed by J. Parnell Thomas, a righteous pillar of our political community who later was sent to jail for fraud. The other members of the committee were much more concerned with exploiting the public’s fascination with Hollywood and with generating publicity for themselves than with anything else. They subpoenaed Gadg, and his testimony has wounded him to this day. Not only did he admit that he had been a Communist, but he identified all the other members of the Group Theatre who had also been Communists. Many of his oldest friends were furious, called the testimony an act of betrayal and refused to speak to him or work with him again.

  Until then, Gadg had collaborated with Arthur Miller, for whom he had directed All My Sons. After that, he presented me with a movie script about life on the New York waterfront. When Miller backed out of the project, Gadg called Budd Schulberg, the novelist, who like himself had named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Schulberg had been working on a script about corruption on the docks that was based on a prize-winning newspaper series describing how the Mafia took a bite out of every piece of cargo moving in and out of the ports of New York and New Jersey. Gadg and Schulberg merged their subjects, and for months tried to find a studio that would finance it. Darryl F. Zanuck tentatively agreed to do so, then backed out, saying he thought it a poor story to tell on the wide Technicolor screen of CinemaScope, which he thought of as Hollywood’s salvation from television. Finally Sam Spiegel, an independent producer and the last of the great schnorrers, who had made The African Queen, agreed to produce it, and Harry Cohn at Columbia agreed to finance the picture that eventually would be called On the Waterfront.

  The part I would play was that of Terry Malloy, an ex-pro boxer whose character was based on a real longshoreman who, despite threats against his life, testified against the “Goodfellas” who ran the Jersey waterfront. I was reluctant to take the part because I was conflicted about what Gadg had done and knew some of the people who had been deeply hurt. It was especially stupid
because most of the people named were no longer Communists. Innocent people were also blacklisted, including me, although I never had a political affiliation of any kind. It was simply because I had signed a petition to protest the lynching of a black man in the South. My sister Jocelyn, who’d appeared in Mister Roberts on Broadway and became a very successful actress, was also blacklisted because her married name was Asinof and there was another J. Asinof. In those days, stepping off the sidewalk with your left foot first was grounds for suspicion that you were a member of the Communist party. To this day I believe that we missed the establishment of fascism in this country by a hair.

  Gadg had to justify what he had done and gave the appearance of sincerely believing that there was a global conspiracy to take over the world, and that communism was a serious threat to America’s freedoms. Like his friends, he told me, he had experimented with communism because at the time it seemed to promise a better world, but he abandoned it when he learned better. To speak up before the committee truthfully and in defiance of his former friends who had not abandoned the cause was a hugely difficult decision, he said, but though he was ostracized by former friends, he had no regrets for what he’d done.

  I finally decided to do the film, but what I didn’t realize then was that On the Waterfront was really a metaphorical argument by Gadg and Budd Schulberg: they made the film to justify finking on their friends. Evidently, as Terry Malloy I represented the spirit of the brave, courageous man who defied evil. Neither Gadg nor Budd Schulberg ever had second thoughts about testifying before that committee.

  At that time, Gadg was the director on the cutting edge of changing the way movies were made. He had been influenced by Stella Adler and what she had brought back from Europe, and he always tried to create spontaneity and the illusion of reality. He hired longshoremen as extras. He shot most of the picture in the most rundown section of the New Jersey waterfront. He was pleased because the weather was really cold. The chill added reality, and he was delighted with the fact that our breath showed on the screen. The irony of all this was that he had to get permission from the Mafia to shoot there. When they invited him to lunch, he dragged me along, and I didn’t know until afterward that the gentleman we had lunch with was in fact the head of the Jersey waterfront. Although Gadg turned his friends in to the House committee over communism, he didn’t even blink at having to cooperate with the Costa Nostra. By his own standards, it would seem that this was an act of remarkable hypocrisy, but when Gadg wanted to make a picture and had to move some furniture around to do so, he was perfectly willing. Actually, I met a number of people from the Costa Nostra at that time, and I would prefer them any day to some of the politicians we have.

  The cast included my longtime friend Karl Maiden, Eva Marie Saint, Lee J. Cobb and Rod Steiger. One of the reasons Gadg was an effective actors’ director was because he was able to manipulate people’s emotions. He tried to find out everything about his actors and participated emotionally in all the scenes. He would come up between takes and tell you something to excite feelings in you that fit the scene. Still, he did create mischief with his technique. In Viva Zapata! I played Tony Quinn’s brother, and Gadg told Tony some lies about what I had supposedly said behind his back. This intensified Tony’s emotional state and was very good for the picture because it brought out the conflict between the brothers; unfortunately, Gadg never bothered to tell Tony afterward that he had made up those remarks. I didn’t learn about it until fifteen years later on a talk show, where Tony expressed himself on the subject. I called him up and told him that I never said those things, and that Gadg was just manipulating him. It was a relief to be able to clear up this fifteen-year deceit. From then on, Tony and I started speaking again.

  Gadg was wonderful in inspiring actors to give a performance, but you had to pay the price.

  People have often commented to me about the scene in On the Waterfront that takes place in the backseat of a taxi. It illustrates how Kazan worked.

  I played Rod Steiger’s unsuccessful ne’er-do-well brother, and he played a corrupt union leader who was trying to improve my position with the Mafia. He had been told in so many words to set me up for a hit because I was going to testify before the Waterfront Commission about the misdeeds that I was aware of. In the script Steiger was supposed to pull a gun in the taxi, point it at me and say, “Make up your mind before we get to 437 River Street,” which was where I was going to be killed.

  I told Kazan, “I can’t believe he would say that to his brother, and the audience is certainly not going to believe that this guy who’s been close to his brother all his life, and who’s looked after him for thirty years, would suddenly stick a gun in his ribs and threaten to kill him. It’s just not believable.”

  This was typical of the creative fights we had. “I can’t do it that way,” I said, and Gadg answered, “Yes, you can; it will work.”

  “It’s ridiculous,” I replied. “No one would speak to his brother that way.”

  We did the scene his way several times, but I kept saying, “It just doesn’t work, Gadg, it really doesn’t work.” Finally he said, “All right, wing one.” So Rod and I improvised the scene and ended up changing it completely. Gadg was convinced and printed it.

  In our improvisation, when my brother flashed the gun in the cab, I looked at it, then up at him in disbelief. I didn’t believe for a second that he would ever pull the trigger. I felt sorry for him. Then Rod started talking about my boxing career. If I’d had a better manager, he said, things would have gone better for me in the ring. “He brought you along too fast.”

  “That wasn’t him, Charlie,” I said, “it was you. Remember that night at the Garden you came down to my dressing room and said, ‘Kid, this isn’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson’? Remember that? ‘This ain’t your night.’ My night! I could have taken Wilson apart. So what happened? He gets the shot at the title outdoors at a ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville. You was my brother, Charlie, you should have looked out for me a little bit. You should have taken care of me better so I didn’t have to take the dives for the short-end money … I could have had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charlie …”

  When the movie came out, a lot of people credited me with a marvelous job of acting and called the scene moving. But it was actor-proof, a scene that demonstrated how audiences often do much of the acting themselves in an effectively told story. It couldn’t miss because almost everyone believes he could have been a contender, that he could have been somebody if he’d been dealt different cards by fate, so when people saw this in the film, they identified with it. That’s the magic of theater; everybody in the audience became Terry Malloy, a man who’d had the guts not only to stand up to the Mob, but to say, “I’m a bum. Let’s face it; that’s what I am.…”

  On the day Gadg showed me the completed picture, I was so depressed by my performance I got up and left the screening room. I thought I was a huge failure, and walked out without a word to him. I was simply embarrassed for myself.

  None of us are perfect, and I think Gadg has done great injury to others, but mostly to himself. I am indebted to him for all that I learned. He was a wonderful teacher.

  I had a great conflict about going to the Academy Awards and accepting an Oscar. I never believed that the accomplishment was more important than the effort. I remember being driven to the Awards still wondering whether I should have put on my tuxedo. I finally thought, what the hell; people want to express their thanks, and if it is a big deal for them, why not go? I have since altered my opinion about awards in general, and will never again accept one of any kind. This doesn’t mean that what other people believe has any less validity; many people I know and care about believe that awards are valuable and involve themselves in the process of the Academy Awards and others. I don’t look down upon them for doing so, and I hope that they do not look
down upon me.

  If I regretted anything, it may have been that Duke Wagner wasn’t around for that evening. By that time he was dead.

  I don’t know what happened to the Oscar they gave me for On the Waterfront. Somewhere in the passage of time it disappeared. I didn’t think about it until a year or so ago, when my lawyer called and told me that an auction house in London was planning to sell it. When I wrote a letter to them saying that they had no right to do so, they replied that they would abide by my wishes, but that the person who had put it up for sale wouldn’t relinquish it because supposedly I had given it to him or her. This is simply untrue.

  29

  WHEN I MUMBLED my lines in some parts, it puzzled theater critics. I played many roles in which I didn’t mumble a single syllable, but in others I did it because it is the way people speak in ordinary life. I wasn’t the first actor to do it. Dame May Whitty, who, like Eleonora Duse, was a fine actress who deviated from the traditional acting school’s techniques of declaiming, superficial gesture and stilted dialogue, was famous for muttering and mumbling. In her day it was unheard of for actors to mumble or slur their words and speak like ordinary people, but she got away with it.

  If everyone spoke according to the rules of the old school of acting, we’d never pause to search for words, never slur a word, never say something like, “Uh …” or “What did you say?”

  In ordinary life people seldom know exactly what they’re going to say when they open their mouths and start to express a thought. They’re still thinking, and the fact that they are looking for words shows on their faces. They pause for an instant to find the right word, search their minds to compose a sentence, then express it.

  Until Stella Adler came along, few actors understood this; they recited speeches given to them by a writer in the style of an elocution school, and if audiences didn’t instantly understand them or had to work a little to do so, the performers were criticized. The audience was conditioned to expect actors to speak in a way seldom heard outside a theater. Today actors are expected to speak, think and search for words to give the impression that they are actually living in that moment. Most actors in America now strive for this effect. However, there are other affectations that have crept in. For example, many actors rely on cigarettes to convey naturalness. When smoking was in vogue, Stella criticized some actors’ behavior and would refer to it as cigarette-acting. Generally actors don’t realize how deeply affected the technique of acting was by the fact that Stella went to Russia and studied with Stanislavsky. This school of acting served the American theater and motion pictures well, but it was restricting. The American theater had never been able to present Shakespeare or classical drama of any kind satisfactorily. We simply do not have the style, the regard for language or the cultural disposition that fosters a tradition of presenting Shakespeare or any other classical drama. You cannot mumble in Shakespeare. You cannot improvise, and you are required to adhere strictly to the text. The English theater has a sense of language that we do not recognize and a capacity for understanding Shakespeare that we do not. In the United States the English language has developed almost into a patois. Not long ago, perhaps only fifty years or so ago, there was a style of classical acting in England in which Shakespeare was declaimed with an ample distribution of spittle. Even today there are English actors and directors who, to their artistic peril, choose to ignore the precise instructions that Shakespeare gave them in his speech to the players in Hamlet. This not only pertains to acting but to all forms of art. I quote it here: