Larry shared one characteristic with other British actors I’ve known who wouldn’t “play down.” In The Entertainer, for example, he played a decrepit Cockney vaudeville song-and-dance man, Archie Rice, but he refused to talk in a Cockney accent, even though the part called for it. He wouldn’t use an accent beneath his own station in life; he simply spoke in perfect English.
I’ve heard it said that I should have devoted my life to the classical theater as Olivier did. If I had wanted to be a great actor, I agree that I should have played Hamlet, but I never had that goal or interest. For the reader who has gotten this far in the book, I hope that by now it is apparent that I have never had the actor’s bug. I took acting seriously because it was my job; I almost always worked hard at it, but it was simply a way to make a living.
Still, even if I had chosen to go on the classical stage, it would have been a mistake. I revere Shakespeare, the English language and English theater, but American culture is simply not structured for them. Theatrical ventures ambitious enough to accomplish something truly worthwhile seldom survive. The British are the last English-speaking people on the planet who love and cherish their language. They preserve it and care about it, but Americans do not have the style, finesse, refinement or sense of language to make a success out of Shakespeare. Our audiences would make a pauper of any actor who dedicated his career to Shakespeare. Ours is a television and movie culture.
31
IN 1955, I took the part of Sky Masterson, the gambler who falls in love with a Salvation Army sergeant played by Jean Simmons, in Guys and Dolls. When the director, Joe Mankiewicz, asked me to be in the picture, I told him I couldn’t sing and had never been in a musical, but he said he’d never directed one before, and that we’d be learning together. Frank Loesser, who wrote the music for the Broadway show on which it was based, recruited an Italian singing coach to teach me to sing, and after a couple of weeks with him I went to a recording studio with Frank to record my songs, which were to be synchronized later with shots of me mouthing the words on film. I couldn’t hit a note in the dubbing room with a baseball bat; some notes I missed by extraordinary margins. But the engineers kept telling me to do them over again, and they would stitch together a word here, a note there, until they had a recording that sounded like I’d sung the bars consecutively. They sewed my words together on one song so tightly that when I mouthed it in front of the camera, I nearly asphyxiated myself because I couldn’t breathe while trying to synchronize my lips. The audience never realized that when I sang a song, it was a product of many, many attempts.
When the picture was finished, Sam Goldwyn conned me into attending the picture’s premiere in New York by giving me a car. I had always refused to go to one, but when he offered me the car I felt obligated to go. I didn’t realize that such gifts didn’t cost him a cent because he could charge them to the picture’s budget.
Jean Simmons and I were picked up at the Plaza Hotel by a limousine and driven to Times Square, which was aglow with searchlights and floodlights and jammed with people and police who were trying to restrain them behind wooden barricades. As we approached the theater, the crowd suddenly surged forward, broke through the barricades and attacked the limousine like a horde of Mongol warriors. Screaming hysterically, they engulfed the car, flattening their noses and cheeks against the windows until they looked like putty that had been softened in a warm oven. One girl was pushed so hard by the people that her head broke a window in the car, panicking the driver, and he stepped on the gas and almost ran over a bunch of other teenagers. Finally several policemen on horseback pushed through the melee to clear a path, but there were still so many people that we had to stop across the street from the theater.
Measuring the distance, I figured we were at least fifty yards from the goal line and wondered how we were going to make it the rest of the way. Then six big cops came up to the car, opened the door, grabbed Jean, lifted her in the air and carried her into the theater. Then it was my turn: six other cops grabbed me, lifted me up and began steamrolling toward the theater. There was so much screaming I couldn’t hear anything. One cop lifted me by one arm and another got under my other shoulder, and others lifted my feet off the ground. We inched through the crowd and pretty soon hands from all sides were pinching me and grabbing my groin. Then someone got my tie and held it, but the cops didn’t know this and kept forging ahead like a team of draft horses on extra rations. I became dizzier and dizzier. I couldn’t scream because I was being strangled; but even if I had, there was so much noise the cops wouldn’t have heard me.
Finally the cops won the tug-of-war and the tie puller had to let go. They carried me into the lobby, where I sat on a flight of stairs, shaking and muttering to myself, “Jesus Christ, what the hell am I doing here?”
As I wiped my brow I saw there was a piece of paper in my hand. I unfolded it and saw that it was a summons with my name on it, a subpoena to appear to testify in a lawsuit involving Sam Spiegel, who was being sued by someone who claimed he was owed money from On the Waterfront. That process server is a man I’d like to meet. How he got that subpoena in my hand, I’ll never know.
I’ve always been amazed by the qualities in human nature that can turn crowds into mobs. Those people with hungry, glazed eyes looking at us through those car windows were in a trance. They were like helpless robots swaying to a magic flute. Much the same sort of thing happened when Frank Sinatra bewitched bobby-soxers at the same theater a few years earlier, and ten years later the Beatles would similarly mesmerize a different generation. For some reason celebrities of a certain kind are treated as messiahs whether they like it or not; people encapsulate them in myths that touch their deepest yearnings and needs. It seems to me hilarious that our government put the face of Elvis Presley on a postage stamp after he died from an overdose of drugs. His fans don’t mention that because they don’t want to give up their myths. They ignore the fact that he was a drug addict and claim he invented rock ’n’ roll when in fact he took it from black culture; they had been singing that way for years before he came along, copied them and became a star.
Of course mythologizing isn’t limited to celebrities or political leaders. We all create myths about our friends as well as our enemies. We can’t help it. Whether it’s Michael Jackson or Richard Nixon, we run instinctively to their defense because we don’t want our myths demolished. When the news broke about Watergate, many Americans who worshiped Nixon refused to believe what they had heard. Years later, some began to admit that he had orchestrated a coverup, but said he wasn’t so bad. “Sure, people stumble in their lives,” they rationalized, “but taken all and all, he was a great president.” They refused to acknowledge the lies and deceit that were so much a part of the character of a man who called himself a law-and-order president. Some people who have heard his recorded voice on the Oval Office tapes proving that he abused the presidency and the trust of the people who elected him justify him by arguing that presidents are under great pressure and what he did was perfectly understandable. By the time he died in 1994, it seemed history had been totally rewritten by the mythmakers. As one newspaper columnist put it during the days of mourning for Nixon, it was if he had suddenly been canonized.
We make up any excuse to preserve myths about people we love, but the reverse is also true; if we dislike an individual we adamantly resist changing our opinion, even when somebody offers proof of his decency, because it’s vital to have myths about both the gods and the devils in our lives.
32
I WAS GETTING READY to sing in Guys and Dolls when Elia Kazan invited me to visit him on the set of a new movie he was filming called East of Eden. Several months earlier he had asked me to be in the movie, John Steinbeck’s retelling of the Cain and Abel story set in California’s Salinas Valley, playing opposite Montgomery Clift as my brother. But I was busy and I think Monty was, too. Instead, Gadg cast as one of the brothers a new actor named James Dean, who, he said, wanted to meet me. Before introducing us,
Gadg told me that his new star was constantly asking about me and seemed bent on patterning his acting technique and life after me—or at least on the person he thought I was after seeing The Wild One.
Jimmy was then about twenty, seven years younger than me, and had a simplicity that I found endearing. When we met, I sensed some of the same aspects of the midwestern farm boy who had suddenly been transplanted to the big city that I’d had when I went to New York—as well as some of the same anxieties I’d felt after being thrust into the status of celebrity at a young age. He was nervous when we met and made it clear that he was not only mimicking my acting but also what he believed was my lifestyle. He said he was learning to play the conga drums and had taken up motorcycling, and he obviously wanted my approval of his work.
As I’ve observed before, acting talent alone doesn’t make an actor a star. It takes a combination of qualities: looks, personality, presence, ability. Like Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo wasn’t much of an actress, but she had presence. She probably played the same character in every film she ever made, but she was beautiful and had an unusual personality. Mickey Rooney, on the other hand, is an unsung hero of the actors’ world. He never became a leading man—he was too short, his teeth weren’t straight and he didn’t have sex appeal—but like Jimmy Cagney he could do almost anything. Charlie Chaplin was also one of the best. But a lot of people became movie stars simply by playing themselves. Their looks and personalities were so interesting, attractive or intriguing that audiences were satisfied by these qualities alone.
Jimmy Dean, who made only three pictures, East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, had everything going for him. He was not only on his way to becoming a good actor, but he had a personality and presence that made audiences curious about him, as well as looks and a vulnerability that women found especially appealing. They wanted to take care of him. He was sensitive, and there were elements of surprise in his personality. He wasn’t volcanic or dynamic, but he had a subtle energy and an intangible injured quality that had a tremendous impact on audiences.
Like me, he became a symbol of social change during the 1950s by happenstance. Rebel Without a Cause was a story about a new lost generation of young people, and the reaction to it, like that to The Wild One, was a sign of the tremors that were beginning to quake beneath the surface of our culture. I always think of the years leading up to that period as the Brylcreem Era, when people wore pompadours and society’s smug attitudes and values were as rigidly set in place as the coiffure of a ladies’ man. Rock ’n’ roll, the Beatles, Woodstock, the civil rights movement, rioting in the streets because of racial injustice and the Vietnam War were just around the corner. A sense of alienation was rising among different generations and different layers of society, but it hadn’t openly manifested itself yet. Old traditions and venerated institutions were distrusted and the social fabric was being replaced by something new, for better or worse.
Because we were around when it happened, Jimmy Dean and I were sometimes cast as symbols of this transformation—and in some cases as instigators of alienation. But the sea change in society had nothing to do with us; it would have occurred with or without us. Our movies didn’t precipitate the new attitudes, but the response to them mirrored the changes bubbling to the surface. Some people looked in this mirror and saw things that weren’t there. That’s how myths originate. They grow up around celebrities almost by spontaneous generation, a process over which they have no control and are usually unaware of until they are trapped by them.
Laurence Olivier became a legend as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights; with his beautiful face, he was perfect for the part and a very good actor. But Emily Brontë’s novel about star-crossed lovers moved half the world to tears, and it was another of those actor-proof roles. Nobody knew at the time that the picture would make Olivier a larger-than-life figure and shape the world’s perception of him for the rest of his life. The public retained in its collective memory the mythic image of Olivier as Heathcliff, just as they remembered Jimmy Dean drag-racing in an old Mercury coupe or me riding off on a motorcycle. Actors have no way of anticipating the myths they may create when they take on a role. Humphrey Bogart was an effective performer, but no great shakes as an actor. I doubt if he understood the subtext of Casablanca or gave any thought to the possibility that it would become a cult film, but his role in that movie affected the public’s perception of him forever. Charlie Chaplin was one of the few actors who had the intuitive sense to consciously create a myth about himself as the Tramp, and then he exploited it.
The closer you come to the successful portrayal of a character, the more people mythologize about you in that role. Perception is everything. I didn’t wear jeans as a badge of anything, they were just comfortable. But because I wore blue jeans and a T-shirt in Streetcar and rode a motorcycle in The Wild One, I was considered a rebel. It’s true that I always hated conformity because it breeds mediocrity, but the real source of my reputation as a rebel was my refusal to follow some of the normal Hollywood rules. I wouldn’t give interviews to Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons because the practice seemed phony and degrading. Every actor was expected to butter up the columnists. You were supposed to put on a happy face, give them tidbits about your life, play the game because they would help sell tickets to your movies and determine the course of your career. But I didn’t care if I got publicity. When I first became an actor, I had tried to be open and honest with reporters, but they put words in my mouth and focused on prurience, so after a while I refused to do it anymore. I was tired of being asked the same inane, irrelevant questions, then seeing my answers distorted. It grated on me that movie stars were elevated into icons; Hollywood was simply a place where people, including me, made money, like a mill town in New England or an oil field in Texas.
After we met on the set of East of Eden, Jimmy began calling me for advice or to suggest a night out. We talked on the phone and ran into each other at parties, but never became close. I think he regarded me as a kind of older brother or mentor, and I suppose I responded to him as if I was. I felt a kinship with him and was sorry for him. He was hypersensitive, and I could see in his eyes and in the way he moved and spoke that he had suffered a lot. He was tortured by insecurities, the origin of which I never determined, though he said he’d had a difficult childhood and a lot of problems with his father. I urged him to seek assistance, perhaps go into therapy. I have no idea whether he ever did, but I did know it can be hard for a troubled kid like him to have to live up to sudden fame and the ballyhoo Hollywood created around him. I saw it happen to Marilyn, and I also knew it from my own experience. In trying to copy me, I think Jimmy was only attempting to deal with these insecurities, but I told him it was a mistake. Once he showed up at a party and I saw him take off his jacket, roll it into a ball and throw it on the floor. It struck me that he was imitating something I had done and I took him aside and said, “Don’t do that, Jimmy. Just hang your coat up like everybody else. You don’t have to throw your coat in the corner. It’s much easier to hang it up than pick it up off the floor.”
Another time, I told him I thought he was foolish to try to copy me as an actor. “Jimmy, you have to be who you are, not who I am. You mustn’t try to copy me. Emulate the best aspects of yourself.” I said it was a dead-end street to try to be somebody else. In retrospect, I realize it’s not unusual for people to borrow someone else’s form until they find their own, and in time Jimmy did. He was still developing when I first met him, but by the time he made Giant, he was no longer trying to imitate me. He still had his insecurities, but he had become his own man. He was awfully good in that last picture, and people identified with his pain and made him a cult hero. We can only guess what kind of actor he would have become in another twenty years. I think he could have become a great one. Instead he died and was forever entombed in his myth.
33
IN A FADED BROWN ENVELOPE saved by my sisters are the remains of a long-ago romance that some readers may fi
nd as touching as one by Shakespeare. It’s the story of a boy and a girl in their teens who were very much in love, told in their own words in letters to each other.
“Sweetheart,” the boy writes, “if you should be taken away from me, I don’t know what I’d do. Do you know that you mean everything to me? A fellow can do most anything, dear, if he has a little girl like you to back him up. With you backing me up, I feel as if I could go through the seven fires of hell and come out rather cool.…”
“I love you every second,” the girl responded. “I love and adore you. There couldn’t be anyone else in the world for us but each other … it was ordained from the first that we should be together. I have always known it. You will never, never know how I love you … you are everything in the world I hold dearest. If anything should happen to you, I think I should go insane.…”
Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Page 18