Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me

by Marlon Brando

  After Louis’s death, Paul Ford, a very funny actor, was brought in to replace him, but I, director Danny Mann and Glenn ruined the movie. On the first day of filming, I discovered that Glenn thought of himself as a masterful scene-stealer. He wouldn’t be photographed from the left because he thought it was his “bad side,” so before every shot he came to the set early and installed himself in the position he wanted, where the camera would see him from the right side; then, after we took our marks, he backed up a step or two, so that the camera had to follow him and he wound up full-faced in the shot, and other actors had to turn and lose three quarters of their faces. Sometimes he would gesture across my face, or as I said a line he would make a quick movement to catch the audience’s eye; or he would begin stuttering to draw attention to his character.

  I knew what Glenn was doing, but I don’t think he ever realized how transparent he was. I had occasionally run into actors who tried to hog the camera, but had never met someone of this caliber. I knew the techniques as well as anyone; they’re not mysterious. A lot of actors try to do it and manipulate the audience. Olivia de Havilland had a wonderful trick of breathing deeply to make her breasts swell in and out; when she did, she made short work of the other actors in the scene because the audience—at least all the males, and probably half the females—was preoccupied with the movement of her breasts. But Ford took scene-stealing to Olympian heights, and in this fragile story, which required the two of us to act in delicate concert, he wanted to be the center of attention in every scene.

  At the beginning I tried to reassure Glenn that I wasn’t a threat to his status, and in several scenes turned three quarters around so that he would appear full-faced to the camera. I wanted to let him know we weren’t combatants, but he kept it up. Whenever we took our places for a shot, just before the camera started rolling he took a step or two backward, which made me pull my head around to look at him as he went upstage; in the camera’s eye, I went from full face to a narrow profile. But he thought I was just stupid. I finally thought, To hell with this, and I followed him across the stage the next time he did it. When he backed up, I moved forward; he backed up again and I moved another few inches; we repeated this until we were moving across the stage inches at a time like a couple of dancers doing a tango until finally the camera operator shouted, “Hold it. I can’t hold the focus anymore! You’re out of focus.” Eventually I decided that the picture was a dead horse and that there was no way it could be saved; it was a sensitive comedy and we were wrecking it. I didn’t think it was one of Danny Mann’s best efforts. Quite apart from everything else, I felt inept as a comedian; David Wayne should have played the part in the movie.

  But since the picture was lost anyway, I decided to have some fun with Glenn’s performance. Thereafter I made sure to arrive on the set before he did and took a position that made him face the camera from his left side. I began stepping on his lines and blowing mine when he had a big scene and trying to rattle him during his speeches. When an actor has a long take, he hates to be distracted, so before one of his big speeches to a group of Okinawans, I got a flyswatter from the prop man and started following nonexistent flies around in the background, swatting one occasionally, and during his close-ups I stuck my head in and out of the camera as if searching for a fly.

  Glenn looked at me as if he had been struck with an anvil. He didn’t know what to think, because with all his trickery and my letting him get away with it initially, he didn’t understand what I was doing. I wore him out; he thought I was too dumb to see through him, which made it even more fun to play tricks on him on and off the set. He was a miser about food, and at one of the locations we shared a dressing room in which he kept a cache of candies and desserts he had bought at an army PX and that he was tightfisted about sharing. After he brought back a box of cookies, I saw him hide it in our room and I pinched some. When Glenn discovered that some of them were missing, he stormed out the door and blamed a group of Japanese kids from the neighborhood who were hanging about and were only about two feet high. He screamed at them, “No cookies. No cookies. Do not eat cookies. No go in there.”

  I didn’t like how he treated the kids, and I thought he should have given them the cookies in the first place because in those days there weren’t many sweets to go around. Later that day, I ate a few of the remaining cookies, then threw several others on the floor and stomped on them. When he came in and saw the crumbs, he exploded. It must have been about $1.75 worth of cookies, but it sent him into a rage, and he demanded that the producers post guards outside our dressing room, which led to a lot of jokes about the “Cookie Watch.”

  When he discovered more cookies crushed on the floor the next day, Glenn asked me if I knew anything about it, and I told him in my most convincing manner that it was a mystery to me. How did those kids get into the trailer past the guards? he asked.

  He never found out. Again it was one of those English drawing-room mysteries—like Louis Calhern, the whiskey and the straw.

  36

  IF I HADN’T BEEN an actor, I’ve often thought I’d have become a con man and wound up in jail. Or I might have gone crazy. Acting afforded me the luxury of being able to spend thousands of dollars on psychoanalysts, most of whom did nothing but convince me that most New York and Beverly Hills psychoanalysts are a little crazy themselves, as well as highly motivated to separate patients from their money while making their emotional problems worse. I think I’d have made a good con man; I’m good at telling lies smoothly, giving an impression of things as they are not and making people think I’m sincere. A good con man can fool anybody, but the first person he fools is himself. It occurs to me that when I was thinking about becoming a preacher I believed the talents I thought would make me a good tent-show evangelist were the same ones that would have made me a good con man.

  Having had the luck to be successful as an actor also afforded me the luxury of time. I only had to do a movie once a year, for three months at the most, which paid me enough so that I didn’t have to work again until my business manager called and said, “We’ve got to pay your taxes at the end of the year, so you’d better make another movie.” When that happened, I’d look around and grab something.

  After Teahouse of the August Moon, my father, who thought of himself as my manager even though I’d only put him on the payroll so he’d have an office to go to after my mother died, started pressing me to make another picture. Pennebaker Productions, he said, was facing serious financial problems. As always, he was preoccupied with money. He complained I was spending too much on the UN picture and on a western I wanted to make, and he claimed that a friend I’d put on the Pennebaker payroll was exploiting me. He said if I didn’t make another picture soon, I’d be in trouble with the IRS. He urged me to sign for a picture based on a novel by James A. Michener that Joshua Logan wanted to direct and that Warner Brothers, with producer William Goetz, had offered to finance in a joint venture with Pennebaker. I read the novel, Sayonara, which was set in postwar Japan, and thought it raised interesting issues about human relations, but I didn’t like the script. In the script and the novel, the character Logan wanted me to play, Major Lloyd Gruver, a Korean War–era U.S. Air Force pilot, fell in love with a beautiful Japanese woman, Hana-ogi, a member of a distinguished and elite dance troupe, but their interracial romance was doomed by the tradition in both cultures of endogamy, the custom of marrying only within one’s own race or caste. In accepting this principle, I thought the story endorsed indirectly a form of racism. But with a different ending, I thought it could be an example of the pictures I wanted to make, films that exerted a positive force. I told Logan I’d do the picture if the Madame Butterfly ending was replaced by one stating that there was nothing wrong with racial intermarriage, and that it was a natural outcome when people fell in love. I wanted the two lovers to marry at the end of the picture, and Logan agreed.

  But once we were in Japan, I discovered that Josh was burdened with an overwhelming depression tha
t made him unable to function. I ended up rewriting and improvising a lot of the picture, and we had to limp along as best we could. With Josh’s problems and a long run of rainy weather, it was a difficult picture to make, and I don’t think Logan knew what was happening most of the time.

  My father now called me Marlon instead of Bud, and we were civil to each other, but the friction between us never ended. After he began working for me, I didn’t expect him really to do anything, but he constantly wrote memos warning me that my company was wasting money on projects that were going nowhere, and that I was too concerned with making a statement and not enough with making money. “To date,” he wrote me before we had received our share of the profits from Sayonara, “Pennebaker is almost as far away from producing a picture as it was at the beginning, and we have spent $18,000 in hard dollars contributed by you, $25,000 by MCA, and over $153,000 loaned by Paramount—$196,000. Pennebaker’s reputation as a producer has been declining and it can be assumed that this is not without its reflection on you.” He said we’d wasted $72,000 alone on preparations for the UN movie. “Some of the reasons for our diversions were that Pennebaker wanted to be a helpful force in the world. I agree heartily with the thought, but I think there is some question as to whether this sort of program belongs in an embryonic production company.…”

  Regardless of what he thought, I wanted to make pictures that were not only entertaining but had social value and gave me a sense that I was helping to improve the condition of the world. My father disagreed with my priorities: “The corporation” should be “operated with the prime objective of turning out tasteful, good pictures that are commercial until such a time that it can afford to do something for the emotional satisfaction involved. I think we have put the cart before the horse in some respects. Our purpose, at least the purpose of the industry, is to entertain rather than try to use loaded directive thought … more real lasting good is probably produced by foundations, universities, colleges, medical research, hospitals and even churches, and these are all activated and made possible by the use of dollars earned in a hard commercial way. As you say, I have a money neurosis in one way. I think you have a money neurosis in another way. Someday I think we should discuss our respective tendencies. I personally don’t believe there is anything wrong in having money if it is used as an instrument rather than a means … if money can be used properly it can become an instrument for great good. After Pennebaker has earned sufficient money any surpluses above needs can be used as you see fit.”

  My father also continued to complain that my friends who worked for Pennebaker were using and exploiting me. “You have great perception and knowledge,” he said, “but you allow yourself to be conned into doing things emotionally. You can afford this personally, but you cannot afford this in Pennebaker.…”

  When the press fabricated stories about me, I feigned indifference over what was said and what others thought about me. I think I was convincing in this pose of detachment, but it was a mask. Newspapers and magazines invented things that were not only untrue, but were often gratuitously salacious and they offended me greatly. I became particularly annoyed by stories in Time and Life. I engaged a research organization to dig up all the negative unassailable facts it could find about Time Inc., the parent company, spent about $8,000 for a long profile on the company’s history of distorting and slanting the news, and then went on one television and radio program after another to slam Time and Life. I was after their advertising. I wanted revenge. I intended to hurt them, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it because I was only repeating facts of how skewed the magazines’ presentation of the news was as a result of the political biases of Henry Luce. On radio and television, I said his magazines were ruining the reputation of the United States, that they were unpatriotic and injuring the stature of our country abroad, and that they insulted other countries with distorted stories for which our nation would ultimately have to pay a price. I relished doing this. That’s how I was during a large part of my life; if I thought anybody had wronged me, I hit back.

  Time Inc. sent a woman out to see me who was related to a friend of mine. She called on a pretext of some sort and I invited her to dinner. We had several martinis, and by the time we headed back to my house I was driving an S pattern across the highway and she was even worse off. I pulled into my driveway, but before we got out of the car, she tried valiantly to carry out her mission. In slurred tones, she said, “Marlon, what’s all this about you attacking Time? What’s behind it? What’s going on here?”

  “Oh, I think they’re great magazines,” I said, “but there’s a few corrections they should make, and I’ve gone on several programs to set the record straight. I’m going to keep doing it because I feel it’s my civic duty to correct the press when it’s wrong. Actually I think they should appreciate it. They have a letters-to-the-editor column, and in a sense this is just a letter to the editor. It’s a continuing letter that will go on and on until they don’t feel they have the right to ruin the reputation of America …”

  Then I lowered her into the bushes, intending to act the beast with two backs with the emissary of my enemy, but I was so awash in alcohol, so immobilized and out of ammunition that I couldn’t tell the ivy from her earlobes. She returned to New York with her virtue intact. But from that day to this, Time has seldom mentioned my name, and if it has, it’s been in a cursory way. Time Inc. is a big company, but it was the old story of David and Goliath: it takes only one well-placed stone in the middle of the forehead.

  In late 1957 I went to Europe to make The Young Lions, a movie based on Irwin Shaw’s novel about three soldiers—two Americans and a German—whose lives intersected before and during World War II. Monty Clift played the Jewish-American soldier, Noah Ackerman, and I played the German, Christian Diestl. Jay Kantor told me that Dean Martin, whose career had been in decline after his breakup with Jerry Lewis, was desperate to play Michael Whiteacre, an American entertainer reluctantly drafted into the war, to prove that he could handle a serious dramatic role, so I helped him get the part. When we met at a restaurant in Paris before the filming started, someone spilled a pot of scalding water on my crotch. The pain was excruciating and sent me to a hospital for several days, where I thought about the script and decided to exercise the right in my contract to change it.

  The original script closely followed the book, in which Shaw painted all Germans as evil caricatures, especially Christian, whom he portrayed as a symbol of everything that was bad about Nazism; he was mean, nasty, vicious, a cliché of evil. Like many books and movies produced by Jews since the war, I think it was a perfectly understandable bias that, consciously or unconsciously, Jews felt would ensure that the world would never forget the Holocaust and, not coincidentally, would increase sympathy and financial support for Israel. Indirectly Shaw was saying that all Germans were responsible for the Holocaust, which I didn’t agree with. Much to his irritation, I changed the plot entirely so that at the beginning of the story my character believed that Hitler was a positive force because he gave Germans a sense of purpose. But as the story developed, he gradually became disenchanted and struggled to turn his back on these beliefs. Like many Germans, Christian had been misled by Hitler’s propaganda and believed he would bring a lasting peace to Europe by conquering it—the same rationalization that Napoleon had employed by saying he wanted to unify Europe to bring peace. I thought the story should demonstrate that there are no inherently “bad” people in the world, but that they can easily be misled.

  I’m uncomfortable with generalizations about anything because they are rarely accurate. At the time, we were just coming out of the McCarthy era, when many people’s lives had been ruined because so many Americans accepted the myth that every Communist—or anyone who’d ever had a drink with one—was the devil incarnate, while overlooking the malignancy of Joe McCarthy, who was a greater menace than the people he targeted.

  In The Young Lions I wanted to show that there were positive asp
ects to Germans, as there are to all people. Depending on your point of view, there are positive and negative elements in everyone. Hitler propagated the myth that the Germans were a superior race and the Jews inferior, but accepting the reverse of this is equally wrong; there are bad Jews and Germans, and decent Jews and Germans. I decided to play Christian Diestl as an illustration of one element of the human character—that is, how, because of their need to keep their myths alive, people will go to enormous lengths to ignore the negative aspects of their beliefs.

  It happens all the time. I’ve watched parents tell television interviewers how proud they were of their son who died in Vietnam because he had been fighting to defend freedom, his country and American ideals, when I am sure they must have known in their hearts what a foolish war it was and that their son’s life had been squandered for nothing. Memories and myths were all they had to cling to; they couldn’t admit that their son was dead because of the senseless and destructive policies of Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara and the rest of the “Best and the Brightest.”