Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me

by Marlon Brando

  I drove Lisa a few more miles and decided that the desert was a perfect place to make love. The desert, and beyond it a backdrop of rose-colored mountains, were beautiful; except for a few birds, the two of us could have been alone on the moon. But as I started to climax, the earth began to shake; suddenly it seemed as if a million tons of TNT were being detonated beneath us, and as the earth shook, an enormous, vibrating tremor swept through my entire body. What kind of an orgasm is this? My God, this is magical! I thought. This is the orgasm to end my life; I’m going to die of orgasm right here in the middle of the desert. Then there was a tremendously loud blast.

  Lisa looked up at me and asked, “What was that?”

  Then it occurred to me that the sound had probably been from some young air force pilot in a supersonic jet flying fifty feet off the ground. It happened so fast that I never saw the plane—if there was one. But if there had been, the shock waves and sonic boom washed over us at exactly the right moment. I’ve never had an orgasm like that before or since. For a moment I thought I was going to die. What a way to go!

  45

  YEARS AFTER OUR troubles over The Egyptian, I saw Darryl Zanuck humiliate his son Richard unmercifully. He had hired Richard to run Twentieth Century-Fox, then fired him and announced his dismissal as if it were a personal triumph. He said things no son should ever hear from his father. Later, when I ran into Zanuck at the Stork Club in New York, I stood beside his table and said in a voice that everyone could hear that he should be ashamed of himself.

  I saw this happen again when I worked with Charlie Chaplin on A Countess from Hong Kong. Chaplin was an actor I had always admired greatly. Some of his films, such as City Lights, still move me to tears as well as laughter. In the beginning of that movie, he introduces himself and establishes his character in a hilarious scene by having the camera discover him asleep in the arms of a statue. At the end of the film, after he has been sent to jail for stealing money to pay for a blind girl’s operation to give her sight, he passes her flower shop. He recognizes her, but of course she does not know him because previously she was blind. He is now a tramp with holes in his shoes and the ragged tail of his shirt sticking out of his trousers. He is stunned when he sees her. As he starts to walk past, she runs out from the shop and pins a rose in his buttonhole; then when she feels his suit and shoulders, her face brightens, and the audience realizes that she recognizes with her fingers the man who helped give her sight and whom she loves. The viewer experiences not only her love but his shame as she realizes that he is a tramp. The moment is magical, one that reaches into the audience’s unconscious, which only the best acting can do. Chaplin knew exactly what the audience would experience. I don’t know if it was conscious or instinctive, but he understood the myth he had created with the Little Tramp and attached himself to it tenaciously.

  Comic genius or not, when I went to London to work with him late in his life, Chaplin was a fearsomely cruel man. He was almost seventy-seven when he offered me the part of a diplomat named Ogden Mears in A Countess from Hong Kong. In this comedy set aboard a luxury liner sailing between Hong Kong and San Francisco, Sophia Loren played an impoverished former dance-hall girl who stowed away in my room. Although I revered Chaplin, who had written the story based on a voyage he had taken from Shanghai in 1931, when he offered me the part in 1966, I told him I didn’t believe I was right for it. I’ve always been leery of comedies, but he insisted that I could do it, and since I regarded him as a genius, I agreed to be a marionette in his hands. I figured he must know something I didn’t, that he thought I could add something to the picture not apparent to me, and that I could help him achieve it.

  But A Countess from Hong Kong was a disaster, and while we were making it I discovered that Chaplin was probably the most sadistic man I’d ever met. He was an egotistical tyrant and a penny-pincher. He harassed people when they were late, and scolded them unmercifully to work faster. Worst of all, he treated his son Sydney, who played my sidekick, cruelly. In front of everybody, he humiliated him constantly: “Sydney, you’re so stupid! Don’t you have enough brains to know how to place your hand on a doorknob? You know what a doorknob is, don’t you? All you do is turn the knob, open the door and enter. Isn’t that easy, Sydney?”

  Chaplin spoke to his son this way again and again and reshot his scenes over and over for no reason, berating him and never speaking to him with anything except sarcasm. Oona O’Neill, Charlie’s wife, was always there but never defended her stepson. It was painful to watch, especially after Sydney told me that Chaplin treated all his children this way. He said that one of Charlie’s sons had gone to Paris over his objections, returned home at Christmas and knocked on the door. Charlie opened it and broke his nose with one punch, then slammed the door, leaving his son bleeding on the ground, and refused to let him in. He was a very rich man, but from what Sydney said, he never gave his children any money to speak of. For example, Sydney dreamed of opening a restaurant, but his father, who was worth millions, wouldn’t lend him anything.

  “Sydney, why do you take this?” I asked him one day. “Why don’t you walk off the set? Why don’t you tell him off? Why do you accept this kind of humiliation? There’s no reason for it.”

  “He’s getting old,” Sydney said, and made excuses for his father: he was having problems with the picture, he had the flu, he was worried about this or that.

  I said, “None of that’s an excuse for being so sadistic, especially to your own son.” But I could never persuade Sydney to stand up to his father, and he continued to take the abuse.

  One day I arrived on the set about fifteen minutes late. I was in the wrong and I shouldn’t have been late, but it happened. In front of the whole cast Chaplin berated me, embarrassing me, telling me that I had no sense of professional ethics and that I was a disgrace to my profession.

  As he went on and on, I started to fume. Finally I said, “Mr. Chaplin, I’ll be in my dressing room for twenty minutes. If you give me an apology within that time, I will consider not getting on a plane and returning to the United States. But I’ll be there only twenty minutes.”

  I went to my dressing room, and after a few minutes, Chaplin knocked on the door and apologized. Thereafter he never got in my way, and we finished the picture without further incident.

  Charlie wasn’t born evil. Like all people, he was the sum of his genetic inheritance and the experiences of a lifetime. We are all shaped by our own miseries and misfortunes. He knew what was touching, funny, sad, pathetic and heroic; he knew how to tap the emotions of his audiences to arouse them, and he had an intuitive knowledge of the workings of the human personality. But he never learned enough to understand his own character.

  I still look up to him as perhaps the greatest genius that the medium has ever produced. I don’t think anyone has ever had the talent he did; he made everybody else look Lilliputian. But as a human being he was a mixed bag, just like all of us.

  46

  ASIDE FROM ELIA KAZAN and Bernardo Bertolucci, the best director I worked with was Gillo Pontecorvo, even though we nearly killed each other. He directed me in a 1968 film that practically no one saw. Originally called Queimada!, it was released as Burn! I played an English spy, Sir William Walker, who symbolized all the evils perpetrated by the European powers on their colonies during the nineteenth century. There were a lot of parallels to Vietnam, and the movie portrayed the universal theme of the strong exploiting the weak. I think I did the best acting I’ve ever done in that picture, but few people came to see it.

  Gillo had made a film I liked, The Battle of Algiers, and was one of the few great filmmakers I knew. He is an extraordinarily talented, gifted man, but during most of our time together we were at each other’s throats. We spent six months in Colombia, mostly in Cartagena, a humid, tropical city about 11 degrees from the equator and not far, I thought, from the gateway to Hades. Most days the temperature was over 105 degrees, and the humidity made the set a Turkish bath. Gillo’s first shot was f
rom the window of a tiny cubicle, supposedly a prison cell in an old fort, with the camera looking down on a courtyard where a prisoner was being garroted. When I saw that Gillo was wearing a long, heavy winter overcoat despite the heat, I couldn’t believe it. With the movie lights blazing, it must have been over 130 degrees in the room. But he filmed take after take and never removed his overcoat.

  “Gillo,” I finally asked, “why are you wearing that heavy coat?” He was drenched in sweat. “Gillo, why don’t you take it off?”

  He shrugged, pulled his collar up, looked around and said in French, “I feel a little chilly, I don’t know why. I’m afraid I might get a cold.”

  “That coat’s not going to help you. If you’re ill there’s no sense in weakening yourself more by losing all that fluid.”

  “I’ll be all right,” he said and turned away.

  I walked over to one of the members of the crew and said, “Unless he’s getting the flu, he’s doing something very strange. He’ll exhaust himself and pass out from the loss of so much perspiration.”

  During the next break, Gillo came outside and I noticed that he was wearing a pair of brief blue trunks underneath the overcoat. An odd combination, I thought, swimming trunks and an overcoat in this heat? While I was watching him, he pulled a handful of small objects from one pocket of the coat and shifted them to the other. I went over and asked him, “What are those?”

  “Do you believe in luck?” Gillo asked.

  “You mean fate?”

  “Luck, fortuna.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess so. Some days you feel lucky, some days you don’t.”

  He dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of plastic that looked like a curly red chile pepper. “What is that?” I asked.

  “A little something for good luck. Touch it,” he said, adding that it would bring good luck to the picture.

  I did, and asked where his good luck charm came from.

  “Italia.”

  “What do charms like that cost?”

  “Nothing.” He reached into his pocket again, brought out dozens of little chile peppers and gave me one. He seemed happy that I’d accepted it, and said I’d helped assure that the picture would be a success.

  I’ve since met other Italians who won’t go anywhere without a charm in their pockets, but Gillo took superstition to cosmic heights. One of his friends told me that he always wore that overcoat whenever he directed the first shot of a new movie, and insisted that the same prop man be in the shot wearing the same pair of tennis shoes. He was the man who was strangled in the first scene, and the tennis shoes had been painted to look like boots. On Thursdays, I was told, you must never ask Gillo for anything because if he refused you it would bring him bad luck. He also never allowed the color purple to appear in his pictures, or for that matter anywhere in sight, because he considered it bad luck. His obsession over the color was limitless; if he could, he would have obliterated it from a summer sunset.

  Gillo was a handsome man with dark hair and beautiful blue eyes who came from a family of diverse accomplishments; one brother, he told me, had won the Stalin Peace Prize, another was a Nobel laureate, and his sister was a missionary in Africa.

  Despite his warehouse of superstitions, Gillo knew how to direct actors. Because I didn’t speak Italian and he spoke little English, we communicated mostly in French, though a lot of it was nonverbal; when I was in a scene, he’d come over and with a small gesture signal “A little less,” or “A little more.” He was always right, though he wasn’t always clever about knowing how to stimulate me to achieve the right pitch. He was a good filmmaker, but he was also a martinet who constantly tried to manipulate me into playing the part exactly as he saw it, and often I wouldn’t go along with what he wanted. He approached everything from a Marxist point of view; most of the people who worked for him thought this dogma was the answer to all the world’s problems, and some of them were sinister. They were helpful to Gillo, but I didn’t much care for them. Some of the lines he wanted me to say were straight out of the Communist Manifesto, and I refused to utter them. He was full of tricks. If we disagreed, he sometimes gave in, then kept the camera running after saying “Cut,” hoping to get me to do something I’d refused to do. In one scene I was supposed to toast Evaristo Marquez, the actor playing a revolutionary leader who was my foil and the hero of the picture, but Gillo didn’t want me to sip from my drink after the toast; I was to spill my wine onto the ground as a snub while Evaristo sipped his. At that moment in the picture this gesture did not seem to me to be consistent with my character, and so I refused to do it; I wanted to really toast him. Gillo let me do it my way, then kept the camera turning after the take was over and got a shot of me throwing my drink on the ground because I thought we had finished the shot. When I saw the picture, this was the shot he used.

  In another scene on a very hot day, when I was wearing only shorts and a jacket for a shot above the waist, Gillo wanted me to say something I didn’t want to say and made me repeat the scene over and over, thinking that he would finally exhaust me and I’d do what he wanted. But after about the tenth take I realized what was going on and asked the makeup man to get me a stool. I strapped it to my rear end and continued doing the scene my way, then after each take lowered myself onto the seat and pretended to be reading The Wall Street Journal, which Gillo detested as the symbol of everything evil. After scores of takes, he finally gave up; I’d worn him out.

  Most of our fights were over the interpretation of my character and the story, but we fought over other things, too. Gillo had hired a lot of black Colombian extras as slaves and revolutionaries, and I noticed that they were being served different food from the Europeans and Americans. It looked inedible to me and I mentioned this to him.

  “That’s what they like,” Gillo said. “That’s what they always eat.”

  But the real reason, a member of the crew told me, was that Gillo was trying to save money; the food he was giving the black extras cost less. Then I learned that he wasn’t paying the black extras as much as the white extras, and when I confronted him about it, he said that if he did the white extras would rebel.

  “Wait a minute, Gillo; this picture is about how whites exploited the blacks.”

  Gillo said that he agreed with me, but he couldn’t back down; in his mind the end justified the means.

  “Okay,” I said, “then I’m going home. I won’t be a part of this.”

  I went to the airport at Barranquilla and was about to get on a plane for Los Angeles when Gillo sent a messenger with a promise to equalize the pay and food.

  Making that movie was wild. Everybody smoked a strong variety of marijuana called Colombian Red, and the crew was stoned most of the time. For some reason making a movie in Cartagena attracted a lot of women from Brazil. Dozens of them showed up, mostly upper-class women from good families, and they wanted to sleep with everybody. After they went home, some told me, they intended to see a doctor who would sew up their hymens so that when they got married their husbands would think they were virgins. The doctors in Rio must have made a lot of money from that movie.

  My truce with Gillo didn’t last long. Although he raised the pay for the black extras and briefly gave them better food, I discovered after a few days that they were still not being fed the same meals as Europeans working on the picture. We were shooting scenes in a poor black village; the houses had mud floors and stick walls, and the children had distended bellies. It was a good place to shoot because it was what the picture was about, but heartbreaking to be there.

  “You can’t feed these people that kind of crap,” I told Gillo. This time he ignored me, so I got everybody on the crew to pile their lunches against the camera in a pyramid and refuse to work.

  Gillo came up to me angrily with his team of thugs and said, “I understand you’re dissatisfied with lunch.”

  “Yes.”

  “What would you like to have for lunch?”

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p; “Champagne,” I said, “and caviar. I’d like to have some decent food, and I’d like it served to me properly.”

  Somewhere Gillo found a restaurant that sent my meal to the set, along with four waiters in red jackets with dickeys on their chests and napkins over their arms. When they set up a table with linen and silver and candles, I said, “No, the candles shouldn’t go there; they should go here, and the forks should go on the other side of the plates.” Then I touched the bottle of champagne and said it wasn’t chilled enough. “You’d better put it on ice a little longer.”

  I fussed with the table setting while the crew and people from the village gathered around to watch with their arms folded. In their eyes I must have been the epitome of the self-indulgent capitalist who wanted everything. Gillo sent a publicity photographer to take a picture of the event, and herded some black people into the background. After everything was arranged perfectly, I searched the crowd for the poorest, sickest, unhappiest-looking children I could find, invited them to sit at the table, and then served them the meal. The people cheered, but as far as my relationship with Gillo was concerned, the episode made the situation worse.

  We continued to fight while other problems came up: a key member of the crew had a heart attack and died; the cameraman developed a sty and couldn’t do any filming; the temperature got even hotter, with all of us working long hours and flirting with sunstroke. The few union rules in effect were much more lenient than they were in the United States and everybody’s temper was short. I also found it increasingly amusing that a man so dedicated to Marxism found it so easy to exploit his workers. Meanwhile, Gillo’s superstitions knew no bounds. If somebody spilled salt, Gillo had to run around the table and throw more salt on the ground in a certain pattern dictated by him; if wine was spilled, he made the guilty party dip a finger in the wine and daub it behind each ear of everyone at the table. It was sad but hilarious. I began doing things to irritate Gillo, asking him for favors on Thursdays, wearing purple and walking under ladders; once I opened the door of my caravan, shone a mirror on him and yelled, “Hey, Gillo, buon giorno,” and then smashed the mirror. In Gillo’s eyes breaking a mirror was a direct invitation to the devil to enter your life. Once he raised his glass at lunch in a toast and said, “Salute.” I raised my glass while everybody drank, then spilled my wine with a flourish on the ground, which to Gillo was the supreme insult. He got a gun and stuck it in his belt, and I started carrying a knife. Years before, I’d practiced knife-throwing and was fairly accurate at distances up to about eighteen feet, so sometimes I took out my knife and hurled it at a wall or post a few feet from him. He shuddered slightly, put his hand on his waist, rested it on the butt of his gun and then eyed me sternly, letting me know that he was ready for battle, too.