Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me

by Marlon Brando

  One day when we were having one of our arguments over how the movie should be played, I screamed at him at the top of my lungs, “You’re eating me like ants … you’re eating me like ants.” I didn’t even know it was coming out of me. It made him jump nine feet in the air. Another day, we came close to a fist-fight over a scene showing four half-naked black children pushing and pulling the headless body of their father—the man garroted in the first scene—home to be buried. Gillo shot part of the take in the morning, then adjourned for lunch. When I returned to the set afterward, he wasn’t back yet and the wardrobe lady was holding one of the children in her lap.

  “What’s the matter with the boy?” I asked.

  “He’s sick.”

  “What is it?”

  “He vomited a worm at lunch, and he has a very high temperature.”

  “What’s he doing here then?” I said. “Where’s the doctor?”

  She said Gillo wanted the boy to finish the scene because if he didn’t he would have to find another child to play the part and lose part of a day’s shooting.

  “Does he know he’s sick?”

  “Yes.”

  I called a doctor and told him to get to the set as fast as he could. When he arrived I said, “Take my car and get this kid to the hospital right now.”

  When Gillo returned from lunch, I was steaming and so was he because I had sent the boy away. We came within inches of mixing it up; only the fact that he was shorter than me kept me from punching him. Several days later I couldn’t take Gillo or the heat anymore. I needed a vacation. People were dropping like flies from illness and exhaustion. I drove to Barranquilla and left for Los Angeles at four A.M. A day or two later, I got a stinging letter from the producers saying that I was in breach of my contract, and that unless I returned to Colombia immediately, they would sue me. I wrote back demanding an immediate apology for their preposterous accusations—all of which were true—and said I couldn’t possibly think of returning after being so excoriated; my professional reputation was at stake. I knew the producers’ threats were empty because I had learned long ago that once filming starts, the actor has the edge; too much money had been spent to abandon the project; and even if they could win a lawsuit it would take years to adjudicate, by which time all the money they’d invested on the project would be gone. If he knows what to do, the actor can get away with almost anything under these circumstances. Most of them are too intimidated to do anything, but I wasn’t.

  After a five-day vacation and a letter of apology, I told the producers I would finish the picture, but only in North Africa, where the climate was more pleasant and the terrain and settings similar. They agreed, if I would just return to Colombia for a few more shots. I didn’t want to see the country again, but I agreed to go. They booked me on a Delta Airlines flight from Los Angeles to New Orleans and a connecting flight from there to Barranquilla. When I walked onto the plane at Los Angeles International Airport, I asked a flight attendant, “Are you sure this is the flight to Havana?”

  She opened the cockpit door and told the captain, “We’ve got a guy out here who wants to know if we’re going to Havana.”

  The captain said, “Get him off the plane, and if he doesn’t leave tell him we’ll have the FBI here in two minutes.”

  “Oh, please,” I said, “I’m awfully tired.”

  The flight hostess, who didn’t recognize me, said, “Get off the plane, buddy.”

  I was delighted because I was in no hurry to go back to Colombia, so I ran down the ramp at full speed to the concourse. As I sprinted past the check-in desk one of the agents said, “Is there anything wrong, Mr. Brando?”

  “No,” I said, out of breath, “they just seemed a little nervous, and I don’t want to have any extra trouble and worry on the flight.” Then I ran like a gazelle, expecting the agent to telephone the pilot and say, “You just kicked a movie star off the plane.” Sure enough, an agent was waiting for me as I tried to sprint past the ticket counter.

  “Mr. Brando, we’re awfully sorry,” he said. “We didn’t know it was you; please accept our apologies and go back to the plane. They’re holding it for you.”

  “No,” I said. “Not now. I’m terribly upset. I’m usually nervous about flying anyway, and if that pilot is so nervous I don’t think I’d feel safe flying with him …”

  The story made the papers and the airline apologized, but it did give me a longer vacation because there wouldn’t be another plane out of New Orleans for Barranquilla for three days. Unfortunately, they chartered a special plane to meet me in New Orleans and I had to return to Colombia after only two days.

  All of the above to the contrary, however, Gillo was one of the most sensitive and meticulous directors I ever worked for. That’s what kept me on that picture because, despite the grief and strife, I had the deepest respect for him. Later, when I wanted to make a movie about the Battle of Wounded Knee, he was the first director I thought of to do it.

  47

  I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN lucky with women. There have been many of them in my life, though I hardly ever spent more than a couple of minutes with any of them. I’ve had far too many affairs to think of myself as a normal, rational man. But somehow I always thought there must be something—someone—out there. There was something: huge alimony payments, and if not that, enough trouble for fifty men.

  With women, I’ve had what you might call a Rolodex life. I enjoy identifying and pushing the right emotional buttons of women—which usually means making them feel that they are of value to me and offering them security for themselves and their children. The less likely I was to seduce a woman, the more I wanted to succeed. Doing rude things to nuns was always a fantasy. In a hospital once, I tried; her name was Sister Raphael and she was quite beautiful. She often came to my room to see how I was feeling, and because there was something unusually extroverted about her, I thought, Somewhere in her there’s got to be a touch of the tart. So I tried—and failed. Whatever human responses may have been stirring beneath her habit, she was committed to God, and no force on earth is more powerful than a strong belief system, religious or otherwise.

  When my timing was off and two women crossed paths, it often led to problems because of their presumption of exclusivity. Once when I fled my house after two women had discovered each other there at the same time, I remember thinking, Marlon, you’re fifty-six years old and are cowering in a stand of bamboo; aren’t you ridiculous?

  In such situations honesty is not an effective remedy. One woman, an actress who had the notion that I was planning to spend the rest of my life with her, was naked in my bedroom when she asked, “Where were you last weekend?” As she walked toward me, I flinched and covered myself like a boxer. She smiled and said, “What are you afraid of? I’m not going to hit you!”

  “Just a reflex,” I said. Then it occurred to me that it was time to quit lying. This is absurd, I thought, why not tell her the truth? It’s stupid to lie to her.

  So I told her I had spent the weekend with a woman she knew, and she grabbed my hair and started pummeling me. She was screaming and I couldn’t get away because of her grip on my hair. Finally I grabbed her with both arms, shoved her across the room, ran down the hall stark naked, grabbed my car keys and scampered out the door, cutting my feet on the walkway. It was December and very cold; I was naked, my lips were blue and my feet were bleeding. After I started the car, I suddenly worried that the woman might be hurt, so I skulked back to the house, peeked in the bedroom window and saw her sitting on the bed speaking on the telephone. I went to a neighbor’s house, borrowed a blanket, put it around me and, still freezing, started driving without a destination in mind. Then I thought of my friend Sam Gilman, who didn’t live far away, and decided to seek sanctuary with him for the night. On my way to his house, I remember asking myself, Is this the way you want to live, Marlon? Driving down Ventura Boulevard in the middle of the night without any clothes on?

  I banged on Sam’s door, and when he saw
me standing there holding a blanket over my private parts, he roared with laughter. I said, “Sam, have you got any Valium?”

  At this he howled.

  “Sam, have you got any clothes?” He gave me a pair of Jockey shorts and an army shirt and socks, and when his wife got up and saw me, she started laughing, too. I said, “Sam, it’s not funny.” At this he almost had a stroke.

  Several hours later I went home and the woman was gone, though I kept seeing her for another five years.

  One afternoon I was home in bed with a girl when we looked up and saw an airline hostess in her uniform staring down at us. I suddenly remembered I’d made an appointment with her but had forgotten about it. Since I had allowed the girl I was in bed with to think that we would be together forever, the stewardess had arrived at an awkward moment, though to her credit she handled it well: she dropped her overnight case on the floor and said, “I see you’re busy now, so I’ll go into the kitchen and get something to eat. I’m starving.”

  I apologized to the girl in bed for embarrassing her, made up some lies about the stewardess and renewed my pledge of undying love. But she got up, dressed and went home, and I can’t say I blame her.

  Another time, another woman found a piece of lingerie in my bedroom that didn’t belong to her. When she challenged me about it, I laughed, thinking that joking would pacify her. Instead, she slammed me on the head with her keys, which were strapped to an eight-inch piece of oak. Blood streamed down my forehead, across my eyes and dribbled on the floor, creating a crimson pool on the carpet. I have a high threshold of pain and it didn’t really hurt me, but I didn’t tell her that. I pretended to lose consciousness and dropped slowly to the floor, smearing the blood across my face with my hands to make it look worse. By then she was reduced to tears, and in a panic ran around the house looking for bandages and medicine and telling me she was going to take me to the doctor.

  “No, no, I’ll be all right,” I said. “But I can’t see. I don’t know what’s wrong. I can’t see.”

  I turned the situation into an advantage and defused her rage, though she never did forget about that lingerie.

  Though I generally have a good memory, I’ve had affairs with women whom I met later and didn’t remember. Once, at a party in Los Angeles, I eyed a fetching woman across a room, a svelte, sloe-eyed woman with a fine face and dazzling figure, and said to myself, Damn it, Marlon, there goes the afternoon. Putting on my best Charm Boy act, I went over to her, stared into her eyes and said, “Excuse me, I think I’ve fallen in love. May I sit down?”

  She looked at me with an inscrutable Mona Lisa smile but said nothing, so I asked her why she was smiling.

  “Am I smiling?”

  “If you have to ask me whether or not you’re smiling, you’re in trouble,” I said.

  “Well, perhaps I am.”

  Switching to automatic pilot, I went ahead with my act and she became very engaging, with both of us playing out our roles in the mating dance preordained in every anthropoid culture, all leading toward sexual coupling and its intended purpose, procreation. I followed her down the alleyways of our flirtation and thought we were headed toward my intended destination when she said suddenly, “You know, we’ve met before.”

  “Really? It couldn’t be. I’d never have forgotten your face. Never.”

  “Well, we have.”

  “Where?”

  “You really don’t remember, do you?” she asked.

  “You’re kidding me,” I said. “You must be joking.”

  “We met in Tahiti.”

  “Where in Tahiti?”

  She named a hotel in Papeete.

  “We met there?”

  “Indeed we did.”

  “Where did we meet there?”

  “In your room.”

  “How do you remember it so well?” I asked.

  “Because my room was two doors away from yours.”

  It turned out that one night in Tahiti I had made love to this fascinating lady, and then she had gone out of my life. Recognizing my blunder and trying to recover from it, I said, “Do you think for one minute I could ever have forgotten that night? It is embossed on my brain. I never expected to see you again. Of course I remember you; it was one of the great nights of my life!”

  While I doubt that she ever truly believed me, the flirtation led to its predictable conclusion. She was a Brazilian archaeologist, a remarkable woman and a wonderful dancer; the way she set her foot down was like nothing else I’ve ever seen. She was beautiful and exotic, but she wanted a monogamous relationship, and when she realized my instincts led elsewhere, she sometimes expressed her displeasure in a volatile way. After we resumed our affair, I was in a swimming pool at a big Hollywood party with an old friend from New York, Jeff Brown, a quiet, staid fellow who I think was amazed by the bacchanalian atmosphere, and we were talking while in the pool when suddenly she came over and hit my head with the heel of her shoe. She was drunk and hit me so hard that I grabbed her and pushed her across the pool as far as I could. But my head still hurt, so I ducked underwater to make it feel better. When I came back to the surface, Jeff was looking at me. He had a broken nose. His face looked like a crushed strawberry—a huge, flattened, bloody, crushed strawberry. His mouth was wide open and he was looking at me in astonishment. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he asked the woman, who said, “Oh, my God, who are you?”

  She had recovered quickly after I pushed her, and just as I had ducked underwater, she had hauled off and tried to hit me again, but this time Jeff got it in the nose.

  48

  IN SOME WAYS I think of my middle age as the Fuck You Years. If I met a man who had a certain kind of overt masculinity, he became my enemy. I would find his weakness, then exploit it. I adopted his manner until I made a fool of him, which often took the form of sleeping with his wife. I used to be very vengeful. I agreed with something that George Santayana said: “To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.”

  I have a different attitude now, but during those years I loved the thrill of taking certain risks: it was like rock climbing, scaling the vertical wall of a granite cliff without a safety rope, or jumping out of a plane and waiting until the last moment before pulling the ripcord, unsure that my parachute would open.

  As I’ve observed, there was a lot of extracurricular fucking in Hollywood and Beverly Hills during the early sixties. At parties one of the popular pastimes was a variation of the kids’ game of “It.” The hostess turned off the lights and in pairs everybody went into hiding inside the house—and they were usually big houses. If the guests designated as “it” found you in the dark and could identify you by touch, they were no longer “it.” One night I went off with the wife of a songwriter who had a little too much testosterone in his personality for my taste. While hiding with her in the darkness, I started to do what comes naturally, but she said, “No, not here, not here.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “They might turn on the lights.”

  “So what?”

  She answered, “But I’m married.”

  A few days later, she called and told me her husband had gone for a few days to their home in Palm Springs. We were upstairs in bed when we heard a car come up the driveway and then the garage door open and close. We knew it was him, so there wasn’t anything for me to do except climb out the window. I lowered myself over the edge, grabbed some ivy hanging from the wall and tried to descend cat-burglar style to the ground, but I lost my grip and fell about seven feet into a huge bush that broke my fall and stabbed my legs with branches as sharp as spears.

  For thirteen years I had an affair with a very attractive Beverly Hills woman. She is still alive, so I’ll call her Lenore. Our kids grew up together, and I knew her and her husband very well. He was a physicist with a medical degree, as well as five or six others, and he owned a lot of patents that made him extremely wealthy. I used to park my car a few bloc
ks from their house in the middle of the night and in my tennis shoes stroll leisurely down the street, vault over their back fence and open the back door, which she left unlatched for me. Her husband was usually asleep upstairs in his room, and I would walk up the back stairs, where she’d be waiting for me, sometimes in the shower. For some reason we conducted a lot of our sex in the bathroom, where she was both athletic and imaginative. Then we’d either go to bed or I’d leave. Being upstairs with her husband so close by added excitement to the adventure. Before dawn I usually got up and hid under her bed in case he came in, and sometimes I would fall asleep, which was taking a chance because sometimes I snored. Lenore’s children occasionally came in, and after a while they knew what was going on, but they were good soldiers about it. Since our kids used to play together, we had almost a familial relationship.

  Lenore’s husband, Arthur, was very intelligent but affected an aw-shucks persona. He pretended to be unsophisticated and said things like “Gosh!” “Gee whiz!” “Golly!” and “For heaven’s sake!” On the other hand, he kept a loaded Saturday night special in his room.