Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me

by Marlon Brando

  One summer night, I climbed over the fence and found the door unlatched as usual. After opening it, I turned to tighten the latch; I was supposed to lock the door after entering. While I was doing so, Arthur walked out of the kitchen and was standing two or three feet away from me in the dark when I turned around. I jumped about four feet, and he beat me by at least two feet. “Oh my gosh!” he said. “You scared me.”

  I was paralyzed and couldn’t think of anything to say. My brain simply stopped working, though it functioned enough to remember Arthur’s gun. A headline flashed through my mind: ACTOR KILLED—MIDNIGHT INTRUDER SHOT, MISTAKEN FOR BURGLAR. It had happened to more than one playboy. After a few seconds I said the first thing that came out of my mouth: “Boy, am I glad to see you.”

  Then I tried to find the right face to go along with the words, whatever they meant, but there wasn’t an expression I could come within a mile of, so more words came out of me like bubbles: “God, Arthur. I’m really glad to see you. I’ve got to talk to somebody about this …”

  These words flew out of my mouth as if they were coming from someone else, and I thought to myself, What are you talking about, you maniac?

  Finally I said, “Arthur, can we talk?” I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’ve got a problem.” I went on. “Can we talk?”

  “Why, sure,” Arthur said.

  “Let’s go out to the sunporch,” I said. I knew the house well and that a walk to the sunporch would give me about forty-three feet and thirty seconds to come up with something to explain why I was in his house at 2:50 A.M., to say nothing about the door being unlatched.

  When we got there, I slumped down in a chair, looked over at him and said gravely that one of my sons was missing from home. “Have you seen him?”

  “My gosh, no.”

  “You haven’t seen him at all today?”

  “No.”

  Now I had a toenail grip on a theme, but only a toenail; if I made a slip, it was a straight drop about nine hundred feet down. But I gained a little more ground by saying, “You know, he’s not home. I don’t know where he is. He hasn’t been home all day. I’ve been worried sick.”

  My son was home asleep, of course.

  “Well, we sure haven’t seen him around here,” Arthur said sympathetically.

  “I don’t know whether to call the police or what,” I said. “Maybe he’s just out joyriding with some friends, or maybe he’s in trouble, but I’m worried. The only thing I could think of was that he might be here—you know, the kids are always staying overnight with each other. I thought of telephoning, but I didn’t want to wake everybody up.”

  Then I realized I had taken the wrong road; instead of telephoning, I had merely jumped over his fence, climbed up his driveway and opened his back door with the apparent intention of waking up the whole household. I wanted to escape from this cul-de-sac as fast as I could, but before I could say anything, Arthur said, “Well, maybe Lenore might know where he is.”

  “Lenore? She’s probably dead asleep.”

  But Arthur said, “Well, gee, let me wake her up. I think she’d want to know about this …”

  At that moment, Lenore came down the stairs in a sexy peignoir, looking radiant, with her hair beautifully combed, ready to receive the paramour who had climbed over her fence. As she descended the stairs, she looked at Arthur and me sitting in the sunporch and burst out laughing, howling one of those laughs that go on and on and knock you to your knees. The sight of me looking up at her with my worried, second-hand Hertz-Rent-a-Face and Arthur trying to look compassionate, with his chin arched and his eyebrows pointed to the ceiling, made her explode, and she couldn’t control herself. She grabbed a potted palm near the foot of the stairs, desperately trying to remain erect, choking on the sad news conveyed by my face, and still couldn’t stop laughing.

  My heart was pounding like a jackhammer and my blood pressure must have been 200 over 6. Why was she laughing? Was she hysterical? She couldn’t possibly think the situation was amusing. There she was in her lovely nightgown, with her hair combed, at three A.M. howling with laughter. How could she be behaving this way? Ignoring her laughter, I asked with a straight face if she had seen my son recently.

  At this, the potted palm Lenore was clinging to fell over; she couldn’t hang on to it. I was so frozen with terror that I didn’t see what Arthur was doing as this was going on. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the doorknob in the hall. That’s where I was looking. He was on my right. She came from the left into the sunporch, and I was staring past her at the doorknob, thinking that I was going to be attacked by the same hysterics if I looked at her, so finally I said, “I don’t think there’s anything funny to laugh at.”

  Somehow, in her mind it was uproarious to see two men sitting in her sunporch in the middle of the night, especially one who was as guilty as a safecracker caught in the act, looking desperately for a reason to be in her house, and whose only excuse was, “Have you seen my son?” Eventually she stopped laughing, threw herself in a chair and said, “No, I haven’t seen him.” And with that Lenore, a very nimble-minded woman, launched into a performance that would have delighted Stella Adler. What temerity she demonstrated: if I had been a daredevil for jumping over her fence, imagine what she became, a collaborator and partner in bringing the escapade to a conclusion. Once she stopped laughing, she quickly grasped the picture. She could read it in our faces, and what she couldn’t read, she imagined, and joined Arthur in expressing her support for me and for my fatherly concern.

  Finally I said, “I’d rather not call the police. You know what I think I’ll do? I’ll just go home and wait. He’ll come home. I’ll just be patient instead of panicking. What do you think, Arthur?”

  Arthur agreed that this was probably the best thing to do, so I got up and thanked them profusely while my chin quivered a little and Lenore nearly went into spasms while trying to keep from laughing.

  “Where did you park your car?” Arthur asked.

  “It’s down around the corner,” I said, and thought to myself that if I had to run into another patch of stupidity and make up another unbelievable story, I wasn’t going to make it.

  I said good night, and tried to reach the door as fast as I could while Arthur was saying, “Well, gosh now, you be sure to let us know …”

  I walked out the door a free man, and maybe even did a little jig at the corner.

  In hindsight I’m sure Arthur knew what was going on all along. Like Lenore and me, he was very good at playing a part. Eventually he killed himself, not because of Lenore or me, but because of a long illness that wasted him.

  49

  AT HOME ONE NIGHT, before leaving to visit a woman in Beverly Hills whose husband was spending the night in the hospital for some tests, I ate a quart of ice cream. That wasn’t unusual, but at the time I was getting ready to start a new movie and was on a strict diet, so after I ate it, I stuck my finger down my throat and threw up. (No, I am not a bulimic, but occasionally I do things like that.) The vomit was pink, but it didn’t alarm me, and I drove down Benedict Canyon to my friend’s house. After Sylvia and I did the usual wrestling around, we watched television until she got sleepy and went upstairs to bed. I finished watching the program, then got up to go home, but suddenly felt as if I were standing on the edge of a trembling precipice, inches from falling into the void. Through the fragile mists of overwhelming dizziness, I remembered the pink vomit and thought, Uh, oh, I must be bleeding internally.

  I knew I needed help, so I crawled up the stairs on all fours to Sylvia’s bedroom; it was a narrow spiral staircase that was almost vertical, and I can still see the fuzzy carpeting looking up at me a few millimeters from my nose. All the while I kept thinking, If I die here, her husband’s going to know what she’s been doing. Then the same voice in my head said, Finally, Marlon, somebody’s going to make you pay for your sins.

  I struggled up the spiral staircase one step at a time, then crawled down the hall to the side of Sylvia’s
bed and said, “You’ve got to get me to a doctor, I’m sick.”

  We both understood the situation: if I passed out there, she’d have to call the paramedics and her husband would discover I had been in the house at three A.M. If she took me to the hospital, people would see her with me. If I died, it would be even worse. Sylvia did something rather brave that I’ll always be grateful for; without a beat, she said she was taking me to the hospital. Maybe she didn’t have much choice, but she saved my life and it was courageous of her. She drove me to the UCLA Hospital, where emergency-room nurses sat me on a gurney and started asking me questions. A doctor came in, asked more questions, shook his head and said he didn’t think anything was seriously wrong with me.

  “Doctor,” I said, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me. I’m bleeding internally. Stick a tube down my throat into my stomach, and you’ll see that there’s blood in there.”

  “Well, we’re not certain of that.”

  “You’ll never know until you try it,” I answered.

  They did what I suggested and pulled out a lot of black fluid from my stomach. I suspected I had split my esophagus doing my imitation of a bulimic, so by then I must have been bleeding internally for at least four hours.

  “What happens if you can’t stop the bleeding?” I asked.

  “We’ll take you upstairs and operate on you.”

  “How can you operate on me if I’m already going into shock?”

  “Well, we don’t know how much blood you’ve lost, so we’re going to pump your stomach.” They pumped the blood out, then pumped ice water down my esophagus, which stopped the bleeding. The next day they ran a tube with a camera lens down my throat and confirmed what I had thought: there was a tear in my esophagus. They put me on soft foods for ten days, and I was fine, but the experience left me with a herniated esophagus, which in later years I’ve tried to control with biofeedback and meditation.

  I’ve gone on and off diets for years, usually before starting a new movie. When I have to lose weight, I can do it. It wasn’t unusual to drop thirty-five or forty pounds before a picture. I ate less, exercised more and it came off. The hard part was putting myself in the right psychological mode, so that eating stopped serving as an avenue of pleasure. I’m not fat by nature. I got fat mostly because I loved brownies, ice cream and everything else that makes you fat. One reason for this, I suspect, is that when I was a kid, I’d come home from school to find my mother gone and the dishes in the sink. I’d feel low and open the icebox, and there would be an apple pie, along with some cheese, and the pie would say: “C’mon, Marlon, take me out. I’m freezing in here. Be a pal and take me out, and bring out Charlie Cheese, too.” Then I’d feel less lonely.

  Food has always been my friend. When I wanted to feel better or had a crisis in my life, I opened the icebox. Most of my life, I weighed about 170 pounds, though when I had my nervous breakdown in New York, I dropped to 157. After forty, my metabolism shifted gears, but I kept eating as much as ever while spending more and more time in a sedentary relationship with a good book.

  There probably isn’t a diet I haven’t tried. During the seventies, one of them limited me to a quart of lemon juice and a few ounces of feta cheese daily. After spending the night at a woman’s house in Santa Monica while on this diet, I woke up after she’d gone out to do some errands and had a terrible pain deep in my stomach. I drove home, swallowed some antacid pills and fell asleep even though I was almost doubled up with pain. When I woke up an hour or so later, I had a bad case of diarrhea and threw up. My vomit was black, so was my stool, and I felt dizzy. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I had the presence of mind to know I should do something before I passed out. I went to the bedroom to call for help and distinctly remember asking myself, after I fell face first on it, What is the telephone doing down here? Falling down must have provided my brain with enough blood to keep me going because I managed to tell the telephone operator that I was afraid I might pass out while we were speaking, gave her my name, address and telephone number in case I did, then asked her to call my psychiatrist and tell him I needed help. He drove over, and as he walked me to his car all I could think of was that he wasn’t strong enough to pick me up if I lost consciousness. Finally, as we were driving to the hospital, I realized I must have a bad case of internal bleeding again; I hadn’t eaten anything except lemon juice and feta cheese for three weeks, and the acidic citrus juice must have cut a hole in my stomach.

  By the time the doctor got me to the hospital, I’d lost half my blood. My blood type is O-positive, and for some reason the nurses couldn’t find any supplies of it; if I remember correctly, all the O-positive blood was frozen. They sat me up on a bedpan and took my blood pressure every two or three minutes. I suspected I was in shock and dying from a loss of blood. From the way the nurses acted, I also suspected they were worried that I could go any second. They were overly polite, talked a little too loud and moved a little too rapidly while assuring me that everything was going to be all right. When Alice, my secretary, arrived at the hospital, I saw fear in her eyes. A doctor gave me several injections, and after what seemed like an hour or more, they came up with the blood needed for my transfusion. Once they did, I was okay. Later Alice said the doctors had told her I came within inches of dying. She also swears she saw me praying in the emergency room, but I’ve never believed her.

  50

  NONE OF US EVER fully understands the psychological forces that motivate us, nor can we—not yet, at least—understand all the biochemical reactions that occur in our brains and direct us to make one choice rather than another, to follow one path and spurn others. But I think one thing is certain: everything we do is a product of these biochemical reactions. As Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, wrote recently, “ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

  It is risky, even foolhardy, to ascribe adult behavior to a single event or even a series of events in childhood; there are more grays in the palette of human behavior than blacks and whites, and I know this. But as I grew older and pursued one exotic, dark-skinned woman after another, I couldn’t help but wonder if I wasn’t always trying to replace Ermi, my governess, whose soft, dusky skin has seldom been far from my mind since I was seven. She was the ideal embedded in the emotional concrete of my soul. Once I lost her, I suppose I spent most of the rest of my life trying to find her. Along with my mother, Ermi may also have had a lot to do with my refusal—or was it my inability?—to trust women after I grew up. If you’ve never had warmth, love or affection, it is hard to give it, or if you’ve had it and it has been stolen from you, if you think you’ve been rejected and abandoned, you fear being hurt again. My mother abandoned me for a bottle when I was little more than an infant; then Ermi deserted me. True, she was simply leaving to live her own life and to get married, but to my seven-year-old mind, after having lived with her so intimately, after devoting my young life to her, after being abandoned by the only other woman in my world, her disappearance was desertion, and my world collapsed.

  After that, I always wanted several women in my life at the same time as an emotional insurance policy to protect myself from being hurt again. Because I didn’t want to be hurt again, I found it difficult to love and to trust. So, like a vaudeville juggler spinning a half-dozen plates at once, I always tried to keep several romances going at the same time; that way, if one woman left me there would still be four or five others.

  I enjoyed the women’s company, but a someone named Harvey was always standing in the corner, an invisible rabbit called a relationship. All but a few women wanted me to promise that their love would be returned in equal measure, and that it would be forever and undying. Sometimes I told them what they wanted to hear, but I have always thought that the concepts of monogamy, fidelity and everlasting love were contrary to m
an’s fundamental nature. Sure, adolescent, childish myths tell us what love ought to be, and so do the songs we sing; they all proclaim one way or another: I love you … you love me … we’re going to love each other forever … I’m going to love you till I die and after I die I’m still going to love you, until you die and we’re together again in heaven. The songs are part of our cultural mythology, promulgating values that collide with our fundamental nature, which is the product of billions of years of evolution.

  I don’t think I was constructed to be monogamous. I don’t think it’s the nature of any man to be monogamous. Chimps, our closest relatives, are not monogamous; neither are gorillas or baboons. Human nature is no more monogamous than theirs. In every human culture men are propelled by genetically ordained impulses over which they have no control to distribute their seed into as many females as possible. Sex is the primal force of our and every other species. Our strongest urge of all is to replicate our genes and perpetuate our species. We are helpless against it, and are programmed to do as we do. There may be variations from culture to culture, but whether it is in Margaret Mead’s Samoa or modern Manhattan, our genetic composition makes our sexual behavior irresistible.

  Although I let some women believe I loved them—and in some cases I may have meant it at the time—there was one woman I loved more than any other.

  I was in my early forties when I met Weonna in Rome. She had a part in Candy and was with a friend of mine. He and I had the same rivalry I’d had with Carlo Fiore; we both tried to seduce each other’s girl. After he introduced me to Weonna in a hotel lobby, he went off and I put it to her succinctly.