Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work
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BRANDO’S
SMILE
HIS LIFE, THOUGHT, AND WORK
SUSAN L. MIZRUCHI
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York · London
To Saki
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
INTRODUCTION HIS SMILES
CHAPTER ONE LESSONS OF THE MIDWEST
CHAPTER TWO MANHATTAN SCHOOLING
CHAPTER THREE BUILDING THE REPERTOIRE
CHAPTER FOUR THE EPIC MODE, 1960–1963
CHAPTER FIVE POLITICAL FILMS, 1963–1969
CHAPTER SIX ANNUS MIRABILIS, 1972
CHAPTER SEVEN VILLAINS AND SUPERMEN
CHAPTER EIGHT CITIZEN OF THE PLANET
EPILOGUE LYING FOR A LIVING
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Brando’s Plays and Films
Notes
Permissions
Index
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Playing bongos, Paris, France, 1950s
With Jane Goodall, ca. 2001
Great-Aunt June in the Midwest, photographed by Brando, 1950s
With sisters Jocelyn and Franny in Omaha, 1927
Dodie Brando, Omaha Playhouse, 1925
With Grandmother Bess Myers while filming The Men, 1949
On pony with sister Franny, Evanston, 1932
Lincoln Elementary School, Evanston, 1935–1936
Brando’s first mash note, 1936
With his mother picnicking, 1930s
Marlon Brando Sr., 1930
Schoolboy, Evanston, 1934
Cowboy, Evanston, 1932
Marlon Brando Sr. playing chess on One-Eyed Jacks set, ca. 1959
The young acting student, ca. 1944
Posing, 1940s
Applying makeup for Teahouse of the August Moon, 1956
Applying makeup in On the Waterfront, 1953
The Ugly American with mustache and cigar, 1963
Original program for A Flag Is Born, 1946
A Flag Is Born, 1946
Stanley Kowalski, 1948
Rehearsing for The Men, 1949
With Birmingham VA Hospital veterans, 1949
Emiliano Zapata, ca. 1908
Brando’s Zapata before his assassination, 1952
Playing chess on the set of Julius Caesar, ca. 1952
On roof with dead pigeon in On The Waterfront, 1954
Golden Globe Awards ceremony, February 24, 1955
As Napoleon, on the set of Désirée, 1954
Greeting Irwin Shaw in Paris, 1957
Scriptwriting on One-Eyed Jacks, ca. 1959
Handshake with Dad Longworth in One-Eyed Jacks, 1961
Mona Lisa with card from One-Eyed Jacks, 1961
Reading on the Bounty, ca. 1961
Flirting on the set of Mutiny, ca. 1961
Climbing Bounty’s rigging, ca. 1961
Playing chess on the Bounty, ca. 1961
On Tetiaroa, 1970s
Brando’s revised script page from The Ugly American, 1962
Using wife’s toes as letter holder, The Ugly American, 1963
On the set of The Chase, 1965
With Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1966
With John Huston on the set of Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1966
Playing chess on the set of Burn!, ca. 1969
Paul in anguish, Last Tango, 1972
Paul in dance hall, Last Tango, 1972
The Don in wedding attire, 1972
The Don’s death scene, 1972
With Dick Cavett in New York City, June 1973
Robert E. Lee Clayton in Missouri Breaks, 1976
Singing on the Breaks set with Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Lloyd, and Harry Dean Stanton, 1975
On the Apocalypse Now set in the Philippines, 1976
At home with white cat, ca. 1955
With father on Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person show, 1955
With son Christian during trial, 1990
With Nelson de la Rosa on the set of Dr. Moreau, 1995
Conversing with a parrot during filming of Dr. Moreau, 1995
With Mira Sorvino in Free Money, 1998
With Robert De Niro in The Score, 2001
Brando as Mrs. Sour, 2004
With Buddha statue in Bangkok, ca. 1956
Sample of Brando’s annotations on a book about American Indians, ca. 1962
At “fish-in” with Robert Satiacum, March 2, 1964
Giving forty acres in Liberty Canyon to Indians, 1974
Speaking at civil rights event with Martin Luther King Jr., ca. 1963
With James Baldwin at March on Washington, August 28, 1963
Praying with children in Thailand, 1950s
Screening film on hunger at UNICEF headquarters, ca. 1967
Brando’s island, Tetiaroa, ca. 2004
On The Dick Cavett Show, June 1973
Brando as Brando, 1997
INTRODUCTION
HIS SMILES
Marlon Brando loved watching people, a habit that supported a genius for impersonation and characterization. Though it came naturally, he pursued it with an almost scientific zeal. “The face is an extraordinarily subtle instrument,” he noted. “I believe it has 155 muscles in it. The interaction of those muscles can hide a great deal, and people are always concealing emotions. Some people have very non-expressive faces. . . . In such cases I try to read their body posture, the increase in the blink rate of their eyes, their aimless yawning or a failure to complete a yawn—anything that denotes emotions they don’t want to display.”1 Brando made a lifelong study of emotions and the differences of personality and culture that inhibited their expression, which he managed to exploit in a remarkable variety of film roles.
His interest in human faces went beyond their function as measures of diversity. He was also aware of how they revealed, in profit-driven Hollywood, an actor’s marketability, or the lack thereof. The smiles accorded celebrities by the local cognoscenti were calibrated to their earning power. “You can figure which salary bracket a Hollywood actor is in by the kind of smile he gets. When I first came out here I got $40,000 a picture. The smiles people gave me showed two teeth. Now, I’m paid around $125,000 and more, I get both uppers and lowers, but they’re locked together. The smile goes up at the corners, but the teeth are set. I’ll never get the kind of big fat grins that go with $250,000 a picture. They only pay that kind of money to cowboy stars.”2 Brando’s sense of what smiles could expose explains why he was sparing with them on camera.
When you think of Brando, you don’t think of a smile. Granted, comedy was not his forte and most of the characters he played were unaccustomed to happiness. But equally important was his understanding of smiles as indices of vulnerability or manipulation. When he does smile in films, it’s usually compromised in some way—it’s a half-smile, or an ironic smile, or a smile threatening to collapse into something sad or sinister.
Consider Stanley Kowalski of A Streetcar Named Desire, covered with automobile grease, shooting an uncharacteristically diffident grin at his wife, Stella, hoping to reassert, against her sister Blanche’s scheming, his masculinity and erotic appeal. The wistful smile of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, as he straightens his nose with a finger to remind Edie of his early profile before the boxing career, before he had compromised himself by betraying her brother. The unctuous smile of the splendidly arrayed Lieutenant Fletcher Christian of Mutiny on the Bounty, accompanied by paramours as he meets the unsophisticated captain whom he considers beneath him. The Godfather’s wedding-photograph smile, classic Brando, on the verge of a grimace; Paul’s smirk in Last Tango in Pari
s, responding to his lover’s exasperated speech: “Do you really think that an American sitting on the floor in an empty flat eating cheese and drinking water is interesting?” Or the desperate at-your-service smile of Max in The Score, barely a step ahead of the mob.
Brando carefully controlled his smiles: he knew their price. He knew the commodity status of body parts, none more so than his own. As soon as he achieved fame on Broadway, he saw that an actor, like an athlete, could become a slave to his image. Smiles, he recognized, were never free.
His reading of body language was so adept, according to his nephew, that “it was almost supernatural. He would know more about you than you could imagine just by the way you sat down in a chair.”3 Once at a social gathering, Brando asked a woman her age, and she demurred. “It doesn’t matter,” he responded, “I can tell from your teeth.” He guessed accurately. He honed these skills with such habits as frequenting the criminal courts in Brooklyn for the human spectacle they provided. Another New York pastime was sitting in the Optima Cigar Store phone booth watching people walk by, and he was “wrecked,” a friend recalled, when his freedom to observe was ruined by the fact that he had become an object of scrutiny.4
Both the actor and the man were obscured by this public obsession. He created characters so powerfully authentic that audiences refused to believe that these creations were not real. While many considered him a great actor, they missed how denying him distance from his roles qualified that greatness. Even the most astute analysts overlook the conscious observant mind behind the work. It has been difficult for us to see how much more the actor was than any one part, and how different the man was from all of them. As the actor and idol who made it all right for men to be tongue-tied or incoherent, he became so synonymous with an inarticulate masculinity that it was impossible for audiences to accept that the physique was inseparable from an equally formidable intellect.
Brando has been a victim of sexism. Because he was so charming and physically appealing, his equally energetic mind tended to be negated. So dazzled are his most admiring critics that they can’t reconcile his attractiveness with the idea of a man who loved language let alone owned a book collection that outstripped those of most academics.5 Thus, Daphne Merkin opened a 2004 obituary with her memory of being “struck by libidinal lightning” after first seeing Brando on screen, and pronounced him “an untutored philosophe who liked to dabble in half-baked political stands.” And Camille Paglia celebrated a “Brando, mumbling and muttering and flashing with bolts of barbaric energy, [who] freed theatrical emotion from its enslavement by words.” Neither portrait can accommodate the fact that the fantasy hunk took books to bed and undoubtedly (given the limits of even his body) spent more time there reading than engaging in what Paglia called “epic womanizing.”6
This is not to deny Brando’s attractiveness or his womanizing. One of his friends described Brando as having “the kind of face artists are always interested in. . . . It was as if a klieg light had been shoved up his ass and was shining out his pores.”7 Though it’s worth emphasizing that Brando considered himself only “reasonably attractive,” attributing his magnetism to his energy and strangeness as a Nebraska farm boy in cosmopolitan settings. But our preoccupation with the looks that helped to bring Brando fame and fortune has clouded our appraisal of his contributions as an actor and as a public citizen who took to heart Hannah Arendt’s ideal of independent thinking. The excessive focus on his romantic affairs—what was most common about him—has limited our appreciation of what was most unique and enduring.8
Among celebrities with iconic status, those whose single name alone conjures an image—Garbo, Marilyn, Sinatra, Michael, Olivier—Brando is distinctive for his ambiguity. Garbo in profile, Michael moonwalking, Sinatra crooning, Marilyn above a subway grate in billowing white skirt, Olivier in evening dress. The name Brando invites a question: Is he the charismatic brute in a white tee; the biker in a black leather jacket and gray cap; the Godfather; the father of Superman; or the bald phantom of the Vietnamese jungle in Apocalypse Now? There are many Brandos, early and late. In contrast to most cultural icons, he eludes the prospect of a persona. Brando was more fluid, more wily than others who achieved comparable fame. This is attributable to the diverse identifications of a lead actor who preferred character roles and foiled expectations in choosing film parts. He had a wide-ranging curiosity and was suspicious of absolutes and rigidity of any kind, rejecting the pressure to conform to a single likeness.
While some have suggested that Brando’s disdain for the celebrity that transformed his life was motivated by self-hatred, its more obvious roots were his bohemian tendencies and democratic politics. Along with Zapata, whom he played in a movie, Brando believed that the masses were doomed when they projected their own power onto idealized objects of worship. No one was worthy of such idolatry, least of all actors and entertainers. What has been overlooked is the seriousness of his thinking on these subjects, how deeply he lamented the adulation that he considered so misplaced. Partial to Talmudic wisdom, Brando surely would have appreciated the aphorism, “If you want truth, shun fame.”9
“The worst thing that can happen when someone becomes famous,” Brando observed, “is for him to believe the myths about himself—and that, I have the conceit to say, I have never done. Still, I am stung by the realization that I am covered with the same muck as some of the people I have criticized because fame thrives in the manure of the success of which I allowed myself to become a part.”10 Celebrity was a dirty business, Brando recognized almost as soon as he achieved it at twenty-three, and he never came to terms with its consequences. The invasion of his privacy, the constant distortions of his views in the press, and the conviction on the part of so many that they knew him—his resentment toward these downsides of celebrity remained surprisingly fresh until he died at the age of eighty.11
According to friends from Streetcar days, after the play’s sensational opening on December 3, 1947, his image was plastered throughout Manhattan, and it became difficult for Brando to go anywhere undisguised without attracting attention. By the 1950s, his detection in public could elicit mobs. Meeting Brando at their seats in a theater, his date heard a roar from the lobby when admirers discovered him. Another time at a hotel, the police had to handle a sea of unruly people when word spread that Brando was there.12 Brando himself recalled a crowd so ferocious at the premiere of Guys and Dolls that he feared it might tear him apart limb by limb. But he was calm when fans swarmed his limousine en route to a day of filming for The Fugitive Kind. “You know,” he said to costar Maureen Stapleton, who was trembling beside him, “they feel about me the way you and I feel about Adlai Stevenson.”13 As Brando told Truman Capote, he had been roused from the troubled self-absorptions of a very young man to find himself “sitting on a pile of candy.”14 There is wonder as well as contempt in Brando’s realization that his discharges have become sweet rather than foul.
Throughout his life, Brando struggled to use his fame as a way of cleansing fame’s “muck.” He gave interviews on talk shows when he had a cause to support, such as black civil rights, or compensation for the violation of US–Indian treaties. But sometimes he appeared because a film contract had stipulated it, and in these encounters he did his best to turn the camera back on his interviewers. In Meet Marlon Brando (1966), the Maysles brothers, documentary filmmakers who gained renown in 1964 for a film on the Beatles, recorded Brando’s stratagems as he promoted Morituri, his 1965 film about espionage in World War II. By exposing the profiteering aims of movie star and journalists, he managed to turn the discussion into a critique of publicity. Brando’s goal in the Maysles film is captured by a Yiddish phrase he often used, “Tuches afn tish”—literally, “behind on the table,” or “show your cards.”15
“Every time we get in front of the television, everybody starts hustling,” he says conspiratorially to a reporter. “I don’t think we should sneak around it. I think we ought to say we’re here as hucksters. He’s a
newsman, and I’m a huckster, and I’m thumping the tub for a picture called Morituri.” Audiences, with their craven appetites for details of the private lives of stars, unwittingly fuel this cycle of corruption. “People don’t realize that a press item, a news item is money, and that news is hawked in the same way that shoes are or toothpaste or lipstick or hair tonic or anything else. And if you put something in the paper about Elizabeth Taylor or Richard Burton everybody’s gonna buy it, everyone wants to know about that. It becomes an item and it becomes a sellable item, and the merchandising aspect of the press is not really fully recognized I think by the public. And when you don’t cooperate with those merchandising systems, people that sell news . . . it’s sort of an unwritten code that if you don’t cooperate with those people and tell them about the intimacies of your personal life then you’ve broken the rule and have to be publicly chastised for it. Or chubicly clastized for it, if you like.”16
The Maysles film reveals methods Brando had been using for years to counter a limelight he despised. On Broadway, he responded playfully to the personalization of actors that from the start irked and increasingly oppressed him, fabricating details for playbills. Biographies for I Remember Mama (1944), Candida (1946), and A Flag Is Born (1946) stated, respectively, that he “was born in Calcutta, India, where his Father was engaged in geological research . . . in Bangkok while his father was engaged in zoological research . . . in Bangkok, Siam, the son of an etymologist now affiliated with the Field Museum in Chicago, Mr. Brando spent his early years in Calcutta, Indo-China, the Mongolian desert and Ceylon.” By the 1980s he was branding himself in letters as “Bran Dough” and “Branflakes.”17 Enlisted to promote his autobiography for Random House, he appeased himself by writing pages of his own parody interviews.18
Brando’s sister Jocelyn, who died a year after him, wrote a dirge for his funeral that summarized his lifelong struggle with the engine of publicity.
They are scattering you tonight or tomorrow
And I am with you every breath of the way