Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  What he had, perhaps in greater supply than any actor of the twentieth century, were extraordinary powers of concentration. When he was on stage or set inhabiting his fiction, absorbed in a book or watching something or someone, he was impossible to disturb. A grandson of Brando’s recalled an episode with his grandfather in the late 1990s. Spying a bee by the side of the pool, Brando picked it up by a wing. The bee was unbelievably still, and Brando said, “Watch this.” He stuck out his tongue and placed the bee carefully on its surface. Then Brando pulled his tongue back and closed his mouth for ten to fifteen seconds. When he opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue, the bee was there still, not moving. Brando let out a gentle breath and the bee flew away.44

  HIS LIBRARY AND SCRIPTS

  According to Emily Dickinson, one of Brando’s favorite poets, “abyss has no biographer.”45 Humility approaching despair is a reliable stance for biographers, given the infinite complexity of human beings, even to themselves. Brando himself observed: “Everyone we know in our lives views us through a slightly different prism. . . . There is no such thing as being able to judge anything objectively. It is a pose that scientists have foisted upon the world.” Others’ perceptions of us can’t help but be distorted. As a celebrity, Brando was especially subject to such distortion, but his endless curiosity about human nature prevented his believing himself harder to understand than others. As he pointed out to an adoring fan, “I am simply a human being just like you . . . nothing more or less than one of some four billion human animals on the earth.”46 When it came to the question of his own distinctiveness, Brando was disarmingly modest.

  Still, his penchant for self-contradiction and resistance to pigeonholing, as well as the delight he took in putting people on, has made Brando’s life especially prone to myths and clichés. Here, too, he preempted biographers, noting, “I’ve learned that no matter what I say or do, people mythologize me.”47

  As Brando aged and tragedies marred the apparently charmed life, the regnant myths grew increasingly negative.

  • His ambition and materialism drove him to end his promising career on Broadway, which he abandoned prematurely for Hollywood.

  • He was coarse, uneducated, and inarticulate and helped to transform those liabilities into 1950s masculine ideals.

  • After 1960, he made films just for money and rarely put effort into his roles.

  • He was obese and became that way because he despised the idolatry that was generated by his good looks.

  • He was prejudiced against Jews.

  • He was greedy and exploited the film industry that embraced him.

  • He was a fair-weather idealist who supported political causes when they were popular and could bring him publicity.

  • He was a miserable man who died alone and virtually penniless.

  Each of these myths will be dispelled over the course of this book. Brando’s disdain for publicity, which stacked the deck against balanced or admiring perspectives, partly explains their perpetuation. Brando’s friends were expected not to speak publicly about him. Breaking that rule resulted in immediate expulsion from his inner circle; so those who did talk (or write) were either already outside the circle or antagonistic toward him. Brando’s tendency to compartmentalize his experiences and passions, and his intense secretiveness, also limited people’s ability to understand him.

  Brando placed a higher value on privacy than on reputation and was willing to be rude or to sell himself short in order to thwart an intrusion. Brando biographies as a whole display more than the usual dependence on gossip, and their facts are subject to more than the usual recycling. The not-infrequent vagueness or omission of references seems a convention of celebrity biographies, as though readers are expected to take them as partially fiction.48

  When he died on July 1, 2004, Brando left a vast material record of his life and work that has never been explored by biographers. A significant portion of his private property was sold at Christie’s in 2005: 328 lots, nearly 60 of which included books, film scripts, research materials, and notes for films. I was fortunate that the private collectors who bought them were willing to share them with me.49 When the executors of the Brando Estate heard that I had located and digitally photographed the thousands of books and scripts sold at Christie’s, they granted me access to their own archives. As the first biographer to have reviewed Brando’s archives—those sold to the public as well as those retained by his estate—I can report that Brando’s hunger for knowledge was as insatiable as his more legendary appetites for women and food. The library had books from his teenage years; Brando began collecting books in earnest as a young actor in Manhattan and added to the library throughout his life. It reflected his need to know as much as possible about everything that intrigued him.50 The range and depth of the collection suggests there was very little that did not. Christie’s curators, who entered Brando’s Los Angeles home on Mulholland Drive in the autumn of 2004, said that the four-thousand-book collection was utterly unexpected and genuinely extraordinary.51

  What can a library reveal about its owner? Brando seems to have lived among books. Many were in his bedroom, on shelves covered with strong twine to prevent a book avalanche during routine Los Angeles tremors or earthquakes. Intimates remember his bed as littered with them; in countless photographs he is carrying or reading one. The fact that his books have phone numbers scrawled inside and sometimes contain letters, photographs, and other extraneous papers, suggests that they were ready to hand. The list of bedside books alone confirmed his diverse tastes: 1001 Yiddish Proverbs, The Pentagon Papers, Jung’s Man and His Symbols, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, King Richard II, James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science, Amnesty International, The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse, The Great Music of Duke Ellington, The International Book of Wood, Hugh Brody’s Maps and Dreams.52 The library validated his gift for language, recalled by close friends and documented in letters and interviews, and his devotion to humor in all its cultural varieties.53

  Brando’s collection also revealed his subversive streak. There were books borrowed from friends, checked out from lending libraries, and stolen from his psychiatrists—all of them catalogued under his system. There were books belonging to his sisters, who were well aware of his habits. Jocelyn scrawled an ultimatum on the front cover of her Anthology of Islamic Literature (1966): “This belongs to Jocelyn Brando and it must be returned to her or else!” Her brother’s library classification number on the facing page, just above the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, “Trust in God But Tie Your Camel,” serves as ironic commentary on her threat.54

  A significant percentage of Brando’s books were gifts. Brando especially admired Lewis Thomas’s Lives of a Cell, annotating it cover to cover. He sought out the author, who responded with inscribed copies of his other books. Brando owned a copy of Emma Goldman’s Living My Life with her personal signature (“Emma Goldman, St. Tropez, 1931”), as well as a signed copy of Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy—both apparently gifts from friends.55

  The many women with whom he had affairs gave him books by the dozens, often poetry, sometimes handmade, presented with memories of past dates or pleas for more, and accounts of their relationships. The diversity of his romantic tastes was reflected in the fact that some inscriptions (and books) were in foreign languages with or without translations. Brando made marginal notations in about a quarter of his books; sometimes the marginalia amounted to a line or a check mark. His system of demarcations grew more elaborate over time and included spirited debates with the authors’ ideas. The marginalia changed: as a youth he used pencil, which gave way to black or blue pen and lengthy argumentation. By the 1980s, he was highlighting books in red and green, and sometimes yellow or pink. The handwriting, a relatively proper cursive in the 1950s and ’60s, shifts to a spidery print as he ages.

  He was impatient with pontificating, hedging, and exaggeration. Typical marginal responses include: “were you there?” “did you coun
t?” and “ridiculous.” His enthusiasm for subjects is exemplified by “get” next to a book or thinker—his most frequent comment. Invariably, he then added that work or author to his collection. He used another common phrase, “Great God,” in the 1950s and ’60s to express exasperation with a writer’s sentimentality or self-indulgence. “Dio” was perhaps the most common of all; it was the sign of appreciation for something he might use for dialogue in a film. He even annotated footnotes, indexes, and bibliographies, indicating how thorough he could be when exploring a subject that absorbed him.

  Books of politics and poetry, well represented in Brando’s library, were the most likely to be heavily annotated. This was particularly true of those about India, Japan, the South Pacific, and American Indians. He read widely in American history and legal practice, noting details relevant to civil rights or Indian treaties. He had numerous self-help and psychology books, as well as collections of quotations from major thinkers. And there was science: Brando was an early owner of personal computers when they first became available, and he was drawn to scientific innovation.56 He loved reading about wildlife, the environment, the seas and planets, and he collected books on topics as small as “the soul of the white ant” and as vast as “infinity.”57

  He had books about every type of pet in his menagerie (dogs, cats, raccoons, pigs) and about insects, whales, porcupines, and bobcats. His interest extended to esoterica: the language of cats, the sex life of wild animals. His commitment to the environment, and to developing sustainable building materials on his Tahitian island, led to exploring the special properties of coconut wood.58 One garden book contained a detailed plan for a bamboo garden, with instructions on ideal land sloping for the site and its best growing seasons.59 A photograph of Brando and Jane Goodall discussing primates for a prospective documentary in his lush bamboo garden shows that he managed to implement that plan.

  He seems to have had a grammar or vocabulary book for every country he visited, and many of these had annotations. He spoke French, Spanish, and a Tahitian dialect, some Japanese, Yiddish, Italian, and German. The hundreds of books on usage, mostly pertaining to English but sometimes to a foreign tongue, confirm his fascination with the nuances of style, lexicography, and pronunciation.

  Many remarked over the years on Brando’s acuity for imitation and for picking up foreign tongues, which was enabled by a sensitivity to the rhythms of speech. But his responsibility for many of the lines he spoke in his films has been almost completely overlooked. He subscribed to an ideal of brevity; when it came to dialogue, he truly believed that less is more. His script emendations invariably involved cuts: a few forceful sentences substitute for pages of conversation; a lifted eyebrow or grimace replaces lines altogether wherever possible. A final shooting script with Brando’s revisions for the oceanside love scene in One-Eyed Jacks typifies his method. Crossing out whole paragraphs recounting the suffering of his protagonist, Brando inserts a shrug and one unforgettable statement: “So that’s my sad tale.”60 A tireless observer of nature, people, and animals, he recognized the physical poetry of a dancer or the silent empathy of a dog.

  Brando with Jane Goodall on Mulholland Drive. © Thomas D. Mangelsen, www.mangelsen.com.

  Together, Brando’s books and scripts reveal the powerful sense of humor that seemed so at odds with the gloomy characters he played. Though he was expert at locating the humor in their darkness, the latter always prevailed. Still, when things couldn’t get worse, he recognized that humor was the last stand of human invention. In The Chase, Sheriff Calder responds to a hostile townie’s hint that he is overpaid (“Taxes in this town, Calder, pay your salary to protect the place”): “Well, if anything happens to ya, Lem, we’ll give you a refund.” In Mutiny on the Bounty, Lieutenant Fletcher Christian turns to a sailor who has just betrayed a mate and asks, “Is there anything else you wished to discuss, early Renaissance sketching, perhaps?”

  New access to his annotated scripts and notes on films, to interviews he gave throughout his life, and to the accounts of those who knew him, allow twenty-first-century audiences to appreciate a cultural figure of the twentieth century whose contributions to acting, as well as to public life, can now be illuminated. It is finally possible to recognize the thought behind the performances—whether the subject is acting, political activism, or understanding other cultures.

  Brando’s Smile describes the powerful “life of the mind” that sustained and goes a long way toward explaining his contributions as an actor and cultural figure.61 Philosopher Hannah Arendt’s phrase is invoked deliberately here: Brando admired her and owned many of her books, annotating them heavily.62 My purpose is to allow Brando to speak through his films, political activities, interviews, and writings, as an authority on his own experience and beliefs. Despite his lifelong resistance to biographers, Brando offered a steady stream of commentary over the years, including lucid explanations for the major choices he made.

  To the end, Brando was bemused by his fame and committed to his own standard of honesty, however adept he was at peddling fictions. In Notes for his Autobiography (NFA), he wrote, “Fifteen books have been written about me. People seem to be intrested in those who are puzzling perhaps, a kind of intrest not to far from a cross word puzzle or the hidden answers to the questions to be found on the nightly game show. . . . I am unconcerned whether people despise the book or find it entrieging. My first concern is that it is true and that it is not boring or simply an exercise in self enthrallment.”* Humbled by a lack of education while prone to Midwestern reticence, Brando could be quite guarded about the things that mattered most to him. His ideas about films and his extensive theorizing about culture and human experience is a revelation. And that is the point of this book: to provide insight into the life and mind of an American actor who continues to mesmerize and inspire us for reasons we can now more fully understand.

  As he wrote in Notes for his Autobiography, “It’s hard to believe that there isn’t any acceptable reason for living other than seeing the kids get through before I go—I want to scratch something on the wall of the cave, to leave a grain of something that said I was alive for some pale sliver of a moment in the evening of this species; there has to be something more than just shuffling softly toward the turnstile with our cross-town Transfers to Eternity in our hands.”63

  *Brando’s original spelling is preserved for all quotations from his own writings (letters, notes, etc.) throughout this book.

  BRANDO’S

  SMILE

  CHAPTER ONE

  LESSONS OF THE MIDWEST

  FOREBEARS

  Marlon Brando’s roots were thoroughly American, which may seem surprising because he was so original and unorthodox. Yet Brando’s individuality and nonconformity marked him as American in the deepest sense. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on April 3, 1924, entering the world feetfirst, a breech delivery that foreshadowed athleticism: the physicality, even acrobatic vigor that he would bring to every role. His parents, Dorothy Pennebaker Brando and Marlon Brando Sr., were Nebraska natives of Irish, English, and German ancestry. His paternal grandfather, Eugene Brando (b. 1857), was from New York state; his grandmother, Marie Holloway (b. 1868), was from Illinois; all four grandparents on his paternal side were American born.

  Little is known about Brando Sr.’s mother, Marie, who left Eugene, a harsh, penurious office clerk, in 1900 after seven years of marriage, abandoning their five-year-old son in the process. Raised by paternal aunts and neglected by his father, Marlon Sr. was bitter about his upbringing (though he named his first daughter Jocelyn after one of the aunts). His paternal relatives therefore figured minimally in Marlon Jr.’s childhood, and the actor could only recall his paternal grandfather’s Victorian rigidity.1

  Members of Dorothy (“Dodie” to family and friends) Brando’s family, intellectual and eccentric, played a comparatively large role in her son’s life with their wide-ranging curiosity, bookishness, and alcohol problems. His maternal great-grandfather,
Myles Joseph Gahan (b. 1844), was a renowned Nebraska doctor (chairman of the Nebraska Medical Society and chief surgeon for the Union Pacific Railroad) who transmitted his taste for learning and offbeat spiritualities as well as a predisposition toward alcoholism to the four children he had with Julia Watts Gahan: Dodie’s mother Bess (b. 1876), Vine, June, and Myles Jr. A lifelong alcoholic and con man, Myles Jr. seems to have been most susceptible to the paternal weakness, while Bess, the eldest, followed the doctor’s idealism and curiosity.2

  An Irish immigrant who served as a medic in the Civil War, Gahan had graduated from medical school and acquired surgical skills by the time he moved to Grand Island, Nebraska, in 1875. A town of about 900, Grand Island was mostly German and Protestant, with some Catholics and a few Jews by the time Brando’s maternal great-aunt, June Beechly, was born in 1881. According to June, the town had been completely Indian prior to white settlement, and a Gahan, “Uncle Jay,” was head of the Indian reservation. June recalled an Indian conclave in Grand Island, when she was a teenager. “Tribes from all over the country came. . . . And mother told me I want you to go up there and see the Indians and watch them dance, because you’ll never see anything like this ever again.”3 Healers and idealists, with an appreciation for the native inhabitants displaced by the progressive settlement that benefited their own family, the Gahans had greater awareness than most of their white brethren. This helped to explain why Bess Gahan was so intent on alleviating the plight of the downtrodden, a vision she conveyed to her daughter Dodie, who in turn conveyed it to her son, Marlon Brando Jr. Bess’s experience of human weakness through the spectacle of her father’s alcoholism probably also contributed to her sensitivity to suffering. The marriage of Myles and Julia was ruined by Dr. Gahan’s addiction. According to Brando’s Great-Aunt June, her father “tried to kill mother twice,” while under the influence of alcohol. At the same time, he was a beloved doctor who “brought all the children into the world in Grand Island and took care of them.”