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

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  At Shattuck, Brando honed his contempt for arbitrary power, cultivated his skills as a prankster and subversive, and studied drama and poetry with a man he genuinely admired, Duke Wagner, head of the English Department and the drama association. Brando’s two-year study of the mentality and customs of a major military academy would prove useful to the many soldiers and veterans he later impersonated in a theater and film era preoccupied with war and its aftermath. Sage McRae (Truckline Café), Stanley Kowalski (Streetcar), Bud Wilocek (The Men), Emiliano Zapata (Viva Zapata!), Mark Antony (Julius Caesar), Napoleon (Désirée), Lloyd Gruver (Sayonara), Christian Diestl (Young Lions), Fletcher Christian (Mutiny on the Bounty), Harrison Carter MacWhite (The Ugly American), Freddy Benson (Bedtime Story), Weldon Penderton (Reflections in a Golden Eye), and Colonel Kurtz (Apocalypse Now)—military men all—benefited immensely from Brando’s knowledge of Shattuck and its principles.

  But in a pattern that would be repeated, the more Brando understood about the place and those who upheld its norms, the more he detested it. By instigating pranks such as setting small fires with Vitalis hair tonic, locking teachers in their quarters so classes had to be delayed or canceled, and stealing the clapper from the bell tower because he was annoyed by its constant clanging, he did his best to disrupt the status quo. Finally, he was expelled in the spring of 1943 for insubordination during an army inspection of the school. Quizzed by an inspecting officer, Brando had confessed that if he found himself on a battlefield without superior officers to direct him, he would “run like hell.” This was not the answer the inspectors were looking for. It was a sign of Brando’s popularity that the entire student body protested his expulsion and succeeded in gaining a retraction. The group of cadets that argued his case urged Brando in a May 24 letter to return. They spoke for the battalion as a whole, they noted, in their conviction that no one so respected by 230 cadets—for his toughness and spirit on the football team and in general—could be deserving of expulsion.38

  The letter brought Dodie to tears and highlighted a fundamental truth about Brando’s rebellious personality. As he matured and increasingly embraced his eccentricities, his inability to follow rules and fit in tended to arouse admiration and affection rather than the opposite. Unquestionably odd, his oddity nevertheless remained accessible. Some combination of personal magnetism, sensitivity, and the desire to please made him generally appealing. Like other renowned American individualists who created models of independence that their fellows imitated in droves, Brando was destined, it seemed, to democratize his uniqueness.

  Among the lasting impacts of Shattuck were the knee injury sustained on the school’s football team, which prevented Brando from being drafted in World War II, and the discovery of his talent for acting. Aside from athletics, shop class, and drumming, acting was the only endeavor for which Brando had ever shown aptitude. The mimicry had come early: From a young age he could imitate a person’s voice, walk, or accent within minutes of appraising them. His feel for drama seemed innate. Even grade-school friends in Evanston marveled at the realism of his death scenes in games of “cops and robbers” or “cowboys and Indians.”39 Accompanying his mother to summer stock in Wisconsin at the age of ten, his talent for imitation surfaced when he developed a Southern accent simply because he liked the speech rhythms of kids from Tennessee he met there.40

  On The Ed Sullivan Show in 1955, when asked how he had become a drummer, Brando recalled one of his favorite sounds when he lived on the farm: the pulsating donkey engine that powered the water pump. “It just had something to say to me, it had an appeal for me,” Brando told Sullivan. “Some people are drawn to tone and others to color, and form.” Sullivan pressed him and Brando described the “eccentric, off rhythm,” and then, at a loss for words, he reproduced the engine’s arrhythmic puffing sound exactly. Yet there was a darker side to this skill. Brando told a friend that, as a small boy, whenever Dodie was drunk and remote, he would do imitations in order to get her attention. Her son’s extraordinary renditions of animals, people, and machines were certain to rouse Dodie from an alcoholic stupor and bring her back to him.41

  Brando’s first role at Shattuck was in a one-act play inspired by the King Tut legend, A Message from Khufu (1931), by Herman Stuart Cottman. His parents attended. Dodie could see his talent and had a serious talk with Duke Wagner, and then with her son, encouraging him to take acting seriously. Wagner continued to give him starring roles, in such plays as Foster Fitz’s Four on a Heath, in which he affected an authentic British accent and a memorable death scene, and Moliere’s The Doctor in Spite of Himself. After he was expelled, Brando went to say good-bye to Wagner, who promised him: “The world is going to hear from you.”42

  MANHATTAN TRANSFER

  Jocelyn, twenty-four in the spring of 1943 and living in Manhattan, had already displayed a flair for acting. She had appeared in plays in Libertyville and at the Lake Zurich Playhouse and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She had her own stage and film career but would never quite get over the feeling of having been the first sibling in the profession, and then having been overshadowed by the instantaneous success of her younger brother.43 Franny, also resettled in Manhattan, was a twenty-two-year-old painter attending the Art Students League. No one in the Brando family had graduated from college: Marlon Sr. left the University of Nebraska and Dodie her college of nursing, after a year each. Franny had the most schooling of any of them as an undergraduate at UCLA for two years. In this sense, Brando’s choice to pursue the arts rather than formal schooling was consistent with his family. And after a summer of living with his parents and digging ditches for a construction company, Brando readily accepted his parents’ offer to support his moving to New York to try out acting school.

  But the people central to his childhood, whether he followed them or they followed him, would be part of his life in these new locales. His parents and sisters, his great friend Wally Cox, Carmelita Pope, Grandmother Bess, Great-Aunt June, Aunt Betty: all teachers of these “Midwestern lessons,” which, despite his resistance to schooling, had struck deep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MANHATTAN SCHOOLING

  Arriving in wartime Manhattan during the spring of 1943, the nineteen-year-old found jobs as plentiful as unattached women; he worked as an elevator boy, waiter, and short-order cook. He enrolled at the New School for Social Research in the fall of 1943 because it was “the up and coming place. It was before the Actors Studio, and he went there and he worked with Stella Adler and the rest is history.”1 At first Brando lived with his sister Franny in her Greenwich Village apartment on Patchin Place, but soon he moved in with her neighbor, Celia Webb, a Colombian woman ten years his senior, who was the first of a seemingly endless series of girlfriends in New York. In keeping with a pattern somehow tolerated by numerous women, she would remain his lover long after other women had taken her place as his primary love interest (herself always one among many), and work for him as an assistant. In a different kind of loyalty, he supported Webb and her son over the years and paid the medical bills when she had terminal cancer. Perhaps she spoke for many of his girlfriends in characterizing Brando as “my addiction.”2

  In the winter of 1944, Dodie, who had split up again with Marlon Sr., drove to Manhattan with the family’s Great Dane, Dutchy, and rented an apartment on West End Avenue, where Jocelyn (with her one-year-old son Gahan—she had married Don Hanmer in 1942), Franny, and Brando soon joined her. During her New York sojourn, which lasted less than a year, Dodie’s drinking was a constant source of anxiety for her children. When she was on an alcoholic binge, Brando and his sisters would spend hours searching for her at bars she frequented in Manhattan.3 Brando knew that he could never really help his mother, who invariably returned to the source of her grief. It was not long before Dodie reconciled with Marlon Sr. and rejoined him in the Midwest. Her departure sent her son into a severe depression that he overcame at the time through endless walks, reading in the Christian Science Reading Ro
om, and the conviviality of the Adlers.4

  Brando would eventually symbolize many things to many people, but those who met him in New York during the 1940s, the decade when he became an actor, were struck by his essential Americanness. Practical, down to earth, knowledgeable about how things worked, aroused by injustice and hostile to elitism, outgoing with a prankish sense of humor though somewhat shy, the young Brando was both observer and restless performer, pushing behavior to the edge, ever aware of where the edge was. “He was so powerfully physical, that was the first impression I had of him,” Nina Green recalled of meeting him in 1944 as a freshman at Bard College. He was dating her friend Ellen Adler (the daughter of Brando’s acting teacher, Stella Adler), and he visited on weekends. “The clowning around and funny animal sounds and backward leaps . . . [he] pushed the boundaries of behavior, but always knew where to stop. . . . What I remember most was the way he looked at people. I remember his eyes, the lids dropping, a way of looking sideways so people wouldn’t know he was looking.”5

  As distinctive as he was, Brando could get lost in a crowd, melting into the common humanity to avoid being recognized. If he wanted to project, however, he could appear taller than those with substantial height advantages. Always unpredictable, he struck people as “very human” and “very strange.”6 This would be the appraisal for many years to come, as Brando evolved over the years in Manhattan, Hollywood, Europe, and Tahiti. For many (especially the cognoscenti) who saw him act—and they would eventually number in the millions—another attribute would be added to this list: “genius.”7

  FOR A YOUNG MAN with as many interests as Brando, so physically, intellectually, emotionally open to experience, 1940s Manhattan offered a perpetual feast, catalyzing one lifelong preoccupation after another. His love of music, traced to his mother’s encyclopedic knowledge of the international song repertoire, was easy to satisfy there.8 His adolescent realization of his avocation for drumming was another passion bound to be nurtured in New York. At the Palladium Ballroom on Broadway, the discovery of the Afro-Cuban bands of Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez, with their conga drummers, would be so galvanizing that Brando bought his own congas and retired his sticks for life.9

  Brando also was drawn to the athleticism of modern dance, though he claimed to be even more drawn to the female students who studied it. But there was no question of his commitment to the classes he enrolled in with Katherine Dunham, the choreographer, anthropologist, and social activist who so inspired Brando that he briefly considered a career as a dancer. Dunham’s teaching appealed to him because of her combined attention to the intellect and the body. She had written a master’s thesis on Haitian dance in the anthropology department at the University of Chicago while arousing controversy by introducing a bare torso into dance, making blatant the provocative eroticism of dance. The seeker in Brando who gravitated to big questions and ideas always balanced the athlete who was drawn to the physical arts. His engagement with Latin American musicians and Dunham enhanced a natural agility duly noted by the actor Paul Muni. When they were first getting acquainted, Brando told him about his studies with Dunham. Muni responded, “That accounts for the fact that you move like a panther.”10

  A chance meeting with James Baldwin and Norman Mailer at Hector’s Cafeteria in the Village, shortly after his arrival in New York, led to decades of mutual education and camaraderie between the future actor and the future author of Go Tell It on the Mountain. Neither Mailer (who was finishing his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, 1948) nor Baldwin had published at that point, and Brando, who was always drawn to accents, wondered why Mailer spoke like a Texan after he revealed in their casual conversation that he was from New York. Mailer explained that he had assumed the accent in the army to disguise his Jewishness. Brando and Mailer never clicked, though they encountered each other occasionally in subsequent years, but he and Baldwin quickly recognized their mutual interests—intellectual, political, and psychological. Eventually, Baldwin would give Brando his manuscripts and books to read. Meanwhile, in the 1940s, to cool off in the sweltering heat of Manhattan summers, they rode on the open-air tops of buses and sometimes took the ferry to Staten Island. They discussed race and the value of suffering, and the impact of violent, uncomprehending fathers.11 When he later began to read Baldwin, Brando highlighted two passages in The Fire Next Time that spoke toward their bond. He put a big check beside Baldwin’s statement that he defended himself against fear of his father by recognizing “that I already knew how to outwit him,” and another check by the sadder revelation, after an encounter with a mentor, that it made Baldwin “think of my father and me as we might have been if we had been friends.”12

  In addition to cultivating new friendships, Brando was also able during this first year in Manhattan to revive old ones. He found that his childhood pal Wally Cox from the Lincoln School in Evanston was living near his sister Franny and her new husband, artist Richard Loving. Their close friendship resumed as if uninterrupted. Cox was supporting himself as a silversmith while pursuing every acting and comedy opportunity he could find. His elaborately patterned silver rings were not only the means of survival but also works of art. Cox influenced the enamel art of Loving, who became an important American painter and taught for years at the Art Institute of Chicago.13 What he treasured in Brando, Cox wrote Brando in the early sixties, was the instantaneous understanding of ideas impossible to explain to most people.

  Cox gained renown for playing the protagonist in Mr. Peepers, a 1950s television show about a brilliant but incompetent science teacher, an early nerd, who was “no more like him than . . . Nancy Reagan,” according to Brando. Cox also perfected the character type through a mundane humor designed to locate for “serious students of abnormal psychology . . . the exact moment of damage to spiritual tissues that caused my defection from the ranks of heroes to the slippery grease paint and the creaky boards” of the stage.14

  Brando kept Cox’s ashes following his death in 1973, along with Cox’s Donaldson Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Musical, the 1949–1950 Dance Me a Song. “I’m not sure I will ever forgive Wally for dying,” Brando reflected in the 1990s. “More than a friend; he was my brother, closer to me than any human being in my life except my sisters.” Knowledgeable about botany, history, physics, chemistry, electronics, and several foreign languages, he “taught me how to speak and to see in words the melodies of life.” For his part, Cox considered Brando his greatest friend on this cold planet. Defending his choice, Cox highlighted Brando’s profound understanding and affection for human beings in general, and his equally profound ability to comfort Cox in particular.15 When Brando died in 2004, some of his ashes were mixed with Cox’s before they were scattered in Death Valley. This ultimate disembodied reunion was appropriate. Although in appearance and in their tendencies as actors (the comic straight man versus the dramatic brooder) they could not have been more different, in matters of the heart and mind they could not have been more alike.

  THE ADLERS, THE GROUP THEATRE, AND THE NEW SCHOOL

  The story of Brando’s schooling as an actor begins with Stella Adler, who taught at the New School for Social Research in the 1940s. Erwin Piscator was the director of the New School’s Dramatic Workshop, but “Stella Adler was its soul.”16 Stella came from a great stage family, the youngest daughter of Jacob P. Adler, a star of New York’s Yiddish Theatre and a leading proponent of Yiddish theater in Europe and America. Jacob Adler’s funeral in 1926 was a rare spectacle, as thousands gathered to pay their respects at the Eagle Actors’ Club on the Lower East Side, where the body lay in state.17 Stella’s mother Sara (Jacob’s third wife) was also a Yiddish Theatre star, and all of his nine children acted, some having extended careers. Stella had her debut in 1906 at the age of four, in her father’s production of Zalmon Libin’s Broken Hearts. For her, acting was the source of being.

  In the fall of 1943, when they met in class, Stella was forty-one years old—beautiful, narcissistic, but capable of strong materna
l feelings for a remarkably talented and handsome waif like Brando. Adler had everything he could have wanted in an acting teacher: knowledge about the latest methods from Russia, Paris, London, and New York; extensive acting experience in vaudeville and repertory as well as on Broadway and in The Group Theatre; a father who had provided lessons in how to nourish a natural actor’s needs and ignore his worst habits; an understanding of the importance of theater and its communal nature; a vibrant Jewish home full of artists and intellectuals into which she welcomed Brando; and a beautiful daughter three years his junior, for him to fall in love with and befriend for life.