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

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  The New School atmosphere was reinforced at the home of Adler and Clurman (by now married), whose apartment on West Fifty-Fourth Street was a gathering place for the Adler acting clan and frequented as well by a Jewish intelligentsia that sometimes included composer Aaron Copland and conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Brando compared dinner at the Adlers to “an evening with the Marx Brothers. . . . Jokes flew around the dinner table like bullets, half in Yiddish and half in English, and I laughed so hard that I nearly got a hernia.”44 Stella’s mother, Sara, the star of the Yiddish Theatre, was also living in the apartment from 1944 to 1945, when Brando was most often there. He was especially attentive to her, seeking her out in her room to hear stories about the Yiddish Theatre. She spoke passable English and he spoke some Yiddish, but acting was their common tongue.45 Despite this bond, Sara initially discouraged Brando’s romance with her granddaughter Ellen. Her reluctance would disappear after she saw his breakout performance in the play Truckline Café, which convinced Sara that Stella was justified in declaring Brando “the greatest young actor since Papa.”46 Judging from the heartache of her life with Jacob, Sara might have been more resistant to the relationship after seeing Brando perform. But, unlike Stella, who deliberately avoided actors as romantic partners, Sara was a fatalist when it came to love, and she probably recognized that Ellen was too far gone to be helped.47

  In the fall of 1944, a year after enrolling at the New School, Brando landed his first big role as Nels, the fourteen-year-old son of Norwegian immigrants in John Van Druten’s I Remember Mama, a drama produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein at the Music Box Theatre. The play was a success by Broadway standards, and Brando received good reviews. But apparently regarding it as only a part of his education, he set up a bookcase for himself backstage, where he read between scenes. He describes being approached one evening by Richard Rodgers, who “peered at the book in my hands. It was the Discourses of Epictetus.” After scanning “the other titles in the bookcase—Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and books by Thoreau, Gibbon, and Rousseau . . . he looked at me with a perplexed expression and walked away.”48 For years to come, as his fame grew and he gained control over his time between scenes, especially in the drawn-out downtime of filmmaking, Brando would make sure that he had a private space for reading. As this exchange with Richard Rodgers suggests, he would be an anomaly in the world of theater and film as he had been everywhere else.

  Brando was not the only actor who ever read during breaks. What made him exceptional—and the same was true of his approach to music, women, games, health, and food—was the energy he devoted to the pursuit. He had learned the lessons of Stella Adler and the New School in general: An actor’s work is only as good as his mind. So he dedicated himself to intellectual development. A few trends are conspicuous in his reading from this period. One was the emphasis on the classics in philosophy, history, and literature, some of them recommended by teachers or others he respected. The Gahan family fascination with Eastern religion and philosophy was also an influence, and his reading in those fields included works by the Indian spiritualist Krishnamurti. He read the Christian Bible as well, wondering in a letter to his Grandmother Bess, “It is full of beautiful thoughts but they don’t mean much to me. Nana, why do they tell you to fear God?”49 Finally, there were works of drama and also dramatic theory (including some by Stanislavski), a subject he explored more at this point than at any other time in his life.

  Brando reading Krishnamurti in front of a church. © Bettmann/Corbis.

  THE EARLY THEATER WORK

  Harold Clurman was reluctant to hire Stella’s star pupil for a pivotal role in Truckline Café, the Maxwell Anderson play he was directing (and producing with Elia Kazan) that was scheduled to open in February 1946. He went to see Brando in I Remember Mama and admired the performance, but he remained skeptical because the role of Nels was so different from that of Sage McRae, the depressed and ultimately murderous GI of Truckline Café. He finally capitulated, as was his custom when Stella had a strong desire. It turned out to be a good decision. Though Truckline Café flopped when it opened on Broadway on February 17 and closed after a nine-day run, Brando won the Donaldson Award for Best Supporting Actor and Clurman was credited with releasing the formidable emotional power of the fledgling actor.50

  How Clurman did this has become a subject of theater lore. Parts came slowly to Brando; this was as true of him at the end of his career as it was at the beginning. There was no doubt of latent talent, and Clurman recalled Brando’s work in the initial rehearsals as arresting. But the young actor seemed unwilling to unleash the deep well of feeling the director believed was there. It was “a volcanic part,” Brando remembered, leading to “an explosive, incandescent moment in the play when Sage admits shooting his wife and then breaks down.” After Clurman tried everything, including affective-memory exercises that did not help, he followed his instincts. Dismissing the rest of the cast, he commanded Brando to shout his lines. Clurman made Brando do this several times, directing him to increase his volume each time. Brando began to get exhausted and then enraged. Finally Clurman had Brando climb a stage rope while shouting his lines. When he came down, he looked mad enough to hit the director. But something had happened to Brando; in the remaining rehearsals, Brando reached ever deeper into the part. Clurman would remember: “On opening night—and every night thereafter—his performance was greeted by one of the most thunderous ovations I have heard for an actor in the theatre.”51

  Anderson’s play was criticized for the size of its cast (reviewers thought it so unwieldy that they commended the director for keeping everyone from colliding) and their long-winded speeches, but Brando made much of his brief time on stage as a haunted, deranged, teeth-chattering fugitive. He prepared for the scene by having himself drenched with cold water and running up and down the stairs backstage. He hollowed himself out, his body gaunt, perfecting a slouch and a withdrawn, almost catatonic mumble that was nevertheless entirely audible when he sat center stage and explained to the waitress why he had killed his wife. When he finally broke down, he was standing again, and Anne Jackson, later an accomplished actress in her own right, recalled how Brando captured the character’s pain by crumpling himself into a childlike posture, turning his feet inward and hunching his shoulders as he began to cry.52 Equally striking was the actor’s decision to include a skip in his step as he walked off, handcuffed beside the gun-toting posse, as if McRae were joyously embracing the prospect of death. Though some reviewers overlooked the performance, theater devotees who were there did not forget it.53

  Brando’s success in Truckline Café gave him options. He next appeared on Broadway with Katharine Cornell, the prestigious stage actress, in George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, directed and produced by her husband, Guthrie McClintic. Brando played the young poet Eugene Marchbanks, who falls in love with the beautiful, aging wife of a clergyman. Brando demonstrated range in moving from Anderson’s harsh naturalism to Shaw’s drawing-room drama, though his distinctive interpretation of Marchbanks was at odds with the rather staid Cornell. Brando described it as two people “dancing to a different beat,” constantly struggling to get in step. Contemporary reviewers didn’t seem to mind the dissonance and admired both performances. One observed, “If there isn’t any Marchbanks, there isn’t any play at all, and the latter is one of the toughest roles in the theater. The asinine, 18-year-old introvert can be too effeminate or too loudly positive.” Brando, he concluded, achieves “a balance that makes for a better understanding of the lovesick young nuisance than has been scaled by most of his predecessors.”54

  Brando embraced the unpredictability of the character, breaking the monotony of the stylized farce. He managed to inject conviction and humor into lines like the following: “All the love in the world is longing to speak; only it dare not, because it is shy, shy, shy.”55 But he also found qualities with which he could identify. Marchbanks’s neglect and loneliness as a child, and his overwhelming sensitivity to cru
elty, spoke to Brando, whose ability to empathize, to invest his “asinine . . . introvert” with a complex humanity was confirmed by the reactions of theatergoers. Despite the fact that the rest of the company consisted of beloved veterans, Brando regularly received the most applause at the end of the play.56

  Brando’s encounter with another leading lady of Broadway, Tallulah Bankhead, was less successful. A connection between Brando’s agent, Edith Van Cleve, and Bankhead provided his entrée. Hired to play the part of Stanislas, Bankhead’s young lover in Jean Cocteau’s The Eagle Has Two Heads, Brando found himself in the position of prey, confronting the charged libido of a fragile older actress fearful of losing her beauty. Brando never felt comfortable in the role. He was dissatisfied with the accent he assumed, troubled by Bankhead’s strident political conservatism, and most of all troubled by her sexual demands on him. He was relieved to be fired after six weeks of out-of-town trials.

  Brando took advantage of other Manhattan opportunities; perhaps the most enduring was a course on makeup at the New School for Social Research. Given his avowed descent from the Russian and Yiddish theaters, where actors were skilled in makeup techniques, it is not surprising that Brando was engaged with makeup, unlike almost all American-born actors. Russian actors were expert in developing external features, which they believed made their characterizations more vivid. The two Yiddish Theatre actors most adept with makeup, Jacob Adler and Paul Muni, had honed their skills among the Russians. Adler recalled admiringly how they could rebuild themselves, “like sculptors.”57 Brando did his own makeup for years, viewing it as integral to creating a role. Photographs on sets, from The Teahouse of the August Moon, On the Waterfront, and The Chase, for instance, show him fashioning the eyes of his Okinawan interpreter and the bloody faces, in turn, of Terry Malloy and Sheriff Calder. In a letter to the producer of his 1989 movie The Freshman, Brando refers to his “complete course in makeup” at the New School, which was enhanced by “the best make-up men at all the studios.” Thus, Brando knew just how to “put on the scar tissue above my eyes, layer by layer in hot wax in On the Waterfront.”58

  Applying makeup for Teahouse with Glenn Ford looking on. © Underwood & Underwood/Corbis.

  Applying bloody makeup in Waterfront. Columbia Pictures/Photofest.

  Brando’s autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, features a collection of photographs from a series of films, all displaying the specific characteristics he adapted for each role. They range from the 1950s—Mark Antony, Napoleon, the biker of Wild One, the Nazi officer of Young Lions—to the later roles of Don Vito Corleone and the South African lawyer of A Dry White Season. Each frame reveals how carefully Brando envisioned the physiognomies, facial musculature, gestures, and accessories of his film personae.59 He understood the function of a mustache: pencil-thin, it registered tradition and age; more flourishing, it trumpeted sexual energy or sometimes buffoonery.60 The first mustache he wore for a fictitious character was in the role of Ambassador MacWhite in the 1962 film The Ugly American, where he played a man whose authority and self-importance seemed to require both a respectably narrow mustache and a big expensive cigar. Brando knew that people adjusted themselves to the clothes they put on in the morning, to the ways they enhanced themselves with accessories or made up their face with foundation, concealer, and blush.

  The Ugly American with mustache and cigar. © 1963 Universal Pictures, courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC.

  A FLAG IS BORN

  Brando was much too young to have met Jacob Adler, but when the chance arose to appear on stage with Paul Muni, he seized it. Working with Muni meant working with an old Yiddish Theatre master, and Brando did not squander the opportunity. He called Muni’s scenes in A Flag Is Born—a play by Ben Hecht about the founding of Israel in which Brando played a young Holocaust survivor—the best acting he ever saw. “His performance was magical and affected me deeply. He was the only actor who ever moved me to leave my dressing room to watch him from the wings.”61 When the pair met at rehearsals for Flag in the summer of 1946, Muni was fifty-one and had played more than three hundred roles in the Yiddish Theatre before his Broadway debut—a nonspeaking part in We Americans. Muni stole the show as an old man in the October 1926 production, and one critic demanded to know how an aged actor of such talent could have been ignored for so long. Over the next decade, Muni kept a Broadway career alive through commercial and critical successes in Counselor-at-Law (1932) and Key Largo (1939), while starring in a series of well-regarded films, including Scarface (1932); I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932); Bordertown (1935); The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), which earned him an Oscar; The Good Earth (1937); The Life of Emile Zola (1937); and Juarez (1939).

  Muni’s personality and instincts seemed designed to charm a thoughtful individualist like Brando. Muni was committed to the complexity of human nature. “No villain ever thinks of himself as a villain, just as no hero can be all-hero. . . . Let a small light show through. Remember, he is a human being, and even a monster has a soul!” He teased interviewers, saying he disdained acting. It wasn’t a job for a grown man, he insisted, and he would have preferred being a shoe salesman. And he often turned down lucrative offers for roles he considered beneath him because they were tawdry or melodramatic.62 Muni, like Jacob Adler, regretted missing a formal education, and even though he read voluminously, he feared being exposed as “a blithering idiot.” He shied away from Shakespeare, whose work he revered, because he believed mastering the language required a lifetime of study.63 Like Adler and Brando, Muni was exceptional among actors, in that he had star power but remained throughout his career preoccupied with characterization, challenging himself with every new role, seeking a range of cultural experiences in selecting theater and film projects.

  A miserable GI who avenges himself on an adulterous wife in a bleak postwar melodrama, a foppish poet in a comedy of manners, a Holocaust survivor in an unqualified polemic: the scope of Brando’s first three major theatrical roles foreshadowed the greatness to come. The magnitude of Brando’s acting, and his ability to persuade people that he was the persona he had assumed, was nowhere more powerfully evident than in A Flag Is Born, because of the play’s subject matter and the guilt it inevitably aroused.

  Brando’s experience in Flag provides a fitting culmination to the story of his theatrical apprenticeship, because it brings together so many of its elements. The play was directed by Luther Adler, Stella’s brother and the Adler clan member with the most prolonged career on Broadway and in Hollywood. The only project on which Brando worked with Yiddish Theatre actors, it featured Luther’s half sister Celia in addition to Muni. Flag also featured a former Group Theatre actor in Luther Adler and composer in Kurt Weill, who wrote its original score. The immediacy of Flag’s subject matter was consistent with The Group’s commitment to drama that addressed the times.

  But the most significant aspect of A Flag Is Born was that it appealed to Brando’s social conscience: his desire to help Jews in particular and the oppressed in general. Brando was one of three non-Jews with leading roles, including Quentin Reynolds, a prominent war correspondent who took the role of narrator, and Metropolitan Opera tenor Mario Berini, who sang the liturgical music. The cast and company worked for little or nothing in solidarity with the play’s Zionist cause, and playwright Ben Hecht solicited funds for Israel from the audience after every performance. “Give us your money,” he declared, “and we will turn it into history.”64 Scheduled for a four-week run at the Alvin Theatre, the play generated so much enthusiasm that it was extended to twelve.

  Since 1941, Hecht had been working with a group of Palestinian Zionists to persuade the American government and the American Jewish leadership to help European Jews escape the advancing German army—with money, political asylum, and even weapons. They became known as the Bergson Group after their leading member, Peter Bergson, the Zionist activist, published editorials and advertisements in major papers. Among the most visible was Hecht’s sard
onic “Ballad of the Doomed Jews,” which appeared in the New York Times on September 14, 1943, and exposed the world’s indifference to the fate of the Jewish people. The Bergson Group also sponsored a 1943 pageant, We Will Never Die, celebrating Jewish contributions to civilization over the centuries. Starring Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson, it opened to a packed Madison Square Garden and filled equally vast venues (including Chicago Stadium and LA’s Hollywood Bowl) across the country.

  A result of these efforts was President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 founding of the War Refugee Board, which helped save the lives of 200,000 European Jews. By 1945, the Bergson Group, renamed the American League for a Free Palestine, had turned its attention to Holocaust survivors. And this was where the talents of Ben Hecht became especially useful. Hecht confessed in his autobiography that he had been oblivious to his heritage until the German mass murder raised it to the surface.65 The son of Russian Jewish immigrants in Chicago, he worked his way up as a muckraking journalist and then turned to playwriting. By 1928, Hecht had won a Pulitzer Prize for a Broadway hit, The Front Page, coauthored with Charles MacArthur, which would be turned into the classic film His Girl Friday (1940). He became a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1930s, winning two Academy Awards, one for the screenplay of Scarface, starring Paul Muni.66