THE MEN TO THE WILD ONE
Brando’s performance in Streetcar was the most famous of his early work in Hollywood. For his role as Stanley Kowalski, Brando was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor, the first of four consecutive nominations (for Viva Zapata!, Julius Caesar, and On the Waterfront). But Streetcar was not Brando’s first film, and the one he chose for his introduction to Hollywood says a great deal about his artistry and individuality.
From the start of his career as a stage actor, Brando disdained publicity. He exhibited this dislike in various ways, such as in the tall tales he spun for publicity biographies and interviewers.34 For someone like Brando, who loved stretching the truth and testing the gullibility of listeners, the platform granted to celebrities was initially wondrous, though it quickly grew repugnant to him. He could never understand why his opinions were privileged over those of people with genuine expertise. Brando’s critique of publicity, which was catalyzed during his earliest inklings of fame, was never about a sense of superiority, for he accepted his own cultural commonality. “We are all voyeurs to one degree or another, including me,” Brando conceded, “but with fame comes the predatory prowl of a carrion press that has an insatiable appetite for salaciousness and abhors being denied access to anyone.”35 Brando’s efforts to protect his privacy were often futile, and the more he resisted incursions into his life, the more avidly, it seemed, he was pursued. The only way to gain leverage in the exchange with journalists and fans, he decided at a surprisingly young age, was to exploit his fame to publicize causes that concerned him. Similarly, the power he enjoyed in Hollywood from the beginning, as an actor with box-office draw, became a means to promote his values, which were reflected in his choice of film projects. In response to the flood of film offers he received through his New York agent, Edith Van Cleve, after being in Streetcar, he instructed her to accept one: Stanley Kramer’s The Men.36
Brando “never had any respect for Hollywood,” but he “knew exactly what [he] was doing” when he left the stage for movies. He had no illusions about the Broadway world in which he had triumphed. Though the theater held compensations for actors in the form of sustained rehearsals and camaraderie that arose over months of work, and though there were avenues for the occasional idealistic production like A Flag Is Born, commercial considerations reigned as supreme on Broadway as they did in Hollywood. Brando recognized that Hollywood took the impulses of “phoniness” and “greed” to new heights, but it offered much bigger audiences and much higher pay, as well as greater control over his time and choice of vehicles. At the point when Brando arrived in Hollywood, the studio-contract system was breaking down; because of his stature, he could have much greater freedom in selecting roles, enabling him to negotiate one-picture deals instead of long-term commitments.37
A careful reader and reviser of scripts, he usually knew what he was getting into when signing onto a picture. The factors that predicted success in most Hollywood ledgers were for him subordinate to other concerns: the subject matter and the challenge and interest of his intended role, the quality of the script, the reputation of the director in handling actors, the setting and what it offered in terms of opportunities for travel or fresh experiences. Brando’s first Hollywood film, Stanley Kramer’s The Men, directed by Fred Zinnemann with a screenplay by Carl Foreman, met all of his criteria. The Men was Kramer’s third picture, and he was known as a producer willing to address social problems typically avoided in Hollywood. His first, Champion, had been an indictment of the violence of boxing; his second, Home of the Brave, treated racism in the US Army. The Men concerned an even more difficult subject: the plight of paraplegic war veterans, former soldiers with spinal injuries consigned to lifelong paralysis, including sexual dysfunction.
Brando’s contractual negotiations with Hollywood proved an accurate forecast of his behavior when he got there; from the outset, he foiled prevailing rituals and expectations. For a community this fresh—only a few decades old—his indifference was more than a slight. Eschewing a hotel, and the grand reception accorded stars, he insisted on living as a guest at his Aunt Betty’s modest bungalow in Eagle Rock, California, where his grandmother, Elizabeth Myers, was visiting with her dachshund. He preferred a homelike atmosphere among people he knew and trusted to a posh Beverly Hills hotel the producer had reserved. Theodore Strauss, a Life journalist who followed him around on the set of The Men reported, “No one has accused him of posing; everyone to whom we’ve spoken has a sort of confused respect for a man who, up to now, has managed to live as he feels, without caring a hoot what anyone thinks.”38 He was also careless about finances. “Because he rarely looks at money and sometimes pays for a package of cigarettes with a $20 bill, he usually is penniless.”39
Brando slept every day until noon; when he wasn’t working, he “buried himself” in books. According to Strauss, Brando “reads everything, absolutely omnivorous—from Krishnamurti to recent novels.” A photograph accompanying Strauss’s piece shows Brando searching through a bookcase at his aunt’s, where he was likely to have found the religion and philosophy tomes favored by family tastes. Major works of psychology in Brando’s collection, by Freud, Jung, and Karen Horney, date from this period. Friends who spent time with Brando in France during the late 1940s and early ’50s remember him as extremely interested in psychoanalytic ideas and methods. They recalled too that even then he was talking about the American Indians, possibly from reading up on their history. Brando’s close friend Ellen Adler had met Faulkner in Paris around that time, and she may have been responsible for Brando’s copy of Light in August, though this was not among the books he borrowed, permanently, from her. In his twenties, Brando seems to have read what he believed he needed to know to be educated (Faulkner) or politically responsible (history of the Indians). But he also read with an idealistic resolve to understand himself and others (psychology). He would sometimes confess, in discussing a book, that he saw himself on every page.
Brando brought this same determination to his film work, seeking in-depth knowledge of his subjects. To prepare for The Men, he spent a month living among the paraplegics in the Birmingham VA Hospital. Moving into a thirty-two-bed ward, he took up life in a wheelchair, building his upper-body muscles and learning to treat his legs as dead weight. The hospital staff was not informed that Brando was an actor, so this allowed him to blend in with the other patients. He found the community’s dark humor—which included using hypodermic needles as water pistols—especially congenial. In one incident, he accompanied a group to a restaurant, the type of outing where the vets endured stares and sometimes overt displays of pity. On this particular evening, a devout Christian serenaded them on the healing powers of Jesus, who could help them walk again if they believed in Him. Brando, seeing a chance to turn the tables, couldn’t resist. Hoisting himself slowly to his feet, he took a few stumbling steps and then burst into a jig, shouting, “Hallelujah.”40
Such antics endeared him to the vets, many of whom, out of friendship, agreed to appear in the movie as extras. On his part, Brando was simply overwhelmed by their circumstances. “They were young, virile men,” he noted years later, “trapped in inoperative bodies. . . . Some of the friends I made at Birmingham killed themselves, unable to take it anymore.”41
Rehearsing for The Men. Ed Clark/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
All of this intense empathy went into Brando’s portrait of Ken Wilocek. A sign of the toll exacted by the film was the lesson it provided in utilizing emotion on screen. Brando had a scene where his character had to admit to himself that his paralysis was permanent and that he would never walk or make love again. He arrived at the studio early, planning to work patiently on creating the right mood, relying on his usual methods, including reading poetry and listening to music. Though the strategies succeeded, Brando’s energy crested before the cameras were ready, and he felt drained when he finally played the scene. From that experience, he learned that film actors had to be skilled manipul
ators of their emotions, protecting them for the cameras, holding the most powerful in check for the close-up. Filmmaking, he understood increasingly, was a highly technical art requiring the utmost in physical and psychological self-control. To succeed in a role, an actor had to know how to keep “simmering all day long, but never boiling over.” It was the rare director who was any help to the actor in this regard. The management of emotion was a perilous and lonely enterprise.42
Despite Brando’s conviction that The Men was a learning experience and that he had ruined an important scene, critics responded favorably. This would become a pattern. Brando was his own toughest critic, finding fault in his most celebrated work. Brando’s standards, his sense of what might be accomplished in a particular scene, were usually higher than anyone else’s. He often believed himself to have fallen short of the possibilities of imagination and communication. It was rare for him to be gratified by his performances or to accept praise from others. Still, he took great interest in their reception: reading letters from fans and often writing thoughtful responses (though this declined over time) and collecting and filing movie reviews, with the help of assistants.43
Brando with Birmingham VA Hospital veterans. Ed Clark/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
He must have been pleased with the reviews of The Men, which, one reviewer asserted, “ranks with the handful of extraordinary movies that do credit not only to their makers but to Hollywood.” The review went on to commend the film for resisting miraculous recoveries and keeping its focus on the ordinary courage it took to live with paraplegia. Brando, “in his first movie appearance, does a magnificent job. His halting, mumbled delivery, glowering silences and expert simulation of paraplegia do not suggest acting at all; they look chillingly like the real thing.”44 Brando could never count on critics who recognized inarticulateness as part of his characterization and saw that an actor whose work seemed “like the real thing” had achieved something extraordinary. (That charge would approach absurdity in 1962, when a Boston Globe reviewer of Mutiny on the Bounty complained about his strained speech in the death scene!)45
Viva Zapata! (1952), Brando’s third movie, whose production began while A Streetcar Named Desire was still in the editing room, was exemplary in this regard. Elia Kazan, the director, and John Steinbeck, who wrote the screenplay, had been discussing for years the idea of a film about the Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata. Both had been inspired by the 1934 MGM movie Viva Villa! on Pancho Villa, and thought they could interest the producer Darryl Zanuck in the commercial potential of Zapata’s storied life. Zanuck had done The Mark of Zorro with Tyrone Power and had a fondness for adventure tales with casts of bandits set in exotic places. Zanuck’s commitment to Viva Zapata! was unsettled by the growing prominence of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and Kazan was forced to assuage the producer’s worries about its political content. The history of a popular Mexican leader who headed a peasant revolt against corporate and imperial usurpers of their land seemed risky in the existing Hollywood atmosphere. Kazan’s detailed letter to Zanuck presaged future acts of rationalization and opportunism. Affirming the “strongly, and incontrovertibly anti-Communist” message of this “pro-democratic” film, Kazan enumerated all the reasons why the producer should embrace its subject.46 The letter accomplished its purpose, securing Zanuck’s patronage. While Kazan’s case for the “anti-Communist” message was a strident indicator of the lengths to which he would go to promote a project, there was truth in the insistence that Steinbeck’s script, and Zapata’s ideals in themselves, were compatible with democracy.
Emiliano Zapata. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
At this point in his relationship with Kazan, Brando had no reason to distrust the director’s political integrity. That would come later, with his quandary over appearing in On the Waterfront after Kazan fingered “Communists” at a HUAC hearing. In Viva Zapata!, Brando saw an opportunity to work with his favorite director on a screenplay by a major American writer. Among the few subjects Brando had taken to at Shattuck was Latin American history. Viva Zapata! gave him the chance to explore Mexico and immerse himself in one of its most dramatic political episodes. He pored over painted and photographic portraits and read every book he could find about the revolutionary hero who so distrusted power.
One of the books Brando bought was Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec (1947), a classic study of the Indians of Zapata’s region by Mexican artist and ethnologist Miguel Covarrubias. Zapata was part Indian himself, as were most Mexicans, and the book detailed every aspect of this world—from music, art, language, courtship rituals, and religious customs to industries, politics, and methods of warfare.47 Brando would have been intrigued by Covarrubias’s portrait of peoples resistant to colonization who were converted to Catholicism “at the point of a sword,” their religion displaying “the usual compromise between Indian worship and Catholic superstition.” And he would have appreciated the gloomy conclusion about the threat of Fascism throughout Latin America, given “a docile and serviceable lower class of pious, ignorant, and contented peasants ruled by that privileged triumvirate: the Church, the Military, and the Landlord.” Had Brando and Covarrubias ever met, their overlapping interests would have yielded stunning conversation. Covarrubias was a jazz devotee who did famous caricatures of the Harlem Jazz scene; he befriended John Huston while the future director was traveling in Mexico and illustrated the play Huston wrote during these travels, Frankie and Johnny (1930). Like Brando, Covarrubias was a world traveler whose fascination with Southeast Asia resulted in the book Island of Bali (1936); his experience of New York’s modern dance scene and marriage to an American dancer led to the establishment of the first Academy of Dance in Mexico City in 1950. Mexico South was hailed as visual ethnography, but it was probably mere coincidence that Brando’s character in his own visual ethnography, One-Eyed Jacks, was called Chamaco, or “Kid”—Covarrubias’s nickname until his death in 1957.48
The political and aesthetic features of Mexico South, its interest in the peasantry’s democratic potential and in the popular arts of indigenous Indian cultures, was compatible with the other book that Brando read in preparation for Viva Zapata! As a prelude to the film’s screenplay, Steinbeck had written an account of Zapata and the long prehistory of conquest that formed the backdrop to his life. He was a great admirer of Zapata, inspired by his loyalty to common soldiers and fearlessness in battle as well as his exemplary defense of the individual against the opposing forces of Communism and Fascism. While acknowledging Zapata’s violence, Steinbeck insisted that he was no crueler than his enemies, and he accepted the myth of his legendary endurance—“He is still alive and still a force.” Steinbeck was convinced that Zapata would eventually be recognized as his nation’s greatest leader, enjoying “a parallel position to the Virgin of Guadalupe, as the human patron of the freedom of Mexico.”
Steinbeck’s 359-page narrative gave Brando an early education on the Indians of the Americas. Brando would have noted that the Indians were denied citizenship throughout the period of Spanish conquest and treated as “native animals.” This would have explained why the first two popular leaders of Mexico, Benito Juarez and Porfirio Diaz, were “pure Indians,” a circumstance that made the growing tyranny and corruption of the Diaz government even more painful for the Indian populations that suffered its worst consequences. Brando, typically, wanted to understand both sides of the conflict, which is why he also read the history of conquest from the perspective of the colonizers, described in William H. Prescott’s massive one-volume history, The Conquest of Mexico and the Conquest of Peru.49
Brando traveled to southern Mexico, Zapata’s Anenecuilco region, to explore the legend firsthand. There he studied local accents and gestures and arranged to interview people who had known Zapata. He also met Movita Castaneda, a Hispanic actress with whom he would be involved for decades. Castaneda, who starred in the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, would become Brando’s wif
e in 1960 and raise two of his children, Miko and Rebecca. As in Brando’s marriage to Anna Kashfi, the purpose was to legitimate the children, and Brando and Castaneda never lived together as husband and wife. Castaneda had been born in 1916 on a train near Scottsdale, Arizona, to a Mexican mother who was immigrating with her daughters and son to work in the cotton fields. After the family moved to Los Angeles, Castaneda earned money during the Depression by singing on the streets near Paramount Studios. In 1932, during casting calls for that era’s Mutiny on the Bounty, Castaneda lied about her age and landed a role as the Tahitian love interest of Franchot Tone’s character, the ship’s gardener and translator. The film was the first of many in which she appeared, including Apache with Henry Fonda. By 1951, Castaneda needed a break from Hollywood; while traveling in Mexico, she met Brando when they shared a taxi together in Cuernavaca. What impressed Castaneda most about the youthful American actor was his great affinity for people: his responsiveness to everyone, young and old, beggars, commoners, the distinguished, and the neglected.50 This deep feeling for humanity seemed especially suited to his subject.
In developing his treatment of Zapata, Brando in his usual way focused on aspects with which he could identify. Despite the historical and cultural distance, Brando, in Kazan’s words, was able to find “the man in himself.”51 Zapata was the son of a mestizo, a small class of landowners, part Indian and part Spanish, whose holdings were greatly diminished under Diaz. Emiliano and his brother Eufemio became horsemen, and Steinbeck speculates that Emiliano may have been the greatest Mexican horseman of his time. Zapata was proud of his noble Spanish lineage (the Salazars) on his mother’s side, and he was neither a Marxist nor an anarchist. His main concern was protecting the lands of peasants so they could continue to grow their corn and other crops, living as they had for generations. Zapata was driven to politics by the policies of the Diaz government, which sought to consolidate peasant lands in the hands of a few wealthy estate owners, in order to make them more available for lucrative sugar development. Zapata’s motto, “It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees,” was a plea for the dignity of ordinary citizens.52 A visionary who proved immune to the pervasive corruption of Mexican politics, Zapata had an even greater impact as a martyred hero than as a rebel leader.
Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work Page 11