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

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  There and at jazz clubs in this Saint-Germain-des-Prés area, where Brando played bongo drums, he found a congenial “stronghold of freedom just after the war,” becoming friends with the writer Jean Genet and the singer Juliette Greco, who had famous love affairs with Miles Davis and Brando friend Quincy Jones.77 We do know that Brando was familiar with The Rebel by 1957. He mentions in a 1957 letter to a friend, “I’ve just finished reading Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving and found my own shocking image on every other page. I’m currently reading The Outsider [which discussed Camus’s Rebel] and again finding myself mirrored.” Another sign that Brando was thinking carefully about rebellion while characterizing Terry Malloy is that the character came up later in notes he made in preparing for Mutiny on the Bounty.78

  That Brando owned and annotated a later edition of Colin Wilson’s book suggests its importance to him. In his 1982 edition of The Outsider, Brando marked a passage summarizing a basic principle of Camus’s philosophy that is pertinent to Terry Malloy. According to Camus, “Freedom is not simply being allowed to do what you like; it is intensity of will, and it appears under any circumstances that limit man and arouse his will to more life.”79 As an Irish Catholic, Terry knows that it is not possible to triumph over suffering. It is possible, instead, to decide how to suffer and for what purpose, thus asserting one’s freedom. Though the protagonist does get the girl and prevail over organized crime at the end, Darryl Zanuck may be forgiven for thinking this would never appeal to Americans in the 1950s era of prosperity and consumption.

  Golden Globe ceremony, February 24, 1955, when Brando won Best Actor award for On the Waterfront. © Leigh Weiner.

  Brando believed that audiences identified with the story of a man with the courage to stand up to the mob and to admit his own failure. Kazan was convinced they responded to the theme of redemption: No matter what a man has done, he can atone.80 Brando’s moral had standing up to HUAC as its goal; Kazan’s moral had atoning for the past to gain redemption as its goal. The film undoubtedly supported both views. But what persists beyond these explanations is the image of mainstream audiences in the mid-1950s, abandoning the comforts of home entertainment to spend 108 minutes in a grim, colorless world so cold that the actors’ breaths were almost visible on the screen. Suffused with an unbearably sad score by Leonard Bernstein, they witnessed violence and death while bonding with characters whose cowardice, occasional courage, and perpetual bad luck demanded empathetic identification. Something powerful was being worked out in the recognition of these brutal working-class lives—many Catholic, culturally and racially diverse—as central to the American experience. The popularity of On the Waterfront revealed that Americans were not yet done with suffering, that the traumas of the 1930s and ’40s, of Fascism, world war, displacement, and mass death, were not readily set aside. Americans continued to honor a notion of community that was founded in renunciation no matter how often they were told—by advertisers, politicians, and producers—that the times were now different. Leonard Bernstein cites Terry Malloy’s “sacrificial gesture at the end of the film,” which supplies “the motive of his nobility,” to confirm that sacrifice remained a ritual and ideal of national significance.81

  The unparalleled success of On the Waterfront helped to consolidate a quality that had distinguished the Brando hero from the outset—he was one who suffered, and in doing so dignified an essential feature of human existence. Given the brilliance of his performance, there is a temptation to dismiss what comes later in the 1950s as anticlimactic. That would overlook a Napoleon that Laurence Olivier considered the greatest of all renditions of the nineteenth-century emperor; a singing gambler with almost universal romantic appeal; two movies that broke new ground in their depictions of colonialism and race; and a Nazi soldier who provoked some of the first serious discussions by the entertainment industry of the cultural basis for the Holocaust. The roles Brando undertook between 1954 and 1957 represented significant mature work involving experiments with characters from different cultures, challenging norms on interracial romance, testing his abilities as a performer, and extending the boundaries of political debate.

  INNOVATION AND IDEALISM, 1954–1958

  Brando’s idealism has been treated as something of a cliché, a fancy of his to be mentioned but never taken quite seriously. The actor’s library, however, reveals his abiding commitment to the political and cultural values portrayed in his movies. Brando’s reading in the 1950s appears to have focused on three main areas: comparative philosophy and religion; Asian cultures, including their histories, languages, and arts; and social scientific theory (politics and psychology in particular). What is noteworthy about Brando’s collection (and this was as true of his later books as it was of those from the 1940s and ’50s) was the preponderance of classics (and influential books that would become classics) and definitive works on subjects that interested him. During this period, he was reading as background for his roles, as well as for his own edification. He was eager to understand the deeper history of Asian countries, to find commonalities among peoples, at the same time as he was fascinated by the otherness of these places and their patterns of thought.

  In the years 1954 through 1958, when Brando was earning prizes for being among the top moneymaking stars in Hollywood, he was also winning awards from the US Savings Bond Program and the United Nations for service to the national and international communities.82 This was a chief motivation for forming his own film company, Pennebaker Productions, named after his mother: Brando’s hope of reconciling his good works and his professional aptitude. One of Pennebaker’s first goals was to make a film about United States diplomacy and interventionism in Southeast Asia that would bring attention to both the negative and the positive aspects of American foreign policy. Since the early 1950s, Brando had been concerned about the effects of Cold War rhetoric and the indifference on the part of the nation’s leaders and representatives abroad to the cultural complexities of the places where America intervened. He recognized, well before many did, the diplomatic missteps that would culminate in the Vietnam War. To this end, he spent a month in the spring of 1956 touring Southeast Asia—researching on behalf of the film that would become The Ugly American—an area of the world that had long interested him. The tour was heavily covered in the local press, and though the focus tended to be on trivialities typically aroused by a film star, he did manage to publicize his commitment to cross-cultural understanding.83

  Brando conveyed his enthusiasm for what he had seen in a letter to Ellen Adler in August 1956: “Bali is the womb of the earth and as soon as I can manage it, I am going to fluff off this senseless network of nerve ends and go live in a place that was made for living. Oh God Ellen I tell you I have seen some wonder lately in my life and I am going to see more. I’ve been to the Phillipines, to Hong Kong, and Thiland, Java, Singapore, and Japan. . . . Ellen honey try to arrange your life to see some of that before its too late, because the world is swelling with a dreadful effort to standardize so fast that very shortly it will all be gone. Really gone.” For Brando, who had chafed under the stresses of fame and fortune in Hollywood almost from the beginning, these relatively untrammeled Eastern countries provided a respite of sorts. Though he was too shrewd an observer of culture to overlook the craving for all things American that threatened the integrity and distinctiveness of places like Bali, he was able to luxuriate in the peace they still offered visitors like him.

  Despite their “dreadful effort to standardize,” such cultures contrasted starkly with California, described in an earlier letter to Ellen from the summer of 1954. Here he is, “living in Beverly Hills in one of the canyons,” with about eight old friends, “in one gay knot . . . having more fun than a barrel of monkeys that are being used to test a new polio vaccinne.” Brando writes from “the sound stage,” where

  the horror of this production is full upon me. The director is completely affable and gentle and decent; the fact that he is an intelectual amputee concerns me
somewhat since I am contractually oblidged to act this part. The embarrassment of being in this production is equal to that that would be incurd were I oblidged to stand on a table in the Oak room of the plaza and, nude, except for a nosegay of carrots jammed in my puckered ass hole, and attempt to put out my flamming pubic hair with a squirt gun filled with toothpaste. After I have gained the summit of the herendous pile of manure I am going to Europe for a little while and commit fornication with dogs in an effort to reduce the spleen that is being presently generated.84

  The production to which Brando referred was Désirée; the part was Napoleon. When Brando’s mother died on March 31, 1954, from hypertension precipitated by years of alcoholism, he was overwhelmed by her loss. During the traumatic period of her illness, he had signed on to this costume drama directed by Henry Koster to settle a contract dispute with Darryl Zanuck. Brando’s obvious disenchantment with Koster, and the project in general, did not prevent his usual serious preparations. He watched the available screen performances, modeling his soft British accent on Claude Rains’s Napoleon in Hearts Divided (1936). From the biographies of Napoleon, including one he had in his collection, Napoleon’s Victories (1893), a classic memoir by Captain C. Parquin of the Imperial Guard, he picked up attitudes, mannerisms, and turns of phrase.85

  Robert M. Johnston’s Napoleon: A Short Biography (1904), a historically accurate portrait of the man’s life and achievements, which guided the reader through the 40,000-book maze of Napoleonic bibliography, offers a standard view of Napoleon that Brando’s reading would have provided. “What produced the greatest impression on all who met him was the brilliancy and imperiousness of his steel blue eyes” which “revealed the volcanic energy of the soul beneath.” Steely stares were a Brando specialty, and he used them in abundance. He would have learned too about Napoleon’s passion for prophecy, together with the finickiness that “was the nightmare of every colonel in the army.” Spirited off to prison by opposition forces, Brando’s Napoleon is a stickler for detail and not too distracted to upbraid a soldier for his untidy uniform. The same obsessiveness informs every civic and political venture, and Brando makes much of Napoleon as “the modern Justinian,” the great codifier of French law, and of his genius for military maneuvers. Among the memorable scenes is Napoleon’s return in the middle of the night from Russia, despondent in defeat, shielding his eyes as he recounts the devastation of his armies. The hypnotic recitation reveals Napoleon’s remarkable coldness; already strategizing his next move, he shows no remorse for human loss. This foreshadows the ending, where he is angered at mention of the lives extinguished in his conquest of Europe. Brando’s Napoleon is an intellectual opportunist continuously hatching plots, confirming the biographic insight that “the field of ambition in which he strove for existence was only bounded by planetary space.”86

  While the script was weak and the picture essentially a drawing-room romance, Brando exploited the chance to play one of history’s great men. Bringing alive the leader’s singular determination, arrogance, and magnetism, he succeeded in producing a wholly credible Napoleon. The choice of a quiet voice and subdued yet regal bearing suggested a person of inborn authority, devoid of self-doubt. A journalist who interviewed Brando in his dressing room during the filming of Désirée described how he physically embodied the role. The five-foot, ten-inch actor had appeared taller in person than on screen, and had come off as sensitive and observant. Just before he went to the set, she “witnessed a startling transformation—he stood up and suddenly he seemed smaller, fatter, completely changed. His soft eyes were now brooding, dark and heavy with pain.” Brando made a few adjustments at his makeup table, affixing a nosepiece, arranging his hair, and when he turned to face her, he was Napoleon—physiognomy, frame, even the stalking stride.87 As Laurence Olivier said, Brando’s “Napoleon was immeasurably the best Napoleon ever, simply marvelous because of his own particular quality of being so easy, so easily bringing a sense of genius to a character who was a genius. He is a very, very remarkable actor. On the movies he learned to be controlled. He wouldn’t like to be called a technician but he was one, a very great one.”88

  On the set as Napoleon. © Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos.

  Despite misgivings about the picture, Brando managed to find himself in the role, exemplified by the fact that his Napoleon had more in common with Emiliano Zapata and Don Corleone than with other Napoleons. A lonely brooder, Brando’s Napoleon treated others as pawns in a perpetual game of chess. There were elements of this in Brando, of course. Those closest to him insisted that, however disguised, he was enormously ambitious, and he was also adept, through his charisma and stratagems, at bending others to his will. Still, he was no Napoleon, and his ability to convince audiences that he was signaled his power as an actor. As Group Theatre veteran Robert Lewis noted at the time, Brando’s talent was “to work from the inside out,” fitting himself to the character and not the character to himself. An anonymous theatergoer observed of Brando’s acting: “The only other place I’ve seen such a terrifying shift of identity is in a schizophrenic ward. But this man has control of what he’s doing.”89

  One actor Brando met in Hollywood during this time was James Dean, who was seven years younger and idolized him. Dean had taken up some of Brando’s hobbies, including motorcycling and drumming, and was constantly asking director Elia Kazan during the filming of East of Eden about Brando’s personal habits as well as acting techniques. “He dropped his voice to a cathedral hush when he talked about Marlon. I invited Brando to come to the set and enjoy some hero worship. Marlon did and was very gracious to Jimmy, who was so adoring that he seemed shrunken and twisted in misery. People were to compare them but they weren’t alike. Marlon, well trained by Stella Adler, had excellent technique. He was proficient in every aspect of acting, including characterization and makeup. He was also a great mimic. Dean had no technique to speak of.”90 For his part, Brando found the young star appealing and identified with a Midwestern innocence in Dean that made him attractive to Hollywood and also vulnerable to its wiles. Though he felt sympathetic toward Dean, they never became close, but Brando did recommend that Dean see a psychiatrist to deal with his sensitivity and his own “father troubles.” People sometimes have to borrow another actor’s style when starting out, Brando commented, adding that Dean clearly had developed his own by the time he did Giant. He predicted that Dean would have had a major career had he not died so young.91

  The overt link between Brando as Napoleon and his next role as Sky Masterson was his costar Jean Simmons (the only actress with whom he appeared twice). More fundamental was the conviction he brought to the suave ladies’-man side of both characters. Désirée and Guys and Dolls were vehicles for Brando’s considerable powers of seduction, but, significantly, not of the tough, inarticulate kind he had perfected as Stanley Kowalski and Johnny Strabler. Because Brando knew each character from the inside out, he could imagine and express who they would be when in love. In Sky Masterson, he plays a man who knows women better than they know themselves, captivating them with wit and eloquence. While Brando glows as a romantic lead in white silk gliding through a waltzing lesson with Simmons in Désirée, he is almost as bright as the sun in Guys and Dolls. As a gambler whose conversance with the Bible surpasses that of the attractive missionary (Simmons), he plies her with rum drowned in milk to help her relax, not to take advantage of her.

  In Guys and Dolls, Brando fulfills a classic female fantasy: the man who understands virtue as well as vice. Keenly observant, he is a risk-taker who never loses a wager, a commitment-shy maverick who quotes his daddy as often as the Good Book. The greatest source of his allure is a golden tongue, which is matched by a mellow baritone that seems aimed, especially in numbers like “I’ll Know When My Love Comes Along,” at dazzling women more than music critics. In keeping with Damon Runyon’s comic content, Brando’s touch was light; he adapted his acting to the musical’s task of storytelling through song. As Hollis Alpert wrote in the Satur
day Review, “Brando can’t really sing . . . but he almost convinces you that he can.” His sex appeal, however, was irrefutable, and his abilities in this respect were reflected in the overwhelming reaction of audiences. The mob scene at the November 3, 1955, premiere in Times Square was almost life-threatening for Brando and Simmons. Filmed in Cinemascope and Technicolor, Guys and Dolls was the highest-grossing picture of 1955, earning more than $9 million at the box office that year. Nominated for four Academy Awards, the film made many lists of top movie musicals.92

  Brando gave interviews (probably obligated by the fine print of his contract) to generate publicity, doing his best as usual to subvert the agenda. Conceding some anxiety about the reception of his first singing part, Brando said he believed it “an actor’s job to try new things. His voice, facial expressions and body movements, his acting techniques are the tools of his trade . . . [he] should develop as many uses of them as possible. Mr. [Samuel] Goldwyn was willing to risk more than five million dollars on the picture, so I figured I might as well take a chance with him.” Brando’s implicit comparison of gambling and movies as big-money risk industries undermined the Hollywood bravado major actors were expected to sustain. Likewise, his emphasis on the unheralded talent behind an extravaganza like Guys and Dolls reminded listeners that celebrities do not work alone. Commending his voice coach and the music director, Brando revised the image of the multitalented star. Eager to reaffirm the myth Brando has tarnished, the unctuous interviewer closes with a compliment: “We hear you’ve developed a fine singing voice. Some compare you to Nat King Cole.” Brando’s laconic reply punctures the balloon: “Well, I don’t think that Nat has very much to worry about.”93