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

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  Brando would never take full pleasure in his successes on stage or screen, a consequence in part of his father’s attitude toward acting. According to Brando Sr.’s conventions, acting was self-indulgent, a Bohemian activity that was reserved for women, homosexuals, and outcasts. A man full of pain who lived in terror of his own emotions, he seems to have been threatened by the power of acting to move people. Brando Sr. was even more threatened by the way his son’s almost instantaneous and utterly unexpected success sent the son soaring beyond his own mediocrity and nullified his patriarchal authority.26 Yet Brando himself was permanently marked by these conventions, and when they combined with his idealistic appraisal of the corruption of the reigning production companies on Broadway as well as in Hollywood—their focus on profit and tendency to indulge rather than elevate American tastes—he had ample support for his doubts. To preserve his own integrity, to accomplish something for which he had respect, he would have to go beyond acting.

  THE FUGITIVE KIND

  After the expenditure of intellectual and emotional energy in One-Eyed Jacks, Brando’s next project might have seemed ideal. It fulfilled a tacit promise to appear in a version of Tennessee Williams’s play Orpheus Descending, written in 1955 with Brando and the Italian actress Anna Magnani in mind. When it was produced on Broadway in May 1957, Orpheus featured Cliff Robertson and Maureen Stapleton in the lead roles; it closed after a short run. Offered the role in 1959 in a film to be titled The Fugitive Kind, Brando accepted. He had reservations about his Orpheus character, the lonely drifter Val Xavier, but he needed the money—a million-dollar salary—to pay the mounting bills for his divorce from Anna Kashfi and the ensuing custody battles over their son Christian (b. 1958). Nor did it make sense for him to refuse work with a playwright he admired and a good director, Sidney Lumet. Still he worried about the fundamental vagueness of the Orpheus figure, Xavier, a guitarist who revered Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson but had renounced the life of a musician. Persisting questions about Xavier’s motivations and beliefs were especially troublesome in light of the powerful characterization of Anna Magnani’s Lady Torrance.

  In a letter about Orpheus to Williams of March 24, 1955, Brando explained the problem he saw in the two roles. Referring to Magnani, he wrote, “I can’t think of an actress I would rather play with providing the potential dynamics of the parts are equal. . . . When you play with her you either make sure that the PARTS are equally volatile, or plan to carry a fair-sized rock in your hand when you go on stage.” Despite Brando’s esteem for Magnani as an actress, the pair never jelled on screen, which may have had more to do with the dramatic imbalance he identified than with the actors.

  Williams’s drama about Orpheus, the musician who sought to spring his beloved Eurydice from hell through song, had gone through several incarnations, beginning with a 1940 Theatre Guild production, The Battle of Angels, with none of them succeeding in bringing the Greek myth alive in Williams’s archetypal South. Moreover, the weakest link of the screenplay remained the Orpheus character, a vehicle of poetry rather than drama. This was acknowledged implicitly by a sympathetic New York Times review that characterized The Fugitive Kind as a distinguished film that is “rare today,” praising Magnani and Brando as “fine and intelligent performers [who] play upon deep emotional chords. Old feelings of poignancy and longing come through their handling of the words.”27 One of the film’s highpoints was Xavier’s speech about “the fugitive kind,” a scene that also foregrounded cinematographer Boris Kaufman’s singular methods of lighting.

  There are two kinds of people in the world, Xavier tells Lady, the buyers and the ones that get bought. Then he remembers a third kind: “a kind that don’t belong no place at all,” typified by a bird that lives its entire life in the sky because it has no legs and cannot land. “I seen one, once . . . its body was light blue colored. And it was just as tiny as your little finger . . . and its wings spread out that wide. And you could see right through ’em. That’s why the hawks don’t catch ’em, because they don’t see ’em . . . these little birds don’t have no legs at all, so they have to live their whole lives on the wing. And they sleep on the wind . . . and they only light on this earth but one time . . . it’s when they die.” (Italics indicate words stressed by Brando.) Throughout the speech, Kaufman’s camera alternately shades and illuminates, mimicking the mobility of the actor’s eyes, mouth, and hands. Brando’s gaze shifts constantly, his face a volatile map of wonder and sadness, as he reenacts the bird’s soaring rise and fall.

  Brando had a gift for commanding attention through storytelling. He could do it by using his whole countenance as an accompanying register, or he could do it through voice alone, as exemplified by his 1954 reading of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea for a radio program.28 He respected authors who could create worlds that were complete in themselves. His own access to that world came through imagination and his ability to be in the moment. When he addressed Hemingway’s fish in the voice of the old man, Brando was on the sea in his boat, just as he lived temporarily on the wing with Williams’s misfit bird. This is what Brando meant when he told writer Irwin Shaw that his character Christian Diestl in The Young Lions did not exist until Brando brought him to life.29

  MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY AND THE DISCOVERY OF TAHITI

  After The Fugitive Kind, Brando chose to do another historical movie. When he was offered the part of Fletcher Christian in the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, slated for filming in Tahiti, he had been contemplating the role of T. E. Lawrence in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Brando was interested in Lawrence (he owned a copy of T. E. Lawrence, by His Friends) and knew Lean to be a congenial director, but the lure of Tahiti drew him to the Mutiny project. The Polynesian island had been a focus of his youthful fantasies, modeling a carefree, harmonious existence. In Manhattan, he continued to dream about Tahiti, accumulating books on the subject and searching the Museum of Modern Art for images of the region and its inhabitants.30

  Brando had written into his contract the promise that the new Mutiny on the Bounty would deal substantially with the mutineers’ experiences on Pitcairn Island. This, together with the assurance that the film would use locals as extras, convinced Brando to sign on to the film in early 1960. He flew to Tahiti with the producers that spring to help select the cast and shooting sites.31

  MGM’s remake of Mutiny on the Bounty was an implicit challenge to the studio’s own 1935 version, starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, which had won an Oscar for Best Picture. Brando admired Charles Laughton’s Captain Bligh but was unimpressed with Clark Gable, who “hadn’t even bothered to speak with an English accent. . . . As always, Clark Gable played Clark Gable.”32 An early script (October 1960) for the remake indicates a screenwriter, Eric Ambler (the first of at least four screenwriters—including William L. Driscoll, Borden Chase, Charles Lederer—of manifold scripts), still dazzled by the original. The Fletcher Christian character is pure Gable, bland and obliging, devoid of Brando’s ruminative angst.33 The mutiny occurs before the arrival in Tahiti and is driven by Christian’s concern for the crew rather than by a sense of pride and principle. Christian’s behavior on Pitcairn follows this mold, as he strives to create a unified community on the island. Subsequent scripts reveal Brando’s handiwork, his annotations steering the story into greater dramatic tension and complexity. By far the most important thematic change he introduces is the emphasis on class.

  Brando’s Lieutenant Fletcher Christian boards the ship in full aristocratic regalia—gray silk suit, red cape, Puritan-style top hat, and a walking stick—accompanied by French-speaking ladies. His accent is exceedingly refined and he looks down on Captain William Bligh as a vulgar parvenu, questioning Bligh’s zeal for the voyage’s purpose, transporting breadfruit from Tahiti to Jamaica, which Christian characterizes as “a grocer’s errand.” In this first appearance, Brando’s Christian is an unmistakable womanizer. But his pomposity disturbed critics still devoted to Gable’s manly democrat who
found Brando’s character “oddly foppish,” “more a dandy than a formidable ship’s officer.”34 Brando’s main concerns were intensifying the conflict with Bligh and attempting historical accuracy. The real Christian was a member of the landed gentry, from a distinguished old family with important connections. Well educated, reputed to be a skilled navigator, “he was a gentleman, a brave man.” As a Bounty sailor who returned to England with Bligh reported, “Every officer and seaman aboard ship would have gone through fire and water to serve [Christian].” Bligh’s origins were humbler. The intelligent, ambitious son of a customs officer, he had worked his way up through the naval ranks. Despite a hot temper, Bligh was hardly the sadist immortalized by Charles Laughton. He was closer to the Bligh now played by Trevor Howard, who saw harsh punishment—or what he called “cruelty with purpose”—as a form of efficiency.35

  Brando was familiar with British classism and could imagine how it might be compounded by a strict naval regime aboard an isolated sailing ship. In multiple scripts of Mutiny on the Bounty, he made revisions to emphasize this sensibility. He excised curses from Christian’s lines, because gentlemen never swore, and corrected an “Eton expression” (Brando’s phrase) given to a common sailor.36 Elsewhere Brando complained that writers were reneging on promises made to him; chief among them was the promise that the Pitcairn sequences would be complicated by putting Christian directly at odds with the utopian hopes of the common sailors and having him strategize a return to England. The writers had missed opportunities as well, Brando felt, to represent the perspectives of Tahitian characters.37 He was eager that the clash of cultures be elaborated: “could be more amusing . . . pointing up the idiocy of protocol and our unnatural formality and our lies.” He insisted on authenticity, observing that the Tahitian translator’s English was too “exact he understands too much” . . . “every once in a while he uses an extraordinary word.”38 He did his trademark trimming, substituting a precise word or sentence for two or more lines of dialogue.39

  He edited down most of his scenes, among them the argument between Christian and midshipman Ned Young over a water cask and the tense discussion, between Bligh and Christian, about the decision to go around the Horn in (Brando’s phrase) “a ninety-one-foot chamber pot.” Brando also wrote the following lines: “I was just thinking that our little errand for groceries might wind up in a page of naval history. If we succeed in negotiating the horn in the dead of winter.”40 Brando liked his phrasing enough to reprise it fifteen years later for the part of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. In response to Captain Willard’s (Martin Sheen) declaration, “I’m a soldier,” Brando’s Kurtz says dismissively, “You’re an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect the bill.”41 On the Mutiny script, Brando’s marginalia were sometimes amusing. Next to an offer by the Tahitian King, Hitihiti, to send his daughter as a gift to King George, Brando quips, “K Geo too old to do anything about it.”42 More often he provided instructions for character motivation and plot development. For example, he recommended that Bligh’s character emerge subtly: “let us discover Bligh’s stinginess, ill will gradually, more interesting”; “Bligh must not be gratuitously cruel”; “we should have Bligh have some conflict about his cruelty.”43 He worried about integrating story parts and keeping viewers engaged, suggesting camera shifts to build excitement.44

  Brando rewrote the scripts for most of his films, before and during production, but Mutiny on the Bounty was special because of his emotional and intellectual investment in Tahiti, its traditions and people. From his perspective, the picture was a work-in-progress. It reflected a personal interest in the prospects for happiness in an idyllic setting relatively isolated from modernity. That he believed in the prospect at all was the sign of a persisting romanticism that a decade in Hollywood had not erased. But there was a gap between his intellectual judgment and his hope that experience might prove otherwise. He was thrilled that Tahitians had never heard of Marlon Brando, but he recognized that the very presence of the Mutiny production, and the impact of filming there, were already transforming this “island paradise.”45 The judgment comes through as well in Brando’s comments on the Pitcairn Island sequence. For instance, “if individuals are not responsible in a democracy it won’t work”; “men given freedom is not enough”; “education has little to do with it (cap[acity] to govern).” An idealistic plea scripted for Christian, on behalf of an island where “no King’s men . . . grow fat while others starve and . . . make wars that others have to fight,” regaining “the Paradise that was lost,” to “live as God and nature intended,” earns this acid remark from Brando: “Hardly God’s intention.” Nor was Brando entirely unsympathetic to Bligh’s position. “C. says to Bligh Give the men a sense of creative responsibility B. says no. Bligh is right for wrong reason.”46 Brando believed Bligh’s prime offense was blaming everyone but himself when problems arose. Continuing reading about the mutiny even years later, Brando checked and underscored the following in his copy of Richard Hough’s Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian (1973): “A basic tenet of leadership which Bligh never learned is that you never delegate responsibility. You depute and supervise and it is your responsibility if your subordinates fail you.”47

  The script in various versions ran to more than a thousand pages. Brando annotated a third of it, in addition to writing a hundred pages of notes on themes, character development, and what he termed “speech characteristics” and “colorful phrases.”48 He translated some of the love scenes into Tahitian, which he began studying before his arrival for filming in the late fall of 1960. Brando’s French-Tahitian conversation manual (by this time he was fluent in French), Cours de Tahitien, was annotated partly with dead mosquitoes.49 He understood the film’s main conflict to be “political in essence that men who cry for liberty, democracy, humanity if they are not individually equipped to contribute to that idea, cannot make it work and thus a new face of evil is born.” Elsewhere he notes, “Man is his own worst enemy.” Of Christian he writes, “He allows himself the luxury of vain emotional outburst. Self-love. In retrospect he hates the fact that he allowed himself to be driven. The audience should feel he is justified at time of mutiny. Audience should feel that his guilt is understandable.”50 Brando’s observations demonstrate how far he was from idealizing either the hero or the common sailors. The highborn gentleman’s regret over what he has lost, together with his anticipation of a future trapped on Pitcairn with the ship’s crew, precipitates despair. The sailors, on the other hand, desire a liberty for which they are neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared. These interpretations were consistent with lifelong assumptions—no one was thoroughly good or bad; absolutism was misguided; virtuous aims could have unintended consequences—that Brando had substantiated through reading.

  Brando’s reading made him as knowledgeable about the mutiny, the South Seas, and Polynesian culture as anyone involved with the film. His library included multiple copies of The Bounty Trilogy (1951, 1962) and other titles by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. In addition, it contained more than a hundred books on Polynesia—its languages, environment, history, and culture. There were scholarly accounts of the region, such as Douglas Oliver’s The Pacific Islands (1952, which Brando bought at the American Museum of Natural History in New York), and books on Westerners in the Pacific, such as Frederick O’Brien’s White Shadows in the South Seas (1920), with accounts of Gauguin and Melville.51 Books on politics and philosophy directly relevant to the film’s conflicts were also in Brando’s collection, and he may have been reading them during the time he worked on Mutiny. They dealt with race and caste, the nature of community and order, the forces that preserved or threatened them, and what led individuals to rebel. He wrote in Sidney Hook’s Political Power and Personal Freedom (1959), that “reason is ever subjugated to the contagion of emotion,” and he wondered “why there is an incessant belief that men will listen to reason.” He underlined the observation that “men must agree on a certain number of fundamental posit
ions—on what is good or evil, true or false—in order not to massacre each other,” and a passage on cultural differences that warned against one group imposing its ways upon another.52

  Reading on the Bounty. High-resolution image courtesy of Alexander Khochinskiy.

  At the same time, Brando’s reading in early 1960 was influenced by the impending execution of Caryl Chessman, a San Quentin convict whose death sentence he had actively opposed. Brando and others who protested (Elizabeth Hardwick listed “the Pope, Albert Schweitzer, Mauriac, Dean Pike, Marlon Brando” in a September 1960 essay on the affair in The Partisan Review) considered the death penalty barbaric and especially inappropriate in the case of a man guilty of robbery and sexual assault but not murder. Letters to Brando from UC Berkeley political scientist Eugene Burdick (coauthor of the novel The Ugly American) and historian Richard Drinnon confirm that he was among a small group of California luminaries (including scientist Linus Pauling and poets Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti) intent on abolishing capital punishment in the state. The plan was to force a vote in the California legislature through petition, and Brando’s participation provided an invaluable means of generating publicity for the cause.53

  When Mutiny director Carol Reed met Brando for the first time that spring, he found him preoccupied with Chessman’s recent execution (May 2, 1960). Throughout that summer and fall, Brando explored the possibility of directing a picture based on Chessman’s memoir, Cell 2455, Death Row. Brando had no delusions about Chessman’s innocence, but he considered the punishment extreme, believing the execution to be no better than “an act of vengeance against a man . . . suffering from an emotional disease.”54 He was as concerned about the effect of the death penalty on the state and the judicial system that imposed it. He had in his collection A History of Capital Punishment (1960) by John Laurence, opening with an epigraph about Abraham and Isaac, and The Partisan Review issue with Hardwick’s essay characterizing Chessman as a cultural sacrifice. Brando marked and clipped Hardwick’s piece, but he may also have read Francis Golffing on the nature of utopia in the same issue.55