The Don in wedding attire. Paramount Pictures/Photofest.
One of the few aspects of Brando’s performance as Corleone that is underappreciated is the way he ages. He is introduced as a relatively vital man in his sixties. Masculine and physically imposing—“an old bulldog,” as Brando conceived him, with a growling voice—and looking so fine in his wedding “tux that an inexperienced observer might easily have thought the Don himself was the lucky groom.”36 At his olive-oil company office, just after the wedding, the Don is forceful as he rejects the proposal of Sollozzo, the enterprising gangster who wants him to invest in the new drug market, scolding Sonny for divulging his enthusiasm for the deal, giving instructions to Luca Brasi. When he is shot a few scenes later, by thugs sent by Sollozzo, hoping to eliminate a key barrier to his plans, the Don shrewdly anticipates the gunmen’s attack, protecting his body as best he can, the muscular frame exposed as he sprawls against his car. In the next major scene, with Bonasera again, before an embalming table, the Don remains a man of consequence. But the skin is gray, the jowls seem looser, the hair thinner. Grieving the death of his firstborn son intensifies an aging process already accelerated by bullets. Here, too, Brando’s improvisations are pivotal. The script: “I want you to use all your powers, all your skill, as you love me. I do not want his mother to see him as he is.”37 On screen: “I want you to use all your powers and all your skills. I don’t want his mother to see him this way. . . . [lifting the blanket to reveal Sonny’s mutilated frame] Look how they massacred my boy!”
The Don then hosts a boardroom colloquy for Mafiosi from around the country. Here he summons much of his original authority, appearing older than at the wedding but reinvigorated. In the script, the Don is to address them: “Ah well, let’s get down to business. We are all honorable men here, we don’t have to give assurances as if we were lawyers. . . . Well, no matter, a lot of foolishness has come to pass.” Instead, he does not flatter them as being “honorable,” perhaps also recalling Antony’s subversion of the word in his speech in Julius Caesar. He is far more straightforward when Brando changes the lines to: “How did things ever get so far? I don’t know. It was so unfortunate, so unnecessary.” Nor does Brando envision the Don as an equivocator or one to dishonor his dead. He cuts: “Perhaps my son was too rash, too headstrong, I don’t say no to that,” opting for the crisp “Tattaglia lost a son; and I lost a son. . . .” He ignores the script’s directive that “he gesture expressively, submissively, with his hands,” because the Don is sparing with gestures as well as words and would never behave “submissively.” Brando then trims two-thirds of the Don’s summarizing speech,38 keeping and embellishing the plea on behalf of his youngest son: “But I am a superstitious man, and if some unlucky accident should befall him . . . then I’m going to blame some of the people in this room. And that I do not forgive. But that aside, let me say that I swear, on the souls of my grandchildren, that I will not be the one to break the peace we’ve made here today.” (Italics indicate words stressed by Brando.)39
Brando’s part ends with two extraordinary scenes in the Don’s garden.40 Both are set in 1955; it is ten years since Connie’s wedding, and the patriarch has aged. Robert Towne wrote the scene with his son Michael after Brando requested that the Don, for once, articulate his feelings. The conversation focuses on business, but the successor, sensing his father’s dissatisfaction, provides an opening.41 The Don rises and sits closer to his favorite son, their heads nearly touching: “I never wanted this for you. . . . I worked my whole life, I don’t apologize, to take care of my family, and I refused to be a fool, dancing on a string held by all those big shots . . . but I thought that when it was your time that you would be the one to hold the strings. . . . Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone, Something. . . . Just wasn’t enough time, Michael, wasn’t enough time.” He sighs, taking his adult son’s face in his hands for a kiss. It was this kind of self-possession that endeared audiences to the Don: a man who could be this physically familiar with a grown son and equally prepared to kill on his behalf.
The Godfather is a novelty in Brando’s career as the first in which he played a father. Indeed, the Don’s death scene was the only time that he ever acted with a child.42 In contrast to the previous scene with Michael, this one was mostly unscripted. Coppola recalled that the producers considered it unessential, so it was shot while the cast and crew were at lunch.43 But Brando set aside time to play with four-year-old actor Anthony Gounaris before the cameras were rolling, a preparation richly rewarded.44 In the scene, which may be only a day later than the prior one with Michael, the Don seems weaker, the body bulkier, the mouth more sunken, as he wipes sweat from his brow and wearily directs the little boy with the watering can. The Don’s fondness for children energizes a moment of invention as he summons the boy for a game. He uses an orange peel to make himself into a jagged-fanged monster, arousing genuine fear in the child actor, who appears to be feeling fear, rather than performing it. The monster-Don placates him with a chuckle and picks up the boy. Then the Don institutes a chase, which results in his heart attack. He falls dying in the tomato patch. The border between movie and reality, unsettled by the child actor’s fear, is further shaken by his guffaw at the Don’s death throes, which he views as theater. Truly frightened before by the orange-peel monster, the child is now entertained by Brando’s acting of the death scene. Whether or not the child is acting, his wisdom is irrefutable: Brando’s death scene is masterful, and Anthony Vito Corleone’s lovable grandfather is a scary monster.
The Don’s death scene, 1972. Paramount Pictures/Photofest.
Our attachment to the Don makes us conflicted about him, despite what he does for a living. Still, the fear he arouses makes him an even more compelling character. Of all Brando’s roles, Don Corleone has most in common with Stanley Kowalski. Both are in significant ways conventional: men among men who take pride in their families. But both are dangerous, and they force audiences to confront their attraction to men who ruthlessly pursue their ambitions and desires. By foregrounding the inseparability of their violence and seductiveness, Brando highlighted the contradictions in American norms of masculinity. While cultural mythology aligned male success with virtue, experience often suggested the opposite—that it signaled a susceptibility to corruption. The Hollywood establishment was so pleased to have Brando back on top that it overlooked what he considered the caustic appraisal of American culture that was The Godfather’s message. Cover stories in major magazines about Brando’s redemption after years of wandering in the wilderness typically offered a sampling of his opinions and then dwelled on the professional fairy tale.45 This was not the case with Shana Alexander’s profile in Life, which linked Brando’s ambivalence toward acting and American institutions in general to his understanding of the film’s messages. Brando observed, “The Mafia is so . . . AMERICAN! To me, a key phrase in [The Godfather] is that whenever they wanted to kill somebody it was always a matter of policy. Before pulling the trigger, they told him: ‘Just business. Nothing personal.’ When I read that, McNamara, Johnson and Rusk flashed before my eyes.” Alexander’s summary of Brando’s performance is equally telling: “The picture is as full of life as a Brueghel painting and as full of death as a slaughterhouse. Any actor can die, actorlike, of gunshot or garrote or knife; and in The Godfather, dozens do. Amid this wall-to-wall blood, one is stunned by the great power of the actor who can move us by falling dead of natural causes in a vegetable garden, as Brando does. . . . In dying the way we all expect to die—unexpectedly—he teaches the difference between death as titillation and death as terror.”46
THE DON’S AFTERLIFE
Brando’s characters were believable because Brando believed in them as independent creations. There is no stronger evidence of the autonomy he gave them than the parody he wrote in 1994 about going to heaven and meeting the Godfather. The vignette, which reveals Brando reflecting, quite literally, on Don Corleone’s afterlife, arose from a clause in the contract for h
is autobiography requiring that he promote it. He seems to have sought mastery over this dreaded obligation by inventing parody interviews, including this one with the Don in the other dimension. Brando’s portrait is respectful but critical. The Don is in heaven, after all, and resourceful as ever (convening conferences, listening to opera, using computers), but he lacks wings (an offer to earn them by eliminating Saddam Hussein is refused because “there’s no violence allowed . . . up here”). Moreover, his parochialism prevents his appreciation of the rich company (“Ziggy Freud” and “Al Einstein”) in the celestial ghetto for agnostics where he resides, “because I didn’t really believe in anything.”47 The satire is telling: The Don’s pragmatism takes him far, but he will never overcome his murderous impulses or enjoy the fruits of the examined life.
The most notorious result of The Godfather was the Academy Award that Brando received for his performance and turned down via a delegate from the Apache tribe. Brando’s decision to send Sacheen Littlefeather to the Academy Awards ceremony on March 27, 1973, to refuse a possible Oscar for Best Actor was the most sensational of his efforts over three decades to publicize the grievances of American Indians and to help them gain compensation for injustices of the past and present.48 It also represented the integration of his acting achievements and his activism.
Brando knew the whole world would be watching, which was why members of the Academy missed the point when they complained that he should have appeared himself to turn down the award on the Indians’ behalf. The strategic substitution—American Indian for Hollywood star—was designed to give Indians the worldwide audience he had been struggling to give them for more than a decade. It also supported his longstanding critique of a profit-driven media and the base cravings it fed. The situation was ideally suited to redress Brando’s complaint that people ignored the problems of Indians while feasting on every tidbit they could get about Hollywood stars. If he won the Academy Award, he could force them to listen to what he believed they should hear. “I felt it was a tremendous opportunity for an American Indian to be able to voice his opinion to 85 million people,” Brando said on The Dick Cavett Show on June 12, explaining why he had not appeared himself. One viewer called it “shock treatment” for a global television audience and “one of the most dramatic civil rights protests” ever.49
Sacheen Littlefeather hadn’t had time to deliver Brando’s entire rationale for refusing the award, so on March 30, 1973, the New York Times published “That Unfinished Oscar Speech” under Brando’s byline. “For 200 years we have said to the Indian people who are fighting for their land, their life, their families and their right to be free: ‘Lay down your arms, my friends.’ . . . When they laid down their arms, we murdered them. We lied to them. We cheated them out of their lands. . . . But there is one thing which is beyond the reach of this perversity and that is the tremendous verdict of history. And history will surely judge us.” Brando’s speech concluded with the “hope that those who are listening would not look upon this as a rude intrusion, but as an earnest effort to focus attention on an issue that might very well determine whether or not this country has the right to say from this point forward we believe in the inalienable rights of all people. . . .”
Members of the Cheyenne, Paiute, and Lummi tribes accompanied Brando for his June 12 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. In the wide-ranging discussion, which covered, in addition to his recent refusal of the Oscar, the Indian fishing industry and his theory of acting as a human survival mechanism, Brando confirmed that his attitudes toward publicity and the media were unchanged. For every five minutes on himself, he made sure that equal time was spent on the aspirations of the Indian representatives with him. Brando was polite though straightforward about his goals (saying that he found it distasteful to discuss his movies when the audience knew so little about the suffering of Indians), making clear that shows of this sort were worthwhile only to the extent that they illuminated social problems he considered important.
With Dick Cavett in New York City, June 1973. Photograph by Ron Galella/WireImage/Getty Images.
While biographers sometimes refer to a gap between Brando’s emotionally exhausting year of moviemaking in 1972 and the start of filming for The Missouri Breaks in 1975, his professional activity continued relatively uninterrupted. The idea that Brando retreated immediately to Tahiti, where he drowned in the past and ate gluttonously, is unsupported by facts. On The Dick Cavett Show, he looked trim and suntanned. Moreover, he typically ate freely between projects, gaining thirty or forty pounds after a film and then dieting like a prizefighter as the demands of production loomed. He spoke candidly about the weight issue in interviews. “I’ve gone on and off diets for years, usually before starting a new movie. When I have to lose weight, I can do it. It wasn’t unusual to drop thirty-five or forty pounds before a picture. I ate less, exercised more and it came off. . . . Most of my life, I weighed about 170 pounds. . . . After forty, my metabolism shifted gears, but I kept eating as much as ever while spending more and more time in a sedentary relationship with a good book. There probably isn’t a diet I haven’t tried.”50
Eating for Brando was an addiction akin to the alcoholism of his family, and he tried different therapies, including self-hypnotism, to control it. Brando’s weight fluctuations can be seen by wardrobe fittings where he weighs in at his usual film weight of 170 pounds; by reports of his dieting on set (turkey and Tab got his weight down for The Nightcomers; he lost too much for The Godfather, so the Don’s paunch required padding); by the hundreds of diet books in his library; by the many photographs of him; and by the logs he kept, when he was dieting rigorously.51 Nothing was a greater inducement to weight loss than a doctor’s suggestion that excess pounds were compromising his health and longevity. Daily logs Brando kept in his last two years to track his weight for medical purposes show that, at his heaviest, Brando was about 260 pounds.52 Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, when Brando was in his fifties and sixties, his weight fluctuated according to the demands of filming and his understanding of its impact on his overall well-being, his sex life especially. The roles that he played as he aged afforded greater indulgence of his tastes and compulsions. Liberated from the image of a sex symbol, his physical condition became a personal choice more than a professional necessity.
Brando’s rejuvenated celebrity with The Godfather gave him leverage to dictate the terms of subsequent projects and to secure from them significant financial support for his evolving Indian projects and the development of Tetiaroa. “Pictures,” as Brando called them, were what he knew and did best; he would never stop making them. For the most part, Brando would be reprising charismatic villains like Vito Corleone, men who had chosen to live by their own laws. And though Brando could sometimes behave like these characters on set, and had major difficulties with directors during this period, his dedication to his characterizations once his energies were focused on the work at hand continued to reward directors and fellow actors alike.
CHAPTER SEVEN
VILLAINS AND SUPERMEN
The Godfather usually is viewed as the end of Brando’s serious professional career. Together with Last Tango in Paris, it is seen as a brief, spectacular resurgence of his talent after which he completely lost interest in acting. Instead, I see The Godfather as the performance that initiates Brando’s late period: an adventurous casting-out into undiscovered territory where he dramatizes his own experience of fame, by playing larger-than-life, anarchic, often demonic figures. Brando once said that acting was “like blowing up a balloon and then letting go,” thus pinpointing the element of unexpectedness that made everything he did so distinctive. He invariably repudiated the method actor label as meaningless, describing his own acting, if pressed, as instinctive.1 After he had immersed himself—through reading, research, and observation—in the world and mind of his character, he was free to improvise in ways that even he couldn’t anticipate.
When the Academy Award nomination for Best Actor as Don Vito Corleone w
as announced, it was pointed out that Brando had significantly fewer scenes in The Godfather than had the other nominees in their respective pictures. But the logic of the nomination was obvious: He was the dominant presence both within the film and beyond it, as the Don became a cultural icon. Don Corleone, whose criminality was reconciled with the highest virtues—dignity, a sense of justice, devotion to family—introduced a signature element of Brando’s late roles, a specialization in charismatic villains. Only a few of these films were acclaimed and highly profitable, and some were even ridiculed. But Brando’s appearances usually created audiences for them and made them worthwhile.
Moreover, the characters and scenarios Brando devised illuminate his life in ways that his earlier films did not. Brando became more and more self-reflective, whether building on political preoccupations (Apocalypse Now; A Dry White Season; Columbus), previous characterizations (The Freshman), or sometimes drawing, in the nineties, on conflicted areas of his experience (his offspring, The Island of Dr. Moreau; his tumultuous affairs with women, Don Juan DeMarco; his fears for his son in prison, Free Money). The way these films addressed personal events was usually indirect, especially at the outset. He appeared in a remake of H. G. Wells’s Moreau because of his scientific and political interest in genetic engineering, and in Don Juan he played a psychiatrist, not the compulsive romancer of women. But the explorations they sometimes elicited suggest that when he was performing, he could not help but be engaged. Though he claimed to have entered into the films after The Godfather and Last Tango for money alone, and he earned huge sums in almost all of them for cameos, Brando was invested in some way in each of these late roles, and the particulars of those investments are revealing of his life as an actor and, occasionally, as a man. Above all, the last twenty-five years of Brando’s career demonstrate that he was never done with acting. Annotated scripts; notes on characterization, dialogue, and plot; and books he read to develop roles between 1976 and 2001 confirm the energy and intelligence he continued to devote to what he called “the world’s oldest profession.”
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