According to Miko, Brando “loved kids and learned a lot from them. He picked their brains.” And he seemed to them infinitely knowledgeable. “There was nothing he didn’t know something about,” Miko said. “It was like having a walking Internet with you. You could put him in a room with anyone and he would know about that person’s area or talent.” Though Brando was not authoritarian or dictatorial, he did follow his own father’s example in sending Miko to military school for a year when he was floundering, but then he advised him to “find something you love to do, and you’ll never have to work.”49 Brando was especially preoccupied with his firstborn son, Christian, the product of his brief, tumultuous marriage to Anna Kashfi. Twenty-two in 1980, Christian was bright but had never graduated from high school, and he had abused drugs and alcohol since his early teens. Christian was also idealistic, resistant to Hollywood values, and drawn to nature and animals. Overwhelmed by his father’s fame and talents, and by the way Brando alternately indulged and neglected him, equally handicapped by a mother with various addictions, Christian pursued different vocations over the years, including tree surgeon, welder, and actor, never quite finding his way. Brando tried to help, financing his endeavors and even those of the women close to him he believed good for his son (investing $20,000, for instance, in a new business for Christian’s young wife), and encouraging him to get therapy, but such efforts proved futile.50
Brando himself had begun to find peace during these years through a combination of therapy and meditation techniques. He had always read widely in psychology and alternative medicine, which were, to begin with, family concerns. His mother, grandmother, great-grandfather, and aunts were drawn to these ideas and practices, as well as to more conventional methods—for example, his mother’s work with Alcoholics Anonymous and Marty Mann in the late 1940s.51 Though alcoholism ran in the family, so did the faith that human weaknesses could be corrected. Brando spent years in psychoanalysis but grew increasingly disenchanted with traditional Freudian methods. It was only in the 1980s that he discovered a clinician, Dr. G. L. Harrington, whose practicality combined with Brando’s own relative stability to produce significant results. He expressed his gratitude by including the doctor in the dedication to his 1994 autobiography.
In Dr. Harrington he seems to have met the right person at the right time: someone who enabled him to benefit from a lifetime of reading and introspection. A respected Los Angeles psychiatrist who had helped to inspire a field called “choice theory,” Harrington was rare in his humility toward his expertise: “If all the professionals in our field suddenly disappeared, the world would hardly note their absence.”52 Harrington was also a pragmatist with a good sense of humor, and he encouraged Brando to trust his instincts. For despite a difficult upbringing, and an adulthood marred by fame and the endless conflicts generated by his sexual self-indulgence, he had a talent for living that was as great as his talent for acting.53 Brando had an extraordinary ability to embrace the moment. As his assistant Avra Douglas remarked, “For Marlon it was about the journey not the destination. That’s what we should all aspire to be like. He was always talking about living in the moment, as if right now is all that mattered.” This is echoed by Miko, who described a road trip to Death Valley with his father that took “a week from LA, because Dad insisted on stopping to look at every flower and tree on the way. He was never in a hurry to do anything.”54
Indeed, this is where Brando becomes especially challenging for biographers. It is possible to look at his life beyond film as a record of futility—endless serial romances, many children all needing more attention than he gave them, a major film on Indians foiled, unrealized utopian schemes for Tetiaroa, original film scripts never produced, and films abandoned at the point of production. Some have concluded that America’s greatest film star was a failure in life, and occasionally on screen. Brando had his share of disappointment and misery, some of it of his own making. But he never lost his unlimited appetite for experience and knowledge.55
What made his intellect unusual was that it was as practical as it was idealistic. He could get as excited about garden tools or ship implements as he could about the causes of evil; he could be as absorbed in books about home building as in books about being at home in the universe.56 And he could be happy sitting in the doorway of his thatched hut on Tetiaroa, watching the changing colors and clouds drift across the lagoon. “I’ve sat there in that position, just contemplating life . . . little birds of thought flitting through my mind. I’ve digested a lot of my philosophy in those times.”57
It was in this period, too, that Brando consulted an expert on biofeedback, purchasing an instrument for measuring galvanic skin response, a method used by psychoanalysts Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich. He read a great deal about meditation and befriended swamis well versed in the subject, mastering techniques that allowed him to reduce his blood pressure dramatically, sometimes bringing it as low as 90-over-60. Brando also made his own relaxation tapes, which he used regularly. It was during the 1980s that he began meditating twice daily, even experiencing on multiple occasions satori, the sudden awakening that is the ultimate goal in Zen Buddhism.58
Brando’s general well-being was reflected in an extended taped conversation (Brando did almost all the talking) with Michael Jackson at his home in August 1983. The topic was developing the famous singer’s acting skills. They covered everything from relationships with fathers to racism and hatred, to the wisdom and distortions of the Judeo-Christian Bible, as one of Brando’s Tahitian toddlers wandered in and out and secretaries interrupted with messages on the intercom. The candor of Brando’s ruminations confirmed his affection for Jackson. He invokes, for instance, his favorite comparison between actors and boxers who both seek to dominate. Great actors are like boxers with opponents, sparring with audiences, forcing them to adapt to their rhythms, their moves. “As soon as they can second-guess you, then they’re ahead of you. You got to make ’em wait and get them on your time.” He also intuits Jackson’s exceptional sensitivities. “You’ve got more nerve endings than most people. . . . I’ll bet you’re the kind of person who can get injured by what you’re imagining. You can walk into someplace and everyone is chasing around trying to get your autograph and you don’t care . . . what I see in you is not so much loneliness but aloneness.” He is just as open about himself. For years, Brando confesses, he nursed a grudge against his country for its racism and violence, but study and travel convinced him that America had no monopoly on cruelty. In Africa, you might be killed for wandering into a territory with the wrong scarification; Cambodians, Russians, the Dutch in Indonesia had slaughtered millions. For prejudicial malevolence, however, nothing could top the caste system of India and the categorical suffering of the Untouchables it perpetrated. The only country that he saw coming close to rivaling India’s barbarism toward its own was China.
Brando mentions a novel he is writing on the subject—about piracy on the South Seas during the 1920s.59 The novel, coauthored with Donald Cammell, was Fan-Tan, an adventure tale that recalled maritime romances by Rafael Sabatini and Jack London and featured a hero, Anatole Doultry, with various Brando traits. The novel offers a wealth of information about Brando’s favorite subjects, including ships and shipbuilding, Chinese arts and history, and the puzzle of prejudice and hatred. The many boxes in the Brando Estate Archives with Brando’s dictation and notes show that he earned his status as lead author.60 Likewise, for every paragraph in Fan-Tan, there are corresponding books in Brando’s library. The protagonist, Annie, contemplates the rigorous design of Chinese hulls; the technical capacity of “wireless” radios in the early twentieth century; the formidable appetites of rats, roaches, red ants, and other shipboard vermin; and the fan-tan itself—an elaborate game of chance played with every type of legal tender in the world. The Rabelaisian emphasis on bodily fluids and excess, the distrust that defines the novel’s central romantic relationship, the perpetual sense of danger—all provide windows of a kind on Brando’s
fantasies.
The same was true of another creative project from this period of hiatus, his script for a film entitled Jericho. Copyrighted April 7, 1988, “An Original Screenplay by Marlon Brando,” Jericho, set in Medellin, Colombia, is a spy thriller about the CIA and the Colombian cocaine trade. The opening credits scroll over a scene at a church tower where an altar boy discovers a bell clapper replaced by a maggot-covered human head. Brando’s complaints about the dispensable beginning of The Ugly American echo in this lesson on how to grip an audience by the throat before the credits end. The immediate image of the well-groomed aristocrat at breakfast, like the Don Corleone fade-in after the horse-head scene in The Godfather, reveals who is responsible for the bell’s ghoulish silence. The powerful are immune to the grisly violence they authorize. As these echoes demonstrate, Brando the scriptwriter builds on everything he has learned over a lifetime of moviemaking. His prospective role was the jaded CIA agent Billy Harrington, code-named “Jericho,” with an unparalleled record and knowledge of Colombia.
“Harrington” is named after Brando’s psychiatrist; the character’s biofeedback tape reflects a familiar film history (Vietnam, water buffalo, African drumbeats), while his home-surveillance system is the creator’s dream. Brando read Robert Sabbag’s book about the cocaine trade, Snowblind (1978), for details about character types, pricing and smuggling systems, weaponry, and lingo.61 Harrington’s love interest, “Mook,” a Colombian singer who divides her time between drug kingpins and Communist guerrillas, is conceived for Rita Moreno, and CIA agent “Smokey Robertson” is for longtime friend Quincy Jones. Jones recalled their long, hilarious discussions about Jericho: Brando was to “play a white agent who acted black,” while Jones “played a black agent who acted white.” Both of them, Brando noted, were “bilingual” in the American languages of race. Every time he walked into a room, the only black among whites, Jones was being read as a representative black man and behaved accordingly. He was also reading the whites. Brando himself drew on similar skills as a dance student in Harlem and a jazz aficionado at all-black clubs in Manhattan during the 1940s and ’50s, and later as a civil rights activist. In light of their familiarity with the experience of being the other, it makes sense that Jones and Brando made a habit of studying the language when they traveled to a foreign country. Brando hoped their association on film would dramatize the positive dimensions of life as a constant exercise in translation.62
Of all the projects Brando worked on in the eighties, Jericho came closest to realization: Elliott Kastner, who had produced three previous Brando films, including The Missouri Breaks, signed on as producer. By the end of 1987, Jericho was financed and filming locations in Colombia, Mexico, and Washington, DC, were set. But the film was never made, for reasons that remain unclear.63 Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Brando continued to work on original scripts (Tim and His Friends; Bull Boy; A South Sea Story) and an adaptation, with Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison, of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, entitled “Big Daddy.”64 Brando also kept alive the prospect of a film version of Fan-Tan; he had the draft of a screenplay in 1993 and consulted with Michael Hastings, who had done the script for The Nightcomers, about another adaptation in 1998.65 Despite his efforts, Brando never produced a screenplay or fiction that was on par with his standard of performance, which may explain why he didn’t pursue them wholeheartedly.
When Brando returned to filmmaking after his hiatus, he was often making movies for the money, but those with whom he worked saw how the process energized him. His assistant Avra Douglas confirms what intimates never doubted: “He cared so much that he needed to pretend he didn’t care at all.” One of the not-so-well-kept secrets of Brando’s life was his dedication to the craft that he revolutionized and complained about—endlessly. His disappointment and occasional outrage when things went wrong on productions—and they did increasingly since his choice of projects predictably shrank as he aged—was precipitated by the high hopes he brought to almost all of them. Still, he continued to demonstrate versatility and inventiveness on film to the very end. This was certainly the case with A Dry White Season (1989) and The Freshman (1990), in which he delivered two of the best performances of his late career.
THE LAWYER AND THE BOSS: A DRY WHITE SEASON AND THE FRESHMAN
Brando’s trusted Hollywood agent Jay Kanter remained unconvinced by his friend’s retirement and proved it in the winter of 1988 by signing him for a cameo in a film about South African apartheid, A Dry White Season. It helped that Brando’s character, Ian MacKenzie, was a British lawyer—he loved British accents and the drama of the courtroom—and working with Euzhan Palcy, the director from Martinique who had won acclaim for Sugar Cane Alley (1983), was attractive. Set in 1976 and based on a novel by distinguished South African author André Brink, the film exposed the vicious police state run by the country’s white minority. Because he believed in the cause, Brando donated a portion of his salary to an antiapartheid foundation. It had taken five years for the film to get funded, partly owing to its controversial subject. It ended up being banned in South Africa, and the South African members of the cast feared reprisals from their government.66 Brando’s filming began in London, in the fall of 1988, with a company that included Donald Sutherland, Susan Sarandon, Michael Gambon, and South African actor Zakes Mokae. The film featured songs by Joseph Shabalala performed by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and a score by jazz composer Dave Grusin, who had done the score for the psychedelic sex farce Candy (1967), based on the Terry Southern novel, in which Brando starred under the direction of his old friend Christian Marquand.
A Dry White Season was a rare late film for Brando, in that he played a hero rather than a criminal or villain. And though the part was small, he was nominated for multiple Supporting Actor prizes, including an Academy Award. Brando’s tweedy barrister was a charming persona with his gravelly voice and wheeze and ponderousness—describing his orchids as “naughty mistresses” that have repaid his loyalty by giving him “a permanent allergy.” The proper Brit, he plies his visitor with refreshment and reacts fastidiously to the purpose of Benjamin du Toit’s (Donald Sutherland) visit. “Oh, Justice,” MacKenzie says, as if suddenly becoming aware of a foul odor, “well I’m afraid that’s a trifle more complex to serve you up than a cup of tea. . . . You see, justice and law, Mr. du Toit, are often just . . . well, they, I suppose they could be described as distant cousins, and here in South Africa, they’re simply not on speaking terms at all.” The live chess game on his desk ensures that he’ll take the case; that he understands the match is as winnable as it is incremental, with one side having everything to lose, the other everything to gain. In court, the mannerisms of the eccentric barrister distract from his wits. Leaning on his cane, he circles the courtroom, gently ridiculing and then passionately attacking the witnesses called to defend the racist regime. He knows that no amount of evidence will convict the police interrogators who tortured his client to death. Brando’s grimace of disgust—brows twitching, lips moving in silent protest as the judge announces the verdict of innocent—conveys the pain of life in the moment. Yet he is equally aware of the regime’s eventual defeat. The verdict is no more consequential than a fly landing in his tea; the warrior (who has seen worse) will carry on.
Brando was distressed by the cut of A Dry White Season that he was shown before its release. With the exception of his own cameo, and other solid contributions from leading actors, he found the work amateurish, especially the editing. Because he believed in the film’s politics, he offered to fund and supervise reediting. When he was rebuffed, Brando was so incensed that he did a television interview on Saturday Night with Connie Chung to publicize what he believed to be MGM’s indifference to the film. Still, A Dry White Season did better than he expected, earning respectful reviews from major critics who uniformly praised Brando’s performance.67
One of the most successful films of Brando’s late career was a comedy, The Freshman (1990). Despite Brando’s insistence that he lac
ked aptitude for the genre, he played comic roles throughout his career (The Teahouse of the August Moon; Guys and Dolls; Bedtime Story; Candy), and two of his biggest roles in the 1990s, in The Freshman and Free Money, were comic. He could get along with anyone who had a sense of humor, and his own taste in comedy tended toward the arcane.68 Among his favorite comedians was a Jewish standup performer named Willie Howard, whose routines Brando saw when he was a young actor in New York. Howard’s signature persona, Professor Pierre Ginsbairge, spoke with a French-inflected Yiddish accent. Brando liked to catch Howard’s shows between his own matinee and evening performances, finding this an ideal way to relax. He called Howard “the most ridiculous person I ever saw in my life . . . truly silly,” and remembered his own conspicuousness, roaring with laughter among mostly unmoved audiences. On occasion, Howard, noticing the devotee, would play directly to Brando, who never met the comic, afraid that would mar the magic of his humor.69
Howard’s specialty was double-talk, deliberately unintelligible speech combining actual and nonsensical words, a discourse that Brando perfected—to the dismay, in one instance, of Young Lions costar May Britt. Seated beside Brando at the cast dinner, the young Swedish actress, who considered her English adequate, couldn’t understand anything he said. He later confessed that he had been doing double-talk.70 That Britt recalls her embarrassment so fondly suggests his ability to draw people into his irrepressible humor. Brando’s sister Fran saw this as “one of his most endearing and exhilarating qualities. Part of it comes from his uncanny ability to observe and mimic. Besides being able to catch and portray people instantly, he is also able to see many hidden or unrecognized qualities in people. Through mimicry and exaggeration and wit and timing . . . he is able to reduce the mimicked and others to helpless laughter—it is irresistible. And he can make lots of fun of himself as well.”71 Brando was never more fun than when he was doing comedy, which David Niven confirmed just after filming closed on Bedtime Story (1964). “I miss you very much and absolutely loved working with you,” Niven wrote, proposing they appear together in Milos Forman’s upcoming King Rat.72
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