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

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  Brando’s passion for Jewish comedians like Howard, Jackie Mason, and Woody Allen made him receptive to Andrew Bergman’s script for The Freshman, which he read in the spring of 1988. Brando had enjoyed Bergman’s The In-Laws and was amused by this story of Carmine Sabatini, a mobster with a striking resemblance to Don Corleone, who hires an innocent film student to transport endangered species for an exclusive gourmand club. Full of twists and turns, the movie had an offbeat comic quality that appealed to Brando, who had no qualms about parodying his role in The Godfather. While some were offended by what they saw as the desecration of a cultural icon, Brando had never taken himself that seriously. He didn’t believe he was, nor did he like being treated as, larger than life. He was not above exploiting the adulation, however.

  What he valued was humor, and he would have agreed with Edward (BD Wong), the animal keeper in The Freshman, who asks, “Without humor, what do we have?” In prerelease publicity, Brando explained that “there is no substitute for laughter in this frightened and endlessly twisting world.”73 Anything, from Brando’s perspective, could be illuminated through the lens of comedy. His parody of Don Corleone was an expression of affection as well as possession: Only the originator could do justice to the original. While many had imitated the Don since his immortalization in 1972, Brando alone knew his vulnerabilities, and consequently his comedic potential. Uneducated, resentful of missed opportunities, domineering, impatient—all this was fair game for the characterization of Carmine Sabatini.

  An incident from June 1989, during the New York filming of The Freshman, revealed that comedy was no trivial pursuit. One night in Little Italy, Brando was introduced to John Gotti, the crime boss, who happened to be playing cards with “an extraordinary group of characters straight out of the Mafia yearbook.” The actor decided to outsmart Gotti with a card trick, using a shaved deck he often carried. “Suddenly the whole room” was “quiet as a tomb,” as Gotti’s companions pondered how to react to this possible “disrespect.” Politely and quickly, Brando left. Gotti called a few days later with an invitation to a fight, which Brando declined.74 Where there is humor, Brando recognized, there is risk. The best comedians followed their instincts fearlessly, aware that the greater the danger, the greater the payoff.

  From this perspective, The Freshman is a work that explores rather than takes comic risks, with scenarios like the animal-loving stepfather who shoots wildly at hunters; the German chef who sings “Deutschland über Alles” while preparing endangered species for wealthy gourmands; the narcissistic banalities of an NYU film professor. The main theme is a contrast between the imitation and the original, embodied by Carmine Sabatini, whose likeness to the Godfather is unmentionable because it annoys him. Sabatini is a childish thug, cracking nuts barehanded while awaiting an assent to a demand, bullying a broker reporting low stock returns. Like the Mona Lisa hanging in Sabatini’s living room, which his daughter claims is the original, Sabatini’s authenticity is supposed to be equivalent, even superior, to what everyone takes as genuine. Both Sabatini and Corleone are Hollywood fictions, the film insists; if you liked one, you’ll like the other. Despite the gimmickry, filmgoers largely complied.

  While some remember The Freshman for the image of a portly, aged Brando on ice skates, the telling scene features Sabatini and the freshman Clark Kellogg (Matthew Broderick) in his dorm room. With its attention to parents lost and found, a poetry recitation, and allusions to Curious George, the scene was determined to be sincere, and there were many ways it could have gone wrong. But Brando kept things light, avoiding sentimentality. He draws attention to their roles, asking Clark with a chuckle whether he wants a bedtime story as he settles into an armchair, invoking a paternal familiarity that remains credible even when the plot’s resolution reveals that he has been acting all along. Recordings exist of Brando playing a father for real. An extended 1964 script commentary on The Chase (his dictation later typed into transcripts by assistants) is interrupted by Brando impersonating Higgledy-Piggledy for his six-year-old son Christian. “Again, Daddy, again!” the boy commands, as the actor improvises solely for his pleasure.75 Like all children, and probably Brando’s in particular, Christian dreads the ending, which means bedtime and his father’s withdrawal—just for the night or maybe for days or months. Still, while the dramatic invention lasts, the child has what he wants, and he at least could care less about the quality of the acting.

  Exposing the make-believe dampens neither desire nor the necessity for good acting. It is appropriate that the film’s subject is an eating association, for The Freshman is also about the appetite for cultural icons, which takes in the Don, Mona Lisa, and Curious George: figures so compelling that people can never get enough of them. Brando appeases these appetites by keeping the copy close to the original and providing pointed echoes. For example, Sabatini’s repetition of his favorite image from the poem Clark recites, the reference to the white cat (“the certainty of his fur”), parallels Vito Corleone, repeating Michael Corleone’s pride in the little son who “reads the funny papers.” The symbolic white Persian also registers personal history: Brando, according to friends (and photographs), seemed always to have a white cat among his pets.76 This moment at the dorm, like others from Brando’s late films, refers to his movie and his personal-but-public past. (The camera panning the office effects of his psychiatrist in Don Juan DeMarco passes a framed photograph of Brando and his father from their joint appearance on Person to Person, with Edward R. Murrow, the only kind of familial scene the actor was willing to share—one that was already accessible.)

  At home, 1955. Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images.

  On May 16, 1990, Brando’s personal life became scandalously exposed. Christian Brando fatally shot Dag Drollet, the boyfriend of his half-sister Cheyenne in his father’s Mulholland Drive home. Drollet and Cheyenne had been together for three years, and though the relationship was now precarious, she was seven months pregnant with his child. Brando did everything possible to help Christian, hiring top Los Angeles lawyers William Kunstler and Robert Shapiro and trying to placate a media to whom he had now become easy prey. Brando aged dramatically and vacillated between obsessive consultations with the defense team and withdrawal into his misery. Chief among his worries was shielding twenty-year-old Cheyenne, whose mental health had been a growing concern. In August 1989, during filming of The Freshman, Cheyenne had been in a single-car accident in Tahiti, and Brando had flown back to Los Angeles to oversee her surgery for a fractured skull and facial injuries. After the shooting, she was spirited off to Tahiti, and then to Europe, to avoid subpoenas to testify in California and, later, Tahiti. Reports on Cheyenne’s psychological problems were inconclusive, but it was clear that drug use catalyzed or exacerbated her fragile mental health.

  Marlon Sr. and Marlon Jr., 1955, Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person show. © Bettmann/Corbis.

  Brando never entirely recovered from the trauma of the killing and his son’s trial and prison sentence for voluntary manslaughter. His feelings of guilt were palpable during (televised) trial testimony, where he confessed that his own unconventional and erratic lifestyle had led, however inadvertently, to this sordid violence. He tried to ensure some protection for Christian in jail by consulting old friends from the Black Panthers.77 But he could not help his precious daughter, who committed suicide by hanging at the age of twenty-five, in Tahiti.

  Brando with Christian during trial, 1990. AP.

  Brando did not attend the funeral. A wrongful-death suit filed against Christian and Brando by the family of Dag Drollet was one reason, but it probably also was because he couldn’t bear it. He never returned to Tetiaroa. His handwriting became shaky and his taste in poetry bleaker. He had always read poetry for consolation. In his Pocket Book of Verse, he underscored stanzas from Thomas Hood’s famous “The Bridge of Sighs,” about a young woman’s suicide, and from Philip Larkin’s “Ambulances,” about the miseries that stop at every door.

  In the afterm
ath of these events, Brando was often depressed, sometimes irascible. When a film set, like that of Columbus, was already troubled, the role suffered. He never took his unhappiness out on subordinates, but directors and producers had long been fair game, and they were especially so during this period. As an actor, he had controlled his private furies, drawing on them for characterizations; Columbus was one of the few times where they were reflected in a flat, lifeless performance.

  THE TORTURER AND THE HEALER: COLUMBUS AND DON JUAN DeMARCO

  Brando’s experience on Christopher Columbus: The Discovery was one of the most negative of his late career; he battled with the father-son producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind over the film’s content, he disappointed his friends in the Indian community for taking part in it, and his contribution to the film was an embarrassment. What made the whole fiasco even more painful was that the film’s subject, the first encounter with the Indians of the Americas, was one about which he cared deeply. Perhaps most important, Brando had already worked with the Salkinds on Superman and should have known how unlikely they were to make a film on this subject that was anywhere close to what he had in mind. But Brando needed money to pay bills from Christian’s trial, and his multimillion-dollar salary left him in no position to complain about producers seeking to capitalize on the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World. Yet Brando hoped that intellectual honesty could be reconciled with commercial success. He also hoped that the clause in his contract stipulating that the film honor the historical facts would ensure him significant influence, especially given his wealth of knowledge about the Indians. Moreover, he was enthusiastic about playing Tomas de Torquemada. The role of the sadistic fifteenth-century priest and confessor to Queen Isabella of Spain and architect of the Spanish Inquisition was made for Brando, who appreciated the complex possibilities of this learned hypocrite. Like Hitler, Torquemada was rumored to have had Jewish ancestry, which may have fueled his bigotry and fanaticism. Distressed by the stature and influence of Spain’s Jews, in 1478 he managed to institutionalize his paranoia in the Holy Office for the Propagation of the Christian Faith. Under his auspices as Grand Inquisitor of Spain, appointed by Pope Sixtus IV, Torquemada effected the expulsion of more than forty thousand Spanish Jews and the death by torture of an additional two thousand.

  Brando was able through script revisions to document the cruelty of Torquemada, but he had little success countering the film’s suppression of Columbus’s violence against the natives. “Instead of a day for celebration, Columbus Day ought to be one of mourning. I wanted to tell the truth about how he and his minions exploited and killed the Indians who greeted them,” Brando said, describing how he managed to convince Ilya Salkind of the significance as well as potential profitability of a truthful portrait of Columbus. When Salkind’s father, Alexander, arrived on the set, however, Brando’s script was tabled. At that point, Brando could have walked out, had he been willing to forgo his salary. Instead, the disconsolate actor responded with “an embarrassingly bad performance,” the only time in his career where he was deliberately ineffective in a role.78 “No one can sue you for a bad performance,” he said when it was over.79 Brando’s sabotage was about loyalty—to friends as well as to historical truth. Personal relationships, some of them longstanding, were at stake. But anger and depression probably also played a part.

  A January 3, 1992, letter to Brando from Jumping Bull of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, written on behalf of American Indian Movement members, begins with the Indian version of Columbus: “For us, Columbus was the first man to commit genocide against the American Indians who welcomed him so warmly and who helped him find his gold. . . . They were forced to give up their religion or die. They all died anyway.” Word has it, the letter continues, that the Salkind film portrays Columbus as a hero. Citing Brando’s record of support—questioning by the FBI; arrests; taking fire from the National Guard in Menominee, Wisconsin; smoking the sacred pipe and sweating away sins—the group wonders how Brando, “our brother always,” could have been reconciled to this travesty.80 The truth was, he hadn’t been. In the end, the movie failed in every possible way. One reviewer noted that, “to glimpse our greatest actor in this mega-claptrap is a cruelty far worse than anything Torquemada could devise.”81 Christopher Columbus: The Discovery was a rare film in which Brando brought his personal travails to the set, where they combined with genuine professional difficulties.

  More commonly, even in the 1990s, no matter how reluctant Brando might have been to go to work, once he got there, acting distracted him from his private troubles, providing relief, even pleasure. This was true of the first film he made with Johnny Depp, who became a good friend. Depp’s idealism, their similar senses of humor, their shared love of boxing, and the young actor’s promise solidified the bond.

  Filming for Don Juan DeMarco (1995) began in July 1994. Still uncertain about working on it even as late as January, Brando had sought the opinion of filmmaker Joseph Brutsman, who would later work with him on Free Money. Brutsman’s predictions proved accurate: that Depp’s character, a misunderstood eccentric typical of Depp’s dramatic risk-taking, would ensure young fans; that Brando as a psychiatrist whose dimming sexuality is awakened by a depressed youth convinced he is Don Juan would draw mature audiences; that the script, with Depp and Brando in the leads, would yield an appealing film.82 Women devastated by Brando over the years might have enjoyed watching the aged overweight actor in a toupee taking instruction from a young Don Juan—if they recognized him. Brando plays normalcy so naturally here that he nearly disappears.

  After all the years of therapy, Brando seemed to relish modeling his good psychiatrist Mickler on the empathetic G. L. Harrington. The role also allowed him to highlight methods that he had found personally beneficial. One of them, evident in his work with Quincy Jones on Jericho, was learning other languages and talking to people in their own. Dr. Mickler rescues Don Juan from suicide in the first scene by embracing his fantasy. Another was a resistance to psychotropic drugs; an exploratory talking cure, Mickler suggests, works best. But when he tells his wife, “No fire, no heat no heat, no life . . . this is a twelve rounder and this is the third round, and you and I are going to go out of here like Halley’s comet,” he seemed to be speaking for Brando. A few years earlier, at the age of sixty-five, he had written to a producer of The Freshman about medical complications from an infected urethra, noting that it was “a blessing” he had ignored the plans of doctors in New York “which would have importantly altered my sexual life.”83 Brando’s concerns were sincere: Brando had just fathered a daughter, Ninna, with his housekeeper, Christina Ruiz, with whom he had two more children, in 1992 and 1994. Like his character, he was determined to live out his days to the fullest.

  The film reunited Brando with Francis Ford Coppola as producer and drew on Lord Byron’s original Don Juan. Critics were willing to overlook the clichés.84 This was a romance, billed as an ideal “date-movie for couples of all ages.” The Mickler marriage was solid, just needing cultivation like the garden Marilyn Mickler (Faye Dunaway) tends so carefully. In script revisions, Brando tried to make Mickler more distinctive, but nothing could alter his suburban professionalism.85 Looking through window blinds upon the Don Juan–influenced transformations of the hospital staff staged daily on the lawn below, Mickler’s eyes are remarkable for their blandness, especially when compared with the monstrous chill cast by Don Corleone as he peeks through a different set of blinds. It might have been tempting to equate Brando at this tragic time with the film’s characters: the patient who manages to substitute his imagined world for reality and the physician who gradually accepts the substitution, joining his patient on the “Island of Eros.” But Brando was too much the realist to mistake celluloid fables, or the celebrity myths they supported, for reality. This may be why he chose to play unqualified villains for his last three films, sometimes probing the characters deeply enough to expose painful aspects of his own life.r />
  VILLAINS REDUX

  The last three characters in Brando’s late rogues’ gallery included an intellectual monomaniac killed by his own creations, Dr. Moreau (The Island of Dr. Moreau, 1996); a sadistic, Bible-quoting prison warden, the Swede (Free Money, 1998); and a self-pitying, desperate gangster, Max (The Score, 2001). Brando found a bit of himself in each of them, as he always did, but he also invested them with current worries, which was rare. While there were sparks of invention in all these performances, they also revealed his exhaustion, and at times he used battles with directors, or the acting process itself, to express contempt toward Hollywood and toward himself for his lifelong participation in its fictions. Brando’s performances in these films intensified rather than relieved their grimness. All three were profitable, but Dr. Moreau and Free Money were critical flops, while The Score was a qualified success.

  What made the hubristic scientist Dr. Moreau intriguing was the overlap between his interests and Brando’s own: the nature of evil; human modification through genetic experimentation; the bonds between humans and animals.86 A visionary seeking to derail a century of progress, Moreau has retreated to an island where he pursues methods of crossbreeding he hopes will produce a nobler, more altruistic species. The inevitable result, according to the script adapted by Richard Stanley, Michael Herr, and Walon Green from H. G. Wells’s classic fantasy, is the creator’s death at the hands of his monstrous offspring. Brando held long talks on the film’s development with producers and directors, and also improvised freely during filming. A source of his disgruntlement on Dr. Moreau was that the film’s producers fired Richard Stanley, the original director, who was also the screenwriter before filming began, replacing him with John Frankenheimer. Brando had already spent hours with Stanley discussing the film’s themes and script, ground that he had to cover again with Frankenheimer.87 In keeping with his usual methods, Brando reconceptualized, rewrote, and also improvised much of his scripted part, changes that both directors welcomed. This time, his revisions enabled reflection on historical missteps, including his own. In discussing the film with Frankenheimer and others, he noted that the previous year had been the most difficult of his life. Though he didn’t mention details, everyone knew that Brando’s daughter Cheyenne had committed suicide in Tahiti five months before he was due on location in Australia for Dr. Moreau. The film’s account of atom bombs, causing mutations in surviving human populations and untold damage to surrounding ecosystems, paralleled Brando’s worry over French nuclear testing near his island of Tetiaroa. Moreau is a self-conceived savior, collecting the forlorn mutants “scattered across the Pacific,” their deformations caused by the “French . . . exploding their bombs.” He explains, “God exists in the very center of the atom past the quark, beyond the nutrinos . . . men are animals and I want to make better ones.”88