Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work
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23Interview with Edward R. Murrow, Person to Person, April 1, 1955.
24Ibid.
25This was confirmed by Martin Asinof, interviews with the author.
26Brando taped this August 1983 conversation with Michael Jackson, which took place in his Mulholland Drive home. Their main subject was developing Jackson’s acting skills.
27Lindsey Interviews.
28Brando interview with Michael Jackson, August 1983, Brando Estate Archives. Ellen Adler, interviews with the author, February 15, April 22, May 7, December 17, 2010.
29Brando described making the screwdriver to Robert Lindsey (Lindsey Interviews), even remembering the high school teacher’s name as Mr. Wilkensen. He kept the three letters he earned from Lathrop Junior High School in track and basketball, and they were sold at the 2005 Christie’s sale as Lot 327.
30Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, with an introduction by Conrad Aiken (New York: Modern Library, 1924), pp. 6, 8. The scansion appears periodically throughout the book, which is in a private collection.
31See Manso, Brando, pp. 9, 19, 40, 57, 59, 74–75; and Songs, pp. 52–53, for recollections of Brando’s reading growing up.
32Carmelita Pope, interview with the author, February 3, 2012.
33Manso, Brando, p. 74; and Songs, pp. 52–53.
34This letter to his sister Jocelyn and her husband was written sometime between 1940 and 1942.
35Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett (London: William Heinemann, 1951), p. v. Brando’s copy is in a private collection.
36Brando’s notes in a stenographer’s notebook, Brando Estate Archives.
37These letters written by Brando to his parents and Grandmother Bess from Shattuck are dated February 1942 (exact date not available), February 5 and April 2, 1942, respectively, Brando Estate Archives.
38The letter was signed by Harry Webster, Larry Branley, Joe Bill Hall, Dave Bronson, and Dave Claypool, a self-described “committee of five,” envelope dated May 24, 1943, Brando Estate Archives.
39Frances Brando Loving, “Brandos Put Life in the Old Block.”
40Manso, Brando, p. 27.
41The Ed Sullivan Show 1955 interview with Brando and George Englund’s account of Brando doing imitations for his mother are both included in Brando, TCM Documentary, 2007.
42Brando’s answer to the inspecting officer, the Shattuck play, and Wagner’s statement are recounted in Songs, pp. 58, 54, 59. Jocelyn Brando describes her parents’ reaction in her interview for Nebraskans in Film Project.
43Martin Asinof described a persisting competitiveness on Jocelyn’s part, interviews with the author.
CHAPTER TWO. MANHATTAN SCHOOLING
1Jocelyn Brando, Nebraskans in Film Project.
2Quoted by Ellen Adler, interviews with the author, February 15, April 22, May 7, and December 17, 2010.
3Ellen Adler recalled accompanying Brando on his searches, interviews with the author.
4Brando: Songs, pp. 97–98.
5Nina Green, interview with the author, November 30, 2011.
6Sam Shaw, Brando in the Camera Eye (New York: Exeter, 1979), p. 20.
7Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan were the first to use this term to describe Brando, but not the last. Williams is quoted in Elia Kazan, A Life (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 346. Kazan himself makes this assertion on p. 659.
8She “knew every song that was ever written,” he commented in his autobiography, and also admired classical music, especially powerful modernists like Stravinsky. See Songs, p. 9. Also see Brando’s collection of song and music books, KBL, Box 45.
9Jocelyn Brando was interviewed for the Adler Studio documentary Imagine Brando (Madoff Productions, 2008). Brando describes the experience in Lindsey Interviews and in Songs, pp. 22–23 and 66–67.
10Muni quoted in Jerome Lawrence, Actor: The Life and Times of Paul Muni (London: W. H. Allen, 1975), p. 293. For Brando’s response to Manhattan jazz clubs, see Lindsey Interviews and Songs, pp. 66–67.
11Baldwin was open in most of his writings about his father’s harsh treatment of him. See, in particular, his candidly autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Knopf, 1952). Brando never admitted publicly that his father beat him, but he confided it to friends such as Michael Jackson, in their taped conversation from August 1983.
12The marked pages, 42 and 89, are in Brando’s copy of The Fire Next Time, in KBL, Box 45. Account of meeting Baldwin and Mailer: Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 63. Memories of riding on the open-top buses with Brando and Baldwin to cool off during Manhattan summers in the 1940s, Ellen Adler, interviews with the author.
13Loving built two large kilns at the Brando family farm in Mundelein, Illinois, when he and Franny moved there in 1953. These allowed him to expand the scale of his work as well as his reputation. When he was hired in 1961 at the Chicago Art Institute, he taught enameling as well as drawing and painting. “Richard Loving,” The Enamel Arts Foundation, www.enamelarts.org.
14Wally Cox, My Life as a Small Boy (New York: Avon, 1961), p. 124.
15Wally Cox’s letters to Brando and Cox’s Donaldson Award certificate, Brando Estate Archives. Brando’s comments about Cox appear in the Lindsey Interviews and in Songs, pp. 95–96. Ellen Adler also spoke at length about the friendship in her interviews with the author.
16Songs, p. 78.
17New York Times, April 3, 1926.
18Stella Adler, Introduction to Jacob Adler, A Life on the Stage, translated from the Yiddish with commentary by Lulla Rosenfeld (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 2001, first excerpted in Die Varheit, Prologue April 16, 1916, and subsequent chapters, April 30, 1916–February 28, 1919, and Die Neie Varheit, April 1–July 30, 1926), pp. xiii–xiv. In Joseph Rumshinsky’s music for the play, Shylock’s movements were accompanied by, a “somber Hebraic cello line” that reinforced the Jew’s enclosure in a world of his own. See Lulla Adler Rosenfeld, The Yiddish Theatre and Jacob P. Adler (New York: Shapolsky Books, 1988), p. 305.
19Quoted by Tom Oppenheim, Lecture on Jacob Adler (available on the Adler Studio website), delivered February 22, 2009, at “Jews/Theatre/Performance in an Intercultural World,” a conference at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan. In the same lecture, Oppenheim quotes Stella Adler’s characterization of her “mission from my parents“ to “make it better for them. Otherwise, why are they here?” “Unless you give the audience something that makes them bigger—better—do not act. Do not go into theater. Unless you can create something bigger—better . . . there is no use climbing around chattering on a stage.” www.stellaadler.com/cultural-center/jacob-adler-center.
20Tom Oppenheim, director of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, describes this in detail, interview with the author, May 7, 2010.
21Adler, Life on the Stage, p. 93.
22Ibid., p. 30.
23Ibid., p. 82. The parallels between Adler and Brando are almost uncannily abundant. They were subversive pranksters in childhood. They were extraordinarily competitive with other actors. They were exceedingly fortunate in their career breaks. They were “a cause of grief to every woman who loved [them]” and shared the distinction of making two different women, almost simultaneously, pregnant. They were inept in business. They were indifferent to materialism. Adler at home could easily be Brando: “He filled the house with dogs, cats, canaries, and plants, told humorous stories, and played tricks that made his children laugh. But he was not talkative, and kept many things to himself.” Indeed, the impressions of Harold Clurman, one of the few who knew them both, are strikingly complementary. Of Adler he noted, “Everything about him breathed a masculine fullness which commanded the admiration of both sexes. With this there dwelled within him a sensibility which one might (even today!) call ‘feminine.’” Clurman characterized Brando’s Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar as a “roughneck, gross, bluff, and brutal.” But he also observed that “none of the brutishness of his part is native to him,” and, given Br
ando’s “acute sensitivity,” he could easily have played Stanley’s female antagonist, Blanche Du Bois. All the points above about Adler can be found, in order, in The Yiddish Theatre and Jacob P. Adler, pp. 7, 85, 138, 250, 193, 249, 286, 321, xiv. The points about Brando are from Ellen Adler interviews; Clurman, All People Are Famous, p. 259; and The Collected Works of Harold Clurman, edited by Marjorie Loggia and Glenn Young (New York: Applause, 1994), p. 134. See Collected Works, p. 895, for Clurman quote on Adler’s “masculine fullness.”
24Adler interview in Helen Krich Chinoy, Reunion: A Self-Portrait of the Group Theatre (reprint of Educational Theatre Journal, vol. 28, no. 4, [December 1976]), p. 512.
25Harold Clurman makes this point in On Directing (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 145.
26Quotes in this paragraph are from, respectively, Elia Kazan, A Life (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 64, and Elia Kazan, Kazan on Directing (New York: Vintage, 2009), p. 198. Brando’s comment from a 1963 interview on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson is in Brando, TCM Documentary, 2007.
27See Wendy Smith, Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940 (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990).
28Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the 30’s (New York: Da Capo, 1983, reprint of 1945 edition), p. 28.
29Mel Gordon, Stanislavsky in America: An Actor’s Workbook (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. xii–xiii.
30Strasberg and Clurman quoted in Reunion, pp. 544–45.
31Tone quoted in Smith, Real Life Drama, p. 29.
32Lewis quoted in Reunion, p. 485. The final observation, about “witnessing a real accident,” is Lewis quoting the Theatre Guild character actress Helen Westley.
33Gordon, Stanislavsky in America, pp. 154–55; Smith, Real Life Drama, pp. 179–82; and Reunion, pp. 508–9, provide complementary accounts of the Strasberg–Adler disagreement.
34Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, edited by Barry Parks (New York: Vintage, 1999), pp. 87, 300, 303. While Brando owned a number of books on acting, he seemed much more interested, if annotations are any indication, in books on biofeedback and autogenic training, which offered similar advice in more scientifically nuanced terms.
35Stella Adler emphasizes her differences from Strasberg in Reunion, p. 508, and Ellen Adler makes the point about Brando’s vulnerability as a young student in her interviews with the author.
36Adler, The Art of Acting, p. 165.
37Songs, p. 81.
38Stella Adler, quoted in Paul D. Zimmerman, “The Godfather: Triumph for Brando,” Newsweek, March 13, 1972, p. 59.
39Adler, The Art of Acting, pp. 180, 52.
40After being told this by Brando, Paul Muni replied, “Ahhh, that’s a difficult part. I’ve never done it. Tell me—you got a Method neck?” Paul Muni Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Box 5.
41Brando had a copy of the 1941 one-volume Random House edition of The Basic Works of Aristotle, translated by Richard McKeon, which is marked throughout with light pencil lines, the annotating style he used in his youth. These quotations from the section on “Rhetoric” are, respectively, from Book II: Ch. 23, p. 1420, and Book III: Ch. 16, p. 1443. Brando’s copy of Aristotle is in KBL, Box 64. He also owned every book I have drawn on above in my account of the Yiddish Theatre and The Group Theatre, including: The Fervent Years; Real Life Drama; Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov; A Life on the Stage; The Yiddish Theatre and Jacob P. Adler, etc. KBL, Boxes 86 and 92.
42Quoted in Manso, Brando, p. 113.
43I have drawn on Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, New School: A History of the New School for Social Research (New York: The Free Press, 1986), for this and subsequent paragraphs. See pp. 37, 12, xii, and xiii for quotations.
44Quotes in last two paragraphs are from Lindsey Interviews and from Songs, pp. 72, 98.
45How much Yiddish Brando knew has been a point of controversy. Alan King was convinced of Brando’s fluency, as was Stanley Brooks. But Ellen Adler thinks his gift for imitation helped him to exaggerate his actual knowledge of the language. Ellen Adler interviews; Stanley Brooks, interview with the author, April 18, 2011; Alan King with Chris Chase, Name-Dropping: The Life and Lies of Alan King (New York: Scribner, 1996).
46Ellen Adler interviews.
47Ibid. See also Rosenfeld’s account of the Jacob and Sara Adler marriage in The Yiddish Theatre.
48Songs, pp. 92–93.
49Brando letter to parents and grandmother, fall 1943, quoted in Songs, p. 76.
50When Truckline Café closed after nine performances on Broadway, Clurman and Kazan took out one-page advertisements in the New York papers excoriating the reigning theater critics as a “group of men who are hired to report the events of our stage and who more and more are acquiring powers which, as a group, they are not qualified to exercise—either by their training or by their taste.” Quoted by Wolcott Gibbs in The New Yorker, “The Theatre,” March 9, 1946, p. 43.
51See Christie’s catalogue, The Personal Property of Marlon Brando: Thursday 30 June 2005, p. 191, for a photograph and details about the Donaldson Award. For quotations from Clurman, see On Directing, p. 117; for quotations from Brando, see Songs, p. 101.
52Anne Jackson described Brando’s performance in an interview she gave with her husband, Eli Wallach, for Brando, TCM Documentary, 2007.
53The theater and film critic Pauline Kael, for example, offered recollections of being in the audience at Truckline. See Karl Malden, When Do I Start? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 159, and Carlo Fiore, Bud: the Brando I Knew (New York: Delacorte Press, 1974), p. 52, for accounts of the reception and the preparations backstage.
54Brando’s comment on Candida is from the Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 103. The review is from Billboard, April 13, 1946, pp. 50–51.
55Candida, Act II, p. 2.
56See Fiore, Bud, pp. 63–65.
57Adler noted that they could make themselves shorter, taller, fatter, thinner. The Yiddish Theatre, p. 171. Stanislavski provided a window into such methods in his autobiography, with a series of photographs that revealed the distinct faces he crafted for various roles. The director Edward Dmytryk described Brando as “one of those actors, rare today, particularly in Hollywood, who uses makeup freely to help establish or enhance a character.” It’s a Hell of a Life But Not a Bad Living (New York: Times Books, 1978), p. 225.
58Brando letter to Mike Lobell, July 10, 1989, Brando Estate Archives.
59These photographs appear between pages 348 and 349 in Songs. Materials from The Island of Dr. Moreau include the memos and images Brando selected so carefully for Songs, in a private collection. He might have been familiar with Stanislavski’s autobiography, My Life in Art (Boston: Little Brown, 1924), translated by J. J. Robbins, which features a similar collection of photographs revealing Stanislavski’s makeup and dress for various roles.
60That is perhaps why Brando used them rarely (unless, as in Viva Zapata!, he was playing a historical character who had one). Aside from the full-bearded look Brando wore in Burn! (1969), and the trim mustache he adopted to support the patriarchal authority of Don Corleone (and his own sendup of the role in The Freshman, 1990), his only other facial hair was the walruslike mustache he assumed for the farce Free Money (1998).
61Songs, p. 108.
62Quote from Lawrence, Actor, p. 56; see p. 119 for Muni on shoe salesman. It was probably just a coincidence that Brando, according to his nephew Martin Asinof (interview with the author, June 5, 2013, with follow-ups July and August 2013), also claimed he would have made a very successful shoe salesman and enjoyed it.
63Lawrence, Actor, pp. 219, 247. Brando said something similar about playing Mark Antony. See chapter 3.
64Hecht quoted in David S. Wyman, “Ben Hecht’s ‘A Flag Is Born’: A Play That Changed History,” www.wymaninstitute.org/articles/2004, p. 4.
65Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), p. 517.
66I have drawn on Robe
rt Francis, “Ben Hecht’s ‘A Flag Is Born’: Propaganda Plus Top Drama,” Billboard, vol. 58, no. 37 (September 14, 1946), pp. 3, 45; Wyman, “Ben Hecht’s ‘A Flag Is Born’”; Edna Nahshon, “From Geopathology to Redemption: ‘A Flag Is Born’ on the Broadway Stage,” Kurt Weill Newsletter, vol. 20, no. 1 (2002), pp. 5–8; and Steven Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936–1946,” American Jewish History, 84.3 (1996), pp. 221–51, for factual details above.
67“A Flag Is Born,” quoted in Nahshon, “From Geopathology to Redemption,” p. 7. See A Child of the Century, pp. 550–87, for Hecht’s firsthand account of the Roosevelt administration’s persistent refusal to rescue European Jews. He concludes: “With all our mass meetings and stinging propaganda we had managed to rouse no protest against the Jewish Massacre from Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, or their official governments. The war for the rescue of humanity from German defilement ended ‘triumphantly’ with all the Jews of Europe exterminated and the great victors still indifferent to that amazing fact,” p. 587. These events were foremost in Hecht’s mind as he set out to write A Flag Is Born.
68See Wyman, “Ben Hecht’s ‘A Flag Is Born,’” p. 5, on play’s earnings.
69Brando owned hundreds of books on Jewish history and culture. They are difficult to isolate among his library holdings since books on Jewish subjects were distributed throughout the collection when it was sold by Christie’s to various buyers.
70Brando’s comments on Larry King Live during an extended interview in 1996 became notorious. King himself defended Brando’s devotion to Jews and Jewish causes and insisted the comments had been exaggerated. Brando remained enraged at King to the end of his life, believing that King had set him up to generate publicity for his show. In a letter to King, responding to an invitation to King’s birthday party, Brando charged, “That discussion . . . produced the reaction you clearly anticipated, you made me out to be Anti-Semitic.” Letter in Brando Estate Archives, not clear that it was ever sent.
71The meeting with Javits, Schary, and Wiesel on February 16, 1975, in New York City is cited in a detailed calendar from 1975, kept by Alice Marchak, Brando’s secretary from 1958 through the late 1980s, in the Brando Estate Archives.