72Brando’s extended remarks here are from his taped interviews with Robert Lindsey. Only a few of his observations appeared in Songs My Mother Taught Me as Brando stated them, and Lindsey understandably avoided potentially inflammatory subjects such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, genocide across the world, and comparative suffering. Songs, pp. 73–74. Chapter 15 of Songs focuses on A Flag Is Born.
73Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 107.
74Luther Adler and Paul Muni are quoted in Lawrence, Actor, pp. 292–93.
75“A Flag Is Born,” quoted in Nahshon, “From Geopathology to Redemption,” pp. 7–8; Francis, “Ben Hecht’s ‘A Flag Is Born,’” p. 45.
76Recounted by Ellen Adler, interviews with the author.
77Songs, p. 110.
78Kazan, A Life, pp. 341–42.
CHAPTER THREE. BUILDING THE REPERTOIRE
1Ellen Adler, interviews with the author, February 15, April 22, May 7, December 17, 2010.
2Songs, p. 143.
3Miller, introduction to the 2004 edition of A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New Directions), quoted in Kazan, Kazan on Directing (New York: Vintage, 2009), p. 65.
4Brando discusses such details with Robert Lindsey in interviews for his autobiography, and also with Michael Jackson in their taped conversation from August 1983.
5Kazan on Directing, pp. 166–67.
6Songs, p. 124.
7Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: Signet, 1951), with an Introduction by the author, “On a Streetcar Named Success,” p. 48. According to the OED, the term kibitz, as Williams uses it here, meaning “to look on and offer unwelcome advice, esp. at a card game,” came into wide usage around 1920.
8Streetcar Named Desire, scene 1, p. 13.
9Williams’s letter to Kazan, April 19, 1947, quoted by Kazan in Kazan on Directing, p. 62.
10Williams, April 19, 1947, quoted in Kazan, Kazan on Directing, p. 62.
11Even here, Brando invested his villain with a certain charm, and it’s likely that the characterization would have been complicated over time. He won an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor for the performance.
12In his interview with Edward R. Murrow, Person to Person, April 1, 1955, Brando noted that he considered it the responsibility of films to raise the level of audiences, as opposed to pandering to them.
13List of Books around Marlon’s Bed, Brando Estate Archives. He offered these observations about McCarthy, Murrow, and Stone in the Lindsey Interviews, Brando Estate Archives.
14George Seldes, ed., with a foreword by Henry Steele Commager, The Great Thoughts (New York: Ballantine, 1985). This heavily annotated book is in KBL, Box 95.
15Dodie Brando, interviewed in Omaha World-Herald, 1948. Brando’s mother may well have resisted her son’s bully because he recalled aspects of her husband.
16A Streetcar Named Desire, p. 29.
17Williams’s letter to his agent is quoted in Kazan, Kazan on Directing, p. 63.
18Kazan, A Life, pp. 350, 351.
19Barbara Johnson, quoting Jacques Lacan in “Apostrophe and Abortion,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 198.
20Quoted in “Cinema: A Tiger in the Reeds,” Time, October 11, 1954, p. 6. See also Philip C. Kolin “The First Critical Assessments of A Streetcar Named Desire: The Streetcar Tryouts and the Reviewers,” Journal of Drama Theory and Criticism (fall 1991), pp. 45–67.
21A Streetcar Named Desire, pp. 129–30.
22Memoirs/Tennessee Williams, introduction by John Waters (New York: New Directions, 2006), pp. 83, 131.
23Clurman, quoted in Kazan, Kazan on Directing, p. 67.
24Brando made this point about the actor’s “face” on film as his “stage” many times. He is quoted making this point to an actor he was directing in One-Eyed Jacks by Shaw, Brando in the Camera Eye, pp. 50–59; and by Tom Oppenheim, interview with the author, May 7, 2010. He also made the point in Lindsey Interviews and in his ten-day acting class, “Lying for a Living,” in 2001, both in the Brando Estate Archives.
25Patricia Bosworth, Brando (New York: Penguin Lives, 2001), pp. 212–13.
26See Songs, pp. 202, 204.
27Lindsey Interviews.
28See Songs, p. 85; Lindsey Interviews; and “Lying for a Living” Transcripts.
29The middleweight champion told the story on The Martha Raye Show. The show, during which he relates this anecdote about Brando, was covered in a newspaper piece, “Brando and the Rock.” Clipping in the Brando Estate Archives, n.d.
30Brando: Lindsey Interviews; Songs, pp. 170–71; Kazan, A Life, p. 659.
31Kazan, Kazan on Directing, p. 156.
32A Streetcar Named Desire, p. 44. In the theater version of Streetcar, Stanley got his boy. But the Hollywood censors insisted that Stanley be punished for his ravishment of Blanche, rendering the film infant’s gender ambiguous by having the baby wrapped in a white blanket, rather than a blue one, as in the play.
33Adler quoted in “Cinema: A Tiger in the Reeds,” Time, p. 6.
34Lot 323 in Christie’s catalogue for the New York estate sale of The Personal Property of Marlon Brando: Thursday 30 June 2005, p. 193.
35Brando: Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 143.
36Jay Kanter, interview with the author, April 21, 2011.
37Lindsey Interviews and Songs, pp. 152–54.
38Theodore Strauss, Life Archives. Notes for Article on Marlon Brando in The Men, 1950: see life.time.com/culture/marlon-brando-rare-early-photos-of-the-hollywood-legend-in-1949/.
39Strauss, Life Archives.
40Ibid.
41Lindsey Interviews and Songs, pp. 149–50.
42Brando describes this experience in his conversation with Michael Jackson, August 1983, and also in “Lying for a Living” Transcripts.
43Brando’s autobiography and personal files include numerous letters from fans as well as his responses to them. Brando’s script files, in private collections, invariably contain stacks of contemporary reviews. Hundreds of miscellaneous contemporary reviews and fan letters, also in Brando Estate Archives.
44“The New Pictures, July 24, 1950,” Time, pp. 1–2.
45“Once more I must caution Brando against mumbling,” Marjory Adams wrote in her otherwise positive review of the film, which she called “magnificent in scope, heart-tuggingly beautiful” (with the exception of Brando, whom she found inferior to Gable). “I made next to nothing out of his final words as he lay on the sandy beach after fighting through a disastrous fire on the Bounty.” Boston Globe, November 16, 1962, p. 20.
46Kazan’s letter to Zanuck is reproduced in Kazan, Kazan on Directing, pp. 170–71.
47Brando would note this years later in the margins of the script of The Brave (1997), a film about Indians he made with Johnny Depp.
48Quotations from Miguel Covarrubias, Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec (New York: Knopf, 1947), pp. 355, 68–69, 406–7.
49Brando’s copies of Covarrubias and Prescott’s 1,288-page history are in KBL, Box 97, and KBL, Box 54. Steinbeck’s bound volume of notes is in the Kazan Collection at Wesleyan University’s Cinema Archives. The quotations in these two paragraphs are from John Steinbeck, Zapata: A Newly Discovered Narrative by John Steinbeck, with His Screenplay of Viva Zapata!, edited by Robert E. Morsberger (New York: Penguin, 1975), pp. 46, 47, 20, 22.
50Rebecca Brando interview, March 2, 2012.
51Kazan, Kazan on Directing, p. 166.
52The line was used as a rallying cry for the Spanish Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Albert Camus was probably drawing on a different source when he quoted the line in L’Homme Révolté (1951; first English translation, The Rebel, published in 1954).
53Kazan, Kazan on Directing, p. 167.
54Kazan uses the apt word fussed to describe what Brando does with Quinn’s body. He recalls in Kazan on Directing that he gave no direction in that scene: “If you start giving directions to any actor like Brando in a scene like that you’
re very liable to hurt yourself,” p. 168. And Brando, in a letter to Coppola (in Brando Estate Archives), confirms what fellow actors observed, that he “directed himself” in The Godfather, 1980, pp. 1–2.
55Those who knew him corroborate Brando’s extraordinary memory for literature and language. Ellen Adler, Jay Kanter (April 21, 2011), Rebecca Brando (March 2, 2012), Avra Douglas (February 29–March 4, June 18 and 19, 2012, and June 23 and 24, 2013), Tom Oppenheim (May 7, 2010), and Patt Morrison (April 22, 2011) all recalled, in interviews with the author, Brando reciting from memory extended passages from Shakespeare, as well as Shakespeare’s sonnets and other poetry.
56Brando’s 152-book collection of Shakespeare and other literary classics, Lot 316 at the Christie’s sale, was expected to sell for $600 to $800. It sold for $21,600. See Christie’s, sale 1600, June 30, 2005, www.christies.com. These books are in a private collection.
57Brando’s annotated copy of The New Hudson Shakespeare edition of Julius Caesar (Agnes Knox Black, 1935) is in a private collection. These annotations are on pp. 91, 97, 104, 105, respectively.
58Lindsey Interviews; Songs, p. 174; and Time, “Cinema: New Picture, June 1, 1953,” p. 2.
59Bobby Seale’s interview is in Brando, TCM Documentary, 2007.
60Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 178.
61Lindsey Interviews.
62Brando’s copy of Sidney Hook’s Personal Power and Political Freedom: Critical Studies in Democracy, Communism, and Civil Rights (New York: Criterion, 1959), with these annotations, which appear on pp. 114, 109, and 110, respectively, in KBL, Box 64.
63For Kazan’s thinking during this period, see Kazan, A Life, pp. 448–66.
64Account of Kazan and HUAC in previous paragraphs, Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980), pp. 199–222; Kazan, Kazan on Directing, pp. xix, 94, 169, 181, 206, 221, 254, 296–98 and Kazan, A Life, pp. 420, 432, 440–71 and passim, 630, 818; Dmytryk, It’s A Hell of a Life But Not a Bad Living, pp. 93–103, 145, 146–47; Malden, When Do I Start?, pp. 217–18, 236–38; and Songs, pp. 193–97.
65According to Brando family lore, an attempt had been made to blacklist Brando just before the release of Julius Caesar. When studio heads at MGM were approached with the news that Brando was going to be added to the roster of “Communist”-leaning stars, and picketers were enlisted at theater sites across the country, the studio responded in the expected way by paying hush money to protect their box office. Martin Asinof, Jocelyn Brando’s son, referred to this in an interview with the author, June 5, 2013, with follow-ups July and August 2013.
66Lindsey Interviews. The correspondence between Brando and various agents discussing Jocelyn’s blacklisting and her brother’s successful efforts to secure work for her in the early 1960s, which also includes an exchange between Brando Jr. and Sr. and some notes by Jocelyn herself, is in the Jocelyn Brando File, Brando Estate Archives.
67Ellen Adler interviews.
68Letter to Richard Schickel, Brando Estate Archives.
69Quoted in Kazan, A Life, p. 508.
70“Don’t blame me when they pack you off to Abyssinia,” Father Vincent tells Father Barry after the raucous anti-Teamster meeting he runs in the church where a church window is shattered by a rock. See Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront: Original Story and Screenplay, Final Shooting Script (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), p. 42.
71Schulberg appeared on May 23, 1951. On the Waterfront, edited by Joanna Rapf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 4. For Kazan’s account of Sam Spiegel’s contributions, see Kazan, A Life, pp. 517–18. Kazan’s own annotated version of the script is in the Kazan Collection, Wesleyan University Cinema Archives.
72Schulberg, Final Shooting Script, p. 100.
73Ibid., p. 49, and Budd Schulberg, “The King Who Would Be Man,” Vanity Fair (March 2005), p. 10, on the force of Brando’s “wow.”
74Schulberg, Final Shooting Script, p. 104. Kazan, A Life, p. 517; p. 521 (on the crew’s great admiration for Brando’s “professionalism”); pp. 525–26 (on the “small miracles” “Marlon was always presenting me with”). There are, for instance, differing accounts of whether Eva Marie Saint’s dropped glove was an accident or was suggested to her by Brando. See Malden, When Do I Start?, pp. 245–46.
75King James Bible, Book of Isaiah, 61:10.
76Ellen Adler, interviews with the author.
77Brando mentioned Genet, Greco, and the Saint-Germain-des-Prés scene in his October 14, 1996, interview on the set of The Brave (1997), conducted in French and translated into English. Apparently it was never published, and is in a private collection.
78“It is essentially the same,” Brando noted of the situations of Malloy and Christian. Christie’s catalogue, The Personal Property of Marlon Brando: Thursday 30 June 2005, p. 153.
79George Englund reproduces Brando’s letter from the spring of 1957, in Japan during the filming of Sayonara. The Way It’s Never Been Done Before: My Friendship with Marlon Brando (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), pp. 83–84. For the summary of Camus’s ideas, see Colin Wilson, The Outsider: On the Alienation of Modern Man (New York: Putnam, 1982), p. 30. This is the rare book of literary criticism annotated by Brando. The markings, with some caricatures, run throughout Wilson’s discussion of Hemingway, Sartre, and Camus and include a section on “L’Homme Révolté,” which Brando might have read in French at some point. Brando’s photocopy of Wilson’s book is in KBL, Box 50.
80Lindsey Interviews; Songs, p. 199; Kazan, A Life, p. 528. For criticism on the film, see, in particular, Leo Braudy, On the Waterfront (London: British Film Institute, 2005); On the Waterfront, ed. Joanna Rapf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and David Bromwich, “Brando and On the Waterfront,” Threepenny Review, no. 65 (Spring 1996), pp. 19–21.
81Quoted by John Burlingame, “Leonard Bernstein and On the Waterfront,” in Rapf, On the Waterfront, p. 139.
82The Christie’s catalogue, The Personal Property of Marlon Brando: Thursday 30 June 2005, features photographs of these various awards, pp. 176–79.
83In the Brando Estate Archives is a file of 200 news items from various places where Brando, George Englund, and Stewart Stern toured while researching their film on American diplomacy and the United Nations programs.
84Brando letters in possession of Ellen Adler.
85Napoleonic Victories is in Brando’s Book Inventory, Brando Estate Archives. Women mention going on dates with Brando to the public library. In Songs, he describes reading in various Manhattan libraries. For borrowed books, never returned, see, for instance, Burke Davis, Gray Fox: Robert E. Lee and the Civil War, checked out of the American Library in Paris, March 31, 1973, KBL, Box 1; Sartre, On Genocide, checked out January 6, 1970, from LA Public Library, KBL, Box 82; Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, checked out January 6, 1951, from New York Public Library, KBL, Box 86.
86See Robert Matteson Johnston, Napoleon: A Short Biography (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1904), pp. vii, 5–6, 93, 126, and 143 for quotes and other details brought out in Brando’s performance.
87Gitta Parker, “A thousand talents, A thousand faces, A thousand moods . . . This is Brando,” n.d., clipping in Brando Estate Archives. The article was written during the filming of Désirée, summer 1954. Parker was a journalist who sometimes wrote for Collier’s Magazine.
88Laurence Olivier on The Dick Cavett Show, January 24, 1973.
89Quoted in “Cinema: A Tiger in the Reeds,” Time, pp. 6, 2.
90Kazan, A Life, p. 538.
91Brando discussed Dean in Lindsey Interviews and in Songs, pp. 220–22.
92AFI Catalog of Feature Films: http://www.afi.com/members/catalog/DetailView.aspx?s=&Movie=51518.
93The recording of this radio interview is in the Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California.
94Quoted in Bob Thomas, Brando (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 117.
95Williams liked Brando’s spontaneous improvisation in rehearsals on Broadway so much that it was added to subseq
uent editions of the play.
96Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 305.
97Felix Keesing, Native Peoples of the Pacific World (New York: Macmillan, 1945), p. 34, KBL, Box 6.
98Brando describes editing the Sayonara script in Songs, pp. 244–45, and the actual script, in a private collection, contains his revisions. Brando’s work on The Young Lions script was reported in Variety, September 26, 1957, and confirmed by his handwritten revisions on “First Draft” of The Young Lions script, April 25, 1957, in a private collection as well as in the film.
99In the 1990s, when he met the parents of his long-term Japanese lover and impressed them with his command of Japanese, his knowledge had grown considerably. Avra Douglas, interview with the author.
100See Manso, Brando, pp. 422–23, for an account of the episode.
101Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 244.
102Brando’s annotated script for Sayonara, private collection.
103January 9, 1958, letter reproduced in Christie’s catalogue, The Personal Property of Marlon Brando: Thursday 30 June 2005, p. 174.
104Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 347.
105Brando mentions this contractual right to change the script in Songs, p. 249.
106Brando,“First Draft,” Young Lions script, private collection.
107Brando’s annotations in his copy of Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946), pp. xii, ix, respectively, KBL, Box 57. Brando’s interests in these questions never abated. Another book he annotated a few years later was Gudrun Tempel, The Germans: An Indictment of My People (New York: Random House, 1963), KBL, Box 65.
108Lindsey Interviews.
109Brando’s comments in his copy of Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), p. 15, KBL, Box 6.
110Gardner Murphy, In the Minds of Men (New York: Basic Books, 1955), frontispiece, KBL, Box 64. Brando’s annotations run throughout.
111Press conference quoted in Tony Thomas, The Films of Marlon Brando (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1973), p. 113. Brando had a copy of David Schoenbrun’s 1957 book, As France Goes, in his library with the inscription, “To Marlon Brando, in grateful memory of a most intelligent interview, David Schoenbrun, Paris, July 15, 1957.” KBL, Box 27.
Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work Page 39