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

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  14Brando, audio commentary on The Ugly American, Brando Estate Archives.

  15Brando’s heavily annotated script from The Ugly American—some of it in Brando’s hand, some in the hand of an assistant who trusted Brando for spelling (hence the errors)—in a private collection. Stewart Stern, interviews with the author, July 21, July 26, and September 20, 2013.

  16Brando, audio commentary on The Ugly American, Brando Estate Archives.

  17Brando’s Fletcher Christian (Mutiny on the Bounty) and Dr. Moreau (The Island of Dr. Moreau) wear glasses briefly; Adam Steiffel of The Formula wears them; and Ian MacKenzie, the lawyer in A Dry White Season, keeps a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose, but the glasses become a centerpiece of characterization only in The Ugly American.

  18Brando archive materials include correspondence between MB Sr. and MB Jr. regarding Jocelyn Brando’s blacklisting, letters to producers, and contracts with agents and producers, all engineered by Brando and his agent, Jay Kanter, under Brando’s direction. Brando’s Papers, Jocelyn Brando File, include: letter from MB Sr. to MB Jr., December 30, 1963; letter to MB from Jocelyn’s agent Ronald Leif, December 6, 1963; Jocelyn’s 3-Year Contract with Revue Studios “commencing January 1, 1961”; letter to Jocelyn from Ronald Leif, January 16, 1961; a contract between Jocelyn and Revue Studios, October 21, 1960; and MCA Artist’s “Notice,” October 21, 1960; as well as pages of handwritten notes on Jocelyn’s experiences of blacklisting.

  19Marlon Sr. letter to Marlon Jr., November 8, 1963, reports at the end that Jocelyn “is really operating under full steam at the book bin and enjoying it ‘hugely.’”

  20As evidenced here, too, by Brando’s exhaustive notes and script revisions.

  21This event and Brando’s work in civil rights and other political activism is discussed at length in chapter 8.

  22Brando’s copy of Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), was thoroughly annotated. On his copy of Fey and McNickle’s Indians and Other Americans, he writes on the back cover: “Phillipines and other countries got war reparations, why not Indian?” For more on Brando’s reading on the Indians, starting in the late 1950s, see chapter 8.

  23Most of Brando’s copies are annotated, KBL, Boxes 34, 52, 82. William O. Douglas, America Challenged (New York: Avon), pp. 24, 31, KBL, Box 29.

  24Brando’s admission that he froze at the sight of Douglas, so that he could barely converse, signaled his esteem for the justice. He mentions this in Lindsey Interviews, and in Songs, p. 379.

  25“Marlon Brando Fights for Civil Rights,” Ebony, October 1963, pp. 60–67.

  26All quotations are from typed and handwritten notes on the film, variously entitled “The Chase, Notes,” and “The Chase, Random Notes on the Script,” February 9, 1965, some untitled without dates. They are also from notes written onto the scripts themselves, including the original script by Lillian Hellman, November 6, 1964; “The Final Shooting Script,” March 30, 1965; and revised scripts May 14 and 20, 1965, in private collections.

  27Arthur Penn Interviews, edited by Michael Chaiken and Paul Cronin (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), p. 164. This interview took place in 1982. According to Angie Dickinson, who played Ruby Calder, the wife of Sheriff Calder, Brando encouraged his fellow actors to improvise with him. “I’m not the only one who’s allowed to improvise, you are too,” he told her. Angie Dickinson, interview with the author, September 25, 2013.

  28Robin Wood, Arthur Penn (New York: Frederick Praeger, 1969), pp. 6–7.

  29“Between us, it’s not really my film,” Penn told an interviewer in October 1965 about The Chase. Arthur Penn Interviews, p. 11.

  30Film historian Robin Wood offers a key articulation of this claim in Arthur Penn, p. 12 and passim. The claim is repeated in Arthur Penn Interviews, pp. xi–xii.

  31Arthur Penn Interviews, p. 198. This interview was not published until 2008. See also the Arthur Penn Interview in Brando, TCM Documentary, 2007, in which the director again credits Brando with this innovation.

  32Wood, Arthur Penn, p. 70.

  33Shooting Schedule and Temporary Index Breakdown for The Chase, in a private collection.

  34While Hellman distanced herself from the film to some extent when it appeared, Brando’s film notes and script annotations suggest her engagement with some of the revision process. He often addressed his commentary to Hellman in these notes and script marginalia.

  35Reflections in a Golden Eye, script, revised September 21, 1966, pp. 135–36.

  36Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, ed. Barry Parks, p. 201.

  37Brando on the Today Show, April 19, 1963. Brando was drawing on a recent short piece, “No Time Like the Present (excerpts from Time),” in Esquire, vol. 59 (April 1963), pp. 58–59, that had treated Time’s portrayal of Williams, providing excerpts of reviews Time had done of Williams’s plays over the years. The short piece had been published anonymously.

  38The Motion Picture Association of America, letter of September 15, 1964, and Ray Stark’s letter to Elizabeth Taylor, August 1966, Reflections in a Golden Eye Folder, Herrick Library, Beverly Hills. Angie Dickinson confirmed that Brando’s star remained high in the 1960s. She recalls that her agent tracked her down in London to tell her about the prospective part in The Chase. She asked him whether the script was good, and her agent shrieked: “Angie, it’s Marlon Brando’s wife! Take the part!” Angie Dickinson, interview with the author, September 25, 2013.

  39Brando Estate Archives.

  40Tennessee Williams’s “Afterword,” 1971, is reproduced in the 2000 Houghton Mifflin edition of Reflections in a Golden Eye, p. 134. Williams made the comment about Brando as “the greatest living actor . . . greater than Olivier” in Memoirs, 1975. See Memoirs/Tennessee Williams, p. 83.

  41Martin Scorsese mentions his debt to Brando’s talking mirror scene in Reflections, for the scene in Taxi Driver, in Brando, TCM Documentary, 2007.

  42John Huston materials on Reflections in a Golden Eye, Herrick Library.

  43Chicago Sun-Times, October 17, 1967; New York Post, October 12, 1967; Los Angeles Examiner, October 12, 1967.

  44Stark’s letter in Reflections in a Golden Eye Folder, Herrick Library.

  45Bobby Seale describes an all-night vigil with Brando in an interview for Brando, TCM Documentary, 2007.

  46Roger Ebert traveled to Cartagena to interview Pontecorvo in April 1969, just before the filming there ended, and met a hot and forlorn director with an ill son and star (Brando was away being treated for some sort of skin rash), and numerous problems. See “We Trust the Face of Brando,” New York Times, April 13, 1969.

  47Pauline Kael, “Mythmaking,” The New Yorker, November 7, 1970, p. 159.

  48See Vincent Canby’s admiring review, “The Screen: Marlon Brando and Black Revolution,” New York Times, October 22, 1970, for the Fletcher Christian comparison.

  49Pontecorvo’s crew thought Brando overlooked these cast members’ preferences for a simpler cuisine. Songs, pp. 325–26; author interview with Salvo Basile, cameraman for Burn!

  50Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 324.

  51Pontecorvo describes this decision and Brando’s approval of it, as well as the inspired response to Brando’s clipped performance: “He did the scene in a marvelous way. When he finished the scene, the whole crew applauded,” quoted in Joan Mellen, “A Reassessment of Pontecorvo’s Burn!” Cinema 32 (winter 1972–1973), pp. 38–46.

  52Ibid.

  53Kael, “Mythmaking,” p. 159.

  54Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 320.

  55As Pontecorvo put it, “I make one film every eight or nine years. . . . If you had the list of films I’ve refused, ‘The Mission,’ ‘Bethune,’ etc., you’d have a telephone book,” Gerald Peary, “Film Reviews, Interviews, and Sundry Miscellany,” geraldpeary.com, “Talking with Gillo Pontecorvo,” at the Berlin Film Festival, 1991.

  56Peary, “Talking with Gillo Pontecorvo.�
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  57Songs, p. 467.

  CHAPTER SIX. ANNUS MIRABILIS, 1972

  1Through his sixties and seventies, when Brando fathered three children with Christina Ruiz (in 1989, 1992, 1994), he pursued women with incomparable energy, as confirmed by letters from his many conquests in Brando Estate Archives. This is also confirmed by his assistants.

  2Grobel Interviews, Brando Estate Archives.

  3Michael Winner’s director’s commentary in the DVD of The Nightcomers provides details about Brando’s behavior on the set. The commentary includes descriptions of his extensive knowledge of ropes and knots, which is evident as well in the Burn! scene where he ties the noose for José Dolores’s execution. The Ashley Book of Knots and Des Pawson’s Handbook of Knots (1998) are in the KBL.

  4See Christie’s catalogue, The Personal Property of Marlon Brando: Thursday 30 June 2005, p. 119, for page from The Nightcomers script, with Brando’s handwritten revisions. See the film for changes from script to performance.

  5Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 5, 1972.

  6Fax to Mr. Michael Hastings, United Kingdom, from Marlon Brando, Los Angeles, California, June 18, 1998, Brando Estate Archives.

  7Director’s commentary in DVD of The Nightcomers.

  8The Portable Blake (New York: Viking, 1946), p. 655. Brando’s copy of the book is in a private collection.

  9Last Tango in Paris: The Screenplay, p. 163.

  10“I didn’t ask him to become anything but himself,” Bertolucci told Time. “It wasn’t like doing a film. It was a kind of psychoanalytic adventure,” February 12, 1973. Brando rewarded the director’s comments with a cold shoulder.

  11As Brando told Shana Alexander in an interview he gave for Life after the making of The Godfather, “The biggest gap is not expressing what you feel but knowing what you feel. Most people don’t know.” “The grandfather of all cool actors becomes the Godfather,” Life, March 10, 1972.

  12Picard, The Human Face, pp. 131, 100–101. Brando seems to have borrowed the book permanently from his friend Anita Kong Wylie. Brando’s copy (KBL, Box 78) had two marked passages: those above on the cinema face and the smiling face reflecting the divine. See Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 146.

  13E. Ann Kaplan’s, “Importance and Ultimate Failure of Last Tango in Paris,” Jump Cut, no. 4 (1974), pp. 1, 9–10, rehearses the usual platitudes, including: “One often feels that Brando is not really acting, but that he is rather expressing a real hostility toward society. . . . The result, however, of Brando’s using the film in this way is that he absolutely dominates the film and thus sends the whole thing off balance.” Kaplan’s claim that Paul in the first scene “virtually rapes” Jeanne is exemplary.

  14Brando mentions this in Grobel, Conversations with Brando, p. 89. He also had many books of anthropology and psychology, far too numerous to mention (Karen Horney’s Feminine Psychology, for instance; Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation; Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperament), on sexual customs in different cultures, and on masculine and feminine psychology, that covered such issues.

  15“I possess nothing,” he says, though he “has seen everything, in a way.” “Nature favored me as to my physique,” Clamence exults. “I was made to have a body.” “One can’t get along without domineering or being served. . . . I wanted to dominate in all things.” These quotations are from Brando’s copy of Albert Camus, The Fall, translated by Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1957), pp. 8–10, 44, 54, 17, 28, respectively. Brando marked all of these passages, in a private collection.

  16Quotes are from The Fall, pp. 60, 62. For more on acting, see pp. 60–62; and women as a refuge, guilt, see pp. 98, 108–9.

  17Sunday Morning Address: The Last Tango to Nowhere, Kenneth J. Smith, Philadelphia Ethical Society, September 16, 1973. This review was in Brando’s materials on Last Tango, in a private collection. For more on Brando’s interest in the ministry, see chapter 8.

  18Brando followed this press, carefully, out of curiosity and also wariness, keeping, apparently, most articles written about him from the early days on Broadway through his old age, Brando Estate Archives.

  19Capote and Brando continued to do battle until the end. Capote paid winking tribute in his famous novel In Cold Blood by putting Brando’s 1955 acceptance speech for his Academy Award for On the Waterfront in the mouth of Perry Smith, one of the murderers, who plans to use it if ever “called upon to make a speech.” In Cold Blood (New York: Vintage, 1965), p. 146. Brando consigned Capote to hell in the parodic post-life celebrity interviews he wrote (and never published) for his Random House autobiography, Brando Estate Archives.

  20These acting lessons are discussed at greater length in the Epilogue.

  21Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, October 14, 1972; Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, October 28, 1972; Vincent Canby, New York Times, February 2, 1973.

  22Mario Puzo’s letter is reproduced in Christie’s catalogue, The Personal Property of Marlon Brando: Thursday 30 June 2005, p. 123.

  23Brando discusses this in Lindsey Interviews; in “Lying for a Living” Transcripts; and in Songs, p. 411.

  24These quotations are from Brando’s personal script of The Godfather, in a private collection. These quotations appear on the back of the last page of the bound script. Coppola and Ruddy’s visit is recounted by Brando in Lindsey Interviews and in Songs, p. 407. Ruddy is quoted in Thomas, The Films of Marlon Brando, pp. 229–30, and also in a feature of the 2001 DVD version of The Godfather, “A Look Inside.”

  25Rebecca Brando, interview with the author, March 2, 2012; Miko Brando, interviews with the author, September 21 and 23, 2012, and June 16, 2013.

  26Puzo lamented the failure to appreciate “the irony in my books,” as quoted in Mario Puzo, The Godfather: The Original Classic (New York: NAL, 2002, first published 1969), p. 431.

  27Coppola recalls producer Robert Evans’s complaint in the director’s commentary for The Godfather DVD.

  28Shana Alexander, “Brando Plays a Mafia Chieftain,” Life, March 10, 1972 (cover story).

  29Pauline Kael, “Alchemy,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1972, p. 138.

  30These quotations are from Brando’s annotated personal script of The Godfather, in a private collection, and from an additional copy of Brando’s annotated personal script, in another private collection. The complete personal script is dated March 16, 1971; the loose script pages, dated May 3, 6, and 7, 1971, represent revisions of the complete personal script.

  31These quotations are from Brando’s loose script pages. The quotations appear, respectively, on p. 1; p. 7, Scene 1C; p. 4, Scene 1A.

  32Brando’s Godfather script, p. 30, in a private collection.

  33Brando’s loose script pages, Scene 1A, p. 3, in a private collection.

  34James Caan on Brando, TCM Documentary, 2007.

  35Brando’s loose script pages, Scene 1A, p. 4.

  36Puzo, The Godfather (novel), p. 12.

  37Brando’s loose script pages, Scene 55D.

  38This includes the following: “What manner of men are we, if we do not have our reason? To what purpose would I start all these troubles again, the violence and the turmoil? My son is dead, and that is a misfortune and I must bear it. . . . We are all men who have refused to be puppets dancing on a string pulled by the men on high. . . . We have to be cunning like the business people, there’s more money in it. . . . Who is to say we should obey the laws they make for their own interest and to our hurt?” Brando’s personal script for The Godfather, pp. 115–16, in a private collection.

  39Brando’s Godfather script, in a private collection. They appear, respectively, on pp. 112–13 and 115–16.

  40The Godfather was filmed in the spring and early summer of 1971, shooting schedule, in a private collection.

  41Brando respected Pacino’s acting abilities and encouraged Coppola to hire him for the role of Michael.

  42Brando as Napoleon appeared briefly at a New Year’s celebration in Désirée (19
54) carrying his heir, whom he hands off distastefully, describing the infant as “damp.” He also acted with a pair of youth in The Nightcomers (1972), but the girl was nineteen and the boy around fourteen when the film was made. And he played, after The Godfather, the father of Superman, holding another infant son, again briefly (1979).

  43Director’s commentary, Godfather DVD.

  44Michael Corleone refers to his son as “three years old” in the previous scene; the cast list gives Anthony Gounaris’s age as four. Notes by Brando’s secretary, Alice Marchak, from The Godfather production confirm the time Brando spent “with child playing and getting to know him,” Brando Estate Archives.

  45See, for example, Life, March 10, 1972; Newsweek, March 13, 1972; Rolling Stone, January 20, 1972.

  46Life, March 10, 1972, p. 44.

  47Brando taped these interviews, which were then transcribed by his assistants. The one featuring the Godfather is entitled as “Random House TV Interview, August 27, 1994,” Brando Estate Archives.

  48Brando’s work on behalf of Indians is discussed at length in chapter 8.

  49Brando made these comments in his appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, June 1973. The viewer, David R. Convis, responded in a letter of June 8, 1973, to Sacheen Littlefeather, Sacheen Littlefeather file, Brando Estate Archives. The file also contains about a dozen letters from Littlefeather to Brando that reveal their relationship as formal and always cordial.

  50Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 345.

  51Wardrobe fittings for assorted films, Brando Estate Archives. KBL includes diet books in Boxes 7, 9, 18, 20, 21, 22, 32, and 40. See Peter Cowie, Coppola: A Biography (New York: Capo, 1994), p. 67, on the “padded false paunch” Brando used.

  52These logs, entitled “Progress Report,” from 2003 and 2004, record Brando’s daily weight, pulse, and blood pressure. His weight, predictably, is highest during the Thanksgiving–Christmas holiday period, from late November through December. The highest weight recorded is 258 on December 2 and 3, 2003, but the pulse rate is 67 and the blood pressure 110/75. The lowest recorded is 228 on May 22, 2003. That log page includes the following note: “May 15, 2003 MB had his Breathing Test (improved a lot better) and check-up with Dr. Strieter. He was given another set of menus and low fat/No Sodium diet. They asked for a copy of MBs Progress report, Nutritional intake and Medicine chart.” Brando Estate Archives.