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

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  82Joseph Brutsman letter to Brando, January 20, 1994, in a private collection.

  83Letter to Mike Lobell, July 10, 1989, Brando Estate Archives.

  84Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, April 7, 1995, expressed a rare disgust with Brando’s acting. Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, April 7, 1995; Hal Hinson and Desson Howe, Washington Post, April 7, 1995; and Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle, April 7, 1995, were all charmed by Brando’s performance.

  85He added, for instance, the prediction that Don Juan would do “a flamenco number on Bill’s head until it looks like a tortilla, and it’s on your watch!”; complaining in the margin: “no jargon,” “cliché,” “lay language,” and, finally, “dialogue too conventional; makes the character conventional.” Brando’s revisions are all on the revised script draft, December 20, 1993, pp. 16, 22, 30, 32, in a private collection.

  86A note in his files from June 26, 1989, for example, directs his assistant to “Buy Book: Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesize the Human Gene. Published by MicroSoft in Seattle in 1988. Author is Stephen Hall.” Next item: “Go to Corner of Van Nuys Bl. and Ventura and buy the June Issue of Smithsonian ’89. Marlon wants 10 photocopies of the article entitled, ‘A Molecular Code Links Emotion, Mind and Health.’ Author is Stephen Hall.” Brando Estate Archives.

  87Seventy-five-pages of Brando’s transcribed conversations with Stanley date from November 17, 1994. The equally long transcribed conversations with John Frankenheimer date from August 10, 1995, Brando Estate Archives.

  88Brando’s rewritten script pages for the first meeting between Dr. Moreau and the island visitor, Edward Douglas (David Thewlis), are in a private collection. All of these quotations are from this script.

  89David Page, who was Brando’s costume designer for most of his late films, including The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Score, recounted this in an interview with the author, August 19, 2013.

  90Brando buddies who worked with him in theater and films over the years include (in order of association): Carlo Fiore, Sam Gilman, Philip and Marie Rhodes, Christian Marquand, George Englund, and Robert Redfield. All of them, with the exception of Gilman and Marquand, wrote books about Brando that conveyed some hostility toward him, or gave interviews to biographers who were hostile to him, but Brando could be hard on them as well.

  91Alex Ross, “Island of Lost Auteurs: What the Hell Happened to John Frankenheimer?” Slate, September 10, 1996.

  92Brando told Joseph Brutsman at dinner in Montreal following the wrap of Free Money that he “would be blamed” for whatever shortcomings were found in the film. Joseph Brutsman interview with the author, December 1, 2012.

  93The party was held on October 21, 1995; the invitation is in a private collection. The book with its inscription is in KBL, Box 37.

  94Brando’s 1995 letter to Baz Luhrmann is in Brando Estate Archives, as is the correspondence with Lynch.

  95Brando’s letters to Marquez (April 16, May 28, and June 30, 1997) are in the Brando Estate Archives.

  96Brando was especially preoccupied with the Caryl Chessman case, about which he considered making a movie in the early 1960s. See chapter 4 for more on his views about and struggle against capital punishment.

  97Joseph Brutsman recalled, in interviews with the author, how Brando reflected on the situation of his son Christian, while they were touring the prison that would provide the setting for a few of his scenes in Free Money.

  98A boy who knew Brando in elementary school in Evanston, Illinois, remembered how he reacted “when he got ‘hit’ by a bullet. . . . He’d get plugged and he didn’t just fall down. . . . He really knew how to die. He made a specialty of it. I mean it was real.” Quoted in Manso, Brando, p. 23.

  99See writer and director’s commentary in DVD of Free Money. All the details about behind-the-scenes developments are from there, unless otherwise noted.

  100Grobel, Conversations with Brando, p. 83.

  101Chicago Sun-Times, July 13, 2001, and Rolling Stone, July 13, 2001.

  102For more on The Big Bug Man, which was directed by Bob Bendetson and Peter Shin and never released, see Archie Thomas, “Brando’s Last Role: An Evil Old Lady,” The Guardian, July 8, 2004, and Peter Gilstrap, LA Weekly, “Last Tango in Drag,” July 22, 2004.

  103The Big Bug Man script by Bob Bendetson, p. 83.

  104Marice Tobias, quoted in Gilstrap’s “Last Tango in Drag.”

  105Marice Tobias and Paul Doherty described their work with Brando in interviews with the author on, respectively, December 17, 2012, and March 15, 2012. I drew here also on Bob Bendetson interview with the author, June 22, 2013, and Peter Shin interview with the author, July 1, 2013.

  CHAPTER EIGHT. CITIZEN OF THE PLANET

  1Brando discusses this with Robert Lindsey, Lindsey Transcripts, Brando Estate Archives.

  2Jay Kanter mentioned Brando’s computers, which were upgraded yearly and sometimes even more often, in an interview, April 21, 2011. Avra Douglas, who worked as Brando’s assistant from 1990 to the end of his life, described how he insisted on learning new computer programs as they came out. Avra Douglas interviews. Brando’s collection of Scientific American and other magazines, and hundreds of books on science and technology, are in KBL.

  3Brando quoted in Grobel Interviews, Brando Estate Archives.

  4Dodie Brando quoted in “Mrs. Brando’s Boy,” p. 62, magazine article from 1952 in Brando Estate Archives.

  5Brando’s copy of M. D. Berlitz, Deuxième Livre: Pour l’Enseignement des Langues Modernes (New York: Nouvelle Edition Americaine, 1924), in a private collection.

  6Brando’s calendar for 1967, recording his daily appointments and travels, lists him in New York City on January 27, 28, and 29; in London from January 30 to February 10; in Cairo on February 17; Istanbul on February 18 and 19, and Hawaii on March 27. March 28 reads: “Beverly Hills: Marlon returns home from trip around the world.”

  7This interview in French during filming of The Brave on October 14, 1996, in Los Angeles was never published, in a private collection.

  8Herman Leonard’s recollection of the trip was sent in an e-mail on December 21, 2004. Herman Leonard Estate.

  9Grobel, Conversations with Brando, pp. 22–23.

  10Morris’s chapter on Brando was called “The Godfather’s Dilemma” (London: Little Books), pp. 573–80. Quotes are on pp. 576–77.

  11Tom Oppenheim recalled how surprised he was to find Brando, in the year before he died, still capable of intense anger over the way fame had hampered him. Tom Oppenheim interview, May 7, 2010.

  12Telegram from February 22, 1960, Brando Estate Archives.

  13Clurman, All People Are Famous, pp. 260–61.

  14This is from one of Brando’s favorite quotation books: The Great Thoughts, compiled by George Seldes (New York: Ballantine, 1985), n.p. Brando owned two volumes of Aristotle’s works: one is in KBL, one in another private collection. The volume in KBL has pencil markings throughout; the volume in the private collection has no annotations.

  15Brando’s Grandmother Bess had worked for J. L. Webster, an attorney who had defended Standing Bear of the Ponca tribe in a case that paved the way for citizenship rights for American Indians. See chapter 1, and Manso, pp. 3–4, 272.

  16The Brando Estate Archives include scripts from the 1960s, but the script by Mrs. B. R. Hill is not among them. Brando letter addressed to Mrs. Hill, Brando Estate Archives.

  17Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 384.

  18The catalog was in Brando’s materials from The Godfather set, in a private collection. Another catalog of “Books about Indians,” from the New York Museum of the American Indian, with a Congressional Research Service stamp from August 9, 1973, which also had Brando’s annotations, is in a private collection. In both cases, every book marked by Brando in the catalog is in his collection. Brando even had a catalog of Rare Out-of-Print Books on the American Indian and the Early West by T. N. Luther Books (Kansas City, MO, 1964), in a private collection.

 
19Brando’s annotated copy of The Cowboy Encyclopedia is one of hundreds of his books on Indians purchased by an anonymous buyer at the Christie’s sale. The October 25, 1957, correspondence between Marlon Brando Sr. and Marlon Brando Jr. regarding “the future of Pennebaker,” Brando’s film company, reveals that one possible script had strong Indian themes. Correspondence in Brando Estate Archives. These early scripts and notes for One-Eyed Jacks are in the One-Eyed Jacks collection at the Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, and in a private collection.

  20He was taken in particular by the Northwest Indian custom of potlatch, whereby the wealthy voluntarily redistributed their bounty by dispensing it publicly as gifts to the community. He queried in the margin, “Does it prevail?” See D’Arcy McNickle, They Came Here First: The Epic of the American Indian (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1949), pp. 56–57. Brando’s copy of McNickle’s book is in a private collection. Next to a description of a “golden staircase” on a Papago reservation in Arizona leading to a cave housing possibly the mythological beginnings of many tribes, Brando wrote, “go there,” and beside a reference to “the incense of sweet grass” he scrawled, “get some,” pp. 31, 78. He marks, too, in another example, a passage on the precision of Indian names for things: “In the Hopi language shape and size of an object are not mentioned unless the thought is concerned with them,” p. 95.

  21McNickle, They Came Here First, pp. 79, 83

  22Ibid., pp. 92, 127. McNickle quotes Montaigne’s account of the Indians on p. 122.

  23This is acknowledged in various notes written by Brando on Indian history that are in the Brando Estate Archives: for example, “Notes on Indians, Sept. 3, 1963, Tahiti.”

  24They Came Here First, pp. 176–78.

  25These are covered in detail in McNickle’s final chapter, “Supplanting a People,” pp. 188–290.

  26Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 389.

  27They Came Here First, pp. 100, 101, passages marked by Brando.

  28Ibid., pp. 188, 189, passages marked by Brando.

  29His copy of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Report, P.L. 95–341, Federal Agencies Task Force, Chairman Cecil D. Andrus, Secretary of the Interior, August 1979, which was designed to rectify a century of efforts to stamp out tribal cultures in the name of peaceful assimilation, is in a private collection.

  30Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974), p. 240.

  31Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 377.

  32Brando’s copy of the Hearings on the Senate Joint Resolutions 170 and 171 is in a private collection. Among his comments, which are consistently critical of the lack of preparation and data on the part of the senators in making decisions about Indian rights established by mid-nineteenth-century treaties, he asks, “When was joint resolution 171 submitted to the committee and by whom? It seems that the reasons for its existence were unknown to those on the subcommittee even after it was formulated.” Senate Committee Hearings, p. 22. “The Fish-in Protests at Frank’s Landing,” Gabriel Chrisman, Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project (HSTAA 498, Autumn 2007), www.civilrights.washington.edu.

  33From the early sixties onward, Brando was working with Jack Beck, a CBS producer on ideas for television shows about Indians. He did numerous talk shows, often accompanied by Indians—for example, The Les Crane Show and The Johnny Carson Show, where he screened slides on Indian history.

  34The Beverly Hills Fundraising Dinner for Kennedy at the Hilton Hotel is listed on Brando’s calendar for 1963, Brando Estate Archives. Songs, pp. 291–92, and Lindsey Interviews. The encounter with Douglas is also described in Songs, p. 379, and in Lindsey Interviews.

  35This quotation from one of two telegrams is reproduced in the Christie’s catalogue, The Personal Property of Marlon Brando: Thursday 30 June 2005, p. 132.

  36The quitclaim deed for the forty acres in Liberty Canyon, California, was dated December 27, 1974, and was prepared by the Law Offices of Rosenfeld, Meyer, and Susman, which handled Brando’s legal affairs, in Brando Estate Archives. The land grant was covered, somewhat snidely, by Garrick Utley on ABC News, and also on local television in Los Angeles. A collection of legal papers relating to the bequest, along with transcript notes of a speech Brando delivered at the event, are also in the Brando Estate Archives.

  37Grobel, Conversations with Brando, p. 111.

  38Brando’s FBI file, which dates from 1946 to 2004, is #1203025-000 in the US Department of Justice, FBI, Records Management Division. Brando’s work for the Irgun, in 1946, during and after his performances in Ben Hecht’s A Flag Is Born, might have attracted the attention of the FBI in the 1940s.

  39In his concern over the issue of surveillance, Brando was again ahead of his time. Transcribed discussion with Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, Brando Estate Archives.

  40For more on the Church Committee Reports, see the Assassination Archives and Research Center, http://www.aarclibrary.org/index.htm.

  41Brando’s nephew Martin Asinof recalls coming out of the Mulholland Drive house with Brando in the early 1970s and seeing a man in a black suit working on the telephone pole above the house. Asked what he was doing with the phone wires, the man replied that he was from the phone company, a claim that was refuted when Brando checked directly with the company. Asinof and Brando concluded that the man had been setting up a wiretap on his phone. Martin Asinof, interview with the author, June 5, 2013, with follow-ups July and August 2013. The portion of Brando’s FBI file #1203025-000 released to the author confirmed that the FBI kept watch on Brando’s activities with the Indians between 1975 and 1976. It also included a letter dated December 13, 1968, from J. Edgar Hoover, regarding the December 6, 1968, incident when Brando was removed from a plane to Colombia at the Los Angeles International Airport after he jokingly asked the stewardess, who didn’t recognize him, whether this was “the plane to Cuba.”

  42This was noted by Bruce Cook in his piece on Brando on the set of The Missouri Breaks in Crawdaddy, December 1975: “Two gentlemen from the FBI visited me yesterday, asking me questions, and I asked them some. It wound up that we had a two- or three-hour conversation,” Brando told him. “They were nice men. Their big question was, would I aid a man who was a fugitive from justice . . . and my big question to them was, if a friend of theirs with the FBI killed someone wrongly, would they turn him in and testify against him?” (pp. 39–40).

  43These details are described on the website of the Alexian Brothers, www.alexianbrothers.org. Brando discusses these incidents directly in Songs, pp. 393–99, and in more detail in the Lindsey Interviews.

  44For example, Brando’s calendar for June 23, 1963, lists “Dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Ken MacKenzie” and “After Dinner . . . Film at Studio—The Exiles.” His calendar for January 24, 1964, lists “Les Crane T.V. Show . . . ABC-TV With Ralph Lone Bear (Pawnee).” Brando’s daily calendars from 1963 and 1964 also feature frequent meetings with Jack Beck, visits to Indian reservations, etc., calendars and Brando’s correspondence from the early 1960s with Jack Beck concerning programs on Indians in Brando Estate Archives. Brando notes in a passage about a Tuscarora Indian protest at Niagara Falls in Edmund Wilson’s Apologies to the Iroquois (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1960), p. 148: “Find out what T.V. coverage there was from Jack Beck.” Brando’s marginal reference to his Johnny Carson Show appearance is in Dee Brown and Martin Schmitt, Fighting Indians of the West (New York: Ballantine, 1974), p. 3.

  45According to a main source, the massacre “was the worst blow ever struck at any tribe in the whole plains region.” The 700 Colorado militia headed by Colonel John Chivington that attacked the friendly Cheyennes in November 1864 not only killed but also mutilated their victims, taking scalps and other body parts as trophies of battle. (Brando marks a passage in Stan Steiner’s The New Indians, uncorrected page proofs, p. 39, detailing the eroticized savagery of Kit Carson and other soldiers toward the Nav
ajo and Apaches.) A few weeks later, at a Denver theater, some of these soldiers exhibited the scalps, mostly those of women and children, accompanied by audience cheers and patriotic airs. (Notes are in Brando’s copy of Life of George Bent: Written from His Letters by George E. Hyde [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968], p. 162.) In 1865, a congressional committee condemned the murder “in cold blood” of “unsuspecting men, women, and children” with “every reason to believe they were under the protection of the United States authorities.” But it took the Methodist ministry more than a century to apologize for the un-Christian behavior of its prominent lay preacher, Colonel Chivington. (United States Congress Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 1865, University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. Accounts of the United Methodist Church condemnation of the massacre, which resulted as well in contributions to the development of a research and learning center at the Sand Creek Massacre Historic Site, can be found at UMC.org.) Surviving tapes of his plot summaries for the Sand Creek Massacre series featured Chivington and the more conciliatory Major Edward Wynkoop and wife Louisa as prominent characters. (Stan Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961], p. 19.) Brando annotated Hoig’s book thoroughly. On a page of one source, Brando sketched an imaginary dialogue between an officer, Major Edward Wynkoop, and a friendly white trader who lived among the Indians just before the massacre: “Wynkoop would ask him how he could live without civilization. He replies, I can’t that’s why I live with the Cheyenne.” See notes in his copy of Life of George Bent, p. 41.

  46Brown and Schmitt, Fighting Indians of the West, pp. 40–41, 23. These possibilities come up in notes and correspondence in the Brando Estate Archives.

  47Producer Frank P. Rosenberg wrote in the New York Times: “Every line every actor read, as well as every button on every piece of wardrobe, got Brando’s concentrated attention until he was completely satisfied.” “Eyeing ‘Jacks’: Producer Scans a Hectic Three-Year Stint with Star-Director Brando,” March 26, 1961.