Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  By now he had enough physical confidence to take on anyone his age. When he joined the school’s drama club on a whim and volunteered to pantomime a young girl preparing to take a bath, nobody dared tease him. He liked the idea of impersonating villains, and once played the gangster John Dillinger in a sketch. Classmates were chilled by his impersonation, greeting it first with awed silence and then with wild applause. For the most part, though, the club did lightweight fare—Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It with You was a favorite—and Bud had trouble with comic timing. To no one’s surprise he took direction badly and, as a consequence, never got cast in any full-length plays. Yet by now he had acquired the itch to perform. Instead of acting, he got hold of some drumsticks and wooden kegs and organized an after-school rhythm band he called Keg Brando and His Kegliners. When the group failed to get any bookings it dissolved. Bud withdrew into himself again, reading books his mother had accumulated over the years: The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, the tragedies, comedies, and history plays of Shakespeare. And like most children his age, he became an addict of network radio.

  Albert Einstein, newly arrived from Germany, explained radio to the American public: “You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. And radio operates in exactly the same way; you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.” The absence of cat was what made the medium so miraculous. Broadcasts in the East, Midwest, and South reached all parts of the United States; regionalisms were no longer confined to discrete geographical areas. Now everyone knew the sound of an Atlantan’s drawl, a Brooklynite’s nasalities, a Bostonian’s flat a’s.

  Somewhere along the way, the carbon microphone had reversed the conditions of show business. Actors didn’t need to be comely anymore; they could get by with a flexible voice and a few sound effects. The journalist Alistair Cooke was fond of quoting a seven-year-old who preferred radio to movies because “the pictures were better”—and so they were for most American children.

  In his evocative memoir, Raised on Radio, Gerald Nachman recalls that old-time radio was “made of words,” addicting him to stage plays with their emphasis on speech. “Radio was America, presented in tones of pure red-blooded patriotism.” The youths of that era were inspired to see the places they “kept hearing about each night, sparking a wanderlust the way a passing train and paddle-wheeler might have for a boy a century before.”

  The attitudes and values of old-time radio programs could be more powerful (and on occasion more insidious) than ones conveyed by parents and schoolteachers. On the upside there was the Shakespeare summer of 1937, when NBC presented condensed versions of the canon, starring John Barrymore, while CBS produced Hollywood Salutes Shakespeare, featuring Leslie Howard and Tallulah Bankhead. There were H. V. Kaltenborn’s coverage of the Spanish Civil War and President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, which talked the nation out of the Depression and into recovery. There were the comic feud of Fred Allen and Jack Benny and the sophisticated remarks on Information Please.

  But these episodes aimed for an adult audience, and the young listened to them with half an ear, if at all. They spent the bulk of their attention on fifteen-and thirty-minute melodramas. Grand Central Station provided glimpses of a city as glamorous and mythic as Oz: “Drawn by the magnetic force of the fantastic metropolis, day and night great trains dive with a roar into the two-and-a-half-mile tunnel which burrows between the glitter and swank of Park Avenue and then…Grand Central Station! Crossroads of a million private lives! Gigantic stage on which are played a thousand dramas daily!”

  The Lucky Strike Hour glamorized the employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—“G-Men,” in radio parlance. An FBI official later explained that “in the Depression, households would give up the refrigerator they bought on time rather than giving up the radio.” This fact was duly noted by J. Edgar Hoover, who cooperated with broadcasters willing to flatter the bureau and its chief. Thus indoctrinated, audiences “were much more willing to cooperate fully when a real FBI agent knocked on their door.”

  The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet dramatized other aspects of crime-fighting America. These vigilantes were just as idealized as movie heroes—Anglo-Saxons whose trusted (but socially inferior) assistants were nonwhites: an Indian in the case of the Ranger, a Japanese (later Filipino) valet for the Hornet. Racial stereotypes ruled the day: Black actors were relegated to comic roles, the males commonly playing buffoons, the females domestics. CBS scriptwriter Norman Corwin recalled the unheard-of use of an African American performer in a central role: “Through the corridors, it was, ‘Hey, you heard about the Corwin show? He’s got a Negro playing the leading role. Holy smoke!’” The harshest racial ironies were triggered by the Amos ’n’ Andy show. Its main characters were played by white men doing black southern accents. Mispronunciations and malapropisms were endemic: “Ah denies de allegation, and Ah resents de alligator” “You has my infernal gratitude.” For the most part, audiences loved the show. But there was growing resentment in the black community. A group of lawyers tried to get the program off the air, and The Pittsburgh Courier, an important African American newspaper, said Amos ’n’ Andy was guilty of nothing less than the “exploitation of Negroes for profit.” Already sensitized, Marlon spent a lot of time pondering the situation: “I was born only sixty-two years after one human being could still buy another in America,” he was to write. “I remember first being amazed by this discovery and wondering how it could be.” He sought out accounts of slaves in the library, empathized with their descendants, and tried to imagine himself as a black man in servitude.

  Still, there was a virtue even to the racially distorted melodramas and hack comedies of the 1930s: To differentiate among villains and heroes and supporting players, the actors used different inflections and regionalisms. Listening to them, Bud discovered that he had a talent for vocal mimicry. After he had turned the radio off, he played the dialogue in his mind, replicating what he had heard, then rolling the syllables over his tongue. He carried the process over into real life, watching and listening to neighbors, teachers, friends, copying their voices.

  He got more opportunities for impersonation when he picked up his mother at the police station. On numerous evenings Bud heard the familiar, dreaded words from a police desk sergeant: “We have a Dorothy Pennebaker Brando here. Could you come down here and get her?” And those were the easy times. All too frequently he and his sisters would look at the clock at 6 p.m. and realize that Dodie was not coming home. They would have to go door-to-door through the bars of Chicago’s skid row, examining the women slumped on bar stools until they found her. The girls were mortified; Bud would make mental notes about the way cops and drunks looked, spoke, and walked, filing it all away somewhere, who knew for what.

  The hostility he felt on these occasions was directed toward Marlon senior rather than Dodie. As the fourteen-year-old saw it, the alcoholism was his father’s fault, a result of deliberate neglect and brutality. Bud’s wrath erupted one evening shortly after he had fetched his mother from yet another spree. Marlon senior took over from there, leading his wife to their upstairs bedroom. Bud heard a body hit the floor. Then came the sounds of slapping, followed by wails of distress. Bud took the stairs two at a time and flung open his parents’ door. Dodie lay on the bed, facedown, crying, as Marlon senior loomed over her. Like a hero in one of his favorite noir movies, Marlon junior advanced on his father, and said in a low, clear voice, “If you ever hit her again, I’ll kill you.”

  Marlon senior backed off. Bud reasoned that it was because “he was staring at more adrenaline than he had ever seen in his life. My father was afraid of nothing and we probably would have fought to the death had it not been for the fact that perhaps he felt guilty.” Whatever the case, Marlon senior walked out of the bedroom, leaving Dodie on the bed. The incident did a great deal to bolster Bud’s protective instincts, but it fai
led to diminish his father’s roughness or his mother’s dependence on liquor.

  And so he continued to misbehave. According to Sigmund Freud, “acting out” occurs when an individual “does not remember anything of what he has repressed,” but reproduces it “not as memory, but as action; he repeats it without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.” In Marlon’s case, the bad conduct repeatedly took the form of sass, particularly directed toward authority figures. Hired as an usher at a local movie house, for example, he wearied of wearing a traditional uniform, and he substituted a dickey for the starched shirt and awkwardly sewed a pair of cuffs to the jacket to make it appear that he was in full regalia. When the deception was discovered, Bud was summarily canned. He took swift revenge with another comically anarchic act, chopping up rotting broccoli and mixing it with overripe Limburger cheese, then stuffing the mess into the air-conditioning system. An overpowering stench drove the panicked audience to an emergency exit. On other occasions he wrote a French assignment on toilet paper and unrolled it as he spoke, lit firecrackers and threw them out of classroom windows to give the impression of gunfire, hung a dead skunk on a football scoreboard.

  The principal wasted hours lecturing Bud on propriety, but an irritated teacher reached into the boy’s record to exact a more devastating measure of revenge. Since the beginning of World War I, intelligence tests had been used to determine future performance. The exams measured chronological age against mental age, with 140 and above as “gifted” and 78 and below as “retarded.” The U.S. Army had been provided with thousands of draftees, and the exams were used to categorize them as potential officers, enlisted specialists, platoon leaders, and infantrymen. After the war, schools adopted these severely flawed tests for their own purposes. The numbers were supposed to be kept confidential, but teachers knew the results of the tests—and so did a lot of students. A backlash began. Walter Lippmann, the widely syndicated columnist, commented, “One only has to read around in the literature of the subject to see how easily the intelligence test can be turned into an engine of cruelty, how it could turn into a method of stamping a permanent sense of inferiority upon the soul of a child.” That engine of cruelty made its mark on Bud when the teacher announced to his class: “Young Brando here has an IQ of ninety; no wonder he’s so disruptive and has such trouble keeping up with the rest of you.” Thus another stamp of inferiority was affixed, to go alongside those Marlon senior had supplied. By the time Bud reached the age of fifteen, a lifelong pattern was set: No one in a position of power could be trusted, therefore all symbols of control must be resisted. Given his deportment, close-by neighbors could hardly be blamed for giving him a wide berth, warning their children about too close an association.

  Matters seemed to worsen by the month. On many mornings Dodie had to shake off a hangover, get herself together, and drop by the principal’s office, summoned there to hear the latest litany of Bud’s infractions. In time a letter went out to Marlon senior, asking him to come in and discuss his son’s pockmarked report card. At that point, the head of the family saw only one solution. The boy would have to be sent to military school. Marlon senior had been a hellion in his own youth; Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota, had straightened him out just fine. It would do the same for his recalcitrant son.

  Resistance was useless. Bud was a minor and the law was on his father’s side. In September 1941 the seventeen-year-old signed the appropriate papers, picked up his uniform, and checked into Shattuck. Like all military schools of the period, it was oversubscribed. All year long the countdown to conflict had been resounding like a 4/4 beat from a kettle drum. The German and Italian consulates in the United States had been ordered closed. The American people were being prepared for the inevitable by the White House, newspaper editorials, and radio bulletins. Reporters in Paris fled the country; France was under Nazi control. But there was plenty of news coming out of England. On CBS, the crisp uninflected voice of Edward R. Murrow regularly issued from London: “It seems strange to hear the English, who were saying, ‘We’ll win this one without help from America,’ admitting now that this world—or what’s left of it—will be largely run either from Berlin or from Washington.”

  With all this in mind, Marlon senior convinced himself that putting Bud in a military academy was an act of high patriotism. Shattuck had been in operation since the Indian wars of the 1870s, helping to supply the U.S. Army with an officer cadre. Now, with half the world aflame, the academy geared up anew. More than half the class was composed of difficult children from prosperous midwestern families, among them the Mayos of the Mayo Clinic, and the Hormels, owners of the prominent meatpacking company. These folks could easily afford the annual tuition and boarding fee of $1,500. The Brandos had little in common with them—except that their son had also been sent to Shattuck to learn the values of discipline and rectitude.

  When he looked back at the school many years later, Marlon junior realized that by then “any hope I had of receiving love or support from my parents was probably moribund.” But the youth was in denial, sending home letters in a futile attempt to win their respect and affection. Intimidation was the first rule of Shattuck, something Bud noted from week one. “Dear Folks,” he wrote home. “I am settled materially but not spiritually. The staff is tough and the reward is usually a good, sweet, but firm kick in the ass.” Calder Willingham, who had attended The Citadel in South Carolina, used a military school as his milieu in End as a Man. The novel describes the treatment of a new recruit, Simmons, by vicious upperclassman Jocko De Paris.

  “Is it true you once tapped your sister?”

  “Sir, have you no respect for the dead?”

  De Paris wailed in imitation, “Sir, have you no respect for the dead?…Now let’s carve some extra bone from your coccyx. Take hold of those ankles.”

  Simmons bent over and grabbed his shoe tops.

  De Paris took the broom, tested it back and forth with his wrists, and poised it. Then his arms swung back in a graceful arc, and his eyes half shut. The broom came down with a loud whacking noise. Dust clouded up from the trousers and Simmons grunted.

  De Paris spelled out F-R-E-S-H-M-A-N. One blow for each letter. There was coagulated blood on Simmons’ undershorts when he took them off that night.

  IN THE CLASSROOMS of this particular academy, the virtues of integrity, leadership, trust are the orders of the day. But the private life of the cadets amounts to antimatter, and dishonesty, betrayal, anal sadism are the orders of the day. Though Willingham later called his book a “wild, reckless nightmare-vision,” it was true to its time, and provided a rare portrait of adolescents in the pulverizing environment of a military school in a military time.

  There could have been no more inappropriate place for Marlon, and in response to the institute’s rigid class system he assumed an attitude of cool belligerence. Over the years, critics sometimes looked back at family albums and professed to see a seedling superstar. Actually, Marlon Brando, Jr., showed little distinction at the time. He had darkening blond hair, an earnest smile, and the intense, hormonal aura common to most boys his age. He and the camera had yet to establish their complicated love-hate relationship. At his maximum height of five feet, ten inches, he weighed less than 150 pounds. A good deal of that avoirdupois was muscle, a result of the weight lifting begun in Libertyville and continued at Shattuck, and this helped him to get along and go along. Like an apprehensive cat that pushes out its fur to seem larger, Bud “walked big,” carrying himself like an athlete. The cocky stance had its effect; upperclassmen kept their distance. “I did my best to tear the school apart and not get caught at it,” Bud was to state. “I would do anything to avoid being treated like a cipher, which is what they aim for when they put you in a military uniform and demand conformity.”

  His hostility notwithstanding, Marlon was still Bud, the kid who acted out, then suffered pangs of guilt. One day, startled by a loud slap on the shoulder, he turned around and decked the cadet who did
it. Having made his statement, Marlon promptly apologized. It was the old Tom Sawyer back-and-forthing again, going out for football, then slacking off when it came to practice and injuring his knee in the process; joining the school band as a drummer, then dropping out because rehearsals were so boring; making a try for academic excellence only to fall behind in his schoolwork when his attention wandered. Meantime, he kept hoping for the reinforcements that never came. In his letters home he kept appealing to Marlon senior and Dodie: “Which one of you died, and which one of you has broken your right arm?” The questions were ignored; there were no return letters.

  Bud’s deteriorating performance was accented with a never-ending series of pranks and capers, ranging from putting Limburger in light fixtures to pouring Vitalis, a liquid hair tonic, over the transom of a hated master and igniting it. From the other side of the door, the mischief-maker was pleased to hear the man frantically beating out the eerie blue flames with his jacket.

  The news about Pearl Harbor failed to stop Bud’s showy defiance. Classes buzzed with stories of the Japanese sneak attack, the fall of Wake Island, and the declaration of war after President Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech. Most of the students were gung-ho about becoming commissioned officers, leading enlisted men into battle. Bud rankled at the thought. At a meeting to discuss America’s entry into the war, the school’s chief administrator informed him that he was in the very same chair where Marlon senior had sat in 1918, when it was announced that the United States had entered the Great War. The implication was clear: Pranks were all very well for adolescence, but this was a deadly serious time. Ergo, Marlon junior must buckle down, get passing grades, and go for a commission in the army.