After these two plays the company caught on. While Dodie forgave her son, Piscator was not so charitable. From the beginning he suspected that young Brando was having his way with the women. Left unchecked, this could sully the company’s name and endanger the German’s lofty reputation. He was correct about Marlon’s amatory habits, but when the impresario made his move he convicted an innocent man. As it happened, he was prowling around the premises and on impulse peeked into a barn. There were Marlon and an apprentice, asleep on the upper level. They were hauled into his office and unceremoniously dismissed. Everyone in the company except Piscator knew the irony of the situation. It was like one of those B-movie mysteries in which a criminal, having slain several people, is framed for a murder he didn’t commit. Marlon and the young lady had been innocently practicing their lines and had fallen asleep. She stated that she was in fact still a virgin, but Piscator was deaf to her pleas, and to Marlon’s protestations. The accused were gone on the night train out of Sayville.
Back in the city Marlon was invited to call on Maynard Morris. With his customary blend of indifference and curiosity, he dropped by in the company of his sister Jocelyn. Morris made his case. He was a hard-selling agent. He had the inside track in New York theater. He had no personal life; every waking effort was dedicated to his clients. At a time when so many young leading men were “out of town,” as he delicately put it, he could point an actor in the right direction, get him past the cattle-call auditions and into producers’ offices. Marlon was silent throughout the pitch, and might well have walked out had it not been for Jocelyn’s insistence. “Sign with Morris!” she demanded, and almost as a lark he put his signature on the contract.
Having made this effort, Marlon went off to Cape Cod for a vacation, only to be summoned back to the city two weeks later. Morris had just the role for him. When Marlon learned what his new agent had in mind, he was crushed: a fifteen-year-old called Nels in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama? This after the virtuoso performances in Hannele? What was MCA thinking? Dodie knew the book from which the play had been adapted. Kathryn Forbes’s bestseller, Mama’s Bank Account, was a collection of sentimental anecdotes about a family of Norwegian immigrants in bygone San Francisco. To her it was just one more scrap of saccharine nostalgia, like the long-running Life with Father, designed to keep America’s mind preoccupied. With his mother’s judgment ringing in his ears, Marlon blithely and contemptuously went off to audition for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Mama was the songwriting team’s first attempt to produce a straight play, and they were casting with great care. Marlon’s reading was, in his own judgment, “a disaster,” a jumble of falterings and pauses. Rodgers disdainfully looked away and Hammerstein shrugged. Only the playwright, John Van Druten, evidenced any interest. This Brando person was nonchalant, almost indifferent, and yet he radiated a strange power—the young man seemed to fill up the room. Van Druten was not only the playwright but the director, and thus the final arbiter. His colleagues gave way, and Marlon got the job. “I simply stepped off one lily pad onto another,” was the way he put it in later years. It all seemed so easy—and so retrograde, playing an adolescent in a piece of commercial fluff. He took the script home and showed it to Dodie. The dialogue confirmed her worst suspicions: Van Druten had written pulp fiction for the stage. But at least one significant person disagreed. Of all people, Stella Adler, worshipper at the temple of Art, was delighted. She predicted that Marlon would be in a long-running, well-paying hit. He would be making $75 a week, a considerable salary in 1944, when a steak dinner cost $1.50 and a used car could be obtained for $500—if you could wheedle enough gas to run it. And besides, Stella argued, Mama would provide excellent exposure. An actor needed to showcase his wares, and Broadway was the biggest window in town. He nodded; his teacher was right and his mother wrong. This was a great shock to him. For all the carefree behavior in school and in New York, for all the pent-up resentment he had about Dodie’s irresponsible alcoholism, he was vitally dependent on her approval. This was the first time she had been overruled by someone outside the family. By playing Nels, a role he disliked but needed, Marlon edged out from under the long shadow of home.
4
I Remember Mama opened on October 19, 1944, during the final month of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fourth presidential campaign. By now the Russians had turned back the German divisions, Guam had been retaken, southern Japan bombed. Victory was within reach, and for men of draft age the pressure was easing. Even so, FDR had to work furiously for votes, attempting to dispel the notion that, at the age of sixty-two, he was too old for office. His opponent, the vigorous forty-two-year-old Thomas E. Dewey, governor of New York State, kept stressing the need for new blood; the government was being run by “tired old men.” Admiral Halsey was the same age as the President, the GOP candidate pointed out. Admiral King was sixty-six, Generals MacArthur and Marshall sixty-four. The next generation was hammering at the door.
The polls indicated that Dewey’s message would not be enough to defeat a failing but illustrious leader. Yet the governor’s subtext had an effect; Americans pondered the coming postwar economy, aware that in every field—with the curious exception of politics—there would be a need for different approaches and new faces. Marlon wavered between profound insecurity and a new self-assurance. For too long he had been told that he would amount to nothing; a Broadway stage could show his inadequacies to the world. On the other hand, Stella had brought him along swiftly, showed him how to move and speak, elevated him not only in his own eyes, but in the eyes of her students, her family, her friends. So perhaps he wasn’t so flawed after all. Still, even if the puppy had learned a few tricks, how could the part of Nels help him get on? The Norwegian boy was everything Marlon was not: religious, respectful, decorous. Wasn’t this a classic example of miscasting? Or maybe they were casting against the part. Impossible to tell. Well, he would mark time, make the best of a bland part. Easy money.
He soon discovered that it was not so easy. Young Marlon was used to novices and students more or less his own age; Mama was peopled with veterans like Mady Christians, a hard-edged, experienced stage and film actress who played the title role, and Oskar Homolka, a scene-stealing pro who could upstage a baby. As a wicked old uncle, Homolka would step on other people’s lines, take an eon to roll a cigarette, grumble, wink and smile whenever it pleased him, and generally drive his fellow performers to distraction while he beguiled the audience. Along with Van Druten, these stars brought Marlon up short, constantly forcing him to watch and learn anew. As in adolescence, when he was not studying, he was rebelling. One of his first mutinous gestures was the autobiography he submitted to Playbill—a calculated put-on. “Born in Calcutta, India,” it read, “where his father was engaged in geological research, [Marlon Brando] came to this country when he was six months old.”
During rehearsals, he took another tone and became the soul of decorum. By the time the show opened, Marlon had thoroughly and obediently inhabited the character of Nels, suggesting the slightest Scandinavian intonation, growing a little more mature from scene to scene. He was touching when he had to be and got laughs when they were called for. In the play’s finale, which called for him simply to look up in astonishment, the eloquence and modesty of his body language was unfailingly greeted with applause as the curtain lowered.
In later years, those who saw the original production read too much into his performance. (Marlene Dietrich, an opening-night attendee, said Marlon was “the most natural boy I ever saw,” and Stella topped her. “He stood in perfect contrast to the overacting of Homolka and Christians, who were practically eating up the scenery. Marlon showed what subtlety on stage can accomplish.”) The fact is that most reviewers were dazzled by the efforts of Christians, Homolka, and Van Druten, and omitted the Brando name. Only Robert Garland, the Journal-American critic, paid attention: “The Nels of Marlon Brando is, if he doesn’t mind me saying so, charming.”
If Nels was an e
ngaging figure, the man who played him was anything but. Marlon detested Homolka, whom he recalled as “a brusque, unpleasant pompous man, which made him enjoyable to irritate.” The irritation consisted of misplacing props, and once, of substituting salt for sugar. Homolka’s favorite moment occurred in the first act, when, milking the scene for all it was worth, Uncle Chris slowly sweetened his coffee with spoonful after spoonful after spoonful of sugar, then took more time to savor the drink. On this special evening Homolka shocked the audience by violently spitting out the contents of the doctored cup. Homolka got through the performance, but swore revenge. It took the form of silence; offstage he didn’t talk to the young nuisance for three months. Not that Marlon cared. He was bored with the play after a few weeks. To him it was tantamount to a school assignment, reciting by rote every night and twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays. He tried some improvisations, but Van Druten, a pudgy soft-spoken Briton, was a lot tougher than he looked. The playwright/director kept dropping by and pulling all the actors back to their original interpretations—there would be no ad-libbing or ornamentation, thank you very much. When Van Druten proved inflexible Marlon concluded that I Remember Mama was not going to be a springboard for anything. The show ran for 713 performances and became a hit film, but other men played Nels after a season. Marlon could deal with uncomfortable situations and annoying people; against ennui he had no weapons. For diversion he took some modern-dance lessons and boxed a little. These activities never compensated for the sense that he was walking in place. It was either fight or flight, and he flew.
It was a good time to be free of constraints. New York in the spring of 1945 was a place of power and euphoria. Headlines blared good news day after day: American troops crossed the bridge in Remagen and poured onto the turf of the Third Reich. More than a thousand bombers attacked Berlin. Tokyo was firebombed. Even the death of President Roosevelt on April 12 could not dampen the city’s spirits for long. Two weeks later, the papers ran photographs of Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist leader, along with his mistress, both bodies hanging upside down in a town square, riddled with bullets. Berlin fell on May 2; V-E Day followed on May 8, and in midsummer, after the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, V-J Day was announced on August 15. The terrible weapons, instead of instilling fear, brought forth predictions about an Atomic Age, when machines would be powered by the harnessed atom and controlled by a new moral force called the United Nations. Veterans had been trickling back home; soon they would all be back in the United States. They would need houses and jobs, and talk of a booming postwar economy was everywhere.
Somehow Marlon failed to savor the moment. Gripped by malaise, he went back to la dolce vita, chasing girls or allowing them to chase him, having multiple affairs with Stella’s daughter, Ellen, and half a dozen other women. Within the acting community, much was made of this; later Brando would be characterized as a “sexual outlaw” and a “walking Kama Sutra.” In fact, of the seven deadly sins Gluttony ran a bad second to Sloth. Marlon was lazy by nature, and that inclination was useful as a defense mechanism. After all, if you didn’t compete, how could you lose? And if you were indifferent about your career, about women, about life in general, who could criticize you? Only your folks.
But in 1945 those folks were not in a position to criticize anyone. Throughout her sojourn in New York Dodie continued to drink heavily, while Marlon senior sulked in Evanston. Damned if he would come to postwar New York to haul his wife out of bars. Nor would he take a trip east to see his son in a play—even if the damn thing was on Broadway. That being the case, Marlon junior should have been the most carefree man in town. Instead, the twenty-one-year-old began to feel twinges of guilt about the way he was squandering his gift—if indeed he really had acting talent, and not just a knack for mimicry.
The big news on Broadway was Tennessee Williams, whose play The Glass Menagerie was going to win a lot of awards for him, and for his cast. Marlon saw it, was struck by its honesty and poignance, and was saddened because he wasn’t in it. The work was unashamedly personal—Williams’s mother, Edwina, was a self-deceiving woman, married to a brutal husband, C.C., who disliked her, regarded his mentally disturbed daughter, Rose, as a social catastrophe, and hated the effeminate son, Tom, he referred to as “Miss Nancy.” Trapped by the Depression and the town of St. Louis, where C.C. managed a shoe factory, Tom Williams knew that “somewhere deep in my nerves there was imprisoned a young girl, a sort of blushing school maiden.” He also knew that somewhere deep in those nerves was an artist. He watched his mother recede into the fantasies of her youth of cotillions and gentleman callers, and his sister be swallowed up by madness. The worst came when Rose underwent a lobotomy to relieve her depression, and became totally incapacitated, a ward of the state. Tom fled the scene, wandering through Los Angeles, New Orleans, Provincetown, New York, always pecking away at a typewriter that Edwina had given him years before. Whatever else went on in his disordered days, he continued to write. Elia Kazan was to remember the work habits of Williams, who now insisted on being addressed by his pen name. Every morning he “would get up, silent and remote from whoever happened to be with him, dress in a bathrobe, mix himself a double dry martini, put a cigarette in his long white holder, sit before his typewriter, grind in a blank sheet of paper, and so become Tennessee Williams.”
An early effort, Battle of Angels, introduced a theme the playwright was to pursue obsessively for decades: A young drifter comes to town and awakens the latent passion in a love-parched shopkeeper. Battle opened in Boston—and closed there. Tennessee pushed on, encouraged by a sympathetic agent and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The Chekhovian Glass Menagerie allowed him to give full range to his poetic talent and sensitivity without directly confronting the subject of sexuality. For that sort of freedom he would need three things: a highly charged drama rather than a play of subtlety and suggestion, a new director, and a very different kind of star. The first requirement was his and his alone, and long before the raves and rewards came in he set to work on Poker Night, a story that would become a play. In that form it would take on a new title: A Streetcar Named Desire.
5
Montgomery Clift had already appeared in five productions, but always as a supporting player. In 1946 he became the star in Foxhole in the Parlor, with his name high up on the marquee. His reviews were the stuff of dreams: The Journal-American said he was “terrifying in the role of the returned soldier.” The World-Telegram put the play on its season’s-best list, and the Herald Tribune called Monty’s work “superb sensitivity.” To be sure, Clift, like Marlon, had never been in uniform. But he had more than atoned for his lack of service by playing a wrecked veteran. Meantime his fellow Omahan had done nothing except screw around, and playing the part of the satyr in real life had lost its savor. Marlon jealously watched Monty’s rise and thought about the old acting classes, the kind of ambition he once possessed. Had Stella’s faith been for nothing? He picked himself up and auditioned for a role in Maxwell Anderson’s Truckline Café. The drama, a genre play that takes place in an eatery, allows disparate people to drop in and out of one another’s lives. Among the patrons of this seaside diner is a disturbed war veteran named Sage McRae. Afflicted by the pain of what he has experienced overseas, and by what he has seen upon his return, he changes from a bewildered figure in the first act to a murderer in the third, shooting his unfaithful wife and casting her into the bay.
Marlon read for the part—a comparatively minor one that would keep him onstage a total of six minutes—with enormous sincerity and a total lack of technique. In a way it was like the audition for Mama. Just as Rodgers and Hammerstein had found him wanting, two formidable theater men were also turned off by Marlon’s initial reading. In the front row, a displeased Elia “Gadge” Kazan shook his head and sighed. The former actor had already shown his versatility by directing Thornton Wilder’s difficult modernist play, The Skin of Our Teeth, featuring Clift. Summoned to Hollywood, he had turned out the sen
timental, top-grossing Hollywood film A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But the theater was his first love, and he had just returned to New York to co-produce Truckline. Next to him sat Harold Clurman, Stella Adler’s husband. The director was already famous for his presentations of Clifford Odets’s incendiary works Waiting for Lefty, Golden Boy, and Awake and Sing! A few seats away was the playwright, Maxwell Anderson, recently lauded for such powerhouse dramas as Key Largo and Winterset. The talk around Broadway was that Truckline couldn’t miss—provided, of course, that the cast was up to the writing.
Kazan disagreed with the prevailing wisdom. His first choice for the part of Sage McRae was Burgess Meredith, but the star had a Hollywood commitment. Clurman was unwilling to wait and grabbed Marlon, settling, in Gadge’s opinion, for second best. Maybe third best. And where did MCA get off with such an outrageous salary demand? The company had just assigned a new agent to guide Marlon’s career, and Edith Van Cleve asked for $500 a week. Kazan was outraged; Burgess Meredith got that kind of money, but he had all sorts of film and stage credits. Who the hell was this one-shot wonder to get that money? The line was held at $275 and Gadge thought he was being magnanimous.
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