Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  While in New York Marlon made sure to see Wally Cox go through his paces at the Century Theatre. There, before a live audience every week, the Walrus played the title role in Mister Peepers. The pioneering TV sitcom was built around his bespectacled, bumbling personality. Playing the part of an amiable but bewildered high school science teacher, Wally had grown nearly as popular as his friend. Georgeann Johnson, a member of the Peepers troupe, ran into Marlon during that time. “People always thought those two made an incongruous pair,” she said. “Marlon was one of those actors who seemed to have lights on him at all times. In a store, he was what you looked at, not the merchandise. But Wally was so intelligent, so well informed about so many things, that intellectually he was often way ahead of Marlon. And Marlon knew it.” Indeed, Brando said that Cox “probably came closer than anyone I’ve ever known to being a genius. He was absorbed as I was by human foibles, and was one of my greatest teachers. I was untutored and uncertain in my use of language. Almost as if he were leading me by the hand, Wally taught me how to speak and to see in words the melodies of life.” At this point, Marlon relished his friend’s success more than his own. He had been given $100,000 for an unsatisfactory performance and said he didn’t care if he ever acted again. Anywhere. Once again, neither Wally nor any of his other friends believed a word he said.

  5

  “I can see the thing’s body. It’s large, large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather! But that face, it…it’s indescribable! I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate!” The terrified voice issued from radio sets on October 30, 1938, throwing a nation into panic. By using a documentary format, the twenty-three-year-old actor/scriptwriter/director Orson Welles convinced his listeners that Martians had landed in New Jersey and were heading their way. In a follow-up newspaper column, journalist Dorothy Thompson discerned a new and dangerous world being born: The producer John Houseman, Welles, and the members of their company “have demonstrated more potently than any argument, demonstrated beyond a question of a doubt, the appalling dangers and enormous effectiveness of popular and theatrical demagoguery.”

  Impressed by her conclusion, Houseman went on to produce a modern-dress Julius Caesar, with the emperor as a leader along the lines of the Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini. Following that he staged a sensational King Lear on Broadway in 1950. By then the protean Englishman had shown an unerring instinct for works that caused chatter and/or made a satisfactory profit for their investors. Bigwigs at MGM had already invested in Kiss Me, Kate, Cole Porter’s rendition of The Taming of the Shrew; they thought it was time to do a straight adaptation of Shakespeare to showcase the studio’s glossy style. Houseman was the logical choice to produce Julius Caesar. The director would be Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a major force in film since his Oscars for writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives in 1949 and All About Eve the following year. There was no need for this team to pore over casting directories. They had already filled the roles in their minds.

  Louis Calhern had proved himself as a Shakespearean actor as well as a movie villain; he would make a pompous, vulnerable Caesar. John Gielgud, with his “lean and hungry look” and elegant diction, was ideal for Cassius. James Mason would be Brutus; Edmund O’Brien, a veteran of the Mercury Theatre, but better known for his tough-guy roles in B movies, was cast in the small but pivotal role of the provocateur Casca. Deborah Kerr would play the blindly loyal Portia, Brutus’s mate; Greer Garson was Caesar’s anxious wife, Calpurnia. That left one major role to be filled: Marc Antony. The rising young actor Paul Scofield was mentioned for the part and a screen test arranged in London. From Hollywood, Houseman cabled Mankiewicz and asked him to delay things for a few days. “I had just had a mad but brilliant idea,” wrote the producer in his memoir, “that we seriously consider Marlon Brando for the role of Antony.” The suggestion was met with general disbelief by Houseman’s English colleagues. When they heard Marlon’s name, they immediately thought of Stanley Kowalski bellowing for Stella and assumed that this was his natural speaking voice. The producer knew better. He remembered a young, articulate Marlon playing opposite Paul Muni in A Flag Is Born and convinced Mankiewicz to let the actor audition. Marlon was in no mood to get into costume but he did agree to tape one of the speeches. After all, he argued, it wasn’t his looks they were worried about, but his diction. Marlon didn’t use the familiar “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech. Instead he chose Marc Antony’s vengeful prediction to the Senate after the assassination:

  A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;

  Domestic fury and fierce civil strife

  Shall cumber all the parts of Italy….

  And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,

  With Ate by his side come hot from hell,

  Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice

  Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war…

  Houseman appraised it as a “powerful and flawless recording.” It was so good that a false rumor made its way around the industry: Laurence Olivier had made the tape and Houseman had fallen for the substitution. Mankiewicz was not so enthusiastic at first. In his opinion Marlon needed to work on his articulation—the voice was supple enough but self-consciously gentle or, as he put it sardonically, “exactly like June Allyson.” Just the same, he could see the virtues of casting a maverick in the role, particularly since Marlon was willing to take a pay cut in order to work with such a distinguished group. When he signed on, no publicity was issued. That led Hedda Hopper to tell her readers, “I don’t believe the rumor that Marlon Brando will play Marc Antony in MGM’s Julius Caesar. His voice just wouldn’t blend with the rest of the cast.”

  In fact it did, for two reasons. He was moved anew by the passages he had pored over in the Shattuck Academy library. And Gielgud went over the speeches with Marlon, line by line, adding fervor and grace to his approach. As they worked together, the Englishman passed on a lifetime of wisdom about playing Shakespeare: how to clarify a subtext, how to recite iambic pentameter in a natural manner, how to sustain interest over the course of a long monologue. Some of the coaching is evident in the finished film but, Houseman insisted, the real credit had to go to Brando himself. In take after take he repeated his speeches without a hitch, never losing his energy or concentration.

  Houseman was unaware that the Brando performance had its own subtext. During the filming Marlon learned that Elia Kazan had cooperated with congressional investigators, naming a whole string of “subversives.” The director set up an elaborate defense of his films for the HUAC, pointing out that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was strongly pro-American and that Viva Zapata! was discernibly anti-Communist. Some of Gadge’s onetime friends responded by cursing him in public, or by crossing the street rather than greet him. Arthur Miller topped them all: He wrote a play called The Crucible. Set in eighteenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, it reviled those who gave in to hysterical witch hunters.

  Marlon hardly knew how to respond. At this point he was a sentimental activist with only a superficial knowledge of American politics, Left or Right. All he had was the scuttlebutt: Fox chief Spyros Skouras warned Gadge that if he wanted to continue his movie career he would have to spill his guts. Yet Gadge’s defenders said the Committee already had the names he mentioned: Morris Carnovsky and his wife, Phoebe Brand; J. Edward Bromberg; Art Smith; Clifford Odets. The detractors responded: In that case why wasn’t Kazan satisfied with his testimony? Why did he have to follow it with a self-justifying full-page ad in The New York Times: “Secrecy serves the Communists. At the other pole, it serves those who are interested in silencing liberal voices. The employment of good liberals is threatened because they have allowed themselves to become associated with or silenced by the Communists. Liberals must speak out.”

  Looking back, Conrad Bromberg, son of J. Edward, coolly appraised Kazan’s situation. Gadge “w
asn’t about to be destroyed. Business was involved, too. Twentieth Century–Fox had pictures in the can directed by Kazan. In a sense he had leverage. He also had a contract for several hundreds of thousands of dollars. So if he did a number for them they had to do a number for him.” Bromberg’s take, spoken many years later, was exactly what Marlon believed the day he took a morning break with Mankiewicz. As they walked along one of the studio streets, the director turned to say something and noticed that tears were coursing down the actor’s face. In a low voice, Marlon asked, “What do I do when I see him? Do I bust him in the nose, or what?” Mankiewicz knew very well who the “him” was; the story of Kazan’s capitulation was in every paper and on everyone’s lips. The director knew that he had to calm Marlon down or risk the loss of a pivotal member of the cast. As they ate lunch, Mankiewicz discussed Kazan’s career move, using the vocabulary of a Los Angeles self-help guru. “Try to understand his pain,” counseled the director. “He’s got to have pain.” Booming generalities filled the air. As feel-good and fatuous as the advice was, it seemed to take hold. Marlon never again raised the subject of Gadge in Mankiewicz’s presence. He swallowed the sadness and rage, and used it to make his performance all the more memorable.

  Marlon’s autobiography devotes one line to his work on that film: Among all those British professionals, “for me to walk onto a movie set and play Marc Antony was asinine”—yet another example of his persistent self-denigration, and wholly incorrect. Indeed, the actor who played Marc Antony’s servant was quick to praise Marlon’s self-discipline. “The anti-Brando people would have been astonished at how professional he was,” said William Phipps. “They were quick to think of him as being a rogue and sloppy. But he came to the set extremely well-prepared. Yeah, he was a Method actor—Marlon’s method.” After a screening, John Huston praised Marlon in a different way: “Christ! It was like a furnace door opening—the heat came off the screen. I don’t know another actor who could do that.” Gielgud offered the young American a full season at Hammersmith, costarring with Scofield. In time he might even get to play Hamlet. Marlon politely declined; he said he had no interest in acting in the theater. The reply was both true and disingenuous. Streetcar had been instructive; repeating the same lines for months at a time revealed his low threshold of boredom. But something else lay behind the refusal. Gielgud was a workaholic, so committed to his vocation that he scarcely knew anything else. In 1939 a story about him made the rounds. Returning home with a bunch of newspapers, he was asked whether Germany had declared war on Britain. “Oh, I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “But Gladys Cooper has got the most terrible reviews.” He was also an out-of-the-closet homosexual who brought his lover to the set, but who could assume any character in any play, gay or straight. When Gielgud put Cassius’s uniform on for the first time, the entire cast watched in wonderment as he turned from a WASP-ish gentleman into a hard-edged, convincingly masculine Roman soldier. What they saw was more than artifice; it was art, and Marlon could not bring himself to acknowledge that truth. It implied that what he did for a living was an honorable and worthy vocation.

  1954–1955

  That Streetcar Man Has a New Desire!

  1

  Upon the release of his latest film, Marlon became everything MCA had hoped for, and more. With four edgy and lauded roles behind him, he was the hottest property in Hollywood, the first sexually threatening star since Rudolph Valentino.

  Separated by thirty years, Rudolph and Marlon appeared to be as different as Naples and Omaha. In fact, the similarities were uncanny. Pre-Valentino, the silent screen’s male ideals were straight arrows like Douglas Fairbanks and William S. Hart; after The Sheik opened in 1921—exactly three decades before the debut of Streetcar—conditions changed. The hot-eyed Italian electrified the postwar American female. In her biography of Valentino, Dark Lover, Emily W. Leider wittily asserts that the actor’s image “helped to deflower America.” A movie magazine put it in a less extravagant manner: Rudolph “does not look like your husband. He is not in the least like your brother. He does not resemble the man your mother thinks you ought to marry.” Men tried to denigrate him as a slinky androgyne, a “pink powder puff.” It did no good; the ladies were crazy about him. Soon, young men on the make were being called “sheiks,” and sometime afterward a brand of condoms called Sheiks carried a profile of Valentino.

  In a valedictory, Charlie Chaplin saluted the great lover of the silent screen, who died young: “He had an air of sadness. He was intelligent, quiet and without vanity, and had great allure for women.” H. L. Mencken was more pointed and tragically accurate: “Valentino’s agony was the agony of a man of relatively civilized feelings thrown into a situation of intolerable vulgarity, destructive alike to his peace and to his dignity. Here was a young man who was living daily the dreams of millions of other young men. Here was one who was catnip to women. Here was one who had wealth and fame. And here was one who was very unhappy.”

  Marlon Brando could relate to those sentiments. Upon his arrival the contemporary beaux idéals of the cinema also turned into back numbers. Overnight, Anthony Quinn noticed, “everybody started behaving like Brando.” The hesitant, wounded, sexually volatile presence of this new star was irresistible. Like Valentino, Marlon did not look like anyone’s brother or husband—he was unfraternal and did not in the least resemble an ideal candidate for the altar. Men tried to dismiss him as androgynous; retouched pictures of Marlon engaged in sex acts with other men circulated in New York and Hollywood. If they served to make him attractive to male homosexuals, female filmgoers were turned on in much larger numbers and with greater intensity. They continued to be iron filings to the Brando magnet. Yet for all the workmen’s compensations of money and fame, he, too, exhaled an air of melancholia; he, too, was a surprisingly vulnerable figure surrounded by wretched excess. It was one thing to be a sly ladies’ man about town and quite another to be the latest sex symbol. It reduced you from a private seducer to a public joke, a punch line, a satyr with a permanent erection. The only way to deal with the process was to characterize the city as Tinseltown and himself as a wage slave like any other guy. He just had a bigger paycheck; that was the only difference. What was Hollywood? he asked anyone who would listen. Before they could reply he supplied the answer: “Simply a place where people, including me, made money, like a mill town in New England or an oil field in Texas.” He could see by their faces that they didn’t believe a word he said.

  2

  “The Fifties,” observed John Updike, who came to maturity in that period, “should be understood as, like the Twenties, a post-war decade. The returning veterans had set the tone for the colleges; serious study, leading to the private redoubt of the career, the kids, the collie, and the tract house. As in the Twenties, business interests reasserted control over government.”

  These conditions were not to last. Although the youth of the 1950s were subsequently labeled as the Silent Generation, a great deal of angst and fury bubbled just below the surface. Americans, particularly American working men, had to deal with mixed messages. On one hand, executives were encouraged to play the game: white shirt and tie, gray flannel suit, and political opinions to match. On the other hand, numerous bestsellers warned about the price of conformity. The titles of two were especially eloquent: The Lonely Crowd and The Crack in the Picture Window.

  Through that crack, intimations of a rebellion could already be seen. A young blues singer attracted the attention of Sun Records, whose founder was looking for “a white man with a Negro sound and the Negro feel.” Handled correctly, he “could make a billion dollars” for the two of them, cutting across the race line. “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky” went out on one 78-rpm record, and Elvis Presley caught on. He already had his musical role models, but he needed a look, a pictorial style. He had already seen Marlon’s first three movies; he would slowly begin to take on the actor’s smoldering, alienated affect.

  Signs of chang
e were everywhere. In the field of art, avant-garde ateliers displayed the aggressive “drip” paintings of Jackson Pollock, the violent, disturbing artworks of Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, the abstract dirges of Mark Rothko. In the concert halls the strange aleatory compositions of John Cage were taking hold, and in the far-out jazz clubs Charlie Parker’s saxophone played ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths, notes so far removed from the original tune that audiences were at once intrigued and baffled.

  Unsurprisingly, movies were the last art form to address these stirrings. Hollywood faced enormous losses if its products failed to please; filmmakers could hardly be expected to lead the way in any social or aesthetic movement. Even so, executives were not numb to what was going on outside the studio gates, and among the canniest of them was Stanley Kramer. The producer sensed that he could tap into the emerging spirit of the age—and make money in the process. To that end, he bought the rights to “The Cyclists’ Raid,” published in Harper’s magazine. The article recounted a weekend in Hollister, California. Back on July 4, 1947, a gang of young bikers invaded the small town, terrifying its populace before they were finally subdued and ejected.