At that very moment there came a deus ex machina. Packing up, Kazan and Schulberg heard noises across the hall from their hotel room. A party was under way, hosted by Sam Spiegel, who knew them both by reputation. They stopped by and got his ear. The producer listened to their sad story and asked them to come to his room the next morning. At the stroke of 7 a.m., writer and director knocked on Sam’s door. To an inert, yawning figure, Schulberg read the script, acting out all the parts. He described the experience as “talking to a cave of silence,” but the cave did not remain soundless for long. Shortly after Budd said, “Fade out,” S. P. Eagle pronounced the magic words: “We’ll make the picture.” Within weeks he arranged private financing and sold the distribution rights to Columbia.
Spiegel had only one choice for longshoreman Terry Malloy, centerpiece of the drama: Marlon Brando. Kazan was not so sure; given the HUAC business, Marlon would probably want no part of him. Sam then encouraged Gadge to consider Frank Sinatra for the starring role. After meeting the singer, now turned serious actor, Kazan convinced himself that “Frank had grown up in Hoboken, where I was going to shoot the film, and spoke perfect Hobokenese. He’d be simple to work with.”
He had not reckoned on Spiegel’s silver oratory. The next thing Kazan knew, Marlon Brando had signed a $100,000 contract to appear in the film, now called On the Waterfront. The famous Spiegel charm had roped him in, and Marlon would work with Gadge after all. Sinatra had already been promised the part, but Kazan made no protest because, he subsequently confessed, “I always preferred Brando to anybody.” Stung by the betrayal, Sinatra sued Spiegel for $500,000, charging breach of contract (later settled out of court), refused to talk to Kazan for months, and thereafter referred to Marlon as “Mumbles.”
The hard work now began. Spiegel, who posed as a laid-back money guy, was actually an instinctive and severe editor. He knew what was wrong with the script and what was right with it, and insisted on all sorts of fine-tuning. At three-thirty one morning Schulberg’s wife, Virginia, awoke to find the bathroom light on in their Bucks County house. Budd was shaving and muttering to himself. “I’m driving to New York,” he explained.
“What for?”
“To kill Sam Spiegel.”
Instead of murdering Sam, though, Budd and Gadge obeyed him, rejiggering scene after scene. After all, Sam had made the picture possible, when all around them had turned away. But there was an end to gratitude; when Kazan said the words, “Let’s shoot!” the editing sessions were over. Rehearsals took place at the Actors Studio in November 1953. It was an appropriate venue; many Studio actors were hired to play featured roles, among them Karl Malden as Father Barry, modeled on an outspoken Hoboken priest, Father John Corridan; Rod Steiger as Charley “the Gent” Malloy, Terry’s brother; Rudy Bond as a local goon, Nehemiah Persoff as a cab driver, and Martin Balsam as a crime investigator. Other performers brought New York accents and faces every bit as convincing as Sinatra’s New Jersey persona. Among them were Lee J. Cobb (another “friendly” HUAC witness, wryly named Johnny Friendly in the film), Fred Gwynne, and Leif Erickson. Kazan also hired the retired prizefighters Abe Simon, Tony Galento, and Tami Mauriello for more verisimilitude. Schulberg’s friend Roger Donoghue, a middleweight who had killed another boxer, George Flores, in the ring and then hung up his gloves, was hired to teach Marlon the moves and postures of an ex-pug. When they were getting to know each other, Budd asked him, “Could you have been a champion?” Roger thought about it. After a pause he said, “I could have been a contender.” Budd put that phrase in the script.
The key Studio veteran was Eva Marie Saint, a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old blonde with a modicum of stage experience. Kazan had seen her in Horton Foote’s Broadway play A Trip to Bountiful, and asked her to read for the part of Edie Doyle, the sole love interest in Waterfront. One other actress was under serious consideration for the role, Elizabeth Montgomery, and Karl Malden helped both of them prepare for their reading. Kazan stayed on the fence—until Saint auditioned with Marlon. Kazan put them in a room and told her: “You’re a Catholic girl. You have a little sister. Her boyfriend is coming. She’s not home. Do not let this man in.”
Marlon listened to the instructions and talked his way into the imagined apartment with a combination of charisma and salt-of-the-earth purity of heart. “We laughed and giggled,” Saint remembered, “and I ended up laughing and crying at the same time. Gadge could see that sparks were flying, that Marlon had his way and that I was very vulnerable to him.” She sensed that what Brando did “was more than improvisation. It was that this young man had the power to see through you—you felt like glass. I stayed off balance for the whole shoot.”
Gadge cherished that unstable quality and tried to preserve it throughout the filming. As before, he kept everyone’s nervous tension at maximum strength. Some things eluded even his iron control, but Kazan’s luck held: The foul weather, for instance, worked in his favor. The winter of 1953 was especially miserable in the East, and on rainy days the chill seemed to get into the actors’ bones. The misery on their faces—caused by cold fronts rather than plot points—supplied the scenes with an unexpected pain, and the misty breaths, the stripped trees, and threatening skies gave every exterior scene an austere Italian neorealismo tone. “They were miserable-looking human beings,” Kazan observed, “and that includes Brando.” Indeed, at one point Marlon exhaled a steamy breath and muttered, “You know, it’s so fucking cold out here there’s no way you can overact.”
Although he insisted on leaving the set at 4 p.m. in order to see Dr. Mittleman, Marlon never gave Kazan the hard time everyone expected. When his parents visited the set, he was especially solicitous, introducing them to the cast and crew and making an extra effort to be polite to everyone. His mother was no longer hitting the bottle; she looked slim and chic and well turned out. But the years of alcoholism had done her in; she had lost weight because of liver and kidney trouble. Despite her cheery countenance, she was gravely ill.
Perhaps because Marlon was aware of his mother’s precarious health, perhaps because of a self-protective diffidence, the star’s relationship with Saint remained strictly professional. She was at the beginning of a long, happy marriage to theatrical producer Jeffrey Hayden, and if she was attracted to Marlon, and he to her, there was no offscreen liaison. “It was as if we were safe for each other,” she remembered. Kazan used Saint’s natural shyness to advantage; she had to play a romantic scene in a slip, and her discomfort before the cameras was noticeable. Kazan approached and whispered one word in her ear: “Jeffrey”—his way of saying, “You’re not going to bed with Terry Malloy; you’re going to bed with your husband.” In a moment the inhibitions were swept away, and she played the moment with a delicate fervor.
With all its metaphors and muckraking postures, Waterfront turned out to be, in essence, a film noir, following the stations of Terry Malloy, as the failed middleweight boxer rises from mobbed-up punk to transfigured hero. Terry, whose favorite company is the pigeons he raises on a rooftop, operates in a treacherous and claustrophobic environment. Racketeers run the Hoboken docks and Johnny Friendly, head of the longshoremen’s union, is as dirty as the loading platforms. In this little world defiance is a death sentence. Terry’s brother Charley is Friendly’s trusted henchman; Terry got his undemanding job because of Charley’s influence with the boss. When Friendly is challenged by Joey Doyle, a valorous dockworker, Friendly has him rubbed out—with the full knowledge of Charley and the unwitting assistance of Terry.
Outraged, the local priest, Father Barry, delivers an on-the-spot sermon: “Some people think the Crucifixion only took place on Calvary. They better wise up…. Every time the mob puts the crusher on a good man, tries to keep him from doing his duty as a citizen, it’s a crucifixion!” He exhorts the longshoremen to stop the blind obedience to Friendly, to fight the corruption on the docks by going before the Waterfront Crime Commission. Terry wavers, torn between his loyalty to Charley and his growing affection
for a neighborhood beauty, Edie Doyle—sister of the murdered man. Ultimately he decides to give evidence—to name names—at the commission hearing. Afterward he finds his own beloved birds slaughtered in their rooftop cage: This is what happens to stool pigeons. Charley Malloy is literally hung out to dry, a corpse dangling from a meat hook. And worse is still to come. At the finale Terry is attacked by vicious thugs, as the longshoremen stand by, unwilling to help. But Terry will not be silenced. After the beating Father Barry urges him to his feet. Bloody, intrepid, the wounded man inches his way toward the workplace. Thanks to Terry’s grit, the longshoremen realize that the savagery was Friendly’s curtain call. The committeemen are about to take away his authority, leaving him with nothing but a loud mouth and empty threats. As he bellows, the men defiantly fall in line behind Terry. They have a new leader.
The Christian symbolism of Waterfront was so obvious Schulberg felt obliged to speak to Catholic laymen at Fordham University. Even though he was Jewish, he told the rapt audience, “I agreed with so much of the social message of Jesus and I was moved by it, and further moved by the depth and commitment of people like Father Corridan. It wasn’t a problem for me.” Nor was it a problem to portray Terry as noble. If the scenarist was more objective than the director, their ideas meshed in Terry’s speech: “I’m glad what I done—you hear me?—glad what I done.”
Yet it was not this calculated speech that audiences remembered, nor was it the scene they cherished most. Nor did they attach much meaning to the story of a good, simple man whose informing was justified. Marlon, as usual, had lost himself completely in the role, had picked up the loping gait and halting, insecure speech of the boxers he’d sparred with years before. (“I can make a hell of a middleweight out of this kid,” Donoghue burbled after one session. Schulberg intervened. “Just get us through this movie. Then you can have him back.”) In Hoboken, Marlon had watched real longshoremen at work, old sagging bulls of men, and younger guys with hard bodies and closed faces. He made their gestures part of Terry Malloy’s persona, and the authenticity of the performance was what hypnotized filmgoers. In many ways, Terry was the flip side of Stanley Kowalski, still inarticulate, but now compassionate and perplexed, searching for affection rather than conquest, wanting to do right in an atmosphere of compromise.
Among the film’s many memorable encounters, two stood above the rest. As Terry and Edie first get to know each other, she accidentally drops a glove. Terry picks it up, and, after absentmindedly playing with it, gently tries it on his own hand. What could have been a paperback Freudian moment became one of the film’s few tender exchanges. To Terry, who once wore Everlast ten-ounce mitts in a boxing arena, her glove is a delicate and exotic item—like Edie herself. He treats it with unaccustomed care, winning her trust and the audience’s heart.
But it was the second scene that journeyed from the screen to the lexicons. With the exception of Clark Gable’s “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” from Gone with the Wind and Ingrid Bergman’s oft-misquoted “Play it, Sam” from Casablanca, no lines were to be so repeated, mimicked, satirized, and admired. When Johnny Friendly learns that Terry plans to testify before the committee, he orders a hit. As an extra twist of the knife, Charley Malloy is ordered to do the job. The brothers take a ride downtown, during which Charley pulls out a pistol and turns it on Terry. The script called for Steiger to give Brando a choice—cancel the testimony or die: “Make up your mind before we get to 437 River Street.”
Marlon thought the incident was bogus. The audience, he complained to Kazan, would never believe that Charley, “who’s been close to his brother all his life, and who’s looked after him for thirty years, would suddenly stick a gun in his ribs and threaten to kill him. I can’t do it that way.”
Gadge insisted that the exchange was credible and touching.
The two actors gamely performed the scene as written. They did it again. And again. Marlon kept insisting that the result was false to the characters until Gadge sighed, “All right, wing one.”
In the improvised exchange, Steiger spoke of his kid brother’s all-too-brief boxing career. The brevity had to be blamed on Terry’s manager: “He brought you along too fast.”
Marlon added to Schulberg’s lines, reaching for the words that would put him in the books. “It wasn’t him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, ‘Kid, this ain’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson.’ You remember that? ‘This ain’t your night!’ My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville. You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money…. I could a had class. I could a been a contender. I coulda been somebody instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charley.”
Kazan, quick to claim credit on many occasions, was unusually candid about the Brando monologue. The praise he received for directing that scene belonged to Marlon. “Who else could read ‘Oh, Charley!’ in the tone of reproach that is so loving and so melancholy and suggests that terrific depth of pain? I didn’t direct that; Marlon showed me, as he often did, how the scene should be performed.”
Kazan didn’t mention Marlon’s dark side, evident when it came time for Charley to react to Terry’s speech. “Marlon wouldn’t give up his appointment with the shrink,” said one of the supporting cast members, “and that bent Rod Steiger into a pretzel. He had to do his closeups with Gadge reading Marlon’s lines.” Kazan didn’t mind; a great film was worth any number of inconveniences and bruised egos. Marlon didn’t give it a backward glance. When he saw the dailies, he said the taxi scene was effective because of the subtext, not the performance; almost every viewer believes he could have been a contender, whether in boxing or dry cleaning. The star’s refusal to recognize his own worth was a long story with many chapters to go.
4
Waterfront wrapped in January 1954. Two months later, Dorothy Pennebaker Brando hovered between life and death. Marlon, at her bedside along with Jocelyn, heard his mother advise both of them to “try to get along with people.” He nodded dutifully and kept the tears back. But when she assured her children, “I’m not scared, and you don’t have to be,” he broke down. He had never made his peace with Dodie, never found a way to forgive her weaknesses, or to express his gratitude. After the funeral and cremation he seemed even more rudderless than usual. Out of nowhere he felt the need to dump Movita, to be alone again, to find new work or abandon acting entirely. During the filming of Waterfront he had signed a two-picture deal with Zanuck, but the first movie was supposed to be The Egyptian, a fatuous, pseudo-historical epic of the ancient Middle East—the diametrical opposite of Waterfront and its gritty, emotional truth-telling. Nothing seemed to be going right, and Kazan, ever-mindful of Kazan, was worried. Gadge hankered for an Oscar, a demonstration from the town that whatever he had done in the past, the only politics that counted now were studio politics. Damned if he would let anyone spoil things.
When Waterfront was edited and Leonard Bernstein’s edgy score added, Kazan took a print out to the Coast. For formality’s sake he sat at Harry Cohn’s side at a private screening room, pretending to take notes for an already edited movie. To his relief, Harry only wanted to know how much the filming had cost. The answer provoked a smile: $900,000, very cheap for a top-of-the-bill feature. Gadge recalled: “He had a girl with him, of course; they always do.” The pair had already dined, and probably indulged in some other pleasures, because about a third of the way through the screening, heavy, rhythmic breathing filled the air. Cohn was fast asleep. Kazan let him snore away, fearful that if the mogul woke he would ask to see the film from the beginning.
Kazan knew what he had. A day before the notices were printed, three hundred people stood in line at the Astor Theater. The foll
owing morning Waterfront was greeted with critical raves. Even so, Columbia had no idea how to market its hit. In a sidelong reference to Bing Crosby’s Academy Award–winning role as a benign priest, one early poster read, “A story as warm and inspiring as Going My Way… but with brass knuckles!” Other ads used money quotes—“Movie making of a rare and high order!” (New York Times). The film needed no such promotion; word of mouth did it all. In the end, the strongest evidence that Waterfront was a blockbuster came not from the box-office receipts, but from Abe Lastfogel, president of the William Morris Agency, who assured Gadge that he could now make any picture he chose. From Hollywood, Darryl Zanuck sent a note to Kazan, indicating the temperature of the town: “The advent and debut of CinemaScope was responsible, more than anything else, for my final decision against the property.” His peers fell all over themselves to curry favor; Kazan, filmmaker, was back. But there was still one hurdle to go: the volatile Marlon himself.
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