Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  To that end, Gadge dispatched Roger Donoghue to keep his eye on the star. Brando was to make no public statements about acting or Hollywood or writers or informers. All he had to do was shut up and make nice and the Oscar was his. The boxing coach conveyed this advice to Marlon, who groused about it but complied. Though he refused to admit the truth to Donoghue—or anyone else, for that matter—he wanted a statuette almost as much as Gadge did. During the run-up to the Oscars, no provocation could make him say anything that might embarrass himself or the film. Waterfront received twelve nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor. Once more Marlon was pitted against Humphrey Bogart, who had starred as Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. But this time out the oddsmakers favored Brando three to one—the multiple of his next salary offer.

  The bookies were on the money. At the Pantages Theatre on Oscar evening, On the Waterfront garnered eight Academy Awards, tying the record for a black-and-white feature set the year before by From Here to Eternity. Montgomery Clift had received his third Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his performance in that film; now it was Marlon’s turn—and Gadge’s—for a stronger affirmation. Kazan was gracious, Marlon shy. In the presence of a thousand attendees, including Marlon Brando, Sr., plus an estimated thirty million viewers, the actor held the gold figure and smiled down on it. With his signature mumble, he allowed that “it was much heavier than I thought,” vaguely mentioned those who had been “so directly responsible for my being so very, very glad,” called the occasion “a wonderful moment and a rare one,” and went offstage to wild applause. Whether the reticence was itself an act, no one could tell.

  Euphoria took over. Columnists called the winner America’s greatest and most influential actor. Over the next month Brando and Clift found themselves dubbed “The Gold Dust Twins,” and read predictions about a renaissance of American filmmaking. Smiles and kudos greeted Marlon wherever he went. Someone was always picking up the check for him and listening to the young man pontificate: “Acting, not prostitution, is the oldest profession in the world. Even apes act. If you want to invite trouble from one, lock your eyes on his and stare. It’s enough of an assault to make the animal rise, pound his chest and feign a charge; he is acting, hoping that his gesture will make you avert your eyes.” Offers crowded the in-box of his ambitious agent, Jay Kanter. There seemed no limit to what this thirty-year-old star could achieve in the next decade or so. Laurence Olivier was generally acknowledged as the world’s greatest actor. But Sir Laurence was a forty-seven-year-old intellectual whose technique was in every sense a world away from Brando’s. Besides, he was a Brit. With all his professed diffidence, Marlon was keenly aware that he had only two real rivals: Montgomery Clift and a twenty-four-year-old the columnists were calling “The New Brando.” The title did not sit well with the old Brando, and something very much like jealousy began to invigorate him. He had met James Dean at parties and found the youth a little too idolatrous for comfort. He referred to him as “the kid” and was displeased to find him copying every Brando gesture, down to the T-shirt, the motorcycle, the conga drums, and the habit of throwing his jacket on the floor when he entered parties. At one of those soirees Marlon took him aside and dispensed a little advice: “Jimmy, you have to be who you are, not who I am.” In later years Marlon remembered that Dean “had an idée fixe about me. Whatever I did, he did. He was always trying to get close to me. I’d listen to him talking to the answering service, asking for me, leaving messages. But I never spoke up. I never called him back.”

  5

  Although he was used to tumult, Hollywood got to be too much for Marlon. In the spring of 1954, having deleted Movita from his life, he traded California for New York. There he settled into an apartment adjoining Carnegie Hall and acquired a new girlfriend, fashion designer Anne Ford. The affair was brief and cleansing; he needed to start over, to find a different path. But choosing the next woman turned out to be a lot easier than selecting the next film. He dreaded The Egyptian, a bloated epic that would feature Darryl Zanuck’s latest protégée, Bella Darvi, née Bella Wegier, whose screen name had been concocted from the first names of the producer and his wife, Virginia. One meeting with Ms. Darvi was enough for Marlon to see that she was not Zanuck’s acting discovery, but Zanuck’s inamorata, and that the film would be a colossal waste of time and energy.

  Without informing anyone, Marlon vanished. Aware that Zanuck had hired professionals to locate him, he kept changing locations before he could be run to earth. He dressed elegantly, in contrast to his usual T-shirt and jeans, to throw off bounty hunters. Wally Cox and Janice Mars helped with the deception, giving their friend shelter in their apartments when he was not registered at an East Side hotel under the name of his maternal great-grandfather, Myles Gahan. Just when things had quieted down, Marlon made the mistake of returning to his apartment to get some personal items. The place had been staked out, and U.S. marshals nabbed him. Zanuck announced a lawsuit; court papers said that the actor had violated his contract, forcing production for The Egyptian to close down while the producers awaited Marlon Brando’s replacement, Edmund Purdom. MCA stepped in and worked out a deal. Zanuck would forgive the debt, provided that Marlon appeared in his next production, Desirée, the story of Napoleon and his consort, Josephine.

  Trapped, Marlon was forced to agree to the producer’s terms. His way of fighting back was the same one he used in military school: insurrection. The director of Desirée was Henry Koster, né Hermann Kosterlitz, yet another German refugee who had caught on in Hollywood. This particular German was a featherweight, best known for his work on Deanna Durbin musicals and for bringing the comic team of Abbott and Costello to Hollywood. Marlon distrusted the man on sight, and proceeded to follow his own first law of cinema: “Never give a stupid, egotistical, insensitive or inept director an even break.” He made a policy of forgetting his lines or reciting them with a nasal pseudo-British intonation and creating havoc between takes, passing around a football, squirting extras with a fire hose, and mocking the Anglo-Indian intonations of his costar Merle Oberon.

  More galling than the weakness of Koster, or of the property itself, was the ascent of James Dean. The novice actor was filming East of Eden under Kazan’s guidance, and word was that the kid had an extraordinary presence, an aura. Marlon went to the set to see what the fuss was about. Jimmy didn’t seem all that much when they met at parties, but there was no question that Gadge had an eye for actors on the come. The two men stared at each other. James dropped his eyes. This adulation meant very little to Marlon; as he watched a new star being created he felt uncomfortable and strangely obsolete. With ill-advised, revealing words, he told reporters, “Mr. Dean appears to be wearing my last year’s wardrobe and using my last year’s talent.” Marlon returned to the Desirée set surlier than ever, and for a while it appeared that the feature would be a kind of live cartoon, a filmed asylum run by a man pretending to be Napoleon. Discipline was required, and Koster was obviously not the man to supply it. Producer Julian Blaustein took the job. He drew Marlon aside and warned him that the picture would be summarily shut down if there were any more hijinks or showing-up of the director or his fellow performers. End of contract, end of salary, end of story.

  Marlon couldn’t tell whether Blaustein was making an empty threat or a real one, but he was unwilling to take a chance. From that day forward he stopped capering and tried to remember his lines. If his impersonation of the Corsican was uninspired, the picture finished on time and within its narrow budgetary constraints. En route, he acquired some additional girlfriends. One, Josanne Mariani-Bérenger, a striking nineteen-year-old, had been serving as an au pair for Bela Mittleman’s family. She wanted to pursue a career in Hollywood, regarded Marlon as the catch of a lifetime, and expressed the desire to marry him right away. The other was the exotic Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno, who seemed to desire freedom every bit as much as Marlon did.

  As soon as Desirée wrapped Marlon took off for Europe on the Île de Fra
nce. The man who played Terry Malloy tried to look the other way as he crossed some picket lines on the docks, but the incident did not escape alert photographers and tabloid editors, who made an item out of it. Josanne had preceded him, and several weeks later the two met at her hometown, Bandol, near the Riviera. Her father was an unworldly French fisherman, but he, like his neighbors, had heard of Marlon Brando and gave interviews to the local paper. To one reporter, he announced the engagement of his daughter and the acteur américain. When this made the International Herald Tribune, a journalist sought out the ex-girlfriend Movita. Her forecast: “I do not think he will marry her soon. He isn’t the type to walk into something unless he’s sure.” Whether her feelings were prompted by jealousy or realism, Movita had Marlon’s number. Seeking to escape the snares of publicity, he had walked into a trap. Paparazzi descended on the village, snapping pictures of the couple walking on the shore, peeking in the windows of the Bérenger home, even lighting up the interior of the local church with flashbulbs as Josanne knelt and prayed. It was all too much for Marlon. Suffocating, he sought to escape the “carrion press.” Perhaps, theorized a friend, “he would have felt like a heel, cutting out on Josanne. Then he learned that the year before she had posed in the nude for an artist. The paintings were in several galleries. No harm done, but it was enough to give Marlon a sense of self-righteousness. If she could do that, how pure was she after all? And so he got away without guilty feelings.”

  In the fall Marlon made the cover of Time, scowling out from newsstands as Napoleon Bonaparte. The portrait helped to boost the picture, even though the accompanying headline was not indulgent. It inquired: too big for his blue jeans? Inside, an unnamed producer tried to sound eupeptic. “Two more like Brando,” he predicted, “and television can crawl back into the tube.” This was an exercise in graveyard whistling. Everyone in the business knew the truth: There were some fifty million sets in U.S. homes, and thousands more were being purchased every week. Despite the inducements of wide screens and high-fidelity sound, more people were staying home to watch the little screen instead of going out to see the big one. Brando couldn’t save the studios; no one could.

  Not that this meant much to Josanne. In France they still watched movies in theaters; television was something you saw in bistros. Eager for reconciliation, she took advantage of the American publicity swirl, flying to New York and appearing on television news programs. She identified herself to everyone as Brando’s fiancée. Marlon played along; when he debarked from the liner United States he went to her hotel and escorted Josanne to his Carnegie Hall apartment. Reporters had been waiting for days for a glimpse of the actor, and seeing the couple arm-in-arm made them ecstatic. With unaccustomed amity, Marlon and Josanne posed for pictures. It was all a sham. He knew theirs would be a fishbowl marriage, doomed before it began. He picked fights with her; she returned the insults with some of her own. During a dinner with Marlon and Tennessee Williams she suddenly turned on her fiancée and accused him of closet homosexuality. She told Williams that Brando and the actor Christian Marquand had been lovers. The playwright was too drunk to take it all in. Marlon said nothing. He seemed to lack the energy to pull down the curtain. Before the spring of 1955, though, he was spotted in the company of several women, among them Rita Moreno and the Swiss actress Ursula Andress. Josanne angrily left Marlon and took her own apartment. She went out on a number of dates with new escorts, but carried a torch for months, perhaps years, afterward. Occasionally Marlon would phone and chat for a while, and she allowed herself to fantasize about a reunion. Then weeks went by while she waited for the call that never came. One of her dates remembered Josanne imbibing too much wine, reminiscing about Marlon, then going into the bathroom, where she smashed wineglasses against the tub and wailed, “That fucker, that son of a beech!” By that time, the son of a beech had thoroughly extricated himself. His mind was on a new project, an adaptation of the Broadway hit Guys and Dolls, costarring the runner-up in the Terry Malloy contest, Frank Sinatra.

  6

  WANT VERY MUCH TO HAVE YOU PLAY MASTERSON, READ THE TELEGRAM FROM JOSEPH MANKIEWICZ. IN ITS OWN WAY ROLE AS I WOULD WRITE IT FOR YOU OFFERS CHALLENGE ALMOST EQUAL OF MARC ANTONY. Marlon teetered; the director pushed him over. “You have never done a musical; neither have I.” And bear in mind: Before Julius Caesar, “we never did Shakespeare, either.”

  Sam Goldwyn had spent the unprecedented sum of $1 million to acquire the hit musical Guys and Dolls, and he wanted to ensure that his money would come back tenfold. The secondary comic parts would be played by the Broadway regulars Stubby Kaye, B. S. Pully, and Vivian Blaine. For the male leads, however, no less than superstars would do. Kirk Douglas came up for consideration, as did Robert Mitchum and Burt Lancaster, even though none of them had ever sung a note onscreen. Clark Gable had; he was in the running, along with Bing Crosby. Goldwyn briefly pondered the idea of casting Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis as Sky Masterson and Nathan Detroit before coming to his senses. In the end he decided that Marlon was a box-office draw, and that all fans who bought a Frank Sinatra record would spend good money to see the Chairman of the Board in a big role.

  The casting of Brando and Sinatra seemed inspired—one of the great show-business confluences of the twentieth century. Even at this early point both were on their way to the pantheon. No one would come close to the influence they wielded on their fellow actors and singers, and they might end up showing each other a modicum of courtesy and regard. It was not to be. Danger signs were apparent during the earliest days of production. Sinatra told the press he was ecstatic to be playing Nathan Detroit; in reality he much preferred the part of Sky Masterson, the romantic lead. For the second time Brando had been given a role Sinatra coveted, and the word “forgiveness” had never found a place in Frank’s lexicon. Moreover, he saw in Marlon a figure-head of youthful rebellion, an avatar of all that threatened his career. The wounded swagger notwithstanding, Sinatra was a deeply insecure man in the mid-fifties. For by then rock ’n’ roll, the new favorite of American youth, had reached out from the black ghetto to the white world. The electronic sound, the new young voices, the strong back-beat, pushed most of the established crooners from center stage. Frank condemned it outright as “the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.” Elvis Presley, a fan of Marlon’s rebel pose, sang the kind of music that was “deplorable, a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac. It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.”

  Against such a personality Marlon stood no chance. And there were technical problems as well. After all, this was a big-league musical, requiring everyone to dance and sing. Marlon had taken some choreography classes as a newcomer in Manhattan, but had never sung anywhere except in the shower. All that would be taken care of, he was assured. His character would be built up, dance lessons would be furnished: MGM’s vocal coach, Leon Ceparo, was the best in the business. True enough, but like the boxing coach Roger Donoghue, Ceparo would be conned by the Brando ability to ape the mannerisms of others. A couple of lessons were enough to convince the coach that Marlon “could make the Met if he studied hard,” an event as likely as the Metropolitan Opera tenor Jussi Björling playing Stanley Kowalski.

  The tone for the film was set on the first day of rehearsals, when Brando was introduced to Sinatra. “Frank,” Marlon confided, sotto voce, “I’ve never done anything like this before, and I was wondering, maybe I could come to your dressing room and we could just run the dialogue together?”

  Sinatra was succinct: “Don’t give me any of that Actors Studio shit.”

  From that point on, the wall between them rose a few more inches every time the actors spoke. The two men were diametrical opposites: Marlon required multiple takes; Frank detested repeating himself. Marlon repeatedly changed the dialogue. Frank, who had committed hundreds of lyrics to memory, rarely blew a line. Marlon tried to find the essence of Sky Masterson. Many of Frank’s intimates were gamblers; he had
known Nathan Detroits in New York, Atlantic City, and Las Vegas and needed no research. Marlon was in strange territory. Frank had nothing to prove. He had risen from bobby-soxer heart-throb to the most popular self-described “saloon singer” in America, had already made more than twice as many films as Marlon, and, as proof that he was not just a pop icon, had received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in From Here to Eternity. Marlon was essentially a loner. Frank’s entourage followed him everywhere.

  Could this marriage be saved? Mankiewicz did his part. He listened sympathetically to Sinatra’s complaints about Marlon’s repeated errors and retakes, and then heard Marlon out when he objected to his costar’s romantic crooning. Detroit was supposed to be a character, for Chrissake, not a disc jockey’s dream. Masterson was the love interest here.

  Nothing helped. By the time the cameras were ready for the big number, “Luck Be a Lady,” Marlon had lost his confidence. He begged producer Sam Goldwyn to let him lip-synch to the voice of a professional tenor. Goldwyn refused; he knew a film with the legitimate claim “Marlon Brando Sings!” would be worth millions at the box office.

  And he was correct. The picture turned out to be better than anyone expected, but was still an aesthetic failure. The second bananas did all the heavy lifting: The Broadway veterans were unfailingly funny, and the dialogue, based on Damon Runyon’s charming tales of an underworld that never existed, worked well onstage: