Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  On the set in Kyoto, Marlon brought out his familiar arsenal of mischief. He pretended to have broken his arm for a day (“One more picture with Brando and I’ll be an old man,” Logan sighed). And he holed up in the Miyako Hotel, shunning the cast, scarcely talking to a soul until his father and aunt Betty arrived to watch him perform. Throughout, Marlon engaged in a tug-of-war with his director, sometimes to see who would win the power struggle, sometimes just to egg himself on. One of the film’s most affecting scenes comes when Gruver discovers the bodies of his friend airman Joe Kelly (Red Buttons) and the Japanese woman he loves (Miyoshi Umeki), whose culture forbids her to marry an American. The double suicide serves as a profound, life-altering shock, and Marlon insisted that he should play it in a spectacular manner, with howls of sorrow, followed by a smashing of furniture and a tearing of hair. It was as if he had decided to follow Yogi Berra’s much-quoted advice: “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” On the one hand, he was still very much the star; put ten people in the same shot and he was the one you watched. On the other hand, his instincts, once nearly infallible, were beginning to play him false. Whatever Marlon’s flaws, he had never been vulgar or over the top except when in summer stock. Suddenly he was making hammy, tasteless moves—an ominous turn of events. Happily, Logan stood up to Brando, refused to countenance the changes, denounced Marlon’s ideas as amateur theatrics, and redid the scene his way. Major Gruver pushes through a small crowd of traumatized Japanese witnesses, discovers the bodies, stands silently, and then murmurs, “Oh, God.” The director’s version made the cut.

  Logan made many other wise decisions, but the shrewdest of all was one Marlon ignored to his everlasting regret. Truman Capote had persuaded The New Yorker to send him on an overseas assignment—to profile Marlon Brando in situ. The previous year Capote had followed an American troupe touring the Soviet Union in a production of Porgy and Bess. The prose in The Muses Are Heard was faultless, the attitude disparaging. “He’ll make us look like idiots,” Logan warned, and gave the author a wide berth. Out of perversity as well as curiosity, Marlon made himself available.

  Carlo Fiore was on hand when Truman entered the Brando digs, caparisoned in desert shades: tan woolen cardigan, matching corduroy trousers, and suede chukka boots. He carried a disarming gift, a bottle of 100-proof vodka. After some small talk, the little man suddenly launched into a story that should have served as an alarm bell. He and Leonard Bernstein regularly enjoyed tête-à-têtes at Lenny’s apartment, during which they eviscerated the reputations of their mutual friends and acquaintances. Unbeknownst to Capote, Bernstein had turned on a hidden microphone. He debriefed Truman, encouraging him to speak of hidden sexual scandals, monetary problems, and family squabbles.

  Some time afterward, Capote was invited to a well-attended party at the Bernstein apartment. At the appropriate moment Lenny asked for silence—and then pressed the playback button on his tape recorder. “It was a monologue in maliciousness,” Capote remembered. At first the insulted and injured turned on him—how dare he spill such intimate secrets? What kind of creature befriends you only to betray you? But later in the evening the crowd became furious with Bernstein. He was obviously the one who had encouraged Truman, and who edited the tape so that only one speaker could be heard. He was considered more cruel than Truman, who at least had the good grace to look miserable and humiliated. Lenny was laughing out loud. They made their exits, speaking angrily to the host. His stunt had backfired.

  Capote’s story, coupled with the gift of vodka, “made me suspicious,” Fiore would write later. He had a strong foreboding that Truman “would chop Brando up into small pieces, then go around telling people that mayhem was the writer’s art.”

  That’s precisely what Capote did. Trading on his own unhappy childhood, he unburdened himself to Marlon, confessional here, rueful there, open about his homosexual encounters, lost loves, and personal liabilities. It was an infallible technique. “The secret to the art of interviewing,” Capote was to remark, “is to make the other person think he’s interviewing you. You tell him about yourself, and slowly you spin your web so that he tells you everything. That’s how I trapped Marlon.”

  The vodka helped. By the end of the evening, Marlon, whose excesses rarely included booze, had consumed far too much alcohol. His tongue was thoroughly loosened and Capote got everything he wanted. Although journalists had covered Brando since Streetcar, he had always been able to keep them from probing into his psyche. Wisecracks furnished his defense, along with tall tales of amorous adventures and well-rehearsed anecdotes about his childhood. Capote was different. He knew which questions to ask, when to offer the next drink, which buttons to push. The Brando profile, “The Duke in His Domain,” ran in the November 9, 1957, issue of The New Yorker. That magazine was not in the habit of publishing nonfiction hatchet jobs, and “The Duke in His Domain” occasioned more commentary than anything it had published since John Hersey’s Hiroshima.

  Less than a third of the way into the piece, it becomes clear that alcohol has loosened Marlon’s tongue, exactly as Truman had planned. The interviewee complains about his oversensitivity, advising the interviewer to be numb to the miseries of this brutal world. Otherwise they will have their way with him—as they have had Marlon Brando. Once in a while there are remissions; psychoanalysis has been of some aid. “But still, the last eight, nine years I’ve been pretty mixed up, a mess pretty much.”

  It is evident from the piece that Capote considers the actor a self-absorbed monologuist and something of a hypocrite, contrasting Marlon’s high-minded ambitions with a recent proposed Pennebaker film, a commercial Western entitled A Burst of Vermilion. Capote goes on to describe, in considerable detail, the squalid condition of Marlon’s room, with uneaten food and soiled clothing scattered about, along with undigested books of Eastern philosophy. Encouraged by Capote, Marlon indiscreetly runs down both parents, but focuses mainly on Dodie and her habit. He wanted to take care of her, he claims in bathetic tones, have her move in with him in Manhattan. But his love was insufficient. “I couldn’t take it any more—watching her breaking apart, in front of me, like a piece of porcelain. I stepped right over her. I walked right out. I was indifferent. Since then, I’ve been indifferent.”

  Indifferent about his ascent, certainly. Success as an actor, he goes on, is a meaningless thing. Celebrity leads nowhere. He has a good mind to abandon the whole hollow career. Because in the end “you’re just sitting on a pile of candy gathering thick layers of—of crust.” Worst of all, in Capote’s eyes, is Marlon’s dismissal of live theater. That this once-great, now self-indulged performer could put down a three-thousand-year-old art form in favor of movies was too much to bear (although Capote had accepted Hollywood money for the script of Beat the Devil and would appear as an actor in Murder by Death).

  The conclusion is particularly unkind, treating its subject as a man-child who has fooled the world even as he has deceived himself. The interview over, Capote takes his leave to wander the streets of Kyoto. Suddenly he encounters Brando again, squatting like a Buddha on a garish sixty-foot poster advertising The Teahouse of the August Moon. “A deity, yes; but, more than that, really, just a young man sitting on a pile of candy.”

  Marlon was livid when he read the piece, and wondered whether he ought to sue Capote and The New Yorker for character defamation. Lawyers wisely discouraged that idea, and he contented himself with dreams of throttling the writer. Forget about it, advised Logan. “You should have killed him before you invited him to dinner.” Theoretically, the article shouldn’t have provided much of a detour in Marlon’s life and career. How damaging could a biographical article be, even if it was written by the shrewdest craftsman in the business? But it did make a difference. Marlon had been portrayed as a windy clown, a fool with too much money and not enough character. Actors who envied his high position were emboldened to criticize him, comedians jumped on his mannerisms, and critics spotted egregious flaws in his work. In 1958, a
fter several months of battering, Marlon wrote a letter to Capote, complaining of the damage done to an innocent who trusted a journalist. “Here is the inevitable communication,” he began, attempting to ape the author’s polished style. Now that he had time to reflect, he realized that an amalgam of vanity and “unutterable foolishness” had deluded him into thinking their conversation was private.

  Capote saw no reason to reply; the mission had been accomplished to his satisfaction. As Truman’s biographer Gerald Clarke notes, Brando’s “soul could not have been more public if it had been on exhibition at Madame Tussaud’s.” Despite the mockery and denigration, however, Marlon enjoyed the last laugh—at least as far as his bank account was concerned.

  When Sayonara opened at the end of 1957, Time labeled it a “modern version of Madame Butterfly which has gained in social significance but lost its wings,” adding with a portmanteau word that the film was marred by “too much Brandoperatic declamation.” Newsweek found Sayonara a “dull tale of the meeting of the twain.” Fans disagreed. Star power and that traditional studio favorite word of mouth made the movie a nationwide hit. Jay Kanter had negotiated a profitable contract: Ten percent of the gross went to Marlon. It would be enough to put him in the millionaire category. For the moment, at least, Pennebaker Productions had been redeemed.

  The judgment of Brando’s peers, of course, was something else entirely. Here Capote had done considerable damage. On Oscar night, Miyoshi Umeki won for Best Supporting Actress and the reformed standup comedian Red Buttons got his statuette for Best Supporting Actor. Marlon, nominated for the fifth time as Best Actor, got nothing. Alec Guinness took the prize for his performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Another award was granted that night, but few home-grown filmmakers paid attention. Federico Fellini’s film Nights of Cabiria won for Best Foreign Language Film. It was the second time one of his movies had been cited. The previous year La Strada, starring Anthony Quinn, had taken the prize. Remembering Ingrid Bergman, the Hollywood elite gave the Cinecittà products a smattering of emotionally distant applause. As far as they were concerned, such products starred Italian stallions, busty signorinas, and aging American actors trying to give their careers a jolt. Such foreign films had comparatively small grosses and therefore were of interest only to New York cineastes and snobs.

  Marlon now made a point of denigrating the whole idea of prizes; as he put it, “I never believed that the accomplishment was worth more than the effort.” This cool, ironic statement veiled his true feelings. After the Academy snub he felt an urgent need to take back the hill. An adaptation of Irwin Shaw’s bestseller The Young Lions came to his attention and he passed up other opportunities to star in it. The book was Shaw’s entry in the Great American War Novel sweepstakes, competing directly with Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity. His was by far the glossiest and most calculated. The winding plot concerned the lives and fortunes of three men in World War II: Noah Ackerman, a sensitive Jew from New York City; Michael Whiteacre, a WASP movie producer; and Christian Diestl, a proud young German officer. The three men are like far-apart images on an inflated balloon. Slowly Shaw lets out the air and draws them closer and closer until they meet in a shattering finale. The casting of the trio was at once classic and bizarre. Noah would be played by Montgomery Clift, but this was not the same actor of the early 1950s. Screening the public from his homosexual liaisons, he now moved in a small circle of intimates. Elizabeth Taylor was one of his few female friends, and it was at a party in her mountain house on May 12, 1956, that he had drunk too much, not for the first time. As he had proceeded uncertainly down the hill, he suddenly lost control of his car. It picked up velocity, skidded, and rammed full speed into a telephone pole. One of the attendees saw the accident from his rearview mirror. He sped back to the house, frantically calling for an ambulance. Taylor shrieked, “I’m going to Monty!” and ran down the steep hill. Patricia Bosworth, Clift’s biographer, states that the actress was “like Mother Courage. Monty’s car was so crushed you couldn’t open the door, so Liz got through the back door and crawled over the seat. Clift pantomimed weakly to his neck. Some of his teeth had been knocked out and his two front teeth were lodged in his throat. She reached deep and pulled them out.” He was taken to Cedars of Lebanon, where doctors operated on a broken nose, fractured jaw, and facial lacerations. The patient had also suffered a severe cerebral concussion and back injuries. Nine months later, his face reconstructed and body healed, Clift had returned to the set of Raintree County. But he was not the same man physically or psychologically. So began what was to be called the longest suicide in Hollywood.

  Whiteacre would be played by Dean Martin, whose film career had suffered from the breakup with his clownish partner, Jerry Lewis. The light comedian Tony Randall had been a strong candidate for the part, but Clift preferred Martin, and Marlon went along with the choice. Their nods were good enough for director Edward Dmytryk. Marlon was cast against type as the German. In keeping with his developing view that evil was relative and that any nation or group was capable of monstrous crimes, he welcomed the chance to play a Nazi with dimension and sympathy. His views ran directly counter to those of the unforgiving. In an essay about cant, Vladimir Nabokov evoked the Russian word poshlost to describe “bogus profundity,” emotion that posed as thought. A favorite instance: “We all share in Germany’s guilt.” Irwin Shaw was another who had no sympathy for the devil. In his short story “Act of Faith” Shaw put his attitude into the mouth of Major Segal, a Jewish-American soldier conversing with a captured German officer.

  “Segal,” said the major, “after this war is over, it will be necessary to salvage Europe. We will all have to live together on the same continent. At the basis of that, there must be forgiveness. I know it is impossible to forgive everyone, but there are millions who never did anything….”

  “Like you?”

  “Like me,” said the German. “I was never a member of the party. I lived a quiet middle-class existence with my wife and three children.”

  “I am getting very tired,” Segal said, “of your wife and three children.”

  Marlon plowed ahead regardless; he intended to remake Christian, give him more dimension than he had in the book, use him to deny the concept of national character. When the troupe went off to Paris for the filming, Marlon held a press conference. “Naziism,” he stated, “is a matter of mind, not geography…there are Nazis—and people of good will—in every country.” V-E Day lay a dozen years in the past, and both Dmytryk and screenwriter Edward Anhalt were willing to soften Shaw’s original intent. Still, it was the star who took the biggest hit when the novelist learned what was going to become of his German officer.

  It all began in a Paris restaurant, where a cup of hot tea spilled on Marlon’s trousers. He screamed in agony and was promptly sent off to a hospital. Recuperating, he called Anna, elaborating on what had happened. She suggested a headline: brando scalds balls at prince de galles. He laughed as he winced. The third-degree burns took a long time to heal, though, and the stay did little to sweeten his disposition. Nor did a subsequent meeting with Clift. Brando told his fellow actor that he knew all about alcoholism; he didn’t want to see a man he admired go down that path. Had Monty tried psychotherapy? Clift was insulted—look at Marlon, at least twenty pounds overweight; didn’t he have a food problem? Monty continued to deny his habit even while consuming double vodkas, and distanced himself from further inquiries. By the time Marlon sat still for a televised interview with CBS correspondent David Schoenbrun, he was in a sullen and confrontational state. So was the other guest, Irwin Shaw. When their host asked about the upcoming film, Shaw replied that Marlon, like most actors, was incapable of playing flat-out villainy. Instead, he wanted Christian to be what fellow war novelist Merle Miller called “a cuddly German.” Infuriated, Marlon said that Shaw was ignorant, that he had no idea of who Christian Diestl really was. Yes, it took a writer to put him on the page, but only a p
erformer could breathe life into the man: “Nobody creates a character but an actor. I play the role; now he exists. He is my creation.” With matching self-inflation Shaw told Brando he was a monument of ignorance. The former playwright marred a lot of former friendships when he went on to define an actor as nothing more than a container. “You have to pour ink into the goddam fool to get anything out of him.”

  Marlon was no less competitive when filming got under way, except that his focus shifted from Shaw to Clift. Over the course of several films he had told everyone within hearing range that acting was only a sideline. It afforded him “the luxury of time.” He was required to do a movie once a year for three months at the most, “which paid me enough so I didn’t have to work again until my business manager called and said, ‘We’ve got to pay your taxes at the end of the year, so you’d better make another movie.’” Once more, statement and reality were at odds. On the set of Lions, he studied Monty at work, trying not to show his interest, but giving the show away as he stared intently. Irked, Monty instructed Dmytryk, “Tell Marlon he doesn’t have to hide his face when he’s watching me act.” In a turnabout, the next week he cased Marlon, now sporting bleached-blond hair and the accent of an educated German. Clift watched two takes. Unimpressed, he informed the director, “Marlon is sloppy—he’s using about one tenth of his talent.”

  The stars appeared in only one scene together, and most of the time the competition was not between actor and actor but between actor and addiction. Monty alleviated his psychic and physical pain with fruit juice laced with powdered Demerol and bourbon. Marlon was obsessed with lunches, dinners, and snacks, consuming large meals on his off days, then crash-dieting so he could cram into his military uniform.