Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  The feeling passed. A few days later Marlon received a call from a psychiatrist, advising him that his father had come in with severe depression. He was “on the edge of a precipice.” No guilt attended the son’s reply: “When he’s hit bottom—please call me and I’ll see if I can arrange something.”

  Marlon’s other affairs, financial, amatory, professional, proved a little easier to manage. France Nuyen was back on the string; so was Rita Moreno, and there were others. When he was not out with them he wandered alone through the house on Mulholland Drive, moody, introspective, trying to resolve problems that had troubled him since childhood. He ransacked Rollo May’s The Meaning of Anxiety and Man’s Search for Himself; Karl Menninger’s Love Against Hate; Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, a little volume of aphorisms by a longshoreman-turned-philosopher. The son of German-Jewish immigrants had caught the imagination of liberal and conservative thinkers, not least because he himself had almost no formal education, yet managed to discern the nature and origins of mass movements. He argued convincingly that the totalitarians of the twentieth century, notably Hitler and Stalin, began as men with feelings of self-hatred. They became successful because their programs offered cowards and nobodies a sense of significance. Marlon, who felt a kinship with all autodidacts, marked up the book with exclamation points and arguments; the author’s aperçus were at once intriguing and disturbing. He could go along with some:

  • “The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.”

  • “The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”

  • Failed artists (like Hitler and Mussolini) are “the most violent extremists in the service of their holy cause.”

  But he had trouble with the notion that the “segregated Negro in the South is less frustrated than the nonsegregated Negro in the North.” Try that on Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. One way or another, Marlon would have to address the subject of race in the United States—if only he had the time. Things always seemed to get in the way. Every day, for example, new scripts arrived by mail or messenger. He could discard most of them. Not all, though. Not the one by Tennessee. After Williams’s play Battle of Angels died in Boston in 1940, the playwright revised it and retitled it Orpheus Descending. This modern setting of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend opened on Broadway in 1957, starring Maureen Stapleton and Cliff Robertson. Panned by most critics, it lasted for a mere sixty-eight performances. But Williams refused to quit. He had enjoyed success with Streetcar, and less than a decade later with the film adaptations of The Rose Tattoo and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He decided that the play, touched up and furnished with yet another title, would make a splendid feature. United Artists agreed.

  The Fugitive Kind had already attracted the dark, vulpine force of nature Anna Magnani (leading lady of The Rose Tattoo) as Lady Torrance, Williams’s ideal for the role of a frustrated middle-aged housewife. The Actors Studio graduate Joanne Woodward would play Carol Cutrere, a young, slatternly heiress. Marlon was familiar with the play, and liked the script. He could see himself as Snakeskin Xavier, another in a long line of Williams’s stud/antiheroes. MCA was brought in to negotiate with United Artists. Marlon expressed his apprehensions about appearing with a Vesuvius like Magnani, nicknamed La Lupa—the wolf. “They’d have to mop me up,” he predicted. The studio dangled the bait of a $1 million salary. Mindful of alimony bills and Pennebaker debts to be paid, he signed on the dotted line. With that gesture, Marlon Brando became the first American actor ever to receive a seven-figure paycheck. The zeroes after the numeral one did not prevent him from proclaiming his discomfort, not only with the leading lady but with the director.

  Sidney Lumet had started as an actor (replacing Brando in A Flag Is Born back in the day), switched to directing television, and then made a distinguished film debut with 12 Angry Men. At the time Lumet was married to Gloria Vanderbilt. They were dedicated New Yorkers, and he arranged to have The Fugitive Kind filmed within easy commute of Manhattan. The place he chose was Milton, New York, about an hour’s drive from the city. The small town became a stand-in for a Dixie village. Already disoriented, the Italian Magnani got more flustered when she found that Marlon hadn’t the slightest interest in her as a woman. The actress had just turned fifty-one. Up to now, she had been considered something higher than beautiful—the essence of the female animal. Even so, the testimony of the mirror and the daily footage could not be denied. Was she still alluring after all these decades before the camera? In her eyes, only Marlon could provide assurance. His memory of their first encounter is ungentlemanly, but rings as true as the one with another aging actress, Tallulah Bankhead.

  On a summer afternoon, La Lupa managed to get him alone in her hotel room. Without preamble she kissed him feverishly. They rocked back and forth as she tried to lead Marlon to the bed. He saw that she was “in a frenzy, Attila the Hun in full attack.” Grabbing her nose, he pinched so hard she released her grasp, and he made his getaway.

  In response, the furious Magnani gave him, and everyone on the set, a hard time. Marlon was equally difficult. Woodward resented his pauses and vagueness; the only way she would work with him again, she stated later, “is if he was in rear projection.” Cast in a small part, Maureen Stapleton, watching from the sidelines, complained about his halting delivery: “I could make a dinner in all that space.”

  Williams held his tongue throughout the filming, but the playwright’s unhappiness showed on his face. In time he was to pass harsh judgment on Marlon: “Brando’s offbeat timing and his slurred pronunciation were torture for Anna, who had to wait and wait for her cue, and when she received it, it would not be the one in the script.” Thus, the film was “mutilated by that uncontrollable demon of competitiveness in an actor too great, if he knew it, to resort to such self-protective devices.” Generally, reviewers were unhappy with the results. Lumet had opened up the theater piece and evoked fine performances from the rest of the cast, but his efforts could not compensate for the drama’s shortcomings. What had seemed poetic on the page once again turned into self-conscious rhetoric: “I tried to pour oblivion out of a bottle, but it wouldn’t pour out.” Magnani was overemphatic, Brando oversubdued, and Woodward a bit too florid for her own good. Only on one or two occasions did a scene seize the imagination, as in Marlon’s defining speech to Lady: “You know there’s this kind of bird that don’t have no legs, so it can’t light on nothing and has to stay all its life on its wings in the sky. I seen one once, and its body was as tiny as your little finger, but its wings spread out this wide, and they was transparent and you could see the sky right through them. The hawks can’t catch them because they don’t see ’em. They live their whole lives on the wing, they sleep on the wind—and never light on this earth but one time when they die.” Marlon had difficulty with this monologue. He was going through a custody fight for his son, and he kept going up on the same spot. “The same line,” recalled Lumet, “and bang, he’d lose it.” Marlon asked for some time off. The director thought not; the longer Marlon stewed about his offscreen troubles, the worse he would be onscreen. They went through thirty-four takes until both men were satisfied. At that point, the star suddenly hugged the director. Lumet thought it was because Marlon “respected the fact that I hadn’t violated him, that I let him fight through it himself and did not try to be a psychoanalytic smart-ass.” Their mutual effort caused the scene to shimmer; the rest of the film had nothing comparable to offer.

  Released in 1959, Fugitive found little critical support. On one coast, the Los Angeles Times labeled Williams’s personae “psychologically sick or just plain ugly.” Back east, The New Yorker called the film “cornpone melodrama,” and the playwright/scenarist was greeted with catcalls as he left the Manhattan premiere. “I just booed back,” he told friends. One-Eyed Jacks, released a little over a year later, suffered much the same rec
eption. Paramount had taken over, laboriously paring six hours of footage down to two hours and twenty-one minutes. The result was one of the most striking—and incoherent—Westerns ever made. Its best moments deserved to be mentioned alongside the works of John Ford, and shown alongside Shane and High Noon. But the commercial editing had come at a prohibitive cost. Some dialogue didn’t track; many reaction shots occurred without the proper stimulus. Looking at the result, Malden sounded like the rueful Terry Malloy: “If we’d made it the way Marlon wanted it to be made, like a Greek tragedy, it could have been a breakthrough western. It could have been a classic.” After Marlon viewed Paramount’s final cut, he sighed, “Any pretension I’ve sometimes had of being artistic is now just a long, chilly hope.” Reviewers expressed bewilderment and the editors of Esquire magazine gave it one of their smirky Dubious Achievement Awards: brando on the rocks. In later years, much too late for the studio bottom-liners, Jacks became a cult film, deservedly admired by fans of retro Westerns like Red River and The Searchers. An odd little book by novelist/screenwriter Barry Gifford is a lyrical defense of the movie. In Brando Rides Alone, he concedes that Marlon’s thirteenth film is “not a masterpiece,” but adds that he would always remember Brando’s Rio “suppressing his hatred of the father figure he once loved and trusted who’d thrown him to the wolves. It may well have been the poet e. e. cummings saying, ‘How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, mister death?’”

  Marlon, whose luck and timing used to be infallible, had lost his way. Nothing seemed to click nowadays. Friends told him about the Dean Martin–Judy Holliday musical, Bells Are Ringing, still playing in neighborhood theaters. He caught it one evening and watched Frank Gorshin do a dead-on impression of Marlon Brando as a lost, inarticulate figure. People broke up all around him. He scrunched down in his seat and grumbled. What was wrong with these people? He didn’t mumble anymore. It was as if they hadn’t seen a damn feature since 1953.

  1960–1963

  Stockholders, Man the Lifeboats!

  1

  Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was released between the terminals of The Fugitive Kind and One-Eyed Jacks, and like many of his colleagues, Marlon failed to recognize its significance. James Dean was dead and Montgomery Clift incapacitated, but an important new actor had entered the global scene. In 1960 Marcello Mastroianni appeared in his breakthrough role as a world-weary journalist surrounded by materialistic excess. Together, he and Fellini struck a nerve and created a worldwide hit. The Italian performer refused to be taken in by the sudden rush to fame. He told interviewers that Federico had selected him for the role because the picture needed “a face with no personality.” Here, Marcello’s attitude toward the professional actor posing as artiste coincided with Marlon’s. Brando: “An actor’s a guy who, if you ain’t talking about him, he ain’t listening.” Mastroianni: “An actor is someone who goes out to recite ‘To be or not to be’ while he’s thinking about his lawyer or worrying about the money he has to send to his first wife.”

  But with all his self-deprecation, Mastroianni knew he was onto something vitally different, just as the young French directors knew that they had just tapped into a fresh kind of cinema with Nouvelle Vague—New Wave—movies like François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.

  Had Marlon been more focused, had his career guides been more leery of the collapsing studio system, he might have been a part of these foreign experiments. At the very least he could have found work in challenging, intelligent epics. For despite the recent box-office disappointments, Sam Spiegel believed that Marlon would be an ideal Lawrence of Arabia, made him an offer, and sent him Robert Bolt’s vivid scenario. To Peter O’Toole’s undying gratitude, Marlon responded: “I’ll be damned if I’ll spend two years of my life out in the desert on some fucking camel.”

  He made misjudgments in his personal life as well. The separation from Anna Kashfi had gone from bad to impossible. After their divorce became final she tried to prevent Marlon from seeing Christian, and he went to court to gain access to his son. He called her “emotionally disturbed.” She said he was a lout, whose behavior “tended to degrade himself and his family in society.” Most of her accusations centered on Marlon’s habit of bringing his latest girlfriend around and showing her off to Christian. The judge restored Marlon’s visitation rights, provided that he didn’t do anything to provoke his ex-wife or disturb their child. Marlon promised to do as instructed—and then promptly took up flamboyantly with his old flame Movita Castaneda. Anna dismissed this as a cheap gesture, done only to make her jealous. Actually, there was more to the affair than that; in June 1960, he and Movita were secretly married in Mexico. They returned to Los Angeles, but declined to live as man and wife. Movita was pregnant and soon delivered a child, Miko. Marlon installed wife and baby in a spacious Coldwater Canyon house and continued to live bachelor-style on Mulholland Drive.

  All this cost thousands per month. There were now two children and two wives to support. James Cagney’s stirring performance failed to save Shake Hands with the Devil, Pennebaker’s 1959 film of Ireland in the postrevolutionary period. The company’s next production, Paris Blues, wasn’t scheduled to go before the cameras for another year. The need for cash was dire, and producer Aaron Rosenberg knew it. He had a question for Marlon: What about a remake of the MGM classic Mutiny on the Bounty, with Brando in the role of Fletcher Christian? At first Marlon was unenthusiastic; he didn’t believe a simple shot-for-shot restatement of the old Clark Gable–Charles Laughton epic would suffice for the modern viewer. However, his curiosity had been aroused. He got hold of the Charles Nordhoff–James Norman Hall historical novel from which the movie had been adapted. It turned out to be part one of a trilogy. The first book concerned the actual revolt against the tyrannical Captain Bligh. The second, neglected volume, Men Against the Sea, followed Bligh’s astonishing survival in a small boat with a bunch of loyal crewmen and short rations. The third, Pitcairn’s Island, told of the mutineers in later years: how some enjoyed their freedom; how others were hunted down, brought back to England, and hanged; how the remaining seamen turned against one another, resulting in recrimination and murder. The latter portions of the story fascinated Marlon. He agreed to do the film with this proviso: “I want to investigate what happened to the sailors after the mutiny. Why did they go to Pitcairn Island and within two years kill each other off? What is there in human nature that makes men violent, even in an island paradise? That’s what would interest me.”

  The demand seemed reasonable enough to Rosenberg. He assigned novelist Eric Ambler to do a scenario incorporating all three books and persuaded MCA that this would be the most remarkable Brando film to date. Surely it would be the most remunerative. Playing the part of Fletcher Christian, the star would earn a flat fee of $500,000, plus 10 percent of the gross, plus $5,000 a day for every day the film went past its six-month schedule (practically a guarantee given the complexities of production), plus $10,000 a week to cover overtime expenses. Additional bait was dangled: Most of the movie would be shot on location in Tahiti, the nirvana Marlon had visualized when still a miserable cadet. He succumbed.

  Privately, Brando was not so pleased with the man assigned to steer this Bounty, Sir Carol Reed. It was hard to believe the studio’s claim—that it was aiming for another Ben-Hur, MGM’s megahit of 1959. Sir Carol’s specialty was the intimate psychological drama, not the wide-screen blockbuster. The Fallen Idol, for example, explored the mind and loyalties of a boy who witnesses a killing. The Third Man, Graham Greene’s atmospheric thriller, was basically the story of two men, one honorable and drunk, the other amoral and romantic, who compete for the attention of a woman in depleted postwar Vienna.

  A meeting was arranged between director and star; it was not a success. Instead of discussing the material at hand, Marlon went on about the California rapist Caryl Chessman, who had been sentenced to death. This was a story crying out for a film, Marlon insisted, one that could show the foll
y of capital punishment. Reed hadn’t the slightest interest in making such a movie. When the discussion finally got around to Bounty, Reed found the actor’s suggestions useless. Brando had only the most rudimentary knowledge of Tahiti, derived mainly through old photographs and the paintings of Gauguin. Brando’s request for historical accuracy was dismissed out of hand. To defuse the conflict, Rosenberg stepped in, reminding his star that no one in the audience would know or care about what British sailors or Tahitian natives wore in 1789. Moreover, Bounty was scheduled for release in two years. At that time it would compete with two other wide-screen extravaganzas: Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz; and Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier under the direction of Stanley Kubrick. Authenticity was fine for documentaries. But the tale of Bligh versus crew was cluttered with salts and officers. It needed all the sex and spectacle it could get.

  Marlon was anxious to get to the Society Islands; he accepted the producer’s argument. The events of the first few weeks could have come from an Evelyn Waugh farce. A group of allegedly glamorous Tahitian women—vahines, in their native language—had been hired on the spot. Their come-hither looks turned out to be unusable because their teeth were marred by brown stains and streaks, the result of chewing betel nuts. To cover these flaws, they were required to wear temporary dentures. Some five thousand were flown in from the United States. The vahines were delighted, took the teeth caps, and vanished to admire themselves in their home mirrors. They went missing for days. An MGM official came up with the solution: Extras were required to pick up their dentures in the morning and hand them in at the end of the day. The sand was equally disappointing. It was black powdered lava, disappointing to the eye and ugly to the camera. Tons of white sand had to be trucked in from a faraway beach.