The new corporate heads wanted to change the way films were made and sold, and they wanted to entice youth back to the film palaces. Yet these men and women were raised on the movies of Goldwyn and Warner and Zanuck and Zukor, and they were still in love with the images of the past. Should their movies comment on the moral chaos of contemporary America? Or should they look backward to the glory days of pure entertainment?
By 1968, a number of features had begun to reflect this dilemma. Two hits directly echoed the current social unrest and seemed poised to invigorate the industry with a new comic force (The Graduate; The Producers). Two others were moral fables cloaked as science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey; Planet of the Apes). A fifth looked at American violence without condemning its strangely attractive characters (Bonnie and Clyde). At the same time, though, the retro musical genre showed its age (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; Funny Girl). And sweaty, achingly unfunny comedies (Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River; Candy) gave the lie to the tag line in many full-page ads and billboards: “Movies Are Better Than Ever.” Judging by the last film, they were worse. Much worse.
Of all the trash to unreel that year, no film was more appalling than Candy. Directed by Marlon’s old copain Christian Marquand, it was based on a ten-year-old chichi sendup of Candide by the nose-thumbing novelists Mason Hoffenberg and Terry Southern. This time out, the protagonist was female, exploited by a parade of sexual predators without ever losing her innocence. Filmmakers had stayed away from the novel because of its tittering faux-pornographic style. But in the anything-goes 1960s ABC-TV backed a screen adaptation, assuming that it would attract a young audience. To further assure the picture’s success, it was loaded with celebrities, including the Beatle Ringo Starr, Richard Burton, John Huston, Charles Aznavour, and Marlon Brando, much as Casino Royale had boasted the star power of Peter Sellers, David Niven, and Woody Allen.
Apparently no one in charge noticed that the James Bond spoof, released only one year before, had been a major bomb. So was Candy. Most American critics found Buck Henry’s adaptation smug and wit-free. The movie, observed the Times’s bright new reviewer Renata Adler, managed “to compromise, by its relentless, crawling, bloody lack of talent, almost anyone who had anything to do with it.” After eviscerating Richard Burton for a “lack of any comic talent whatsoever,” John Huston and Ringo Starr for being “humorless,” and Charles Aznavour for performing “uncrisply and badly,” Adler relented when she came to Brando. As “a Jewish guru (the film has an ugly racialism and arrested development, frog-torturing soft sadism at its heart),” he was “less unendurable because one is glad to see him on the screen, in anything, again.”
Marlon knew the picture would be a turkey before he ever uttered a line. He had taken the job because of his friendship with Marquand, and because a few days’ effort would bring him a salary of $50,000. He needed every cent. Negotiations for Tetiaroa had been concluded in his favor, at a purchase price of $70,000. That was a onetime cost; more expensive were the bills coming in from Anna and Movita. The second Mrs. Brando had filed for divorce, demanding child custody as well as costs for upkeep of home and wardrobe. During the filming of Candy, Marlon asked fellow actor James Coburn if he had any children. Coburn, also a divorcé, said that he had two kids but that he didn’t get to spend much time with them. “I don’t either,” lamented Marlon, “and I don’t know how they’re going to grow up.”
Only Marlon’s ability to compartmentalize kept him afloat. In her elegant memoir Off the King’s Road, Phyllis Raphael, then the wife of a film producer, writes of an evening she and her husband spent with Marlon and Rita Hayworth. The time is 1968, the place a fashionable Westwood restaurant. No longer a sex symbol, the actress is ill and weary; only a few hints of the old glamour can be discerned. Yet that night the star pays court to her even as he slyly romances Raphael. “Marlon Brando in a brown velvet jacket with a black broadtail collar has his arm draped around Rita Hayworth’s shoulders, but his knuckles—light as a firefly’s wings—are tracing the upper flank of my left arm.” No one else at the table can see Marlon’s hand, but, she goes on, “his touch is heating up my skin like a sun reflector in the California desert.” And all the while he delivers a paean to Hayworth, what a sensitive actress she was, how her Stanislavski technique helped to mold his work. Hayworth leans back, “suddenly younger, even glowing. He’d moved her into the spotlight.” All the while, Marlon has other plans in mind. As the dinner concludes, he speaks to the younger woman: “‘Phyllis,’ he said in his soft, buttery whine, ‘I live on Mulholland. Up at the top, honey. You can’t miss it. Why don’t you come over later? I’m always up late.’” The invitation is not accepted, but she finds herself secretly covering the spot where she had been caressed, as if she could “save what was left of him from blowing away.”
Manifestly the seducer had not lost a step. Professionally, however, Candy had put him in the subbasement of his career. If Marlon didn’t care to count, others did. It was all over town that Brando had made eleven consecutive commercial flops. Paradoxically, the only way he could break the string was to make a twelfth. It was a modish thriller in the French Nouvelle Vague style, entitled The Night of the Following Day. By agreeing to star in the film, he would discharge his final obligation to Universal.
The director was Hubert Cornfield, whose previous credits included such bottom-of-the-bill pictures as Plunder Road and Lure of the Swamp. Marlon of course distrusted the man on sight. To further roil the proceedings, he maligned the script as “arty and nonsensical.” He had a point. In rural France four schemers grab an adolescent heiress and hold her for ransom. The quartet includes Marlon, at his thinnest in ten years; onetime girlfriend Rita Moreno; Richard Boone, best known for his TV series Have Gun—Will Travel; and Jess Hahn, a veteran heavy.
To compensate for a profound lack of plot and character development Night leaned on visual style. This it had in overplus: bleached-out interiors, an abandoned beach at sunrise, harrowing music, odd outfits. Perhaps the oddest were the blond wig worn by Moreno in her role as a scheming airline stewardess and by Marlon in his role as a devious chauffeur. Missing were credibility and narrative drive. Everything was ominous; nothing made sense. The last scene was a duplicate of the first—the heiress looks at the solicitous flight attendant. Had the kidnapping taken place in her imagination? Or is she foreseeing the horror to come? Marlon let it be known that Night made about “as much sense as a rat fucking a grapefruit.” His hostility carried over to the set. From the first day, some actors said they could feel a palpable tension between Marlon and his old girlfriend. Perhaps as a protective barrier Moreno had brought along her husband, a New York–based cardiologist, and their infant son. In the view of the more cynical and observant actors, however, that barrier had been painfully breached. To them, evidence of Marlon and Rita’s old attraction and revulsion was clear-cut, particularly during a pivotal scene. The chauffeur was to accuse the stewardess of drug abuse. Her denial would trigger a brief physical skirmish. In rehearsals Rita feigned a smack across Marlon’s cheek. But when Cornfield shouted, “Action!” her private resentments suddenly went public. She slapped her costar hard across the face. Astonished, Marlon retaliated by striking her with furious and inappropriate force. She burst into tears, the two tussled furiously, and the cameras recorded it all. “You’re through, you dumb bitch! You’ve had it!” Marlon shouted at the end of the scene, and it was not stated in character. This exchange made the final cut. The director tried to restore calm, but he was too inexperienced to assert any meaningful authority. In the final days, at Marlon’s insistence, the second lead took the director’s chair. Richard Boone restored order, commanding the cast with a severity Cornfield had never displayed. It was not enough. The star’s mental afflictions were never more apparent. Once again he seemed to hold two conflicting ideas in his head: a) his colleagues must not be injured by his behavior—it was incumbent on him to make Night, with all its shortcomings, the best it could possibly be; b)
all authority figures, even a good guy like Boone, must be defied and betrayed. After two days of unsatisfactory takes, Boone accused him of “phoning in” his lines. Marlon responded by inventing new speeches and making faces as the cameras rolled.
The end result was irreparable. As soon as the film wrapped the cast scattered, anxious to get as far away as possible. They had wasted their time and effort on yet another Brando movie gone awry. It didn’t matter whose fault it was; none of them would willingly work with him again. Universal pieced the mess together and released it quietly. One friendly review appeared in Time, no doubt triggered by that scene of unrehearsed malignity (Brando’s “powers remain undiminished by intervening years of sloppiness and self-indulgence. It is good to have him back”). The rest of the assays were appropriately withering. The Los Angeles Examiner said the dialogue was so incoherent it must have been improvised on the spot. In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael stated that Marlon “had never been worse or less interesting, not even in A Countess from Hong Kong.” And in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert inquired, “Should Brando really be wasting his time on this sort of movie?” No one knew the answer better than Marlon himself.
2
In the May 1968 issue of Jet magazine, Louie Robinson headed his article why marlon brando quit film for civil rights. With the knowing tone of an insider, Robinson told his readers that the actor’s decision had been made immediately after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, as the civil rights leader stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The murder triggered riots in more than a hundred cities across the nation, and five days later President Lyndon Johnson declared a day of mourning. Flags flew at half mast as a crowd of three hundred thousand paid their last respects. At the funeral, King’s haunting sermon was broadcast. In it he forecast his own death and asked that no mention of his awards and honors be made. All that needed to be recollected were his attempts to “feed the hungry…clothe the naked…be right on the [Vietnam] war question,” and “love and serve humanity.” The soul singer Mahalia Jackson sang his favorite hymn, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” as a nation wept.
During this period, wrote Robinson, Marlon “made one of the strongest commitments to furthering Dr. King’s work. White, wealthy and still a major star, the forty-four-year-old Brando would seem to have the most to lose and the least to gain. Yet, shortly after Dr. King’s death, Brando announced that he was bowing out of the lead role of a major film [The Arrangement] which was about to begin production, in order to devote himself to the civil rights movement.”
It was true that in the wake of national grief Marlon did appear on ABC-TV’s Joey Bishop Show, where he reflected, “If the vacuum formed by Dr. King’s death isn’t filled with concern and understanding and a measure of love, then I think we’re all really going to be lost here in this country.” And he did bow out of a starring role in The Arrangement, which would have reunited him with Elia Kazan, whose novel the movie was based on, and who was directing. But rhetoric aside, he had no intention of quitting filmmaking. He thought to carry on Dr. King’s legacy through the use of movies. Robinson did not know this, nor would he have understood it. Nor would Kazan. Nor, for that matter, would Marlon, who was making the whole thing up as he went along, infuriating everyone in the process.
One of the angriest was Gadge. With his novel, Kazan had proved Oscar Wilde’s observation “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” The narrator is Eddie Anderson (read Elia Kazan), a charming, wealthy, corrupt, and ultimately destructive figure. The adman’s life has been a series of disloyalties and duplicities en route to the top. His unhappiest victim is Eddie himself—the poor but promising writer who sold out to Mammon and now looks back on a spilled life. Written with gusto and promoted tirelessly, The Arrangement rose to the top of the bestseller lists and stayed there for nine months. “Who better to direct the film adaptation than me?” Gadge asked rhetorically. “And who better to play me than Marlon?” Aware of Brando’s flops and compromises, he elaborated on his choice: All Marlon had to do was to “come and be photographed. Talk about typecasting!” To that end, the director wrote a glowing and, he thought, persuasive letter to the actor, entreating him to lose weight and regain the old fire in the belly: “If you really want to, you can be a blazing actor again. The wanting is the hard part.” Marlon evinced some interest. Heartened, Gadge scheduled story meetings and even set up an appointment with a wig maker. He wanted Brando to look more like the Anderson of the book, and Marlon went along. It was all a feint. Biographer Richard Schickel points out that “in the end Brando betrayed Kazan.” If Marlon had ever been tempted by the notion of working with Gadge again, The Arrangement was certainly not what he had in mind.
On the afternoon of April 4, 1968, the actor called the director and asked him to drive over to the house on Mulholland. Kazan could hardly be blamed for assuming that this was to be a creative meeting, a discussion of how the role of Eddie Anderson might be interpreted. He never got to the front door. Marlon met his car in the driveway and, as Gadge got out, began an intense monologue. Dr. King had been murdered, gunned down on the balcony of a Memphis hotel. How could anyone think about filmmaking at a time like this? Marlon went on at length and in detail: The conditions of race and economics could not continue, America must change or die. The rhetoric so hypnotized Kazan that he scarcely noticed he was being led back behind the wheel. Before he could turn the ignition key, Gadge was informed that Marlon wouldn’t—indeed, couldn’t—be in The Arrangement. The director slowly drove away. As he did, he watched Marlon in the rearview mirror. Slump-shouldered, the actor entered his house without looking back. The two men never spoke again.
Marlon didn’t mention that he had also turned down a lead part in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He was through with trivia, he told his agent. The only film he wanted to do was Queimada. Since the release of The Battle of Algiers two years before, he had been intrigued with the idea of working with Gillo Pontecorvo. The director had shown the world his radical sympathies and had come away with awards and legions of new admirers. Algiers had the persuasive, hand-held-camera feel of a documentary. Never, not even in newsreels, had there been a better and more honest portrait of the ruthless Arab agitators and the vindictive occupying army of France. It was no wonder that Time had described this work as “a blueprint for revolution.” Feelers were sent out and Pontecorvo and Brando met. “Our ideas were in the same political sphere,” the director announced afterward. “While I am an independent Italian left-wing thinker, he is an independent left-wing American thinker. We both liked the idea of an ideological adventure film. He was concerned with the idea of film as medium serving a political purpose.”
Set in the mid-nineteenth century, the script followed the doomed relationship of two men, a black revolutionary, José Dolores, and Sir William Walker, a high-toned, amoral British mercenary (“I don’t know what I believe or what I should do, but whatever I do, I will do it well”). Walker’s government sends him to a Caribbean island controlled by Portugal, a waning colonial power. Long before, the Portuguese had slaughtered the native Indian population, taken full control of the sugar plantations, and imported African slaves to work them. Sir William embodies Hamlet’s observation that “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” superficially friendly to the administrators, he is in fact Queen Victoria’s agent provocateur sent to stir up trouble among the slaves. Concentrating on the charismatic Dolores, Sir William encourages him to overthrow his masters. In time a violent rebellion does take place, forcing the Portuguese to flee. Into the power vacuum rush the British, full of empty promises to the insurgents.
A decade later, Dolores and his fellow workers come to realize their appalling mistake: They have only traded oppressors. Another rebellion is in the making, this one against the British. Her Majesty’s colonial administrators, aware that the slave organizer is now the most dangerous man on the isla
nd, send Sir William back. He is to track down Dolores and have him eliminated. A true mercenary, Sir William carries out his orders. But Sir William’s is a Pyrrhic victory. Moments later his own death occurs at the hands of another guerrilla, a young black man who will replace the fallen leader and lead the rebels to victory.
As Marlon studied the scenario he felt an old itch. For the first time in years he stopped going through the motions of rehearsal, and now started ransacking libraries for material on imperialists and the subjugated. He had already determined the sound and posture of William Walker: He would be an arrogant upperclassman with a kind of Fletcher Christian accent. But what were Sir William’s inner feelings about the sway of empire and those who resisted it at the cost of their lives? And just who were these rebels? Did they have any relation to the antiwar demonstrators and self-styled revolutionaries of the 1960s? In search of answers, he flew to Oakland. An intermediary arranged a meeting with Bobby Seale, cofounder of the radical Black Panthers, and Eldridge Cleaver, the Panthers’ minister of information. Marlon had read Cleaver’s collection of incendiary essays Soul on Ice, written while the author was in jail for assault with intent to murder. Marlon’s old racial consciousness was reawakened. He couldn’t take his eyes off Cleaver; the man seemed to be a Dostoyevskyan hero in another skin, in another country. They talked until nearly 4 a.m. By then the listener had become a disciple, convinced that at “a fundamental level all the Panthers really wanted was respect as human beings.” Sitting nearby was Bobby Hutton, the seventeen-year-old secretary of the Panthers, who impressed Marlon as a poised and “beautiful boy who could have been my own son.” Two weeks later, Hutton was dead, shot by police when they raided a house where he and Cleaver were holed up. The killing of the unarmed Hutton, Marlon decided, “confirmed everything I’d heard during that long night.” The next day he flew back to Oakland. James Farmer, the head of CORE, seemed to be in charge of things and made no secret of his disdain for Marlon. (“They told me that he despised me because I was just another knee-jerk white liberal to him.”) The dilemma was intolerable: It was one thing to be hated by integration-hating whites in Alabama, and quite another to be held at arm’s length by the very people with whom he identified so strongly. A minister addressed mourners at Hutton’s funeral. Then Marlon spoke, attempting to convince the audience that he and they were on the same page. “The preacher said that the white man can’t cool it because he has never dug it. I’m trying to dig it, and that’s why I’m here. You’ve been listening to white people for four hundred years, and they haven’t done a thing. Now, I’m going to begin right now informing white people what they don’t know.”
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