Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  In 1970, shortly after Marlon signed the contract for that feature, Paramount hired thirty-one-year-old Francis Ford Coppola to write and direct an adaptation of The Godfather. He was not the studio’s first choice; Arthur Penn had been a front-runner, as had Franklin Schaffner and Fred Zinnemann. When those old pros turned down the chance, the front office settled on Coppola. It was hardly a shot in the dark. Coppola had written the greatly admired script for Patton. But this credential was only a part of his attraction; he was very green, and the studio intended to use him as their marionette, controlling every move.

  Paramount gave Coppola a hard time about everything. The front office wanted Robert Redford, Ryan O’Neal, Dean Stockwell, or Martin Sheen for the role of Michael Corleone, the Don’s favored son—anybody but Coppola’s first choice, the unknown Al Pacino. As for the Don, recalled the director, “Ultimately they said, ‘What about the Godfather?’” They suggested Orson Welles, George C. Scott, Edward G. Robinson. Coppola kept shaking his head. One of them had an off-the-wall proposal: What about Carlo Ponti? At the time Ponti was known for two things: He was a highly successful producer of Italian and international films, and he was the husband of Sophia Loren. Short, balding, resolutely unglamorous, he had never acted in his life.

  That hardly seemed a liability to Robert Evans, Paramount’s production chief. Evans could have had a career in the garment industry; his family’s company, Evan-Picone, was one of the most prominent fashion houses. Robert wanted no part of it, however; people told him he was handsome enough to be a movie star, and he believed them. After a few roles it became obvious that his talents lay elsewhere, and he switched to the producer track. In the last year he had gained considerable velocity, having shepherded Love Story from weepy paperback to blockbuster film. “Bob was execrable on screen,” said Peter Bart, vice president of production. “But you could go to the bank on his instincts.” Paramount did exactly that, and grossed millions. These days few people dared to contradict Evans.

  Coppola was one of them. “I said, ‘I don’t want a real Italian for the part of the Godfather. I want either an Italian-American or an actor who’s so great that he can portray an Italian-American.’” And who would that be? Evans inquired. Coppola named the two men he considered the greatest actors in the Western world: Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando. Inquiries got under way. Sir Laurence was said to be very ill; acting was the last thing on his mind just now. The field appeared to be clear for Marlon. Coppola rationalized the situation: Brando would be even better than Olivier because Puzo had always had him in mind, and because younger actors held the man in awe. On this film they would give the performances of their lifetimes. The director’s pitch left Stanley Jaffe cold. He was a second-generation mogul (his father, Leo, had been the president of Columbia Pictures) and he was not going to be pushed around by creative types. “As the president of Paramount Pictures,” he said loftily, “I want to inform you that Marlon Brando will never appear in this motion picture and I instruct you not to pursue the idea anymore.”

  Upon hearing that declaration, Coppola fell from his chair to the carpeted floor, writhing and clutching his chest. “I give up,” he groaned theatrically. “You hired me; I’m supposed to be the director. Every idea I have you don’t want me to talk about. Now you’re instructing me that I can’t even pursue the idea. At least let me pursue it.”

  The Paramount people exchanged glances. The young man might be full of himself, but you had to admire his chutzpah. They consulted and then gave in—with three provisos. One: Marlon had to do the film for bubkes—literally “beans” in Yiddish, but translated more accurately as very little money. Two: Brando had to put up a cash bond. If he caused delays in shooting, his insurers, rather than Paramount, would pay for it. Three: He had to do a screen test to assure everyone that at forty-seven he could play a capo di tutti i capi twenty years his senior.

  Number three was the hardest; Coppola tackled it first. Puzo had sent Marlon a handwritten letter a few weeks back: “I wrote a book called The Godfather. I think you’re the only actor who can play the Godfather with that quiet force and irony the part requires.” He followed it up with a phone call. Marlon allowed that he wanted the part; he saw the story as “about the corporate mind, because the Mafia is the best example of capitalists we have.” By then Puzo figured he had a sure thing—if only Paramount hadn’t insisted on the screen test. How could anyone ask Marlon Brando to try out for anything? Coppola thought about it, called up the actor, and meekly offered, “Mr. Brando, don’t you think it would be a good idea if we fooled around a little bit, and do a little improvisation for the role, and see what it would be like?” Marlon said that would be fine.

  At 7 a.m. the next day Coppola arrived at Mulholland Drive with a small crew and a selection of props—small Italian cigars, an espresso cup, pieces of cheese, appetizers. A housekeeper ushered them into the living room. Brando entered in a kimono. He had “long flowing blond hair and a ponytail,” the director remembered. “Very handsome.” Marlon looked at the cheese and took a bite. “These old guys,” he said, “their collar is always creased like this.” Then he rolled up the ponytail, took some shoe polish, and colored his hair black. On his instructions, a makeup man penciled in a little mustache and darkened the creases around the actor’s mouth and eyes. Marlon stuffed facial tissue in his cheeks, wrinkled his collar some more, put on a jacket, lit a cigar, tightened his diction—and turned into Don Corleone. One of the cameramen showed him a playback of the videotape. He was pleased at his bulldog appearance, “mean-looking, but warm underneath.” Coppola knew he had captured something invaluable that morning. He also knew that nothing would be accomplished without a go-ahead from Gulf + Western, Paramount’s parent company. A viewing was arranged for G + W’s volatile president, Charles Bluhdorn. In the immense New York office, Coppola ran the footage of Marlon as he had first appeared, surferlike, blond, and indifferent. “No, absolutely not,” the CEO decreed. After Brando’s hair was darkened and his face and carriage assumed a different persona, Bluhdorn did something very rare: He changed his mind. Evans came in, inspected the later footage, and didn’t recognize Marlon: “He looks Italian, fine. But who is he?”

  “The word goes back to Los Angeles,” said Coppola, “that Charlie thinks the screen test of Brando is incredible. I jumped over five guys that way.” The ones he couldn’t jump over were the Mafia wiseguys. For sixty-seven weeks they had suffered while the Puzo novel stayed on the goddamned Times bestseller list. It gave them a bad image, what with the killings and the extortion and the hookers and the contraband. And now Paramount was going to make a Marlon Brando picture of it? They had a lot of problems with that, with this punk kid Francis, with his Italian name, no less, and with his star. Who the hell did Brando think he was? A cheapie, a has-been. Somebody ought to take care of the situation, Cosa Nostra–style.

  1971–1972

  How Did God Go About His Work?

  1

  Marlon needed The Godfather as much as The Godfather needed him. Perhaps a bit more. The list of recent and not-so-recent failures was long and painful to contemplate. The Fugitive Kind: one of Tennessee’s mistakes, and unprofitable to boot. One-Eyed Jacks: his sole directorial attempt, a flameout. Mutiny on the Bounty: universally panned, wasteful, a neutron bomb. The Ugly American: purposeful, decent, Jocelyn got work, nobody cared. Bedtime Story: David Niven an avalanche of laughs; the picture a fiasco. Morituri, The Chase, The Appaloosa, all letdowns. Who was it called the sixties “a slum of a decade”? Well, these were a big part of the big dump. A Countess from Hong Kong: bad Brando and no business. Reflections in a Golden Eye: good Brando and no business. Candy: garbage. The Night of the Following Day: incoherent. Queimada: the best Brando, noble, memorable, circling the drain. Why did he make them all? It was hard to remember sometimes. A combination of debt, women, kids, and on rare occasions a belief in the material.

  Would The Nightcomers be one more on the list? He had every reason to think
so. The movie was designed as a prequel to Henry James’s eerie ghost tale The Turn of the Screw. It needed a subtle hand, and Michael Winner was alleged to have lobster claws. Marlon would play Quint, the gardener of a British estate. Gruff, unmannerly, Quint is less interested in his duties than in seducing the estrous governess, Miss Jessel (Stephanie Beacham), supervisor of two recently orphaned children. The scenario concerns the servants’ sadomasochistic affair and the effect it has on all around them—especially the orphans. Marlon approached his character with care, not least because he wanted the news to get around: Brando is behaving himself. Brando knows his lines cold. Brando can do an Irish accent. Brando is not causing delays. Filming took place in a large country house, and Winner set aside a dining room just for Marlon and whatever guests might be visiting him. Marlon objected; he hated class distinctions and wanted to eat with the rest of the crew. Said Winner, “I am sorry to say this, but the crew do not wish you to eat with them. They are much happier in the next-door canteen eating on their own and not worrying about the overpowering presence of their employers and a major star.” Thereafter Marlon ate in his dressing room or trailer. The dining room was taken by Winner.

  Marlon’s demeanor got good marks from the beginning; in her diary Beacham remarked on Marlon’s increasing girth but called him an “amazing talent,” even with his proclivity for monkeyshines. She was deaf in one ear, and Marlon had gotten into the habit of inserting flesh-colored earplugs during rehearsals to blot out distractions. They wound up shouting at each other, and then dissolving with laughter at the result. Sometimes Marlon displayed a darker kind of humor. “We had a scene where he tied me to the bed posts with ropes. Suddenly, the bell to break for lunch rang. Marlon got up, and without saying a word, marched off to his dressing-room. I tried to untie myself. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t get those knots undone. I couldn’t believe it. He had been able to do it so easily. Then some of the crew came to my rescue, but they couldn’t untie me either! Finally, someone called Brando who, very calmly, came back to the set and proceeded to untie me with the greatest of ease.” She took it in good spirits: The two were seen chuckling between takes.

  Crew members witnessed a few head-to-head collisions with the director—Winner was a coarse talent masked as a refined one; Brando, as always, was a fragile ego covered with a hard carapace of fake lechery and vulgar remarks. He was forever grabbing Beacham, to whom he was not attracted, or trying to offend the Jewish Winner by calling him “mein Führer.” With all that, the two men came away with warm mutual regard. Marlon said that Winner was always Peter Politesse, the only one who ever talked to him as he preferred to be talked to. The Nightcomers suffered from meager distribution and failed to make the hit parade, but that didn’t seem to matter to Winner. He was to pronounce Marlon a figure of profound importance: “Before Brando, actors acted. After Brando, they behaved. That is the difference—an extraordinary effect on the history of drama and the history of movies.”

  And so it came to pass that another director recognized Marlon’s extraordinary talent. Meantime, the star remained in the black hole of his career. He stayed there throughout the filming, although every now and then the cast could see glimpses of the old Brando—alongside the one who prevailed most of the time. They watched him veer in a single day—sometimes in a single hour—from ennui to euphoria, from a total rejection of his profession to an artful performance that moved fellow performers to tears. His indifference was not faked, but the result of a self-portrait that could never, ever be erased. If the boy was no good, how could the man be worthy? If people applauded him, if producers paid him, if directors saluted his work, then obviously they belonged to the Club of Phonies. “I ought to know,” he told friends. “I’m a charter member.” Even so, Marlon couldn’t put himself down all the time. There were scenes in The Nightcomers when the conflicted actor breathed life into his character, and it was at those moments that he wished his life onscreen to continue, to go on at the highest level. Was it too late?

  Just when the industry seemed ready to shut him out for good, Marlon made a last desperate gesture for respectability and stature, in seeking the Godfather role. He sought an audience with the higher-ups at Paramount. “You may have heard a lot of crap about how I misbehaved on pictures,” he told Robert Evans. “Some of it is true, some of it is not true. But I’ll tell you this: I want to play this role. I’ll work for it, work hard. It’s going to be something special for me.” Yet even as he spoke he feared that The Godfather could be a washout like the others. So many things depended on luck, timing, other actors, the director, the script, the studio. You just never knew. Never. Jesus, it would be good to break the string.

  2

  The Italian-American Civil Rights League was founded in April 1970. It posed as an organization much like B’nai B’rith and the NAACP, alerting the country to verbal and physical bias against Italian-Americans. The league’s first great cause was the “victimization” of Joseph Colombo, Jr., on a charge of conspiracy to melt down U.S. silver coins into ingots. The arrestee was the son of the reputed mobster Joseph Colombo, Sr. Two months after the league was created, it claimed to have forty-five thousand members; in November, Frank Sinatra held a benefit concert in Madison Square Garden, solidifying the organization’s credentials and its treasury. With a $600,000 war chest, the IACRL felt strong enough and rich enough to go up against Paramount.

  As plans got under way for filming, The Godfather producer Albert Ruddy received some disturbing mail. Letters (many of them sent from the same post office) decried Paramount’s forthcoming adaptation. It was “anti-Italian,” “un-American,” “provocative,” “shameful.” With the missives came dark predictions of labor-union demonstrations and stoppages. The Grand Venerable of the Grand Council of the Grand Lodge of New York State’s Sons of Italy urged an economic boycott of the film. He called on federal and state authorities to refrain from giving the production any cooperation whatsoever. Protests were not confined to the private sector; Ruddy got mail from New York State congressmen, senators, and judges. One complaint took the high road: “A book like The Godfather leaves one with the sickening feeling that a great deal of effort and labor to eliminate a false image concerning Americans of Italian descent and also an ethnic connotation to organized crime has been wasted.” So many careers “could have been made into constructive and intelligent movies, such as the life of Enrico Fermi, the great scientist; Mother Cabrini; Colonel Ceslona, a hero of the Civil War; Garibaldi, the great Italian who unified Italy; William Paca, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.”

  Others took the low road. The Manhattan offices of Gulf + Western were twice evacuated because of bomb threats. In Los Angeles, Al Ruddy took extra precautions. He told police he had a bad feeling about the Mob. Would they please investigate suspicious activity in or around Paramount? In a few days they got back to him: His car was being tailed by person or persons unknown. Ruddy switched vehicles with his secretary. She parked his car in front of her house. In the morning she found it riddled with bullet holes. In Hollywood to collaborate on the screenplay, Puzo enjoyed the perks of a big office, a commensurate salary, and four phones. He soon found that being the father of The Godfather came with a curse. At a Los Angeles restaurant he was introduced to Frank Sinatra, generally thought to be the model for Johnny Fontane, the down-on-his-luck singer given a second chance by pledging fealty to Vito Corleone. Sinatra, wrote Puzo with cheery bravado, never looked up from his plate, but “started to shout abuse. The worst thing he called me was a pimp, which rather flattered me. But what hurt was that there he was, a northern Italian, threatening me, a southern Italian, with physical violence. That was roughly equivalent to Einstein pulling a knife on Al Capone.”

  Ruddy couldn’t afford such a jaunty response. As if this were the latest chapter of The Godfather, he arranged to plead his case with Joseph Colombo, Jr. That cleared the way for a meeting with Joseph Colombo, Sr. It took place at the Park Sheraton Hotel, and the old
man was not alone. In the hotel’s grand ballroom were some fifteen hundred members of the league, all of them radiating hostility. Junior informed the audience that Mr. Ruddy had agreed to delete the pejorative words “Mafia,” “Cosa Nostra,” and all other Italian labels from the script. As a capper, he agreed to turn over the proceeds of the film’s New York premiere to the league’s hospital fund. This did not elicit the expected response. “I couldn’t care less if they gave us two million dollars,” Senior snapped. “No one can buy the right to defame Italian-Americans.”

  What the hell did these people want? Ruddy wondered. He promised, in front of all those assembled, that the Godfather film would depict individuals, and that it would never, ever allow the dialogue to defame or stereotype any group. If you think about it, he pointed out, what it really is, is a story of America, of proud, energetic immigrants who overcome bias and poverty. He added another level of assurance. “Look at who’s playing the roles.” He was about to reel off a laundry list of non-Italians, starting with Marlon Brando and including James Caan, Robert Duvall, Sterling Hayden, John Marley, Diane Keaton, Abe Vigoda. Before he could begin, the senior Columbo interjected: “Who is playing?”