“Lots of people,” Ruddy replied.
“How about a good kid from Bensonhurst?”
Ah, so that was it. These wiseguys were star fuckers like everyone else. They wanted in on the casting of a big movie. Fair enough; what was the harm in letting them pick and choose actors for walk-ons and small parts? It was better than bullet holes. He listened as the senior Colombo indicated one delegate, then another and another, as they made suggestions about young men suitable for the screen. Ruddy noted down all the names. By the end of the evening Colombo inserted a pin in the producer’s lapel, designating him a captain in the league. Smiles all around. They continued during the filming in New York. Threats of labor troubles, breakages, and extortions evaporated. Paramount had already been shaken down.
3
Colombo did more than smooth the way at assorted restaurants and bars that would provide The Godfather’s backgrounds. He also introduced the lead actors to his associates. James Caan studied their mannerisms and came away awed. “They’ve got incredible moves. There’s tremendous interplay. They toast each other—‘centanni,’ ‘salute a nostra’—all this marvelous Old World stuff from guys who were born here and don’t even speak Italian.
“I noticed also that they’re always touching themselves. Thumbs in the belt. Touching the jaw. Adjusting the shirt. Gripping the crotch. Shirt open. Tie loose. Super dressers. Clean. Very, very neat.”
Marlon, the ultimate mimic, went him one better. He got himself invited to the home of a well-placed mafioso in New Jersey. Some forty people attended a dinner in his honor. He could see the importance of well-prepared food and vintage wine; the manner in which powerful dons spoke in quiet voices; the way the men went out of their way to be gracious to their women, but also how they kept them in secondary roles; the exaggerated politesse to a stranger, albeit a movie star; the overwhelming feeling of la famiglia—loyalty to one’s own. He took mental notes that were to affect the film and everyone in it.
Two generations before, when Stella Adler’s father, Jacob, the Yiddish-theater impresario, became the first Jewish actor to play Shylock on the New York stage, he had studied the role intensely, reaching below the anti-Semitic portrait to find a whole human being with a wide range of emotions and justifications. “Weighty and proud his walk,” the actor reasoned, “calm and conclusive his speech, a man of rich personal and national experience, a man who sees life through the glasses of life and eternity. So I played him, so I had joy in him.”
Marlon, a devotee of Jacob’s widow, Sara, and a pupil of his daughter Stella, had the same urge to turn a standardized villain into a man of dimension and stature. Bearing in mind the Adlerian approach to character, he set out to portray Vito Corleone as a modest, quiet man. As he saw it, the Don was “part of the wave of immigrants who came to this country around the turn of the century and had to swim upstream to survive as best they could. He had the same hopes and ambitions for his sons that Joseph P. Kennedy had for his.” As a young man “he probably hadn’t intended to become a criminal, and when he did, he hoped it would be transitional.” As he says to his son, “I never wanted this for you. I work my whole life, I don’t apologize, to take care of my family. And I refused to be a fool, dancing on the strings held by all those big shots. I don’t apologize—that’s my life—but I always thought that when it was your time that you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator Corleone. Governor Corleone…Well, there wasn’t enough time, Michael. There just wasn’t enough time.”
As rehearsals began, Marlon’s coworkers gave him a wide berth. Duvall had appeared in The Chase with Marlon; he was happy to be cast as Tom Hagen, the Godfather’s adopted son, but was not rendered speechless by the opportunity. The others, however, were clearly intimidated. Pacino could barely articulate his feelings: “Have you any idea what it is for me to be doing a scene with him? I sat in theaters when I was a kid, just watching him. Now I’m playing a scene with him. He’s God, man.” Watching the cast behave with such gingerly respect, Ruddy remarked that “in a sense Marlon had created these guys,” and Puzo concurred: Marlon was “the one guy with whom they all wanted to act, and here was their chance.” They remained stiff and unnatural around their favorite until he began cracking jokes and making faces and “unfroze them. No attitude, no superiority. He was a superstar, all right, but from that point on he was first among equals.”
Those equals were consumed by curiosity. Each had his own approach to acting, to climbing inside the character he was to play. But how did God go about his work? What was Marlon’s technique? They scrutinized him, watching for giveaways. As Vito Corleone he had them alternately scratching their heads in wonder and laughing at his weird ways. The man they regarded with such fervor had read the novel, had studied the script, and yet knew very few of his lines. He saw to it that cue cards were scattered wherever he did his scenes. They were attached to dishes, to furniture, to cameras, and sometimes written with ink on his palms. By the time Vito Corleone conversed with Luca Brasi, played by the massive wrestler Lenny Montana, the cast had loosened up. They were so relaxed and confident, in fact, that Montana faced Marlon with his back to the camera and opened his mouth. On Montana’s tongue, Caan had attached a piece of tape. It read “Fuck you, Marlon.” The cast and star broke up, and the director joined in. Coppola’s mirth covered a queasy feeling that Marlon was setting a bad example to the others—a blizzard of idiot cards was the last thing The Godfather needed.
Marlon would not budge. Committing lines to memory would make his performance sound like “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” “People intuit,” he said. “They unconsciously know you have planned that speech.” The fact was that “in ordinary life people seldom know exactly what they’re going to say when they open their mouths and start to express a thought. They’re still thinking, and the fact that they are looking for words shows on their faces. They pause for an instant to find the right word, search their minds to compose a sentence, then express it.” It was his way, and that was that. Coppola could only smile, nod, and hope that the Brando method wasn’t infectious. To the director’s relief it never did catch on with the others, and Marlon’s inventions added vigor and originality throughout the months of filming. On one occasion, for example, a confrontation between Vito and Johnny Fontane was going nowhere. It was all too evident that Al Martino was a singer, not an actor, and that his plea for godfatherly help was about as authentic as wax fruit. Upon the next take, Marlon took matters into his own hands:
FONTANE: Oh, Godfather, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.
DON CORLEONE: You can act like a man!
The Godfather suddenly slapped Fontane. Martino’s face registered trauma and fear, and they were not faked. Marlon pressed on:
What’s the matter with you? Is this how you turned out? A Hollywood finócchio that cries like a woman? “What can I do? What can I do?” What is that nonsense? Ridiculous.
He imitated the character’s whine, Martino straightened up, and the scene took off. Marlon contributed hundreds of other ad-libs and gestures that gave The Godfather a chiaroscuro reality. It was he who grabbed a stray cat, stroking it while he gave his lethal orders in a tender, strained voice, and it was he who articulated the line “After all, we’re not murderers, whatever that undertaker thinks,” pausing then to sniff a rose—a moment that was not in the script. The multiple portraits of authority, warmth, and evil had seldom been projected so effectively. And when a scene with Vito’s little grandson was slow and cloying, it was Marlon who peeled an orange, made fangs with pieces of the rind, stuck them in his gums, and made the boy shout with an appealing mirth.
As usual, the power Marlon displayed onscreen was offset by the antics he initiated or provoked. “He was always trying to figure out a way to stop eating,” said Caan. “He had this plan.” He would say to his assistant, Alice Marchalk, “‘Listen, after nine o’clock I want you to lock up all the cabinets. After nine o’clock no matter what I say don’t give me the key
.’ At nine-twenty he says, ‘Alice, give me the key.’ ‘No.’ He says, ‘I swear to God I’ll fire you.’ ‘No.’ So he went and got a crowbar and just busted all the locks.”
“Mooning” became an outdoor sport—Caan and Duvall began to drop their pants and display their buttocks during breaks in the action. Marlon outdid them by dropping his pants and mooning the entire company of men, women, and children during The Godfather’s elaborate wedding scene. The monkeyshines continued at the crucial moment when Vito Corleone is gunned down at an outdoor market. Guards were supposed to put him on a stretcher and rush the Godfather to a hospital. Marlon arranged to have six counterweights hidden under his blanket. They were used to anchor camera booms, and added an additional three hundred pounds. Recalled Caan: The stretcher bearers “were very big guys, maybe six foot three, two hundred and thirty pounds, weight lifters. They sweated halfway up. One guy’s voice climbed three octaves. Their veins stuck out. They couldn’t make it. They had to quit.” Marlon fell off the stretcher laughing, and gave the joke away.
All this was taken in good grace by the cast, crew, and studio. What Paramount could not forgive was the rising cost of production. The fault, for a change, lay not with the star but with his director. Coppola insisted on his private vision of perfection, with multiple takes and expensive delays. Interiors were built and rebuilt until he got exactly what he wanted. The lighting never seemed to satisfy him. Every film set is rife with rumors; during the frequent down time all sorts of gossip is engendered, some of it total fiction, some of it with grains of truth. The Godfather set was no different, just more intense. It was bruited about that the studio wanted to replace the young director (true), and that Kazan was hovering just out of sight, waiting to take over (false). Coppola overheard the scuttlebutt but was defenseless. He would need two major interventions to save his job. When the Oscars were announced for the best films of 1970, Patton ran the table. It was judged the best film of the year. George C. Scott won for Best Actor—and became the first performer to refuse his statuette, claiming that the Academy Award ceremonies were little more than a “beauty contest and a meat market.” Francis Ford Coppola was only too glad to come onstage and accept his award for collaborating on the Best Original Screenplay. Even then he was considered vulnerable. Paramount grudgingly acknowledged Coppola’s writing talent, but had deepening doubts about his managerial skills—particularly the all-important ability to stay within budget. Marlon thought it was time to make a stand. He had come to admire Coppola, “Victor Vicarious,” as one of the stagehands called him, an indoor type who had suffered from polio as a child and who lived his adventures through the characters he moved around onscreen. Like everyone else on The Godfather, from the grips on up, Marlon knew about the threats from Paramount. He confronted Bluhdorn directly with nine words, stated Godfather-style: “If you fire Francis, I’ll walk off the picture.” Coppola stayed.
Upon completing his work on the movie, Marlon told friends that The Godfather was one of the most pleasurable experiences in his career. And after viewing the still-incomplete movie at Coppola’s San Francisco office, he spoke euphorically to the press. In his judgment The Godfather was flat-out “one of the most powerful statements ever made about America.” Coppola had bought the interpretation of the Mafia as ur-capitalists, and, by suggestion, brought in the Cuban crisis, the explosions on campus, the Vietnam War, the corruption around President Nixon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the illicit links between the private sector and the government. “Certainly there was immorality in the Mafia,” Marlon reflected, “but at heart it was a business; in many ways it didn’t operate much differently from certain multinational corporations that went around knowingly spilling chemical poisons in their wake. The Mafia may kill a lot of people, but while we were making the movie, CIA representatives were dealing in drugs in the Golden Triangle, torturing people for information and assassinating them with far more efficiency than the Mob.”
People listened to him in a way they hadn’t for more than a decade. The irony was that as the superstar once again took control of his lumbering career, Marlon lost his grip on everything else. Christian Brando had turned thirteen. He continued to live with his mother in a state of confusion and misery; Anna Kashfi had become addicted to alcohol and various pharmaceuticals. Her behavior swerved from ecstasy to melancholia and back again, often within a single day. Christian, influenced by what he saw, had his own problems with substance abuse. On his visits to Mulholland, Marlon saw what was happening; he told the boy he disapproved of drinking and drugs, but added that if he was going to drink bourbon and smoke pot, he could at least do it at home, “in front of me.”
At the same time, Marlon’s second ex-wife, Movita, was costing him $1,400 per month for court-ordered maintenance and child support. Marlon stubbornly refused to pay, partly because of jealousy—Movita was known to have a new man in her life. But there was another, more urgent reason for his parsimony. Alberto Grimaldi had just initiated a major lawsuit accusing Brando of willfully and deliberately causing delays and relocations in the filming of Quiemada. As compensation, the producer was demanding the sum of $700,000. Despite frantic maneuvering by Marlon’s lawyers, Grimaldi convinced a judge to have the actor’s financial assets frozen. Living expenses would be allowed, but nothing else could be taken from saving banks or securities. The result was that after twenty-six films and several million dollars in salary, Marlon would have to live from paycheck to paycheck, the way he had when he was twenty-four years old. Pennebaker had been sold. Other investments had turned sour. Two ex-wives had their hands out and five young Brandos, ranging in age from one to thirteen, had to be fed and clothed. There was Christian by his marriage to Anna Kashfi, Miko by his marriage to Movita Castaneda, and Teihotu, Rebecca, and Cheyenne by Tarita Teriipaia, the current Mrs. Brando.
And so, having completed his most promising film since On the Waterfront, Marlon was still strapped for money, concerned for his children, and uncertain about the future. Emotionally and financially drained, he desperately needed time out at Tetiaroa with Tarita and the kids. But there was no time for a break. He needed cash flow and he needed it now. There was only one way to get it. He would have to make another movie.
4
David Merrick was pleased with his reputation as Broadway’s Abominable Showman, the producer with the temper of a warthog and the ethics of a fox. In a notorious 1961 stunt, Merrick rescued a musical panned by every major newspaper critic. Out of the Manhattan phone book he picked seven ordinary citizens who happened to share the reviewers’ names. After paying them, he ran their names under an ad for the show. It read, seven out of seven are ecstatically unanimous about SUBWAYS ARE FOR SLEEPING. Yet he could be amiable at times, and he had a shrewd eye for talent. Merrick productions included the megahits Gypsy, Oliver! and Hello, Dolly! By 1972 he was rich and ready to invade Hollywood. For his first venture the showman chose an adaptation of Child’s Play, the story of dark doings at a Catholic school. He enlisted Sidney Lumet as director and James Mason as one of the professors. Merrick thought Marlon Brando would be ideal as Mason’s antagonist. He enticed him with promises of a decent salary and the chance to work again with Lumet, who had directed The Fugitive Kind. At Marlon’s insistence, Merrick agreed to find a part for Wally Cox. Marlon and Wally had never quite been out of touch, but only recently had they talked to each other about their personal travails. From mutual friends, Wally heard about Marlon’s backstairs fights with his exes; from the same people, Marlon learned about Wally’s career nosedive. Since the last broadcast of Mister Peepers, the diminutive clown had suffered a series of reverses. The Adventures of Hiram Holliday, a TV comedy series built around him, failed after one season. The Walrus currently depended on a voice-over role as the cartoon character Underdog, and guest shots on game shows. Marlon knew that his pal was unhappily married and drinking hard. He hoped to put Wally back on track by giving his career a jump-start in Child’s Play.
Marlon had not
reckoned on Merrick. The producer lionized the performing Brando but had no experience with the editorial one. Marlon had barely arrived on the Westchester County, New York, set when he began to insist on dialogue changes. Lumet was not happy, but admitted that Brando “saw the holes in the story and lack of logic.” Arguments erupted between star and producer as the director sat on the sidelines. “David thrives on conflict,” Lumet sighed, “but I do not feel as he does that tension is a spur to creativity.” Two days later Marlon was replaced by Robert Preston. “I simply threw Mr. Brando out of my film,” Merrick told the Los Angeles Times. “He wanted to make basic changes in the story and I could not accept that.”
Marlon knew his Shakespeare and counted his sorrows as Hamlet did, not in single spies but in battalions. If he was out, so was Wally, who took the news badly and began drinking again. Merrick spread the word that Brando was more difficult and unmanageable than ever. Alberto Grimaldi picked this moment to pounce. With a combination of guile and promises to drop the lawsuit, he enticed Marlon to play the lead in a new film to be directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.
The son of an Italian professor and cinema critic, Bertolucci had the appearance and demeanor of a leading man. He was instead a filmmaking wunderkind, already renowned for meticulous camera work, use of symbolic colors to emphasize the emotional content of the narrative, and lively, audacious editing. His most celebrated feature, The Conformist, took Alberto Moravia’s novel and gave it new life, tracking the backward slide of a young man in Mussolini-run Italy who buries his homosexual past and joins the Fascists. The price for his “normality” is a job as assassin. His quarry: a former professor, judged to be an enemy of the state.
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