Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  A succès d’estime, the feature established Bertolucci as a major European director. He backed away from American offers—he called Hollywood “the big nipple”—but found himself short of money. Grimaldi became his banker and savior. For Alberto could not only supply financing, but supply Marlon Brando by entirely forgiving the star’s debt and throwing in a $250,000 salary plus 10 percent of the gross after the movie broke even. Bertolucci was not as excited as the producer had hoped. Jean-Louis Trintignant, star of The Conformist, had been his first choice to play Paul, the lead in Bertolucci’s new sexual drama. But as Bernardo remembered it, “He told me in tears he couldn’t be naked on film. Then I tried Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon. Belmondo said it was a porn script. Delon wanted to be the producer.” So it came down to Marlon after all. As so many others had done, Bernardo approached the American gingerly—he and Marlon had once met in Paris, but at the time the young director had been too awed to speak up. The impression he’d gotten was of a man absurdly reduced in size. Bernardo had seen Viva Zapata! as a youth, and in his mind the American was sixty feet tall.

  In the fall of 1971 Bertolucci made a house call. He and Marlon went over the broad outlines of the scenario, reshaped to accommodate Brando’s appearance and background. Paul, a middle-aged American expatriate, small-time boxer, onetime actor and drummer, wanders the streets of Paris, despondent over the suicide of his adulterous French wife. They had owned a rundown hotel; today his life has lost whatever meaning it had. He learns of an apartment for rent and goes to see it. As it happens, a liberated twenty-year-old, Jeanne, is looking over the same flat. She and her fiancé, a talentless New Wave filmmaker, need a place to live. Paul and Jeanne meet by chance in this gray, unfurnished place—and light it up with a burst of impulsive, semi-clothed sex. Their brief encounter leads to a passionate and unbridled three-day affair.

  Marlon had his doubts; Bernardo gently pressed on, attempting to win his listener’s confidence, much as Truman Capote had done. Both men wanted something from Marlon; the difference was that the writer had aimed for exposure and humiliation, and the director looked for revelation and art. Bernardo and Marlon conversed for two weeks, first with the Italian speaking of his upbringing, his adolescent fantasies—he dreamed of sex without consequence, having an intense liaison with a woman he didn’t know and who didn’t know him. He went on about his experience with Freudian analysis and his love of nihilistic literature. Bertolucci was fondest of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose protagonists embraced sex but despised love (“In this world we spent our time killing or adoring, or both together. ‘I hate you! I adore you!’ As if it were the greatest of pleasures to perpetuate ourselves”), and the sadomasochistic maunderings of Georges Bataille, a writer proud of his moral numbness: “How sweet to enter the filthy night and proudly wrap myself in it. The whore I went with was as uncomplicated as a child and she hardly talked. There was another one, who came crashing down from a tabletop—sweet, shy, heart-breakingly tender, as I watched her with drunken, unfeeling eyes.”

  Gradually Bernardo induced Marlon to drop his guard and address the anguish of his own formative years. The Brando parents and siblings entered the conversation. Only Marlon’s children were left unmentioned; he considered them works in progress and kept his worries and guilt bottled up. They were fit subjects for a psychotherapist, not a film director. The Italian was captivated, both by the disclosures and the secrets: “I had at my disposal a great actor with all the technical expertise any director would require. But I also had a mysterious man waiting to be discovered in all the richness of his personal material.” Bertolucci wanted Dominique Sanda to play Jeanne. When she announced her pregnancy he interviewed scores of ingenues until he found one with the appropriate sexual dazzle. Maria Schneider had to meet with Marlon’s approval, however, and when Marlon showed up in Paris, great care was given to the way she auditioned before him. At one point Maria was asked to remove her clothes; she obliged without a moment’s hesitation, unselfconscious and insouciant. Bernardo dubbed her “a Lolita, but more perverse.” Marlon agreed. She was used to that label. The illegitimate daughter of actor Daniel Gélin, Maria had been an unsupervised teenybopper from the age of fifteen, living in Montparnasse communes, swinging with male and female partners, trying her luck as a painter, fashion model, and would-be starlet. Maria and Marlon hit it off immediately. He dragged her off to a zinc bar and advised, “We’re going to go through quite a lot together, so let’s not talk. Just look me in the eye as hard as you can.” The next day flowers arrived with a note from Marlon and from then on, Maria said, “he was just like Daddy.” She did not mean to imply an incestuous relationship. Physically, Marlon exerted no appeal. Running her hand down her torso to her midriff, she told a Time reporter, “He’s almost fifty, you know, and he’s only beautiful to here.”

  As soon as filming began, Bertolucci experienced the problems of every Brando director since Kazan: Marlon steadfastly refused to memorize his part. The customary cards were strategically scattered around the set where they could be easily spotted. Rather than force the star to mend his ways, Bernardo accommodated them. During Paul’s monologue over the body of his wife, for example, the widower casts his eyes upward. The edit makes him seem to be petitioning heaven; actually Marlon was looking for a piece of paper overhead, checking out the lines before he spoke them. Schneider was not exactly a director’s dream either; she hung around with the friends of her youth, getting stoned at night and showing up late the next morning.

  No one seemed to care, least of all Bertolucci. He deliberately excluded her from any discussions of the script. Only Marlon was allowed to add or subtract dialogue as he chose. Bertolucci tried to shoot in sequence, and the first footage was not promising. The opening scene showed Marlon trying to drown out the sound of an overhead train by screaming out, “Fucking God!” That vehement reaction, noted Bernardo, “was Marlon’s idea. He started at such a violent pitch, I thought, ‘I cannot work with this actor.’ My fear lasted all that week. Then Marlon said he was feeling the same thing about me. From then on, everything went very well.”

  Marlon also went over some scenes with friends at his rented rive gauche apartment. Christian Marquand saw that “forty years of Brando’s life experience” was going into the film: “Brando talking about himself, being himself. His relations with his mother, father, children, lovers, friends.” In one such interlude, Paul tells Jeanne about his upbringing. “My father was a drunk, tough, whore-fucker, bar fighter, supermasculine and he was tough. My mother was very, very poetic and also a drunk. All my memories of when I was a kid was of her being arrested, nude. We lived in this small town, a farming community…I’d come home after school…. She’d be gone, in jail or something…and then I used to have to milk a cow every morning and every night, and I liked that. But I remember one time I was all dressed up to take this girl to a basketball game and my father said, ‘You have to milk the cow.’ I asked him, ‘Would you please milk it for me?’ And he said, ‘No. Get your ass out there.’ I was in a hurry, didn’t have time to change my shoes, and I had cow shit all over my shoes. It smelled in the car…and I can’t remember very many things.”

  A friend asked him about that particular real-life incident: “Marlon, why didn’t you just wipe the cow shit off your shoes? You had time for that.”

  The reply came in the form of an inquiry: “You’ve never really hated, have you? When you hate like I do, you have to suffer the pain.”

  Pain and humiliation were the guiding principles of The Last Tango in Paris. Marlon had exposed some of his internal anguish in The Men, Streetcar, and Waterfront. But now he went all the way, referring directly to his upbringing, speaking of his mortality, yoking sex and terror. Paul asks Jeanne to penetrate him anally with her fingers because he wants to “look death right in the face…go right up into the ass of death…till you find the womb of fear.” He talks of his “hap-penis” but shows no sign of joy no matter how overheated the lovemaking
. Sometimes the misery is turned inward: “What the hell, I’m no prize,” confesses Paul. “I got a prostate as big as an Idaho potato, but I’m still a good stick man. I don’t have any friends, and I suppose if I hadn’t met you, I’d be ready for a hard chair and a hemorrhoid.” At times the masochism turns to sadism, as in a scene that was to become notorious, Paul sodomizes Jeanne with the aid of a stick of butter. Joy is always accompanied by humiliation, and, in the end, Paul’s early declaration “We’re going to forget everything we know. No names, nothing. Everything outside this place is bullshit” is shown to be false. Obsessed with Jeanne, he seeks her out when she returns to her fiancé. The young woman has had enough of this fixated older man; terrified, she guns him down. Much was made of a last detail, when Paul removes a wad of gum from his mouth and parks it on a banister before his final breath.

  Unquestionably, Marlon’s was a mature performance, made more so in contrast to Maria’s self-indulgent twaddle and Bertolucci’s soft-core demand that Paul and Jeanne copulate on camera. Marlon absolutely refused. “If that happens,” he pointed out, “our sex organs become the centerpiece of the film.” Yet for all the provocative scenes and inventive staging, Last Tango had an adolescent soul. In Tea and Sympathy, an instructor’s wife comments on the self-annihilating term papers of pubescent boys: “So intense! These kids would die for love or almost anything else…. Failure; death! Dishonor; death! Lose their girls; death!” The latest Bertolucci film was marked by the same sort of over-heated narcissism.

  No matter; death, as well as sex, has always sold well, and buzz about the film began long before its October 1972 release. Invited to a private screening, one academic interpreted Last Tango as a secular confessional, with Marlon as sinner and penitent. Another observed that the director, hypnotized by the paintings of Francis Bacon, had lit the interiors with sharp red and yellow contrasts, and made Brando into one of those agonized, half-eviscerated Baconian martyrs, “who show on their faces all that is happening in their guts.” A third felt that the difference in the lovers’ ages showed the cruelty of the clock, very much in the style of Malcolm de Chazal, the French aphorist: “She gave herself, he took her; the third party was time, who made cuckolds of them both.” Paul can brutalize Jeanne, he maintained, but she has a longer stay on earth. Which is why, as victim turned victimizer, she predicts that in ten years he’ll be in a wheelchair. In a delphic Hemingway style, Marlon commented, “This is a true film. I’ll add that it is humane and poetic. In our daily life almost everything is squalid, scandalous or odious. Things which are too true always give us a sense of annoyance, of nausea, and this film is true.” Ingmar Bergman had a unique interpretation. To the Swedish director, Last Tango was a closeted story of two homosexuals. “If you think about it in those terms, the film becomes very, very interesting. Except for her breasts, that girl, Maria Schneider, is just like a young boy. There is much hatred of women in this film, but if you see it as being about a man who loves a boy, you can understand it.” He added that the filmmakers would have been “very courageous if they had made it with a boy. As it is now, it makes no sense as a film.” Schneider may have edged closer to the truth when she said simply, “Bertolucci was in love with Marlon Brando, and that’s what the movie was about. We were acting out Bernardo’s sex problems, in effect trying to transfer them to the film.” What the hell, the actress reminded listeners, she was bisexual; she had slept with twenty women and fifty men and damn well knew what she was saying.

  5

  The squalid, the scandalous, and the odious were waiting to happen off-camera as well. In the latter stages of filming Last Tango, Marlon learned that while Anna Kashfi had further descended into a haze of pills and alcohol, Christian’s litany of behavioral problems ranged from substance abuse, to attacking classmates, to setting fire to a dorm at his private school in California. And now he had vanished. Anna claimed to know nothing about the youth’s disappearance. In fact she knew everything. Afraid that Marlon would try to gain custody of Christian, she had arranged to have the boy spirited out of the States and into Mexico.

  Marlon hired a private detective who scoured Baja California, paying informers, flying over the region in a helicopter in search of an encampment. He spotted a tent, landed, enlisted some local police, and raided the place. Five men were at the site, unarmed and apprehensive. They objected loudly to this invasion of privacy, but the federales were in no mood to indulge them, and one of the five soon gave the plot away, nodding at the tent. The cops kicked aside a pile of dirty clothing and found Christian, trembling with fever. Aware that cooperation was the only way they could escape long prison sentences, Christian’s “guardians” confessed that Anna had promised them $10,000 to kidnap her son, taking him out of his father’s reach.

  Another court battle began when Christian was taken back to California. The press followed it day by day, announcing in the end that Marlon had been granted sole custody for the next year. Guilty, angry, almost as confused as the thirteen-year-old, he took his son to France, then to Tetiaroa, where his latest family had been holed up all these years. Under a benign tropical sun, Christian played with his little half-siblings Cheyenne and Teihotu, and got pampered by his stepmother Tarita. Marlon was keen to have his oldest boy on the island; in his opinion American teenagers were “the most conformist of people, anything but radical. You’ve got to learn the right words, dress the right way.” When he was satisfied that Christian was zigzagging back to normal, he hied him to Sun Valley, Idaho, in a further attempt “to maintain the kid’s health and straighten him out.” As the straightening process got under way, Marlon’s attention was distracted by the intrusions he hoped to avoid. Advance word on The Godfather was euphoric. Newspapers and networks sought face time with the man who had played the title role. Marlon bided his time, waiting for the reviews. Within a week the film was on its way to legendary status.

  In subsequent years, numerous historians claimed that The Godfather met with unanimous raves. That was far from the case. National Review critic John Simon, notoriously hard to please, said that the film was disfigured by its “basic dishonesty.” It showed the Mafia “mostly in extremes of heroic violence or sweet family life. Even the scenes of intimidation are grand and spectacular. Missing is the banality of evil, the cheap, ugly racketeering that is the mainstay of organized crime.” The acting, he went on, was predominantly good, with the exception of Marlon Brando, who displayed “a weak, gray voice, a poor ear for accents, and an unrivaled capacity for hamming things up by sheer underacting—in particular by unconscionably drawn-out pauses. Only when the character is near death does Brando’s wheezing performance lumber into sense.”

  In The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann complained, “They have put pudding in Brando’s cheeks and dirtied his teeth, he speaks hoarsely and moves stiffly, and these combined mechanics are hailed as great acting. Like star, like film, the keynote is inflation. The Godfather was made from a big bestseller, a lot of money was spent on it, and it runs over three hours. Therefore, it’s important.”

  Vogue called the movie an “overblown, pretentious, slow and ultimately tedious quasi-epic. The gangsters have their Greatest Story Ever Told, but minus [director] George Stevens.”

  In New York magazine, Judith Crist held The Godfather to be “dangerous.” The function of the film was “to show us that Hitler is a grand sort of family man, gentle with children, daring and ruthless with enemies, implacable in the matter of honor and so loyal to the ties of blood that even a brother-in-law, to a sister’s sorrow, must go (juicily garroted) if he happens to have betrayed a son of the house.” Still, she added drily, “you can’t say the trash doesn’t get first-class treatment.”

  The naysayers were drowned out by their colleagues and overwhelmed by public opinion. Variety’s rave was strictly business: “With several million hardcover and paperback books acting as trailers, Paramount’s film version of Mario Puzo’s sprawling gangland novel, The Godfather, has a large pre-sold audience.
This will bolster the potential for the film which has an outstanding performance by Al Pacino and a strong characterization by Marlon Brando in the title role.” Time praised The Godfather as “that rarity, a mass entertainment that is also great movie art” Newsweek zeroed in on Marlon: In the 1950s “he was hailed as the greatest actor of his generation. Now the king has come to reclaim his throne.” Pauline Kael set up a reclamation project in The New Yorker: “Is Brando marvelous? Yes he is, but then he often is; he was marvelous a few years ago in Reflections in a Golden Eye, and he’s shockingly effective as a working-class sadist in The Nightcomers, though the film itself isn’t worth seeing.” No one has aged better on camera than Marlon Brando, she went on; “he gradually takes Don Vito to the close of this life, when he moves into the sunshine world, a sleepy monster, near to innocence again. The character is all echoes and shadings, and no noise; his strength is in that armor of quiet.” And in an unprecedented piece entitled bravo, brando’s GODFATHER, New York Times critic Vincent Canby not only hailed the star’s comeback, but took some of his colleagues to task: “After a very long time, in too many indifferent or half-realized movies, giving performances that were occasionally becalmed but always more interesting than the material, Marlon Brando has finally connected with a character and a film that need not embarrass America’s most complex, most idiosyncratic film actor, nor those critics who have wondered, in bossy print, what ever happened to him.”

  Marlon’s champions won the day. For on The Godfather, they pointed out, he had done his thing and, after a string of unmitigated disasters, this time his thing had worked big-time. He had created a whole man on the screen, an aging, contradictory patriarch capable of ethical behavior as well as ruthless dispatch, an authority figure who exuded clout but knew when to let the next generation take over, an immigrant who was no stranger to capital crime, but whose dislike of the drug trade made him an anomaly among the other dons. There was another element to the actor’s renaissance. The exquisite timing, which for so long had eluded Marlon, had returned. More than his talent, more than Coppola’s vision, what made The Godfather so profoundly effective was its moment of release. Just as the film showed across the country in late spring and early summer, a pervasive malaise spread across the land. The Vietnam War was at its end game; North Vietnam forces had crossed the DMZ into the south. President Richard Nixon, in desperation, had ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor. The antiwar movement, once the province of the draftable young and the New Left, was joined by middle-class citizens, fed up with phony, euphoric reports from the battlefield and empty promises of peace. The Club of Rome published its report The Limits of Growth, warning that Western civilization could not go on with its profligate, irresponsible ways. Paranoid politics stained the presidential campaign. Up for reelection, Nixon worried aloud about Democrats who wanted to usurp his power in the upcoming election. The President’s operatives went into covert action, attempting to spy on the opposition, and were caught red-handed. From the White House, denials of official involvement were issued on an almost weekly basis, but with each press conference the administration’s credibility weakened. The plot would unravel to become the scandal of Watergate. As if to lend credence to The Godfather, mafioso Joey Gallo was shot to death at Umberto’s Clam House in Manhattan’s Little Italy. The bullets didn’t stop there. Governor George Wallace, a lifelong opponent of integration, was shot by a deranged gunman.