New York City Mayor John Lindsay directed his fire at the United States itself: “The insane attack upon George Wallace is yet another terrible and inevitable example of the violence of our nation. From the needless neglect of our most pressing national needs, we have reaped a harvest of division, despair and death.” In a Times op-ed column, Tom Wicker sought to blame the action of a potential assassin on “violent western movies, the organized violence of professional football, the endless lines around theaters showing The Godfather.” Attackers of that film agreed with Wicker; they spoke of its apologia for murder and revenge. Defenders pointed out, as Marlon had done for so long, that The Godfather offered no such rationale. It was instead a metaphor for the United States, with its heritage of vigilantism and feudal retribution, its massive corporations beyond the reach of the law. The message of the film resided in its opening line, they insisted, spoken not by the Don but by one of his supplicants. “I believe in America,” says an entrepreneur. “America has made my fortune. And I raised my daughter in the American fashion.” When that daughter was beaten by two men, “I went to the police, like a good American. These two boys were brought to trial. The judge sentenced them to three years in prison—suspended sentence. Suspended sentence! They went free that very day! I stood in the courtroom like a fool. And those two bastards, they smiled at me. Then I said to my wife, for justice, we must go to Don Corleone.”
Predictably, the debate served only to lengthen lines around the theaters. A lot of ticket buyers were already pre-sold, as Variety suggested, because they were fans of the Puzo novel. Those who hadn’t read the book found that the movie could stand by itself, a vigorous tale well told, with an outstanding cast and high-gloss production. In addition, they found the post–World War II period of The Godfather, with its uneasy shifts of power, its nouveau riche racketeers and Senate investigations, eerily appropriate to their own time. Less than a month after its release, the film had earned more than four times its original cost of $6.2 million. No Hollywood product had ever risen so rapidly. In the first year of release the film grossed $81 million in North America alone. By the end of the year, the catchphrases of the Don and his family had permanently entered the public vocabulary: “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer” “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.”
As always with Marlon, extravagance ruled. When things went bad—as in the case of lawsuits by ex-wives, the misbehavior of alienated children, financial difficulties, and a litany of cinematic failures—waste and tragedy defined the Brando image. When things went right—as in the lustrous years when his career began, and here in 1972—the superstar was spotlighted with a golden gel. The rise of The Godfather in the spring and summer of that year was followed by an epochal screening of Last Tango at the New York Film Festival. Attended by every important movie critic in the country, it elicited some of the most febrile responses in the history of cinema.
The national controversy was kicked off by Pauline Kael’s review in The New Yorker. The night of the New York Film Festival presentation, October 14, 1972, she wrote, was comparable to the evening of May 29, 1913, when Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps had its premiere. The movie had “the same kind of hypnotic excitement as the Sacre” and Bertolucci and Brando had “altered the face of an art form.” Semicoherently, she went on: The audience is “watching Brando throughout this movie, with all the feedback that that implies, and his willingness to run the full course with a study of the aggression in masculine sexuality and how the physical strength of men lends credence to the insanity that grows out of it gives the film a larger, tragic dignity.” As for Schneider, when “she lifts her wedding dress to her waist, smiling coquettishly as she exposes her pubic hair, she’s in a great film tradition of irresistibly naughty girls.”
Kael was to be criticized not for her opinions but for her reportage. She had seen an earlier version. In her review she mentioned Paul “on all fours barking like a crazy man-dog to scare off a Bible salesman who has come to the flat.” No such scene was in the finished movie. It had landed on the cutting-room floor. Bertolucci told the Times, “Pauline said, ‘You shouldn’t have done this to me,’ but I never liked that scene. It was meant to be funny, but it was sad, terribly embarrassing somehow. A little too phony. I’ve never seen a Bible salesman in Paris. That was just a scriptwriter’s perversion.”
Looking back, Marlon decided that Kael, “unconsciously, gave more to the film than was there.” Nevertheless, he went out of his way to call her a talented reviewer with a worthy passion. As well he might. She had helped to restore his depleted bank accounts. For what happened after her rave was a kind of mass hysteria, with Kael’s acolytes—irreverently labeled “Paulettes” within the business—amplifying her views in national newspapers. United Artists reproduced her four-thousand-word review verbatim, turning it, in effect, into advertising copy. Next came full-throated cheerleading from the newsmagazines. No one was going to put them alongside the unsophisticated Parisians of 1913 who had hooted at Printemps. Newsweek critic Paul D. Zimmerman assured his readers that Last Tango was “a genuine masterpiece of staggering proportions.” In a lavishly illustrated cover story entitled self-portrait of an angel and monster—the words Bertolucci used to describe his star—Time editor Christopher Porterfield wrote, “For boldness and brutality, the intimate scenes are unprecedented in feature films. Frontal nudity, four-letter words, masturbation, even sodomy—Bertolucci dwells uncompromisingly on them all with a voyeur’s eye, a moralist’s savagery, an artist’s finesse.” (Thousands of readers disagreed; cancellations followed, usually with a terse explanation: “Since you have stooped to pimping for B-rated peep-show-type movies, this is my last tango with Time.” “Minutes after my Time came, I threw it into the refuse can, whereupon the rest of the garbage got out and walked away.” “Where have all the flowers gone? They have wilted into a stinking pile of compost nurtured by irresponsibility, disrespect, laziness, greed and moral decay exemplified by Time’s feature story on Last Tango.”)
The film’s profitability rose in direct proportion to its notoriety. A court in Bologna issued a ban: “Obscene content offensive to public decency…catering to the lowest instincts of the libido, dominated by the idea of stirring unchecked appetites…permeated by scurrilous language.” Copies were impounded and destroyed, Bertolucci’s civil rights were revoked for five years, and he received a four-month suspended jail sentence. In England the film was the first to be brought to trial under the Obscene Publications Act (the prosecution was dropped after a judge ruled that Last Tango was a movie rather than a publication). In the United States, the Catholic Conference placed Last Tango on its list of condemned movies. And in Cincinnati, city elders declared the movie to be obscene and theaters stopped showing it.
Given the wild reception, Last Tango couldn’t fail to show a profit. This one was immense. By the time the dust settled, Marlon had pocketed some $4 million. At this moment the recovered Laurence Olivier was starring in the trivial mystery Sleuth and Richard Burton wasted his time and talent in Bluebeard and The Assassination of Trotsky. Marcello Mastroianni, as always, was doing honorable, original work in Fellini’s Roma and the World War II drama Massacre in Rome. But these were art-house movies that escaped public attention. Marlon Brando was alone at the top. Of course, because it was Brando his stature could not go unquestioned. There were questions about his performance in the Bertolucci film, for example. Was it in fact an impersonation? Or was Paul just a condensed version of Marlon, spewing forth his contempt for social hypocrisy—and for what he had become since the early days? Richard Schickel made the shrewdest assumption: “In the formal sense, this was not really acting, but it was an astonishing act of self-assertion. For Brando had taken it all—his conceptions and misconceptions of himself, our conceptions and misconceptions about the same subject—and made a role of the mess.” Whether Last Tango mattered as much to the rest of the world as it did to Kael wa
s irrelevant. The film had not only underwritten Marlon’s radical credentials; it had renewed his license as a sexual renegade. The erotic persona—the one that had been so instrumental in his early success—had returned, giving him new life at the age of forty-eight. Audiences now regarded him as an amalgam of the fictional Stanley Kowalski and Johnny Strabler and Terry Malloy and the real Marlon Brando. Nothing was sexier than that. He was richer than he had ever been. And as if all this were not sufficient, he was considered a lock for Best Actor at the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony. It would not do for a revolutionary to get himself up in a tuxedo and march up to the stage to accept his statuette. He fretted about that for weeks. And then an idea came to him.
1973–1990
An Intense and Hopeless Despair
1
At long last Marlon felt Christian was ready to go back to school. He saw the boy off, packed up, and headed for Tetiaroa—only to turn back when terrible news arrived. Besides Frannie and Jocelyn, only one person had truly known Marlon from the days he was known as Bud, the wayward kid from Omaha. Frannie was more than a thousand miles away, involved in her own exurban life. Jocelyn, even though she lived in Los Angeles, had finally kicked her habit and now counseled other alcoholics. “She was close to Marlon geographically,” confided a friend, “but not spiritually.” That left Wally Cox, and suddenly, on February 15, 1973, he was gone, dead of a heart attack at the age of forty-seven. The Walrus had been depressed about his fading career and deteriorating marriage. Rumors of suicide circulated, unconfirmed by the Los Angeles coroner.
The childhood cronies and New York City roommates had not been all that close in the last few years, but neither had they been alienated. Too many factors kept pushing them apart, celebrity on one side and the lack of it on the other, domestic miseries, professional obligations. Child’s Play would have been a kick, working with Wally again. That went bust, and now it was too late to help the little guy. Grieving openly, Marlon caught a plane to L.A., all the while reconstructing the close friendship as if it had never suffered any lapses. “Here I am trying to save the world with all my noble causes,” he lamented, “and I couldn’t even save my best—my only—friend.” After the cremation ceremony, Marlon, rather than the widow, Pat Cox, took possession of the ashes and kept them on his mantel. Wally “was my brother,” Marlon told a reporter. “I talk to him all the time.”
At the moment his noble cause was the commitment to an old interest: the plight of the American Indian. Marlon had broken off relations with the Panthers, but he had kept in touch with leaders of the American Indian Movement. In February, AIM and members of the Oglala Sioux poured into Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation of South Dakota. This was the site of the massacre of some three hundred Lakotan Indians in 1890. The idea was to call national attention to the bleak situation of the tribes. As soon as journalists arrived on the scene, spokesmen reminded them that the American Indians had been lied to since Benjamin Harrison occupied the White House. They had been rounded up and placed in reservations, a euphemism for concentration camps if ever there was one. Today their life expectancy was about two thirds of those of American Caucasians, and their rates of alcoholism and suicide were among the highest in the world. Yet thanks to a cherished Hollywood tradition, Native Americans were still being portrayed as savages in war paint, slayers of unarmed women and children on the Western frontier.
In conversation with two old acquaintances, AIM activists Russell Means and Dennis Banks, Marlon spoke of the disconnect between movie imagery and historical reality. They told him that someone had to make the world care about the American Indian, someone who could elicit attention. Marlon was the one who could do it. Together the men hatched a scheme. Marlon would endorse the organization’s slogan: “The Red Giant is on one knee, but he’s getting ready to stand up.” And he would amplify it in a very public arena—the Academy Awards show. After consideration, Marlon began to get cold feet. He believed in the work of AIM, but any civil rights sermon would require a more authentic voice. Suppose a Native American were to deliver it in his place? Russell and Means had a suggestion. They knew an appropriate Indian woman, Sacheen Littlefeather. The twenty-six-year-old Indian possessed the right credentials. She had been born on a reservation. She had always been concerned for her people. She was very presentable and showed great poise in public situations. She could handle it. Marlon liked what he heard. He flew Littlefeather to L.A., worked out a routine, and arranged to have her attend the televised Academy Award ceremonies as his official representative.
On the night of March 27, 1973, Littlefeather showed up at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Apache regalia, complete with buckskin dress and beads. The show’s producer, Howard Koch, spotted Marlon’s representative holding a fifteen-page speech in her hand. He attempted to head her off at the pass. Just before the announcement for Best Actor, Koch warned Littlefeather to keep her statement brief. Very brief. In fact, if she went on more than forty-five seconds, he would cut off her microphone and move the cameras elsewhere. When the name of the Best Actor was announced, Littlefeather spoke in a small, intimidated voice. “Marlon Brando has asked me to tell you, in a very long speech which I cannot share with you presently—because of time—but I will be glad to share with the press afterward, that he cannot accept this very generous award. And the reason for this being the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry and on television in movie reruns and also the recent happenings at Wounded Knee. I beg at this time that I have not intruded on this evening and that in the future our hearts and our understanding will meet with love and generosity. Thank you on behalf of Marlon Brando.”
Scattered applause greeted her, quickly replaced by jeers. Marlon’s Oscar refusal rippled throughout the rest of the evening. When Clint Eastwood announced The Godfather as Best Picture, he kept his tongue firmly in his cheek, demanding equal time for “all the cowboys shot in John Ford Westerns over the years.” Raquel Welch, presenter of the Best Actress Oscar, said plaintively, “I hope the winner doesn’t have a cause.” Cohost Michael Caine criticized Marlon for “letting some poor Indian girl take the boos, instead of standing up and doing it himself.” Charlton Heston, the other host, felt that in view of the academy’s embrace of Marlon after years of coolness between them, what Marlon had done was “childish. The American Indian needs better friends than that.” Variety considered l‘affaire Brando an instance of unforgivable “rudeness.” It developed, in the days to follow, that Littlefeather’s credentials were more concerned with show business than with social causes. Gossip columnists delighted in pointing out that she had been named Miss Vampire in 1970, and that, despite her appearance, she was not a full-blooded Indian. Her mother claimed French, German, and Dutch forebears; it was her father who had ancestors from the White Mountain Apache and Yaqui tribes in Arizona.
That was all fine with Marlon. He had reconnected with Miko, the twelve-year-old he’d sired with Movita, and invited him to watch the awards show along with his half-brother Christian, now almost fifteen, in the comfort of their father’s bedroom on Mulholland Drive. The trio enjoyed every minute, including the catcalls and jibes—all three knew the value of bad attention. Indeed, the forbidden speech Marlon wrote for Littlefeather gained worldwide circulation a day after she handed it to a reporter.
For two hundred years we have said to the Indian people who are fighting for their land, their life, their families and their right to be free, “Lay down your arms, my friends, and then we will remain together. Only if you lay down your arms, my friends, can we then talk of peace and come to an agreement which will be good for you.”
When they laid down their arms, we murdered them. We lied to them. We cheated them out of their lands. We starved them….
Perhaps at this moment you are saying to yourself what the hell has all this got to do with the Academy Awards? Why is this young woman standing up here, ruining our evening, invading our lives with things that don’t concern us, and that we don�
�t care about?
I think the answer to those unspoken questions is that the motion picture community has been responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing him as savage, hostile and evil. It’s hard enough for children to grow up in this world. When Indian children watch television, and they watch films, and when they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know.
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