Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  On his social activism: “If we occasionally wish Brando would get off his minority-group hobbyhorse, we may have to recognize the other side of the coin: that this compulsion to do something is one of the sources of his fascination as an actor, the ambition of Terry Malloy and Johnny to be something more. He may, like Zapata, be the ultimate contradiction—a man ‘of the people’ who towers above them, a man in constant tension with his own myth.”

  On his screen presence: “He is intensely physical, strong, sensual, and yet there is a stillness, the hesitation of a troubled soul. He watches like nobody else watches, and behind the glare is a mind that knows more than it will ever, can ever utter.”

  On his central quality: Brando’s “essence is contradiction, conflicts that can never come to rest in resolution, and he will therefore frustrate and disappoint all those who travel society’s single track. His coarse language and brute force are not the impulses of a boor, but the masque of a poet, the cry of rage against the imprisoning niceties of civilization.”

  Richard Schickel also tried his hand at biography; Brando: A Life in Our Times was the most discreet of the genre, tracking its subject with dignity and perception: “Whatever Brando has done or not done, no actor in his life and his work has more consistently kept us in touch with the erratic—that which is unpredictable and dangerous in ourselves and in the world.” This was not nearly good enough for Camille Paglia, then establishing her credentials as pop intellectual. “My idol, Keith Richards, virtuoso rhythm guitarist of the Rolling Stones, named his son Marlon. Why? You would never know from Schickel’s book. Marlon Brando, the wild, sexy rebel, all mute, surly bad attitude, pre-figured rock and roll, the great art form of my Sixties generation.”

  For Marlon, it was all a waste, writers pressing their noses against the window, squinting at a stranger they pretended to know. It was time for him to take the stand. His friend and onetime director George Englund had contacts in the New York book world, and soon every prominent publisher went out to Los Angeles to present his case. “It was kind of a paradox,” said Sir Harold Evans, then president of Random House. “He would audition for a part, but we were the ones auditioning for the part of publisher. Which meant being interrogated by him.” Over the course of Evans’s audition, “We debated everything from anthropomorphism to drilling in Alaska to the native rights of the Sioux Indians. His range was absolutely vast.” Brando learned that his English visitor lived with Navajo Indians when he first came to America in the 1950s. That sealed the deal. Evans put Marlon together with Robert Lindsey, who had helped Ronald Reagan with his presidential memoirs. Marlon was cooperative—up to a point, refusing to mention, let alone discuss, his wives or his children. As celebrity and collaborator talked, another Brando book was known to be in the works. Hyperion had signed Peter Manso, biographer of Norman Mailer, to write the unauthorized life of Marlon Brando from birth to the present time. Manso had been at it for several years, speaking to numerous friends and acquaintances from school days, and digging up material relating to Dodie’s alcoholism, Marlon senior’s brutality, and other family tribulations. The biographer was currently tracking down Marlon’s aggrieved lovers, actors from the old days, friends, acquaintances in Omaha, New York, Hollywood—anyone willing to relate memories and anecdotes. With a wary eye on the competition, Hyperion and Random House each implied that theirs would be the definitive Brando book.

  The race ended in the fall of 1994, when both volumes reached the stores within a month. Comparisons were inevitable, and many newspapers elected to do a double review, appraising autobiography and biography side by side. Marlon’s entry, Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, had provided him with the one and only chance he would ever have to reach an audience in his own voice. Without makeup, without lines written by another author, he speaks in the first person. The good days of his Huckleberry Finn boyhood are resurrected along with the terrible ones. He recalls in agonizing detail the alcoholism of his parents, the hell of their marriage and what it did to their children, the military-school period, his first days in New York, and then the long up-and-down theatrical and cinematic ventures that established (as well as sullied) his reputation as an actor with outsize gifts and mammoth liabilities. Songs has a strangely appealing candor; the man who presents his case in those 468 pages is a complicated, dark, but always charismatic figure. Only later did shrewd readers realize they had been watching yet another Brando performance.

  Like all Brando performances, Marlon’s autobiography revealed (sometimes unwittingly) the foolishness of a great artist trying to get at the truth of his life. His self-analysis, for example, smacks of too many cognitive-therapy sessions: “Frustrated in my attempts to take care of my mother, I suppose that instead I tried to help Indians, blacks and Jews. I thought love, good intentions and positive action could alter injustice, prejudice, aggression and genocide.” He regrets to report that he’s “no longer persuaded that any significant change through a course of behavior will make any difference of lasting importance.” The only help for suffering mankind is a reordering of its DNA. Marlon’s view of patricide also suggests the psychiatrist’s couch: “If my father were alive today, I don’t know what I would do. After he died, I used to think, ‘God, just give him to me alive for eight seconds; that’s all I want, just eight seconds because I want to break his jaw. I wanted to smash his face and watch him spit out his teeth. I wanted to kick his balls into his throat. I wanted to rip his ears off and eat them in front of him. I wanted to separate his larynx from his body and shove it into his stomach. But I realized that as long as I felt this way I would never be free until I eradicated these feelings in myself.” The statement doesn’t jibe with what follows. Since the late Marlon senior is unable to degrade his son anymore, Marlon junior volunteers for the job. Echoing his father’s opinion of the performing arts, he calls acting “the least mysterious of crafts.” Film work is particularly inflated: “I laugh at people who call moviemaking an ‘art’ and actors ‘artists.’ Rembrandt, Beethoven, Shakespeare and Rodin were artists; actors are worker ants in a business and they toil for money. That’s why it’s always been called ‘the movie business.’” Ergo, whatever praise has come his way, Marlon Brando is not an accomplished and revolutionary performer. He never has been; he’s the biggest confidence man of them all. “If a studio paid me as much to sweep the floor as it did to act, I’d sweep the floor.” On the Waterfront: “I was simply embarrassed about myself.” The Godfather: “When I saw it the first time, it made me sick; all I could see were my mistakes and I hated it.” Apocalypse Now: “I was good at bullshitting Francis and persuading him to think my way, and he bought it, but what I’d really wanted from the beginning was to find a way to make my part smaller so I wouldn’t have to work as hard.” Christopher Columbus: “I mumbled my way through the part and gave an embarrassingly bad performance. The pay wasn’t bad, though: $5 million for five days’ work.”

  Occasionally Marlon drops the cynical pose. He admits that “I have always been lucky with women,” but that the good fortune never involved the risk of love. To avoid being hurt, from youth onward he was “like a vaudeville juggler spinning a half-dozen plates at once…always keeping several romances going at the same time; that way, if one woman left me there would still be four or five others.” Amid the bitter childhood memories are grace notes, recollections of rural life, walking the railroad tracks in the winter, watching locomotives laboring to get going with their wheels sliding and slipping, while in summer he and his friends “sat beside the rails, stuck a penny on the tracks with a wad of gum and waited for a train to flatten it, then made necklaces and belts out of the flattened coins.” Near the conclusion are evocations of nights in Tetiaroa. They belong next to Gauguin’s memoir: “I’ve never seen the heavens look so vast as they do from an atoll. The first light is usually a planet, Venus or Mars; then, very slowly, subtle, distant needle pricks appear in space, and as the last glow of the sunset ebbs away and it grows darker, the stars shine
more brightly. Finally the sky opens and the Milky Way and other constellations explode in a panoramic umbrella of light that reaches from horizon to horizon.”

  Manso’s doorstop of a book was different. At over a thousand pages, it purported to be a close study of Marlon Brando’s accomplishments and distresses. That may have been its original aim, but en route the author clearly came to resent the actor who, in Manso’s view, abjectly failed to fulfill his early, middle, and late promise. Interviews with some eight hundred people turned up all sorts of lurid details about Marlon’s affairs, many of them asserted by acquaintances who offered no proof. As Brando’s waistline expanded, so did the biography, filling chapter upon chapter with details of diets, quarrels with directors, battles with ex-wives, and attempts to deal with his difficult children. No doubt that Marlon had an effect on all of them, and that this effect was mixed. But Manso would not let go of this premise; he speculated that in the Drollet case, Marlon “played a key role in the shooting, not by holding the gun, but by setting the stage and providing the emotional cue that led to the killing.” Unable to speak to Marlon himself, Manso tracked down Cheyenne. The young woman was obviously disturbed, and had been for years. She accused her father of sexually abusing her, that she was his “lamb for sacrifice, for his own happiness,” that when she saw The Godfather she wasn’t watching Don Corleone. “It was my father in the flesh. I saw that he had the mentality of the Godfather, of the Mafia—the powerful man able to manipulate people as it pleases him. That’s why I think my father has that power, and it reminded me of voodoo. That’s why I said, ‘He is the demon.’ I believe that even today my father keeps a psychological influence over me, which I don’t know how to get rid of.” In a yoked review of both volumes, Caryn James, a Times film critic, made a sadly apt comparison: “Mr. Brando’s autobiography is no model of the genre, but it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than a quirky memoir. Mr. Manso’s book, with its unnecessary bulk and its subtitle, The Biography, tries to bully readers into believing it is definitive. It is, instead, wearisome and creepy.

  “Three years after the murder, Mr. Manso actually interviewed the emotionally fragile Cheyenne Brando, who railed against her father. There are plenty of disgusting episodes in Brando: The Biography. Tracking down an unstable young woman who was living in a psychiatric clinic in Berkeley has to be among the most chilling.”

  There was no thaw. With few film opportunities left to him, Marlon went into another tailspin, trying to ignore the paparazzi newly aroused by the Manso book, lounging about the house, gaining weight, occasionally visiting his neighbors Michael Jackson and Jack Nicholson, still trying halfheartedly to generate some interest in a documentary about Native American history. The emerging rocker-turned-actor Johnny Depp had been widely praised for his work in Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood. He was about to take the title role in Don Juan DeMarco, a romantic comedy about a young man, Don R. Marco, who believes he’s the legendary seventeenth-century lover. Placed in a mental hospital, he comes under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Jack Mickler, due to retire in ten days. He gives those days to Don—and falls under his spell, as the screen details seductions, duels, and a sojourn in a harem. Mickler comes to see the value in imagination, to appreciate the “healthy sickness” of the young man, and to rekindle romance in his burned-out marriage. “When I read the script,” said Depp, “all I kept seeing was Marlon Brando as the psychiatrist. So when they asked me who I thought would be good in the role, I said Marlon Brando. They looked at me like I was insane.” The director, Jeremy Leven, thought it was worth a shot. “I said, ‘Sure, let’s take it to Marlon Brando,’ and then we can move on and ask someone who would be serious about taking the role. The next thing I know, I’m sitting in Marlon’s living room, and we’re making a movie.”

  It was a happy set in New York City and in Hollywood. Marlon truly seemed to enjoy himself and his colleagues, particularly Depp as Don, and Faye Dunaway as Mrs. Mickler. He pulled no stunts, didn’t test his director, didn’t fill the days with practical jokes. There was a new seriousness about him, and an unaccustomed ease. With the young actor and the old one in harmony, Marlon seemed in a generous mood, and Warner Bros. publicists dared to hope that he might help to promote what was, after all, a low-budget, if agreeable, fantasy. Events overtook them all. Don Juan DeMarco opened on April 7, 1995, to mixed reviews. Variety loved it: “The film’s greatest asset is its glorious acting, with special accolades to Brando, who here delivers yet another magnificent ‘comeback’ performance. Despite a huge frame, Brando is extremely light on his feet, playing in an uncharacteristically relaxed, laid-back manner.” Roger Ebert hated it: “Brando doesn’t so much walk through this movie as coast, in a gassy, self-indulgent performance no one else could have gotten away with.” Marlon was used to varied responses, but there is no telling how he felt about these notices. For nine days later, the dirge sounded again: Cheyenne had hanged herself at the Brando home in Tahiti. At the time she was vastly overweight, like the father she had so often denigrated. She was said to be despondent over a court’s refusal to allow her custody of her four-year-old, Tuki, her son by Dag Drollet. In fact this was one of many suicide attempts; in his book My Life as a Radical Lawyer, William Kunstler wrote about the defense of Christian Brando. He harked back to a dinner at the Brando house, when he asked for a blade to cut his meat. Marlon informed him that there were only butter knives on the premises. “I believe he feared that Cheyenne would use a sharp knife inappropriately.”

  Jocelyn came by; she did her best to console the grieving father, but he was beyond solace. Marlon issued no statement. His sentiments cannot have differed much from those of Mark Twain, who learned of his own daughter’s death from a sudden illness when they were more than a thousand miles apart. Reflecting on the heartbreak, he wrote: “It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.” Cheyenne’s tragedy was compounded because her funeral could not be attended by her brother, who was still in jail, or by her father, who was too devastated to leave home. Tarita arranged to have Cheyenne buried beside Dag, defying the objections of the Drollets. For Marlon, from this point on, the South Seas lost their power of enchantment, and the panoramic umbrella of light faded to black.

  3

  Of course not all of Marlon’s idiosyncrasies and strange habits could be blamed on his personal tragedies. He had long since become notorious for bizarre behavior—when promoting Songs My Mother Taught Me in 1994, for example, he had appeared on Larry King Live to give a disjointed, hilarious account of his life, and ended by kissing the host on the lips. But Marlon was obviously a man in pain, and a year after his daughter’s suicide he made two ill-advised appearances, one on the large screen, one on the small.

  The Island of Dr. Moreau was a remake of the Island of Lost Souls, adapted from H. G. Wells’s turn-of-the-century novel about a mad scientist who changed animals into men. A 1932 version starred Charles Laughton as Dr. Moreau; in 1977 Burt Lancaster took the role. Both films had an air of serious concern, as if genetic engineering loomed just around the corner. The third attempt was a hammy, camped-up attempt to be frightening and comic at the same time. The screen-writer/director Richard Stanley was fired during the early days, replaced by the veteran John Frankenheimer. His was one of three outsize egos assigned to the movie. The others belonged to Val Kilmer, who played Moreau’s oddball assistant, and Marlon, who sported dead-white makeup and a series of peculiar costumes as if to broadcast the doctor’s inner lunacy. Kilmer was going through a divorce at the time; everything seemed to set him off, particularly Frankenheimer’s direction. Marlon spoke to Val about the virtues of self-discipline—and then proceeded to do anything he damn pleased. During one break he spotted a metal pail out of camera range, impulsively inverted it, and covered his face. He called it Dr. Moreau’s latest invention: a device for keeping cool. “No one was willing to say no to anything,” recalled Stanley, “which is why Brando wears an
ice bucket on his head in one scene.” Marlon masked his grief with a series of similar stunts; they did nothing to improve the picture or lighten his burden. Island opened to terrible reviews. The film quarterly Bright Lights Film Journal described Brando as “a waddling behemoth who spends most of his time dressing in ornate, flowing caftans and matching do-rags and playing piano duets with a sort of homunculus figure who wears identical outfits.” Audiences never see “this ballooned up drag queen do any actual research; with more costume changes than a Lana Turner movie, he’s obviously too busy choosing his own gowns.” Island received six Razzie nominations, including Worst Picture; Brando beat out Kilmer by receiving Worst Supporting Actor.

  Marlon had no one to blame but himself. Reviewers could hardly be expected to give him a discount because of a death in the family. Or because, when Christian was paroled in January, the tabloids ran lurid stories about that fatal night at the Brando house. Even so, the impersonation of Dr. Moreau provoked some disproportionately cruel responses, as if the critics got a special kick out of mocking a tormented seventy-two-year-old. None of this kept Marlon from the public. The most notorious of his appearances occurred on Larry King’s show on April 5, 1996. During the course of a rambling interview, King brought up the subjects of racism, violence, and immigration. He mentioned the Jews, and his guest ventured an opinion. “Per capita, Jews have contributed more to American culture than any other single group. If it weren’t for the Jews, we wouldn’t have music, we wouldn’t have art, we wouldn’t have much theater.” Without pausing, Marlon suddenly lurched into a screed about the movies: “Hollywood is run by Jews. It is owned by Jews, and they should have a greater sensitivity about the issue of people who are suffering because they’ve [been] exploited.” He went on: “We have seen the Nigger and the Greaseball. We’ve seen the Chink. We’ve seen the slit-eyed dangerous Jap. We have seen the wily Filipino. We’ve seen everything, but we never saw the Kike because they knew perfectly well that that is where you draw the wagons around.”