Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  The next day Jewish organizations furiously responded. Phil Baum, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, said, “Our review of Brando is clear: he should emulate silent movies, because his soundtrack is not worth hearing.” Abraham Foxman, national director of the B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League, was more specific. “Mr. Brando should know that what he said is utterly false, extremely offensive and plays into the hands of anti-Semites and bigots. His comments raise the centuries-old canard of Jewish control and conspiracy, and his use of an anti-Semitic epithet is hurtful to Jews everywhere.” The Jewish Defense League petitioned (in vain) for the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to remove Marlon Brando’s star from the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Humorist Ben Stein tried to make the affair a tempest in a tea glass: “Hollywood is not really ‘run’ by anyone (it’s far too chaotic for that).” But the damage had been done, and Marlon knew he had bombinated once too often. Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, received a call the following week. Afterward, Hier informed every journalist on his Rolodex that the actor had “expressed his remorse,” and that he insisted his comments were not meant to be anti-Semitic. Marlon’s defenders got into the act, reminding the ADL and other Jewish groups of his philo-Semitism, quoting the passage praising Jews in Songs My Mother Taught Me: “Whatever the reasons for their brilliance and success, I was never educated until I was exposed to them. They introduced me to a sense of culture that has lasted me a lifetime.” Mollified, the protestors quieted down, freeing the performer for his next indiscretions.

  One was called Free Money, a “quickie” shot in Canada. Marlon played an inconsequential part in the negligible movie. The other actors—Donald Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, Thomas Haden Church, Mira Sorvino—seemed uncomfortable, and Marlon’s portrait of the Swede, a bald, mustachioed prison guard, was cringe-making. Almost all his moves are pratfalls, culminating in a scene where he faints, plunging head-first into a toilet bowl. The plot, a story of revenge against the Swede, failed to work on even the most elemental levels, and when Free Money was shopped around to North American theatrical distributors, no one bought it. The film went directly to the video market, where it was mercifully ignored.

  The other was entitled The Brave. The project was attractive to Marlon because Johnny Depp was to star and direct, and because it dealt with the plight of a Native American. The brave of the title is Raphael (Depp), an alienated, alcoholic Cherokee who lives with his wife and two children in a trailer park. With no skills and no future, Raphael accepts the offer of a mysterious figure, McCarthy (Brando). For $50,000 Raphael will allow the maker of “snuff” films to have him murdered on camera. The filming is to take place one week hence. During those seven days Raphael reexamines his life, connects with his children, falls in love with his wife all over again, and constructs a kind of theme park outside his home for the neighbors to enjoy. The Brave was another of those movies undone by its good intentions. McCarthy is too heavily symbolic of the white man’s rapacity, Raphael’s renaissance is put in by the numbers, and the denouement is brutal and implausible. Shown at the fiftieth Cannes Film Festival, the film was received with a mix of loud boos and polite applause. According to Lisa Schwarzbaum, a critic from Entertainment Weekly, Depp’s movie “had a nice look to it, it was beautifully lit, had a very moody feeling to it, but was sort of astonishingly not ready to be seen. It was actually kind of embarrassing. He really needed somebody older who wouldn’t be afraid to say, ‘You know, Johnny, nice idea, but let’s sit on this for a while.’” Schwarzbaum added that “with any luck, it will never be released and nobody will ever have to see it, and I mean that for him as well as the audience.” That was essentially the case: No American distributor picked up the film, and Marlon’s work remained unseen and unappraised, save for Variety’s festival reviewer, who found McCarthy “entirely credible,” though Brando’s “windy philosophizing about death seems an unintended parody of his soliloquies in Last Tango in Paris.”

  For some time Marlon had been experiencing shortness of breath and a dry, hacking cough, but he refused to see a doctor, relying instead on the ministrations of his Filipino housekeeper, Angela Borlaza Magaling, and her sister Vie. Early in 2001 he agreed to play the cameo role of a priest in Scary Movie 2, only to drop out in April, when he was felled by pneumonia. Recovery was slow and the symptoms hung on. Marlon’s old friend and longtime makeup artist Philip Rhodes grew apprehensive. Evidently the Borlazas had been administering injections, but he was unable to find out just what those syringes contained. Fearful, he called Marlon’s sister Jocelyn. “I told her I was afraid something had been done to Marlon. She said, ‘Oh, no, I’ve been talking a lot to Angela, and her sister is an accredited nurse.’” Marlon, convinced that he was on the mend, flew to New York to participate in a tribute to Michael Jackson at Madison Square Garden. He took the opportunity to deliver a lecture. Wearing sunglasses and lounging on a leather recliner, he addressed the full house about conditions in sub-Saharan Africa. “While you’re wondering who that old fat fart is sitting there…I wanted you to realize that in that minute there were hundreds if not thousands of children hacked to death with a machete, beaten to death by their parents, got typhus and died of a disease.” Consulting his wristwatch, he went on, “Hundreds of children have been hacked to death in the minute I’ve looked at my watch. Hundreds more were beaten. Don’t forget that! Think about what I’m saying. It could be you.” Restless, the audience greeted him with good-natured boos. He shrugged and got off. There were other items to attend to. He’d been offered another movie.

  The Score was a caper that would star three generations of exceptional leading men: Ed Norton, thirty-three, Robert De Niro, fifty-eight, and Marlon Brando, seventy-seven. It would be directed by Frank Oz, who had graduated from moving Muppets around on Sesame Street to overseeing such major movies as Little Shop of Horrors, What About Bob?, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, a remake of the Brando/Niven comedy Bedtime Story. Marlon was to play Max, a fey dealer in stolen goods, abetting a middle-aged thief and a young thug in one last heist. Marlon seemed so cheerful and anxious to begin that crew members wondered if he had changed after all these years. He hadn’t.

  Time reported that “wrangling Brando was anything but simple. When the Method-acting legend showed up to shoot his first scene, he was in full makeup (eye-shadow, rosy cheeks, the works), and his initial performance as the gay Max looked something like Barbara Bush doing her best Truman Capote impression.” Oz asked him to “bring it down” and got a sulfurous reaction. Snapped Marlon: “I bet you wish I was a puppet so you could stick your hand up my ass and make me do what you want.”

  There was no truce in the battle of wills. “It was hell,” said Oz. “The first two days with Marlon, I pushed him the wrong way, and as a result I lost him. He hated me, and it was my fault. I was too confrontational, too strong.” Relations became so hostile that Marlon refused to come to the set if the director was on hand. Max’s central scene was directed by De Niro, with Oz secretly conveying instructions through an assistant director. Long afterward, the director concluded, “All actors are frightened that they won’t give you what you want. It was a sad way for me to learn that even Marlon Brando was scared.” Perhaps Marlon was nervous, but his fears did not keep him from delivering a deft performance.

  New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott offered a perverse view of The Score: “There is always a morbid fascination, and a degree of pleasure, to be found in watching first-rate actors trundle through expensive pieces of Hollywood hackwork.” Most of the other responses were enthusiastic. In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan called the film a “top-drawer heist movie,” taking particular delight in one performance: “The showy, flamboyant Max, given to rakish hats and canes, is not in the role of a lifetime—it’s more in the nature of an amusing cameo—but it is still marvelous to see what Marlon Brando does with it.” In the San Francisco Chronicle, Bob Graham opened his review, “No, that isn’t Marlon Brando
in a fat suit at the beginning of The Score. That’s the great man himself. By now, Brando has become as big as his talent.” Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers added, “Brando—his eyes alive with mischief—is the life of the movie.”

  Marlon went home to set up as an acting teacher. To cynical producers, this move was strictly venal; remarked one, “I see the Marlon Brando business is still in operation.” It was true that the Brando name could attract top-tier actors as well as students, and that he could charge a tidy sum for his intensive two-week seminar. But there was more to it than that. If Marlon was in need of revenue these days, he was also out to pay a nonmonetary debt. An altruistic impulse had threaded through his life from the boyhood days as a rescuer, through the connection with black civil rights activists and Indian demonstrators. It surfaced again in the performing classes. He had been extraordinarily affected by his early teachers, Stella Adler most of all, and he truly wanted to give something back to the generations in his slipstream. He wasn’t quite certain how to do it, and enlisted a “faculty” to help him. It included Sean Penn, Jon Voight, Leonardo DiCaprio, Nick Nolte, Edward James Olmos, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, and Michael Jackson. But most of the instruction was given by Marlon himself, under the rubric “Lying for a Living.” Jod Kaftan, a reporter from Rolling Stone, was allowed to sit in on some of the classes. Under the headline the oddfather: marlon brando is hard up, pissed off and stranger than ever, Kaftan described a typical day. “Seven cameras capture the stars’ awestruck faces as they hang on Brando’s every word. They have good reason: Brando hardly ever discusses his craft, and for the first time in years he speaks of acting as if it matters.” Seated on an overstuffed armchair he advises the paying customers, “Your whole face is a stage,” and “Let the drama find you.” He does a convincing improvisation on a prop telephone. “When some of the other actors try it, including Penn, DiCaprio and Voight, Brando’s boundless talent seems obvious.” There are inventive exercises, à la Stella Adler, with black students acting white, and white students acting black (“The white men portray black men as angry, and the black men portray whites as petty and wimpy”). And there are more provocative lectures by Marlon. Then, unforeseen difficulties suddenly arise. The videotape director Tony Kaye shows up dressed as Bin Laden. Voight says he finds “no discernible humor or purpose in the outfit.” During an improvised scene between two women, Kaye moves in for a tight close-up. “Cut,” he says. “Terrible. Boring.” Snaps Marlon, “Let me tell you, what’s boring is sticking that camera four inches from their noses and walking around like a police dog.”

  It is an indication of the storm to come. After shooting for two weeks, Kaye puts together a feature-length documentary called Lying for a Living, without clearing it with Brando. The world premiere is canceled when Marlon threatens to sue. Kaye’s remark does nothing to solve the dispute: “Marlon Brando should be with the Taliban. I think he’d be very comfortable in that world, with a hundred wives, fourteen thousand children, no music, and no one’s allowed to speak.” According to a self-described “insider” who spoke to MSNBC, showings of Lying had to be canceled. “It’s hard to figure out exactly what’s going on because Brando has become quite, shall we say, eccentric by this point, and Kaye is a bit of a puzzle himself.”

  After Lying, Marlon once again became more reclusive, rarely venturing out, eating and reading ravenously. Only a few friends were allowed in, principally his business manager, Jo An Corrales, Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, and producer Mike Medavoy. If he went out for any distance it was to Neverland, Michael Jackson’s ranch near Santa Barbara. Brando’s son Miko, one of Jackson’s bodyguards, said that at the ranch “my father had a twenty-four-hour chef, twenty-four-hour security, twenty-four-hour help, twenty-four-hour kitchen, twenty-four-hour maid service. Just carte blanche. He loved it.” There was more to it than unlimited pampering. Jackson had been fighting charges of pedophilia, and Marlon, a loyal friend to those who mattered to him, wanted to show the flag. As evidence of their camaraderie, he appeared in a Jackson video, You Rock My World, in which Jackson ventures into the significantly named Waterfront Hotel, owned by a glowering, cigar-chomping Marlon Brando.

  In Neverland and out, Marlon declined all interviews. “Once I do one,” he insisted, “they all come. It’s like sticking your toe in the Amazon thinking that it won’t attract piranhas. I’d rather they just portray me as a fat slob and a hoot, and just leave it at that.” Every so often filmmakers asked to visit but such proposals were infrequent, and tended to be unattractive—curious people trying to get a glimpse of Goliath in winter. But there were three offers he couldn’t refuse.

  4

  Friends of Ridha Behi, a soft-spoken North African filmmaker, got a script to Marlon. Entitled Brando and Brando, it followed a Tunisian who comes to America in search of Marlon Brando. Marlon would play himself, at first resistant, then growing warmer, until, over the course of time, the young man and the old one form a bond. Something about the story appealed to Marlon; he spoke of approaching Johnny Depp or Sean Penn to play the secondary role. Early in 2004 Behi came to Mulholland Drive. He found his host in a state of severe depression: Marlon was sad about the atrocity of 9/11, sad about the Middle East, sad about the war in Iraq. He said if he had it to do all over he would be a scientist, not an actor. “He cried and said that he had lost his life.” Behi searched for backers, imploring them, “Please, quickly, I saw this man with oxygen tubes.” Meanwhile, Marlon edited the script. He got a little lift out of being busy, and signed on to a couple of other projects that allowed him to stay at home while he worked.

  The first was a device for video-gamers called “The Godfather: The Game,” based on the film. On a morning when Marlon was feeling a little bit better, his housekeeper led a recording crew into the bedroom. The visitors turned out to be new-millennium geeks, full of technical knowledge. And yet with all their new equipment, the lavalier and shotgun mikes, the DAT tape recorder, Marlon saw that they were like all the others. The look was the same, the awe in the eyes, the deferential manner, the tiptoeing around. If they were bothered by his weight, or by the oxygen tank at his side, they didn’t show it. He decided to play the icon this one last time, but in a new way for a new medium.

  They edged the microphone closer. Philip Campbell, the creative director of Electronic Arts, cued him and he spoke the line. Dissatisfied with his reading, he reached for a tissue, ripped it up, and stuffed it into his cheeks, just as he had done thirty years before. He took a breath and began anew, speaking in the distinctive, cloudy voice of Vito Corleone: “I would like you to go see this man and discover what makes him tick. Then we can make him an offer and see if justice is truly on our side.” Marlon relaxed, comfortable in his own identity.

  Somewhere else Jimmy Caan and Bobby Duvall were doing their own thing for the Godfather game. Jimmy was funny about being a voice-over. “I love it,” he said, “because this way my kids can play with me after I die.” Francis Ford Coppola was not so enthusiastic. “The game has taken the work we all did on the film, and transformed it into a ‘kill or be killed’ slaughter session.” He worked himself into a fury. “I did not give permission for the game, nor was I asked. Any courtesies I extended, and I did make the invitation to see our archives, were given before I knew that the game was already done. I did not cooperate with its making in any way, nor do I like or approve of what I saw of the result.”

  You couldn’t blame Francis for his passion. That was what made him such a force in the good, crazy days. But Jimmy had a point, too, a personal one. And maybe it was bigger than all the objections: My kids can play with me after I die. That was something to think about, to obsess about, really.

  How much time was left, how many breaths? Not a lot. Every mouthful of air was a war. Brando couldn’t stand the strain of travel anymore, even in the backseat of a limo. The people from Electronic Arts understood. They knew he was anxious to go to work on an interactive video. People thought he was broke. There were storie
s in the tabloids. A lot they knew; there were plenty of assets. He was doing this recording for other reasons. To keep his piece on the board. To stay in contention. To surprise the Hollywood smart money who were forever marking him as obsolete.

  The very word “interactive” appealed to him. “In a game,” he told the E.A. people, “it’s the audience that’s doing the acting.” Between takes he spoke about the role, about Don Corleone’s need for respect, for family, for not being careless. “Women and children can be careless. Not men.” They started talking about the past. He cleared his throat, took another hit of oxygen, and gave them a scrap of Terry Malloy, the “contender” speech. The crew had that look again. The respect and care stayed on their faces for the rest of the session. Then they backed away and left, deferential to a fault. And once more he was alone in his sanctuary. California light dazzled through the big windows, but it never seemed to rid the room of darkness.

  A month later another group came in to record his voice. This session was for an animated comedy, Big Bug Man, about a candy maker who gets superpowers after being stung by superinsects. The writer/director, Bob Bendetson, tendered the part of a miserly, six-hundred-pound foreman. Marlon, typically, had some odd demands. He would appear in Bug only if he could play the short, purse-mouthed Mrs. Sour, owner of the candy company. Naturally Bendetson agreed. Marlon added one more stipulation: Though Bug would only use his voice, he insisted on dressing the part. The actor “was gorgeous,” exclaimed Bendetson. “I guess it was part of his Method training or something, where you almost embarrass yourself as the character, so that way you’re free to be the character.”