The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

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  Miss Moore doubts whether anything could induce her to tackle another task like the Fables. She now contents herself with writing poems and book reviews and carrying on her voluminous correspondence with friends. Her neighbors are aware that creative work—mysterious but important—is going on in their midst, and parents on her block have cautioned their children to play quietly in the street at times when she is believed to be writing. As she emerges from her apartment house, bound for market or for the subway station to catch a train to Manhattan, sidewalk passersby are likely to inquire respectfully, “How’s the writing going, Miss Moore?,” to which she usually replies, “Very slow, very slow.” Inspired by her example, several of her neighbors have taken to writing poetry themselves, and they frequently ask her for her opinion of their efforts. While she does not always find it easy in such cases to maintain her appreciative approach to criticism, she has thus far avoided the caustic alternative so adroitly that Cumberland Street is fast becoming one of the nation’s most thriving hotbeds of amateur prosody.

  Placid though others might find most of Miss Moore’s sorties into the world beyond her apartment, she embarks upon each of them in a spirit of adventure, and in her highly volatile mind each of them is charged with terrific drama. Her capacity for stepping up the voltage of ordinary experience is so great that the most commonplace happening or encounter becomes for her a major emotional event. Passing this smiling, delicate-looking elderly lady on her way down the street with her market basket or handbag, only an extraordinarily perceptive person would suspect that a heroic odyssey was in progress and that her impending purchase of a bunch of radishes or a box of crackers would provide her with enough vivid impressions to occupy her thinking for half a day. The primary source of all this internal excitement is Miss Moore’s wildly gymnastic self-starting imagination, but once it swings into action it is liberally fed by the combined resources of her singular gift for observing even the smallest components of an object and her uncanny ability to remember everything she has observed. A friend of hers still speaks wonderingly of the time, a couple of years ago, when he left her outside while he went into a drugstore to make a short telephone call; after he had rejoined her and they were continuing on their way, he recalls, she casually described in minute detail more than fifty miscellaneous items she had noticed in the shop window. Some of Miss Moore’s most rewarding adventures are trips to museums. “I get so excited in them that before long I can’t see anything,” she says. To overcome this difficulty, she has developed the habit of concentrating on a single exhibit and firmly ignoring the rest; a few minutes spent in this way gives her all the stimulation she needs to make the expedition profitable, as the associations of what she has seen begin to multiply in her mind by geometric progression. Another place that Miss Moore heads for when she feels in need of excitement is the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, where she sits beguiled during illustrated lectures on fungi, lichens, snakes, and other flora and fauna, large and small.

  A few of the adventures that Miss Moore fervently refers to from time to time have been more nearly in line with what most people would consider adventuresome—learning to drive an automobile (in Brookline, Massachusetts, four years ago) and playing tennis (on the public courts in Fort Greene Park). Of her tennis she says “I’m not so very good at it, but I’m very reliable. I have a bad backhand and I try to make up for it by roaring around the ball.” By ordinary standards, her most strenuous adventure in a long time was a trip she made to Bermuda last winter to visit some people she knew there. Not only did her ship, to her apprehensive delight, run into a storm on the return voyage (“So reckless!”) but when she reached New York the customs people kept her waiting interminably while they went through her luggage, which contained some liquor she had brought back to give to friends here, and then there was another long wait—“in not exactly a porte-cochere but a kind of barn”—until she could get a taxi. Whether or not the lack of a porte-cochere was responsible, Miss Moore came down with what she calls a case of pneumonia and what her friends call “Marianne’s psychosomatic flu”—a malady that frequently lays her low and that appears to affect her disposition far more seriously than her physical condition. “It depresses me as well as incommodes me,” she says. “It’s dire! And all that penicillin and other things in bottles! It’s like the forcible feeding of an important reptile.”

  When alone at home, Miss Moore does not spend all her time writing. She is an earnest water-colorist and draftsman as well as a poet, specializing in meticulously realistic reproductions of landscapes, flowers, and insects, which reveal the same love of delicate organisms, if not the same expertness of craftsmanship, that is evident in her verse; guests at her apartment occasionally get the feeling that she takes greater pride in her pictures than in her poems. In view of Miss Moore’s obvious devotion to small living things, visitors from time to time express surprise that there is not a single animal or plant in her apartment, but she has a ready answer for them. “If you keep pets or flowers, you are a slave to them,” she says.

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  Unlike many people who have exchanged material gain for the pleasures of contemplative peace and quiet, Miss Moore bears no ill will toward the world of business, finance, and technological progress. On the contrary, she regards it as an interesting and worth-while world, and gladly concedes that some of its activities are quite possibly even more interesting and worth while than the writing of verse. For example, she seldom mentions a magazine without commenting on its advertising, which in a number of instances she rates a good bit higher than the editorial matter it accompanies. She has a way of deprecating romantic notions about her profession, and she has no patience whatever with the tradition of starving for the sake of art. A few months ago, a young and unknown poet called on her with a letter of introduction from a friend, and soon made it apparent that he was deeply depressed because no one seemed to care much one way or the other about his verse. Miss Moore asked if he had a family to support, and he replied that he had a wife and two children. “Well, then,” said Miss Moore with finality, “you had better give up writing and get into something where you can earn a proper living.”

  The respect Miss Moore shows for the practical and prosaic approach to life stands out in such striking contrast to the workings of her own high-flying, fanciful mind that it raises the question of just where in the scheme of things she places both her esoteric art and her bright and elusive contributions to it. It is a question that even Miss Moore herself is unable to answer precisely, but on the basis of her writings, her offhand remarks, and her reactions to various situations it seems safe to say that she looks upon poetry with a mixture of love and petulance. She has often commented on it disparagingly, as in the opening line of her poem unequivocally entitled “Poetry,” which reads, “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle,” and elsewhere she has conveyed the same definite impression that, notwithstanding her lifelong dedication to the art, she thinks of it as a luxury—or, at any rate, a nonessential—when weighed against the really serious aspects of life. Among her friends is one who likens her to a daring performer on a flying trapeze, hugely enjoying her own acrobatics but reassuring herself every now and then by glancing down at a safety net that is sturdily supported by Gibbon, Julius Caesar, Xenophon, the Presbyterian Church, and a handful of male contemporaries, military and scientific, who are accustomed to think—as she conspicuously is not—in what she approvingly calls “a straight line.” In this view, Miss Moore, soaring and pirouetting above the world of reality, assumes the role of a charmingly quixotic intellectual flirt, seeming, both as a poet and as a personality, to tease those who put their faith in humdrum logic but at the same time to regard them with admiration and a certain coquettish timidity. Any attempt to discern in this spectacle so much as a trace of a consistent philosophy can lead only to bafflement, but few philosophers, after all, have been good poets.

  T
ruman Capote

  NOVEMBER 9, 1957 (ON MARLON BRANDO IN KYOTO)

  OST JAPANESE GIRLS giggle. The little maid on the fourth floor of the Miyako Hotel, in Kyoto, was no exception. Hilarity, and attempts to suppress it, pinked her cheeks (unlike the Chinese, the Japanese complexion more often than not has considerable color), shook her plump peony-and-pansy-kimonoed figure. There seemed to be no particular reason for this merriment; the Japanese giggle operates without apparent motivation. I’d merely asked to be directed toward a certain room. “You come see Marron?” she gasped, showing, like so many of her fellow-countrymen, an array of gold teeth. Then, with the tiny, pigeon-toed skating steps that the wearing of a kimono necessitates, she led me through a labyrinth of corridors, promising, “I knock you Marron.” The “l” sound does not exist in Japanese, and by “Marron” the maid meant Marlon—Marlon Brando, the American actor, who was at that time in Kyoto doing location work for the Warner Brothers–William Goetz motion-picture version of James Michener’s novel Sayonara.

  My guide tapped at Brando’s door, shrieked “Marron!,” and fled away along the corridor, her kimono sleeves fluttering like the wings of a parakeet. The door was opened by another doll-delicate Miyako maid, who at once succumbed to her own fit of quaint hysteria. From an inner room, Brando called, “What is it, honey?” But the girl, her eyes squeezed shut with mirth and her fat little hands jammed into her mouth, like a bawling baby’s, was incapable of reply. “Hey, honey, what is it?” Brando again inquired, and appeared in the doorway. “Oh, hi,” he said when he saw me. “It’s seven, huh?” We’d made a seven-o’clock date for dinner; I was nearly twenty minutes late. “Well, take off your shoes and come on in. I’m just finishing up here. And, hey, honey,” he told the maid, “bring us some ice.” Then, looking after the girl as she scurried off, he cocked his hands on his hips and, grinning, declared, “They kill me. They really kill me. The kids, too. Don’t you think they’re wonderful, don’t you love them—Japanese kids?”

  The Miyako, where about half of the Sayonara company was staying, is the most prominent of the so-called Western-style hotels in Kyoto; the majority of its rooms are furnished with sturdy, if commonplace and cumbersome, European chairs and tables, beds and couches. But, for the convenience of Japanese guests who prefer their own mode of décor while desiring the prestige of staying at the Miyako, or of those foreign travellers who yearn after authentic atmosphere yet are disinclined to endure the unheated rigors of a real Japanese inn, the Miyako maintains some suites decorated in the traditional manner, and it was in one of these that Brando had chosen to settle himself. His quarters consisted of two rooms, a bath, and a glassed-in sun porch. Without the overlying and underlying clutter of Brando’s personal belongings, the rooms would have been textbook illustrations of the Japanese penchant for an ostentatious barrenness. The floors were covered with tawny tatami matting, with a discreet scattering of raw-silk pillows; a scroll depicting swimming golden carp hung in an alcove, and beneath it, on a stand, sat a vase filled with tall lilies and red leaves, arranged just so. The larger of the two rooms—the inner one—which the occupant was using as a sort of business office where he also dined and slept, contained a long, low lacquer table and a sleeping pallet. In these rooms, the divergent concepts of Japanese and Western decoration—the one seeking to impress by a lack of display, an absence of possession-exhibiting, the other intent on precisely the reverse—could both be observed, for Brando seemed unwilling to make use of the apartment’s storage space, concealed behind sliding paper doors. All that he owned seemed to be out in the open. Shirts, ready for the laundry; socks, too; shoes and sweaters and jackets and hats and ties, flung around like the costume of a dismantled scarecrow. And cameras, a typewriter, a tape recorder, an electric heater that performed with stifling competence. Here, there, pieces of partly nibbled fruit; a box of the famous Japanese strawberries, each berry the size of an egg. And books, a deep-thought cascade, among which one saw Colin Wilson’s The Outsider and various works on Buddhist prayer, Zen meditation, Yogi breathing, and Hindu mysticism, but no fiction, for Brando reads none. He has never, he professes, opened a novel since April 3, 1924, the day he was born, in Omaha, Nebraska. But while he may not care to read fiction, he does desire to write it, and the long lacquer table was loaded with overfilled ashtrays and piled pages of his most recent creative effort, which happens to be a film script entitled “A Burst of Vermilion.”

  In fact, Brando had evidently been working on his story at the moment of my arrival. As I entered the room, a subdued-looking, youngish man, whom I shall call Murray, and who had previously been pointed out to me as “the fellow that’s helping Marlon with his writing,” was squatted on the matting fumbling through the manuscript of “A Burst of Vermilion.” Weighing some pages on his hand, he said, “Tell ya, Mar, s’pose I go over this down in my room, and maybe we’ll get together again—say, around ten-thirty?”

  Brando scowled, as though unsympathetic to the idea of resuming their endeavors later in the evening. Having been slightly ill, as I learned later, he had spent the day in his room, and now seemed restive. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to a couple of oblong packages among the literary remains on the lacquer table.

  Murray shrugged. The maid had delivered them; that was all he knew. “People are always sending Mar presents,” he told me. “Lots of times we don’t know who sent them. True, Mar?”

  “Yeah,” said Brando, beginning to rip open the gifts, which, like most Japanese packages—even mundane purchases from very ordinary shops—were beautifully wrapped. One contained candy, the other white rice cakes, which proved cement-hard, though they looked like puffs of cloud. There was no card in either package to identify the donor. “Every time you turn around, some Japanese is giving you a present. They’re crazy about giving presents,” Brando observed. Athletically crunching a rice cake, he passed the boxes to Murray and me.

  Murray shook his head; he was intent on obtaining Brando’s promise to meet with him again at ten-thirty. “Give me a ring around then,” Brando said, finally. “We’ll see what’s happening.”

  Murray, as I knew, was only one member of what some of the Sayonara company referred to as “Brando’s gang.” Aside from the literary assistant, the gang consisted of Marlon Brando, Sr., who acts as his son’s business manager; a pretty, dark-haired secretary, Miss Levin; and Brando’s private makeup man. The travel expenses of this entourage, and all its living expenses while on location, were allowed for in the actor’s contract with Warner Brothers. Legend to the contrary, film studios are not usually so lenient financially. A Warner man to whom I talked later explained the tolerance shown Brando by saying, “Ordinarily we wouldn’t put up with it. All the demands he makes. Except—well this picture just had to have a big star. Your star—that’s the only thing that really counts at the box office.”

  Among the company were some who felt that the social protection supplied by Brando’s inner circle was preventing them from “getting to know the guy” as well as they would have liked. Brando had been in Japan for more than a month, and during that time he had shown himself on the set as a slouchingly dignified, amiable-seeming young man who was always ready to cooperate with, and even encourage, his co-workers—the actors particularly—yet by and large was not socially available, preferring, during the tedious lulls between scenes, to sit alone reading philosophy or scribbling in a schoolboy notebook. After the day’s work, instead of accepting his colleagues’ invitations to join a group for drinks, a plate of raw fish in a restaurant, and a prowl through the old geisha quarter of Kyoto, instead of contributing to the one-big-family, houseparty bonhomie that picture-making on location theoretically generates, he usually returned to his hotel and stayed there. Since the most fervent of movie-star fans are the people who themselves work in the film industry, Brando was a subject of immense interest within the ranks of the Sayonara group, and the more so because his attitude of friendly remoteness produced, in the face of such curi
osity, such wistful frustrations. Even the film’s director, Joshua Logan, was impelled to say, after working with Brando for two weeks, “Marlon’s the most exciting person I’ve met since Garbo. A genius. But I don’t know what he’s like. I don’t know anything about him.”

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  The maid had reentered the star’s room, and Murray, on his way out, almost tripped over the train of her kimono. She put down a bowl of ice and, with a glow, a giggle, an elation that made her little feet, hooflike in their split-toed white socks, lift and lower like a prancing pony’s, announced, “Appapie! Tonight on menu appapie.”