Fade to Black: A Book of Movie Obituaries

by Paul Donnelley

  CAUSE: Wilfrid Brambell died of cancer in Westminster Hospital, London. He was 72. He left his flat in Pimlico and his entire £170,720 fortune, apart from three rings which went to his brother James, to his Chinese boyfriend, Yussof Saman.

  Marlon Brando

  Born April 3, 1924

  Died July 1, 2004

  The mumbler. A tight, white T-shirt may not have kick-started Marlon Brando, Jr’s career but it certainly typified his early cinematic image – ironically, at the end of his life he would have needed several T-shirts to cover his enormous bulk. Born just before midnight in Omaha Maternity Hospital, Nebraska, Marlon Brando, Jr, was the youngest of three children and the only son of Marlon Brando (b. 1897, d. July 18, 1965), a notorious philanderer and manufacturer of chemical feedstuffs and insecticides, and an alcoholic mother, Dorothy, known as Dodie, Pennebaker Myers (b. Grand Island, Nebraska, January 20, 1897, d. Huntington Memorial Hospital, March 31, 1954 with Marlon holding her hand). His parents married on June 22, 1918. As a boy, Brando was nicknamed ‘Bud’ while his sister Jocelyn became ‘Tiddy’ (b. San Francisco, California, November 18, 1919, m. Dan Hanmer) and Frances ‘Fran’ or ‘Franny’ (b. September 1922, m. Richard Loving, d. 1994). In 1927 the family moved to 1026 South Second Street, a larger house in a nicer part of town, but his childhood was blighted by his father’s indifference and his mother’s drinking. “He enjoyed telling me I couldn’t do anything right. He had a habit of telling me I would never amount to anything,” recalled Brando in his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me (1994). Brando’s favourite place to be was the monkey house at the local zoo where young Bud spent many hours watching the apes. His mother had founded the Omaha Community Playhouse not long before Bud was born and she starred in many of the productions and on occasion roped her husband in to tread the boards. Jocelyn Brando was to complain that her mother’s involvement with the theatre meant that she became a virtual surrogate mother to Franny and Bud. An assistant director at the Playhouse was later to become well known in his own right. Henry Fonda repaid Dodie Brando’s kindness by recommending Jocelyn for the only female part in the Broadway play Mister Roberts in which he starred. In 1930 the family moved to 1044 Judson Avenue, Evanston, Illinois, when Marlon, Sr. landed a new job. Bud began to attend Lincoln School on the corner of Main and Forest and the family moved to 524 Sheridan Square. A classmate of Brando’s was Wally Cox and they began a close friendship that would last – apart from a 14-year gap from the ages of eight until 22 – until Cox’s death. In 1936 after discovering another woman’s lipstick on her husband’s underwear, Dodie Brando drank herself into a temper and attacked her husband. In 1938 Brando had his first date with a plain girl. His grandmother was to tell Truman Capote, “Ah, Bud. He always went for the ugly ones.” By this time he had become fat so his father bought him a set of dumbbells and insisted that Bud train daily. Brando was also becoming an unruly pupil so Marlon, Sr. decided to send him, in September 1941, to his own alma mater, Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota. At the strictly disciplined school, which he hated, Brando honed his 5́ 8˝ physique to 11 stone 2lbs. He joined the Crack Squad, a precision drill team which his father had been a member of in 1916. It was one of the few times that Brando, Sr. appreciated his son. Bud was to ruin the appreciation by pretending to be lame to get out of the Crack Squad and then compounding his misdemeanour by bunking off. He was expelled. Bud also joined the Shattuck Players. To compound his father’s disappointment at Bud being expelled from military school, he was also rated 4F at his draft medical. Brando was to later claim that he had psychologically outwitted the medic who examined him, although his rating may have had to do with an American football injury. Brando began work as a labourer for the Tile Drainage and Construction Company in Libertyville, Illinois, but digging ditches was not for him and, aged 19 at the end of May 1943, he headed to New York where Jocelyn was already enjoying a measure of success. Their father did not approve, describing acting as a profession for “faggots or fairies”. Brother and sister shared an apartment in Patchin Place in Greenwich Village and he began seeing a dark-haired girl called Cecilia d’Artuniaga Webb. To support himself Brando worked as a lemonade seller on Fifth Avenue and a lift attendant in Best’s department store. Then he enrolled at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research (founded 1940) under the direction of the veteran director, Erwin Piscator. Other students would include Harry Belafonte, Tony Curtis, Ben Gazzara, Walter Matthau, Rod Steiger, Elaine Stritch, Shelley Winters and the playwright Tennessee Williams. Brando also studied under Stella Adler, a leading teacher of the Method school of acting; she became a formative influence. She later said, “I taught him nothing. I opened possibilities of thinking, feeling, experience, and I opened the doors that he walked right through. He never needed me after that … He lives the life of an actor 24 hours a day. If he is talking to you, he will absorb everything about you, your smile, the way your teeth grow. His style is the perfect marriage of intuition and intelligence.” On October 29, 1943, Brando began appearing in Dramatic Workshop productions and his first was Shaw’s St Joan. Thus began a steady stream of work that only let up briefly for Christmas. On February 2, 1944, her birthday, he dated Elaine Stritch who had fallen madly in love with Brando at first sight. He took the devoutly Catholic, still virgin Stritch to a library, then to a synagogue, a Presbyterian church, then to Russian and Greek Orthodox ones before a Greenwich Village restaurant, where she drank so much she couldn’t eat anything, before finishing the night at a seedy nightclub. They returned to Brando’s apartment where he allowed Stritch to play with his cat while he changed into pyjamas. With this she fled and rushed back to the convent where she was living, an hour after curfew. When Elaine told Mother Superior what had happened, she was advised to “say a prayer to Our Lady and she’ll straighten you out”. In March and April 1944, Brando’s wilful, independent streak resurfaced and he missed 17 performances in 34 days. In spite of his lack of application, Brando was signed to the MCA agency and on October 19, 1944 he made his début in I Remember Mama. For a joke, he had told the programme writer that he had been born in Calcutta and left when he was six months old – thus an early Brando myth was born. Most of the critics ignored Brando although Robert Garland of The New York Journal-American described him as “charming”. Again the inability to concentrate on anything for long periods of time affected Brando’s performances. To avoid what he saw as the tedium of doing the same play over and over again, he developed a habit that would last for the rest of his life of rearranging his lines or walking across the stage when least expected. Naturally, this angered older members of the cast. Brando played a trick on his co-star Oscar Homolka on stage, by replacing the sugar that he was to put in his coffee with salt. Homolka spat out the confection and did not speak to him for several months. On March 2, 1946, at the Belasco Theater, he opened in Truckline Café. Brando played Sage McCrae, a Second World War veteran who murders his unfaithful wife, Tory. Karl Malden was also in the cast and Elia Kazan, who had wanted Burgess Meredith for the part of Sage because he did not rate Brando, directed the play. Although the audiences enjoyed the work and were wowed by Brando’s performance the critics did not share their enthusiasm and the play closed a week later. Next came Bernard Shaw’s Candida, as Marchbanks, a play that even his father flew to New York for the opening night on April 3, 1946. His performance in A Flag Is Born (about the birth of Israel) was directed by Luther Adler and starred Paul Muni. It opened on September 5, 1946. Around this time Brando renewed his friendship with Wally Cox, his boyhood chum. Brando had become bulkier thanks to his weightlifting and Cox was of slight build. Brando became his friend, confidant, bodyguard and lover. Hollywood historian Kenneth Anger spent years tracking down a photograph purporting to show Brando administering oral sex to Cox. Brando’s friend Carlo Fiore (b. Brooklyn, New York, June 19, 1919, d. Veteran’s Memorial Hospital, Westwood, Los Angeles, August 11, 1978, aged 59 from drink and drug abuses) described an occasion w
hen Brando grabbed hold of his penis and claimed that he had thought he was in bed with a woman. Brando appeared opposite Tallulah Bankhead in The Eagle Has Two Heads but regretted it ever after. She insisted on “auditioning” him and tried to seduce him but her age and bad breath from smoking and drinking put him off. Undeterred she again attempted a seduction in his dressing room during rehearsals. On opening night she made her third assault on the Brando body and was rebuffed for the third time. He then irritated her by regularly breaking wind outside her dressing room. He asked his agent to get him out of the play and, when his wish was granted, Tallulah put it around that Brando was unprofessional and untalented. The role that was to make Brando’s name, that of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire almost escaped him – the producers originally wanted John Garfield for the Broadway production. He turned it down when the producers refused his demands: to be allowed to leave the production at any time to make a film, a guarantee that he would have the role in any movie version and a commitment to the stage for only a few months. Next in the frame was Burt Lancaster but Hal Wallis refused to release him. The director, Elia Kazan, was not enthusiastic about Brando but agreed to let him read. That was the least of his problems. At the time, to preserve his privacy Brando did not have a phone at home and used the payphone in the lobby of his building. When he finally read, Kazan thought Brando would make an interesting Stanley Kowalski and sent him to the author Tennessee Williams. It took Brando three days to reach Williams’ Cape Cod home from New York and when he finally arrived the playwright was furious at being kept waiting. But when he saw Brando the part was finally cast. He even loaned Brando the $20 train fare back to New York. During rehearsals Brando began dating the sexy and then slim Shelley Winters. The play, which had originally been called The Poker Night, opened on December 3, 1947 with Brando playing opposite Jessica Tandy. His fee was $550 a week. Theatrical history was made that night – usually actors enunciated their lines clearly. Brando deliberately slurred his words. It was an innovative approach that was to set the tone for the whole of the next decade and the audience gave Brando a standing ovation. Despite a plethora of film offers Brando had no intention of moving to the West Coast. Nor did he wish to play the celeb game, eschewing press interviews and refusing requests for pictures. He also lived in a dingy room on 52nd Street and shared a filthy bathroom with the other residents. His only indulgence was a gramophone on which he constantly played Gene Krupa records loudly. Eventually, the lure of Tinseltown became too great. In July 1950, under Fred Zinnemann’s direction, Brando made his screen début in The Men playing a paraplegic war veteran, a role to which he brought an astonishing physical force. To prepare for the part, he spent six weeks observing real casualties at the Veterans’ Hospital in Van Nuys, California. He either spent the day in bed or wheeled himself around in a wheelchair. He spent time with the paraplegics in bars in his wheelchair. Then he reprised on the screen his powerful performance in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) opposite Vivien Leigh. Filmed between August 14 and mid-October 1950, the film required 68 rewrites from the stage version to appease the various censorious bodies. Blanche’s nymphomania was toned down and mentions of her first husband’s homosexuality excised. Brando and Lady Olivier did not get on at first. She was ill with tuberculosis and retired early, sometimes at only 9pm. He was irritated by her habit of saying “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” the first time she saw him and her constant “pleases” and thank yous”. One day he turned on her, “Why are you so fucking polite?” Gradually, he softened towards her and she adopted some of his acting skills to give one of the best performances of her career. Elia Kazan wrote about his portrayal of the animally magnetic, uncouth, slobbish Kowalski, “If there is a better performance by a man in the history of film in America, I don’t know what it is.” Brando suffered during filming – Karl Malden playing Mitch accidentally dislocated Brando’s right shoulder in one scene when he pushed him under a shower. Brando also hurt his knees begging Stella Kowalski (Kim Hunter) not to leave him. His performance received his first (of eight) Academy Award nominations, although he lost out to Humphrey Bogart for The African Queen when Greer Garson announced the winner. Of the top four acting awards Brando was the only Streetcar star to miss out. On March 20, 1952 co-stars Vivien Leigh (Best Actress), Karl Malden (Best Supporting Actor) and Kim Hunter (Best Supporting Actress) all went home from the RKO Pantages Theater in Hollywood clutching Oscars. That same year Brando acquired a pet racoon called Russell, named for a boyhood friend of Wally Cox. Everyone apart from Brando hated the animal which was decidedly un-housetrained and would leave its mess everywhere in Brando’s home. When the creature crawled onto the window ledge and hung by its claws every one of Brando’s friends hoped Russell would fall to his death. Instead Brando summoned the fire brigade to rescue the animal. Wally Cox also moved in with Brando and the pair would spend the weekends cheating at Monopoly. Brando was a Mexican revolutionary in Viva Zapata! (1952), despite the opposition of studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck who disliked Brando’s mumbling. Zanuck favoured Tyrone Power or Anthony Quinn for the role but director Elia Kazan stood firm. Zanuck even sent Kazan a telegram stating: “I DON’T UNDERSTAND A GODDAMNED THING THE SON OF A BITCH SAYS. CAN’T YOU STOP HIM FROM MUMBLING?” Eventually, Zanuck relented and Brando received $100,000 to play Zapata. Ever the perfectionist Brando grew a thick bushy moustache for the part only to have it trimmed to more manageable proportions at the studio’s insistence. Quinn was to play Brando’s brother but the two did not gel. Remembered Quinn, “I didn’t feel totally comfortable with Marlon. Our egos just didn’t jibe.” Mumbling, jibing or not, Brando received his second Oscar nod and his second defeat, losing to Gary Cooper in High Noon. In the summer of 1952 Wally Cox moved out, unable to stand Russell the racoon any longer. Brando then played Johnny, the leader of a gang of motorcyclists in The Wild One (1953) which was considered so powerful and inflammatory that the film was banned in Britain for 15 years. It is remembered especially for an exchange in which Brando, asked what he is rebelling against, replies, “Whaddaya got?” The film was shot in just 24 days over the summer of 1953 and Brando improvised some of the scenes despite the director’s initial reluctance to let him. Brando and co-star Lee Marvin (who played Chino) did not get on and by the end of the shoot had nicknames for each other – Marlow Brandy and Lee Moron. The Wild One was not a box office smash but it did have a cultural influence, with many youths of the time adopting a Brando style. The film was based on a true story when the small Californian municipality of Hollister was taken over on July 4, 1947 by 4,000 bikers, who vandalised the entire town. In fact, the film was such a disappointment that Brando seriously talked of retirement. He claimed that the farm in Nebraska he had invested his money in would yield more than enough income for him to survive on, but it was a financial disaster. In July 1953 Brando toured in the Shavian play Arms And The Man, beginning at the Theater-by-the Sea in Matunuck, Rhode Island. The tour was not a great success – most of the company were Brando’s friends and they lacked much of the finesse needed to handle Shaw’s work. Still, it gave Brando a respite from the flop that was The Wild One. Shakespeare was the next to get the Brando treatment. He played Mark Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953) opposite James Mason (Brutus) and John Gielgud (Cassius). Gielgud remembered that Brando heeded his solicited advice on the delivery of the great Forum speeches “in every particular,” and noted Brando’s collection of tape-recordings by the great American classical actors John Barrymore and Maurice Evans, which he used to improve his diction. However, it would be Brando’s first and last meeting with the Bard. Oscar nod number three and the third consecutive defeat losing out to William Holden for Stalag 17 came with Julius Caesar. In his first half dozen films, culminating in On The Waterfront (1954) as Terry Malloy, the inarticulate, gum-chewing longshoreman who gradually learns where his true loyalties lie, for which he finally won an Oscar, Brando was consistently superb. The celebrated taxi scene in which he
berates his brother (Rod Steiger) for robbing him of the chance to become a boxing champion – “I coulda been a contender” – remains a classic. However, when it was Steiger’s turn to deliver his lines Brando went home early leaving Steiger to talk to a wall, a slight it took Steiger more than 40 years to forgive. It is no coincidence that three of the best Brando films were directed by Elia Kazan, himself a leading figure at the Actors Studio. Had Brando maintained the quality of these films it is indisputable that he would have become the greatest actor on film. It was not to be. On The Waterfront was to be the apex of his career, setting standards that he would never quite recapture, even in the best of the films that followed. It was the first time that an actor had been nominated for Best Actor four years running. Brando had told everyone he knew that he would send a taxi driver to collect the statuette if he won. It was therefore a surprise when he turned up in a natty tuxedo to present the Oscar for Best Director (to Kazan) and accept his award from a bald Bette Davis wearing a jewelled skullcap. She had shaved her head to play Queen Elizabeth I. Ironically, Darryl F. Zanuck was not keen to make the film, “Who the hell gives a shit about labour unions?” he yelled at Elia Kazan. The film is unusual in that it has several links to the rabidly anti-communist McCarthy hearings. It was directed by Kazan who named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (Arthur Miller refused to write the screenplay because of his disgust at Kazan’s actions); it was written by another informer Budd Schulberg and it co-starred Lee J. Cobb who had also blabbed about who was a communist or had sympathies, naming Lloyd Bridges and Sam Jaffe. The film was shot between November 17, 1953 and January 1954 in Hoboken, New Jersey. Many of the major characters in the film were based on real people. Terry Malloy (Brando) was based on Anthony De Vincenzo, a whistle-blowing docker; Roman Catholic priest John M. Corridan was the basis for Father Barry (Karl Malden) and Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) was the gangster Anthony Anastasio (b. Italy 1906, d. 1963 of natural causes), the brother of Albert Anastasia who was known as the Lord High Executioner. Anastasia was one of the Mafia’s most ruthless killers who personally killed more than 50 people but as head of Murder, Inc. was responsible for hundreds if not thousands of killings. He was murdered as he had his hair cut in a Manhattan hotel. ‘Tough Tony’ ran the Brooklyn docks through his vice-presidency of the International Longshoreman’s Association. The mob still held sway in those days so the set was heavy with police guarding the production to ensure no “accidents” occurred. Brando never spoke out against the Un-American Activities Committee even though its work affected the careers of a number of his friends. Brando disliked On The Waterfront when he saw it and refused to give press interviews until the studio forced him. He told UP and AP, “I am fed up with the whole picture … The first time I saw Waterfront in a projection room I thought it was terrible.” Brando’s feelings may have been a crisis of conscience for appearing in a film made by informers. After he finally won the Oscar (on March 30, 1955) every studio wanted a piece of Brando and Fox signed him to star in the epic The Egyptian which would be directed by Michael Curtiz. Brando’s co-star was to be Bella Darvi who was Zanuck’s mistress and a woman with a penchant for alcohol and gambling. She later became a lesbian and committed suicide. She is noticed elsewhere in this book. As he read the script Brando realised that the film would be an enormous flop and sought to extricate himself from it. Fox sued him for $2 million. In March 1954, Dodie Brando’s health finally gave way and she died on the last day of the month. Only her husband, son, two daughters and sister, Betty Lindemeyer, attended her funeral. Brando’s lawyers worked behind the scenes with Fox and as with all these scenarios it was a case of quid pro quo. Fox dropped the suit when Brando agreed to make Desiree (1954) for them. He was to play Napoleon – a better part but in an equally dire script. Brando later admitted that he “let the make-up do the work” much to the annoyance of the director, Henry Koster. “Brando couldn’t play Napoleon,” he said. Koster said that Brando made it very obvious that he was in the film under the strongest protest. Cameron Mitchell who played Joseph Bonaparte, remarked, “Marlon didn’t give a damn. He was fucking 20th Century Fox. He would walk onto the set and go from chalk mark to chalk mark without the slightest show of interest. He flubbed and fumbled and fluffed his way through everything.” Merle Oberon, who was playing the Empress Josephine, was dismayed and furious by Brando’s antics. He would ruin scenes by scratching his nose, his crotch or his buttocks. Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, visited the set and was introduced to “Napoleon”. Selassie had a chest full of medals whereas Brando had a solitary gong pinned to his tunic. Brando said, “You won more battles than I did.” Selassie was not amused. The studio publicity department worked overtime to stop the bad behaviour from reaching the ears of the press. The film was a box office success, not because it was any good but because of Brando’s appeal. On October 29, a Bandol, Nice, newspaper published the announcement of Brando’s engagement to Jossane Mariani-Bérenger, a children’s nanny and the daughter of a fisherman. The press swarmed to Bandol and, for once, Brando cooperated with them happily posing for pictures. Then Brando cooled the relationship when he discovered that Jossane had posed nude for eight paintings. He went on a trip with his gay lover Christian Marquand while Jossane appeared on an American television show for a fee of $1,000 and said that she hoped she and Brando would be married in June of the following year. But the couple split when Brando began to see other women including a black cabaret dancer and the entertainer Rita Moreno. Brando’s next film was Guys And Dolls (1955) in which he played opposite Frank Sinatra. Brando was keen to work with Ol’ Blue Eyes but Sinatra did not share his enthusiasm. He was still annoyed at being passed over for the lead role in On The Waterfront (indeed, he had sued producer Sam Spiegel for breach of contract) and he also wanted to play Skye Masterson, the part given to Brando. Their working styles were also different. Brando liked to consider each scene carefully while Sinatra was very much a one-take man. This difference was much in evidence when the two men came to film their first scene. The script called for Sinatra to eat cheesecake while Brando delivered his lines. Brando could not get it right and one take followed another until eight were in the can. The mercurial Sinatra lost his temper, threw the confection across the set, slammed his fork into the table and screamed at director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, “These fuckin’ New York actors. How much cake do you think I can eat?” The Chairman of the Board stormed off to his dressing room and it took all of Mankiewicz’s diplomatic skills to persuade him to return. Sinatra completed the day’s filming but hated every second of it. Over the next fortnight both men were at daggers drawn and Brando constantly criticised Sinatra’s singing. Brando again disliked the finished product but in the end the film was a commercial success. He later said of Sinatra, “He’s the kind of guy that, when he dies, he’s going to heaven and give God a bad time for making him bald.” In 1955 Brando made a documentary about hunger and deprivation in southeast Asia for UNESCO. That same year in November he met the woman who was to become his first wife in the Paramount commissary. Anna Kashfi claimed that she was born illegitimately in Calcutta, India on September 30, 1934, the daughter of Devi Kashfi, an architect, and Selma Ghose. When she was 18 she enrolled, she alleged, at the London School of Economics but left when she fell in love with an Italian. She became a model and was then discovered by Paramount Pictures. They eventually went out and in December of that year finally went to bed. They were watching television when Brando picked her up and carried her to his bedroom. As she lay in his arms she asked if he was going to rape her and Brando said that rape was just “assault with a friendly weapon”. The sex, she revealed, was “a well-rehearsed, polished performance, selfish, without warmth or naturalness … Physically, Marlon is not well appointed. He screens that deficiency by undue devotion to his sex organ. ‘My noble tool,’ he characterised it with some puffery.” For a time Brando was faithful to her but never wooed her. If he awoke feeling randy, he would drive to her ho
me and when she opened the door would carry her to the bedroom. After his passion was sated, he would get up and leave without saying goodnight. Brando’s next film project was The Teahouse Of The August Moon (1956) which was one of his favourite plays, having seen it four times on Broadway. Brando became one of the first Hollywood stars powerful enough to be able to select his own director and he chose Daniel Mann for the project. He flew to Tokyo, Japan, on April 3, 1956 to begin filming with co-stars Glenn Ford and Louis Calhern. In the Japanese capital Brando was lonely without Anna Kashfi and even the geisha girls could not cheer him. Calhern and Brando renewed their friendship which had begun when they appeared in Julius Caesar. Calhern confessed that he was unhappy because he had a new, much younger girlfriend but was unable to satisfy her sexually. Brando did his best to comfort his friend but on May 12, Calhern died of a coronary. Glenn Ford brought a priest and insisted on holding a wake despite Calhern’s atheism. Brando’s next film, Sayonara (1957), in which he was a Southern Air Force officer involved in an inter-racial love affair in occupied Japan, allowed him to return to the country that he had grown to love. It also meant he was thousands of miles from Kashfi, the woman he loved, but that didn’t seem to deter him. It would be a pattern he would repeat in subsequent relationships much to the annoyance of the women involved. Brando disliked the film’s director Joshua Logan but agreed to work with him because Logan had given Jocelyn a job on Mister Roberts. While the company was filming, the writer Truman Capote arrived to profile Brando for The New Yorker. Capote employed an old journalistic trick to get Brando to open up – he got him drunk. Brando confessed more details than he should about his mother’s alcoholism, insulted Josh Logan and Sayonara, revealed that James Dean had tried to “get close” to him and was generally more open than he would normally be. The piece appeared on October 27, 1957 and 20 years later when it appeared in a collection of his work Capote described Brando as “a wounded young man who is a genius, but not markedly intelligent”. In his next work, The Young Lions (1958), Brando played Christian Diestl, a nasty Nazi. Filmed in Europe Brando began an affair with the model and actress France Nuyen (b. Marseilles, July 31, 1934 as France Nguyen Vannga). The relationship was terminated when another actress knocked an urn of boiling water into Brando’s lap, scalding his genitals. The Young Lions was a critical and commercial success. In September 1957, Brando and the by-now-pregnant Kashfi decided to get married. The ceremony took place on October 11 at the Eagle Rock home of Brando’s aunt Betty Lindemeyer but was not without incident. Brando’s father was not invited. In June 1958, Brando, Sr married again to Anna Parramore, a woman younger than his son, and Brando was pointedly not invited. Brando’s honeymoon was spent with the Western writer Louis L’Amour and his wife. At breakfast Brando would entertain his new wife by stubbing out lit cigarettes on his hands. Then another bombshell followed. A factory worker called William Patrick O’Callaghan claimed that Anna was not Indian as she had claimed but English. He knew that she was born in Calcutta because he had been working on the railways there and that her real name was Joan O’Callaghan. MGM revealed that her pay packets were made out in the name of Joanna O’Callaghan and immigration authorities said that was the name she used when she arrived in the States. She told Brando she had used the name to avoid the quotas that were placed on Indians entering America. The Brandos became the top of every party must-have list because everyone wanted to meet the mysterious “Indian woman” that the Oscar winner had married. The couple argued and Brando resumed his affair with France Nuyen. On May 11, 1958, at 7.30pm in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, Hollywood, Anna Kashfi Brando gave birth to a 7lb 10oz blond, blue-eyed boy who was named Christian Devi after Christian Marquand, Brando’s gay lover, and her reputed father. The mother did not approve of the naming of her son as Christian and to this day has never addressed him as such. Brando and Kashfi also argued over whether the boy should be circumcised. She was in favour, he against. “I’ve never been circumcised and my noble tool has performed its duties through thick and thin without fail,” he said. Brando did not play the devoted husband and when his son was a few weeks old he turned up at home with France Nuyen on his arm. Kashfi was shocked and more so when Nuyen went to the fridge and casually helped herself to a mango. She retired to her bedroom in tears and told Brando that Nuyen had 30 seconds to get out of the house. In September 1958, the Brandos’ maid, Sako, drowned in their pool. Brando was away in New York with France Nuyen and when the news was brought to him he was told that it was his wife who had drowned. Kashfi remembers that when Brando came home he stared at her with disappointment in his eyes. That day she left Brando, taking their son with her, and hired a lawyer. In 1961 he made his only film as a director – the Western One-Eyed Jacks, originally intended for Stanley Kubrick and called The Authentic Death Of Hendry Jones. Brando also took the lead role as a bandit. Though it opened to mixed reviews, it was an intensely personal picture, in which Brando’s relationship with a surrogate father (‘Dad’ Longworth, played by Karl Malden) plainly echoed elements from his own life. Paramount cut it and tampered with the ending, but the brooding atmosphere survived and the film broke new ground for a Western in being set extensively on the Californian coast against a background of crashing waves. Brando had an affair with his leading lady Pina Pellicer. She was to become another person involved directly or indirectly with Brando who would commit suicide. She is noted elsewhere in this book. Towards the end of shooting One-Eyed Jacks Anna Kashfi filed for divorce, which was granted on April 22, 1959. Before One-Eyed Jacks was released Brando made The Fugitive Kind (1960). It was yet another film with which Brando was unhappy. He continued his romance with France Nuyen and the couple went to extraordinary lengths to hide from the press. False noses, make-up, wigs, false names and faux accents were all the order of the day. However, Nuyen commented, “He wasn’t so much afraid of the press. He just wanted an excuse to be a little boy and dress up and be someone else and see how long he could fool everybody.” Brando decided to visit Haiti because he thought no one would know him there. They left New York in the now obligatory disguises and once on the aeroplane Brando told her, “We did it. Not a soul in Haiti will know who we are anyway.” Imagine his disappointment when they got off the flight to be greeted by a brass band and a huge sign bearing the legend, “Welcome Marlon Brando”. The affair fizzled out when Brando became involved with a beautiful actress called Barbara Luna. But on June 4, 1960, during a battle over custody of Christian, Brando married Movita Castenada, a Roman Catholic Mexican who had been an extra in the original version of Mutiny On The Bounty (1935) and who Brando had wooed some years earlier. In October 1960, she gave birth to Brando’s son Sergio (after Christian Marquand’s brother but known by his nickname Miko) who was to become a bodyguard to eccentric pop star Michael Jackson. (The marriage was later annulled on the grounds that she had been married to an Irish boxer at the time of her wedding to Brando.) Brando was not in a good mood when he went for preliminary talks about his new film which was to be a big budget production and a bigger flop. Mutiny On The Bounty (1962) cost $19 million, changed director in mid-course and returned only $9 million after 12 different endings were shot in a desperate search for a way to wrap it up. Brando took the role of lead mutineer Fletcher Christian, played by Clark Gable in the original, while Trevor Howard took over from Charles Laughton as Captain William Bligh. Brando was paid $500,000 plus percentages and overages and was given provisional script approval. Carol Reed was hired as director while Eric Ambler was given the task of writing the script. He began work in December but it soon became obvious that his script was not up to scratch and a new one was commissioned in July from John Gay. That version was jettisoned and more scripts were written by William Driscoll, Borden Chase, and finally Howard Clewes and Charles Lederer. The final tally of writing costs amounted to $237,000, more than a million dollars today. The boat that was to represent the Bounty was built in Nova Scotia at a cost of $750,000. On November 28, 1960, Brando arrived in Tahiti to
begin work and was much smitten with the islands almost immediately. For once Brando was not a recognised star and the local Polynesian girls were very attracted to any man with white skin and had very little in the way of morals compared to the American women Brando was used to. Many of the crew had affairs with local women. Brando was (almost) on his best behaviour and was rarely late on set, such was the respect he had for Carol Reed. Brando began an affair with a Chinese-Polynesian dancer, Tarita Teriipaia, who was then involved with a Danish chef but finished with him for Brando. Tarita played Fletcher Christian’s girlfriend in the film and Brando spent much time with her going through her lines. In January 1961 Carol Reed fell ill with gallstones and heat stroke. The weather turned bad and Brando began to display the eccentricities for which he was famous. The company flew home and MGM asked for a completion date for the film. Reggie Callow, the assistant director, proffered 139 days but the studio demanded 100. When Reed said that he could not accede to that request he was sacked. Lewis Milestone, then 70, was hired to finish the film. He had no time for method acting and soon he and Brando were at loggerheads. Filming continued at the MGM lot until April 22, 1961, when the company returned to Tahiti. Brando was late on set nearly every day and fell ill often, as did many of the crew. On July 25, 1961, tragedy struck when a Tahitian extra was killed and several others injured in a freak accident. Brando and co-star Richard Harris did not get on. One scene called for Brando to strike Harris but for some inexplicable reason he could not bring himself to do it and barely tapped Harris. After three takes, Harris shouted, “Why the fuck don’t you kiss me and be done with it?” In October, the film closed down again while Lewis Milestone and the studio decided on the ending. In July 1962, George Seaton came on board to direct. When it came to film Fletcher Christian’s death scene Brando asked for 200lbs of ice and lay almost naked on it until he began to shiver violently. The cameras began rolling but Brando could not remember his lines. Eventually, his lines were written on Tarita’s forehead. The scene may have been dramatic but it also put Brando in bed for several days and once again the production closed down. Amazingly, the film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture among seven nods. It lost out to David Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia. The studio chiefs held Brando personally responsible for the on-set delays and budget over-runs that scuppered the picture and his influence in Tinseltown was weakened. For the rest of the Sixties, with the exception of Reflections In A Golden Eye (1967), directed by John Huston from a Carson McCullers novel, Brando was unable to find a worthy role. Film followed film – The Ugly American (1963) in which he had difficulty remembering his lines, also featured Jocelyn Brando; Bedtime Story (1964) as Freddy Benson, a con man, mimic and seducer; The Saboteur: Codename Morituri (1965); and Southwest To Sonora (1966) – without making waves. Even A Countess From Hong Kong (1967), Charlie Chaplin’s last film, was a disaster. Intended as a sophisticated comedy and originally written in the Thirties by Chaplin for his then wife Paulette Goddard, Brando played a diplomat opposite Sophia Loren. It stank and they did not get on. During a love scene, he ungallantly asked her, “Did you know that you have hairs up your nostrils?” Candy (1968), an example of mainstream porn with Brando in only one scene as an Indian guru, was the low point of his career. The Night Of The Following Day (1969) was relegated to the second half of a double bill. During the filming of The Ugly American Brando had become involved with a woman named Marie Cui who he had met in Manila on the way to film Teahouse Of The August Moon. She became pregnant in June 1962 but Brando was not convinced the child was his. Nevertheless Cui sued Brando for child support for the daughter, Maya Gabriella, who was born on February 27, 1963 in Manila. Brando’s lawyers claimed that he was not the child’s father and Brando was vindicated by blood tests. Cui still claimed that he was the father. Also in 1963, Brando became heavily involved with the civil rights movement. On December 7, 1964 Anna Kashfi attempted to commit suicide with a drugs overdose. While she was taken to UCLA Medical Center Brando took his son to his Mulholland Drive home. He had to film scenes for The Saboteur: Codename Morituri and Kashfi discharged herself from the hospital and broke into Brando’s home armed with a loaded gun. Taking her son, she hid out at the Bel Air Sands Hotel. Brando arrived with his lawyer, two private detectives and a policeman. A hysterical Kashfi attacked several members of the hotel staff and was arrested. A custody hearing was held in February 1965 and Christian was placed in the custody of his aunt and uncle, Franny and Dick Loving in Illinois. Five months later, a judge returned full custody of the boy to Anna Kashfi. The Seventies began with little respite for Brando. Queimada (1970), made in Italy for Gillo Pontecorvo, was better but little seen abroad; while The Nightcomers (1971), made in England for Michael Winner paired Brando, as Peter Quint, with Stephanie Beacham as Miss Jessel, and was a prequel to Henry James’ The Turn Of The Screw. By now Brando had had a daughter, Rebecca (b. September 1966), by Movita Castenada, and a son, Simon Teihotu (b. May 30, 1963) then a daughter, Tarita Zumi Cheyenne (b. February 20, 1970), by Tarita Teriipaia, and the financial strain of supporting his brood was telling. By 1972 Brando was virtually unemployable, and it took all of Francis Ford Coppola’s persuasion to win Paramount’s approval to cast him in The Godfather. The novel by Mario Puzo about the Corleone crime family had become the fastest-selling paperback novel at that time. He sold the rights to Paramount for $12,500 against a possible $50,000 payday. Puzo read in a newspaper that television comic Danny Thomas was being considered for the role of Don Corleone and was horrified. He rang Brando and begged him to take the part but Brando was totally uninterested. Coppola believed that only Brando or Laurence Olivier could do the role justice. Olivier was ill and, thus, uninsurable. Brando it was. At first the studio wanted nothing to do with him, one executive declaring, “He’s dead in this business. Worse than dead, he’s a vampire.” Paramount had suffered some major recent losses – Darling Lili and Paint Your Wagon, to name but two – and didn’t want to risk another flop. Eventually they agreed that Coppola could screen test Brando (his first since 1946). For it, he stuffed his cheeks with tissue paper, rubbed boot-polish in his hair, smoked, ate Italian sausage, gestured feebly with his hands and jutted out his chin. The effect was instant. “The guy’s terrific,” said one of those who viewed the test. “Who is he?” Word got around Hollywood and almost every name actor wanted to be in The Godfather. The fat, 46-year-old Rod Steiger wanted to play slim, 25-year-old Michael Corleone. Al Pacino eventually took the part. In 1971 the studio producer Albert S. Ruddy made a deal with the youngest Mafioso Joe Colombo (b. June 16, 1914, d. May 23, 1978, seven years after an assassination attempt left him in a persistent vegetative state) that the mob would not interrupt shooting on the film. In return the film would not use the words “Mafia” or “la cosa nostra”. They are used in the sequel, however. Coppola was to say, “I’ve had so many complaints about the horse’s head. There were 30 or so people killed in the film but everyone said, ‘You killed a living animal to get the horse’s head?’ Not I. The horse was killed by the dog food companies to feed your little poodles.” Frank Sinatra, no stranger to mob ties himself, was said to hate the portrayal of crooner Johnny Fontaine (Al Martino, after Vic Damone turned down the part) and associates were unwise to mention the film in the presence of Ol’ Blue Eyes. James Caan spent so much time researching his role as Sonny Corleone with real-life hoods that the FBI put him under surveillance thinking that he was a new “made” guy. Brando based his godfather on Frank Costello (b. Laurapoli, Calabria, Italy, January 26, 1891 as Francesco Castiglia, d. February 18, 1973), the “Prime Minister of the Underworld,” although he had to redub some of his lines when he was even more unintelligible than usual. Filming was watched by genuine Mafia members and they were not impressed by the way that the actors held their guns “like flowers”. The film, which was shot between March and July 1971, premièred on March 14, 1972, in New York but Brando was absent. His performance as Don Vito Corleone for which he was paid $50,000 plus defe
rments earned him his second Oscar. However, he declined to accept it, nor did he accept a New York Film Critics Award or a Foreign Press Golden Globe. Brando sent a telegram criticising the government for its treatment of blacks and Red Indians, imperialist foreign policy and curtailment of press freedom. The Oscar ceremony was held on March 27, 1973 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and The Godfather had received 11 nominations. Brando sent an aspiring actress named Sacheen Littlefeather to the ceremony to refuse on his behalf. When telecast producer Howard W. Koch saw Littlefeather, he said, “My God, Marlon Brando sent the Indians to get us.” With his co-presenter Liv Ullman, Roger Moore announced that Brando had won. Littlefeather ran to the stage and announced that she could not read the long (15 pages!) speech prepared by Brando because of the time limitation (Koch had promised her 45 seconds and “if you go one second over I’ll have you bodily removed from [the] stage. I promise you I’m not afraid to do that”). She refused to take possession of the statuette. She made a brief speech to a mixture of boos and claps but was met with silence as she left the stage. Some of the other winners and presenters made comments about Brando’s decision, much to his annoyance. It was then revealed that Sacheen Littlefeather was really Maria Cruz and had been Miss American Vampire 1970. Chief Dan George claimed that Littlefeather’s speech was ten years too late. Brando’s career revival was brief but consolidated in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris (1972). Bertolucci originally didn’t want Brando or Maria Schneider – he preferred Jean-Louis Trintignant as Paul and Dominique Sanda and then Catherine Deneuve for the role of the anonymous French girl. Bertolucci described his star as “an angel of a man, a monster of an actor”. Brando was no more complimentary about his director: “I don’t think Bertolucci knew what the film was about. I didn’t either. He went around telling everyone it was about his prick.” Brando’s performance as an ageing American, who commits a series of indecent acts in an unfurnished apartment with Jeanne (Schneider) won respect although he may have been responsible for the decline in sales of butter. Some time after filming (which took place in Paris between February 12 and April 1972) Schneider commented, “When I read Last Tango In Paris, I didn’t see anything that worried me. I was 20. I didn’t want to be a star, much less a scandalous actress – simply to be in cinema. Later, I realised I’d been completely manipulated by Bertolucci and Brando. People insulted me in the street. In restaurants, waiters would bring me butter with a funny smile.” Brando refused to wear make-up for the part. In an industry where actors often have affairs, Schneider confessed that she felt no sexual attraction for her co-star at all. Much of the film had been improvised before the cameras and Brando had his lines pinned to Schneider’s bare buttocks. The film was banned in Italy because of a scene in which Schneider appears to put her fingers into Brando’s back passage and another in which he has anal sex with her. Released on December 15, 1972, by the time the film opened in New York on February 1, 1973, it had taken more than $100,000 in advance bookings. Hollywood offered Bertolucci the chance to make Last Tango In Paris 2 but he declined, pointing out that Brando’s character had died at the end of the original. No problem, said the studio, we will say he went to a hospital and recovered. Brando’s later work in the decade consisted largely of cameos. In The Missouri Breaks (1975) he had a small role but equal billing with Jack Nicholson. Cast as a “Regulator” hired to bring Nicholson’s outlaw to book, he camped up the production, playing one scene in a gingham dress and a granny cap. For Superman (1978) he was paid an unprecedented $3. 7 million for just one scene as Superman’s father on Planet Krypton. In The Formula (1980) he had three scenes but co-star billing with George C. Scott. Of both stars, the director Steve Shagan said, “I sensed a loss of purpose, a feeling that they didn’t want to work any more and had come to think of acting as playing with choo-choo trains.” Brando, never the most enthusiastic advocate of film acting, began to lose what little interest he had and concentrated on his other passion, eating. Movies, he said, he made only for the money. “Acting is an empty and useless profession.” He went into virtual voluntary retirement on his very own South Sea island (Teti’aroa, an atoll 30 miles north of Tahiti he bought from an elderly Englishwoman for £2 million in 1963). In the late Eighties, Brando returned to the cinema after a long absence, but the films were no better. The Freshman (1989) was an inferior comic retread of his work in The Godfather, and in 1992 he played Torquemada in Christopher Columbus – The Discovery, the feebler of two weak movies made to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ first landing in America. Such was his bulk that when he did return to the screen in his later years it was hard for him to play anything other than sedentary roles. Hence the South African lawyer he played in Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season (1989) and the psychiatrist in Don Juan De Marco (1995). In 1996 he appeared in a remake of The Island Of Dr Moreau. An Irish comedy, Divine Rapture, with Brando as a Roman Catholic priest, was abandoned in 1995 after two weeks’ shooting. In 1999 he appeared in a film called Free Money, a comedy made exclusively for the Sky Premier television channel in Britain. Marlon Brando’s private life was always public, and he took care to make it so. “Like the vast majority of men,” he said, “I’ve had several homosexual experiences and I’m not remotely ashamed of it.” “I went to bed with them because I thought I was doing them a favour,” he reasoned. At a London party in the Sixties, to which he turned up drunk, Brando invited his host, the critic Kenneth Tynan, to accompany him to the bathroom. There he dared him, as a proof of friendship, to kiss him full on the lips. Tynan, eyebrows raised, assented. Brando had told the actor Cameron Mitchell, his co-star in Desiree, that he was “trisexual,” which must have caused some head scratching in 1954. His last years were overshadowed by tragedy. On May 16, 1990, Christian shot and killed his pregnant sister Cheyenne’s boyfriend of four years, 6́ 5˝ Dag Drollet (b. Tahiti, 1963), in Mulholland Drive. Although the full circumstances will probably never be known, Brando, who had a $500-a-day cocaine habit, was sentenced to ten years in jail for manslaughter. Photographs showed Drollet was shot from half an inch away by a single .45 calibre bullet in the left side of his face as he sat down. In his left hand barefoot Drollet clutched a Bic lighter, a tobacco pouch and a packet of cigarette papers while next to his right hand lay the TV remote control, yet Brando claimed the gun went off during a struggle. Shortly beforehand Cheyenne, a regular user of pot, tranquillisers, LSD, PCP (Angel Dust) and crack cocaine who underwent psychiatric treatment in April 1990 at a Tahitian military hospital, had told him that Drollet regularly beat her. On June 26, Cheyenne gave birth to an allegedly drug-addicted son, Tuki, who weighed 6lb 3oz. She was said to have once boasted, “I am the most beautiful girl in Polynesia, the most intelligent and also the richest because of my father.” On July 2, Jacques-Denis Drollet (b. 1922) filed a civil suit in Tahiti, charging Cheyenne with murder and complicity in murder. Doctors looking after Cheyenne had removed all sharp instruments. In a deposition Cheyenne said that Christian Brando had repeatedly said that he wanted to kill Drollet. Shortly afterwards, a $100,000,000 wrongful death suit was filed against Christian and Marlon Brando by Drollet’s father and stepfather, Albert LeCaill. On January 3, 1991, the prosecutor accepted an offer of Brando pleading guilty to a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter. Shirley Cumpanas, Christian’s former lover, posed nude for $15,000 for Penthouse and set up a 1-900-number to sell the sex secrets of their affair. She gave Elvis Presley a blowjob while married to her first husband and left husband number two for Brando. Joycelyne Lew, who had her breasts cosmetically enlarged, another of Christian’s lovers, sold her story to the tabloids. She said, “He used to worry about his physique and whether he could satisfy me … but, believe me, he could.” Brando’s former wife was later arrested for prostitution. In 1989, after her father refused to allow her to visit him on the set of The Freshman, Cheyenne drove her jeep into a ditch at 100mph. She required months of reconstructive plastic surgery and attempted suicide four times before finally succeedi
ng by hanging herself in her Panaouila, Tahiti home on April 16, 1995. Previous attempts included a drugs overdose on Halloween 1990 and, three days later, trying to hang herself from a tree with a dog lead. Her third unsuccessful attempt was another overdose when her brother was sentenced to ten years in prison (later reduced) while the fourth came in 1994. A curious feature about Brando’s career was the number of films that called for him to be beaten up or otherwise physically abused. In On The Waterfront and The Wild One he was beaten to a pulp; in The Fugitive Kind he was castrated; in Apocalypse Now (1979) in which he played Colonel Walter E. Kurtz he was felled like an ox; and in One-Eyed Jacks, he had his trigger finger smashed by a vindictive lawman. Freud would have had a field day. His last significant role was as Max in Frank Oz’s tortuous 2001 gangster movie The Score, with Robert De Niro and Edward Norton – who apparently took on the film just so that he could see his name on the same poster as Brando. Marlon Brando once famously opined that “the only thing an actor owes his public is not to bore them.” In an interview in 1956 with the Observer he commented, “An actor’s a guy who if you ain’t talking about him ain’t listening.” Not everyone was enamoured of Brando. Edward Dmytryk said, “Montgomery Clift was an exceptionally bright man who liked to pretend he wasn’t, unlike Brando who likes to pretend he’s bright whereas, in fact, he isn’t really.” Michael Winner opined, “He was the most tolerable, wonderful, witty companion and a marvellous human being. Claims that he wasted his talent are total rubbish. He was the most marvellous screen actor ever. He was a great actor … but he didn’t like acting.” Anthony Hopkins agreed, “Whether the film is good or bad Brando is always compulsive viewing, like Sydney Greenstreet, the vulgarian of all time, or Peter Lorre, or Bette Davis daring to do Baby Jane.” Director Josh Logan concurred, “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.” However, in summation, it is hard to disagree with James Mason’s opinion that “Brando made such a mess of his career.”