Infamous Scandals

by Anne Williams

  In his first screen role for the 1950 movie The Men, Brando took this method to extremes, spending a month in bed at a hospital for veterans, so as to prepare himself to play the character of an embittered paraplegic. There was no doubt that he was profoundly committed to his craft and, although his way of achieving his ends was often idiosyncratic to the point of bizarre, most people agreed that he got results – although there were critics who felt that his acting was sometimes rather heavy-handed.

  Simmering sexuality

  Brando’s first big success in Hollywood was in the film of A Streetcar Named Desire, which he had played to great acclaim as a play on Broadway. The intensity and directness of his acting, together with his portrayal of the rough and ready Stanley Kowalski, completely revolutionised the film industry. He went on to make Viva Zapata!, Julius Caesar, On the Waterfront and Arms and the Man, and was soon hailed as the greatest actor of his time. When he played a motorcycle rebel in The Wild One he also became an icon for a rising generation – rock’n’roll heroes such as Elvis Presley modelled their style on Brando’s in the film and, because of him, for the first time the working-class garb of T-shirt, jeans and boots became hip. Brando’s simmering sexuality also earned him many female fans and there were tales of afternoon matinees that sold out because so many women with young children went to see the film. Apparently, not only was he a hit with the mothers but he also appealed to the children, who apparently made motorbike noises while running up and down the aisles. Brando also proved to be a great influence on other actors and film directors. For example, Nick Ray’s Rebel without a Cause, starring James Dean, borrowed a great deal from The Wild On. In fact, many felt that Dean himself had copied a lot of Brando’s style, although others pointed out that Dean’s approach to acting was a lot more mercurial and had a lighter touch.

  Despite all the accolades, however, by the end of the 1950s, Brando seemed to be running out of steam as an actor, and although he continued to be a major draw at the box office, the 1960s saw a slow decline in his career. This was partly because he was very difficult to work with and many studios avoided hiring him, but also because he chose to make films that were considered uncommercial, and consistently overspent when he was making a film.

  However, in 1972 his career was revived by his unforgettable role as Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, in which he mumbled his way through the part but nevertheless managed to convey a powerful but tormented Mafia head. He followed this up with another extraordinary performance in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, in which he played another troubled, ageing man who engages in an affair with a much young woman after the death of his wife. Because of the sexual nature of the film, many missed the fact that Brando had given the performance of a lifetime, but even so, he reinvented his career. After Last Tango, his reputation was such that he could command enormous fees for cameo performances in films, and reputedly charged a million dollars a week for his appearance in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

  Scandal strikes

  Throughout his film career, Brando’s personal life had been extremely turbulent. He had many lovers, both men and women, and married several times. It was reputed that he had had sexual relationships with Rock Hudson and other famous Hollywood stars, but all he would say on the matter was that he was not ashamed of his homosexual encounters. Naturally, many women were drawn to Brando, and he developed a particular liking for exotic looking women. His first wife, Anna Kashfi, convinced him that she was Indian, although in fact she came from Wales and was from an Irish Catholic background. Not surprisingly, their relationship did not last long, and he went on to marry again, first to movie actress Movita Castaneda and then to a Tahitian girl many years his junior, Tarita Teriipia.

  Brando had many children, including Christian Brando, by his first wife; Miko C. Brando and Rebecca Brando by his second wife; Teihotu Brando and Cheyenne Brando by his third wife. There were also a number of adopted children as well. But, despite the family’s enormous wealth, the excesses of Brando’s way of life impacted badly on the children, and in 1990 tragedy struck when his eldest son, Christian, shot a man dead at the family’s mansion in Beverly Hills.

  Murder and suicide

  The man was Drag Drollet, the Tahitian boyfriend of Brando’s daughter Cheyenne. Christian was arrested, brought to trial, and received a sentence of ten years for voluntary manslaughter and using a gun. Brando gave evidence at the trial, and in a rambling speech that showed his mental imbalance, publicly apologised for having let his son down and announced that if he could have changed places with Drollet, he would. However, the parents of Drollet were not impressed, saying that they believed Brando to be ‘acting’ and accusing the US judicial system of letting Christian off lightly because he was the son of a movie star.

  This was only the start of Brando’s troubles, however. Tragically, in 1995 his daughter Cheyenne hanged herself. She was only 25 and had been depressed by the death of her lover at the hands of her half-brother. She also had a history of alcoholism, drug abuse and mental illness, like many other members of her family. To make matters worse, Tarita Teriipia, now divorced from Brando, accused her former husband of sexually abusing Cheyenne, which caused further scandal.

  In the years that followed, Brando’s behaviour began to decline still further, both on and off screen; he became unable or unwilling to remember his lines, and made ever more absurd, childish demands. He became reclusive, overweight and, in his later years, spent much of his time at his Tahitian refuge, or staying with his friend Michael Jackson on his Neverland Ranch. In 2004 he died and it was later revealed that had been suffering from several illnesses, including pulmonary fibrosis, congestive heart failure, diabetes, liver cancer and dementia. His life had been dogged by scandal and his death was a sad one, yet to this day he remains one of the iconic movie stars of the 20th century.

  James Dean

  Since his tragic early death in 1955, James Dean has remained the iconic teenager of American cinema. He embodied the image of the angry, angst-ridden young man and the role that he played with such intensity in Rebel Without a Cause focussed on many aspects of his real life, such as his conflicts with his father. Dean was, of course, very attractive to women, but what was less well known at the time of his fame was that he was almost certainly bisexual. The moral climate of the time made it very difficult for Dean to be honest about his sexuality; and the problems were compounded by the fact that he also seemed very unsure of his sexual orientation. Thus, throughout his years as a star, studio heads in Hollywood were always worried that a scandal would break, and did their best to keep the homoerotic elements of his movies under strict control.

  Since his death, however, a number of biographies about his life have been written by people he came into contact with, and it seems clear that he was to some degree bisexual. Some have alleged that Dean dispensed his sexual favours so as to advance his career and that he was, therefore, only homosexual ‘for trade reasons’. Others, including one of his former lovers, have described him as being attracted to both men and women, and as a person who, in many ways, did not fit in with the conventions of the restrictive society he lived in.

  Sexual favours

  Dean was born on 8 February 1931. His father Winton and mother Mildren lived in Marion, Indiana, before moving to Santa Monica, California. When he was nine years old, his mother died of cancer, which was a major emotional trauma for the young boy. Dean had been very close to his mother and had got on with her a great deal better than he did with his father. In fact, she was later described as being the only person who could understand him, and it seems that throughout his life Dean, in all his adult relationships with women, was constantly trying to reproduce that sense of understanding, but he was never able to succeed.

  After his mother’s death, young James was sent to live with his aunt Ortense and uncle Marcus, Quakers who lived on a farm in Indiana. During his high school years, he made friends with a Methodist pastor,
Dr James DeWeerd, and became very close to him. Academically, Dean did not do particularly well at school, but he did excel at sports. When he finished high school, he moved back to California to live with his father, who by this time had remarried, and began to study law, but then changed course and transferred to drama lessons. This move resulted in tremendous conflict with his father, so much so that the two eventually became estranged.

  However, despite the opposition from his father, it soon became clear that Dean had made the right choice. He seemed to have a natural ability for acting and worked hard on the technical aspects of his new career. Before long, he had dropped out of college to work as a professional actor. To begin with he struggled, gaining only small parts on advertisements and had to earn his living by working as a car park attendant at CBS studios. It was during this time that he allegedly began to exchange sexual favours in exchange for work opportunities in Hollywood, and sometimes so as to have a place to sleep at night. Accounts as to what exactly happened vary; some say that Dean used to boast that he had had sex with five of the major (male) Hollywood stars; others that he was working as a street hustler during this poverty-stricken period of his life. Another commentator, Ron Martinetti, describes Dean as having a homosexual relationship with a radio advertising director, Rogers Brackett, whom he had met while working at the car park. It was allegedly Martinetti who was to help Dean break out of the cycle of failure that he was trapped in.

  Stardom beckons

  Whatever the truth of these stories, one thing was clear, Dean was not making much headway as an actor in Hollywood. The parts he gained in films were very small, and eventually he left California to try his luck in New York. His aim was to forge a career as a stage actor and after auditioning for the prestigious Lee Strasberg Actors Studio, he gained a place to study there. He was ecstatic and wrote letters to his family telling them how proud he was of being accepted at the studio, which had produced such great actors as Marlon Brando.

  Dean began to take on TV roles, and then landed a part in Andre Gide’s The Immoralist. He received rave reviews and it was then that Hollywood started to sit up and take notice. At last Dean was able to return to California, having at last made a success of his career. His first major role there was for director Elia Kazan, in the film version of John Steinbeck’s novel, East of Eden. He played the role of Cal Trask, the rebel son of an authoritarian father and a prostitute mother. Drawing on his actor’s studio training, Dean put in an extraordinary performance, often bringing in completely unscripted improvisations, such as the pivotal moment when his father rejects a gift of money. Instead of leaving, as the script required, Dean threw his arms round his screen father in a final attempt to gain his affection. Kazan was so impressed by Dean’s performance that he kept the sequence in, which gained added impact because of the other actor’s look of surprise when Dean departed from the script.

  Homoerotic tension

  Dean’s next film, Rebel Without a Cause, truly established his iconic status in the history of American cinema. He played opposite Natalie Wood as his leading lady in the film directed by Nicholas Ray. It was a story of a new generation of young men and women bored and frustrated by small-town America, trying to escape from the misery of their family life and engaging in all manner of illegal, dangerous and anti-social activities, from drinking underage, to stealing cars, to knife fighting and drag racing. Dean and Ray clashed in the making of the film as Dean began to take control, directing his own scenes, and becoming intensely involved in portraying the central emotional conflict of his life – his battle with his father. In one scene Dean almost looked as though he was choking the actor playing his father to death. To add to the intensity, the director played on the homoerotic tension between Dean and the actor playing his young sidekick, Sal Mineo, even suggesting at one stage that they kiss, although this was banned by the studio heads.

  After the success of Rebel Without a Cause, Dean sought to extend his acting career by playing a completely different kind of role, that of a bad-tempered, racist Southerner given to drinking and violence. For this part, Dean dyed his hair grey to look older, and shaved his hairline so that it would look as though he was going bald. He gave another intense performance, though in one scene, his drunken mumbling was so incoherent that it had to be re-recorded later, but he never lived long enough to see the reviews of the film.

  Head-on crash

  On 30 September 1955, Dean set out with his mechanic Rolf Wutherich in his Porsche 550 Spyder to compete in a sports car race at Salinas, California. Now a hugely wealthy Hollywood star, Dean had taken up car racing, although he had been banned from doing so while filming. Having finished his work on Giant, an epic film directed by George Stevens covering the life of a Texas cattle rancher and his family, Dean celebrated by driving his car down to the rally, gaining a speeding ticket while doing so. On the way there, a car driven by a 23-year-old university student crossed into his lane on the highway and although Dean tried to take evasive action, it was too late. The two cars crashed head on. An ambulance arrived on the scene and rushed Dean to hospital, but by the time he got there, he was already dead. The student, Donald Turnupseed, escaped with his life and only sustained minor injuries.

  After his death, Dean became a legend of American cinema. His status was undoubtedly enhanced by the fact that he had died early, in a manner befitting the careless young daredevil of Rebel Without a Cause. Not surprisingly, in the years to come, a lot of biographies were written about him, many of them focussing on his ambivalent sexuality. He became a major gay icon, and his films were constantly reanalysed, particularly the scenes between him and Sal Mineo, in which he shows a touching tenderness and love towards his young admirer.

  In 2006 William Bast, who was at one time Dean’s college room mate and close friend, finally admitted that he and Dean had had a homosexual relationship in his book Surviving James Dean. Bast describes the problems they had in pursuing the relationship in the moralistic culture of 1950s America, and also writes about Dean’s relationship with producer Rogers Brackett, who was very important in helping Dean to forge his career in the movie industry. Some commentators, such as journalist Joe Hyams, maintain that Dean only involved himself in homosexual relationships to advance his career, but Bast disputes this, pointing out that in many cases, Dean’s homosexual lovers were not able to help him in that way. Others who knew Dean, such as Gavin Lambert, Nicholas Ray and Elia Kazan, have described him as bisexual. Moreover, several women who had affairs with him, such as actress Liz Sheridan, confirm this, and it seems likely that, had Dean lived longer, the scandals about his sexuality would have seriously damaged his career.

  Hugh Grant

  Actor Hugh Grant, known for his many film roles as the bumbling, feckless but charming British upper-class twit, became the subject of one of Hollywood’s biggest scandals, when in 1995 he was arrested by police on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. He was in his car with prostitute Divine Brown, who was apparently performing oral sex on him. The officer who arrested him charged him with lewd conduct in a public place and Grant later admitted that he had paid Brown $50 to perform the act. When the story came out, a police mug shot of Grant, looking somewhat dishevelled, appeared in newspapers all over the world, along with one of Ms Brown, who also looked somewhat the worse for wear.

  The scandal was such that it looked as though Grant’s reputation would be seriously damaged by the incident, especially as his long-time partner Liz Hurley, another Hollywood star, publicly admitted how upset she was by what had happened. However, in the event, the affair did not damage Grant too badly; in fact, some commentators felt it had actually helped his cause. After the event, Grant made no attempt to defend his behaviour, as many Hollywood stars would have done, and wasn’t even afraid of being interviewed on the subject. Instead, he ‘faced the music’, taking the opportunity to apologise gallantly to all concerned, including Hurley. Indeed, he handled the scandal so well that he may, ironically, have increased his popula
rity among his female fans. Once the sordid details of his amorous tryst had emerged, his image of a flawed but lovable young man getting himself into scrapes – in the tradition of ‘boys will be boys’ – was not substantially altered. As his grandmother reportedly put it to her friends, explaining his behaviour, ‘He had a few drinks and got fresh with the girls’. Sadly, however, his relationship with Hurley did not survive the scandal, and the couple parted, although they later went on to become close friends.

  Comic talent

  Hugh John Mungo Grant was born in London, the second son of Fynvola MacLean, a teacher, and James Grant, a businessman and aspiring artist. The family had military connections, his grandfather being a member of the Seaforth Highlanders regiment, whose tradition was always to die in combat rather than ever to surrender. As a child, Grant was told the story of how his grandfather broke with the tradition to save hundreds of lives. Many years later, Grant spoke about his wish to make a film about his grandfather, but said this would be impossible as his father regarded all films as a ‘vulgarisation of the truth’.

  The Grants had no wish for their son to become an actor and were pleased when Hugh gained a place at Oxford University to study English. On completing his degree, however, he failed to do well enough to follow through with a doctorate, and instead began to trade on his good looks and charm. Before long, he had landed a part in a Merchant-Ivory film, Maurice, and proved that he wasn’t just a pretty face but that he could actually act as well. More choice roles followed, until in 1994 he revealed his talent for comedy in the film that really made his name, Four Weddings and a Funeral. By this time he had developed an engaging film persona of an easily embarrassed, disorganised, rather selfish young man who seeks to avoid responsibility and entrapment in a domestic relationship at all costs. The role was undoubtedly based on the famous character of Bertie Wooster created by P. G. Wodehouse, but Grant’s genius was to update it for the 1990s, which he did to great comic effect in the film.