Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Read online

  Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me

  Brando, Marlon

  Random House, Inc. (1994)

  * * *

  * * *

  The publisher reportedly paid $5 million for this book but expects to

  recoup its investment; after all, this will be the only Brando

  autobiography available. Lindsey, who authored the prize-winning The

  Falcon and the Snowman, also helped Ronald Reagan when he faced writer's

  block over his autobiography. A 500,000-copy first printing.

  Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

  From Booklist

  When Marlon Brando, playing Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront,

  bemoaned the fact that he "coulda been somebody," audiences hung onto

  his words, but according to Brando, the role "was actor-proof, a scene

  that demonstrated how audiences often do much of the acting themselves

  in an effectively told story. " Brando's evaluation of his acting and

  that of other celebrated actors, e.g., Olivier in Wuthering Heights, mark this rumination on his life. In his analysis of his films, from Streetcar to The Freshman,

  the master tries hard to demonstrate hubris and to provide public

  lessons. At the same time, he claims that luck, physical desires, and

  the need to make money motivate him. The book, which the publisher would

  not release in galleys, strikes the reader as a confession, an attempt

  to set the record straight, to circumvent "a carrion press that has an

  insatiable appetite for salaciousness and abhors being denied access to

  anyone, from pimps to presidents." Is it coincidence that Manso's

  unauthorized Brando and this book are being published a month apart? Whatever its raison d'{ˆ}etre, Songs My Mother Taught Me

  has much to offer. First, it's beautifully illustrated, beginning

  before the text with 24 pages of photographs covering Brando's early

  life, continuing with a number of well-placed photos documenting various

  film shoots, and concluding with 32 pages of photographs near the end.

  Brando's account of his early years rings true as he records the

  frailties of his alcoholic parents. His anecdotes about work and play

  are entertaining and memorable, and he addresses the many social causes

  he has championed. It's an interesting, albeit incomplete, work:

  according to coauthor Lindsey, Brando promised to "hide nothing . . .

  except his marriages and his children." (So many marriages, so many

  children.) Readers of Manso can't come here to find Brando's side of his

  marital troubles or the perplexing murder of his daughter's husband at

  the hands of his son. But they will find insight into the life of a man

  who was definitely a contender

  Copyright © 1994 by Marlon Brando

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  PLAYBILL ® covers printed by permission of PLAYBILL Incorporated.

  PLAYBILL ® is a registered trademark of PLAYBILL Incorporated, New York, N.Y.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brando, Marlon.

  Brando: songs my mother taught me / Marlon Brando with Robert Lindsey.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78673-9

  1. Brando, Marlon. 2. Actors—United States—Biography.

  I. Lindsey, Robert. II. Title.

  PN2287.B683A3 1994

  791.43’028’092—dc20

  [B] 94-15281

  v3.1

  To my sisters, Tiddy and Frannie;

  to G. L. Harrington, Clyde Warrior,

  and Bobby Hutton;

  and to my children, who brought me up.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  About the Coauthor

  INTRODUCTION

  IN 1988, I received a telephone call from an old friend, the wife of a Hollywood actor and a gifted writer and actress. She asked me if she could give my private telephone number to one of her friends, but didn’t explain who it was or why. A few moments later, my telephone rang again and I heard a familiar voice say slowly: “This is Marlon Brando.”

  It really wasn’t necessary for him to identify himself. Like millions of people who had spent a sizable portion of their lives in a darkened motion picture theater, I recognized his voice. Like millions of other people during the past forty years, I had grown up with it.

  He said he wanted me to write a book about a passage in his life during which he believed someone had terribly wronged someone he loved.

  A few days later I arrived at a locked gate beside Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills. The gate swung open, and I followed a winding road lined with pepper trees, uncertain where I was going. Then something almost ghostly happened: it seemed that a part of the forest of bamboo next to me began to move. A gap appeared in this leafy tangle as an electric gate, camouflaged with dense foliage, suddenly swung open. It might have been a wall of granite peeling open in an Arabian Nights fantasy.

  The gap in the forest widened, inviting me not only to Marlon Brando’s home at the top of a mountain, but into his life. After my first visit, I returned many times to the house on Mulholland Drive and he and I became close friends. We are an odd couple: I am a journalist with an ordinary past who has been married to the same woman for over thirty years and who, while reporting from Los Angeles as a correspondent for The New York Times, acquired a passionate disdain for the shallow and self-centered egotism and puerility that afflicts most movie actors I had encountered; he is an unconventional and reclusive actor who, after nearly fifty years of public life, despises the press, has had hundreds of women in his life and told me that he hadn’t “
spent more than two minutes” with any one of them.

  Within twenty minutes of our first meeting, he had my shoes off, my belt loosened and my fingers wired to an instrument that measured my galvanic skin response, all the while explaining that it was a technique he sometimes used to get a personality profile of people by asking questions and observing the reaction of the meter. I was more puzzled than jittery. At our first meeting, I discovered that he was the most curious man I had ever met and that he felt uncomfortable, possibly even embarrassed, to be thought of as a movie star. The movies, he said, were the least important aspect of his life, a thought that he would repeat over and over. As a writer, I was accustomed to asking people questions, but he turned it around and bombarded me with endless questions about my family, my childhood, my marriage, my ideas. I felt as if I were being debriefed by a CIA interrogator. He was inquisitive about everything and informed about many topics—physics, Shakespeare, philosophy, chess, religion, music, chemistry, genetics, scatology, psychology, shoe making, or whatever else he might suggest we discuss.

  To my surprise, I learned that we had much in common, and our friendship deepened. The one thing that he didn’t like to talk about was show business. He never touched on the subject unless I brought it up. We talked for hours at a time—sometimes late into the night via long-distance telephone, other times sitting across from each other in the living room of his home overlooking the wide swath of the San Fernando Valley. Some of the conversations lasted until dawn and ended in his heated swimming pool or with the two of us amicably arguing about something in his superheated sauna.

  I never wrote the book that was the topic of our first conversation. He began to change, and told me that he was beginning to see things in less polarized dimensions and that he no longer felt the need he once had to exact revenge on his enemies.

  As curious as he was about me, he was remarkably candid about his own intimate thoughts, experiences and vulnerabilities, which initially made me suspicious, but I learned during the course of our friendship that it was genuine. At first he told me he intended never to write his autobiography: to make available his private musings to satisfy what he regarded as the public’s prurient curiosity about a movie star, he said, would be crass and degrading. But over time, as he changed in other ways, his attitude about recounting the story of his life shifted as well. He had persuaded himself, he told me, that there were “useful aspects in setting down the facts of my life,” and he set about to write his autobiography for Random House. But after almost two years and little progress, he told me that he didn’t have the emotional reserve to write a full-blown autobiography and asked me to help him. At first I declined. I said it was unwise for a journalist to deal professionally with a friend because it is impossible under such circumstances to maintain objectivity. But he promised to hide nothing, to be completely honest with me and to answer any questions I asked him about any topic I wanted except his marriages and his children—a promise he kept. I agreed to help him and began to make notes of our conversations, then to tape-record them. Our hours of talks stretched into days, then weeks. Inevitably, I told him, it would be necessary for him to talk about his experiences in films if he were going to tell the story of his life; he agreed, but with a reluctance that has never changed. He never relented, however, in his determination to say nothing about his children or his former wives, and he insisted that none of the other women in his life be identified in the book by their real names, except for a handful who are now dead. To do otherwise, he said, would be in bad taste.

  Our conversations are the basis of this book, along with some of Marlon’s own writings and meanderings he has committed to paper. I’ve taken the stories he told me, his writings, thoughts, reflections and experiences, and attempted to create from them a concise and accurate account of his life. Inevitably, in deciding on the structure of the book and selecting the words, events, metaphors and anecdotes in it, I have filtered the story of Marlon’s life through the prism of my own perceptions, experiences and interests. When the preliminary draft of the manuscript was finished, he edited and revised it to confirm its accuracy and then added additional recollections, observations and insights. He also decided what would remain in the manuscript and what would be omitted.

  ROBERT LINDSEY

  1

  AS I STUMBLE BACK across the years of my life trying to recall what it was about, I find that nothing is really clear. I suppose the first memory I have was when I was too young to remember how young I was. I opened my eyes, looked around in the mouse-colored light and realized that Ermi was still asleep, so I dressed myself as best I could and went down the stairs, left foot first on each step. I had to scuff my way to the porch because I couldn’t buckle my sandals. I sat on the one step in the sun at the dead end of Thirty-second Street and waited. It must have been spring because the big tree in front of the house was shedding pods with two wings like a dragonfly. On days when there wasn’t any wind, they would spin around in the air as they drifted softly to the ground.

  I watched them float all the way down, sitting with my neck craned back until my mouth opened and holding out my hand just in case, but they never landed on it. When one hit the ground I’d look up again, my eyes darting, waiting for the next magical event, the sun warming the yellow hairs on my head.

  Waiting like that for the next magic was as good a moment as any other that I can remember in the last sixty-five years.

  • • •

  As I sit at home now, winnowing the remembrances, they often come across my mind as unrelated images and feelings with smoky edges. I remember the sweet aroma of fresh-cut hay, the fragrance of burning leaves and the redolence of leaf dust as I scuffed through them. I remember the fragrance of the lilies of the valley in the garden where I often slept on the hot afternoons in Omaha, and I suppose the fragrance will always be with me. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the smell of lilacs or wild roses or the almost chic appearance of the trees in our neighborhood dressed in the silver lamé of a spring ice storm. Or the unforgettable sound that grates on me even today, the squeak of midwestern snow beneath my boots when the temperature was fifteen below. Nor can I forget the smoky fragrance of toast and burning bacon with grits and eggs that drifted up the stairwell of our house on Sunday mornings.

  We had an old-fashioned cast-iron wood-burning stove that always embarrassed me. It was a wonderful stove, but in those days I was ashamed of it because it made me feel that we were poor. If I ever invited friends over and we passed through the kitchen, I tried to engage them and lock their eyes on me so they wouldn’t notice the stove.

  When my mother drank, her breath had a sweetness that I lack the vocabulary to describe. It was a strange marriage, the sweetness of her breath and my hatred of her drinking. She was always sipping surreptitiously from her bottle of Empirin, which she called “my change-of-life medicine.” It was usually filled with gin. As I got older, occasionally I would find myself with a woman whose breath had that sweetness that still defies description. I was always sexually aroused by the smell. As much as I hated it, it had an undeniable allure for me.

  As her drinking increased, it became more and more difficult for my mother to disguise the fact that she was simply an off-the-shelf drunk. The anguish that her drinking produced was that she preferred getting drunk to caring for us.

  My mother was always unconventional. Sometimes when it rained, she wore a shopping bag over her head with a little visor she had torn at the corners; it looked absurd, but she thought it was funny. I was embarrassed by it, though if she did it today, I’d be gasping with laughter.

  The memories of those times drift in and out of my mind like the hoboes who used to come and go near the railroad tracks not far from our house. It is surprising that those remembrances visit my mind and that most of the time, pain and shame are mercifully absent.

  I have been told that I was born one hour before midnight, April 3, 1924, in the Omaha Maternity Hospital. It was a breech birth,
but otherwise unremarkable. My family had lived for generations in Nebraska and was mostly of Irish ancestry. My mother, Dorothy Pennebaker Brando, was twenty-seven; my father, Marlon Brando, Sr., was twenty-nine. I rounded out the family and made it complete: my older sister, Jocelyn, was almost five when I was born, my sister Frances almost two. Each of us had nicknames: my mother’s was Dodie, my father’s, Bowie, although he was Pop to me and Poppa to my sisters, Jocelyn was Tiddy, Frances was Frannie and I was Bud.

  Until I was seven, we lived in a big wood-shingled house on a broad street in Omaha lined on both sides with houses much like our own, and with leafy elm trees that at the time seemed taller than anything that a young boy could imagine. Some of my memories of those days are pleasant. At first I was unaware of my mother’s nipping from the bottle or the unhappiness of my father, who was also an alcoholic, which probably was the cause of his vanishing so often, getting drunk himself and looking for hookers.

  When I was very small, I remember carrying a tiny pillow around everywhere, a talisman of childhood. Hugging it, I went to sleep at odd times and odd places, and as I grew older, I even carried it when I started climbing trees and laying claim to empty lots in our neighborhood as my own private kingdom.

  It’s hard—probably impossible—to sort out the extent to which our experiences as children shape our outlook, behavior and personalities as adults, as opposed to the extent to which genetics are responsible. One has to be a genius to give a simple or absolute answer to anything in this world, and I don’t know any tougher question than this one, although I suspect it’s a subtle mixture of both. From my mother, I imagine I inherited my instinctual traits, which are fairly highly developed, as well as an affection for music. From my father, I probably acquired my strength of endurance, for he was truly a tough monkey. In later years, he reminded me of a British officer in the Bengal Lancers, perhaps a Victor McLaglen with more refinement. He was a traveling salesman who spent most of his time on the road selling calcium carbonate products—materials from the fossilized remains of ancient marine animals used in building, manufacturing and farming. It was an era when a traveling salesman slipped $5 to a bellboy, who would return with a pint of whiskey and a hooker. Then the house detective got a dollar so that the woman could stay in his room. My pop was such a man.