Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Read online

  I didn’t begin to understand the reason for any of these things until I was in my forties. Until then, I usually responded to emotions that I didn’t understand with anger.

  I’ve always thought that one benefit of acting is that it gives actors a chance to express feelings that they are normally unable to vent in real life. Intense emotions buried inside you can come smoking out the back of your head, and I suppose in terms of psychodrama this can be helpful. In hindsight, I guess my emotional insecurity as a child—the frustrations of not being allowed to be who I was, of wanting love and not being able to get it, of realizing that I was of no value—may have helped me as an actor, at least in a small way. It probably gave me a certain intensity I could call upon that most people don’t have. It also gave me a capacity to mimic, because when you are a child who is unwanted or unwelcome, and the essence of what you are seems to be unacceptable, you look for an identity that will be acceptable. Usually this identity is found in faces you are talking to. You make a habit of studying people, finding out the way they talk, the answers that they give and their points of view; then, in a form of self-defense, you reflect what’s on their faces and how they act because most people like to see reflections of themselves. So when I became an actor, I had a wide variety of performances inside me to produce reactions in other people, and I think this served me as well as my intensity.

  I was always very close to my sisters because we were all scorched, though perhaps in different ways, by the experience of growing up in the furnace that was our family. We each went our own way, but there has always been the love and intimacy that can be shared only by those trying to escape in the same lifeboat. Tiddy probably knows me better than anyone else.

  Not long ago, she wrote me a letter about my early years in New York:

  “You were a twenty-three-year-old when all the ‘Streetcar’ stuff hit the fan—a kid—and you were just trying to get along. In the beginning, you really didn’t have much control of your craft. You could only follow your instincts—good ones as it turned out—but how were you to know if the choices you were making were the right ones? Can anyone remember how insecure [it is to be] twenty-three and be suddenly saddled with all the kudos and the notoriety you received? It was embarrassing. You couldn’t think it was deserved. You couldn’t believe you were actually responsible, and Poppa had always said you’d never amount to a tinker’s damn. What the hell was going on? Sure, it’s nice to know you’re doing something right for once, but can it rate all that? You became an actor because acting seemed to be the only thing you had any aptitude for, the only place you’d found where people said, ‘You’re pretty good at that.’ And it was fun and a good place to hide. Most actors hide behind the characters they play. It’s a way of exploring life from a lot of other folks’ point of view. It is exciting to get to ‘be’ all those other people without the responsibility for their actions. The trouble is that the public identifies the actor with the characters he plays, and that creates a schism right there.… Certainly the perks and the money aren’t bad. They can grease the skids, but everyone should know that money and perks can’t buy the important things.”

  Was Jocelyn right when she said that rapid success and, more important, other people’s reactions to it, were hard to handle for an uncertain kid from Illinois? It’s difficult for me to remember exactly what I felt so long ago. What I remember most about A Streetcar Named Desire was the emotional grind of acting in it six nights and two afternoons a week. Try to imagine what it was like walking on a stage at 8:30 every night having to yell, scream, cry, break dishes, kick the furniture, punch the walls and experience the same intense, wrenching emotions night after night, trying each time to evoke in audiences the same emotions I felt. It was exhausting. Then imagine what it was like to walk off the stage after pulling these emotions out of yourself and waking up in a few hours knowing you had to do it all over again a few hours later. In sports I was always a very competitive person, and there was a fundamental part of me that was determined not to fail as Stanley Kowalski, to excel and be the best, so I applied pressure on myself to act the part well every time. But it was emotionally draining, wearisome, mentally oppressive, and after a few weeks I wanted out of it. I couldn’t quit, however, because I had a run-of-the-play contract.

  What I hated most was matinee days, when I’d wake up, look at the clock, discover I was late, and have to run across town to get to the theater on time. Several times I ran all the way from my apartment at Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue to Forty-second Street and Broadway for a matinee only to discover that it was the wrong day: it wasn’t Wednesday or Saturday, and I could have slept longer. Most days, I got up about two in the afternoon after an adventure or two the night before, then fell asleep about an hour before I was supposed to be at the theater; when I woke up, I had to dash across town in a sweat. I was due there no later than eight-fifteen to put on makeup, but I liked to arrive a little earlier to lift some weights and work up a sweat to give Stanley the appearance I wanted for him. I usually showed up as late as I possibly could and sometimes got there late. I hated going to work.

  Of course there were advantages to success in a Broadway play, and not merely the $550-a-week paycheck, which I suppose was equivalent to about $5,000 now. Although I’d told my father when I was rehearsing for The Eagle Has Two Heads that I wanted to look after my own financial affairs, he persuaded me that I was not only too busy, but too inexperienced with money to handle it properly, so I turned my check over to him; he paid my rent, gave me pocket change and invested the rest. The money that came with A Streetcar Named Desire was less important to me, however, than something else: every night after the performance, there would be seven or eight girls waiting in my dressing room. I looked them over and chose one for the night. For a twenty-four-year-old who was eager to follow his penis wherever it could go, it was wonderful. It was more than that; to be able to get just about any woman I wanted into bed was intoxicating. I loved parties, danced, played the congas, and I loved to fuck women—any woman, anybody’s wife. Sometimes I did insane things. When I lived on the eleventh floor of an apartment building on Seventy-second Street, I gave a party one night where just about everyone, including me, was smashed or close to it, and I went over to a window, opened it and shouted to my guests: “I’m sick of this world and everything in it. I can’t stand you people, I’m sick of this life.” I stepped out the window and disappeared. I stood on a ledge about six inches wide beneath the window, ducked and lay flat against the wall, and clung to the windowsill with my hands. Then I held onto a cement balustrade on the side of the building with one hand and let go of the windowsill. My guests screamed. They thought I’d become a blotter on Seventy-second Street. I hid under the window giggling, then looked down, saw the street and gulped. Everyone was still screaming, and one girl finally ran over to the window and looked up and down Seventy-second Street, searching for my body before spotting me. Then she said, “Go ahead, drop. See if I care.” I crawled back up, laughing. Everybody was red in the face. Their veins were popping out of their foreheads, and everyone shook their fists at me. It was nuts; I was fearless after two or three drinks.

  We did a lot of crazy things in that apartment. Sometimes my friends and I took boxes of old-fashioned kitchen matches and emptied them out the window. When they hit the street, they would all ignite at once and create a spectacular show. Several times we tore the New York City telephone book to shreds and threw it out the window, or we’d rip The New York Times apart and fling the pieces out the window. I had many adventures when I lived in that apartment. One night a friend called and said, “I’ve got a couple of great groovy broads. They’re driving around in a black Cadillac, they’re well-heeled and lookin’ good. You can have either one you want, but I think they’ve both ‘got eyes.’ ” (In those days that was jargon for accommodating women.) The girls picked us up and I agreed with my friend Freddie that he was right. They were black, very attractive and wore sweet-smelling
perfume that almost made me dizzy.

  “Where should we go?” one of the girls asked, and I answered, “I don’t know. I’m happy as a pig where I am.” I was already starting to fool around with the girl in the backseat.

  “How about going to our pad?” she said, and I said, “That’s cool. Where is it?”

  “Harlem.”

  A red light went off somewhere in my head, but I said, “Let’s go, what the hell.”

  Her apartment was a third-floor walk-up. After we finished what we’d come there to do, I started playing cards with one of the girls in the kitchen while my friend and her friend returned to the bedroom. Suddenly I heard something outside that sounded like the footsteps of a raging dinosaur. I thought it was my imagination, but the dinosaur got closer and louder, then stopped in front of the door and started pounding, making me wonder fleetingly if dinosaurs had fists. The attractive woman sitting opposite me in her underwear suddenly looked at me with enormous eyes, her mouth forming a huge O. We heard louder and louder pounding on the door, and each time it caved in another inch.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, trying to seem calm.

  “That’s my daddy,” she answered.

  I said, “Your father?”

  “Baby, that’s my daddy.”

  I had never heard the phrase; I didn’t know that some women referred to their boyfriends as their “daddies” or “my old man,” but I got the drift. I looked at her as calmly as I could and said, “Do you have a fire escape in this building?”

  She glanced in the direction of the bedroom, and I grabbed my clothes and shoes, shook Freddie and said, “I’m going out the fire escape because her daddy’s at the door. I’ll meet you down the block if you’re not coming right now.”

  But Freddie also got the drift and broke off what he was doing, and we ran down the fire escape as fast as we could. When we reached the bottom and the ladder lowered us to the sidewalk, we looked up three stories and saw a head shouting, “Hey, motherfuckers, you wait right there! Don’t you be running!”

  We ran like hell, but it had been well worth it. They were very attractive girls.

  My pal that night was a friend I’d met in an acting class at the New School, Carlo Fiore, although he had changed his name to Freddie Stevens because he thought it would make it easier for him to get acting jobs. He was one of my first friends in New York, and we shared a lot of girls; he’d get one and I’d try to move in on him, or I’d get one and he’d try to get her in his bed.

  Freddie had a huge Roman nose, spoke from the bowels of Brooklyn and didn’t have much acting talent, all of which conspired to work against his becoming a star. He had his nose operated on two or three times, the last time by a surgeon who must have used a can opener instead of a scalpel, but it didn’t help. He fancied himself an intellectual and budding member of the New York literati, and was so full of himself that one of our friends, paraphrasing Shakespeare, described the stories he told as “tales told by an idiot full of sound and Fiore, signifying nothing.” Later I tried to get Freddie jobs, but never had much luck unless I could give him one myself. He was charming and funny but troubled; I don’t know whether his lack of success as an actor contributed or not, but he became a junkie and tried hard to get me to take heroin—a “skin pop,” as he called it. When I refused, he always said, “You don’t know how to live.” I watched him fall deeper and deeper into the abyss of addiction while doing whatever I could to make him stop. I was with him once when he tried to go cold turkey, and it was awful. He shook, shivered and threw up, and finally said he had to go home to his Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn and ask his family to help him. A couple of hours later he called me from home and told me frantically that he needed some Seconal. I bought some and went to his house, where I saw something very touching. He had once told me that his mother was mentally deranged, and when I arrived I could see in his face that he was ashamed of her, but he stood next to her lovingly and put his arms around her because he didn’t want to reject her.

  After I’d had some success as an actor, things began to sour between Freddie and me. He became envious then resentful of me, a problem I was starting to have with other friends, a lot of whom were actors or writers, especially if their careers weren’t going well. It was hurtful to experience this because I was too young to understand it. Many years later, Janice Mars told me she thought Freddie in some ways was a victim of his friendship with me. “Poor Carlo just couldn’t survive being your sidekick, and he never carved out a life for himself.… The attraction of your fame and money was too much for him. To be too close to you could be fatal. You were quicksand for anyone without the strength to pull out. It wasn’t your fault. You wanted to help people, but at the same time their availability to you took priority over their own best interests. They lost themselves. Carlo ended up being expendable, involved in drugs, a hostage to failure.”

  Freddie finally got off dope, but then he became an alcoholic and wrote a book about me, probably all that he had left to sell. He continued on his path of self-destruction until he died.

  19

  IT STILL PLEASES ME to be awake during the dark, early hours before morning when everyone else is still asleep. I’ve been that way since I first moved to New York. I do my best thinking and writing then. During those early years in New York, I often got on my motorcycle in the middle of the night and went for a ride—anyplace. There wasn’t much crime in the city then, and if you owned a motorcycle, you parked it outside your apartment and in the morning it was still there. It was wonderful on summer nights to cruise around the city at one, two or three A.M. wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a girl on the seat behind me. If I didn’t start out with one, I’d find one. There was a lovely Jewish girl named Edna whose father was very rich. She was bright, well educated and beautiful, with lovely brown hair and skin that was almost Oriental in color, and she lived with her father in a deluxe apartment on Park Avenue. For some reason, what I remember best about it were the drapes: the windows were covered with two layers of gossamer white curtains, first a lush tier of pleated satin, then floor-length folds of feathery white silk with the texture of a bridal veil. About two o’clock one morning, when I pulled up to her building on my motorcycle, the doorman looked at me as if I were a longshoreman who’d taken a wrong turn on his way to the docks. I climbed off the motorcycle and asked him to call Edna on the house telephone and tell her that Mr. Brando wanted to see her.

  “Do you know what time it is?” he asked.

  I told him Edna was expecting me, which was not true, and said she would be very put out if she were informed later that I had called and not been allowed to come up.

  With a doubtful look, the doorman dialed her apartment and woke her up. Over the phone, pressed to his ear, I heard a frail, sleepy voice say, “Who?”

  “Mr. Brando.”

  I couldn’t hear the next exchange, but the man hung up the phone and said, “Take the elevator to the left.”

  “I know it well,” I said and turned my back on him to express how annoyed I was at the delay.

  Edna’s father was asleep in his bedroom and we went into hers. There was a soft breeze, and the silk and satin curtains billowed behind her like the canopy of a silken parachute. She was wearing a very attractive soft satin nightgown. I pulled the sheets back and was almost paralyzed by the fragrance of her warm body.

  Edna didn’t say anything while I got undressed. I got into bed and she put a soft, lovely arm around me. After we made love, she asked, “Would you like something to eat?” It was about four A.M. and still dark outside, although a narrow shaft of yellow moonlight pierced the curtains, casting a glow across the room. When I nodded, she went into the kitchen and fixed a tray set with Irish linen, English silver, French crystal, orange juice, eggs and perfectly done toast, all wonderfully arranged. I remember eating that breakfast with her beside me, the silver and crystal in front of me, thinking, This is the life, boy. If this ain’t it, you’re never gonna find it.
/>   I had many romantic experiences like this, but I’ll always remember that particular one. I don’t know where Edna is now. It’s been years since I’ve spoken to her, but I’ve often wondered what became of her.

  After the opening of A Streetcar Named Desire, Shattuck Military Academy began sending me letters inviting me to return. The commandant said that I was the most famous Shattuck man ever. “Please come back,” he said, “we’re really proud of you.”

  I always thought it was unstylish of them to do this after they had kicked me out, and I ignored the letters. I’ve never gone back to Shattuck and never intend to.

  20

  FOR A LONG TIME I had the adolescent notion that I was a tough guy. I liked to box because of a silly idea that it would make me more of a man. I wanted to be tough like my father, who was not only a good boxer but a mean barroom fighter. I’m not saying I consciously wanted to be like my father—that was the last thing I wanted because I hated him—but I probably absorbed some of his characteristics inadvertently. He was a strong man; I may have believed that being strong meant being worthy, and, in my twenties, I considered myself a pretty decent boxer. During the run of Streetcar, I often persuaded a member of the crew to spar with me between acts. I bought some gloves and we threw a few punches at each other in a room underneath the stage. It helped to pass the time and to relieve the boredom when I wasn’t onstage. One night during the intermission between the second and third acts, I had about forty minutes before going on, but none of my regular partners wanted to box. I asked a stagehand I’d never sparred with if he’d join me, but he refused.