Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Read online

  “C’mon,” I said, “we’re not going to fight, we’re just gonna box a little.”

  He was a big guy in his early twenties with a thick mop of wavy black hair, about six foot four and 220 pounds. “I don’t feel like it,” he said.

  “You need some exercise, and so do I,” I said.

  “No.”

  I kept it up, but he kept refusing until finally I talked him into it, probably because he’d decided I wouldn’t stop pestering him until he did. We went downstairs, put on the gloves and started sparring, but he was lethargic, so I said, “Come on, give me something I can work with. I’m trying to work on defense. Hit me. I’m not going to hurt you, for Chrissake.”

  But he kept up his little patter of soft thrusts against my gloves until I said, “Come on, would you please throw a real punch? I’m not going to hurt—”

  I don’t remember exactly what happened next, but I felt his fist smash into my nose like a sledgehammer, and the next instant blood poured out of it in a crimson deluge. Until then I’d never been hurt while boxing, but now I was really in pain. I went upstairs to my dressing room, looked in the mirror and saw my face covered with blood. As I tried to wipe it away I took a drag on a cigarette and saw something startling: the smoke from my cigarette was billowing out of my forehead in a big, white cloud.

  It struck me that something was drastically wrong. I looked again in the mirror and saw that my nose was split across the bridge and that the smoke was taking the path of least resistance.

  How did I get into this mess? I asked myself, In less than a minute, I had to go out onstage. According to the script, I was coming home after having gotten drunk celebrating the birth of my child, and after arguing with Jessica I was going to pick her up and carry her off to bed. With not much choice, I wiped my face and walked onstage.

  Jessica, who had always disapproved of my boxing between acts, looked up at me from behind the desk where she was sitting and ad-libbed, “You bloody fool.”

  We finished the scene and the third act as if nothing had happened, though when I picked her up and laid her down on the bed, I felt so nauseous for a moment from swallowing blood that I nearly passed out on top of her. But apparently no one in the audience knew the difference; they probably assumed I’d gotten into a bar fight or other mischief while I was offstage celebrating fatherhood, and that my blood was makeup.

  When we took our curtain call, blood was still cascading out of my nose and falling on my shoes, shirt, pants and onto the stage. Then I went to the hospital, where I was treated by a butcher and sadist. He began by trying to put my nose back together by squeezing the bones in his fingers without giving me any anesthesia. I have a high threshold of pain, but he quickly surpassed it: he kept squeezing and pressing until I was barely conscious. Finally he got the nose stabilized, put a piece of tape over it and that was that. For a long time, I wanted to break the nose of that son of a bitch, even though he did me a favor by ordering me to spend a week in the hospital so my bones could heal. I was delighted to have a vacation. Jack Palance took over the part and I had a lot of fun taking the nurses up to the roof. I didn’t have to go to work, but still got paid for it.

  After several days, the discoloration around my eyes started to fade and my swollen nose got smaller. When I began looking fit enough to go back to work, the doctor said, “Mr. Brando, I have some good news for you: I think you should be getting out of here in a day or two.”

  I didn’t want to leave yet. I was enjoying it too much. Then I heard that Irene Selznick was coming to the hospital to see me. I asked a friend to go a theatrical supply store and buy some makeup. He brought back a rainbow of colors—yellow, green, purple, red and blue—and I made up my eyes until they looked like I’d just had a run-in with a bus on Fifth Avenue. Then I wrapped a big padded bandage over my nose, making it look as swollen as a melon.

  When Irene walked into my room, I sank into my bed with the covers up to my chin, my eyes half closed, and asked wearily, “Irene, when are they going to let me out of here?”

  From the frightened look on her face, I knew she was stunned. She looked down at me and said, “My God, Marlon. You can’t go back to work. You stay right where you are; we’ll get by without you until you’re better. Get some rest. We’ll tell you when it’s time for you to get out.”

  “Please,” I said. “Irene, I’m dying in here, I’ve got to get out.”

  “You stay right where you are,” she ordered.

  So I got another week in the hospital.

  21

  WHEN A Streetcar Named Desire closed in 1949, after a run of two years, I spent three months in Europe, mostly in Paris, picking up a little French and having a wonderful time. I was one of the wild boys of Paris. I did everything, slept with a lot of women, had no sense of time and slept until two P.M. every day. Anything that was imaginable, I did in Paris. When I returned to New York, most of my clothes and almost everything else I owned were gone. I’d always been generous with my friends and had given away a lot of the money I made, but if I didn’t give it, sometimes they stole it. One night I awoke and looked up at the face of one of my closest friends. There was a table between us; on it was a box where I kept my money and his hands were in it. When I opened my eyes, he withdrew his hands, put them on his hips, said “Hi,” and gave me the look of a jackal. He wasn’t the only friend who took advantage of the fact that I didn’t pay much attention to material things, and when I was in Paris some of these friends came to my apartment, fought over my clothes and stole everything in sight.

  The success of Streetcar meant I’d found a way to support myself in a fashion I liked, but it also skewed and shaped my life in ways that saddened me. Fame cuts two ways, I learned: it has at least as many disadvantages as it does advantages. It gives you certain comforts and power, and if you want to do a favor for a friend, your calls are answered. If you want to focus attention on a problem that bothers you, you may be listened to—something, incidentally, that I find ludicrous because why is a movie star’s opinion valued more than that of any other citizen? I’ve had interviewers ask me questions about quantum physics and the sex life of fruit flies as if I knew what I was talking about—and I’ve answered the questions! It doesn’t matter what the question is; people listen to you. A lot of reporters have come to see me after having already written their articles in their heads; they expect Marlon Brando to be eccentric, and so they say to themselves, I’ll ask him a silly question and he’ll answer it.

  The power and influence of a movie star is curious: I didn’t ask for it or take it; people gave it to me. Simply because you’re a movie star, people empower you with special rights and privileges. Fame and its effects on people are a fairly new phenomenon; until a couple of centuries ago, unless they were royalty or a religious prophet whose image was polished by their court or disciples who produced Scripture and Holy Writ, people were seldom famous beyond their own villages. Most people couldn’t read, and what knowledge they had was passed on via word of mouth. Then along came better schools, newspapers, magazines, the dime novel, radio, movies and television, and fame became an instant global commodity. It took 1,500 years for Buddhism to travel up the Silk Road and establish itself in China; it took only two weeks for the Twist to go from the Peppermint Lounge to Tahiti. A century and a half ago, many Americans didn’t know who they had elected president until weeks after an election because it took that long for news to reach the hinterlands. Now when something happens in Bombay, people from Green Bay to Greenland know it instantly; a face is recognized around the world and people who have never accomplished anything become professional celebrities.

  A lot of people who don’t have it lust after fame and find it impossible to imagine that someone else wouldn’t be interested in being famous; they can’t envisage anyone turning his back on fame and all its appurtenances. But fame has been the bane of my life, and I would have gladly given it up. Once I was famous, I was never able to be Bud Brando of Libertyville, Illinois
, again. One of my consistent objections to my way of making a living has been that I have been forced to live a false life, and all the people I know, with the exception of a handful, have been affected by my fame. To one degree or another everybody is affected by it, consciously or unconsciously. People don’t relate to you as the person you are, but to a myth they believe you are, and the myth is always wrong. You are scorned or loved for mythic reasons that, once given a life, like zombies that stalk you from the grave—or newspaper-morgue files—live forever. Even today I meet people who think of me automatically as a tough, insensitive, coarse guy named Stanley Kowalski. They can’t help it, but it is troubling. We are all voyeurs to one degree or another, including me, but with fame comes the predatory prowl of a carrion press that has an insatiable appetite for salaciousness and abhors being denied access to anyone, from pimps to presidents (a journey that becomes shorter every year), and, confused and resentful because it can’t get what it wants, resorts to inventing stories about you because it is part of a culture whose most pressing moral imperative is that anything is acceptable if it makes money.

  I’m not an innocent: I do things for money, too. I’ve made stupid movies because I wanted the money. I’m writing this book for money because Harry Evans of Random House offered it to me. He said that if his company published a book about a movie star, the profits would enable him to publish books by talented unpublished authors that might not make money. At least he was honest, although I thought it was odd for him to admit that he published trashy books so that he could issue those that had real value. In his own way, Harry is a hooker just like me, looking for a way to make money any way he can. I’m only a hooker who has been working the other side of the street. A little self-hatred? I think not, but I admit to perhaps a touch of vanity in being able to see it clearly and confess it.

  Alice Marchak, my secretary for over thirty years, once said she thought I had a kind of split personality: one side of me enjoys the recognition and power of being a movie star while the other side hates the part of me that enjoys it. I doubt this, but it’s impossible to understand oneself. There are yogis and swamis who have lived close to their unconscious, who have a sense of their own character and know themselves deeply, but most people cannot allow themselves to see what they actually are because everybody has a mythological sense of himself. The person Alice sees is not the person somebody else would see. Wally Cox, who was like my brother, would not see me that way. Everyone we know in our lives views us through a slightly different prism. These are Alice’s impressions, and they are right in respect to the lens through which she looks at me. Everything is perception. There is no such thing as being able to judge anything objectively. It is a pose that scientists have foisted upon the world.

  Other than the money, have I enjoyed being a movie star? I don’t think so, regardless of Alice’s opinion. I have always examined myself with precision and determination. Ever since I was young, I have attempted to find out what was unbalanced about myself. I’ve had to take hard looks at my vanities and sullied ambitions in order to find solutions to a pattern of behavior that seems difficult to change. But I don’t see anything in my career, or in the manner in which I pursue life, that indicates I have ever been in love with the accolades of fame.

  No, I don’t think I have ever liked being a movie star. I think of myself as one of a race apart from other actors. Not that I condemn them or what they have done; I simply don’t want to be considered among them. When I was thirty, I tried to express some of my feelings in a letter to a young woman who’d sent me an adoring letter about The Wild One: “Dear Cleola … thanks for your kind letter. It really was very flattering. You shouldn’t make such a fuss about me, though, because I am simply a human being just like you. I am happy and sad, quiet and gay—in short, nothing more or less than one of some four billion human animals on the earth. Don’t make something out of me that I am not.”

  But I’ve learned that no matter what I say or do, people mythologize me. The greatest change that success has brought me has nothing to do with my concept of myself or my reaction to fame, but of other people’s reactions to it. I haven’t changed. I have never forgotten my life in Libertyville when I felt unwanted, and my formative years when I didn’t have the advantages I do now. I have always been suspicious of success, its pitfalls and how it can undo you.

  All in all, I think it would have been better not to have been famous because my entire adult life’s experience, my view of life, and the lives and outlook of my friends and family, have been colored and distorted by it. If Janice Mars was right in believing that intimacy with a famous friend can victimize those around him, there is also a flip side: people without fame try to attach themselves to it, making it difficult to trust anyone. Ever since I became famous, it’s been difficult for me to judge if a potential friend was attracted to me or to my fame and to the myths about me. It is the first thing I notice. And even though they may say it doesn’t, my fame affects them. I’ve given jobs to friends, then discovered they were using me, or worse, stealing from me. I have also been disappointed when former friends like Carlo Fiore, having led empty lives and with nothing else to sell, have chosen to publish intimate, private accounts about our friendship. But I suppose they were simply trying to pay their bills and survive.

  Once you are famous, everything and everybody changes. Even my father. After A Streetcar Named Desire, he started doing something that really annoyed me: he began calling me Marlon. Until then he’d always called me Bud or Buddy like everyone else in the family. Ever since then, it has annoyed me deeply whenever somebody who once called me Bud begins calling me Marlon or somebody who called me Marlon begins calling me Bud.

  The worst thing that can happen when someone becomes famous is for him to believe the myths about himself—and that, I have the conceit to say, I have never done. Still, I am stung by the realization that I am covered with the same muck as some of the people I have criticized because fame thrives in the manure of the success of which I allowed myself to become a part. Though I am not directly responsible, I could have chosen a less putrid trail to walk, but without a high school education, and with no sense that becoming famous would put me next to a sewage plant, I was obliged to develop indifference to the consequences.

  I never planned or aspired or had any ambition to become a movie star. It just happened. I never felt a passion to act for any other reason than to supply myself with the needs of life. When it happened, I was grateful to find something at which I could make a living. I didn’t have anything better to do, acting didn’t grate on me, and after a while I could do it without expending a lot of effort. Later, when it became less enjoyable, it was still the best way I knew to make a lot of money in a short time. To me, acting has always been only a means to an end, a source of money for which I didn’t have to work very hard. The hours are short, the pay good, and when you’re done, you’re as free as a bird. Acting is like playing house. I don’t look down on it, but I have always been much more interested in other aspects of life. Sometimes the themes of plays and movies I have been in have been interesting, but the acting itself doesn’t really absorb me. It has advantages over some jobs. I wouldn’t have wanted to spend my life as a real estate salesman or lawyer. Any nine-to-five job I don’t think I could bear. I don’t do well under circumstances in which I have to be highly disciplined and responsible to other people. But if a studio offered to pay me as much to sweep the floor as it did to act, I’d sweep the floor. Better yet, I would just as soon someone drove up to my house once a week, handed me some money and said, “Good morning, Marlon, how you doing?”

  “Just fine, thank you. See you next week when you bring more money.”

  After I returned from Paris, there were a lot of proposals for new plays and movies, and I accepted one of them—a one-picture deal, not a seven-year studio contract. It was The Men, a story about a group of paraplegic and quadriplegic soldiers in a California Veterans Hospital after World War II. Th
e producer was Stanley Kramer, and the director was Fred Zinnemann. The script by Carl Foreman was a good one. I played a young army lieutenant, Ken Wilocek, whose spine had been smashed by a German sniper’s bullet in the closing days of the war. I had no idea what it was like to be confined to a wheelchair or to spend the rest of my life in one, so I asked to be admitted to the Birmingham Veterans Hospital in southern California as a paralyzed veteran with a background similar to Ken Wilocek’s. A few patients and members of the staff were informed, but most of the patients didn’t know I was an actor, and because it was my first movie, no one recognized me. For three weeks I tried to do everything the patients did and learn what their lives were like. The first thing I discovered was that they hated pity. Once we went out for dinner to an Italian restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, all of us in our wheelchairs, and a woman came over and said to us, “I’m so proud of you, boys. I know what you’ve done for your country.”