Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Read online

  She kept repeating herself, going on and on while the guys became increasingly uncomfortable. They didn’t want her pity. They weren’t interested in what she had to say; the only thing they wanted to do was enjoy their night out.

  “I know you boys will be able to walk someday. You just have to work hard and you’ll do it. I have faith in God that he will help you and you’ll be all right. You’ve got to believe because you are with the Lord and the Lord is with you and will help you.”

  They were really getting sick of her, so I said, “You know, ma’am, I believe you. I believe in the Lord.”

  “Well,” she said, “I want you to believe. You should believe it, soldier, because I know that with the Lord’s work you can recover.”

  I said, “I do believe! I do believe! I feel the Lord has come right into this room and into my body. The Lord is in my body! I feel it …”

  I got up and started tap dancing, then ran around the restaurant and sprinted out the door shouting, “Hallelujah!”

  The guys in their wheelchairs cracked up. Unfortunately they didn’t get many laughs. They were young, virile men—some of them seventeen- or eighteen-year-old boys with good brains who were trapped in inoperative bodies and would never be able to move their arms or legs or make love. Many fought like tigers to make the most of their broken bodies; some put paintbrushes in their teeth and created beautiful paintings. But it was excruciatingly difficult; many were upbeat and determined to get on with their lives, while others gave up. Perhaps the saddest aspect of these men was that they believed they had let their wives down; in most cases, they had lost their capacity for sexual performance, and it ate at them. Some told me that the emotional pain of knowing that their wives did not want to be dishonest and disloyal, yet realizing that eventually they would succumb to temptation, was worse. Some of the friends I made at Birmingham killed themselves, unable to take it anymore.

  I don’t know whether making The Men had anything to do with it, but when the army tried to draft me for the Korean War, I wasn’t interested. During World War II I’d been ready, but by 1950 I was more savvy about the world—or so I thought. I had read enough to become more skeptical about what my government did in my name.

  Notified that my draft status had been changed from 4-F to 1-A, I went to the induction center in New York. I’d had an operation on the knee I injured at Shattuck, and was no longer lame enough to be excluded from the draft. I was given a questionnaire and instructed to fill it out.

  Race?

  “Human,” I wrote.

  Color?

  “Seasonal—oyster white to beige.”

  When an army doctor asked me if I knew of any reasons why I shouldn’t be inducted into the armed services, I answered, “I’m psychoneurotic.”

  He referred me to a psychiatrist, who asked, “Why do you think you are psychoneurotic and unsuitable for military service?”

  “I had a very bad history in military school,” I answered, “I don’t respond well to authority and I got kicked out. Besides, I have emotional problems.”

  Skeptically the doctor asked if I was being treated for any psychological problems, and I told him that I was seeing Dr. Bela Mittelman.

  He gave me a funny look and said, “Who?”

  “Bela Mittelman.”

  “Bela Mittelman! For Chrissake, where is he?”

  I said he had an office down the street about two blocks away.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” he said. They were old friends. Then he scribbled on my induction papers: “Not suited for military service.”

  We chatted a few more minutes, and then as I was going out the door, he gave me his card and said, “Tell Bela to call me.”

  I answered, “He’s in the book, but I’ll tell him …”

  And that was why I didn’t go to Korea.

  22

  MY SECOND MOTION picture was A Streetcar Named Desire. Although Hollywood censors sapped Tennessee’s story of some of its sting, I thought it was better than the play. Vivien Leigh, who had played Blanche in the London stage production, was brought over from England for the movie, and I’ve always thought it was perfect casting. In many ways she was Blanche. She was memorably beautiful, one of the great beauties of the screen, but she was also vulnerable, and her own life had been very much like that of Tennessee’s wounded butterfly. It had paralleled Blanche’s in several ways, especially when her mind began to wobble and her sense of self became vague. Like Blanche, she slept with almost everybody and was beginning to dissolve mentally and to fray at the ends physically. I might have given her a tumble if it hadn’t been for Larry Olivier. I’m sure he knew she was playing around, but like a lot of husbands I’ve known, he pretended not to see it, and I liked him too much to invade his chicken coop.

  Making the movie reinforced my decision not to take on another Broadway play. I’ve heard it said that I sold out to Hollywood. In a way it’s true, but I knew exactly what I was doing. I’ve never had any respect for Hollywood. It stands for avarice, phoniness, greed, crassness and bad taste, but when you act in a movie, you only have to work three months a year, then you can do as you please for the rest.

  Although I decided not to make another long-term commitment to the stage, I was glad to get back to New York after the filming of Streetcar. I lived in an apartment at Sixth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street near Carnegie Hall and dropped in from time to time at the Actors Studio to meet girls. One of them was Marilyn Monroe, who was being exploited by Lee Strasberg. I had first met her briefly shortly after the war and bumped into her again—literally—at a party in New York. While the other people at the party drank and danced, she sat by herself almost unnoticed in a corner, playing the piano. I was talking to someone with a drink in my hand, having a good time, when someone tapped me on the shoulder; I spun around quickly and hit her with a sharp elbow to the head. It was a solid knock and I knew it must have hurt.

  “Oh, my God,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. It was an accident.”

  Marilyn looked me in the face and said, “There are no accidents.”

  She meant it to be funny and I laughed. I sat down beside her and said, “Let me show you how to play a piano. You can’t play worth a damn.”

  I did my best for a few bars; then we chatted, and thereafter I called her from time to time. Finally one night I phoned her and said, “I want to come over and see you right now, and if you can’t give me a good reason why I shouldn’t—maybe you just don’t want me to—tell me now.”

  She invited me over, and it wasn’t long before every soldier’s dream came true.

  Marilyn was a sensitive, misunderstood person, much more perceptive than was generally assumed. She had been beaten down, but had a strong emotional intelligence—a keen intuition for the feelings of others, the most refined type of intelligence. After that first visit, we had an affair and saw each other intermittently until she died in 1962. She often called me and we would talk for hours, sometimes about how she was beginning to realize that Strasberg and other people were trying to use her. She was becoming a much healthier person emotionally. The last time we spoke was two or three days before she died. She called from her home in Los Angeles and invited me to come over for dinner that night. I said I had already made plans for the evening and couldn’t, but I promised to call the following week to set a date for dinner. She said, “Fine,” and that was it. It’s been speculated that she had a secret rendezvous with Robert Kennedy that week and was distraught because he wanted to end an affair between them. But she didn’t seem depressed to me, and I don’t think that if she was sleeping with him at the time she would have invited me over for dinner.

  I’m pretty good at reading people’s moods and perceiving their feelings, and with Marilyn I didn’t sense any depression or clue of impending self-destruction during her call. That’s why I’m sure she didn’t commit suicide. If someone is terminally depressed, no matter how clever they may be or how expertly they try to conceal it, they wil
l always give themselves away. I’ve always had an unquenchable curiosity about people, and I believe I would have sensed something was wrong if thoughts of suicide were anywhere near the surface of Marilyn’s mind. I would have known it. Maybe she died because of an accidental drug overdose, but I have always believed that she was murdered.

  Another friend from that era who died sadly and prematurely was Montgomery Clift. We were both from Omaha and broke into acting about the same time. We had the same agent, Edie Van Cleve, and, although he was four years older than me, we were sometimes described as rivals for the same parts. There may have been a rivalry between us—in those days I was a competitive young man determined to be the best and he was a very good actor—but I don’t remember ever feeling that way about him. In my memory he was simply a friend with a tragic destiny.

  We met while I was in Truckline Cafe. By then Monty had been in several plays, and I was curious about how good he was and went to see him in The Searching Wind. He was good, and after the play I introduced myself and we went out for dinner. Since we shared a lot of similar experiences, there was a lot to talk about and we became friends, though not close ones. There was a quality about Monty that was very endearing; besides a great deal of charm, he had a powerful emotional intensity, and, like me, he was troubled, something I empathized with. But what troubled him wasn’t evident. Later on, I went out with a girl he had dated, and she said she thought he might be a bisexual or a homosexual, but I found it hard to believe. I never asked him and never suspected it, but if he was a homosexual, I imagine he was torn asunder by it. Whatever the reason, he was a tortured man, and to deaden his pain he began drinking chloral hydrate and then became an alcoholic.

  At the time I didn’t understand what was happening or why Monty wanted to destroy himself, but it was tragic to watch. By 1957, when I was in The Young Lions, nobody wanted to hire him, but I encouraged the producers to give him a job. It had been hard for him to find work after being injured in a bad car wreck not far from my house, and his upper lip was paralyzed. He’d had plastic surgery, but the doctors hadn’t been able to repair the damage completely. He could smile with his eyes, but his upper lip wouldn’t move, giving him a twisted, confused look. He had always taken great pride in his looks, and he was self-conscious about the injury.

  When Monty showed up in Paris for The Young Lions, he was consuming more chloral hydrate and alcohol than ever. His face was gray and gaunt, and he had lost a lot of weight. I saw he was on the trajectory to personal destruction and talked to him frankly, opening myself completely to him; I told him about my mother’s drinking and my experiences with therapy and said, “Monty, there’s awful anguish ahead for you if you don’t get hold of yourself. You’ve got to get some help. You can’t take refuge in chemicals, because that’s a wall you can’t ever climb. You can’t get around it, you can’t drive through it. You’re just gonna die sitting up huddled in front of that wall.”

  I gave him the name of a therapist I thought might be able to help him, encouraged him to join Alcoholics Anonymous and talked to him for hours trying to persuade him to stop taking dope and alcohol. But when we shot the picture, he often slurred his lines. I tried to shore him up and did the best I could to get him through the picture, but afterward his descent continued until he died in 1966 at the age of forty-six.

  I do not know for a fact that Monty was a homosexual. Afterward, some people told me he was, but I have heard so many lies told about myself that I no longer believe what people say about others. I do know he carried around a heavy emotional burden and never learned how to bear it.

  23

  WHEN I LIVED in the apartment at Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue, someone began making anonymous telephone calls to me that always followed the same pattern: the phone would ring, I would pick it up and say “Hello,” there would be silence and then the caller would hang up. Then a few minutes later, the phone would ring again and the caller would listen silently while I kept repeating, “Who is this? Why don’t you say something? Look, I think it would be advisable for you to see a psychiatrist at your earliest convenience.”

  After about three months, the caller, a woman, spoke for the first time in frightened, tremulous low tones. I asked her who she was and why she kept calling me, and finally wheedled some answers out of her; she said she had been fixated on me for years, ever since A Streetcar Named Desire was on Broadway. I asked her what she did for a living and she said that she was a hold-up artist—that is, she masterminded robberies, mostly of liquor stores; she planned the “jobs,” as she put it, while a deaf-and-dumb friend who drove a motorcycle did the dirty work. After a three-hour conversation, she revealed that for months she and this friend had been making plans to kidnap me and take me to Long Island, where she was going to imprison and cannibalize me.

  I didn’t know if she was crazy or serious, but realized that whether it was fact or fantasy, I was dealing with a very disturbed mind. I finally decided that she was deadly serious; she explained in great detail how she was going to kidnap me, and she clearly had an intimate knowledge of my life and routine. She said that she had made her deaf-and-dumb friend tear down a billboard of A Streetcar Named Desire, and had papered her entire bedroom with it—walls, ceiling and floor. Sometimes she locked herself in her room without food or water and spent days just looking at the pictures, she said; she also kept a picture of me beneath her pillow and talked to it. After she captured me, she said she was going to eat me because she loved me.

  I decided to meet this woman face-to-face. I was interested to find out why anyone could develop such a fixation, the depth of her disorder and the seriousness of her imbalance. I invited her to my apartment, and when she arrived I opened the door, with the chain still in place, and looked past her to see if her deaf friend was hiding behind her. I told her to stick her hands through the opening, held them with one hand, and reached out and frisked her with the other to make sure she didn’t have a gun. She didn’t, but when I unbolted the chain I half-expected her friend to appear out of nowhere and grab me.

  After she entered the room, she sat on a small ottoman and her first words to me were, “I bet you could beat up anybody.”

  “Nobody can beat up anybody,” I said. “There’s always somebody who can beat you up, and he’s probably just around the corner at the next tavern.”

  She argued with me. “Oh, no, no, no. You can beat anybody up. Don’t say you can’t, because I know you can.”

  “Well, all right,” I said, “I can beat anybody up. Now what?”

  “Do you need any money?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Because if you do, I have lots.” She pulled a wad of hundred-dollar bills out of her purse that would have choked a rhino—at least the top bills were hundreds—and offered them to me.

  “I really don’t need any money.”

  As she sat there, I tried to size her up. She was in her early twenties and wearing a jacket with a fringe on it; she was possibly Italian, big-busted and attractive. She said her name was Maria, and I asked her more questions.

  She answered a few, then interrupted me. “I want to ask you a question. You won’t be mad at me if I ask you something, will you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Are you sure you won’t be mad?”

  I said: “I promise you I won’t be mad.”

  She said: “Can I do something?”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “May I wash your feet?”

  I did about a twelve count after the question, then said, “You want to wash my feet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just something I want to do. I don’t know why.”

  I found myself saying, “Yes.”

  She went into the kitchen, filled a big basin with warm water and then began washing my feet. I was surprised, a little frightened and unfortunately a little excited, but curious at the same time. I wanted to see how far she’d go. There is
nothing more seductive than understanding the dynamics of the human mind and its odd ways.

  Maria washed my feet slowly, deliberately, reverentially, and then dried them lovingly with her hair. Unfortunately it felt wonderful. Of course I understood what was going on; she was fantasizing that I was Jesus and that she was Mary Magdalene. As I looked down at her, the carnal aspect of my personality began to take over, and when she sat on my bed, it overwhelmed anything that was reasonable, rational, moral or decent in me. Without anticipating it, I put my hands on her breasts. I realized I was going over the falls in a barrel. The first thing I knew I was groping with her on the bed, and she was terrified because she was very passionate, and in the grip of her delusion must have thought she was being seduced by Jesus Christ.

  When it passes a certain point, the penis has its own agenda that has nothing to do with you, especially in those days when I was young, uncontrolled, passionate and determined. One is led around by one’s lust and a lot of one’s decisions are not made by one’s brain. When I penetrated Maria, she said, “I’m dying, I’m dying …”

  “No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re living. This is the first time you’ve ever come to life.” I realized she was having an orgasm, and I reassured her that it was all right. She was, I had discovered, a virgin.

  Afterward I felt remorse and asked myself how I could have done this; I had just seduced a girl who thought I was Jesus and who wanted to eat my body. I told her, “I think you need help.”

  I suggested the name of a psychiatrist, and after a lot of salesmanship persuaded her to go see him. A week or two later, I called him because I knew I was involved in something that could be very dangerous.

  “There’s nothing I can do for her,” he said. “She’s fixated on you, and the only reason she came to see me was because you instructed her to. She doesn’t want help. She wants you.” He went on to say that her disturbances were of such a character that he couldn’t treat her. I asked him if he thought she was serious about kidnapping me or was potentially dangerous in other ways. He said he couldn’t be sure, but that in her obsessive state of mind anything was possible, so I should be careful. I decided never to see her again, but was fascinated by her, though no longer in a sexual way, because she was wounded and likable and I felt compassion for her. Still, I realized I had to break the tie between us and I tried hard. For months she called, saying she wanted to see me, and I refused, trying to be evasive and kind at the same time. Then she began sending food and expensive presents to my apartment and imploring me to go to bed with her again. She would come to the apartment and pound on the door and I wouldn’t answer.