Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Page 14

  Six months later I decided to employ a new tactic. “Listen,” I told her gruffly when Maria called the next time, “I don’t want you ever to call me ever again. You’re making a mess out of your own life and you’re boring the hell out of me. I don’t want you in my life. I’ll never want you. I never want to see your face again.”

  I felt bad saying this. She cried, screamed and pleaded with me: “Don’t say that, please don’t say that …”

  She was calling from a telephone booth at a drugstore not far from my apartment. This I learned because one of my friends, who knew the story and had seen her before, happened to be in the store, heard her screaming at me and saw her smash her fists into the glass of the booth, breaking it and cutting her wrists until blood was dripping all over her. Then she went out into the fifteen-degree night and vanished. When he called to tell me what he’d seen, I had already called her home and spoken to her brother, who said her family knew all about her fixation on me but hadn’t been able to help her. He said Maria had seven locks on her bedroom door, had been spending more and more time in her room staring at my pictures without eating, and that other members of the family were intimidated by her.

  Four hours later I called the house again, and her brother told me Maria had come home.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  He said she had arrived with her clothes covered with blood, and that she had smashed everything in the living room—pictures, the television set, chairs, glassware; then she had gone to her room, taken down all her Streetcar posters and set fire to them.

  “What’s she doing now?” I asked.

  “She’s down on the street staring at the ashes of the billboard.”

  “Is she still bleeding?”

  “Yeah.”

  I was afraid she might have cut the arteries in her wrist, but he said he had bandaged her wounds and that she would be all right.

  “Okay,” I said, “treat her as best as you can and let me know what happens.”

  I didn’t see or hear from Maria for several months until I was walking down the street one day on my way home with a woman who had been staying with me. Maria came up to us and I realized she had been waiting for me outside my apartment. This was long before celebrities entertained thoughts that they might be shot by a stalker—it wasn’t in fashion yet—so I wasn’t worried when I saw her. She matched our stride step by step, then turned to me and said, “That bitch can’t take care of you. I’m the only person who knows how to …”

  I said, “Maria, you’ll have to go away. Don’t come around here anymore. I mean it.”

  Her step slowed then and she faded behind us as we walked into the apartment building. That was the last I saw of Maria, though she sent me a card wishing me well after I moved to Los Angeles.

  When I was twenty-six, I had a casual affair with Lisa, a designer, who was half Filipino and half Swedish and lived around the corner from my apartment above Carnegie Hall. After I moved to California, she came by my old apartment occasionally and asked the elevator operator—a man from Barbados named Susho—if he ever saw me.

  Susho, who had designs on Lisa, said, “Yes, but very infrequently. You know, it’s very sad about Mr. Brando.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Susho told her that I had cancer and now came to New York only for my treatments.

  Lisa said she was horrified and asked him what kind of treatment I was receiving.

  “It’s experimental cancer therapy,” he said, “in which he is injected with live sperm. But they’re having trouble because live sperm is so hard to get.”

  The next time Lisa saw Susho, she asked him about me again and he said I was scheduled to come to New York shortly for a treatment, but that my doctors didn’t know where they would find the live sperm they needed. “I was wondering,” he said, “if you would like to help me make a contribution to Marlon.”

  For months Susho took her into the supply room at Carnegie Hall apartments and had intercourse with Lisa while holding a plastic bag under her to capture his semen. Then he’d thank her and said he had to rush it to my doctor. She thought she was helping me by doing it.

  This story seems staggeringly implausible, but it is absolutely true. After it had been going on awhile, Lisa said, Susho told her that he had seen me and that I looked wonderful, but that the treatments were so expensive that I was going broke, so she started giving him money and jewelry for me.

  Though I didn’t see Lisa again for ten years, she became convinced that I was communicating with her after an anonymous caller started phoning her and breathing heavily. She decided it must be me and began talking about our relationship, the sex we had shared, my cancer and so forth. The other person never spoke, but using a code suggested by Lisa, communicated by making kissing sounds with his lips: one kiss meant “Yes,” two meant “No,” three meant “I love you.”

  I don’t know who was on the other end of the line, but Lisa was convinced that it was me, and this went on for years. She said that she had a spirit on her shoulder who told her that it was me and what she should say. Lisa was exceptionally intelligent and the only person I’ve ever known who could multiply three numbers by three numbers in her head instantaneously, and yet was not an idiot savant.

  Because I was living in California, I didn’t know about Susho’s cancer “treatments” or the phone calls. But several years later, I was in New York, walking down Fifty-seventh Street at about 1:30 A.M., when I thought about Lisa and wondered if she still lived in the same apartment. I asked the man at the desk and he said she did.

  I went upstairs and rang the bell. Lisa was in shock when she saw me. She opened the door hesitantly, then started talking fast about my cancer and how happy she was to have helped save my life. Then she talked about the love affair she thought we had carried on via the telephone for almost ten years.

  “Lisa,” I said finally, “none of this ever happened. I never had cancer, and I never called you on the phone.”

  She didn’t believe me. “Yes, it was you. I know it was you.”

  “Why would I call you on the phone,” I said, “and not speak? I’m the biggest blabbermouth in town. This is too weird for words.”

  I asked how much money she had given Susho and she said, “About seven thousand dollars.”

  I called Susho and told him I wanted to see him the next day. He denied everything, but I said that I believed Lisa, that the New York police commissioner was a friend of mine and that I was going to tell the commissioner everything. Then Susho admitted it. “You’re going to have to make payments to Lisa every week,” I said, “and we’ll alert the U.S. government and the government in Barbados, so don’t try to run because we’ll find you.”

  Unfortunately, Lisa decided she didn’t want to put Susho through this, wouldn’t demand her money back and wouldn’t testify against him. I’ve always wished she had.

  When I was living above Carnegie Hall, I woke up one night and was startled by a woman standing over me beside my bed. It was a small apartment with only one room, a kitchenette and bathroom, and she was only inches away from me. I jumped and put up my arms. This must have looked amusing to her because I was still flat on my back in bed. I was so startled that I almost pinched her, thinking that she was an apparition.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Why have you brought me here?” she answered.

  “I didn’t bring you here.”

  “I’m confused. You told me you wanted me here, so I came …”

  “You’re mistaken. Where are you from?”

  “Philadelphia.”

  “What brought you here?”

  “You called me,” she said, “you told me to come.”

  “No, I didn’t. How did you get in?”

  “Through the transom above the door.”

  She was a prim-looking, plain girl with dark hair close-cropped in twenties style. I couldn’t see her figure because she was wearing a winter coat. “Are you religious?” I asked
her because something about her suggested that she was.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have a priest?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you go home and tell this to the priest? Tell him what you’ve done and what happened.”

  I must have been convincing, because she went out the door without another word. I watched her walk down the hall and disappear into the elevator. Two years later, when I was living in Hollywood, a woman, wearing a tam-o’-shanter topped by a fuzzy white ball, approached me as I was walking up the sidewalk toward my house. I ignored her and started to open the front door, but she followed me right up the steps and stood next to me. I still hadn’t recognized her.

  “What do you want?” I asked. Then I realized it was the woman who had climbed over the transom of my apartment. “Why have you come here?”

  “I have a message for you,” she answered.

  “Who is it from?”

  “From God.”

  I was quick with an excuse about needing a root canal and said, “I have to go now. Just tell God I was too busy to listen to his message. Thank him but tell him I had to go to the dentist.”

  I went out to the garage as if to leave in order to get rid of her. But when I got into my car she followed me. “You’ll have to go,” I said.

  “But what about the message from God?”

  “All right,” I said. “What is the message?”

  She stuck her finger an inch from my crotch and said, “This.”

  “That’s the message from God?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” I said, “tell God I’m very glad that he gave me the message, and I’ll certainly take care of it.” I said good-bye, drove away and never saw her again.

  Another time, three teenage girls knocked at my door and asked for a photograph of me. I asked, “How did you find out where I live?” After they gave a garbled explanation, I was polite to them, but I didn’t have any photographs of myself to give them, and they left. But then—I guess they were sixteen or seventeen—they began appearing in my life wherever I went, either in California or New York. I don’t know how they were able to afford it, but they followed me from coast to coast and appeared at restaurants, hotels and other places I visited. “Please, girls,” I told them, “don’t follow me. I can’t go through this anymore. I don’t want to see you.” On one occasion I was at the Plaza Hotel in New York and heard a knock at the door. When I opened it, there they were. I said, “I’m going to have the manager of the hotel send up a detective and have you arrested.” In unison, they pleaded: “Please, Marlon, please,” but I’d had enough and called the desk. The house detective came up to my room and said he had searched the floor but hadn’t been able to find any girls. Five minutes later, they pounded on my door again; they had been hiding under some sheets in a linen closet.

  This went on for another year and a half or so. Years later I got a letter from one of them with an apology for pestering me; they hadn’t been able to help themselves, she said. She asked to be forgiven and I wrote her a letter saying as kindly as I could that I was glad they’d come to their senses. But not long after that, I opened my door, and one of the other girls was standing there. She too apologized and said that all three of them were seeing psychiatrists. I praised her for tackling her problem and then she left.

  24

  WHILE WE WERE MAKING the movie of Streetcar, Elia Kazan directed a love scene between Karl Maiden and Vivien Leigh from a rolling camera dolly. While they acted in front of the camera, he sat on the moving dolly and unconsciously acted their parts with them, moving his hands with theirs, raising his feet, sticking his knees together, mouthing Karl’s lines, then Vivien’s, taking on the expressions and gestures of their characters, raising his eyebrows, pursing his lips, shaking his head. Finally he got so wrought up that he started chewing on his hat.

  I’ve never seen a director who became as deeply and emotionally involved in a scene as Gadg. The amazing thing about him was that after such a scene was over, he’d realize the flaws in the scene and have them do it over.

  Gadg never shaved completely. He used an electric razor, and for some reason he always had patches of stubble somewhere on his jaw. On Streetcar—first the play, then the movie—I discovered he was that rarest of directors, one with the wisdom to know when to leave actors alone. He understood intuitively what they could bring to a performance and he gave them freedom. Then he manicured the scene, pushed it around and shaped it until it was satisfactory.

  I have worked with many movie directors—some good, some fair, some terrible. Kazan was the best actors’ director by far of any I’ve worked for. Gadg, who got his nickname because of an affection for gadgets, was the only one who ever really stimulated me, got into a part with me and virtually acted it with me. Before being a director, he had been an actor in the Group Theatre, and I think this gave him great insight. Creating emotions in an actor is a delicate proposition. Most of the time you have to bring your part fully rehearsed in your back pocket and appear on the set, having done your rehearsal off camera. Gadg knew when to intervene after a few takes and say something that would provoke a strong emotion in you, and most of the time he would get the result he was looking for. He was an arch-manipulator of actors’ feelings, and he was extraordinarily talented; perhaps we will never see his like again.

  Performances evolve. On film it may take several or even many attempts to get it right; you may not hit your pace until the third or fourth take. Gadg knew this; he nursed you along and shaped a better performance with each take. Some directors don’t want you to improvise; they’re either too insecure or too inflexible to see the possibilities. They cannot bear improvisations trapped in unstable egos, or, like Bernardo Bertolucci, who has the highest degree of sensitivity and is delicately attuned to the actor, they encourage you to improvise but add nothing to the performance, relying on you to offer your craft to them.

  Gadg was different; he chose good actors, encouraged them to improvise and then improved on the improvisation. He understood that every performer has to bring his own inspiration and characterization to a part; he gave his cast freedom and would be pleased and excited when he got something good. He was always emotionally involved in the process and his instincts were perfect. Sometimes they were conveyed in just a brief sentence at exactly the right moment, or sometimes he inspired me simply by being there because I trusted his judgment.

  When we had a scene coming up, he often said, “Listen, go work on it, then bring it to me and show me what you’ve got.” So another actor and I would go off by ourselves, rehearse a scene in various ways, try something we thought was real and then show Gadg what we had come up with. Then he’d say, “That’s good, that’s good,” or “No, don’t do that, move it over here …” He almost demanded that you argue with him, but it was never a question of whose ego was in charge. We often had very creative fights over how a scene should be played. He had strong convictions and stuck with them unless you showed him he was wrong. I could stand toe-to-toe with him and tell him he was wrong and he never held it against me. He had the sense to remove his ego from the conversation, and if you convinced him you were right, he’d let you do what you wanted. If you proved you were right, he was the happier for it. “For Chrissake,” I’d say, “you can’t do that; it’s not going to work, people won’t believe it. It’s no good. Nobody behaves that way, but okay, I’ll try it your way.” Then I’d do it as best I could, but when I was finished I’d say, “Now let’s do it my way,” and then it would be decided in the cutting room.

  After A Streetcar Named Desire, Gadge asked me to be in Viva Zapata!, a film that he wanted to direct, written by John Steinbeck and based on the life of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, whom I played. It was a pretty good picture, but I think Kazan made a mistake in not requiring everyone in the cast to speak with a Mexican accent. I affected a slight one, but it wasn’t well done, and most of the other actors spoke standard English, which m
ade it seem artificial.

  Tony Quinn, whom I admired professionally and liked personally, played my brother, but he was extremely cold to me while we shot the picture. During our scenes together, I sensed a bitterness toward me, and if I suggested a drink after work, he either turned me down or else was sullen and said little. Only years later did I learn why.

  The film was produced by Twentieth Century-Fox, and until it was a hit, Darryl F. Zanuck, who ran the studio, was lukewarm about it. An absurd-looking man, Zanuck bore a striking resemblance to Bugs Bunny; when he entered a room, his front teeth preceded him by about three seconds. He also had a tremendously inflated opinion of himself; he considered himself larger than life, was totally self-absorbed, was cruel to many of the people who worked for him and always had a new bimbo in tow. When we made Viva Zapata!, he complained constantly to Gadg about the color of Jean Peters’s skin. He was a bigot of the old Hollywood school, when studios often cast whites as blacks or Asians, and he kept warning Gadg that Jean looked too dark in the rushes and that no one would buy a ticket to see a movie whose leading lady didn’t look white. Time after time he made her change her makeup, and he kept ordering Gadg to reshoot scenes with different lighting so that she wouldn’t “look so dark.”

  Jean was seeing Howard Hughes at the time, and he had sent a woman with her to Mexico to accompany her twenty-four hours a day as a kind of security guard, chaperone and lady-in-waiting. Since nothing ever energized my libido more than a well-guarded target, I was determined to have her. We did a little casual flirting, but her chaperone was always in watchful attendance, so I didn’t get anywhere. Deciding to bring the matter to a head, one night about two A.M., I climbed up on the roof of the house she was living in, intending to implement my plan of seduction. But just as I was about to lower myself on a rope to Jean’s window, the chaperone woke up and saw me, so I had to make a quick exit. Undaunted, I tried other ways to effect my plan, but was never able to get past Howard Hughes’s security.