Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Read online

  “Dearest, I’m the most fortunate man in the world, and I can’t see how I deserve it at all,” the boy wrote after landing in France, bound for the trenches of World War I. “I am so happy in knowing that you are mine, that I seem to be walking on air. You’re the only one I could ever marry and to think that you’re mine is wonderful. It’s us for the rest of our life that is going to be the happiest that ever was.”

  “You are as necessary to me as air and water,” she wrote on the eve of her wedding day. “I love and adore you.… I have now and since the first time I saw you a feeling of absolute security whenever I think of you. I know that whatever happens, you’ll always be there to help me, and you know, dearest, I would move the world for you.… I am absolutely yours and you are mine. I don’t think the ceremony will be necessary as far as we are concerned, for we are honestly married as two people could be. It was ordained from the first that we should be. I have always known it and so has everyone who has ever known us.…”

  There are scores of these letters, passionate and brimming with love, all written by my mother and father.

  Like other things in life, what people glean from their words will vary according to their own experiences, values and prejudices. I do not find these letters moving, but I have read them searching for answers to what went wrong in their lives. I have spent almost seven decades examining every aspect of my life trying to understand the forces that made me what I am, and while I never expect to find the final answer, because I realize it is impossible to be objective about oneself, I’ve tried to reconcile the sweet, hopeful, passionate people in these letters with the parents I knew—one an alcoholic whom I loved but who ignored me, the other an alcoholic who tortured me emotionally and made my mother’s life a misery. I mourn the sadness of their lives while looking for clues to their psyches and, by extension, my own.

  My father, the letters tell me, was kicked out of the University of Nebraska for drinking, and when she was away at college in New England my mother wrote him, “I drank half a quart of whiskey with ginger ale, smoked six cigarettes, drank port wine and more whiskey.… I’ve been sick ever since.… I wanted to get stewed once to see what it was like. I wouldn’t do it in public and I couldn’t at home, and I wouldn’t when I was married because if I ever thought you’d see me in the state I was in last night, I’d get under a bed and stay there for the rest of my natural life. Dearest, that’s one thing we’ll never, never do is get stewed. I think it’s horrible.”

  Is there a clue to why my father behaved as he did in a letter written to them by one of his aunts on the eve of their wedding? “Marlon,” she wrote, “be the boss. Dodie will be happier for having someone who makes her do the thing as it should be done, and don’t think that giving in to her is an action of love, for it isn’t.…”

  Clues, but no answers.

  After my mother left New York, she reconciled with my father, and with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous they both stopped drinking. They then had almost ten years together. I bought them a ranch in the sand hills of Nebraska, which my mother called a frozen ocean because in the winter the broad, sweeping plains were glazed with vast sheets of snow and ice. The ranch was near Broken Bow, not far from where Crazy Horse was assassinated, and she named it Penny Poke Farm as a joke. In the Midwest, a poke was where you kept your money, as in a pig in a poke.

  I don’t know if my dad gave up the whoremongering that brought so much sadness to my mother’s life, but she loved the ranch and the two of them shared a life of sorts, though I never knew its inner dynamics. They went to AA and somehow muddled through, taking the shards of their broken lives and fitting them into a sort of mirror that reflected their togetherness and allowed them to live free of alcohol.

  When my mother became seriously ill during a trip to Mexico with my father in 1953, she was brought to California, and I was beside her hospital bed with her hand in mine when she died. She was only fifty-five years old. After hearing her death rattle, I took a lock of her hair, the pillow she died on, and a beautiful aquamarine ring from her finger and walked outside. It was about five A.M. on a spring morning in Pasadena, and it seemed as if everything in nature had been imbued with her spirit: the birds, the leaves, the flowers and especially the wind, all seemed to reflect it. She had given me a love of nature and animals, and the night sky, and a sense of closeness to the earth. I felt she was with me there, outside the hospital, and it helped get me through the loss. She was gone, but I felt she had been transformed into everything that was reflective of nature and was going to be all right. Suddenly I had a vision of a great bird climbing into the sky higher and higher and I heard Ferde Grofé’s Mississippi Suite. Now I often hear the music and see her in the same way, a majestic bird floating on thermals of warm air, gliding higher and higher past a great stone cliff.

  I keep my mother’s ring close to me. For a long while after she died, the stone was vibrant and full of color, pigmented with deeper and deeper shades of blue, but recently I’ve noticed that the colors have begun to fade. With each year it fades more; now it’s not blue anymore, but a misty, foggy gray. I don’t know why.

  34

  IN THE MIDDLE YEARS of my life, I spent a lot of time searching for something to dedicate my life to and give it more meaning. Elia Kazan claimed I once told him, “Here I am, a balding middle-aged failure, and I feel like a fraud when I act. I’ve tried everything—fucking, drinking, work—and none of it means anything.” I don’t remember saying that, but I may have. With so much prejudice, racial discrimination, injustice, hatred, poverty, starvation and suffering in the world, making movies seemed increasingly silly and irrelevant, and I felt I had to do what I could to make things better.

  I spent these years of my life in a philosophical quandary, thinking, If I am not my brother’s keeper, who am I? Where are the lines between that which is mine, and that which is Caesar’s? Where does my life end and my responsibility to others begin?

  For a long time I was driven to involve myself in a war against what I perceived as social injustice and political hypocrisy. As I’ve grown older, I am less sure of many of the things I felt then, but it was another time. For most of my life, a black-and-white world was attractive and convenient for me; it was easier to take sides. As when I sided with Jewish terrorists without acknowledging that they were killing innocent Palestinians in their effort to create the state of Israel, I believed there was right and wrong about everything, with nothing in between, and I wanted to be sure I was always on the right side. There were good people and bad people, and the bad people were my enemies. The human mind finds it difficult to deal with gray areas. It’s much more convenient to say, “These people are evil,” “This is bad,” or “This is good.” With age, I’ve come to realize that nothing is wholly right or wholly wrong, and that everything human beings do is a product of their heritage, perspective, genes and experience. I think a principal fault of our concept of justice is that it is based on the Judeo-Christian beliefs that separate the world into the guilty and the innocent. No child is born evil. People may be born with a genetic disposition toward one characteristic or another—they have a certain level of intelligence, a special talent, a personality feature, a physical ability—but otherwise they are naked when they enter the world. Using the word “evil” is a convenient way to label an enemy. I used to say that Roy Cohn, who spearheaded Joe McCarthy’s bloodletting, personified evil more than any other person I knew. Now I realize I don’t know what forces made him do what he did. I’m more forgiving now, but it took many years to become that way. Sometimes I still have an impulse to hate and exact vengeance on an enemy, but then I realize that it is a wasted emotion and that I have better things to do with the rest of my life.

  However, earlier in my life I often affixed myself to what the press called “causes.” What affected me most was the suffering of children. I couldn’t understand how the world could let so many children starve to death. Nor could I remain silent when I saw the strong exp
loit the weak. People pigeonholed me as a knee-jerk liberal and mouthed clichés like, “Brando is a defender of the underdog.” I bridled at words like “militant,” “radical” and “liberal” because they were so glibly used to confuse and mislabel complex attitudes. Still, to be fair, I can understand, given the natural human proclivity to see things in black and white, how some of the things I did during the middle of my life produced this image in some minds.

  I thought about becoming a minister, not because I was a religious person, other than having an inexhaustible awe and reverence for nature, but because I thought it might give me more of a purpose in life. I flirted with the idea for a while, but in the end it never developed sufficient force to make me want to do it. Or maybe it was because I became interested in the United Nations, which for a while I saw as perhaps our last hope for peace, social justice and a more equitable sharing of the earth’s resources. For the first time in history, people from different nations with diverse natures, colors, religions and philosophies were working together for the common good. I was impressed by what I read about the UN’s technical-assistance program, which promised to give poor people the know-how and tools to feed themselves, and to create jobs and develop industry. I volunteered to help the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund because it was trying to feed millions of starving children around the world, and I became a roving ambassador for the agency, preaching a different kind of religion: that above all, the world owes its children a decent life. I made television spots for UNICEF and traveled to dozens of countries, holding press conferences to spread the word about the importance of its work and putting on shows to raise money for it. I also decided to make a film about the UN, believing with foolish vanity that I could make a difference by using my movie experience to focus attention on the despair and anguish so many children were enduring. In the spring of 1955, I organized my own movie production company—named Pennebaker Productions after my mother’s maiden name—with three objectives: to make films that would be a force for good in the world, to create a job for my father that would give him something to do after my mother died and to cut taxes. He complained constantly that taxes were taking 80 percent of what I earned, and that by forming a corporation we would be able to cut them substantially to put away some money for my retirement.

  As I’ve noted, I had earned $550 a week for A Streetcar Named Desire and more later, and I had given almost all of it to my father to invest. Money was never important to me once I’d fed myself, had a place to sleep and had enough to take care of my family and people I loved. My father invested it, but like most misers, he was a poor businessman and lost everything, the equivalent today of about $20 million. Some of the money was spent on bad investments in cattle, but most was squandered on abandoned gold mines, where a slick salesman had convinced him a fortune was waiting to be made by extracting gold ore from the mountains of tailings left behind by earlier generations of miners. My dad was taken in grand style; after investing all of my money, he discovered that the price of gold was too low to make mining the tailings profitable, and so I lost everything. For a long time he hid this from me and wouldn’t admit what he had done; when he did tell me, he blamed it on other people.

  35

  PARTLY TO RAISE MONEY to finance a film about the UN’s technical-assistance program in Asia, I took a part in The Teahouse of the August Moon, based on a wonderful play by John Patrick, which in turn was based on a novel by Vern Sneider. En route to Tokyo for the filming in the spring of 1956, I made a detour to Southeast Asia to look for story ideas and visited the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and several other countries. From afar I’d admired the efforts by the industrialized countries to help poorer nations improve their economies, and thought that this was the way the world ought to work. But I found something quite different; even though colonialism was dying, the industrialized countries were still exploiting the economies of these former colonies. Foreign-aid grants were given mostly for self-serving political purposes, and most Westerners never bothered to learn the language of the Asian countries and lived in hermetically sealed capsules of villas, servants, bourbon, air-conditioned offices, expense-account parties and all-white country clubs. A lot of the foreign-aid officials I met seemed arrogant and condescending, with a smug sense of superiority. Apparently because the United States had more television sets and automobiles, they were convinced that our system was infallible and that they had a God-given mission to impose our way of life on others. I was still unschooled in the ways of the diplomatic world and the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, but I sensed that many of the political leaders we were supporting in these countries were looking out only for themselves and their bank accounts. They lived in palaces while their people lived in huts.

  The trip yielded the draft of a script for a movie about the UN assistance program called Tiger on a Kite that was never made, but that in time led to The Ugly American.

  Such trips were always among the most appealing reasons for being an actor. The opportunities to meet people and to experience cultures I would never have otherwise balanced some of the negative aspects of my profession. I remember a visit to Bali on that trip with particular affection. It was before large numbers of tourists had invaded the island, so it still had a sweet innocence. I met artisans and artists who worked all day in the rice fields, then came home, took a swim in a river, and taught dancing or worked lovingly on their artwork, and they seemed to lead a marvelous life. Before tourists polluted their culture, Balinese women didn’t wear anything over their breasts, although if you encountered one on a street she usually covered herself up out of courtesy, not that she thought there was anything wrong with being bare-breasted, but as a show of respect. The women had beautiful bodies, and I kept trying to persuade them to be less respectful. Sitting in a stream with my feet braced against a boulder and water splashing over my shoulders, or looking downriver at a group of naked Balinese women bathing, I thought nothing in life could be more pleasant than this. A sailor I met had jumped ship in Bali and had decided to spend the rest of his life there. I understood why. He had learned to speak a rough form of the Balinese language and lived with two beautiful cinnamon-colored girls. A ship’s carpenter skilled as a woodworker, he earned his way by making instruments for the orchestras that accompanied the legong, a Balinese dance in which the performers moved every part of their bodies, from eyebrows to toes. What a wonderful life he had, I thought, although he said that he had one problem; he was having trouble keeping his girlfriends satisfied. He asked me to send him some testosterone when I got home, and I did.

  In The Teahouse of the August Moon, I played an interpreter on Okinawa named Sakini, who spends most of the movie dueling with Glenn Ford, an American army officer assigned to bring democracy and free enterprise to the island. The Broadway play, in which David Wayne had been marvelous as Sakini, was a delicate, amusing comedy of manners set against the backdrop of a stormy clash of cultures. As I’ve said, a well-written play is nearly actor-proof, but in Teahouse Glenn Ford and I proved how easily actors can ruin a good play or movie when they’re so absorbed with themselves and their performances that they don’t act in concert. It was a horrible picture and I was miscast.

  Still, I enjoyed working again with Louis Calhern, whom I had met on Julius Caesar. He was an imposing, hard-drinking old actor with a classic profile, and he knew every trick in the book, had played virtually every part on Broadway and was full of stories about the theater. Once, he told me, he was getting ready to open in a new play and the producers were so frightened that he would not be sober for opening night that they locked him in a room on the fourth floor of the Lambs Club, the actors’ club in New York. After they had gone, Calhern looked out the window and saw a waiter from the Lambs walking down below. He hailed him, floated a twenty-dollar bill to the sidewalk and asked him to bring up a bottle of whiskey and a straw. When the man knocked on the locked door, Louis said, “Put the straw through the keyhole and the oth
er end in the bottle.”

  He emptied the bottle using the straw and was soon snockered. When the producers, who had frisked him and searched the room for liquor before locking him in, came to get him, they couldn’t believe it, and Louis said they never figured out how he had gotten the booze. It was like one of those English mysteries in which a dead body is found in a drawing room but all the windows and doors are locked from the inside. Nonetheless, on opening night Louis got wonderful reviews for his performance. He was a merry drunk, full of laughter and fun, but underneath an unhappy, lonely man. His wife had just left him, which was shattering, and he was suffering because of it, which made him drink even more. A few weeks after we got to Tokyo, he died from a heart attack, but I think he died happy and full of laughter.

  Someone decided we should have a religious funeral for Louis, and selected a Catholic church with wooden pews, kneeling benches, tatami mats on the floor and no heater. It was freezing when we filed into the place, which, comically, was according to our billing in the movie. Glenn began the eulogies with an actor’s performance. He described effusively how much he missed Louis, looked to the heavens with his chin quivering and seemed to be trying to address Calhern directly as if he were already up there. Meanwhile the priest had kept giving us cues to stand up, sit down, kneel, rise, kneel. For non-Catholics, it was very confusing, as we kept going up and down like a bank of express elevators. I noticed Glenn rubbing his knees in pain, and the next time the priest signaled for us to kneel again, he responded with a look of disgust and a barely audible sound of resentment. At first he wouldn’t go down, then he knelt halfway, then finally all the way, and for some reason this struck me as very funny and I started laughing. People turned around and looked at me, so I tried to disguise my laughter as the choked, tearful bereavement of someone suffering a great loss. I clamped my hands over my eyes in sorrow and tried to stop giggling, but I was in the clutches of a sustained and serious laughing attack, the kind that can take the wind out of you and tighten the muscles around your chest so that you can barely breathe. That I was reacting this way at a funeral made me even more hysterical. Glenn looked over at me with a surprised look that said, “Jesus, he’s sure feeling a lot more grief than I am,” which only made me laugh more. It was a nightmare, and I could hardly wait for the Mass to end. Afterward the priest, thinking I was immobilized by grief, came over to me and said, “My son, let’s go into the rectory so we can have a private communication with Louis’s spirit.” Everyone had to follow or it would have been disrespectful, so we prayed some more there, and I could never stop laughing. On the ride back to the hotel, everybody, even Glenn, expressed sympathy for my loss.