Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Read online

  For a while I thought that the brilliance and success of Jews was the cumulative yield of an extraordinarily rich pool of genes in the Middle East produced over eons by evolution. But then I realized that my theory didn’t hold up because following the Diaspora, Ashkenazic Jews evolved into a group physically much different from Sephardic Jews. Spanish Jews had nothing in common with Russian Jews; in fact they could not even speak to them. Russian Jews were isolated from German Jews, who thought of themselves as separate and superior, and Eastern European Jews had nothing to do with the Sephardic Jews. Besides, there had been so much intermarriage over the centuries that genetics alone couldn’t explain the phenomenon.

  After talking to many Jews and reading about Jewish history and culture, I finally came to the conclusion that in the end being Jewish was a cultural phenomenon rather than a genetic one. It is a state of mind. There’s a Yiddish word, seychel, that provides a key to explaining the most profound aspects of Jewish culture. It means to pursue knowledge and to leave the world a better place than when you entered it. Jews revere education and hard work, and they pass these values on from one generation to the next. As far as I am aware, this dynamic and emphasis on excellence is paralleled only in certain Asian cultures. It must be this cultural tradition that accounts for their amazing success, along with Judaism, the one constant that survived while the Jews were dispersed around the world.

  Traditions passed on via the Torah and Talmud have somehow helped Jews to fulfill the destiny they have claimed, a kind of “chosen people,” if spectacular success in so many, many fields is proof of that. Whatever the reasons for their brilliance and success, I was never educated until I was exposed to them. They introduced me to a sense of culture that has lasted me a lifetime.

  As well as academics and scholars from Eastern Europe, Jewish girls, most of whom were more educated, sophisticated and experienced in the ways of the world than I was, were my teachers during those early days in New York. It was common in those days for girls from wealthy New York Jewish families to rent an apartment in the city and have a little fling before striking out on a career or marriage after they had graduated from college. With my inept, simple ways, I must have seemed to them like an alien from a galaxy beyond the Milky Way. I was a gentile in a Jewish world who had hardly been to school; I rode a motorcycle; I was young, reasonably attractive, full of vim, vigor and sexuality, an exotic specimen if for no other reason than I was different from the boys these girls had grown up with. I didn’t follow any of their rules and they didn’t follow any of mine. They were fascinated by me and I by them. Many were more experienced sexually than I was, and I was a willing and happy pupil. I remember especially Caroline Burke, a beautiful woman who was about ten years older than I was, in whom I always regretted not making a more permanent investment. She was not only physically attractive and well educated, but bursting with elegance, charm, taste and appreciation for beautiful things. She lived in an apartment filled with antiques and always wore delicious perfume. To her, I suppose I was a kind of bumpkin—a nineteen-year-old farm boy who still worried secretly that he had manure on his shoes, but she taught me a great deal.

  I was walking down Fifty-seventh Street with Caroline one day and innocently asked, “Isn’t it funny how you see so many women with blond hair and a mink coat?” There was a woman in front of us with blond hair wearing a mink coat and we were talking about her, when Caroline said, “She’s Jewish.” I asked, “How do you know?” She answered, “Well, it’s because … I don’t know, she’s just Jewish.” I said, “You mean to say, just because she has blond hair and a mink—” She interrupted, “Look, I’m a Jew, and I know what Jews are like from the front, back, side or top.” “Well, how can you tell a Jew from a non-Jew?” She replied, “Well, you have to be Jewish to know that.” I was stunned, and I thought Caroline had remarkable powers of perception.

  After several months in New York, I was still interested in becoming a modern dancer, but then I took an acting class at the New School’s Dramatic Workshop and everything changed. During that fall of 1943, I kept my parents informed of my progress in letters that seem to have been written by a person I barely recognize, a naïve kid trying hard to understand the galaxy he had stumbled into and looking for a place in it as well as a purpose in life:

  Dear Folks:

  I am fine, depimpled and healthy. I haven’t found a room as yet but I think by the end of this week I will have gotten one that I’ve had my eye on … last week, we did “Tonight We Improvise” by Pirandello and it was good. Piscator liked me in it. It was lots of fun. I have met an interesting girl whose name is Renata (beautiful name). She plays the piano for her work and she speaks German, Italian, French and English. Very charming. She was born in Germany.…

  I am learning that you just can’t have a completely frank and sincere relationship with any girl. All most of them do is bore me, truly.… I have been reading the Bible. It is full of beautiful thoughts but they don’t mean much to me. Nana, why do they tell you to fear God? I can’t understand … I am writing this on the subway and putting my thoughts down as they come … Joy Thompson (summer theater girl) fell on her head and went to the hospital—fractured skull and concussion. She has gone back to Canada.…

  How goes it at home? Pop, many things you have said are beginning to take shape and content. Ma, how is your cold? I don’t understand life, but I am living like mad anyhow. You are all good people and much comfort to me.

  All my love

  Bud

  Dear Folks:

  I want to thank you for being so nice about my not writing. Have I forgotten any birthdays? I have been tearing like mad of late.… School is fine. We are doing Moliere in “The Imaginary Invalid” in which I am a young lover of the 18th cent. It’s a good part. I am studying the part of the Templar in “Nathan the Wise,” which is a very good part for me. My philosophy class is real good and Dr. Kaplan in his lectures confirms all I have professed (not openly) about ecclesiastical power and aspects of religion. It is wonderful. I have much to say. I am washing my stuff now in my wash stand.

  I don’t like my landlady. She gives the young lad too much advice. Much too much.

  I am beginning to know how to act—learning to act and developing a sense of direction of action and feeling. It is hard work just as anything else but a source of enjoyment for me because I like it.

  Fran is working like hell and having manifestly wondrous results. She is fine.… I am systematizing my budget.

  Love to you all

  Bud

  12

  THE DIRECTOR of the New School’s Dramatic Workshop was Erwin Piscator, a man of great repute in the German theater, but to me Stella Adler was its soul. During the early thirties, she went to Europe and studied under Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theater, then brought home his disciplines and techniques and taught them to other members of the Group Theatre, a company of actors, writers and directors who for a decade, starting in 1931, tried to mount an alternative to the commercial Broadway theater, staging productions they felt were the cutting edge of social change.

  When I met her, Stella was about forty-one, quite tall and very beautiful, with blue eyes, stunning blond hair and a leonine presence, but a woman much disappointed by what life had dealt her. She was a marvelous actress who unfortunately never got a chance to become a great star, and I think this embittered her. A member of one of the great theatrical families of America, she appeared in almost two hundred plays over a span of thirty years, and wanted very much to be a famous performer. But like many Jewish actors of her era, she faced a cruel and insidious form of anti-Semitism; producers in New York and especially in Hollywood wouldn’t hire actors if they “looked Jewish,” no matter how good they were.

  Hollywood was always a Jewish community; it was started by Jews and to this day is run largely by Jews. But for a long time it was venomously anti-Semitic in a perverse way, especially before the war, when Jewish performers had to disguise
their Jewishness if they wanted a job. These actors were frightened, and understandably so. When I was breaking into acting, I constantly heard about agents submitting an actor or actress for a part, taking them to the theater for a reading and afterward hearing the producer say, “Terrific. Thank you very much. We’ll call you.”

  After the actor was gone, the agent would ask, “Well, Al, what did you think?”

  “Great,” the producer would say, “He was terrific, but he’s too Jewish.”

  If you “looked Jewish,” you didn’t get a part and couldn’t make a living. You had to look like Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Paul Muni or Paulette Goddard and change your name. They were Jews, but didn’t “look Jewish” and employed the camouflage of non-Jewish names. Hence Julius Garfinkle became John Garfield, Marion Levy became Paulette Goddard, Emmanuel Goldenberg became Edward G. Robinson and Muni Weisenfreund became Paul Muni. Later this changed when people like Barbra Streisand said, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to change my name. I’m a Jew and I’m proud of it.” Now Jews don’t have to get their noses operated on to get a job, but Stella was part of a different era. She went to Hollywood, made three movies and changed her last name to “Ardler,” hoping it would help, but she had a sharp, aquiline nose that gave her the “Jewish look.” She had it operated on and the result made her look more like a shiksa; but producers still said she looked too Jewish to offer her the kind of jobs her talent deserved and that would have made her a star.

  But while Stella never fulfilled her dream, she left an astounding legacy. Virtually all acting in motion pictures today stems from her, and she had an extraordinary effect on the culture of her time. I don’t think audiences realize how much we are in debt to her, to other Jews and to the Russian theater for most performances we see now. The techniques she brought back to this country and taught others changed acting enormously. First she passed them on to the other members of the Group Theatre, and then to actors like me who became her students. We plied our trade according to the manner and style she taught us, and since American movies dominate the world market, Stella’s teachings have influenced actors throughout the world.

  Stella always said no one could teach acting, but she could. She had a knack for teaching people about themselves, enabling them to use their emotions and bring out their hidden sensitivity. She also had a gift for communicating her knowledge; she could tell you not only when you were wrong, but why. Her instincts were unerring and extraordinary. If I hit a sour note in a scene, she knew it immediately and said, “No, wait, wait, wait … that’s wrong!” and then dug into her large reserve of intuitive intelligence to explain why my character would behave in a certain way based on the author’s vision.

  “Method acting” was a term popularized, bastardized and misused by Lee Strasberg, a man for whom I had little respect, and therefore I hesitate to use it. What Stella taught her students was how to discover the nature of their own emotional mechanics and therefore those of others. She taught me to be real and not to try to act out an emotion I didn’t personally experience during a performance.

  Because of Stella, acting changed completely during the fifties and sixties. Until the generation she inspired came along, most actors were what I have always thought of as “personality” actors, like Sarah Bernhardt, Katharine Cornell or Ruth Gordon. George Bernard Shaw once said, “A character actor is one who cannot act and therefore makes an elaborate study of disguise and stage tricks by which acting can be grotesquely simulated.” A lot of actors believed that by growing a beard, checking out a robe from the wardrobe department and carrying a staff they could become Moses, but they were seldom anything other than themselves playing the same role time after time. To indicate torment or confusion, they put their hands on their foreheads and sighed loudly. They acted externally rather than internally.

  There were a few good natural actors from the past. I once saw a clip from a 1916 movie, Cenere, starring Eleonora Duse, a fine actress whose career was unfortunately overshadowed by her rival, the more flamboyant Bernhardt. Her acting was understated, simple, without theatrical artifice and enormously effective. Other natural actors whose instincts showed in their work were Paul Muni and Jimmy Cagney, but I believe they were exceptions. Until Stella came along, stage acting was mostly declaiming, superficial gestures, exaggerated expression, loud voices, theatrical elocution and unfelt emotion. Most actors did nothing to experience a character’s feelings and emotions.

  Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Everybody acts, whether it’s a toddler who quickly learns how to behave to get its mother’s attention, or a husband and wife in the daily rituals of a marriage, with all the artifices and role-playing that occur in a conjugal relationship. Politicians are among our most flashy and worst actors. It’s hard to imagine anyone surviving in our world without acting. It is a necessary social device: we use it to protect our interests and to gain advantage in every aspect of our lives, and it is instinctive, a skill built into all of us. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we’re acting. Most people do it all day long. When we don’t feel the emotions someone expects of us and want to please them, we act out the emotion we think they expect of us; we’re enthusiastic about their project even though it bores us. Someone says something that hurts our feelings but we hide our hurt. The difference is that most people act unconsciously and automatically, while stage and movie actors do it to tell a story. In fact, most actors give their best performances after the camera stops rolling.

  A lot of the old movie stars couldn’t act their way out of a box of wet tissue paper, but they were successful because they had distinctive personalities. They were predictable brands of breakfast cereal: on Wednesdays we had Quaker Oats and Gary Cooper; on Fridays we had Wheaties and Clark Gable. They were off-the-shelf products you expected always to be the same, actors and actresses with likable personalities who played themselves in more or less the same role the same way every time out. Clark Gable was Clark Gable in every role; Humphrey Bogart always played himself; Claudette Colbert was always Claudette Colbert. Loretta Young was virtually the same character in every part, and as she got older, cinematographers kept putting more layers of silky gauze between her and their lenses to keep her that way and convince audiences she was still Loretta Young. Nowadays movie grips call the devices they use to conceal the physical evidence of aging “Loretta Young silks.”

  I was lucky because I became an actor at the beginning of an era when the craft was becoming more interesting, thanks to Stella. Once she told a reporter that she thought one of the assets I brought to acting was a high degree of curiosity about people. It’s true that I have always had an unwavering curiosity about people—what they feel, what they think, how they’re motivated—and I have always made it my business to find out. If I can’t figure somebody out, I’ll follow him like a weasel with persistence until I find out what his nature is and how he functions, not for any reasons of advantage—although I admit that when I was young I sometimes did it to gain an advantage—but because I’m curious not only about others, but about myself. I am endlessly absorbed by human motivations. How is it that we behave the way we do? What are those compulsions within us that drive us one way or another?

  It is my lifelong preoccupation. I used to hang around the coffeehouses on Washington Square just watching people. If I was out with a woman, I tried to figure out why she decided to cross her legs or light a cigarette at a certain moment, or what it meant if she chose at a certain point in our conversation to clear her throat or brush back a lock of hair from her forehead. I used to sit in the phone booth of the Optima Cigar Store at Broadway and Forty-second Street looking out the window at people walking by. I saw them for perhaps two or three seconds before they disappeared; if they were close to the phone booth, they might even disappear in a second. In that flick of time I studied their faces, the way they carried their heads and swung their arms; I tried to absorb who they were—their history, thei
r job, whether they were married, troubled or in love. The face is an extraordinarily subtle instrument; I believe it has 155 muscles in it. The interaction of those muscles can hide a great deal, and people are always concealing emotions. Some people have very nonexpressive faces. They carry a neutral expression around all the time, and it is often difficult to read their faces, especially Orientals and the Indians of North and South America. In such cases I try to read their body posture, the increase in the blink rate of their eyes, their aimless yawning or a failure to complete a yawn—anything that denotes emotions they don’t want to display.

  These are matters I have been interested in since I was a child. I was determined to know, to guess and to assess quirks that people did not know about themselves. I have tried to push and probe until I learned their potential for loving, for hating, for anger, for self-interest, for their taste in the things they wanted in life and how much they wanted them, to discover their perimeters and limits and find out how they were truly constituted. I have always been equally curious about my own potential and limits, and tested myself to learn how much I could stand of one thing or another—how honest I could be, how false, how materialistic or otherworldy, how frightened, to what extent I could take a risk and what terrified me most.

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