Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Page 9
I was offered the chance to go on the road with I Remember Mama, but I was sick of it and turned it down. It had taken me only one role to realize how much I hated playing the same part eight times a week—six evenings and two matinees—in a long-running production. Luckily, before I ran out of money I was offered a part in a new Maxwell Anderson play, Truckline Cafe, which was to be produced by Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman and other members of the Group Theatre, including Stella, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg. In a letter I sent home telling my parents I had gotten the part, I told them:
What is with the U.S. mail system? I fully realize that a carrier pigeon is fairly dependable, but in recent years Mr. Farley has made great strides in the field of postal communication, believe me! So why are you not writing? What about a letter?
I am signed, sealed and delivered (the latter almost) into a show which was written by Max Anderson, to be produced by Harold Clurman and Elia Kazan and directed by H. Clurman. The play is called Truckline Cafe—a play that deals with returning vets. I have a good part, however comparatively small (for which I am glad), but they liked me so much they are willing to pay two hundred a week, of which I shall net, what with agency fees and tax, about $154. This will enable me to save and at the same time allow me to cover any additional expenses I might have. It’s a good break!
Rehearsals start in two weeks. I leave “Mama” Feb. 6th. Got a nice long letter from Nana. She and you, Mom, are the greatest women in the world. I love you both dearly. It won’t be long until I can give you the world.
Pop, you ain’t ‘rit’ for years. I’m a little mad.
Love, all of it
Bud
P.S. Happy Birthday Pappy! I couldn’t send a telegram because of the strike! The years to come will bring joy and contentment, Pop, if you let ’em, as Nana says.
Love and a kiss, old man
Me.
I was given the part in Truckline Cafe largely because of Stella. Harold had seen me in I Remember Mama, but was dubious until she persuaded him to take a chance on me; then he gave me a volcanic part, the role of a psychopathic soldier named Sage McRae who returns home from the war and discovers that his wife, played by Ann Shepherd, has been unfaithful to him while he was at war. At first he refuses to believe it, then confirms his suspicions and kills her. There is an explosive, incandescent moment in the play when Sage admits shooting his wife and then breaks down, and it electrified audiences.
On the eve of leaving New York for out-of-town tryouts, I sent a letter to my parents that seemed to express my optimism and idealism at the time:
Dear Folks:
Well, I leave for Schenectady on Wednesday 13th and open on the 16th, then to Baltimore for a week and on to Newark for a week, then to New York tentatively in the first week of March.
The show looks good. It’s hard to tell at this stage of rehearsal just how good. My part is a sensational role that takes plenty of sweat. It’s coming along all right, however. People that see it tell me I’m going to be very good, so I guess things will be O.K. I’m working like a truck and I hope to God the show is successful because I’d love a little rest and some time and money for piano and dancing lessons and a week or two in the country. On the other hand, it’s well to keep busy and accomplishing every day. We’ve been on the go day and night for about a week and a half. All this plus doing my show (which I left last Thursday) and I am sufficiently enervated for any occasion …
You know, the more I hear the lines of the play, the more I am concerned that it is vitally urgent that every one of us do our utmost to arrange our lives in a rigidly self-disciplined pattern with precise direction and foresight in order to exist as a guide for others who are utterly confused and misdirected. Hysteria is as infectious as flu or dysentery. Half of the world is running crazily and fearfully toward the other half of the world with a lust for security, and it has no other choice than to meet the other half, which is rushing just as fast and just as scared, with a ripping smash that leaves the whole in the blue funks of blue funks. As Max Anderson says in the play, “You’ve got to take the lives in your two hands and change them—twist them and change them till you make a way to live!” If I see somebody who can take care of himself and live and work and be happy, then I can do the same. This is such a necessary play. I hope to God it runs.
Well, my sweet ones, good night for now.
Love, Bud
• • •
The play opened on February 17, 1946, at the Belasco Theatre. I got good reviews and so did Ann and Karl Maiden, who became my lifelong friends, but the critics didn’t like it and it closed after less than two weeks. Still, short-lived though it was, Truckline Cafe changed my life. Nothing, I learned, attracts women more than fame, money and success.
I was out of work only a few weeks. After Truckline Cafe, other job offers came in, including one from Guthrie McClintic, a producer, director and the husband of Katharine Cornell, who, with Helen Hayes and Lynn Fontanne, was one of the reigning queens of Broadway. Guthrie had seen Truckline Cafe and offered me the part opposite his wife, of Eugene Marchbanks, a young poet who falls in love with an older woman in George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. Guthrie was an entertaining, emphatic man with a bizarre sense of humor and a hernia that kept popping out when he laughed; when it did, he punched himself in the groin and pushed it back, which made him laugh even harder. Katharine Cornell was proper, quite empty-headed and very beautiful. She had the kind of stage presence that made her a star without having to be good, and there was a nebulous quality to her acting that I found difficult to relate to onstage; performing with her was like trying to bite down on a tomato seed. She acted and spoke lines in ways that were sometimes inconsistent with the character she was playing, but I tried to keep up with her. It was like two people dancing to a different beat, one of them constantly struggling to get in step with the other. Still, I enjoyed the play, which opened on my twenty-second birthday. Sir Cedric Hardwicke was in the cast, along with Wesley Addy and Mildred Natwick, whom I adored. Hardwicke was a Johnny One Note actor who had a single expression throughout the play and his career. He never blinked or flinched. Once he stood offstage watching me act, muttering and shaking his head in disapproval, and one of my friends heard him say, “Must be sex appeal.” He was probably right because I was hopelessly miscast in the role.
After Truckline Cafe and Candida, more offers came in, including some from television and Hollywood. I was in one television show called Come Out Fighting in which I played a boxer, but which required the talents of a sprinter. Because the show was live, I had to make a twenty-five-yard dash every few minutes from one set to another without missing a beat. In the script, after supposedly losing a boxing match, I had to take a shower and create the impression that I was depressed. I stood in my shorts waiting for the water to hit me, but the prop man missed his cue and forgot to turn it on. The camera kept rolling, but no water came out of the spigot. I didn’t know what to do, so I thought, “Well, I’ll look up forlornly and regretfully at the showerhead and think about how awful it was to lose the fight.” Meanwhile I tried to will water to flow out of the shower. Then suddenly a deluge of water hit my face and my body that was so cold that the prop man must have gotten it out of the freezing compartment of a refrigerator. The shock took my breath away and I wasn’t sure I could live through it. But the camera was on me and I had to keep going. I yelled, “Jesus Christ,” completely dropping out of character. Afterward, someone complimented me for a fine job of acting in the shower scene. This was my last experience with live television.
In those days the Hollywood studios all had scouts in New York who kept an eye out for new faces on Broadway. It was the twilight of the old system when the studios all kept large stables of actors, directors, writers and producers under contract. I got feelers from several that wanted me to sign a standard seven-year contract, but I said I wasn’t interested; if a good story came along, I said, I might sign for a single picture.
One of th
e talent scouts got word to Joe Schenck, a Twentieth Century-Fox executive who was one of the pioneers in the movie business, that there was a young actor he might be interested in. I went over for an interview, and Schenck, a frail near-octogenarian who had all but been put out to pasture by the studio, looked at this young kid in front of him and said, “What have you done, son?”
“I’ve done a couple of plays—”
“Why don’t you get your nose fixed?” he asked.
“Why should I get my nose fixed?”
“Because you’ll look better,” he said. Then he turned around and looked at a huge picture of Tyrone Power covering the entire wall behind him. “Well, we’ll talk some other time,” he said, and that was the end of my interview.
Broadway producer Edward Dowling told me that the American Theatre Wing was going to produce a new play by Eugene O’Neill and asked me to try out for it. Although I had read several of O’Neill’s plays, including Desire Under the Elms, I’d always thought he was dour, negative and too dark, and I couldn’t understand the philosophical import of what he was trying to say. But I told Mr. Dowling I’d come over for an audition. The night before, he sent me a copy of the script, which was about an inch and a half thick. I started reading it, but couldn’t get through it because I thought the speeches were too long and boring. After reading about a tenth of it, I fell asleep. The next day I went to the theater and argued with Mr. Dowling and Margaret Webster, the coproducer, for about half an hour about why I thought the play was ineptly written, poorly constructed and would never be a success. “What did you think of it?” I finally asked. “Tell me its virtues.”
I had to ask the question because even though I was spouting off with self-assurance, I hardly knew anything about it, since I hadn’t even read all of the first act.
Patiently, Eddie told me why he thought it was a good play and what he thought O’Neill was trying to say. I continued bluffing, still not having any idea of what the story was about, and finally told him that I didn’t want to do it.
Of course when it opened The Iceman Cometh was called O’Neill’s masterpiece.
15
INSTEAD OF The Iceman Cometh, I acted in a play directed by Stella’s brother Luther, A Flag Is Born. It was a powerful, well-written pageant by Ben Hecht with music by Kurt Weill, although it was essentially a piece of political propaganda advocating the creation of the state of Israel and indirectly condemning the British for stopping the Jewish refugees en route from Europe to colonize Palestine. At that time, September 1946, the New York Jewish community and Jews throughout the world were fixated on the future of Palestine and Zionism. I wanted to act in the play because of what we were beginning to learn about the true nature of the killing of the Jews and because of the empathy I felt for the Adlers and the other Jews who had become my friends and teachers and who told me of their dreams for a Jewish state. In hindsight, I think it was also because I was starting what would become a journey to try to understand the human impulse that makes it not only possible but easy for one group of people to single out another and try to destroy it. It was the beginning of a lifelong interest in the dark side of human behavior.
Everyone in A Flag Is Born was Jewish except me. Paul Muni, the star, gave an astonishing performance, the best acting I have ever seen. I was onstage with him and he gave me goose-bumps. His performance was magical and affected me deeply. He was the only actor who ever moved me to leave my dressing room to watch him from the wings. He never failed to chill me with one particular speech. I played a young Jewish firebrand named David struggling to find his way to Palestine; in a graveyard he meets the wounded and dying Tevya, a prophetlike man, played by Muni, who tries to help him but dies. David covers him with a Jewish flag, then exits, presumably to carry on the fight to make a homeland in Palestine. At the beginning of the second act I had a speech during which a sharp light came down from above and two other lights hit me from the side. It was a fiery, accusatory speech that began with a pause. I waited a long time after the curtain went up, then quietly said, “Where were you?” I paused again and said, “Where were you, Jews?” Another long pause, and then I started to yell at the top of my lungs, “Where were you Jews when six million Jews were being burned to death in the ovens? Where were you?” It sent chills through the audience, which was almost always all-Jewish, because at the time there was a great deal of soul-searching within the Jewish community over whether they had done enough to stop the slaughter of their people—some argued that they should have applied pressure on President Roosevelt to bomb Auschwitz, for example—so the speech touched a sensitive nerve. At some performances, Jewish girls got out of their seats and screamed and cried from the aisles in sadness, and at one, when I asked, “Where were you when six million Jews were being burned to death in the ovens of Auschwitz?” a woman was so overcome with anger and guilt that she rose and shouted back at me, “Where were you?”
At the time, I was outraged along with most people, Jews and gentiles alike, that the British were stopping ships from carrying the half-starved survivors of Hitler’s death camps to a new life—people with little food, nothing to go on except a few dried-up handfuls of hope, including children still suffering from typhus and bleeding internally. That people fresh out of Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz should be stopped on the open sea by British warships and interned again behind barbed wire on Cyprus was enraging. I did not know then that Jewish terrorists were indiscriminately killing Arabs and making refugees out of them in order to take their land; nor did I understand that the British had taken it upon themselves to authorize the forced removal of millions of Arabs who had lived on that land as long as the biblical Jews had.
The play, as well as my friendship with the Adlers, helped make me a zealous advocate for Israel and later a kind of traveling salesman for it. I explained my plans in this letter to my parents shortly after the play closed:
Dear Folks:
I am now an active and integral part of a political organization, i.e., The American League for a Free Palestine. My job is to travel about the country and lecture to sympathetic groups in order to solicit money and to organize groups that will in turn get money and support us. The work will be approximately for two months. I don’t know just exactly when I’m to be sent to Chicago.
The facts concerning the Palestine conflict are little known but nonetheless shocking. You wouldn’t believe the injustices and cruelties that the British Colonial Office are capable of. I’m not being rash. We have had an intensive training period—three weeks—at the end of which there is no viewpoint that has not been presented fairly and unbiased. I am sending you some literature on the subject. We will be leaving in about a week’s time.
I am not slighting my career nor am I slacking on my job. The work that we’ll be doing won’t be easy by any matter of means. It is a tougher and vastly more responsible job than anything the theater could offer. I’m going to do my best to add my little bit. I’m really stimulated more than I’ve ever been. I must rush away now. I will write in detail later.
After volunteering to raise money, I realized that the American Jewish community was divided over the issue of just how militant Jews should be in pursuing their aspirations for a homeland. Some supported David Ben-Gurion, who while publicly seeming to acquiesce to Britain’s insistence that Jewish refugees be interned on Cyprus and other places, was secretly smuggling boatloads of them into Palestine. Others were more impatient and supported Jewish underground groups such as the Stern Gang and the Irgun Zvai Leumi, whose leaders believed that terrorism and military action were necessary to wear down British resistance and lead to the early creation of Israel. I sided with the militants, as did a lot of my Jewish friends. Seeing the films made during the liberation of the Nazi death camps had been a searing experience for me, and I thought that Jews, who had suffered so much, had to do whatever was necessary to acquire a safe place where they could not be punished further by the world. I contributed as much money as I coul
d to the Irgun and helped raise money to buy food for the internment camps, then became a member of one of about twenty two-man teams that traveled around the country soliciting support for the League for a Free Palestine, which in fact was a front for the Irgun. In Jewish schools, synagogues and other places, we described how European Jews who had been lucky enough to survive Hitler’s death camps were being imprisoned in displaced-person camps nearly as inhumane as those the Nazis operated. And we argued that the British had to be pushed out of Palestine. There was always a lot of yelling at the temples we visited between the Jews who favored Ben-Gurion’s approach and those favoring the terrorists whom I supported and who at the time were called “Freedom Fighters.” Now I understand much more about the complexity of the situation than I did then.
16
IN A LETTER written to my parents from Washington while I was helping the Irgun, I told them: “Washington is strongly anti-Negro and I’m getting awfully mad, so I hope we leave soon. Saw in the newsreel that the Ku Klux Klan is beginning to function en masse again.… It makes you gape in awe to think about it. When I get to Chicago, I’m going out to Libertyville to speak on the food drive. I send almost all my salary over to Europe, but I can’t feel that it’s enough.… No definite plans for the summer yet, but a thousand possibilities, maybe a play with Tallulah Bankhead …”
Edie Van Cleve wanted me to try out for a production of Jean Cocteau’s The Eagle Has Two Heads, starring Tallulah, who was a close friend of Edie’s. I would have done just about anything Edie asked me to because she was kind, extremely generous and helpful to me during those formative years. Besides, I needed the money.