By Claudia Roth Pierpont
October 20,
2008
I have to warn you this is Long ! 18 pages but ever fascinating.
Marlon
Brando in 1948, when he played in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” on Broadway.Photograph by Serge Balkin /
Condé Nast Archive
In the midst of Broadway’s
“victory season,” in March, 1946, an outraged ad denouncing the critics
appeared in the Times. Signed by the production team of Elia Kazan
and Harold Clurman, the ad failed to save their drama about returning vets,
“Truckline Café,” from closing after a mere thirteen performances.
But the play has gone down in
history, thanks to a five-minute speech made by a little-known actor in a
secondary role: Marlon Brando, at twenty-one, played an ex-G.I. who comes home
to find that his wife has been unfaithful; in his final scene, he entered
exhausted and wringing wet, and confessed that he had killed her and carried
her body out to sea.
Karl Malden, who played another
minor role, reported that the rest of the cast sometimes had to wait for nearly
two minutes after Brando’s exit while the audience screamed and stamped its
feet. The performance was as remarkable for what Brando didn’t do as for what
he did. Pauline Kael, very young herself and years away from a critical career,
happened to come late to the play one evening and recalled that she averted her
eyes, in embarrassment, from what appeared to be a man having a seizure
onstage: it wasn’t until her companion “grabbed my arm and said ‘Watch this
guy!’ that I realized he was acting.”
The dismal
fate of “Truckline Café” inspired Kazan to form the Actors Studio. Of the
entire cast, only Brando and Malden had given the kind of performance that he
and Clurman wanted: natural and psychologically acute, as contemporary American
plays required. Their ideal of acting derived from their days in the Group
Theatre, which had flourished in the thirties with brashly vernacular and
politically conscious plays—Clifford Odets’s “Waiting for Lefty” was its first
big hit—in which ordinary people were portrayed in a startlingly realistic
style. (Group actors were so authentic that it was sometimes difficult to
understand what they were saying.)
This
revolution in acting grew from Stanislavsky’s accounts of his performances with
the Moscow Art Theatre—an approach eventually known simply as the Method—and,
in its quest for onstage honesty, replaced traditional theatrical training with
exercises designed to stir up personal memories, refine powers of observation,
and free the imagination through improvisation. The Group’s larger goal was an
anti-Broadway, anti-commercial theatre of power and relevance. For the actors,
the goal was a paradox: real emotion, produced on cue.
Although
the Group had disbanded by the time Brando arrived in New York, in 1943, he
soon began taking classes with a charter member, Stella Adler, who had actually
studied with Stanislavsky, and whom he credited as his teacher to the end of
his life. (“She taught me to be real,” he wrote, “and not to try to act out an
emotion I didn’t personally experience during a performance.”)
Adler seems
to have taken less than a week to decide that the brooding nineteen-year-old in
the torn bluejeans and the dirty T-shirt was going to become “America’s finest
actor,” but she always denied that she had taught him a thing. As his
fellow-student Elaine Stritch later remarked, “Marlon’s going to class to learn
the Method was like sending a tiger to jungle school.”
Yet
Brando’s early rehearsals for “Truckline Café” had been disastrous. He mumbled
his lines and could not be heard past the fifth row; Kazan, who was producing,
worried that Adler—who was, not incidentally, married to Clurman—had made
claims that her protégé could not fulfill. But Clurman, who was directing,
sensed that the fledgling actor was nearly choked with feeling, and pushed
until he got him to explode.
As it
turned out, that Broadway season was the first sign of a momentous transition
in the art, if not the business, of acting: Variety’s annual
poll named Laurence Olivier Best Actor for playing Shakespeare and Sophocles on
tour with England’s Old Vic;
Brando, in
a forgettable play, won Most Promising Young Actor and was out of work as soon
as it closed. But he had learned from all his early mentors that even in
America, deprived of Shakespeare and Sophocles, theatre was a morally serious
enterprise that treated life’s important themes. And so, after an awkward stint
in Shaw’s “Candida,” the Most Promising Young Actor turned down Noël Coward’s
“Present Laughter,” imperiously demanding, “Don’t you know there are people
starving in Europe?”
He turned
down a seven-year contract at three thousand dollars a week with M-G-M.
Instead, in the fall of 1946, he chose to do a play that Ben Hecht had devised
to raise money for transporting Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine,
during which he shouted at the cowering audience, “Where were you when six
million Jews were being burned to death in the ovens of Auschwitz?” It may not
have been art, but a lot of people filled out the donation forms inserted in
their programs.
Brando was
no one’s first choice when, the following summer, a great American play finally
came along. Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” was the story of a
highly sexed and poorly spoken middle-aged Polish-American man named Stanley
Kowalski—another vet with a violent streak—who rapes an emotionally fragile and
aristocratic woman, Blanche DuBois.
The play’s
cautionary theme was described by Williams, who strongly identified with
Blanche, as “the apes will inherit the earth.” Kazan was scheduled to direct,
Irene Mayer Selznick to produce, and all agreed that John Garfield, not only a
movie star but a street-talking graduate of the Group Theatre, was the right
choice for their antihero.
It was only
when Garfield made impossible demands that Kazan, scanning his “beginners”
class at the Actors Studio, decided to take a risk on Brando, even though he
was too young for the role. Auditioning for Williams, Brando was like
lightning: electric and illuminating. Not only did he have the sexual power the
play required; he provided the key to redressing what Williams had worried was
the too easy moral imbalance of his work.
Precisely because he was barely twenty-three,
Brando humanized the vengeful Stanley, reducing his willful destructiveness to
what Williams excitedly described as “the brutality or callousness of youth.”
Good and evil were now more subtly matched: it would not be so easy to take
sides. Brando was not as sure as Williams that he was a “God-sent Stanley.” He
worked slowly, and seemed to find it difficult to learn his lines; Selznick
repeatedly complained that she couldn’t hear him. But Kazan had faith, and so
did Williams, whose opening-night telegram to Brando predicted, “From the
greasy Polack you will someday arrive at the gloomy Dane.”
By then,
Kazan was almost rueful that the play, which Williams had built around the
character of Blanche, was looking like “the Marlon Brando Show.” Without
changing a word, the actor seemed to have expanded the role and turned
Williams’s original meaning upside down.
Jessica Tandy, the British actress who played
Blanche, was furious that the audience laughed along with Stanley’s jokes at
her expense—as though he were a regular guy putting an uppity woman in her
place—and stunned that it openly extended its sympathies more to the
executioner than to his victim.
The reason
was not just Brando’s youth: it was the comic innocence that fuelled the gibes,
the baffled tenderness beneath the toughness. The face above the heavily
muscled body was angelic; the pain he showed when he broke down and wailed for
his wife was searing, elemental. And his intensity was almost unbearable. One
critic wrote that “Brando seems always on the verge of tearing down the
proscenium with his bare hands.”
“Streetcar”
was an enormous hit and Tandy received excellent notices, but it was Brando the
audiences loved. More, theatre people recognized him as the long-promised
revolution in the flesh. In Kazan’s view, others were giving fine performances
but Brando was “living onstage”—with the result that he longed to escape the
play after only a few weeks. How many times, on schedule, can one rip oneself
apart?
He had a
contract, however, which kept him smashing dishes and wailing his soul out for
a year and a half, during which his performance varied tremendously from night
to night. Free at last, in late 1949, he ended up in Hollywood, where he
cheerfully antagonized the local monarchs (Louella Parsons wrote that he had
“the gall of a Kinsey researcher”) and announced that he would soon be
returning to the stage.
He was
nevertheless excited about his first film, “The Men,” an uplifting Stanley
Kramer production about a paralyzed veteran whose faithful fiancée draws him
out of despair and into life. Although the film did not do well—the subject of
wounded veterans lost its fascination as the Korean War began—Brando’s reviews
tended toward ecstatic variations on the word “real.”
And he
became known for a correspondingly real if peculiar way of working: publicity
stressed that he had spent three weeks living in a veterans’ hospital among
paraplegics, learning how they moved and what they felt. On the set, the slow
perfectionism of his endless retakes caused a co-star to grumble about “New
York acting”—which was exactly what Kazan wanted when, in 1950, he began
filming “Streetcar.”
From left:
Brando in “Truckline Café”; in “A Streetcar Named Desire”; on the set of “On
the Waterfront”; winning the Oscar for “Waterfront”; and on the set of “The
Godfather.”Photography
from (left to right): Kobal Collection; Warner Bros / Neal Peters Collection;
Sunshine / Retna; George Silk / Time Life / Getty; Steve Schapiro
With the exception of Vivien
Leigh, as Blanche, all of the film’s major cast members had been part of the
Broadway production, and hardly needed to do more than get reacquainted with
their roles. Kazan, however, disliked repeating himself as much as Brando did,
and he seized on Leigh’s sublime fragility as a way to turn the play around
again, and to restore something like Williams’s original moral balance.
Brando, who had always thought
that Tandy was miscast, felt that Leigh was truly Williams’s “wounded
butterfly,” and reacted with an emotional and sexual charge beyond anything he
had shown onstage. Seen against this tragically sympathetic Blanche, however,
Stanley’s brutality was harder to tolerate; if he was not a villain, he was an
extremely charming monster, and the audience was uncomfortably implicated in
Blanche’s destruction by its early laughter and its deep attraction to him.
Brando was nominated for an
Academy Award (and so was Leigh, who won). Yet, as a result of the uncanny life
he put into the slouching, scratching, sweating performance, his tabloid
antics, and probably some public confusion about the much touted Method—did it
mean an actor was just playing himself ? he was widely described as what he
resentfully called “a blue-jeaned slobbermouth,” and dubbed “the Neanderthal
man.”
This was
not the only reason that Brando hated Stanley, whom he spoke of with a disgust
not unlike that felt by Blanche DuBois. In his next film, “Viva Zapata,” a
socially worthy effort (directed by Kazan) about an idealistic revolutionary,
he virtually disappeared behind heavy “Mexican” makeup and a matching accent.
Although
this display of range won him another Academy Award nomination, the
announcement that he was going to play Mark Antony in “Julius Caesar” was
greeted most joyously by the nation’s comedians, who lost no time declaiming
“Friends, Romans, countrymen” in a nasal, Kowalskian bleat. Brando himself was
worried about appearing a fool.
Although he
was an avid reader and memorizer of Shakespeare, his performing experience had
been confined to an acting-school production of “Twelfth Night” and, more
recently, to taunting Vivien Leigh—then Mrs. Laurence Olivier—with a nastily
precise imitation of Olivier’s Agincourt speech from “Henry V.”
The
director of “Julius Caesar,” Joseph Mankiewicz, came upon his star studying
tapes of speeches by Olivier, John Barrymore, and Maurice Evans, and complained
that the genteel result made him sound more like June Allyson. Brando later
explained that the most daunting aspect of playing Shakespeare was relying on
the written text, since he had learned to search around and under words—in
pauses, in gestures, in grunts and mumbles, even in silence—for a sense of
truth.
Once on the
“Caesar” set, in 1952, he asked John Gielgud, who was playing Cassius, to make
him a recording of Antony’s speeches, presumably as a model of diction and
prosodic stress. Brando admired Gielgud, but there is not a trace of the
British actor’s stylized and vibrato-laden music in the young American’s stark
and driven reading.
To accord
with the rest of the cast, Brando adopted a British accent, but the way he
inflected his lines was so unexpected and so commonsensical that the most
familiar phrases took on a natural urgency (“Lend me your ears! ”)
and much of the rest seemed nearly made up on the spot, as when the hint of a
stutter causes him to falter in his plea: “Bear with me, my heart is in the
coffin there with Caesar and I must p-pause till it come back to me.”
Reviewers
were thrilled—there was great pride in the thought that an American Olivier
might be at hand—and he was nominated for yet another Academy Award. Gielgud
was sufficiently impressed to ask his would-be pupil to participate in a
theatre season he was directing in England, where Brando could fulfill
Tennessee Williams’s prediction and play Hamlet. Brando turned him down. He
seems to have been the only person who did not believe that he was up to the
test.
Instead, he
did a biker movie. It was meant to be another socially conscious film, based on
an incident that had taken place in 1947, when a motorcycle gang terrorized a
California town. Brando said he hoped that the film would explore the reasons
that young people were resorting to antisocial behavior; in fact, juvenile
delinquency had become such a huge concern that a Senate subcommittee was
investigating its causes.
“The Wild
One,” released in December, 1953, did not so much explore the causes as define
the era’s terms of opposition: jive-talking hipsters versus squares, leather
jackets versus shirts and ties, easy-riding freedom versus the straight and
narrow. Youth versus age. A mediocre film, it was just enough ahead of its time
to strike a nerve:
Jack
Kerouac was struggling to get his book about his adventures on the road
published (once it appeared, he begged Brando to make the movie);
Elvis was a
year away from appearing on national TV and being called “a guitar-playing
Marlon Brando.” Brando’s Johnny, the leader of the pack, was an antidote to
that other mythic figure of the fifties, the deadeningly conformist Man in the
Gray Flannel Suit. But, as with Stanley Kowalski, the actor was
indistinguishable from the role, and Brando himself came to embody the rebel
myth.
The script
gave a hint of the pain behind Johnny’s steely cool, but his anger and
dissatisfaction were unrelenting. Unlike the tough-guy heroes of the forties,
with their ulterior noble causes—unlike, say, Bogart in “Casablanca”—Johnny had
no idea what he really wanted.
In the
film’s most quoted line, someone asks, “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling
against?”
And Brando
answers, deadpan, “Whaddya got?”
What was
real about the realest actor of them all? What did he draw on during those
improvisations or rehearsals when, by training and by instinct, to go farther
he had to go within? “The torment that underlay Brando’s art is the subject of
this book,”
Stefan
Kanfer begins “Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon
Brando”—the first biography to appear since Brando’s death, at eighty, in
2004—because, as Kanfer explains, “the man’s internal anguish was what drove
him on to the heights of his vocation.”
Examining a
career that spanned more than five decades and thirty-eight films, Kanfer
maintains that Brando, unique among actors, “worked without a mask.” While
other actors preserve boundary lines between their private lives and their
performances, “no such boundary existed between Brando the actor and Brando the
man,” both of whom apparently suffered from what Kanfer, assisted by several
psychiatrists, labels “oppositional defiant disorder,” “narcissistic
personality disorder,” and an “oral fixation.”
This is not
entirely news: long ago Harold Clurman wrote that Brando’s acting had “its
source in suffering,” and Peter Manso, the author of a previous biography,
consulted his own set of psychiatrists to diagnose the actor’s “dissociated
personality,” “manic-depressive mood swings,” and “anxieties over sexual
identity,” among other afflictions. (Brando appears to have slept with an
uncertain number of men and a staggering number of women during his life.)
But nothing
has approached Kanfer’s assertion that the “Rosebud in Brando’s life” was “the
mental illness that had dogged him for decades,” an illness that made his
achievements all the more a marvel and his failures no surprise.
Brando
might have agreed. In his later years, he told his story and freely explained
its impact, starting with the fact that he was born in 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska,
to a mother who “abandoned me for a bottle when I was little more than an
infant,” and who proceeded to drink his childhood away; his father was an
alcoholic, too, although in his case the larger problem was his failure to show
his son any affection or approval.
His two
sisters provided some support, and a young nursemaid provided something like
love, but she left one day without saying goodbye: he had been abandoned twice
over, and, he wrote, “my world collapsed.”
He flunked
kindergarten, and did little better in school as the years progressed. He
stammered badly, and he seems to have been dyslexic, so that reading out loud
in class was an agony; some who knew him at the time suggested, in interviews
with Manso, that this was the source of the famous pauses and obscuring mumble.
Always the class bad boy, he was thrown out of the military school that was
supposed to teach him discipline. Aside from sports, and despite his early
speech problems, drama was the only subject in which he excelled.
Acting,
which by another method might have provided an escape, was for him a way of
sounding out his depths; he described his work with Adler as
“psychotherapeutic,” teaching him not only about theatre but about himself.
During his early New York years, his mother came to live with him for a
time—she was an aspiring actress and a poetical soul, something of a Blanche
DuBois—and when she returned to his father Brando confessed that he had a
nervous breakdown.
By the time
he was in “Streetcar,” the panic attacks had got so bad, and he was so afraid
that in his anger he might kill someone, that he began to see a psychiatrist
recommended by Kazan. Five years later, in 1953, he told Kazan that the only
reason he had agreed to do “On the Waterfront” was that the New Jersey location
allowed him to be near his psychiatrist; his contract included the right to
leave early every afternoon to make his session.
Brando had
initially refused to appear in “On the Waterfront,” out of shock and
disappointment that Kazan—whom he claimed was the best director he ever worked
with—had testified as a “friendly” witness before the House Un-American
Activities Committee, not only confessing his former membership in the
Communist Party but betraying old Group Theatre friends.
Kazan later
admitted that the movie had been an attempt to excuse and even glorify his
actions—or, as Brando put it, an attempt to justify “finking” on his friends.
In the scenario, the naïve ex-boxer Terry Malloy slowly realizes that it is his
moral duty to inform on his gangster friends before a government commission:
this courageous act makes him a man and a hero. It is doubtful that many
viewers saw a connection between Communists and mobsters, but the film’s
emotional grip and its unprecedented visual authenticity made it a triumph.
Shot on the Hoboken piers during
a freezing winter, with a cast drawn almost entirely from the Actors Studio,
and backed by a population of authentically worn longshoremen, “On the
Waterfront” signalled a new sort of anti-Hollywood, neorealistic style of
filmmaking; no less than the revolutionary painters across the Hudson, Kazan
and company could have been called the New York school.
But the film’s success was also
due to Brando, who by all reports invented Terry as much as played him, freely
altering words and scenes with an infallible sense of what the gentle, tortured
boy would do. Kazan, who called this performance the best ever given by a man
in American film, spoke of the importance of Brando’s having been able to draw
on his own “pain,” “self-doubt,” and “inner conflict,” but he also wrote of the
actor’s professionalism and exceptional talent—without which no amount of
anguish could have done the job. As for Brando, he said it was “so cold out
there that you couldn’t overact.”
“On the
Waterfront” won eight Academy Awards—including Oscars for Brando and Kazan—yet
it proved not the start of something but the end. No independent school of film
developed from it, and the crassness of Hollywood only seemed to worsen as the
studios struggled against the new menace of television, wooing audiences
through sheer color and spectacle.
Brando, who
had let down his guard enough to sign a two-picture deal, was assigned to a
bloated historical epic titled “The Egyptian,” which he fled as shooting began.
Sued by the studio for two million dollars, he was officially released from the
picture only after his mother died suddenly, in March, 1954, and he agreed
instead to play Napoleon in another historical turkey, “Désirée”; on its
release, he announced that he had let his makeup play the part.
Time, in a cover story that featured Brando in his
Napoleonic beaky nose and epaulets, focussed on the significance of this
notably insignificant film: if Brando cared about acting as an art, what was
there for him in Hollywood? Yet returning to the stage was no more promising,
since Broadway rarely produced first-rate work, and “there is no U.S. repertory
theater in which a young actor can try the great roles for size.”
Compared
with the careers of his European counterparts (Olivier, of course, or
Jean-Louis Barrault, in France), even the roles he had already played were
sadly limited, so many being “variations on the Kowalski theme.” These
questions recurred with every film that Brando made for the next eighteen
years. Here at last was the great American actor: not a copy of a British actor
or a mere matinée idol but someone original, contemporary, and uniquely
representative of the culture. But what could the culture produce for him to
do?
The answer
was “Guys and Dolls,” “The Teahouse of the August Moon,” “Sayonara,” “The Young
Lions,” “The Fugitive Kind,” “One-Eyed Jacks,” and “Mutiny on the Bounty,” just
to bring his career into the sixties.
One can
hardly doubt his desire to break away from the “Kowalski theme.” He played an
elegant gangster who sang (a little), a Japanese servant, an American officer,
a Nazi officer, a Southern stud, a frontier bandit, and an aristocratic British
fop. He even directed, in the case of “One-Eyed Jacks,” a bizarrely Oedipal
Western that seems almost an illustration of Kanfer’s thesis: a villain named
Dad betrays the hero (Brando as Rio the Kid, inevitably called the Kid),
prompting a consuming desire for revenge; although Dad further punishes the Kid
with a vicious whipping, the Kid ultimately succeeds and shoots Dad dead.
It was the
first film made by Brando’s production company, Pennebaker Productions,
established in 1955 under his mother’s maiden name, and with his father as
chief employee—a standard Hollywood tax shelter that he dedicated to making
“important” films of “social value.” Pennebaker produced very few films during
its existence, but this idealism pervaded Brando’s work, and he now had the
power to have scripts rewritten and characters refashioned to make his points:
at his insistence, the Nazi of “The Young Lions” saw the error of his ways and
rose to ethical enlightenment; the Pinkerton-like soldier of “Sayonara”
overcame society’s racism and married the Japanese woman he loved. Through the
immeasurable influence of movies, Brando believed that he might also help to
refashion reality.
With such
lofty goals, however, every project was sooner or later a disappointment. In
response to his frustrations, he made trouble on the set, he refused to learn
his lines, he ate so compulsively that he had to be fitted with new costumes in
ever larger sizes—the line between self-indulgence and self-contempt becomes
difficult to locate.
And he cost
the studios a fortune, as movie after movie failed. Yet the face on the screen
was so compelling that the question of what to do with his talent remained a
kind of national burden. Truman Capote, in a scathing profile from the late
fifties, portrayed the actor as a bore and a poseur, yet pressed him earnestly
about when he would return to play the “Mount Everest roles in stage
literature.” By the late sixties, Pauline Kael, her hopes for his career
seriously battered, noted that “his greatness is in a range that is too
disturbing to be encompassed by regular movies.” But what other kind was there?
Brando had
good reasons for choosing many of his films in these bleak years: “The Ugly
American” and “Burn!” revolved around serious political issues; there was an
accomplished young director, Arthur Penn, behind “The Chase,” and a legendary
director, Charlie Chaplin, behind “A Countess from Hong Kong”; “Reflections in
a Golden Eye” offered the image-shattering role of a stiffly repressed
homosexual Army officer.
His
performances ranged from as good as possible in deadly circumstances (“The
Chase,” “A Countess from Hong Kong”) to brilliant (“Golden Eye”), but there has
been no other career that so clearly illustrates how complex a work of art a
movie really is, and how many forces it requires—of whatever genius—to make it
right.
Even when
his pictures were plainly bad, he strained to hold on to some purpose—he fought
against the usual Indian stereotypes in the cowboy movie “The Appaloosa”—but
his sense of accomplishment no longer had much to do with his work, outside of
earning the money required to support two ex-wives, a third wife who had been
his Tahitian co-star in “Mutiny on the Bounty,” and a growing number of
children.
Avowedly
searching for meaning in his life, in 1963 he became a vocal supporter of the
civil-rights movement, raising money for Martin Luther King, Jr., and joining
the march on Washington. It was easy to assume that he was nothing but a
political dilettante, particularly after he got involved with the Black
Panthers—Bobby Seale, it turned out, was a big fan of “The Wild One”—and he was
frequently criticized for being distracted, and for disappearing to a private
atoll he had purchased in Tahiti. There is no doubt, however, that he was
deeply affected when King was shot, in 1968, and he probably meant it when he
announced that he was quitting film entirely to work for civil rights.
But by then
it was more accurate to say that the movies were quitting him. With the failure
of the incendiary “Burn!” at the box office, in 1969, he completed a full
decade of commercial flops. He was, in his own words, “washed up and
unemployable,” when Mario Puzo called.
Puzo had
Brando in mind all the while he was writing “The Godfather,” which was optioned
by Paramount before he finished the book. Only Brando, he said, could bring the
“quiet force and irony” that he wanted to Don Corleone, family patriarch and
honorable killer. Although studio executives refused to consider him, the young
director they hired for what they thought of as a low-budget gangster film,
Francis Ford Coppola, had grander things in mind, and argued that the Don ought
to be played by one of the two greatest actors alive: Olivier or Brando.
Since Olivier was too ill to work, Coppola
conspired with Brando to overcome Paramount’s qualms. Brando even agreed to do
a screen test, mostly to show that, at forty-seven, he was capable of aging the
required twenty years. He stuffed his cheeks to create jowls (“the face of a
bull dog,” he said with satisfaction, “mean-looking, but warm underneath”) and
devised a light, unthreatening voice based on tapes of the mobster Frank
Costello: real power makes other people lean in to listen.
Yet he
could not or would not remember his lines. He wrote them on his cuffs, he kept
cue cards stuck all over the set. When challenged by Coppola, he claimed that
this was necessary for his spontaneity: “Real people don’t know what they’re
going to say. Their words often come as a surprise to them. That’s the way it
should be in a movie.” Whether or not this was really his reason, it worked.
Brando’s
improvisatory touches are among the most memorable aspects of the character:
stopping to smell a rose as he denies being a murderer, suddenly slapping a
whining younger man, molding an orange peel into a set of fangs when the Don
plays with his grandchild in a summer garden. None of this was in the script
but simply happened when the cameras rolled. Although Coppola says that Brando
never asked for changes in the dialogue, he apparently made his feelings about
it known, complaining at one point—as if looking back on the hero he had played
so often “Just once, I would like to see this man not inarticulate.
I would like to see him express himself well.”
“Am I a white man in a red state voting for a black President, or a blue
man in a white state voting for a green President?”
“The
Godfather” was not only Brando’s redemption but Hollywood’s, proving that a big
commercial movie could be a work of beauty and significance. It was an American
epic, and, for a time, at least, it took the oxymoronic sting out of the term
“mass culture.” Everyone agreed that it was the kind of film Brando should have
been making all along.
At the
other end of the populist spectrum, so was his next picture, “Last Tango in
Paris,” a European art film that used simulated sex and a veneer of existential
chic to do for porn what “The Godfather” did for cops and robbers. The
director, Bernardo Bertolucci, crafted the role just for Brando. Or, rather, he
asked Brando to craft the role: “He wanted me to play myself, to improvise
completely and portray Paul”—an American expatriate in Paris, who falls into an
intense affair with a beautiful girl—“as if he were an autobiographical mirror
of me.”
Brando was
more than willing to oblige. So when Paul tells the girl that “my father was a
drunk, tough, whore-fucker, bar fighter” and “my mother was very very poetic
and also a drunk,” the life Brando was exposing was his own, and he seems to
have arrived at the precise crossing between the Method and psychoanalysis. The
result, made all the more exciting by having been banned for obscenity in
Italy, was greeted as a distinctly modern masterpiece.
Pauline
Kael compared its première to that of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” and
declared Brando’s performance the fulfillment of his non-acting acting in
“Truckline Café,” twenty-six years before. “Paul feels so ‘real’ and the
character is brought so close,” she wrote, “that a new dimension in screen
acting has been reached.”
“The
Godfather” was released in the spring of 1972, and “Last Tango” premièred at
the New York Film Festival that fall. It was a double tour de force, the
Italian grandpa followed by the art-house stud, and Brando brought the old
intensity and a mournful new dignity to both. Perhaps he should have stopped
there; for a while, it seemed that he would.
He followed
his notorious rejection of his Academy Award for “The Godfather,” when he had
an Apache woman give a speech about Hollywood’s mistreatment of Indians, with
three years immersed in Indian causes. He talked about making a movie about
Indian history, but it never went anywhere, and when he returned to what Kael
had called “regular” films—bad scripts, no scripts, no one to control him—some
final link of discipline was gone.
He was
getting enormous fees, but his performance in the incoherent “Missouri Breaks”
was campy, edged with contempt; by the time of “Apocalypse Now,” in 1979, he
had gained so much weight that Tennessee Williams suggested that he was being
paid by the pound. Brando later wrote that the emotional delving of “Last
Tango” had been so devastating that “in subsequent pictures I stopped trying to
experience the emotions of my characters” and began “simply to act the part in
a technical way.”
He was
certain that “the audience doesn’t know the difference.” It is impossible to
know if he was trying to explain or merely to justify what he had become. In
1980, playing a fat old oil tycoon in “The Formula,” he wore a radio
transmitter disguised as a hearing aid; past even the bother of using cue
cards, he now had his lines read directly into his ears.
For the
rest of the decade, Brando played only one small role, in a single film, “A Dry
White Season,” about South African apartheid. He did it for scale: roughly four
thousand dollars. The rest of the time, “I was content doing other things:
traveling, searching, exploring, seeking.”
At home in
Beverly Hills, he saw a psychiatrist several times a week, slowly learning to
“be the child I never had a chance to be.” At the same time, divorced again and
the father of nine (by his own count; the actual number is uncertain), he was
trying “to get to know my children better.” The efforts involved in these two
ventures—becoming a child, becoming a father—were rarely compatible. It can
hardly be a surprise that Brando’s children had childhoods apparently no
happier than his own.
His oldest
son, Christian, had been hooked on drugs and alcohol since his teens, and had
dropped out of high school; in his new attempt at closeness, Brando proposed
that they get their high-school degrees together—Brando was sixty-three,
Christian twenty-eight—but Brando could not keep up and let the project go. A
similar fate attended all the utopian projects he dreamed up for his Tahiti
paradise: it was going to be a gathering place for artists and intellectuals;
there would be ecological experiments leading to breakthroughs in solar and
wind power; hired scientists would find a way to process algae into a protein
supplement for Third World nations.
Instead, he
watched his expensive equipment rust and his plans crumble. Discussing poetry
with an interviewer there one day—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” had
come up—he remarked, “If the mermaids can’t sing for me here, Christ, they
never will.”
In 1990,
Christian Brando shot his pregnant half sister’s Tahitian
boyfriend—point-blank, from behind, in the head—in the den of his father’s
Beverly Hills house. The trial hypnotized the press, and some (including the
father of the dead boy) considered Papa Brando’s performance on the witness
stand one of the best he ever gave: sobbing, dazed, and often incoherent, he
was wretchedly apologetic for what he swore had been a terrible accident. In
the end, Christian pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and received a
ten-year sentence. Brando, saddled with enormous legal bills, went to work on
his autobiography.
The fee for
the book was reportedly five million dollars; his first stipulation was that it
should contain nothing about his films (not important enough) or his marriages
and children. Although he was prevailed upon to discuss the films, the central
irrepressible subject of “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” which appeared in 1994,
was his childhood and what might be called the psychiatric life that followed
from it.
Sadly, even
his best impulses are reduced to the language of the couch: “Frustrated in my
attempts to take care of my mother, I suppose that instead I tried to help
Indians, blacks and Jews.” His comments about acting are striking, however,
whether for the scant respect he pays his own accomplishments—“for me to walk
onto a movie set and play Mark Antony without more experience was asinine”—or
his dismissal of Hollywood’s domination of international film and television as
“a tragedy.” But, beyond the seventy-year-old unloved child’s self-denigration,
it is worth considering Brando’s argument that in some sense his entire career
was a mistake.
“Generally
actors don’t realize how deeply affected the technique of acting was by the
fact that Stella went to Russia and studied with Stanislavsky,” Brando writes
about his beloved teacher, Stella Adler, a half century after he studied with
her in New York. And he adds, modestly, “Virtually all acting in motion
pictures today stems from her.”
Of course,
most actors would say that it stems from Brando: the man who brought those
slightly incredible theories about realism and honesty and a new kind of art to
the screen. And none of the awful films besides the glorious six or eight that
are his primary legacy have done any damage to his example or his reputation.
He is the begetter of a tradition that extends from James Dean (“Mr. Dean
appears to be wearing my last year’s wardrobe,” Brando sneered on the release
of Dean’s first film, in 1955, “and using my last year’s talent”) to Robert De
Niro and Al Pacino and beyond.
Jack
Nicholson, speaking for American actors, said, “He gave us our freedom.” But
Brando’s thoughts on his heritage continue: “This school of acting served the
American theater and motion pictures well, but it was restricting.” For all the
gains, something essential had been lost, or, rather, was never given a chance
to develop: an American capacity “to present Shakespeare or classical drama of
any kind satisfactorily.” The single contemporary performance that Brando
discusses with rapt admiration is Kenneth Branagh’s “Henry V.”
“In America
we are unable to approach such refinements,” he writes. “We simply do not have
the style, the regard for language, or the cultural disposition.” And we are
probably farther from it after Brando than we were before. Stella Adler,
speaking late in life about the roles her former protégé had not played,
replied to a question about whether Brando was indeed a great actor, “We’ll
never know.”
Yet there was a way in which the
contrasting styles were in accord, a deeper and more satisfying truth about
truth in acting. “If you’re not good at improv you’re not an actor,” Brando
insisted in his last major interview, with Rolling Stone, in 2002,
just two years before his death. He had been teaching an acting workshop—with
assistance from Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn—to a select group that included
the tightrope walker Philippe Petit, one of Michael Jackson’s bodyguards,
several local acting students, and a man he’d found rummaging through the trash
outside the studio.
He was putting the group through
a lot of improvisations, and, for the first time in years, he was enjoying his
work. Still talking about improv, he informed the interviewer of another source
for the tradition that he had unwittingly founded.
“There’s a speech from ‘Hamlet’
that applies to all artists,” he explained, “but it certainly applies to
actors: “ ‘To hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature.’ To be
natural.” Didn’t this sum up the lessons he was trying to pass on? And then,
against every expectation about who he was and what he stood for, Brando backed
up a few lines and launched into Hamlet’s soliloquy—Act III, Scene 2—from
memory: “Let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word,
the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the
modesty of nature: for anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing,
whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ’twere the mirror
up to nature.” “And it goes on,” Brando told the guy from Rolling
Stone. “It says it all.” ♦
