Somebody Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  In Disgrace with Fortune (1924–1942)

  This Puppy Thing (1943–1946)

  Make Them Wonder (1947–1950)

  Photo Insert

  The Illusion Is Complete (1950–1953)

  That Streetcar Man Has a New Desire! (1954–1955)

  A Mess Pretty Much (1956–1959)

  Stockholders, Man the Lifeboats! (1960–1963)

  The Snake in Eden (1963–1967)

  Eleven Turkeys in a Row (1967–1970)

  How Did God Go About His Work? (1971–1972)

  An Intense and Hopeless Despair (1973–1990)

  Messenger of Misery (1990–2004)

  The King Who Would Be Man

  Appendix

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Photographic Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Also by Stefan Kanfer

  Copyright

  FOR LEA PAGE CASTLE AND ALYSSA TRUE CASTLE

  Introduction

  To the end of his life, Marlon Brando insisted that he had done nothing special. In his view acting was a trade like plumbing or baking. The only difference was that he played characters instead of unclogging drains or kneading loaves of bread. This was not false modesty; he believed what he said. But what he believed was untrue.

  There was screen acting before Brando and after Brando, just as there was painting before Picasso and after Picasso and writing before Hemingway and after Hemingway and popular singing before Sinatra and after Sinatra, and even the casual observer can tell the difference. As film historian Molly Haskell pointed out, the film star’s legend “is written in one word. BRANDO. Like Garbo. Or Fido. An animal, a force of nature, an element; not a human being who must, as a member of society, distinguish himself from other members with a Christian name and an initial as well as a surname. There is only one Brando.”

  The eminent screen stars of the 1930s and 1940s—Fredric March, Paul Muni, John Barrymore, Humphrey Bogart, Laurence Olivier, Spencer Tracy—were careful to protect themselves even as they convinced audiences that they were taking risks. But from his debut film, The Men, in 1950, Brando worked without a mask. The inner wounds were manifest, and the risks he took—doing anything, no matter how outlandish or unflattering, to make the character credible—had never been attempted by a Hollywood star. His predecessors drew a line between their private lives and their movie roles. No such boundary existed between Brando the actor and Brando the man. They were one and the same: complicated, dangerous, vulnerable. That, too, was different.

  From today’s vantage point it’s difficult to gauge the impact of certain film personalities on their time. In 1940 Howard Hawks made full use of overlapping dialogue for His Girl Friday; his style has been co-opted so often it has lost its power to electrify an audience. In 1960, ticket buyers were jarred and dislocated when Alfred Hitchcock killed off his star, Janet Leigh, halfway through Psycho; his device has since become commonplace. Similarly, when Brando first appeared, he shook up screen acting in a way that had not been seen since performers were given voices in 1927. His work has been sedulously imitated by performers for more than half a century. Those actors have unwittingly obscured the contributions of the man who started it all.

  Anthony Quinn once described the cinema of the early 1950s: “Everything was proper. Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power, Van Johnson, and along comes Brando.” Marlon was the first to show a profound vulnerability beneath the male exterior, as well as a willingness to depart from the script not out of perversity or an inability to remember lines, but because he was going for the truth of the character at that moment. Along comes Brando, and an art form is transfigured.

  Many factors contributed to Marlon’s achievement. He appeared on the scene at just the right time, he was launched by one of the twentieth century’s central stage dramas, and he was trained by one of the most influential acting teachers of all time, the Yiddish-theater veteran Stella Adler. Some of the attraction he held for her—and later for the world—was a physical presence that echoed the animal magnetism and raw intellect of her father, Jacob, a Second Avenue luminary. This was combined with a quality displayed by Boris Thomashefsky, Jacob’s greatest competitor. In a memoir, Adler’s granddaughter noted that Boris’s “overwhelming masculinity was balanced by a softness even more dangerous. His well-known susceptibility crossed the footlights with fatal impact. He was, in fact, a personality impossible to resist.” She could have been writing about Marlon Brando when he entered stage left two generations later.

  Brando’s genius, like that of so many other groundbreaking artists, was mixed with immense character flaws that stained his personal and professional relationships. So disorderly was his private life that an entire book, Brando Unzipped, is scurrilously devoted to his numerous affairs, liaisons, and marriages. Many other biographies are little more than clothbound gossip columns, or tell-all narratives by onetime associates hoping to cash in on an old professional or social connection.

  These salacious accounts make lively reading. But they have little to do with Marlon Brando’s artistic achievement. Indeed, they tend to reduce his reputation by portraying him as a strutting phallus who happened to make a few good movies when he was not otherwise engaged. Part of this can be directly traced to the actor’s contemptuous self-appraisals. In Conversations with Brando, Lawrence Grobel records the following exchange:

  GROBEL: What about acting as an art form?

  BRANDO: In your heart of hearts you know perfectly well that movie stars aren’t artists….

  GROBEL: Are any people in your profession artists?

  BRANDO: No.

  GROBEL: None at all?

  BRANDO: Not one.

  On other occasions Marlon added to those remarks. Advice to himself: “Never confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent.” To his fellow performers: “Acting is an illusion, a form of histrionic sleight of hand…it’s a bum’s life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.” That response was not as blithe as it sounded. Brando’s early years disfigured the rest of his life. He never fully emerged from the shadows of a cold and brutal father and a longing, desperately unhappy mother who squandered the best hours of her best years in an alcoholic haze. From the actor’s childhood through adolescence, Marlon Brando, Sr., repeatedly told his only son he would amount to nothing. Although Marlon junior proved his father wrong over and over again, the damage had been done. No material success, no critical praise, no financial reward ever served to assuage the wounds Marlon suffered before he could defend himself. Ironically, they were also what gave him such persuasive strength as a performer.

  Few of Brando’s contemporaries bought his line of self-denigration. “Marlon’s work was so beautiful and so pure,” said Julie Harris, his costar in Reflections in a Golden Eye. “There was no explaining where it came from. He didn’t respect acting, but his gift was so great he couldn’t defile it. He could put on pounds, he could say it was all shit, but he still couldn’t destroy it.”

  Director Harold Clurman, the husband of Brando’s acting coach and mentor, Stella Adler, believed that the disrespect was not a pose. He noted, “[There is] something in Marlon that resents acting, yet he cannot help but be an actor. He thinks acting ‘sickly.’ He’d rather do something for ‘the world.’”

  Clurman underlined another irony in Brando’s career. Because Marlon could so completely lose himself in a role, he was convinced that he could feel the wounds of a disenfranchised black, an oppressed Native American, a vagrant, a bewildered homosexual, a palooka. But the offscreen efforts he made on the
ir behalf had no lasting effect. Acting, much as Marlon resisted it, was the one place where he could give voice to the powerless.

  The trouble was, Brando’s gift came with a price tag. He was like some cursed figure from folklore who might have anything he wanted—fame, riches, beautiful women, power—provided that he couldn’t enjoy it. Immensely attractive to both sexes, he seemed in charge of any and all affairs. But he abandoned all three wives and numerous lovers, often in fear that they would abandon him first. He loved his eleven children, but never knew how to relate to them once they entered adolescence—a shortcoming that would have fatal consequences. At the top of the heap in Hollywood, he called the whole thing a sham and became difficult (and sometimes impossible) for directors and writers to deal with. When this misbehavior was forgiven or overlooked, he deliberately slid downhill to a pile of trash, movies that lost money and nearly wrecked him as an actor. The more beguiling his appearance, the less comfortable he was with it, finally distancing himself from his admirers by putting on weight until he grew morbidly obese. This nearly wrecked him as a man.

  “The young Brando,” observes psychiatrist Gary Lefer, “saw brutality in his father and self-abuse in his mother. It was constant, but always kept within the walls of the house. Children of such parents live two lives: the false, well-kempt one presented to the world at large, and the real and messy one that they know at home. They think they’ve put one over on their classmates, and thus know themselves to be phony. They grow up thinking that everything is bogus. Especially their own achievements.”

  The torment that underlay Brando’s art is the subject of this book, as well as the way it played out in his three careers: phenomenal early success, a series of tarnished failures, and then an astonishing renaissance before the fade-out. The man’s internal anguish was what drove him on to the heights of his vocation. But it was also the cause of his many public and private mistakes, as well as the reason he could never stop trying to do something for “the world” and its suffering people. For those efforts he was unfairly derided. As we will see, they were born out of the shame and humiliation he never shook off during a life of ludicrous excess, outlandish triumphs, and appalling sorrows.

  1924–1942

  In Disgrace with Fortune

  1

  It was typical of Marlon to enter the world upside down. The breech birth took place shortly after 11 p.m., April 3, 1924, in the Omaha Maternity Hospital.

  His earliest home was right out of the imaginings of Hollywood at a time when the film industry, dominated by Jewish immigrants, was beginning to reinvent its host country. If status was denied to these rough, uneducated Eastern Europeans, observed historian Neal Gabler, the movies offered an ingenious option. The first moguls “would fabricate their empire in the image of America. They would create its values and myths, its traditions and archetypes. It would be an America where fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent.” This is the superficially idyllic America into which Marlon was born.

  Yet even in the peaceful Midwest, ideal turf of the Dream Factory, there were dark spots no one could ignore. In the year of Marlon’s birth, for example, two adolescents, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, kidnapped and murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks in a Chicago suburb. That was in May. Detectives closed in shortly afterward, the culprits were arraigned in June, and by August they were on trial for their lives. The defense, headed by star lawyer Clarence Darrow, enlisted mind doctors, “alienists,” in the parlance of the day, to establish irresponsibility by reason of insanity. Sigmund Freud was asked to aid the cause, but he was in fragile health and declined the invitation. After being called “cowardly perverts,” “atheists,” and “mad dogs,” Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life imprisonment. But the debate about capital punishment continued unchecked, touching the plains and cities of Nebraska. At virtually the same time, Chicago crime raged on, fueled by Prohibition. The outlawing of alcohol had become official in 1920; since then the racketeers and illegal importers were thriving, peddling booze to the country’s flourishing speakeasies. Turf wars began: Al Capone’s brother Frank was gunned down by police when he led some two hundred armed men into Cicero, Illinois, in support of Mafia-backed politicians. And North Side gang leader Dion O’Banion was shot and killed by three men who had entered his flower shop after hours. The murder began a five-year war with the Capone gang that was to culminate in the notorious St. Valentine’s Day massacre.

  Closer to home, Omaha wrestled with its own Prohibition troubles and with a more intractable problem. Since the end of the Great War, the city’s African American population had more than doubled. With the influx came resentments and racial taunts. The Omaha Bee was particularly inflammatory. The paper’s favorite topic concerned rumored assaults and rapes of white women by black men. The accused were hauled before judges and juries. When they failed to convict, another newspaper, the Mediator, warned of vigilantism in Omaha if the “respectable colored population could not purge those from the Negro community who were assaulting white girls.” A few months later a volatile combination of labor unrest and racial suspicion erupted. Before it ended, a black man was lynched, two other blacks died of wounds suffered during a street fight, the county courthouse lay in ruins, and the city came under federal military control.

  All these provoked conversation at the Brando dinner table through the 1920s and early 1930s, marking an odd contrast to the rustic atmosphere at 1026 South Street. Outwardly all was lyrical. Three children—two pretty sisters and their robust younger brother—played in the large front yard; the backdrop was a capacious wood-shingled house redolent of fresh-cut hay, wild flowers, and smoke from a wood-burning stove. In the next decade Andy Hardy movies would take place in just such an environment.

  But there was a secondary aroma, and it revealed what no passerby could sense. “When my mother drank,” recalled Marlon, “her breath had a sweetness to it I lack the vocabulary to describe.” A furtive alcoholic, she took frequent hits from a bottle she called her “change-of-life” medicine. Dodie—Dorothy Pennebaker Brando—began to spend longer and longer periods with that vessel until, Marlon noted in his memoir, “the anguish that her drinking produced was that she preferred getting drunk to caring for us.”

  “Us” referred to Marlon senior and his children, Frances (known to the family as Frannie), Jocelyn (Tiddy), and Marlon junior (Bud). Dodie had reasons for allowing her husband to fend for himself. Wrote his namesake, “It was an era when a traveling salesman slipped five dollars to a bellboy, who would return with a pint of whisky and a hooker. My pop was such a man.”

  The condition of such families as the Brandos, and such cities as Omaha, was well known to Sinclair Lewis. He had portrayed them in his 1922 bestseller Babbitt, with its hypocritical real-estate-salesman protagonist and his unhappy wife, and the superficially respectable city in which they lived. “At that moment in Zenith, a cocaine-runner and a prostitute were drinking cocktails in Healy Hanson’s saloon on Front Street. Since national prohibition was now in force, and since Zenith was notoriously law-abiding, they were compelled to keep the cocktails innocent by drinking them out of tea-cups. The lady threw her cup at the cocaine-runner’s head. He worked his revolver out of the pocket in his sleeve, and casually murdered her.”

  For Marlon senior, as for George F. Babbitt, money was not a problem; a peddler of products for contractors and architects, the paterfamilias earned more than enough to maintain his family in solid middle-class comfort. Affection, however, was in short supply. He would return home to shower Dodie with gifts, then journey back to a life of one-night stands. There were presents for the kids as well, but precious little concern. Marlon senior continually denigrated his namesake; he mocked the boy’s behavior, his way of speaking, his posture. Hugs were only dispensed on birthdays or at Christmastime; Junior couldn’t recall a single compliment from his father from kindergarten through adolescence. As a result the child sought attention else
where—mainly at school, where he made a habit of flouting authority, and getting punished for it.

  Senior’s ominous moods and black silences were harder for his daughters to deal with. “I don’t remember forgiveness,” Frannie Brando wrote many years later. “No forgiveness! In our home, there was blame, shame, and punishment that very often had no relationship to the ‘crime,’ and I think the sense of burning injustice it left with all of us marked us deeply.”

  That behavior had profound and twisted sources. Although a number of biographies have suggested that the name Brando was originally spelled Brandeau and was of French origin, the family’s founding relative was Johann Wilhelm Brandau, a German immigrant who settled in New York State in the early 1700s. Neighbors who remembered Marlon senior from his school days said there was something “Teutonic and closed” about the youth, but this may have been the perception of hindsight. In any case, he had reason to be withdrawn; his mother ran off without a backward glance when the boy was four. Thereafter, the abandoned father varied between dark and uncommunicative periods and loud, unpredictable demands. In adolescence, Marlon senior was shunted from one spinster aunt to another. He grew up rude and misogynistic, given to binge drinking and bullying. Bud came to see his father in cinematic terms as a British officer in the Bengal Lancers, “perhaps a Victor McLaglen with more refinement.”

  Dorothy Pennebaker came from a background of mavericks, gold prospectors, and Christian Scientists. She married at twenty-one but continued to attract whistles and social attention as a vivacious flapper with artistic yearnings. Early on, Dodie made a small name for herself by cultivating members of Omaha’s little bohemian colony, and beating out the competition for roles at the Omaha Community Playhouse. From walk-ons and juvenile leads she progressed to starring parts in Pygmalion and Anna Christie. It occurred to Dodie that she might take a trip to New York and try a stab at Broadway—especially after she won rave reviews for her appearance in Beyond the Horizon opposite a twenty-one-year-old Omahan named Henry Fonda. All too soon, though, Marlon senior’s rages, as well as his open and continual adulteries, eroded her confidence on-and offstage. She consumed more liquor, took her own lovers, and narrowed her creative impulses.