Somebody Read online

  The more Marlon saw of California, the more he felt displaced. Yet he was contractually obligated. New York glittered like Oz—distant, glamorous, unreal. He sought refuge with his maternal aunt Betty and his grandmother “Nana” in Eagle Rock, an unglamorous suburb fifteen miles from downtown Los Angeles. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t hide from reporters; they sought him out and asked prying questions. He answered the fools according to their folly. Hollywood was “one big cash register.” The only reason he had come west, he went on, was “because I don’t yet have the moral strength to turn down the money.” A single law operated in the film studios: “The larger the gross, the worse the picture.” As usual, his autobiography freely mixed fact and fantasy. Hoping to deflate the paparazzi by being even more ridiculous than the rumors, he told them that his mother was “a drunk” (actually, she had recently joined Alcoholics Anonymous), and that his upbringing was “terrible,” not least because he was born in Outer Mongolia, where breakfast consisted of gazelles’ eyes.

  Lew Wasserman, the head of MCA, tried to placate his new client. He assigned Jay Kanter, a twenty-one-year-old mail-room clerk in the Los Angeles office, to chauffeur Marlon around town, steering him away from the most hostile journalists. Kanter did better than that; he catered to the actor’s every wish, buying him everything from sandwiches to shoelaces. By the time Wasserman offered Marlon his pick of top MCA agents, Marlon had made up his mind: “I want the kid who’s been driving me around.” This impromptu remark was the making of Kanter; he would rise like an express elevator at MCA, becoming the representative of Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe along with Marlon and many other major film stars. Eventually he learned to protect actors from themselves, but at this point in his career he had no way of keeping Marlon Brando and Louella Parsons apart.

  As Hollywood foundered, Parsons remained a feared and loathed columnist. Few dared to malign her in public. Actress Mamie Van Doren, who privately called her a “power-mad, nasty, destructive, vengeful bitch,” waited until the writer’s death to strike back. In a memoir, she claimed that Louella ascended to her position because she was aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht Oneida when a series of mysterious events occurred in the fall of 1924. “In celebration of the forty-third birthday of the silent movie director Thomas Ince, Hearst, fifteen guests—including Hearst’s live-in girl friend Marion Davies and Charlie Chaplin—and a complete jazz band, embarked on a cruise from Los Angeles to San Diego. Ince, the story goes, was caught paying too much attention to Marion.”

  According to Van Doren, Hearst went below, got the gun he always kept on board, and fired at Ince, killing him outright. Ince’s body was taken off the boat in San Diego and cremated before anyone could mention the word “autopsy.” Newspapers in the Hearst chain reported that Ince had been struck with an unnamed illness and died at his home. But, claimed Van Doren, passengers had seen him taken off the boat on a stretcher. “Chaplin’s secretary swore that she saw a bullet hole in Ince’s head. Everyone on that cruise that day was taken care of…. Louella’s payoff was the permanent column.”

  Parsons certainly behaved as if she had lifetime tenure on any paper that carried her maunderings. Marlon was from the East, however, cared nothing for the town’s politics, and even less for its gossip queens. He found Louella difficult to look at and repulsive to read, and implied as much when he met her. She expected deference from newcomers; he arrived on a loud motorcycle, proudly wearing ripped jeans and an aggressively soiled undershirt. Helping himself to a chair, he sat in a wide-legged, provocative manner and filled his conversation with ribald phrases. Unnerved, Lolly coiled and struck. In her widely syndicated column she described this revolting Brando person. He had “the manners of a chimpanzee, the gall of a Kinsey researcher, and a swelled head the size of a Navy blimp, and just as pointed—as far as I’m concerned he can ride his bike off the Venice pier.”

  Marlon relished every word. The column gave him a perverse pleasure, but it was just about the only gratification he was to find during his Hollywood initiation. Everything else seemed to be hard work or bad news. From his aunt came the dispiriting information that Jocelyn and her husband, Don, were at odds and would soon seek to divorce. Marlon senior had wasted a good deal of his son’s paychecks on bad investments. Money was draining out of the account at alarming speed. In a funk, Marlon began work on The Men.

  Kramer had prepared the way by casting real paraplegics, veterans maimed in battle. Although the roles were minor, they were there to lend verisimilitude. But the sense of authentic pain and rue had to come from the film’s centerpiece. To understand what these vets were going through, Marlon checked into the Birmingham Veterans Hospital near Los Angeles, a facility catering to the needs of the severely wounded. At the time such procedures were rare. Humorist S. J. Perelman, who had spent a few years as a screenwriter, once parodied studio attempts at verisimilitude. For the 1945 film The Lost Weekend, “Ray Milland will go to the bars on 10th Avenue. Formerly 10th Avenue was brought to Ray Milland.”

  Over the course of three weeks Marlon learned how to live in a wheelchair, wear heavy leg braces, rely only on his arms for movement. More important, he discovered the sources of mental endurance that allowed paraplegics to deal with the attacks of “Why me?” resentment and depression. Most of the patients had a tough, ironic humor drained of lament and self-pity. He picked that up as well. When the men in the ward realized that Marlon had come to understand, not merely to mimic, they accepted him, shared memories and meals, and asked him to come along—in his wheelchair—when they visited their favorite hangout, a restaurant called the Pump Room.

  When Marlon was in A Flag Is Born, Paul Muni told him about a trick he had played on a judge. The actor, who had come to the United States as a child, went through the final naturalization ceremony at the age of thirty-five, speaking in a hesitant, heavy middle-European accent, squinting his eyes as if he didn’t quite understand each question. During the interrogation his accent slowly diminished. The final answer was delivered in impeccable English. Muni smiled at the astonished official. “Your honor, it’s remarkable. Now that you’ve made me a citizen, I can speak perfectly!” At the Pump Room Marlon had a chance to enjoy a similar put-on, with more spectacular results. As the group sat in their wheelchairs downing their drinks, a wild-eyed woman entered the restaurant and rounded on them. She recognized the young men as veterans, and told them they needed to believe in Jesus. His healing powers would let them walk again.

  The men listened with growing unease. They were not there to be given a sermon; they were there to get drunk and have some rare laughs. That was of no concern to the lady. While the others looked away Marlon gave her all his attention, a rapt, exalted look on his face. She concentrated on him alone, urging the paraplegic to get born again.

  “You know, ma’am,” he responded, “I believe you. I believe in the Lord.”

  “Well, I want you to believe. You should believe it, soldier, because I know that with the Lord’s work you can recover.”

  “I do believe! I do believe!” Marlon gripped the sides of his wheelchair until his knuckles whitened. “I feel the Lord has come right into this room and into my body. The Lord is in my body. I feel it…”

  As he started to raise himself, the tension was palpable. Busboys moved in, anticipating a hard fall. But Marlon kept rising until he stood erect. Step by ungainly step he made his way to the bar. Then, without warning, he suddenly broke into an improvisatory dance, complete with leaps and jetés. The woman shrieked and fled as laughter filled the Pump Room. The loudest roars came from the wheelchair table.

  Marlon missed the workouts and banter the day he started filming. He was in a crowd again, but it was a crowd of players he didn’t know and technicians he didn’t trust. Like most films, The Men would be shot out of sequence, making it difficult to maintain an emotional truth from scene to scene. Disoriented, he hesitated and mumbled, sometimes inaudibly. Director Fred Zinnemann, an Austrian who paid meticul
ous attention to the look and sound of things, was beside himself. In desperation he called Kazan in New York and went through a litany of the actor’s mannerisms and affectations. “Marlon will be all right,” Gadge advised. “Just be patient. He’ll come through, I promise you.”

  Just as Marlon had searched for the soul of Stanley Kowalski, he tried to locate the center of Ken Wilcheck. After several weeks he did feel more comfortable in the part, aided by a group of outstanding performers. Richard Erdman, an underrated character actor, played one of the mordant ward mates along with Jack Webb, shortly to become famous as the deadpan cop on the radio and TV series Dragnet. Everett Sloane, Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane, was the psychiatrist who goads Ken into an acceptance of his condition. But the film was hurt by the miscasting of Teresa Wright. The sweet-faced actress specialized in the support of heroes who were physically afflicted (The Pride of the Yankees) or psychologically burdened (The Best Years of Our Lives). This time out, though, her costar was unlike Gary Cooper or Dana Andrews—or any other film actor. In a vital scene of sexual failure, for example, Marlon’s powerful combination of sensuality and wrath was more than she could handle. It was difficult to believe these two ever had anything in common, even when Ken was whole. As a result, hardly anyone noticed her when the film unreeled. Once again, Marlon was the whole story.

  The New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther called The Men a “fine and arresting film,” and made much of “Mr. Brando as the veteran who endures the most difficult time.” As Ken, he “is so vividly real, dynamic and sensitive that his illusion is complete.” Marlon’s face, his arrhythmic body movements, “and especially the strange timbre of his voice, often broken and plaintive and boyish, are articulate in every way. Out of stiff and frozen silences he can lash into a passionate rage with the fearful and flailing frenzy of a taut cable suddenly cut. Or he can show the poignant tenderness of [a] doctor with a child.” Time referred to the actor as “Broadway’s Marlon Brando,” and went on to hail his cinematic debut as “magnificent.” Ken’s hesitant speech, “glowering silences and expert simulation of paraplegia do not suggest acting; they look chillingly like the real thing.” Marlon made the cover of Cue magazine and delightedly gave out copies to friends and acquaintances. Sympathetic press coverage rolled on; the chorus of approval was nearly unanimous. The only holdout was the public itself. The United States had sent its first big wave of troops to South Korea shortly before The Men opened nationwide. A cinematic look back at maimed veterans, no matter how lofty its aims, elicited too many painful feelings about another war. Grosses slumped off sharply, and after two weeks the movie was judged to be a box-office failure. No one blamed the disappointment on Marlon. He had made his film debut, acting only from the waist up, and he had still wowed them all. As far as the executives at MCA were concerned, he was the next big thing.

  3

  At first, studio discussions about an adaptation of Streetcar went nowhere. All Hollywood was on tiptoe, fearful of making a wrong move. The notion of presenting a drama with a loud vulgarian at its center, plus a rape, plus the suggestions of the homosexuality of Blanche DuBois’s husband…the project was deemed dicey and distasteful by most production chiefs. But not all. The rights to Tennessee Williams’s play had been acquired by the cultivated, smooth-talking superagent Charles Feldman, head of the Famous Artists talent agency. (“Charlie,” Kazan was to observe acidly, was “rather handsome in a soft yielding way, the body suited to bed and armchair.”) The company’s clients included Cary Grant, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Olivia de Havilland, Ava Gardner, William Holden, and Lauren Bacall. No one failed to return Feldman’s calls. He had already sold A Glass Menagerie to Paramount. That film was stultified and miscast—Gertrude Lawrence and Jane Wyman had no resonance at all—but the payment had satisfied the playwright, and he agreed to entrust Feldman with his new work.

  Slowly and cannily Feldman worked his way around the majors, daring the big names to underwrite this masterpiece and accusing them of cowardice when they didn’t. Darryl F. Zanuck, the most outspoken mogul at Twentieth Century–Fox, snapped at Feldman, “You are entirely wrong about my views on A Streetcar Named Desire. I had the story bought before you bought it. I worked out the deal completely with Kazan in New York and then Spyros [Skouras] came in with his objections. He was so violent on the subject that he even offered to resign the presidency of the corporation if we produced the picture…. In the face of this, I withdrew.” Others found reasons not to take the leap.

  Ultimately Jack Warner agreed to back the film, with certain provisos. The script would have to be presented to Joseph Breen, a conservative Catholic, and censorious head of the Production Code Administration. That was fine with Feldman. After a close reading, Breen decreed that the profanity must go, and that the “gross sex” be reworked and made acceptable to the American public. Any hints of perversion were, of course, to be eliminated. The playwright went along with some of the changes, but insisted that the rape scene would have to stay—it was critical to the entire structure of Streetcar. He presented it as a metaphor: “the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society.” After much haggling Breen bought the interpretation, but would not yield in his demand for a new conclusion: The brute must be punished for his conduct. Williams caved. Just before the fadeout Stella would whisper a new and crucial bit of information in her baby’s ear: They were not going to return to Stanley, thereby punishing the transgressor.

  Feldman replaced Irene Selznick as producer; otherwise the Broadway nucleus remained intact. Kazan was scheduled to direct. Marlon, guaranteed star billing and a $75,000 salary, would repeat as Kowalski. Karl Malden, Kim Hunter, Rudy Bond would reprise their stage roles as well. According to Warner, though, the movie needed the punch of a proven box-office star. Jessica Tandy was out. Some top actresses came up for consideration, with Olivia de Havilland leading the pack. Her credentials were impeccable. She had already won two Best Actress Academy Awards—for her work in To Each His Own in 1946 and three years later for the title role in The Heiress. She had been a favorite of filmgoers for over a decade. She was also very pricey. Feldman, who represented De Havilland, demanded $175,000 for her services. Warner Bros. looked elsewhere. The best candidate appeared to be Vivien Leigh. The English actress had first learned to speak like a southern belle for her role as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. And this last season she had appeared as Blanche in the West End production of Streetcar, directed by her husband Laurence Olivier. Jack Warner had long considered Leigh a woman of class and intelligence. Now she seemed even more appealing; her agent wanted a mere $100,000. That meant Warner Bros. could have Marlon and Vivien for the price of Olivia. The studio snapped her up.

  Now the hard work began. On the first day of rehearsal Kazan spoke to the company about his intentions. Leigh was unhappy with what she heard. “When Larry and I did the play in London,” she began, and went on to trill about the Oliviers’ interpretations of the Williams text. Kazan ground his teeth. He could not allow the power to pass from director to actress—especially with the cast looking on. Yet he maintained an air of gentility, pointing out in the simplest terms that Vivien was in Hollywood, not London, and that she was acting opposite Brando, not Olivier. Rather than force an open confrontation, he never varied from his soft, reasonable approach. Two weeks into the filming the star and director got on the same page. Even so, it was too late to rescue the early scenes, marred by her posturing and theatrics. Meantime, Vivien and Marlon had to define their own relationship. Those who expected emotional wrangles were wrong. The two actors shook hands at the first meeting and thereafter maintained a veneer of calm professionalism. It was sheer artifice; Marlon remembered that Leigh was “very much like Tennessee’s wounded butterfly. Like Blanche, she slept with almost everybody and was beginning to dissolve mentally and to fray at the ends physically.” The “almost everybody” did not include Marlon—or so he wrote in his memoir. Though he
informed Wally Cox that he was so anxious to bed his costar that his “teeth ached,” Olivier was in Hollywood at the time, and “I liked him too much to invade his chicken coop.”

  That is not what Leigh told Kazan: “I must say this for Marlon. When it comes to couples, he’s an equal-opportunity seducer. On many a night he rose from Larry’s bed and joined me in mine.” She was a woman of notorious instability, and her testimony is thus unreliable. But David Niven had no such mental difficulties. Of course, he could have been pulling the leg of biographer Darwin Porter, but the account seems credible enough. Newly arrived from London, Niven was Olivier’s houseguest. One evening he chanced to be walking in the garden, where he came upon “Brando and Larry swimming naked in the pool. Larry was kissing Brando. Or maybe it was the other way around. I turned my back on them and went inside to join Vivien. I’m sure she knew what was going on, but she made no mention of it. Nor did I. One must be sophisticated about such matters in life.”

  By some adroit cutting, and by the use of Leigh’s precarious psyche, Kazan corrected the imbalance of the Broadway Streetcar. The film was no longer the Marlon Brando Show—nor was it quite as toned down as Breen wanted. But the studio had the final say, and some four minutes were excised from the feature, infuriating Kazan. Other stresses did not sweeten his disposition. Gadge’s onetime membership in the Communist party had just been revealed to the public, and he was shortly to be grilled by HUAC congressmen. With his career in jeopardy, Kazan fought long and hard for the director’s cut. Against the advice of friends he went public with his dissatisfactions. When the movie opened he sent a letter to The New York Times complaining that the studio had excised vital footage from Tennessee Williams’s master-work. Gadge toyed with the Solomonic idea of showing two versions of the movie, one before the deletions were made, the other afterward. But he knew the answer would be no; Warner Bros. had no intention of roiling any more waters. It was enough that Streetcar could be released without pickets from the Catholic Legion of Decency or some other righteous outfit.