Somebody Read online

  “Occasionally,” Bud remembered, “one of the masters would say something like, ‘Marlon, if you ever stop being a smart-ass, you might make a good officer.’” At those instances, he was shrewd enough to keep his mouth shut. But during the school week he continued his wiseguy capers, sticking paper clips in classroom door locks so that no one could enter; faking a temperature to get out of class by rubbing a thermometer on his trousers until the friction made the mercury rise to 103; locking instructors in their apartments by tying a rope to the front doorknobs of two opposing apartments. The doors opened in, so neither could get out. (“Since they usually lived on the second floor,” Bud noted merrily, “they couldn’t get out a window, so they would be prisoners in their own rooms and there would be no class that day.”)

  Only two activities truly appealed to the youth. Because of poor marks and a general waywardness, he spent an inordinate amount of time in study hall. There he would ostentatiously take out a textbook, notebook, and pencil. To whatever proctor was on hand, he furrowed his brow and bit his lip as if deep in scholarly work—while he quietly added to the list of some 125 song lyrics his mother had taught him. One volume he did pore over. In an English class, the instructor had provided an introduction to Shakespeare. Unlike most of the boys, Bud already knew some of the texts, thanks to his mother’s collection back in Libertyville. But during these study hall periods he awoke to the language, mouthing the words silently, learning their rhythms, and memorizing selected passages. His self-dramatizing melancholia fit well with sonnet twenty-nine:

  When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,

  I all alone beweep my outcast state,

  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries…

  As it did with Marc Antony’s funeral oration:

  This was the most unkindest cut of all;

  For when the noble Caesar saw him stab,

  Ingratitude, more strong than traitors’ arms,

  Quite vanquish’d him: then burst his mighty heart…

  When Bud was in a lighter mood he perused copies of National Geographic, kept on the hall shelves. One morning an article about the Society Islands in the South Pacific caught his attention. He was instantly entranced by Tahiti and its people—most of all, he remembered, “by the expressions on their faces. They were happy, unmanaged faces. No manicured expressions, just kind, open maps of contentment.” To the boy who regarded himself as a captive in an American Devil’s Island, Tahiti appeared to Bud as “at least a sanctuary, and at best nirvana.”

  4

  Besides the forced silence of study hall, young Brando found two other places of fulfillment. The first was the movie house in Faribault. The war, mentioned only obliquely before December 7, 1941, in such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, had become a studio staple. Bataan, Commandos Strike at Dawn, A Guy Named Joe, Hitler’s Children, Sahara, This Is the Army, Watch on the Rhine—it would be hard for Marlon to keep track of them all. Mrs. Miniver, the story of a stiff-upper-lip British housewife struggling through the Blitz, would earn an Academy Award: “This is the war of all the people. It must be fought in factories, fought in the hearts of every man and child who loves freedom. This is the people’s war. This is our war.” The following year Casablanca would offer its own message: “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

  During the war years, casting directors had no trouble finding actors to play German malefactors; hundreds of refugees—some of them Jews hounded out of Europe—found jobs playing Nazi officers and bureaucrats. Japanese villainy was another matter. Internment camps had been set up in Washington, Oregon, and California, and Japanese Americans in those states were rounded up and placed behind barbed wire. Using these citizens was of course impermissible. A Time article, assuming correctly that most of its readers couldn’t tell the difference among Asian peoples, instructed: “Japanese walk stiffly erect, hard-heeled, Chinese, more relaxed, have an easy gait. The Chinese expression is likely to be more kindly, placid, open; the Japanese more positive, dogmatic, arrogant. Japanese are hesitant, nervous in conversation, laugh loudly at the wrong time.” The advisory didn’t help much. And so it was that the Chinese Richard Loo and Sen Yung and the Korean Philip Ahn found steady work as evildoers from the Land of the Rising Sun.

  Even cartoons played their part in the war effort: Popeye starred in Scrap the Japs, croaking out his motto: “I never seen a Jap that wasn’t yeller.” The Donald Duck cartoon Der Fuehrer’s Face mocked Adolf Hitler with a song: “When der Fuehrer says, ‘Ve is der master race,’/We HEIL! [Honk] HEIL! [Honk] Right in der Fuehrer’s face.” And in Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs, a jazzed-up parody of Disney’s Snow White, an obese black queen hires hitmen to knock off the pretty heroine. The thugs are so lethal, she brags, they “kill Japs for free.”

  Officially, the U.S. government issued statements that the enemy was not the German or Japanese or Italian people. It was their leadership that Americans should despise and fight. The facts on the ground were different; there, caricature and exaggeration took the place of reason and history. For a majority of young Americans, the combined efforts of the Office of War Information and the filmmakers were persuasive and long-lasting. Yet even at a tender age, Marlon was not so easily manipulated. He lumped the government and his teachers and his father into one large group whose members could not be trusted. On one level he enjoyed the wartime films as entertainment. On another, they made him deeply uncomfortable, although he could not quite determine why. His racial sensitivities were just developing, and the country’s patriotic fervor pushed them to the background. They would not remain there for long.

  Marlon’s other refuge was the living room of Earle Wagner, one of the academy’s English masters. A provincial flaneur and posturing intellectual, the fortysomething Wagner liked to be addressed as “Duke,” affected an aristocratic mien, and outfitted himself in well-tailored British tweeds. He had a rakish expression and hinted at flirtations and liaisons with local women, but may well have been a tightly closeted homosexual. Wagner encouraged students to come to his apartment, a place he decorated like a fin-de-siècle salon, complete with Oriental rugs and matching leather-bound copies of works by Dickens and Thackeray. The master had a plummy voice and enjoyed reciting soliloquies to his impressionable audience. And every now and again he allowed one of the boys to have a shot at the Bard’s speeches and poems. Bud knew several of those by heart, and impressed the master right away. Other boys also struck Wagner as capable, and the best of them he cast in school productions. Bud was given a major role in A Message from Khafu, a one-act play based on the story of King Tut. The audience applauded him vigorously, and Wagner was so pleased he wrote the Brandos a letter praising his protégé. In it he suggested a different kind of education for their boy, one that might take place at Shattuck—or might not. If he stayed he would have to take several subjects over again (thanks to the radio, Bud could fake a Gallic accent, for example, but French grammar was beyond his competence). Yet being left back would have its advantages; a new regimen might “strike at the root of the boy’s weakness and give him the work he is best qualified for.”

  As he read and reread the letter, Marlon senior wondered what that work might be. What in the living hell was this teacher getting at? Acting? That was no profession for a grown man. Furthermore, if Bud was forced to take subjects over again, he would have to stay at Shattuck another semester or two, at prohibitive cost. No, Wagner’s proposal was completely unacceptable. The lad would straighten up and fly right, and he would do so now. Dodie disagreed with every word her husband said, but bided her time. On Thanksgiving weekend, when both parents visited Shattuck, she sought out Wagner and demanded an answer. Did her son really have a gift for the stage, or was the master just trying to make things easier for an obvious misfit? Wagner maintained that Bud had evide
nced a real talent for the performing arts, a knack for reproducing other people’s attitudes and intonations. The raw youth would need training, of course; he lacked the requisite polish. That appraisal was all Dodie needed to hear.

  Soon afterward she and her son took a private walk on the school grounds. While they strolled she made her case. Bud might as well face it: Academics were not for him. A military institution was of course the hardest of all places, but he was unlikely to do well at any school except one—acting school. Nothing to be ashamed of; it was probably in the blood. Look at Tiddy: She was in New York seeking a career on Broadway. Frances was there, too, pursuing her interest in art. Dodie asked her son to think about his future, about the possibilities that had to be seized now, before his number came up in the draft.

  The trouble was, Dodie didn’t feel strong enough to argue the case with her husband, a man disdainful of “culture” in all its forms. In Anti-intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter points out the suspicion in which artists and thinkers were held by middle America in the first half of the twentieth century: They were “‘man-milliners,’ deficient in masculinity.” And in his study American Manhood, historian E. Anthony Rotundo points out an irony that occurred at the time Bud was coming of age. The stigma of homosexuality “gained insidiousness from the modern notion that sexual ‘inversion’ was not a beastly moral failure or an unnatural visitation, but a natural condition that might be lurking in anyone, regardless of the individual’s purity or moral vigilance.” This added urgency to a man’s desire to distinguish himself from the homosexual. “The more he feared he might be one of the stigmatized group, the more he needed to prove himself a man.” Any hint of androgyny in either behavior or occupation was to be squelched at all cost. So it should have come as no surprise when Dodie brought up the subject of acting school, and her husband exploded: “I’m not going to have this professor make a fairy out of my son, not when I’m having to shell out fifteen hundred dollars in tuition money to make a real man out of him. Not someone who sits in front of a mirror applying women’s makeup. Not some faggot who shakes his ass in front of an audience every night.” The cadet would goddamned well graduate from Shattuck and then go on to a career in business or the military.

  Bud sighed like an artist but obeyed like a son. His parents returned to Libertyville in hostile silence. Marlon senior went on the road and Dodie returned to the solace of scotch and bourbon. By the time spring rolled around Bud was as lost as he had ever been. His grades had slipped yet again. He had engaged in fistfights, committed more pranks, violated curfews to spend time with local girls, including two school maids. His demerits had piled up and he was now on the point of expulsion. The only letup came during his performance in the school production of a British drama called Four on the Heath. Bud, as the tragic hero who commits suicide in the final scene, spoke his lines with a high-toned English accent, remarkable in one so young and untraveled. Again, radio and movies had been ideal instructors.

  During this semester Tiddy married an aspiring actor named Don Hammer. The two of them briefly visited Libertyville—the last stop before Don entered the air force. Tiddy bore good tidings: She had just landed a job as an understudy in a touring company of the Broadway hit Claudia. From here on she would be using her real name, Jocelyn Brando. From his Minnesota outpost Bud heard the news and began to fantasize: If Tiddy could do it, why not him? Crucially homesick, and painfully school-sick, he made up his mind to fail once and for all. A regular army colonel had come to Shattuck looking for candidates he could mold into combat-ready officers. He had been told about Bud Brando, a troubled kid who might yet have the makings of a leader. On the colonel’s orders, a blue team and a red team were set up, each instructed to outmaneuver the other in a wooded area. Bud was put in charge of the blue team. The officer waited until all the troopers were outfitted with packs and rifles, then posited a battlefield situation. Their battalion leader has been killed. What now?

  Bud said that he would ask the company commander.

  And if that man had also been killed?

  Well, what about the squad leader?

  He, too, had been felled by a bullet.

  “Sir,” replied Bud, “I guess I’d run like hell.”

  That reply was considered rank insubordination, especially since it had been overheard by all the cadets. Bud was put on probation and confined to quarters. Shattuck used the honor system, and the detainee lost no time in escaping. He was spotted in town, hauled back into school, and informed that this was his last AWOL. Official expulsion followed the next day.

  Now that mischief could no longer be made, Bud experienced another sudden and deep remorse. He went from room to room, bidding apologetic farewells to his classmates. Arriving at Duke Wagner’s door, he expected a chewing-out, or at least a lecture on dignity and duty. Instead the master offered assurance: “Don’t worry, Marlon. Everything will be all right. I know the world is going to hear from you.”

  Almost fifty years later, the teacher’s words still resonated. “My eyes filled with tears,” Marlon Brando, Jr., noted. “I put my head on his shoulder and couldn’t stop sobbing. It was the only time anyone had ever been so loving and so directly encouraging and concerned about me.”

  He would not find similar encouragement when he came home in disgrace. Bud was in the process of unpacking when Marlon senior dismissed him as a failure in everything he undertook. Dodie tried to intervene; as usual she was unfocused and sometimes incoherent. Bud had just begun to look for a summer job when a letter arrived from Shattuck. The outcast had turned out to be more popular than he ever imagined. The student body had gone on strike on behalf of Marlon Brando, Jr.—and they had won. “The administration have agreed to let you return to Shattuck and make up the time you lost in summer school.”

  It was signed by every cadet in the battalion. Dodie cried when she read the letter, but Marlon senior grumbled that it was undeserved, and Bud knew that it was too late. He sent back a letter thanking his classmates and informing them that while he was grateful for their support he had chosen a different path. This was mere bravado. He had no idea where to turn or what to do. It was 1943. He had turned nineteen in April and would soon be subject to the draft. Some 90,000 German troops had surrendered at Stalingrad. Guadalcanal had been taken back from the Japanese. What the hell, Bud figured—I might as well volunteer, like almost all the other guys my age in Libertyville. He went down to his local draft board and tried to sign up. During the routine physical exam, a doctor discovered Bud’s trick knee. He said it was all too likely to collapse during basic training, to say nothing of battle conditions. The volunteer was marked 4-F and shown the door.

  “Is there anything else you could fail at?” Marlon senior demanded. With a renewed sense of shame and inadequacy Bud took a job digging trenches and laying tiles for thirty-five dollars a week—a humbling assignment, but all that was available to a youth without a high school diploma. In May Marlon senior sat Bud down, reminding him that ten, twenty years from now he might still be doing scut work because he had no training for anything else. Was there something, anything, that interested him?

  To his father’s astonishment Bud did express some ambition after all. He said he wanted to go to New York City and take acting lessons. By now, Marlon senior was ready to make a concession. The men who were in plays and movies couldn’t all be fairies. There was the womanizing Errol Flynn, accused of rape by a couple of teenagers and finally acquitted in court—but not before the phrase “in like Flynn” was coined. And what about Charlie Chaplin? There was a heterosexual if ever there was one. This very year he was on trial for violating the Mann Act, taking a woman named Joan Barry across the California state line for “immoral purposes.” The revelations of their love life were scrupulously followed by the tabloids, with much attention given to Charlie’s remark, made when he was stark naked, “You know, Joan, I look something like Peter Pan, don’t you think?”

  On the other hand, Senio
r could hardly place his awkward, ungainly son in the category of ladies’ man. At best he would be somebody’s blind date, the kind of guy who takes the fat girl to the prom. Ever derisive, Marlon père told Marlon fils, “Take a look in the mirror and tell me if anyone would want to see a yokel like you on the stage.” There was no reply to that, only a sullen expression and Dodie’s counterargument that at least the boy was motivated. Later she slipped Bud some money. That, together with his savings from the job, was enough for an eastbound ticket.

  “As I got out of the cab delivering me from Pennsylvania Station to Frances’s apartment in Greenwich Village,” Bud remembered, “I was sporting a bright red fedora that I thought was going to knock everyone dead.” On the street, nobody gave him a second look. Crushed, he took the stairs two at a time, catching his breath at the top landing while he waited for his sister to answer the door. In a lifetime of traveling, Marlon Brando would never make a longer journey than the one he had just taken from Libertyville to New York.

  1943–1946

  This Puppy Thing

  1

  After Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933, a group of artists and intellectuals saw that they had no future in Europe. The most prescient, best connected, and luckiest made their way from Europe to America. The majority of these exiles set down roots in New York, arguing in cafés, dominating ateliers, teaching courses in philosophy, economics, art, and theater at whatever institutions granted them a salaried position.