Somebody Read online

  Throughout rehearsals he remained suspicious of Marlon, convinced that Stella Adler had oversold him to her husband. In the end Kazan went along with his more intellectual, less instinctive partner—all the while anxious to see the thing flop. At the time, and in later years, Gadge complained that Harold was glib, highbrow, and too deferential to the playwright. In his opinion, the script had to be drastically rewritten; in Clurman’s view, the flaws could be fixed in rehearsal.

  They were not. Yet if Clurman failed to elicit the right words from Anderson, he did manage to badger and provoke Marlon into giving a star turn. The actor, who began by mumbling, was encouraged to shout his lines; then slowly the director ratcheted down the volume until he got an articulate and touching performance. Maxwell Anderson’s daughter, Hesper, was a child at the time; she was allowed to hang around backstage, where she watched the character of Sage McRae being built. Brando, she stated, was “so completely the character that it didn’t matter if you didn’t catch every word he said.” The actor “did pushups backstage before his big entrance, and I’d watch, mesmerized, as he brooded, getting in character, and then wearing himself out physically before collapsing onstage.”

  In Act One, Marlon turned the playwright’s faltering attempts at plain speech into a kind of folk lyricism. When the veteran talked to Tory, the wife he hadn’t seen in two years, all eyes were on him, as if the café held no one else.

  SAGE: It’s a beautiful ocean. Boy, oh boy, I can hardly believe I used to be on the other side, looking this way. The moon used to come up over the water and go down over the land. Here it comes up on the land and goes down over the water. And I used to look over this way, across the water, and know you were there.

  By the time he learns of Tory’s infidelities and kills her, Sage has reverted to a shell-shocked state. Suddenly eager for punishment, he confesses his crime. The couple had returned to the cabin where they had once been happy and dedicated lovers. Sage looked at Tory, then through the window at the wild ocean outside, then at the objects on the wall, still in place after two years. Something was out of joint, and Sage thought he knew what it was. Tory had been unfaithful to him; she had wrecked their future by sleeping with someone else, perhaps with many someones. He remembers confronting her with a ferocity she had never seen in him before. Trapped in the cabin, and by her own shame, she confessed that she was indeed guilty of infidelity: Sage had been away for so long, and she was lonely. But now he had come back to her, and they could return to the old days, the happy times. Sage hardly listened; he seemed to be in another world. He took a pistol from his belt and emptied the bullets into Tory’s body. A burst of five shots was followed by another burst of five shots. She could never betray him now, never make him unhappy again. He picked up the limp body and carried it out to the water. Filled with remorse, but unable to undo his crime, he understands why he did what he did, and why he has to be punished for it:

  She was guilty—and everything about her that I loved went through me like a knife. And now I have to die because everything reminds me of her and goes through me like a knife.

  Anderson had written Sage’s exit as a two-dimensional portrait of irony: A guilt-burdened G.I. leaves the killing fields of war only to bring them home with him. That was not the way Marlon played it. He talked Clurman into letting him walk off in a confident dance step, as if he were embracing his next stop: death row. For the first time in his professional career, Marlon made a perverse and risky move—one that could easily have backfired. It did not. Today, standing ovations are given to chorines and walk-ons. That was not the case on the night of February 27, 1946, when Marlon received a thunderous one. From that evening on, for the next six decades, perverse and risky moves became the mainstays of every Brando performance.

  He had only twelve more chances to make an impression. Truckline received sulfurous reviews from almost every drama critic—the New York Times critic said that Anderson must have written the play “with his left hand in the dark of the moon,” and his was one of the kinder appraisals. Audiences felt differently, at least about Marlon. A young Pauline Kael, who was to become one of Brando’s most vigorous champions and harshest assessors, happened to arrive late one evening. She looked up and saw a man having a seizure onstage. “Embarrassed,” she wrote, “I lowered my eyes, and it wasn’t until the young man who’d brought me grabbed my arm and said, ‘Watch this guy!’ that I realized he was acting.” And Kirk Douglas was to recall, “I went up for a part in Truckline. I didn’t get it. Bitter, I went to see the play, watched another actor play my role. I loved the first two acts—he was terrible. I congratulated myself on how much better I would have been. Suddenly, in the third act, he erupted, electrifying the audience. I thought, ‘My God, he’s good!’ and looked in the program for his name: Marlon Brando.”

  Truckline folded on March 9, to Clurman’s regret and Kazan’s gratification. Although he praised another brilliant new actor, Karl Malden, Gadge was to confess that he was pleased by the failure. He had predicted it all along. Nevertheless, he signed his name to a letter written by Clurman and sent to the Times. It complained that reviewers for the dailies were “acquiring powers which, as a group, they are not qualified to exercise, either by their training or their taste.” The signers had forgotten the famous adage never to argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel, and got their comeuppance. George Jean Nathan, dean of the New York critics, replied, “There is much truth in what the Messrs Clurman and Kazan say, though they have committed the error of picking the wrong play about which to say it, and so have made what they say nonsensical.”

  The quick failure of Truckline Café allowed Marlon to reinvestigate the Pleasure Principle, secure in the knowledge that the play’s abrupt closure was no fault of his own. Indeed, wherever he went he heard praise for what he had done onstage. He had acquired an otherworldly quality, partly because he was just as compelling offstage as on, but also because he affected a total indifference to the world around him. He appeared at parties in shabby clothing, wore sneakers to semiformal occasions, stood silently at cocktail parties when all about him were chattering. The impression was of a star waiting for his big role, an event about to occur. That was exactly the case.

  The Broadway fare that season alternated between the serious and the frivolous. Producers had trouble reading an audience still buoyed by victory but anxious about the economy, the sudden presidency of Harry Truman, the threat of a raucous and bellicose Soviet Union. For those who went to the theater to be diverted, there were musicals like Sigmund Romberg’s Up in Central Park, Harold Arlen’s Bloomer Girl, and On the Town, with a score by newcomers Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. Still, even the musical theater had its darker themes; Rodgers and Hammerstein’s new show, Carousel, daringly abandoned the boy-meets-girl formula and followed the life and afterlife of a carnival-barker-turned-robber. The comedies contained less fluff these days; Harvey, about a man who hallucinates an enormous rabbit, and The Late George Apley, about a Bostonian stuffed shirt, were thinly disguised social commentaries. The serious plays showed a new maturity; A Bell for Adano took a sober look back at the war in Italy, and Anna Lucasta offered an all-black cast in its drama of a waterfront prostitute and her lovers.

  These last works gave Marlon reason to hope that he could move past juvenile roles and short-lived melodramas to make a theatrical statement. Offers came in, and he and his agent considered them all. One stood out above the rest. Guthrie McClintic was not only a producer and director but also the husband of the Broadway diva Katharine Cornell. McClintic had been impressed by Marlon’s Sage McRae—so impressed that he made MCA an unusual offer. He was about to stage a new version of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. Marlon could have the part of Eugene Marchbanks, the hopelessly lovesick poet, without auditioning. The actor was flattered but uneasy. It was one thing to impersonate a Brit in acting class and quite another to do it before a full house evening after evening. Dodie came out of her fog long enough to exp
ress her enthusiasm for the project: a twenty-one-year-old American appearing in a Shavian comedy at the Cort Theatre—alongside such highly placed professionals as Sir Cedric Hardwicke and the First Lady of the American Theater! Opportunities like this came along once in a performer’s life, and then only if he was lucky. Bud knew the lines from Julius Caesar as well as she did: “There is a tide in the affairs of men,/Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune…. We must take the current when it comes,/Or lose our ventures.” Do it, for God’s sake, do it, Dodie urged, and Marlon allowed himself to be persuaded.

  As rehearsals began he was respectful of McClintic and his costars, scrupulous about showing up early, memorizing his part, and paying close attention to the blocking. His deferential attitude lasted about a week. That was when Marlon realized that Ms. Cornell was “quite empty-headed” with “the kind of stage presence that made her a star without having to be good.” As for Hardwicke, he was “a Johnny One Note actor who had a single expression throughout the play and his career.”

  Marlon struck back the best way he knew how: onstage. Early on, two of his New School classmates decided to check him out. Carlo Fiore and Elaine Stritch were appalled. Until Marchbanks’s entrance, every entrance and exit had occurred metronomically. Marlon stumbled onstage many seconds after his cue, fidgeting and pale. The actors exchanged anxious glances. From the prompter’s box came the hissing of Marchbanks’s reply to a query about his politics: “Foolish ideas! Oh, you mean Socialism.” Moments later, Marlon said the words as if he had suddenly snapped out of a funk.

  It took a while for his friends to realize what was going on. Marlon was not paralyzed by stage fright. Almost alone among the cast members, he was paying close attention to Shaw’s stage directions: Marchbanks “is miserably irresolute, does not know where to stand or what to do with his hands and feet and would run away into solitude if he dared.” Yet he shows a “great nervous force, and his nostrils and mouth show a fiercely petulant willfulness, as to the quality of which his great imaginative eyes and fine brow are reassuring. He is so entirely uncommon as to be unearthly.”

  Marlon was unkind about Hardwicke and Cornell, but he was not incorrect. They represented the classical declamatory theater, everything timed to a fare-thee-well, nothing left to chance, the words triumphant, the character secondary. Whereas he embodied Stella Adler’s dictum: Range so deep into the text you become the playwright’s partner. This assault on the past put him in a strange position. His father’s hypocrisy and malice had taught Marlon to distrust all authority figures. Military school had reinforced his contempt for those who would seek the position of leader. And yet here he was, leading by example, inventing a fresh style of acting, bringing a whole group of performers along in his slipstream. Much as he denied the fact, he was the coming man, the founder, however unwittingly, of a new, new school.

  At the same time, Sir Cedric was not entirely mistaken about Marlon. The tyro’s ways were far too risky for this judicious, hypertraditional production. During one performance Hardwicke gazed at Brando from the wings. He shrugged and shook his head. “Must be sex appeal.” At the end of the year Brando’s nemesis George Jean Nathan weighed in with his own appraisal. Recalling the three-week production of Candida, he predicted that the man who played Marchbanks would “in time learn that sensitiveness lies in more than a pale makeup and an occasionally quivering hand, and that a picture of physical weakness is better to be limned than by acting like a puppy ever in fear of a cat.” A revolution had occurred during the run of that play, and nobody seemed willing to acknowledge it—least of all the rebel chief. “I was hopelessly miscast in the role,” Marlon bitterly concluded, and let it go at that.

  1947–1950

  Make Them Wonder

  1

  Edith Van Cleve thought it was well past time to move her client up to the next level—a major Broadway production, a New York–based television show, or best of all, a Hollywood feature. To that end MCA talked Marlon up to theater and film producers, and on cue the offers trickled in. Even at this point in Marlon’s nascent career he seemed determined to undermine himself, a determination that got more perverse as his star ascended. He was, for example, sent the script of a Eugene O’Neill play written in 1939 but never presented on Broadway. Marlon fell asleep while reading the first act, and sent it back to MCA accompanied by an appraisal of this “ineptly written and poorly constructed” work. The Iceman Cometh went on without him. He read for the leading lights of Broadway, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, then casting O Mistress Mine. Seated in the orchestra, Lunt asked the young man, “Would you mind saying something?” Brando paused, then gave a deadpan reply. “Hickory, dickory, dock, the mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one, the mouse ran down, hickory, dickory dumb.” He accentuated the word dumb. The next day the Lunts cast Dick Van Patten in Mistress. It was to run for two years. Noël Coward tendered a part in his new comedy, Present Laughter. Marlon considered the work trivial and unworthy of a time when people were starving in Europe and Asia, and said so. The offer was icily withdrawn.

  Several important film producers expressed an interest in Marlon; all of them wanted to tie him up with a seven-year contract. He said no thank you to Louis B. Mayer; Hal Wallis, who offered a weekly salary of $3,000; and Joe Schenk, who instructed him to get a nose job.

  More out of curiosity than enthusiasm, Marlon agreed to play a boxer in a one-shot TV drama. In 1947 television plays were done live; videotape was years away from practical use. To indicate the passage of time, actors and technicians had to dash from one set to another without missing a beat. A key scene showed the middleweight fighting; another, seconds later, revealed him immediately after a ring loss, preparing to take a shower. Marlon stood in his shorts, trying not to breathe hard after a twenty-five-yard run, waiting for the warm water to spurt forth. Nothing happened. The prop man had forgotten to turn on the faucet. Marlon reached out, turned the device counterclockwise—and got hit by a stream of ice-cold water. He dropped out of character and shouted, “Jesus Christ!” Afterward the actor was congratulated for his realistic interpretation of a pugilist—particularly in the shower scene. It was his last experience with live television. The work made little impression on anyone, least of all Marlon. Yet some trace memory remained. He had no idea how to use it just then. So he simply stored the image in the back of his mind, in the unlikely event that he was called upon to play a failed prizefighter.

  2

  The management of MCA expressed some displeasure with Marlon’s next move. Out of regard for the Adler family he agreed to appear in the Ben Hecht drama A Flag Is Born. The drama would tour the country, raising funds at every stop to be used to transport Jewish refugees to Palestine. Hecht had been at this a long time. Originally, Britain was receptive to the idea of a Jewish national home. The League of Nations empowered the country to administer Palestine until the Jews there were ready for home rule. But in the run-up to World War II, anti-Jewish riots in the Middle East forced 10 Downing Street to change its policies. Fearful that the Arab nations might side with Nazi Germany, British colonialists blocked Jewish refugees from entering Palestine. A new Labour government took office in 1945, and this, coupled with reportage of the death camps, brought a new optimism to Zionists—those who believed the Holy Land was the most appropriate destination for European Jewry. Ernest Bevin, the foreign minister, quickly put a stop to that. “If the Jews, with all their sufferings, want to get too much at the head of the queue,” he warned, “you have the danger of another anti-Semitic reaction through it all.” The statement put him at odds with Harry Truman, who favored the creation of a land called Israel. Bevin added more fossil fuel to the fire when he declared that the only reason the United States favored admission of survivors was that “they did not want too many Jews in New York.”

  This crossfire was Hecht’s theme music. Throughout the 1930s, he had been the highest-paid scenarist in Hollywood. His career was the stuff of legend. This son of Russian immigr
ants once wrote about the most significant moment in his Chicago childhood. When he was six, his aunt Chasha took him to a play. The plot concerned a man wrongly accused of theft. When a policeman came to take him away, little Bennie shouted his protests from the balcony. The theater manager collared the boy and demanded an apology. Chasha struck the man forcefully with her umbrella. “Remember what I tell you,” she advised the boy. “That’s the way to apologize.”

  The lesson took. At the age of sixteen, Hecht talked himself into a job as cub reporter for the Chicago Daily News, climbed over staffers to get his own column, insinuated himself into important circles, became a novelist whose work was judged obscene—until Clarence Darrow agreed to become his attorney and H. L. Mencken came on board as a character witness—and later wrote for Broadway and Hollywood. His credits included Scarface, Twentieth Century, The Front Page, and Wuthering Heights. Yet the monetary and professional rewards never satisfied him as much as the role of fighter for a Jewish homeland. He described himself as an “honest writer who was walking down the street one day when he bumped into history.” The history he bumped into was the Holocaust.

  In the early 1940s the systematic murder of European Jewry was the worst-kept secret in Nazi Europe. Germans and Eastern Europeans saw their neighbors forced to wear a yellow star, then barred from institutions and professions, and finally rounded up and sent away in trucks and trains. Though exact details of the Final Solution remained obscure, they knew they would never see those Jews again. Yet much of the horror was deliberately hidden from U.S. citizens. Some sixty years after the genocide, Max Frankel, former executive editor of The New York Times, acknowledged, “No article about the Jews’ plight ever qualified as the Times’s leading story of the day, or as a major event of a week or year. The ordinary readers of its pages could hardly be blamed for failing to comprehend the enormity of the Nazis’ crime.” That newspaper was hardly alone. In Beyond Belief, a study of the American press and the coming of the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt confirms that as late as 1941 the Chicago Tribune placed the news that German Jews were forbidden to use the telephone “even for a doctor” on the very bottom of page ten. The imposition of “rigid anti-Semitic laws” in Norway was reported by the New York Journal-American on page thirty-two. The death of 450 Dutch Jews in Mauthausen concentration camp appeared in the Baltimore Sun in a thirteen-line article on the bottom of page ten. Papers in smaller markets carried even fewer items about the fate of European Jewry.