Portraits and Observations

  In fact, Brando had evidently been working on his story at the moment of my arrival. As I entered the room, a subdued-looking, youngish man, whom I shall call Murray, and who had previously been pointed out to me as “the fellow that’s helping Marlon with his writing,” was squatted on the matting, fumbling through the manuscript of A Burst of Vermilion. Weighing some pages on his hand, he said, “Tell ya, Mar, s’pose I go over this down in my room, and maybe we’ll get together again—say, around ten-thirty?”

  Brando scowled, as though unsympathetic to the idea of resuming their endeavors later in the evening. Having been slightly ill, as I learned later, he had spent the day in his room, and now seemed restive. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to a couple of oblong packages among the literary remains on the lacquer table.

  Murray shrugged. The maid had delivered them; that was all he knew. “People are always sending Mar presents,” he told me. “Lots of times we don’t know who sent them. True, Mar?”

  “Yeah,” said Brando, beginning to rip open the gifts, which, like most Japanese packages—even mundane purchases from very ordinary shops—were beautifully wrapped. One contained candy, the other white rice cakes, which proved cement-hard, though they looked like puffs of cloud. There was no card in either package to identify the donor. “Every time you turn around, some Japanese is giving you a present. They’re crazy about giving presents,” Brando observed. Athletically crunching a rice cake, he passed the boxes to Murray and me.

  Murray shook his head, he was intent on obtaining Brando’s promise to meet with him again at ten-thirty. “Give me a ring around then,” Brando said, finally. “We’ll see what’s happening.”

  Murray, as I knew, was only one member of what some of the Sayonara company referred to as “Brando’s gang.” Aside from the literary assistant, the gang consisted of Marlon Brando, Sr., who acts as his son’s business manager; a pretty, dark-haired secretary, Miss Levin; and Brando’s private make-up man. The travel expenses of this entourage, and all its living expenses while on location, were allowed for in the actor’s contract with Warner Brothers. Legend to the contrary, film studios are not usually so lenient financially. A Warner man to whom I talked later explained the tolerance shown Brando by saying, “Ordinarily we wouldn’t put up with it. All the demands he makes. Except—well, this picture just had to have a big star. Your star—that’s the only thing that really counts at the box office.”

  Among the company were some who felt that the social protection supplied by Brando’s inner circle was preventing them from “getting to know the guy” as well as they would have liked. Brando had been in Japan for more than a month, and during that time he had shown himself on the set as a slouchingly dignified, amiable-seeming young man who was always ready to cooperate with, and even encourage, his co-workers—the actors particularly—yet by and large was not socially available, preferring, during the tedious lulls between scenes, to sit alone reading philosophy or scribbling in a schoolboy notebook. After the day’s work, instead of accepting his colleagues’ invitations to join a group for drinks, a plate of raw fish in a restaurant and a prowl through the old geisha quarter of Kyoto, instead of contributing to the one-big-family, houseparty bonhomie that picture-making on location theoretically generates, he usually returned to his hotel and stayed there. Since the most fervent of movie-star fans are the people who themselves work in the film industry, Brando was a subject of immense interest within the ranks of the Sayonara group, and the more so because his attitude of friendly remoteness produced, in the face of such curiosity, such wistful frustrations. Even the film’s director, Joshua Logan, was impelled to say, after working with Brando for two weeks, “Marlon’s the most exciting person I’ve met since Garbo. A genius. But I don’t know what he’s like. I don’t know anything about him.”

  The maid had re-entered the star’s room, and Murray, on his way out, almost tripped over the train of her kimono. She put down a bowl of ice, and with a glow, a giggle, an elation that made her little feet, hooflike in their split-toed white socks, lift and lower like a prancing pony’s, announced, “Appapie! Tonight on menu appapie.”

  Brando groaned. “Apple pie. That’s all I need.” He stretched out on the floor and unbuckled his belt, which dug too deeply into the swell of his stomach. “I’m supposed to be on a diet. But the only things I want to eat are apple pie and stuff like that.” Six weeks earlier, in California, Logan had told him he must trim off ten pounds for his role in Sayonara, and before arriving in Kyoto, he had managed to get rid of seven. Since reaching Japan, however, abetted not only by American-type apple pie but by the Japanese cuisine, with its delicious emphasis on the sweetened, the starchy, the fried, he’d regained, then doubled this poundage. Now, loosening his belt still more and thoughtfully massaging his midriff, he scanned the menu, which offered, in English, a wide choice of Western-style dishes, and after reminding himself “I’ve got to lose weight,” he ordered soup, beefsteak with French-fried potatoes, three supplementary vegetables, a side dish of spaghetti, rolls and butter, a bottle of sake, salad, and cheese and crackers.

  “And appapie, Marron?”

  He sighed. “With ice cream, honey.”

  Though Brando is not a teetotaler, his appetite is more frugal when it comes to alcohol. While we were awaiting the dinner, which was to be served to us in the room, he supplied me with a large vodka on the rocks and poured himself the merest courtesy sip. Resuming his position on the floor, he lolled his head against a pillow, dropped his eyelids, then shut them. It was as though he’d dozed off into a disturbing dream; his eyelids twitched, and when he spoke, his voice—an unemotional voice, in a way cultivated and genteel, yet surprisingly adolescent, a voice with a probing, asking, boyish quality—seemed to come from sleepy distances.

  “The last eight, nine years of my life have been a mess,” he said. “Maybe the last two have been a little better. Less rolling in the trough of the wave. Have you ever been analyzed? I was afraid of it at first. Afraid it might destroy the impulses that made me creative, an artist. A sensitive person receives fifty impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they’re so easily brutalized and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs. Never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much. Analysis helps. It helped me. But still, the last eight, nine years I’ve been pretty mixed up, a mess pretty much …”

  The voice went on, as though speaking to hear itself, an effect Brando’s speech often has, for like many persons who are intensely self-absorbed, he is something of a monologuist—a fact that he recognizes and for which he offers his own explanation. “People around me never say anything,” he says. “They just seem to want to hear what I have to say. That’s why I do all the talking.”

  Watching him now, with his eyes closed, his unlined face white under an overhead light, I felt as if the moment of my initial encounter with him were being re-created. The year of that meeting was 1947; it was a winter afternoon in New York, where I had occasion to attend a rehearsal of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, in which Brando was to play the role of Stanley Kowalski. It was this role that first brought him general recognition, although among the New York theater’s cognoscenti he had already attracted attention, through his student work with the drama coach Stella Adler and a few Broadway appearances—one in a play by Maxwell Anderson, Truckline Café, and another as Marchbanks opposite Katharine Cornell’s Candida, in which he showed an ability that had been much praised and discussed. Elia Kazan, the director of A Streetcar Named Desire, said at that time, and has recently repeated, “Marlon is just the best actor in the world.” But ten years ago, on the remembered afternoon, he was still relatively unknown; at least, I hadn’t a clue to who he might be when, arriving too early at the Streetcar rehearsal, I found the auditorium deserted and a brawny young man stretched out atop a table on the stag
e under the gloomy glare of work lights, solidly asleep. Because he was wearing a white T-shirt and denim trousers, because of his squat gymnasium physique—the weight-lifter’s arms, the Charles Atlas chest (though an opened Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud was resting on it)—I took him for a stagehand. Or did until I looked closely at his face. It was as if a stranger’s head had been attached to the brawny body, as in certain counterfeit photographs. For this face was so very untough, superimposing, as it did, an almost angelic refinement and gentleness upon hard-jawed good looks: taut skin, a broad, high forehead, wide-apart eyes, an aquiline nose, full lips with a relaxed, sensual expression. Not the least suggestion of Williams’s unpoetic Kowalski. It was therefore rather an experience to observe, later that afternoon, with what chameleon ease Brando acquired the character’s cruel and gaudy colors, how superbly, like a guileful salamander, he slithered into the part, how his own persona evaporated—just as, in this Kyoto hotel room nine years afterward, my 1947 memory of Brando receded, disappeared into his 1956 self. And the present Brando, the one lounging there on the tatami and lazily puffing filtered cigarettes as he talked and talked, was, of course, a different person—bound to be. His body was thicker; his forehead was higher, for his hair was thinner; he was richer (from the producers of Sayonara he could expect a salary of three hundred thousand dollars, plus a percentage of the picture’s earnings); and he’d become, as one journalist put it, “the Valentino of the bop generation”—turned into such a world celebrity that when he went out in public here in Japan, he deemed it wise to hide his face not only by wearing dark glasses but by donning a surgeon’s gauze mask as well. (The latter bit of disguise is not so outré in Japan as it may sound, since numerous Asians wear such masks, on the theory that they prevent the spreading of germs.) Those were some of the alterations a decade had made. There were others. His eyes had changed. Although their caffè-espresso color was the same, the shyness, any traces of real vulnerability that they had formerly held, had left them; now he looked at people with assurance, and with what can only be called a pitying expression, as though he dwelt in spheres of enlightenment where they, to his regret, did not. (The reactions of the people subjected to this gaze of constant commiseration range from that of a young actress who avowed that “Marlon is really a very spiritual person, wise and very sincere; you can see it in his eyes” to that of a Brando acquaintance who said, “The way he looks at you, like he was so damn sorry for you—doesn’t it make you want to cut your throat?”) Nevertheless, the subtly tender character of his face had been preserved. Or almost. For in the years between he’d had an accident that gave his face a more conventionally masculine aspect. It was just that his nose had been broken. And maneuvering a word in edgewise, I asked, “How did you break your nose?”

  “… by which I don’t mean that I’m always unhappy. I remember one April I was in Sicily. A hot day, and flowers everywhere. I like flowers, the ones that smell. Gardenias. Anyway, it was April and I was in Sicily, and I went off by myself. Lay down in this field of flowers. Went to sleep. That made me happy. I was happy then. What? You say something?”

  “I was wondering how you broke your nose.”

  He rubbed his nose and grinned, as though remembering an experience as happy as the Sicilian nap. “That was a long time ago. I did it boxing. It was when I was in Streetcar. We—some of the guys backstage and me—we used to go down to the boiler room in the theater and horse around, mix it up. One night I was mixing it up with this guy and—crack! So I put on my coat and walked around to the nearest hospital—it was off Broadway somewhere. My nose was really busted. They had to give me an anesthetic to set it, and put me to bed. Not that I was sorry. Streetcar had been running about a year and I was sick of it. But my nose healed pretty quick, and I guess I would’ve been back in the show practically right away if I hadn’t done what I did to Irene Selznick.” His grin broadened as he mentioned Mrs. Selznick, who had been the producer of the Williams play. “There is one shrewd lady, Irene Selznick. When she wants something, she wants it. And she wanted me back in the play. But when I heard she was coming to the hospital, I went to work with bandages and iodine and mercurochrome, and—Christ!—when she walked in the door, I looked like my head had been cut off. At the least. And sounded as though I were dying. ‘Oh, Marlon,’ she said, ‘you poor, poor boy!’ And I said, ‘Don’t you worry about anything, Irene. I’ll be back in the show tonight!’ And she said, ‘Don’t you dare! We can manage without you for—for—well, a few days more.’ ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I’m okay. I want to work. Tell them I’ll be back tonight.’ So she said, ‘You’re in no condition, you poor darling. I forbid you to come to the theater.’ So I stayed in the hospital and had myself a ball.” (Mrs. Selznick, recalling the incident recently, said, “They didn’t set his nose properly at all. Suddenly his face was quite different. Kind of tough. For months afterward I kept telling him, ‘But they’ve ruined your face. You must have your nose broken again and reset.’ Luckily for him, he didn’t listen to me. Because I honestly think that broken nose made his fortune as far as the movies go. It gave him sex appeal. He was too beautiful before.”)

  Brando made his first trip to the Coast in 1949, when he went out there to play the leading role in The Men, a picture dealing with paraplegic war veterans. He was accused, at the time, of uncouth social conduct, and criticized for his black-leather-jacket taste in attire, his choice of motorcycles instead of Jaguars and his preference for obscure secretaries rather than movie starlets; moreover, Hollywood columnists studded their copy with hostile comments concerning his attitude toward the film business, which he himself summed up soon after he entered it by saying, “The only reason I’m here is that I don’t yet have the moral courage to turn down the money.” In interviews, he repeatedly stated that becoming “simply a movie actor” was the thing furthest from his thoughts. “I may do a picture now and then,” he said on one occasion, “but mostly I intend to work on the stage.” However, he followed The Men, which was more of a succès d’estime than a commercial triumph, by re-creating Kowalski in the screen treatment of A Streetcar Named Desire, and this role, as it had done on Broadway, established him as a star. (Defined practically, a movie star is any performer who can account for a box-office profit regardless of the quality of the enterprise in which he appears; the breed is so scarce that there are fewer than ten actors today who qualify for the title. Brando is one of them; as a box-office draw, male division, he is perhaps outranked only by William Holden.) In the course of the last five years he has played a Mexican revolutionary (Viva Zapata!), Mark Antony (Julius Caesar) and a motorcycle-mad juvenile delinquent (The Wild One); earned an Academy Award in the role of a dockyard thug (On the Waterfront); impersonated Napoleon (Désirée); sung and danced his way through the part of an adult delinquent (Guys and Dolls); and taken the part of the Okinawan interpreter in The Teahouse of the August Moon, which, like Sayonara, his tenth picture, was partly shot on location in Japan. But he has never, except for a brief period in summer stock, returned to the stage. “Why should I?” he asked with apathy when I remarked on this. “The movies have a greater potential. They can be a factor for good. For moral development. At least some can—the kind of movies I want to do.” He paused, seemed to listen, as though his statement had been tape-recorded and he were now playing it back. Possibly the sound of it dissatisfied him; at any rate, his jaw started working, as if he were biting down on an unpleasant mouthful. He looked off into space suddenly and demanded, “What’s so hot about New York? What’s so hot about working for Cheryl Crawford and Robert Whitehead?” Miss Crawford and Whitehead are two of New York’s most prominent theatrical producers, neither of whom has had occasion to employ Brando. “Anyway, what would I be in?” he continued. “There aren’t any parts for me.”

  Stack them, and the playscripts offered him in any given season by hopeful Broadway managements might very well rise to a height exceeding the actor’s own. Tennessee Williams wanted him for the male le
ad in each of his last five plays, and the most recent of these, Orpheus Descending, which was pending production at the time of our talk, had been written expressly as a co-starring vehicle for Brando and the Italian actress Anna Magnani. “I can explain very easily why I didn’t do Orpheus,” Brando said. “There are beautiful things in it, some of Tennessee’s best writing, and the Magnani part is great; she stands for something, you can understand her—and she would wipe me off the stage. The character I was supposed to play, this boy, this Val, he never takes a stand. I didn’t really know what he was for or against. Well, you can’t act a vacuum. And I told Tennessee. So he kept trying. He rewrote it for me, maybe a couple of times. But—” He shrugged. “Well, I had no intention of walking out on any stage with Magnani. Not in that part. They’d have had to mop me up.” Brando mused a moment, and added, “I think—in fact, I’m sure—Tennessee has made a fixed association between me and Kowalski. I mean, we’re friends and he knows that as a person I am just the opposite of Kowalski, who was everything I’m against—totally insensitive, crude, cruel. But still, Tennessee’s image of me is confused with the fact that I played that part. So I don’t know if he could write for me in a different color range. The only reason I did Guys and Dolls was to work in a lighter color—yellow. Before that, the brightest color I’d played was red. From red down. Brown. Gray. Black.” He crumpled an empty cigarette package and bounced it in his hand like a ball. “There aren’t any parts for me on the stage. Nobody writes them. Go on. Tell me a part I could do.”