Brando Unzipped, by Darwin Porter an overview and synopsis ©2005, Blood Moon Productions, Ltd. All Rights Reserved ISBN 0-8748118-2-3 Editors note: Marlon Brando presented an unending series of riddles to virtually everyone who knew him. Blood Moon’s newest biography, Brando Unzipped, is loaded with keys to these riddles, presenting for the first time information that could keep a score of commentators busy for weeks. For busy writers who won’t have the time to digest the entire book, here’s a fast and flashy condensation of the most salient points. Material in italics are direct quotes from the author’s texts. |
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| Brando Unzipped, by Darwin Porter an overview and synopsis CHAPTER ONE • During the peak years of World War II, Marlon arrives in Manhattan in the prime of his young manhood, in an oft-repeated costume (tight jeans, tight T-shirt) that attract stares in an era otherwise devoted to baggy clothing. Nebraska-born, and fresh from having been bounced out of a conservative military academy, he is a bohemian, a word that was then in vogue, “until Gore Vidal told us we couldn’t use it any longer.” • He reunites with his sister, Jocelyn, in New York pursuing her own acting career. He pursues earthy affairs with exotic-looking women, takes acting lessons at the New School from Erwin Piscator (a well- respected refugee from Nazi Germany; acquires and is fired from a job as an elevator operator at Best & Co., and develops friendships with cutting edge locals, including both James Baldwin and Norman Mailer. In later years, they each record their reactions to a then-unknown Marlon. • Marlon is “adopted” as a protégé and sexual companion of Stella Adler, duenna of Manhattan’s New School for Social Research, and powerhouse promoter of “Method Acting.” Thanks to an ample and intuitive use of his raw talent, intuition, sexuality, and charm, he rises to the creamy insider status of the New School, its benefactors, and its associates.
night. Ostensibly, Stella had first brought Marlon home to meet her attractive teenage daughter, Ellen, but Marlon’s interest seemed almost entirely focused on the mother, even though he later dated Ellen, as well. One of the future founders of the Actors Studio, Robert Lewis, recalled one night when he dropped off a script at Stella’s: Marlon and his teacher were alone in her apartment. “He was stripped except for a pair of boxer underwear. He was sitting at Stella’s feet, not having much to say but staring at her intently. She was smoking a cigarette while sprawled on the sofa in her nightgown. I just assumed they’d had sex earlier. I don’t know where her daughter or husband were.” Upon seeing Lewis, Stella looked him over carefully. “Marlon and I are studying,” she said. “Tonight I’m going to be a tasty overripe piece of cheese, and he’s going to be a very hungry rat.” • Insights into the ideological conflicts between Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, conflicts that sometimes plunged the New School, with Marlon’s occasional involvement, into slug-and slap-fests in the hallways. • Flashback to Marlon’s days at the Shattuck Military Academy. His athletic prowess, his discipline issues, and embarrassments. • His emotional and perhaps sexual involvement with “Duke,” the autocratic and effete director of the academy’s English and drama department.
sexuality like a weapon.” It was later to be employed with greater career advancement when he met such vulnerable homosexual playwrights as Tennessee Williams and John Van Druten. “I’m not saying that Marlon was testing out the casting couch, but it was obvious to me that to get the best grades and the star parts in our school shows, you had to hang out with the master,” Staver claimed. • Marlon’s early affair, while still at military school, with local 14-year-old Steve Gilmore (who attempted suicide when it was obvious that Marlon had abandoned him) • The “guerilla war” he waged with both Duke and members of the academy’s administration, and his exclusion from further roles in school plays. Marlon is eventually dismissed from the academy for vandalism (including suspicion of arson), insubordination, for having been caught having sex with another (male) student, and for having organized an all-male orgy in the dorm. CHAPTER TWO • Marlon is on the streets of NYC’s Greenwich Village, “raising 17 kinds of hell,” as noted in one of his letters home.
the street. A fellow classmate at the New School, Jennifer Seder, claimed that Marlon dated “pure white trash, dirty-looking girls with stringy hair. I remember one horrible, ugly, and very fat girl with buck teeth he was dating. At the New School we called her “Fang”. Dating, Hell! That was the wrong word. Fucking was more like it. He was probably too ashamed of Fang to take her to a restaurant, even one of those late-night dollar-a-plate spaghetti joints on Bleeker Street.” • Description of early acting roles, including a role in GB Shaw’s Saint Joan and an adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. • A dating experience with a young and very naïve Elaine Stritch and her later recollections. • Emotional and sexual manipulation by Marlon, with Stella Adler’s encouragement and collusion, of the era’s leading playwright, Clifford Odets.
Lotusland of phonies, Marlon is all that’s left of what is true, real, and sincere,” Clifford told director Elia Kazan. On his dying day on August 18, 1963, Clifford ordered the nurse to “send for Brando. Only he—not any doctor—can save me now.” Even near death, Clifford still dreamed about writing that long-overdue film script for Marlon. In the movie he envisioned, Marlon would be cast as Beethoven. • Episodes with Harry Belafonte (his friend) and John Garfield (his competitor). Testimony and quotes about Marlon from Bobby Lewis (one of the founders of the Actors Studio). Descriptions of Marlon’s affection for his older sister, Jocelyn and her later recollections of her younger brother. Introduction of Marlon’s lifetime soul-mate Wally Cox (“Mr. Peepers”). Their friendship, one of the most controversial and most gossiped-about in Hollywood, is explored in depth. • Insights into Brando’s Oedipal bond with his mother, the talented but thwarted actress, Dodie Brando.
total disdain for child-rearing and housekeeping. She did not believe in heavy discipline for her kids but preferred that they “discover their own true natures.” For young Marlon, that often “meant running wild through the town, raising hell, and causing trouble,” in the words of former Omaha neighbor, Mrs. Casey Culler. “The kid was a total menace. The father was always on the road with one of his whores, the mother out drunk in some cheap motor court with someone’s husband. That little brat, Brando—they called him Bud—once dropped my cocker spaniel into my well. I was glad when Omaha saw the last of that brood. I never went to see one of his films when he became a big movie star, and I’m sure I didn’t miss out on anything.” …..….Eyewitnesses and newspaper reviewers of that era acclaimed Dodie’s ability as an actress. “She was one of our best,” said theater critic Nathan Palley. “It’s too bad she had to leave Omaha and go to Illinois. It broke her heart to give up the theater. She could have been a big star. She was starting to attract a lot of attention when her husband took his family to Illinois because of his work.” • More about Dodie and Elaine Stritch, more about Marlon’s early roles as an “incandescent” newcomer, • Dodie’s flirtation with Carlo Fiore, a friend and contemporary of her son, • Marlon’s exhibitionistic nudity on the beaches of Fire Island; additional misadventures, eyewitness accounts of his often bizarre eccentricities. • Marlon is dismissed from his role in a summer stock performance by director Erwin Piscator because of his sexual involvement with one of the actresses, Blossom Plump. CHAPTER THREE • Marlon’s seductive involvement with gay playwright John Van Druten and his play, I Remember Mama, and how he handled both the audition (gracelessly) and the role itself (dynamically, exhibitionistically). Some mini-dramas associated with Marlon’s promiscuity within NYC.
stood in the wings every night, waiting for his time to go on. While doing so, he’d fondle himself into a full erection, which was clearly visible through the tight knickerbockers he wore on stage. Not believing that the tale was true, Van Druten sat out front one night to watch the performance. Marlon’s erection was clearly visible, and some female members of the audience let out audible gasps. Backstage, Van Druten confronted Marlon, charging that “your protuberance is very distracting.” “Marlon continued to show it hard when he walked out on stage,” Carlo Fiore later said. “You could hear the women in the audience swoon. I guess that’s one way to become a star.” • Detailed recitations of Marlon’s relationships and affairs with the A-list personalities who visited him every night in his hopelessly untidy dressing room. One of them was Marlene Dietrich:
next move surprised her. Instead of moving toward her to seduce her, he went over and raised the living room’s window. Crawling out through the open window, he disappeared into the dense fog that had blanketed New York that night, in the open air, ten floors above street level. “Auf Wiedersehen!” he called to her. Obviously figuring that he was just playing a game as a means of frightening her, Dietrich, pretending nonchalance, went to the kitchen to prepare his omelette. In fewer than ten minutes, Marlon appeared outside the suite’s open kitchen window, then swung himself inside, eventually standing beside her, next to her little stove. He’d emerged from the fog like a ghost. “There’s no ledge outside to grab onto,” he said. “But there’s a gutter and a drain pipe that I used to haul me across instead.” fretted about Marlon’s insolence during auditions she arranged for him; Producers Albert Lunt and Lynne Fontanne got involved in a caustic argument which quickly became part of the Brando mystique; Noël Coward was deeply insulted. Even the Austrian-born cabaret chanteuse Greta Keller, who had sung in her salad days to audiences that had included Goering, Goebels, and Adolph himself, had a strong opinion. • Brando’s purported role as a “callboy” in the mid-1940s, as represented by Kenneth London, the British born owner of a “gentlemen for rent” service. • Marlon’s experience as a dancer with the mostly black Katherine Dunham dance troup. Marlon's behavior and his bizarre personal style, verge on the obsessional. • Marlon’s experiences with the mega-wealthy and mega-temperamental tobacco heiress Doris Duke, and her fantasies of being gang-raped; and the most decadent socialite of the postwar years, Jimmie Donohue--the man who seduced both the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Also, a review of Marlon’s involvement with Doris Duke and Rudolf Nuyerev and their aborted film development project.
her two male guests for lunch. “I was astonished to see Nureyev completely nude teaching Miss Duke and Brando how to belly dance. Miss Duke was without her top, but had on some panties. Brando was in jockey shorts. But Nureyev, who looked amply endowed, was letting it flop around, as he taught them the movements. All my life I’ve regretted I didn’t have a film clip of this unholy trio. Surely my clip would have become as famous as that of Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President’ to JFK.” CHAPTER FOUR • Brando’s ongoing rivalry, professional, personal, and sexual, with the fragile and more vulnerable Montgomery Clift, and Brando’s penchant for “sleeping with the enemy.”
crazy. Two real lunatics. They’d do any stupid thing, like run out in front of traffic and see if cars could brake fast enough. They’d go to an expensive restaurant, then run out without paying the bill, flying down the street as a waiter gave chase. One night they pulled off their clothes and jumped nude in front of the fountain at the Plaza Hotel, splashing about. A cop arrested them, but somehow they got off with a small fine. Their agent may have come to the rescue, I’m not sure.” “Monty and Marlon could be two crazies on a Saturday night,” Brooks Clift (Montgomery Clift’ s brother) said. “But there was a big difference. Marlon could pull himself together by Monday morning. Monty, on the other hand, couldn’t come back from the brink so easily. Even in those early years, he could move into a whirlwind of despair, and no one could pull him back. Amazingly, he’d recover from his bouts of depression. But as the years went by, those bouts of depression grew longer and longer until he couldn’t escape his demons, regardless of how hard he fought to do so.” • Brando’s experience in artsy Provincetown, where he arrived between acting gigs, homeless, with only $8 in his pocket. He was “rescued” there by summer residents, some of whom included Tennessee Williams (much to the regret of his then-boyfriend, Mexico-born Pancho); Peggy Guggenheim (always a pushover for a good-looking piece of male flesh); Dame May Whitty (a matriarch of British vaudeville, and a hopeless butt of Marlon’s gift for mimicry); local bartender “Claytina,” and other members of the resort’s arts community. • Brando’s return to Broadway for a well-publicized role in Truckline Café, directed by Kazan. • An encounter with Leonard Bernstein,
why he still kept a room at the low-rent Park Savoy when necessity no longer dictated it is a matter of conjecture. (Actor Tom) Ewell speculated that the room “came in handy for Lenny’s off-the- record assignations.” Natwick, Maureen Stapleton, and Laurence Olivier, husband of Vivien Leigh.
Vivien Leigh, the British theater critic, Kenneth Tynan, confronted the emotionally unstable actress. He too had had an affair with her husband and would later have an affair with her future costar in A Streetcar Named Desire. Although not wanting to cause her even more pain than she was experiencing because of her personal demons, he became a little bitchy after a few drinks. He told her all that he knew of her husband’s affair with Marlon Brando. Vivien listened politely, then said, “Oh, my. What fiddle-faddle! If that’s true, I only hope that poor Larry knew what to do. Marlon Brando. I must try him myself one day!” With that pronouncement, she turned on her heels and walked away. All Tynan saw was the curve of her back as she graciously made her way across a crowded London living room to greet the just-arriving Noël Coward and his partner, Jack Wilson
same week he was given an inch-and-a-half thick script by his agent, Edith Van Cleve. He was asked to read it that very night for an audition she’d arranged in the morning in front of Broadway producers Edward Dowling and Margaret Webster. After a heavy dinner, Marlon started to read the script of Eugene O’Neill’s latest play. In spite of the playwright’s reputation, Marlon had never been impressed with O’Neill’s works, finding his plays “dour, negative, and too dark.” After about fifteen minutes, he fell asleep on the sofa. The following morning at the audition that never came to be, Marlon attacked O’Neill’s play in front of an astonished Dowling and Webster. “It’s a piece of shit,” Marlon claimed. Even though he hadn’ t read the script, he said it was “full of long, boring speeches. O’Neill sounds like an asshole on a soap box. The play is meaningless. The audience will fall asleep only ten minutes into the first act. I saved many plays before but even I can’t rescue this turkey. I wouldn’t even be caught dead performing in it.” Then he walked off the stage before the producers could even respond. On the opening night of The Iceman Cometh, O’Neill received perhaps his greatest critical acclaim. One critic called the play “the best of the decade.” Marlon told Edith Van Cleve, “I read the reviews and wept at what might have been. With me in it, it could have become O’Neill’s masterpiece and my greatest hour upon the stage.” • Brando’s involvement in the intensely political “A Flag is Born”
his fight for the rights of the American Indian. At the time, American Jews were divided over how a Jewish homeland should be established in Palestine. Marlon backed the more militant wing, the Irgun, a group led by Menachem Begin, that advocated violence and was anti-British. Most American Zionists, however, leaned more to the Haganah movement advocating a less violent approach, as proclaimed by the more moderate David Ben-Gurion. After the play had run its course, Marlon actually traveled across the United States, raising money for the Irgun. “I was a hot-headed terrorist back then, advocating violence,” he recalled later in life. “As I matured, I came to understand all sides, even the Arab point of view. I was a bit over the top when I proclaimed in speeches that British troops blocking Jewish immigration to Palestine were committing far greater atrocities than the Nazis. Blame it on my youth!” During the run of A Flag is Born, in the words of Brando’s second wife, Anna Kashfi, “Marlon seduced an ardent harem of voluptuaries. He told me, ‘I wanted a house filled with women. One for every occasion—a picnic in the woods, a day at the beach. One to screw in bed. One to screw standing up.’” Not all visitors arriving backstage were female. One night Frank Sinatra showed up in Marlon’s dressing room to congratulate him on his performance. Marlon later told Stella Adler, “All flash, an overbaked Guinea Pie. As for his singing voice, I’d prefer a castrated rooster at dawn.” Later, when the two stars made Guys and Dolls together, Marlon would have even harsher comments to make against Sinatra. In the scenes he played with Paul Muni, Marlon survived a theatrical legend. During his next venture, he wouldn’t survive as gracefully. The incomparable Tallulah Bankhead was about to barge into his life, the same way she’d aggressively barged down the Nile in her performance of Cleopatra in 1937. CHAPTER FIVE • Tallulah Bankhead and Brando: Hell hath no vengeance like a diva scorned, but when Tennessee Williams and a script by Jean Cocteau get involved, things get more precarious.
aging star and the future star clashed. “Tallulah, for all her fiery talent, clung to the old tradition of certain stage stars, namely that when they are holding forth in a scene, everyone for miles around should be immobilized,” Bobby (Lewis) said. “They interpret any move or reaction from the other actors as distractions. Marlon, on stage, is the kind of actor who has a continuous life going for him, a life which results in scenes rather than star arias supported by accompanying robots. Tallulah even placed spies out in the audience to report to her if Marlon was acting behind her back in sections where she couldn’t keep an eye on him.” In the play, Tallulah had to deliver a thirty-minute monologue, perhaps the longest soliloquy in theatrical history. She had instructed Marlon, who was standing behind her, to remain motionless while she delivered this long, drawn-out speech. “Marlon did everything he could to upstage Tallulah,” Bobby said... “One night, or so I heard, he let out a loud fart during her monologue. He scratched his balls. Later backstage that night, Tallulah told me that she would like to give Marlon a good kick in those balls.” “During Tallulah’s speech, Marlon would unbutton, then rebutton his fly,” Jack Wilson said. “He would squirm during her speech and was especially adept at picking his nose. He would leer at the audience, wink at a stagehand standing in the wings. One night he scratched his ass, and I mean really scratched, going for those dingleberries. Not just onstage but backstage, Marlon was ‘driving me nuts,’ in Tallulah’s words, with his constant sit-ups and push-ups. She called them nipups.” By the time of opening night in Boston, Tallulah herself was calling Eagle “The Turkey with Two Heads”. Marlon was at his most outrageous on opening night. During Tallulah’s long speech, he turned his back to the audience, spread his legs, unbuttoned his fly, pulled out his cock, and urinated against the stage scenery. The audience could clearly see his yellow urine raining down. With her back to him, Tallulah didn’t know why the audience was laughing at her dramatic monologue. …….Later, a Boston theater critic had fun ridiculing both Marlon and the play. He claimed that “Bankhead’s Southern contralto hammered away at Cocteau’s delicate conceits and left them a rubbish heap of mystifying words.” Regarding Marlon’s prolonged death scene, he wrote, “Brando looked like a car in midtown Manhattan searching for a parking space.” crummy apartment with Wally Cox, and improves his motorcycle skills during very late, and very loud, late- night rides through Manhattan. He has been disgraced.
is finally wise to the ways of Brando. No studio wants him any more. I predict he’ll never find work in this town. He was a young upstart on Broadway that got some attention. His day has come and gone. Call him the star that never was. Besides, we now have Burt Lancaster. With Burt about to become the King of Hollywood, no one out here is talking about Brando any more. I suggest he buy a one-way ticket back to Omaha.”…. In New York, The Eagle Has Two Heads opened on March 19, 1947, at the Plymouth Theatre. Trounced by the critics, it closed after twenty-nine performances. Jean Cocteau denounced the production as a “vulgarization of my work.” Dressed in dirty jeans, mud-caked sneakers, and a tattered shirt, Marlon sat in the first row on opening night. He got up and walked out before the curtain was drawn on the first act. • Marlon’s encounters with Shelley Winters.
overweight lady. But oldtime movie fans remember her as sexy, vampish, and svelte, a “hot blonde,” in the words of Luther Adler, Stella Adler’s brother, who would later costar with her in South Sea Sinner in 1950. “She was the kind of gal your Jewish father wanted you to lose your virginity to but not to marry.” “Shelley was destined to play vulgar women, brassy, exciting, the kind you meet in a strange town on a bar stool,” said George Cukor, who directed her in A Double Life with Ronald Colman. Marlon himself later said that “Shelley was perfect for playing a loose woman. She was the woman you knocked up in a cheap motel room before moving on to Elizabeth Taylor.”
researcher who was getting better known every day. She claimed that she was very impressed with Dr. Kinsey when she heard him lecture on sex. “For the first time,” she said, “I understood what sex was about and how it should be approached.” At first Marlon volunteered to be interviewed by Dr. Kinsey, but he later bowed out, giving no reason. Even though he may have kept it a secret from such close friends as Wally Cox and Stella Adler, Marlon, in the weeks leading up to his being cast in A Streetcar Named Desire, developed a fondness for group sex. During his “analytic” sessions with Kim, he confessed that at least once a week he attended an orgy in the Village. Group sex became especially popular in the Village in the months after World War II. “The war liberated both men and women,” Tom Ewell later said. “It was a great time to be alive and to be in New York.” Sometimes groups, often all male, and with Marlon in their midst, would meet in a private apartment for an orgy. Other groups preferred a combination of men and women. Marlon confessed to Kim that he had “an insatiable appetite” at these orgies. He boasted that during one session in particular, at least a dozen young men and women got to enjoy “the pleasures of my noble tool.” He even invited Kim to join him at one of these orgies. That wasn’t her lifestyle, and she politely turned him down • Kim Stanley and Geraldine Page, Broadway’s two about-to-be-crowned queens.
was loudly and accurately proclaiming that each of them in her own way would become the greatest of all Broadway actresses, far better than either Lynn Fontanne or Katharine Cornell. The Stanley/Page debate still rages today as theatrical memory fades. • Irene Selznick was Hollywood Royalty, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer and the ex-wife of David O. Selznick. Her commitment as sponsor of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire led to Brando’s early nomination as Stanley Kowalski, much to the regret of Burt Lancaster, who insisted on conducting his reading of the part in a state of partial undress.
Knox” in Irene’s words, Burt Lancaster arrived at her (Irene Selznick’s) grandly furnished Fifth Avenue apartment. She was impressed with the actor’s good looks, physique, and male charm. But she later told Tennessee and Kazan that she felt Burt was more interested in securing the movie contract to play Stanley than he was in appearing on Broadway. On her first meeting with Burt and Hecht, she told them of her triumph earlier in the day. She claimed that “I fished out Tennessee’s best line from his wastepaper basket. ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’” “I just wish that Williams had put a line or two that good into the mouth of Kowalski,” Burt told her. Over drinks, he agreed to appear at the New Amsterdam Roof Theatre on 42nd Street and Broadway the following morning for a read-through of the play. Once again, as he had with Garfield, Kazan assumed the roles of both Blanche and Stella. At the rehearsal hall, perhaps to show off his manly physique, Burt insisted on removing his shirt. It is not known how Marlon managed to slip in undetected to see Burt’s read-through. Kazan later speculated that Marlon had disguised himself as a janitor. However he managed to conceal himself, Marlon saw Burt go through his first “blind read” of the play. It was the only time that Burt would “appear” as Stanley in front of anyone. Marlon was impressed with Burt’s reading, Bobby Lewis later claimed, “although Marlon still felt that (John) Garfield was the ideal choice for Stanley.” After performing as Stanley, Burt said he liked the role and “saw possibilities here.” Hecht didn’ t comment, claiming, “I’ll have to talk it over later with Burt.” Kazan left the studio for a meeting with Jessica Tandy, and Hecht had to see some old friends from his Brooklyn days. It was at this point that Marlon appeared, or so it is believed, and made the acquaintance of Burt, who had been left alone in the rehearsal hall. “Marlon never told me the complete story,” Edith said. “I was his agent, but I didn’t even know how to get in touch with him most of the time. Technically, he was rooming with Wally Cox and that smelly raccoon. But whenever you needed him, he was never there but stashed away in some bed somewhere in God knows whose apartment. He never had a phone. You literally had to go over to that rattrap where he lived with Wally and leave him a hand-delivered message. The door was always open to their apartment, and complete strangers wandered in and out at random. In those days it was the house party that never ended.” Within forty-eight hours, Hecht called Kazan to tell him that Burt would not be appearing on Broadway but was returning to Hollywood to make a film for producer Hal Wallis. Hecht also told Kazan that he wanted “Burt to be your first choice for Stanley when the film version is made.” Despondent over not being able to cast the right actor in the role of Stanley, Kazan met with Irene once more to reconsider Marlon. In spite of their temporary split, the director finally concluded that Marlon “would be a more dimensional Stanley than either Garfield or Lancaster once he finds himself in the role, which will take weeks, of course.” Irene and Kazan finally decided to send Marlon on a trip to Provincetown where Tennessee was applying his final polishing to Streetcar. “If Tennessee approves of Marlon in the role, he’ll be our Stanley,” Kazan said, • Marlon, out of work, broke, and hungry, can’t afford bus fare to Provincetown for a consultation with America’s most famous playwright, Tennessee Williams, who will judge his suitability for the role of Stanley Kowalski. When he arrives at Tennessee’s cottage, he finds a fractious and frequently quarrelling pocket of ambition, along with overflowing toilets, faulty electricity, and Pancho Rodriguez, Tennessee’s Mexican lover. Marlon, in his own words, interprets Tennessee as “a pristine soul who suffered from a deep-seated neurosis, a sensitive, gentle man destined to destroy himself.” After a reading that lasts no more than two minutes, Tennessee awards Marlon the part. The scene goes on to describe the origins of what became a murkily complicated dynamic between actor and playwright. • Rehearsals for Streetcar begin October 5, 1947. Many dramas ensue during Marlon’s creation of the character, many of them filtered through the perceptions of director Elia Kazan, who observes that “Tennessee is the world’s most hysterical hypochondriac.” Kazan’s words are in reaction to Tennessee’s having (falsely) announced to many members of the newly assembled cast “that he was dying of pancreatic cancer.” • Tennessee says to the cast that “Marlon is the Lawrencian fantasy of the earthy proletarian male.” Kazan, fretting about the sexual antics of his leading male, reports, “Everyone in the cast knew that Marlon was fucking every woman in sight and, for a change of pace, picking up (male) rough trade along the waterfront. I hoped he would get knifed before opening night.” • Rehearsals include some edgy, Method-inspired techniques designed (perhaps ineffectively, and probably destructively) to push the production’s co-star (Jessica Tandy, playing Blanche) into a deeper understanding of the fragile nature of the character she’s portraying. To this end, and orchestrated as a Method exercise by Elia Kazan, there ensue many loud and personal humiliations of Jessica Tandy, whom Marlon detests, including tying her up in ropes onstage and calling her names. Kazan calls off the exercise just before Marlon can piss on her. • Marlon, with misguided folly and machismo, offhandedly and inappropriately proposes marriage to the play’s producer, Irene Selznick. She is not amused. • Marlon befriends Kim Hunter, then in an act that would have meant commercial suicide in the hands of a lesser talent, competes with the play’s director Elia Kazan (who is in love with her) for her affections. In later years, Kim attests in interviews that “Marlon has an uncanny sense of truth as an actor.” Marlon’s undiplomatic reaction? “Kim is a fine actress in every way. She’s going back to Hollywood, but she’s too liberal and sophisticated for those constipated assholes out there.” Tandy, in contrast, complains bitterly that Marlon is interpreting the character of Stanley differently every night. Tandy’s view of Brando? “A selfish, psychopathic bastard.” • The Sandy Campbell affair. Brando, in front of the cast, flaunts his bisexual streak. • Truman Capote walks onto the set with Cecil Beaton, competes with Tennessee for Marlon’s attentions, and lays groundwork for dramas to come. Marlon poses (nude) for Beaton. • Streetcar opens December 3, 1947, makes news around the world. Brando is catapaulted to the level of “hottest actor in the world.” Cary Grant, thanks partly to his friendship with Irene Selznick, is revealed as one of the investors of the original play. Cary gets campy. Other leading stars come to pay their homage and wangle what they can from the theatrical energies pulsing out from Streetcar. Garbo visits Brando and gets narcissistic. Clark Gable (sex symbol of the 1930s meets sex symbol of the 1950s), reacts to Brando, with resultant head-buttings (Marlon: “Gable and Crawford lead the list of the phoniest ‘non-actors’ in Hollywood.”). At Sardi’s, Gable is accompanied by a minor but fiercely ambitious starlet, Nancy Davis (later Nancy Reagan), who has an opinion or two of her own about how to play the scene. Enter Humphrey Bogart, who—with his own brand of humor and macho-chivalry, proposes a role for Marlon in Hollywood, which Marlon, also with macho-chivalry, rejects. • Misadventures on the set of Streetcar. Marlon’s nose is broken during a rowdy backstage boxing match, and (badly) reset by a doctor whom Marlon refers to the rest of his life as “a sadist and a butcher.” As a result, his physical appearance changes forever. • Marlon’s sister, Fran, reports “Everybody wanted a piece of my brother, especially some of the leading female stars of the golden age.” Film critic David Thomson comments on Brando’s promiscuity: “Many of (Brando’s) women seem reconciled to his infidelity. They may not even see it as something worthy of blame, or guilt. He is less fickle than mobile—the way of sperm, after all. …We do not have to agree that he is exceptional at sex; instead, he is unusual in that he pursues sex for its own sake, and is not often drawn into claims of love and eternity—the rhetoric that impedes so many of us. So lovers accept that they will be dropped and then reclaimed, depending on where he is, his mood, the chance of meeting.” • An affair and public embarrassment with Faye Emerson, the then-leading TV journalist in the world, and ex daughter-in-law of former President FDR. During their inaugural interview in the then-novel medium of TV, Brando never averts his eyes, on camera, from her breasts. • A (failed) assassination threat, perhaps a prank, against Jessica Tandy, who performs brilliantly that night despite the fear; Brando miscalculates the potential merit of a film script for Rebel Without a Cause, and turns it down, much to his chagrin; • An erotic incident between Marlon and Ava Gardner who talk dirty to one another in front of witnesses; Sinatra is livid. • Streetcar wins a Pulitzer; but after 855 performances, Brando—loudly proclaiming to the press how much he hated the experience-- never acts again on Broadway. • More interaction with Shelley Winters. CHAPTER SEVEN The parade of famous actresses parading through Marlon’s life increases. Many are interested in playing the film version of Blanche DuBois; others merely want a piece of Broadway’s reflected glory, or perhaps a piece of Broadway’s hottest piece of (male) ass. Raw material for these episodes were related to the author through his interviews with, among others, Marlon’s agent, Edith Van Cleve. • Paulette Goddard: During a visit to Marlon’s dressing room, a resident kleptomaniac steals and then returns her jewelry. • Wendy Barry: Goddaughter of the creator (J.M. Barrie) of Peter Pan, she invites Marlon to a midnight supper in her suite at the Plaza Hotel. As one of the girlfriends of gangster Bugsy Siegel, ramifications ensue. (“When I ran into Bugsy’s other girlfriend, Virginia Hill, in Las Vegas, she struck me so hard that she dislocated my jaw.”) Subsequently, Marlon becomes fascinated by Virginia Hill. (“I’ll always regret not getting a blow-job from Virginia Hill. From all reports, she was the best of the best.”) Marlon is increasingly intrigued by mobsters, adopting their dress code and lobbying hard (unsuccessfully) to portray Bugsy Siegel onscreen. Later, his efforts as a mimic are taken advantage of in Guys & Dolls. • Veronica Lake, actress, style-setter, and schizophrenic: At last, Marlon finds a female companion to accompany him to sex-and-booze orgies in Greenwich Village. Veronica to good-looking newcomers: (“Hi, I’m Veronica Lake—would you like to fuck a movie star?”) Years later, in Miami in the 1950s, Veronica reflected, “Marlon and I were never meant to be movie stars. I knew that if I stayed on, the rat race would have killed me like it did my frequent co-star, Alan Ladd… But Marlon was stronger than Alan or me. He told Hollywood to go fuck itself, and made the bastards take it.” • Anne Baxter (Eve, in All About Eve). Brainy, sexy, and as intuitively ambitious as the character she famously portrayed, she maneuvered with Marlon for the juicy film role of Stella. • Hedy Lamarr. She might have been the most narcissistic and demented actress in film history. Marlon learned about it the hard way. • Ingrid Bergman: In the words of Edith Van Cleve, “I felt Marlon was protecting her reputation.” • Susan Hayward: (“Oh no, buster, no man ever gets near me until he gives me flowers first.”) • Joan Crawford: (“I’ve done everything a woman can do in life, except meet Mr. Marlon Brando.” And several months later, after hearing, secondhand, Marlon’s complaints about her foul breath during foreplay, “I’m no great admirer of his acting or his looks, for that matter. And he looks like he changes his underwear about every two weeks.”) • Miriam Hopkins, who, thanks to her southern background might have made a very interesting Blanche. (“Those boys at the Harvard Lampoon voted me ‘the least desirable companion on a desert island.”) Marlon found her “compulsively vivacious, dashing about making little gestures and chattering endlessly.” Miriam urges Brando to change psycho-analysts as a means of handling the growing frequency of his anxiety attacks. • Bette Davis. Using the worst possible judgment, and despite the fact that at the time she desperately needed a career boost, she turns down the role of Blanche DuBois. (“At the point in our evening together when he insulted Clare Booth Luce, I realized that Marlon was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Instead of scolding, he needed sympathy, even nurturing.” La Vie en Rose: Marlon Goes to Paris: After the run of Streetcar, and many hundreds of highly charged performances (and their attendant mini-dramas) an exhausted Marlon goes to The City of Light. (“After a long schlunk in Paris, I’ll find myself.”) There intrigues are multi-lingual, gossip-worthy, and world-class. • French Director Claude Autant-Lara, the most controversial figure in French cinema, wants Marlon to speak “phonetic” French, even if he doesn’t understand the words, in his role as hero in the film version of Stendahl’s Le Rouge et le noir. Adventures ensue shipboard en route to France. Brando and the ultra- right-wing Autant-Lara part ways because of irreconciliable artistic and political differences. • Encounters between the leading sex symbol of America (Brando) and the leading sex symbol of France (Brigitte Bardot) as arranged by film director and voyeur, Roger Vadim, the “eventual husband” of three of the world’s most beautiful women (Bardot, Deneuve, & Fonda). • Fateful meeting of Marlon with noted French actor Christian Marquand and Roger Vadim, the latter a close friend of a young man from Massachussets, John F. Kennedy, who had recently been holiday- making in Provence. Shortly after their inaugural meeting, Vadim and Marquand invite the newly arrived American actor, Marlon, to live with them in their one-room studio apartment on rue Bassano, where Bardot and many other actors are frequent visitors. According to Vadim, “Brando and Marquand had an unconventional love affair that would span the decades, and fidelity to each other had nothing to do with it. I don’t think I ever saw a more compatible couple. Of course, Christian also served as Marlon’s pimp in future years when Marlon flew in from Hollywood. Christian told me that, ‘All I have to do is speak to any girl and bring Marlon that girl if he wanted her.’” CHAPTER EIGHT Marlon develops friendships and love affairs that thrust him into the creamy and cerebral ivory towers of Paris during the heyday of the postwar existentialists: • Daniel Gélin, a household name in France, with an illustrious career that eventually spans 60 years of French show-biz, is pulled into Brando’s orbit. Marlon hangs out with a crowd that includes Jean-Paul Sartre (who hates him); Simone de Beauvoir (who likes him); and Juliet Gréco (the entertainment- related symbol of l’epoque existentialiste, who indulges him). Truman Capote, upon visiting Paris’ Café de Flore, reports to Tennessee Williams, “Marlon and Daniel Gélin—I spotted them together at a nearby table. They were young and good-looking and unsuccessful at hiding their love. I caught Marlon with his shoes off with his noble foot buried in Daniel’s crotch under the table. Ah, if only I could find true love…” • Marlon becomes the frequent houseguest in the sumptuous Parisian villa (in the rue de Varenne) of the owners and editors of Paris-Match, Hervé Mille and his brother Gérard. In the words of writer Marcel Haedrick, “Through the Mille home passed everyone who had talent, reputation, money, everyone who was of any importance, lasting or otherwise.” The Mille brothers eventually acquire from Irene Selznick the French-language rights to A Streetcar Named Desire and begin maneuvering (unsuccessfully) Marlon into a French-language role in their upcoming production. • Marlon meets Coco Chanel (who, in honor of Marlon’s best-publicized wardrobe, shows up in blue jeans); Edith Piaf (“Who do you think I am, you bastard? Some Pigalle whore?”), and Jean Cocteau (“Next to Marlon, I feel like a very old pretzel standing next to a slab of prize Grade-A American beef.”). A mismatched affair ensues with the notorious French actress Arletty (“My heart is French, but my arse is international.”) who—with Marlon’s help and the role of Blanche DuBois-- hopes to recoup her career after an embarrassing association with the Germans during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Marlon goes to Rome to work as an actor with the neo-realist Vittorio De Sica, legendary director of The Bicycle Thief. Marlon is to be cast as a disillusioned Neapolitan soldier returning from World War II to discover that his pretty young wife (to have been played by the virginal and perhaps miscast Italian actress Pier Angeli) has been prostituting herself as a means of feeding their children. A few days before the beginning of production, De Sica gambles away the film’s budget. Just before the dream utterly collapses, • Marlon is pulled into the orbit of “Italian earth mother” Anna Magnani, and her violent and obsessive conflict with director Roberto Rossellini, who has recently abandoned her in favor of “the Swedish whore,” Ingrid Bergman. When Magnani attempts a joint murder, disguised as an auto wreck, of Rossellini and Bergman, Brando retreats, eventually returning to Paris after a holiday in Sicily, where he narrowly escapes “punishment” by the enraged father of a girl he had earlier seduced. • Once again in Paris, Marlon scorns the glamour and chic of the French literati, opting instead to sleep with the clochards (drunks) of the city beneath the bridges spanning the Seine, wandering the streets of Paris by night, living on scraps of food culled from the garbage. • In smelly and demeaning circumstances, he’s “discovered” by Maynard Morris, an emissary from New York, who has been specially commissioned to drag him back “kicking and screaming” to America, where lucrative movie parts are waiting. • Marlon returns, heavily supervised and chaperoned, to America. In New York, he immediately reunites with Wally Cox, and forms the beginnings of a lifelong dialogue with a junior agent at MCA, Jay Kanter. Jay will remain his theatrical agent (and handler) on and off for the rest of his life. Issues arise about wardrobe, motivations, "The Method," movie contracts, and rebelliousness. Filming of THE MEN, co-starring Brando (as a war veteran and paraplegic) with Teresa Wright. • Dramas include Brando’s “total immersion” as a make-believe paraplegic in a veteran’s hospital, prior to the beginning of the shooting. Arguments and dialogues with the film’s producer, Stanley Kramer, Marlon’s articulation of basic flaws in the movie and his beliefs about the realistic portrayal of partially paralyzed men as sexual, sometimes impotent, and often married, beings. Conflicts with his “prissy and uptight” co-star, Teresa Wright, Bumps and grinds associated with acclimatizing Brando to both film work and Hollywood. • During the height of the “Red Scare,” Norman Mailer gives a splashy but disastrous dinner party. Accompanying Shelley Winters, Brando adds to the tension. The party dissolves into bitterly divided factions. There are episodes with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift (both moderates), Ginger Rogers (a rabid conservative), Charles Chaplin (a neurotic narcissist, an egomaniacal terror, and despite his millions, an outspoken socialist). Disastrous interviews with Hedda Hopper (Brando insulted her, she printed a favorable impression anyway, perhaps the result of a bribe from the studio), and Louella Parsons. (Louella: “He has the manners of a chimpanzee, the gall of a Kinsey researcher, and a swelled head the size of a Navy blimp.”) Other, equally disastrous interviews, have the press referring to him as “a rebel, a goof, a crazy mixed-up kid.” • Praise comes to Marlon from his director, Zinnemann, “Marlon is a combination of idealism and shrewdness. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s all that a director can desire in an actor.” Movie critic René Johnson reviews Marlon’s performance in The Men as follows: “Under the broken body and the childish tantrums, there is a vein of iron, a suggestion of a toppled God, a maimed Apollo.” • The Men is pronounced unsuccessful by some of the critics and by all of the studios. Brand | |||