Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work Page 2
I hope there is a brisk wind that will take you far and wide
Everyone in the world wanted a piece of you
Now you can accommodate them all
Land lightly on their greedy brows
Or blur their eyes with your gritty essence
Or if we could conjure up a gale
You could choke them all to death
“How’s that for a dirge, old man,” she concludes the poem, which, she said, “I think he would have liked.”19
HIS PASSIONS
This book explores the Brando that was not visible to the world in order to better understand the one that was. This Brando was independent of the public persona and often at odds with it. The Brando described here knew a loneliness that felt, he said, as if he were “out on a limb, . . . and none of the other birds will talk to you.”20 He was as drawn to the way that people mouthed words as he was to the words that came out. He was not only a devoted drummer who could hold his own with professional musicians, he was also knowledgeable about an extraordinary range of music. In the 1950s, when he used to go to jazz clubs like Small’s Paradise in Harlem with his friend Quincy Jones, Brando would say, “It’s time to go jiggle some molecules.”21 He had an extensive collection of jazz and classical records as well as many books on music, and his sound equipment was always cutting edge. A note to him during the making of The Chase confirms his eclectic taste (and concern for keeping an organized collection): “Marlon—all of your records are in order here—all in order and all in their correct jackets. There are five records missing but I believe they are with you . . . Bach . . . The Beat of Tahiti . . . Exotica with Martin Denny.”22 Despite his resistance to schooling (he never graduated from high school), he was a reader from youth, and the library he amassed over time, a significant portion of it annotated, suggests a profoundly inquisitive mind.
Brando playing bongos at Club Saint-Germain, Paris. © Herman Leonard Photography, LLC, www.hermanleonard.com.
The image presented here will help to explain what has until now seemed contradictory or accidental in his life and work—why it was, for instance, that his plays and films so often featured music by serious composers—a devotee of music, Brando told close friends, “If you want to know me, listen to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain”—and stories and scripts by major Anglo-American writers, including Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and H. G. Wells.23
It is not unusual for someone lacking an education to esteem those who have one. With Brando the situation is more complicated. He was comfortable among intellectuals, and, as his book marginalia reveal, developed a high opinion of his own talents and qualities of mind. His comment in The Indian Tribes of the United States: Ethnic and Cultural Survival (1962) displays a typical combination of skepticism and respect toward academics. Next to the passage “Individual Indians who dress and speak and act like any contemporary American, still play ordained roles as clansmen, as members or even as heads of ritualistic societies and as upholders of an older social order,” he wrote, “Harvard Proff”—the misspelling exposes the lifelong foible that led people to underestimate him; the insight that tribal behavior is similar everywhere shows sophisticated awareness.24 His confidence and avidity are illustrated by his practice of phoning authors of books he admired and arranging to meet them. When he was living above Carnegie Hall, for instance, he invited Margaret Mead over for dinner after reading her Coming of Age in Samoa. He asked his mentor Stella Adler to join them, because he thought these two formidable woman would get along—they didn’t.25
Equally complex is the issue of his attitudes toward acting. In interviews given throughout his life, he seemed disparaging, insisting it was instinct: Everyone acted, some just did it better than others. He had fallen into acting, and stuck with it because he had never decided what he really wanted to do. Such statements contradict basic facts. Brando prepared deliberately and extensively for film roles early to late, in a manner that would have been familiar to Stanislavski and to Stella Adler. He read books about the world of his characters, wrote pages of notes highlighting questions and problems in his film scripts, and revised numerous scenes and dialogues. As Brando observed late in his career, “In almost all my films I’ve rewritten my parts. Sometimes I’ve written them entirely, but I never asked for any credit.”26
Most belying an indifference to acting is the fact that Brando kept the materials related to his career. Visitors to his home regularly remarked on the few signs of his profession. Little within (a framed portrait from The Wild One on his desk; a mounted still in his study of him embracing Rita Moreno in The Night of the Following Day) disclosed that the inhabitant was a major American actor. But in a shed on his estate there were piles of carefully preserved scripts, notes, papers, and memorabilia from each of his films—every one a time capsule with preparations for the specific movie and evidence of the ordinary life that continued while making it.27 The contents of the career were separated from his home, yet these contents, meticulously cataloged, remained part of the property. Their existence reinforces another striking fact—that Brando made films until the very end. Brando kept acting until he could barely breathe. Less than a month before he died from pulmonary fibrosis, with an oxygen tank nearby, he played a most improbable final role as the voice of a candy-store owner, Mrs. Sour, a dowager with a blonde wig, in The Big Bug Man, an animated film.
Though he enjoyed imagining other careers for himself, Brando also knew that acting was the thing that he could do. His singular ability to impersonate, ennoble, and delight had earned him accolades that would extend far beyond his death. Peers turned out for the sale of his books, papers, and personal memorabilia in greater numbers than curators had seen for other actors’ estates—a tribute to his standing among actors.28 During the 2008 presidential campaign, when asked to identify their favorite movies, both John McCain and Barack Obama named Brando films. That the two candidates could not have been more different—from a cultural, class, and generational standpoint—was a tribute to Brando’s iconic longevity as well as his wide-ranging appeal. This was underlined by their choices: McCain cited Viva Zapata!, reflecting that Republican’s multiculturalism and personal ethic of self-sacrifice; Obama picked The Godfather, affirming the broad appeal of the film’s patriarchal mythology, that a black boy raised by a single white mother in Hawaii could cherish the same compromised familial ideal as any other American.29
Their responses illustrate the continuing importance of an actor whose contributions to theater and film have been widely recognized by other actors and appreciated by large audiences but rarely well understood. For much of his career, Brando was favored by history and his enormous talent was enabled by a combination of factors. Brando’s historical afterlife may prove equally propitious, for there is no actor whose performances are more susceptible to the close study afforded by new technology.
HIS ACTING
One factor that makes Brando’s acting enduring and explains its importance for fellow actors is the sheer heterogeneity of the roles he played. In some films, such as Viva Zapata!, The Teahouse of the August Moon, The Young Lions, Candy, The Godfather, and The Formula, he was virtually unrecognizable, playing characters from other cultures—Mexico, Okinawa, India—or wearing makeup that almost completely altered his features. He experimented with accents and labored, through imitation or research, at the specifics of each one: the Southern accents, all of them distinctive, he used for Sayonara, The Chase, and Reflections in a Golden Eye; the German accents of The Young Lions and Morituri; the Irish accents of The Nightcomers and The Missouri Breaks; the British accents of Désirée, Mutiny on the Bounty, Burn!, and A Dry White Season.
Though he is somewhat notorious for playing uneducated drifters, the actual number of these figures—Johnny Strabler (The Wild One), Terry Malloy (On the Waterfront), Val Xavier (The Fugitive Kind), Rio (One-Eyed Jacks), Matt Fletcher (The Appaloosa), Bud (Night of the Following Day)—is quite
small. Indeed, his characters in general are rather bookish. Sky Masterson (Guys and Dolls) knows The Good Book better than the missionaries: “The only thing that’s been in more hotel rooms than I have is the Gideon Bible.” Sakini (The Teahouse of the August Moon) is conversant with Eastern and plenty of Western philosophy. Sheriff Calder (The Chase) notes condescendingly that the drunken townies would all be “better off at home reading a book . . . if they can read.”30 And Lee Clayton (The Missouri Breaks) takes bird-watching breathers from his work as a hired assassin, usually with a field guide in hand. In keeping with this postwar era, Brando’s repertoire is full of military figures, though his tended to be more offbeat than usual. He was among the first major actors to play a closeted homosexual (Reflections in a Golden Eye)—in this case a Southern officer teaching at an army base. And by the time he makes his first appearance, Brando’s Colonel Kurtz of Apocalypse Now is dangerously at odds with his vocation. He was frequently outside or above the law, playing outlaws, gamblers, adventurers, mobsters, and thieves, but he also played lawmen, doctors, lawyers, ambassadors, and other officials, including Napoleon and Torquemada.31
In each of these roles, Brando created a distinct character with his own particularities of face, gesture, voice, accent, and gait. Even in A Countess from Hong Kong, where he delivers a wooden performance on a tedious script, with improvisation barred by director Charlie Chaplin, Brando is memorable. He draws the stifling of his own acting into the characterization: Ogden Mears’s rigid movements and tight mouth are natural responses to a life constricted by his father’s oil wealth and a cold, demanding wife. Similarly, Brando’s Mark Antony is a subtle opportunist. A bit too quick in satisfying Caesar—moving to the side of his better ear or darting off on an errand—he displays a cunning that foreshadows his smirk as he turns away from the crowd he has aroused. His Napoleon is quiet and restrained, his ambition conveyed subtly through humorlessness and disinterest in other human beings. There is little here that points back to Stanley Kowalski or forward to Colonel Kurtz.
What is continuous from role to role is technique, as in Brando’s exemplary use of objects. This was understood by David Foster Wallace, who wrote in Infinite Jest that Brando “studied objects with a welder’s eye for those strongest centered seams . . . touched whatever he touched as if it were part of him.”32 Among the effective moments in The Wild One is an improvisation with a quarter. Brando’s costar Mary Murphy recalled the way he toyed catlike with the payment for his beer, pushing it toward her across the counter and then retracting it on the point of contact. This unscripted exchange encapsulated the character’s foundational ambivalence: the playfulness countered by aggression toward the alien world of good citizens.33
“Every object you bring on stage has to tell you about the circumstances of the character you’re playing and the world in which he lives,” Stella Adler exhorted decades of acting students. No one took this more to heart than Brando. This was one of the many insights Adler developed over her enormously influential career as a teacher of actors. Trained in the Yiddish theater, and committed to a pure interpretation of realist acting techniques acquired firsthand from Stanislavski in Paris, Adler’s encounter with Brando in 1943–44 was a meeting of perfectly attuned minds. She was his ideal teacher, he her model student. Some moments in his films seem filmic realizations of her classes. Consider Adler lecturing on hats: “The person who wears a high hat has to know how it lives. . . . Do you know you have to use both hands to put it on? It’s made to be worn straight. The person who wears it has a controlled speech, a controlled walk, a controlled mind.” Now, go watch how Brando, as the aristocratic ship’s officer Fletcher Christian, puts on his hat in the first scene of Mutiny on the Bounty.34
Brando had a knack for making whatever he learned appear instinctive. In the climax of One-Eyed Jacks (the only film Brando directed), Karl Malden as “Dad” Longworth, the former friend and protector of Brando’s “Kid” Rio, pronounces Rio’s gunslinging days “over,” promptly smashing his right hand with a gun butt. Recuperating by the ocean, Rio broods, threading a necklace, recently returned by Louisa, Dad’s stepdaughter, through his maimed fingers. At a certain point he stops, noticing that his fingers bend with the necklace supporting them. In the next scene, a leather contraption has replaced the necklace, as Rio flexes his hand and then takes up his gun again. By the film’s end, the gun hand works well enough for Rio to kill Longworth in a shootout, before riding off with Louisa.
Here, too, Brando manages to illuminate pages worth of characterization and plot through his work with objects. One subtle material detail serves to highlight the character’s ingenuity and instinct for survival, the redemptive aspect of his romantic nature (Rio’s inability to forget the girl yields the “cure”), and the desolation of the nineteenth-century West, so at odds with the American 1950s, where people have so few possessions that everything has to be utilized.
Robert Duvall and Arthur Penn, who worked with Brando in The Chase, recalled watching him create the environment for his character, carefully selecting the props for Sheriff Calder’s office and living room.35 Widely viewed as the lackey of the local oil baron, Calder is slow to counter threats of violence, until all hell breaks loose. Brando’s Calder is forever polishing (a saddle, his shoes) and wiping his hands, physical activity that reinforces his interpretation. In one scene, having just been accused of obsequiousness toward the oil baron, Calder grabs a pipe off the mantel and, deep in thought, rubs the bowl across each cheek in turn, inspecting the residue with care. It’s not clear what he expects to find there, but oil, as in “mineral” and “ingratiating,” is a strong possibility. Robert Duvall also learned from Brando during filming to deemphasize the idea of a beginning. With Brando, Duvall noted, there was no deliberate start to a performance, no end; he talked as he moved onto the set, as if the scene were part of an ongoing conversation.36 He eliminated the border between behaving and acting.
“The great moments of emotion are signalized by some ordinary, small, natural movement,” writes Stanislavski in An Actor Prepares. Advancing a technique that is “natural, intuitive, and complete,” he asserts that “strong tragic moments” are reached “through the truth of physical actions.”37 Brando owned this book and others by Stanislavski and referred to them on occasion.38 But he seems to have encountered such ideas, as he did much of what Stella Adler taught, as confirmation of deep convictions. The seeds were there; they just needed watering.
To those who knew him well, he gave the impression, beyond the energy and impulsiveness, of wisdom. If there was such a thing as an actor type, he was it: a close observer of all forms of life, a night owl who hated getting up before noon, sexually promiscuous, resistant to authority and convention. And he had what is referred to as “the actor’s mask”—a high forehead accentuated over time by a receding hairline, with eyes set wide apart and back beneath the brow. This physiognomic detail made Brando’s eyes at once more noticeable and more mysterious. People occasionally mistook them for brown or hazel. Truman Capote, who prided himself on his photographic memory, recalled Brando’s eyes as “caffé-espresso color.” In fact, they were a striking blue-gray, their depth and richness making them uniquely hospitable to photography and film.39
It is a notable coincidence that Paul Klee’s famous work Actor’s Mask was painted in 1924, the year of Brando’s birth. The actor’s mask, according to Klee, reflects both blankness and turmoil. The face discloses little, but the lines suggesting a variety of frequencies confirm much activity within. As Klee wrote, “The mask represents art, and behind it hides man.”40 Brando would have understood this. He was fascinated by masks and studied them for the acting classes he gave in 2001, distinguishing “the masks we wear without masks” from the elaborate ritual apparel worn across time and place.41 He observed a decade earlier that “storytelling is a basic part of every human culture—people have always had a need to participate emotionally in stories—and so the actor has probably played an important
part in every society. But he should never forget that it is the audience that really does the work . . . every theatrical event, from those taking place in Stone Age caves to Punch-and-Judy shows and Broadway plays, can produce an emotional participation from the audience, who become the actors in the drama.”42
The actor as Brando conceives him is a vehicle for the emotions of his audience. He was only sometimes a vehicle of his own, and the audience was not to know when this was or was not the case. Brando was sparing in his use of personal experience for affect in his performances. In this way, among others, he followed Stella Adler. The complexity of Brando’s approach to the world, his deep grasp of his own motivations and those of others, makes him a perilous subject for biographers. Many have fallen into the pits he so artfully constructed.
But Brando also left a significant trail with many clues to his thoughts and beliefs. He clearly recognized his own stature, that his work would generate interest for years to come. He seems to have meant his book marginalia to be read: In places where the scrawl is illegible, he rewrites the words above those that are indecipherable. An idiosyncrasy perhaps. One can imagine him playing audience to his own pearls of wisdom, taking himself down a peg for poor penmanship, or for haughty intellectualism, as he listens in on his own dialogue with a book’s author.
Yet it is consistent with a larger habit of preservation, the passion for ordering his things, which he was able to realize after moving to Hollywood. Every assistant who worked for him was impressed by his zeal for order, exemplified by the fact that almost every book in Brando’s vast library had a number and location.43 The organization of his music, scripts, papers, and books was undoubtedly a counter to the chaotic personal life, the endless women and romantic affairs, the marriages arranged to legitimate children, and the legal wrangling they precipitated. It also demonstrates a fundamental truth about Brando: Despite his peripatetic life, and appetite for novelty, he was in crucial respects a creature of habit, with a deep center of gravity. He usually knew what he wanted, even if that might change so radically from one moment to the next as to make him appear completely indecisive.