Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work Read online

  Great-Aunt June in the Midwest, photographed by Marlon Brando Jr. Reproduced by permission of Brando Enterprises, LP.

  During one of his sojourns in New York City, Dr. Gahan trained with Dr. J. H. Salisbury, an early advocate of the low-carbohydrate diet and inventor of the “Salisbury steak.” Dr. Gahan returned to Grand Island and promoted the diet, and some patients boarded at his home to observe the regimen. Among them, according to June, was “a very talented, brilliant attorney named Edelstein who was tubercular, and he lived on that diet in our house for about five years.” Edelstein was probably the first Jew hosted by the clan, and his presence signaled a bohemian openness shared by three generations of Gahans, Pennebaker-Myerses, and Brandos. Of all the Gahan tendencies, none was more pronounced than their fascination with non-Western religion and philosophy. Dr. Gahan “dabbled in every ism that was ever known,” including Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy, and he believed in reincarnation.

  Bess Gahan shared her father’s freedom of thought and found a congenial spirit of adventure in the handsome William John Pennebaker, whom she met in a rooming house in Cripple Creek, Colorado, where she was visiting with her sisters in 1896. Bess was twenty and Will was twenty-eight, and her sister June believed that Bess was simply smitten with the idea “that a man that old would fall for her.” It was obvious what Bess found appealing in Will, an amateur actor, explorer, and gold prospector who, according to relatives, looked a lot like Marlon Brando Jr.4 Bess and Will married and their daughter Dodie was born in 1897, like her future husband in the month of January, in Grand Island, where Bess and Will were living. Will soon developed tuberculosis and died in 1899. Bess chose a career instead of settling down as a single mother with her two-year-old daughter. Dodie was sent to live with her grandmother, Julia, and her second husband, O. O. Hefner, in Platte Precinct, Nebraska. Bess moved to Omaha and became secretary to Omaha attorney J. L. Webster, who had famously defended Standing Bear, chief of the Ponca tribe, a case that culminated in US citizenship for Indians. Webster saw the spark in Bess and encouraged her reading and outspokenness on social issues: civil rights for immigrants and blacks, and voting rights for women.

  Bess’s second marriage, in 1905, to Frank Myers, a staid, taciturn Omaha businessman, facilitated the reunion with her eight-year-old daughter Dodie and allowed her to pursue her own goals, among them continuing work with Webster.5 Dodie was thrilled to be back with Bess, and Frank Myers intruded little upon the communion of mother and daughter. But the six years of separation from her mother (Dodie spent the last two at a Catholic boarding school) had taken a toll, and her own daughters later speculated that the interlude might have stimulated her genetic predisposition toward alcoholism.6

  In addition to being “an individual and a renegade” with an outrageous sense of humor, Bess practiced Christian Science’s healing touch.7 While she did not pass this skill on to Dodie, its impact on her grandson is evident. Among the dozens of Bibles in Brando’s library, the most heavily annotated—almost every page—was the “Christian Science Bible,” Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health. The impact of this tactile healing method on Brando—a man whose lovers often marveled at his touch, and whose silent expressiveness was a mainstay of his career as an actor—appears to have been especially pronounced.8 (He would later read books on biofeedback and note how the mind can influence the body.)9 Bess and Dodie were both readers and spent hours discussing books; they also took singing and piano lessons. Dodie also shared Bess’s enthusiasm for liberal causes. Even as a mother of small children in the 1920s, when initiatives she cared about were on the state ballot—from improvement of child labor laws and the education of unwed mothers to the reform of health and safety standards, and better conditions for migrant workers—Dodie drove around Nebraska in a dilapidated jalopy giving speeches and handing out pamphlets. Under her mother’s guidance, Dorothy Pennebaker Myers grew into a vivacious young woman, considered talented and beautiful by peers, with dark blonde hair, deep-set blue eyes, and a personality as eccentric and independent as Bess’s.

  Marlon Brando Sr. had also grown up in Omaha. In the fall of 1909, he entered Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota, where he was a model soldier and excelled at sports. Military school was his own choice, motivated perhaps by a desire to remove the taint of a childhood dominated by women. When his money ran out, he transferred to Omaha’s public Central High School, where he met Dodie in the fall of 1911. He was seventeen and she was fifteen and it seems to have been an attraction of opposites. Marlon Sr. was tall and handsome, with “a strong masculine presence” but naturally shy.10 His resolve and desire for acceptance seemed an appropriate counter to Dodie’s disordered past, while he was drawn to her joie de vivre and independence. Both harbored overwhelming insecurities that would make their future together so tumultuous: Marlon Sr.’s distrust and resentment toward women stemming from his mother’s flight and the coldness of his aunts; Dodie’s own experience of how unreliable intimates could be. Their only son would note that neither of his parents knew how to be affectionate toward their offspring.

  Dodie and Marlon Sr. (now an army engineer posted on the West Coast) married in Portland, Oregon, on June 22, 1918. When peace was declared five months later, the Brandos settled in San Francisco, where Jocelyn, their first daughter, was born in 1919. By the time their second daughter, Frances, was born in 1922, they were back in Omaha, renting part of a house owned by Dodie’s stepfather. In the US Census from 1920, Marlon Sr.’s profession was listed as phone company salesman, and he was doing well enough to afford a servant, though he may have depended on the largesse of his in-laws. Given his ambition, fired by the many slights he believed he had to overcome, it’s unlikely that Marlon Sr. could have done anything well enough to satisfy himself. It’s also true, however, that while he managed to keep his family housed, clothed, and fed throughout the Depression, he was never particularly successful, which may help to explain why he was so hard on his namesake, who came along two years after Frances.

  OMAHA ORIGINS

  In 1924, the Brando family was living in a wood-shingled house on Omaha’s Mason Street, lined with identical middle-class homes and elm trees. Brando Sr. was working for a limestone products company as a salesman and was often on the road. When Brando was two, the family moved in with Bess on Thirty-Second Street. She had room because Frank had decamped (amicably) to his downtown club, and Dodie’s half sister Betty (with whom Dodie was close) was at college. The home of Brando’s early years was in some respects vital and nourishing. He was a sunny infant and child, although willful, and liable if thwarted to hold his breath until he turned blue. This only frightened strangers, since Jocelyn and Frances grew accustomed to it.

  “Bud,” as he was called from the beginning to distinguish him from his father, spent a lot of time outdoors with his sisters—he was closest to Franny—free to roam the neighborhood and adjacent woods. A photograph of the Brando children in the spacious yard at their grandmother’s house, ages eight, five, and three, respectively, shows three neatly dressed children remarkably similar in their blond good looks.11 Brando was always sturdy and athletic, climbing trees, pursuing adventures, and he recalled those early years as relatively peaceful. The most powerful attribute shared by the Brando children was a sense of humor. This was a quality they identified with their parents, Grandmother Bess, and indeed most of their relatives. Brando’s sisters remember his humor as especially infectious, even in a family of wits. The home was filled with pet dogs, chickens, geese, and cats, and the children also spent hours watching the monkeys that were kept by a neighbor in greenhouses down the street. Brando’s penchant for protecting and indulging animals was early evident. When his Irish wolfhound named Pat bit an Omaha neighbor and the neighbor beat the dog with a stick, he and Franny retaliated by sneaking into the neighbor’s kitchen and pouring salt everywhere. Brando’s nephew recalled a story his uncle told about another pet, Toto, an enormous St. Bernard that he had in the 1960s and nam
ed ironically after the miniature canine star of The Wizard of Oz. Brando was giving a dinner for some Hollywood guests, and his housekeeper had left the main dish on the kitchen counter. When Brando went to get the roast, he found the platter empty, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Toto heading out the back door. Brando ran after him and wrestled the roast away, put it back on the platter, poured gravy over the dents made by the dog’s teeth, and served it to his guests.12

  Jocelyn, Franny, and Marlon in Bess’s yard, Omaha, 1927. Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images.

  The Brando children played typical games: rummy, poker, and chess, challenging each other to endless physical contests. Jocelyn remembered a “cowboys and Indians” chess set a family friend had carved for the children, with tepees and ranch houses for pawns and ranch cooks for bishops.13 One game they played regularly as children was a form of charades called “Essences.” A player picked someone and had to describe the person by answering questions from other players, such as, “What kind of a day is this person?” or “What kind of a house?”

  Years later, Brando asked his sister Jocelyn for a character sketch to help him write his autobiography, and she followed the “Essence” grid to describe her brother. “What kind of water—a beaver pond”; “What kind of bird—woodpecker with a peacock’s tail”; “What kind of instrument—microscope”; “What kind of chemical element—mercury”; “What kind of sport—judo or kickboxing”; “What kind of weapon—boomerang”; What kind of sound—owl or train whistle in the night”; “What kind of playing card—joker”; “What kind of reptile—chameleon”; “What kind of dog—mastiff and bulldog mix”; “What kind of tree—ironwood”; “What kind of store—hardware”; “What kind of nationality—homesick Gypsy.”14

  Dodie was at her best in Omaha. She had apparently inherited the acting bug from her father Will, and here she was able to exercise her talent for theater and other arts. Dodie thrived at the Omaha Community Playhouse, where she helped launch the career of Henry Fonda by intervening with his father, who was appalled by the prospect of his son becoming an actor. Aware that good acting derives from behavior rather than display, Dodie also knew how to inhabit roles and feel her way into different states of being, impressing Omaha audiences with renditions of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion (her Cockney accent was reportedly perfect), Ruth Atkins in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, and Laura Pennington in Pinero’s The Enchanted Cottage. Jocelyn’s one memory of watching her mother act was of sitting on the lap of Fonda, who had hoisted the small child up so she could see Dodie starring in Pygmalion. Dodie’s immersion in the theater was confirmed by Marlon Sr.’s occasional participation. When he wasn’t traveling for work, he sometimes helped build sets, even appearing once or twice in a play. Dodie was multitalented, according to Jocelyn. “She sculpted well, she wrote well. She read everything . . . she was an excellent actress. We judged from all the parts that she had.” Her son, who earned fame in her avocation, had a file of every playbill, notice, and review that mentioned his mother’s work in the Omaha Community Playhouse.15

  Dodie Brando in newspaper photo, Omaha Playhouse, 1925.

  Dodie created a festive Bohemian atmosphere at Bess’s, which became a gathering place for local artists. Bernard Szold, director of the community playhouse, and his wife Betty were frequent visitors and brought along their friend the artist Edgar Britton; Frances Brando remembers meeting the puppeteer Bil Baird (whose mother and Bess grew up together in Grand Island) with his marionettes on a family vacation in Iowa. Baird and Britton joined their social circle once the Brandos moved to Evanston, Illinois, with radio people and writers added to the mix.

  The festive atmosphere also depended on alcohol, and Dodie’s growing dependence, which Marlon Sr. shared but handled better, was from her son’s birth a significant factor in their lives. Contradictions abounded. This was a family that dosed the children with cod liver oil but throughout Prohibition brewed beer in basement laundry tubs and gin in the bathtub. Marlon Sr. was an upright citizen who believed in discipline, such as putting the children to bed early and feeding them in the kitchen until they acquired proper table manners. He beat his son for misbehavior, yet he drank and consorted with prostitutes when he traveled for work. Dodie hosted Christmas parties where relatives dressed as Santa Claus and taffy pulls for the children and their friends. But she was so unpredictable when on a drinking jag that it became essential for the family to have regular housekeepers. An indifferent mother herself, Bess was not an appropriate substitute, though the children adored her and basked in the attention she was able to give them.

  Brando with Grandmother Bess Myers while filming The Men. Ed Clark/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

  Brando in Evanston with sister Franny. Archive Photos/Getty Images.

  The governess who made the biggest impression on Brando was Ermi. With dark hair and complexion, the attractive eighteen-year-old, of Danish and Indonesian extraction, lived with the family from when he was four until he was seven. Ermi, perhaps because of her personality or her culture, was relaxed about physicality. She bathed and slept with the young boy, both of them nude. While Brando’s prodigious sexual appetites came naturally—Marlon Sr. and Dodie were very passionate and each also had adulterous affairs, though his were more frequent—they seem to have had some influence from this early intimacy with Ermi. Throughout his life, he demonstrated a nearly inviolable preference for brunettes, and almost all of his longstanding romances were with women of ancestries different from his own Anglo-Saxon and Irish ethnicity: Asian, East Indian, Hispanic, black, Jewish.

  SCHOOLING IN EVANSTON AND SANTA ANA

  Ermi accompanied the family in their move from Omaha to Evanston, when Brando was six, which was critical because of Dodie’s difficulty with the transition. Though she surrounded herself in the affluent Chicago suburb with another lively bohemian crowd, and was compensated with summers at theater camps with her children, the loss of the Omaha Playhouse was incalculable. The move was precipitated by a significant promotion for Marlon Sr. to become manager of the Chicago office of the Calcium Carbonate Company, which allowed the family to rent a respectable home at 1044 Judson Street, in the Lincoln Elementary School district. Brando had already shown himself to be a dismal student in his two years at Omaha’s Field Elementary School, where he was the only child in the class to fail kindergarten. He was apparently dyslexic, though it must have been mild because he was reading by the time he entered the Evanston school. Indeed, reading was second nature for the Brando children; they went regularly to the public library in Evanston, both sisters were great readers, and books were the most typical of the gifts they exchanged. From a relatively early age, Brando was partly making up for what he missed at school with reading. What he resented most about school was the regimentation and demand for submission to authority. Around this time, Brando’s slight stammer was treated in a speech clinic at Northwestern University.

  Another passion of the Brando children in Evanston was going to the movies. “Every Saturday we saw the westerns and comedies at the Main [Cinema]; on Sundays we were usually allowed to go to the Varsity, Valencia or Howard theaters,” recalled Franny. “We three got to be pretty good at Tarzan yodels. Bud had a complete cowpoke outfit and could become a very authentic little cowboy with a wonderful swagger.” One of the actors Brando might have seen during this period was the great British character actor Robert Donat (The Count of Monte Cristo, 1934; The 39 Steps, 1935), who was already a favorite of his when he arrived in New York at the age of nineteen.16

  Brando spent six years at Lincoln School, where his fondness for girls and means of expressing interest were already marked by a characteristic seductiveness, originality, and tendency to misspell. Signing the back of one girl’s sixth-grade class photograph, he wrote: “Yours till the ocaen wears rubber pants to keep its botton dry. Lot’s of luck Buddy Brando.” He did not fare well academically but made good friends in Jeff Ferguson and Wally Cox, to whom he remained close
for life. Cox was like a brother to Brando, and he got to know Jocelyn and Franny well. Sensitive and literate, with maverick intelligences that could not be satisfied at school, Brando and Cox were both from unstable families with severely alcoholic mothers. At Lincoln, Brando defended the diminutive Cox from bullies, while they enjoyed each other’s offbeat senses of humor, experimented with words, and invented languages. One of their favorite activities was taking long hikes in the woods, where they examined plants, trees, and insects and often carried their treasures home. When they were both living in Los Angeles as adults, they resumed their childhood pleasure, wandering in the ample woods around Brando’s Mulholland Drive home. Brando kept until he died the walking sticks he and Cox collected on their sojourns.17

  Lincoln Elementary School, Evanston, Sixth Grade, 1935–1936. Brando is in front row, far right. Courtesy of the Lincoln School, Evanston, Illinois.

  Brando’s first mash note, 1936. Reproduced by permission of Brando Enterprises, LP.

  Though the friendship was special, Brando’s defense of Cox was typical of a humanitarian courage that became more pronounced over time. Like his intellectual curiosity, Brando’s altruism was both encouraged and modeled by his grandmother and mother. He befriended the lone black children at Lincoln School whom many tacitly ignored, and he was upset by his fourth-grade teacher’s punitive response. Brando was distressed enough to remember (almost) the teacher’s name as Mrs. Miles. It was actually Mrs. Milar, and she was renowned at the school as a disciplinarian.18 As a boy he regularly brought home sick or starving animals, and even people in distress, among them a woman he found lying on the street. His sister Frances inscribed a copy of the Tao Te Ching “For my dear, large-hearted brother,” and those who knew him confirmed this attribute.19