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

  Brando’s extraordinary sensitivity to others’ pain was reinforced by Dodie’s alcoholism, which became severe in Evanston. Possibly it was his inability to help her that directed his attention to those he felt he could help. At the same time, he was aware of her compassion; when sober, she was devoted to good works. Later in life, after time spent at Alcoholics Anonymous and in 1947 at Yale’s Center of Alcohol Studies, she became a dedicated counselor to other alcoholics. Thus she not only taught him about suffering but showed how to do something about it.20

  Still, the cure was a long way off in those years in Evanston, as the Brando marriage crumbled under the pressure of Dodie’s alcoholism and Brando Sr.’s womanizing. They decided on a trial separation in 1936, and the family moved into an apartment at 524 Sheridan Square, where Brando Sr. remained after Dodie took the children to Santa Ana, California.21 In Santa Ana, they lived with Bess, who had settled there to be near her daughter Betty and sisters June and Vine. The California respite had little effect on Dodie’s drinking, however. She drank even more, disappearing for several days at a time, returning with abject apologies and promises to reform she could not keep. Bess’s faith in Christian Science’s healing powers apparently faltered in the face of her daughter’s devastating addiction. Yet the children seemed to bloom with distance from their father, Marlon Jr. in particular.

  Brando and his mother picnicking, 1930s. From Photofest.

  Years later, Franny summarized the Brando children’s perspective on their parents: “The Terror of Our Father,” “The Wound of Our Mother.”22 A punitive man whose response to a chaotic childhood was the overvaluation of order and authority, Brando Sr. was destined to clash with his freedom-loving namesake. Though he could be charming and had a sense of humor, his children mostly experienced him as forbidding and remote. Critical by nature and by the example of his father Eugene, Brando Sr. resented what he couldn’t understand or control, which his son, who had inherited his mother’s instincts, epitomized. The father focused on the son’s inadequacies and the son obliged, failing at school and indulging his wild side. While they shared traits and a physical resemblance, their relationship was remarkable for its lack of affinity. Brando disdained salesmanship above all else, and the father’s contempt for acting was something the son never quite overcame. At the age of thirty-one, freshly minted Oscar in hand, Brando sat with his father for an interview with Edward R. Murrow. Responding to Murrow’s question of whether he was proud of his son, Marlon Sr. replied, “As an actor, not too proud, as a man, well, quite proud.”23 The highly controlled actor, familiar with every muscle in his face, could not conceal a wince when his father denied feeling pride in his son’s professional accomplishment.24

  Marlon Brando Sr., 1930. Reproduced by permission of Brando Enterprises, LP.

  Nor was there pride in Brando’s athletic prowess, no memories of chores shared or skills transmitted. It seems uncanny that the one unmistakable sign of paternal affection was conveyed through a camera lens. Brando Sr. was a devoted amateur photographer who did his own developing and created an extraordinary visual record of his son’s childhood.25 Towheaded in the family garden at three, on his first pony in Evanston at six, outfitted as a cowboy at eight, picnicking with his mother at ten, leaping over fences and swimming in the ocean at eleven, fighting with his sisters at thirteen, the high schooler atop his beloved horse Peavine Frenzy—these images not only picture a boy at home in nature and in love with the power of his body; they also represent a face and physique that was camera-ready from the outset and accustomed to posing for one.

  Brando Sr.’s regular photographing of his son becomes all the more relevant to the fact that Brando obliged so many major American and European photographers. There was hardly a significant cameraman, or camerawoman, of the era, it seems, who failed to photograph him. The list of those who caught Brando in their lenses reads like a who’s who of notables in the field, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon, Margaret Bourke-White, Carl Van Vechten, Philippe Halsman, John Engstead, Ruth Orkin, Edward Clark, Ronny Jaques, Leo Fuchs, and Sid Avery.

  Brando at age ten. From Photofest.

  Brando in Evanston, age eight. © Bettmann/Corbis.

  Marlon Brando Sr. playing chess on the set of One-Eyed Jacks with Marlon Brando Jr. standing nearby. Photograph and image of Marlon Brando reproduced by permission of Brando Enterprises, LP.

  One passion father and son shared was chess. A photograph from One-Eyed Jacks pictures Brando Sr. engaged in an intense game, his son standing above the board, Brando’s longtime friend and fellow actor, Sam Gilman, the opposing player. Chess was a preferred pastime for Brando; he smuggled boards into many film scenes, and there are photographs of him playing on numerous sets. But it seems especially appropriate that this film about fathers and sons, the only film Brando directed, and for which he was so responsible (starring, directing, and writing story and scripts), afforded an image of Brando Sr. playing chess behind the scenes.

  Brando turned the bulk of his money over to his father, as soon as he began making it on Broadway, and hired him to work for the film company that he began in the 1950s and named Pennebaker for his mother. Trusting his father with his earnings, and hiring him as an employee, both showed the attachment that accompanied his rage at this father who had beaten him.

  He also demonstrated an instinctive awareness that he would never be whole until he worked through his anger. In a long conversation about acting in the early 1980s, Brando told Michael Jackson: “The day Christian [Brando’s first son] was born I said to myself my father is never going to come near him. I didn’t want my father because of the damage he did to me to get near Christian, and it was a mistake because my father by that time had changed. But I hadn’t changed. But by the time he died I forgave him and expressed love for him. . . . I realized I can’t live off of hatred, you can’t do it, you have to live off of love. It was so hard for me to give that up.” Brando’s genius was that he learned to make use of that overwhelming rage. “If I have a scene to play and I have to be angry, I can remember my father hitting me. . . .”26

  As a youth, Brando challenged his father only once. Brando Sr. had retrieved Dodie from a bar where he had found her on a drinking spree; returning home, he had taken her up to their bedroom and begun slapping her. An adolescent at the time, Brando found himself unable to endure the familiar scene and stormed into the room. Filled with adolescent strength and outrage, Brando declared that he would not allow his father to hit his mother again. Unwilling to battle his son, and probably ashamed, his father backed down and left the room.27 In the one adult confrontation Brando had with his father, a couple of years before Brando Sr. died, the son “took him through our lives” and told him “what he’d done to my sisters, our mother, me.” But his empathy for his father was evident in the fact that he spared Brando Sr. one of his deepest convictions: that Brando Sr. was responsible for their mother’s early death and the heavy alcoholism that precipitated it. As a young actor in Manhattan, Brando recalled an incident from boyhood when his father had awakened him in the middle of the night to go along to fetch his mother from a bar. The father’s obvious aim was to humiliate the mother by exposing her binge publicly to her son. But the father’s strategy backfired as usual: Brando sided with his mother’s vulnerability; years later, simply recalling what Brando Sr. had done made him furious.28

  The two years in California away from his father (who stayed in Evanston) during his parents’ trial separation (1936–1938) were good ones for Brando. At Santa Ana’s Lathrop Junior High School, he excelled as an athlete, winning a school decathlon championship and earning three letters in track and basketball. He also set a school record by doing a thousand consecutive push-ups. He would have done more had the coach not stopped him, afraid that the boy might have a heart attack. Another rare memory of doing something for which he was praised came from Lathrop. After Brando made a screwdriver out of metal, he recalled the satisfaction he felt and the pride because the s
hop teacher commended his work.29

  Brando had yet another momentous revelation on the train ride back to the Midwest after his mother reconciled with her husband and they headed to a new family home in Libertyville, Illinois, another Chicago suburb. Now fourteen, Brando was struck by the rhythm of the train and headed to the vestibule between the cars so he could feel the wheels rattling across the steel joints of the track. Spontaneously, he began to pound his hands against the doors and walls in time with the beat of the train. He became an avid drummer as a result. He was probably unfamiliar with the train-simulating rhythm sections of the Cotton Club orchestras headed by Duke Ellington and Count Basie, which mimed locomotives to form a tight rhythmic unit for the rest of the orchestra. But the inspiration he drew from the train was a sign of his musicality, reinforced by his sister Jocelyn’s recollection of how impressed she was by a performance of his teenage band, Keg Brando and his Kegliners.

  REBELLION: LIBERTYVILLE AND SHATTUCK

  The family’s life in Libertyville was as mixed as it had been in Omaha and Evanston. A small farming town, it was a place where people knew one another’s business, and Dodie soon became notorious as a drunk, while Marlon Sr. continued to indulge in whiskey and adultery during his travels for work. Fellow students, particularly girls, noted the savoir-faire handsomeness of the new freshman at Libertyville Township High School. Still, Brando was tainted as a lowly farm kid (though they weren’t farmers and didn’t have antecedents as such) whose truancy and contempt for rules reinforced a general conviction that he was unmanageable.

  Some of the reason for his behavior had to do with home. The Brandos rented a house on a horse farm on the outskirts of Libertyville, and Brando would typically trudge home from school to find the place empty. He developed a strategy that he would draw on throughout his life, turning to animals for companionship. He had always had a “St. Francis” quality: sensing a companion spirit, animals were drawn to him. The Brando menagerie in Libertyville included the horse Peavine Frenzy; a Great Dane named Dutchy; a Bantam rooster named Charlie Chaplin; and Betsey, the cow Brando milked twice a day. He recalled that the barn cats would congregate nearby, their mouths hanging open, so he could squirt milk straight from the udder into their mouths.

  Brando would often stay home on the farm, cutting classes to read through his mother’s library—poetry, Shakespeare, philosophy, religion, and the occasional novel when it proved useful. His 1924 Modern Library edition of Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems dates from around this period. The first layer of commentary is in pencil, a second in pen; there is scansion, basic interpretation (beside “The heart asks pleasure first,” he writes, “when young”), and a recognition of poetic aspects with which he identified (“About herself,” he observes of the line “Much madness is divinest sense,” “Non conformest”).30 Having read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he would quote from it while pursuing girls, whom he sometimes enlisted to pick up books for him. These seemingly contradictory traits—truant and reader—came naturally and helped to support another deep urge—keeping people off balance and mystified about who he was.31

  Particularly as an adolescent, he liked to do quasi-sociological experiments. One girlfriend he sent on a book errand was Carmelita Pope, whom he met while visiting Jocelyn at a summer-stock theater in Lake Zurich, Illinois. He once arrived at her house for a date with a phonograph record on his head, and he kept it there the whole evening. She wasn’t sure whether he was testing the reactions of people to him or his own capacity for withstanding them. It was clear to her that Brando, even at fifteen, was unusual. That’s why she believed the story he fabricated to persuade her to buy him books: He told her that he was laid up with a broken leg after falling off a roof trying to retrieve pigeon eggs. Pope remembered his long stays at her Chicago home, where her Italian-Catholic family became a refuge for him. Her mother was welcoming and would feed him; her father had acted in vaudeville with the Orpheum Circuit to pay his way through law school and later helped the FBI pursue organized-crime figures in Chicago. Brando would sit for hours listening to his stories about such Mafiosi as Al Capone and Sam Giancana. Brando never reciprocated with invitations to his house, hinting darkly at his mother’s drinking and his father’s philandering, but he remembered his debt to the Popes after he became successful on Broadway. When he and Carmelita were acting in New York and her parents came to town, he always insisted on taking them out.

  As teenagers, Brando and Carmelita got drunk together for the first time, on a jug of red wine, and she remembers the dogfight he staged for her in the middle of the night, mimicking the barks of different breeds. While her main concern was the sleeping household, the mimicry was superb. But acting was a distant prospect; he would visit Pope backstage when she performed at the Lake Zurich Playhouse and wondered what she saw in it, an indifference she reminded him of when she understudied Kim Hunter opposite him in Streetcar. However, reading was something he always took seriously. He once offered her ten dollars to read a book he was keen on, a philosophy tome by Bertrand Russell, which she read uncomprehendingly—and for naught, since he forgot his promise.32

  The book habit continued at Shattuck Military Academy, the Minnesota military school his father had attended, where he was reading Kant and Schopenhauer and had “more books than even an A student would have in his room.” Indeed, when Brando was consigned to detention for misbehavior or failing grades, he spent most of the time reading: about Polynesia in National Geographic or Shakespeare’s plays, nourishing a fascination with remote cultures and with language.33

  In sending his seventeen-year-old son to the academy, Marlon Sr. devised a characteristically tough solution that was destined to fail. A great observer with a powerful mind and unlimited curiosity, Marlon Jr. was clearly capable, despite his dyslexia, of learning in the right environment. His aversion to hierarchy made military school the least likely place to unlock his potential. In a sign of how much potential he had, Shattuck turned out to be rather enabling. Yet because he had continuously resisted schooling, there were gaps in his education that embarrassed him and foiled the prospect of his graduation.

  When Brando entered Shattuck in September 1941 over Dodie’s objections—she recognized military school as the last place where her troubled but sensitive son would flourish—he was a sophomore because he had failed that grade in Libertyville. His letters home identified his favorite subjects as geometry and Latin American history and emphasized his desire to make good academically. They reveal that he greatly misses the animals, as well as his grandmother, Bess, whom he asks after and to whom he writes directly. Brando also worries about his mother, expressing repeated concern when a friend’s imminent departure will sadden her. He seems eager to placate his father and also prevent him from visiting—making a strong case for why he should not attend the academy’s 1942 graduation ceremonies.

  The most striking aspect of the letters from Shattuck is Brando’s feeling for language. Even earlier, he had been a bit of a wordsmith, making lists of words he found rare or surprising, a pastime shared with his pal Wally Cox. In a letter to his sister Jocelyn and her husband, Don Hanmer, who was in the army, Brando wrote, “I have some favorite words that I think are beautiful. ‘Minnetonka, Fondelayo, lush, golden, soft, Sharon (I might name one of my kids that), yotaomo.’ I can’t remember any more. I am learning many new and glorious speeches from Shakespeare.” The sixteen-year-old Brando offers advice to his older sister and brother-in-law from Antigone: “Let be the future, mind the present need, and leave the rest to whom the rest concerns.” But he mocks his own literary pretensions, describing himself as “full of fiery enthusiasms, tact, a great amount of knowledge of how life goes for a lad of my years,” concluding, “I go now, into the depths of profound thoughts.”34

  Although he would always be a poor speller, over time he acquired a vast vocabulary. One method Brando used is indicated by his copy of The Brothers Karamazov, where he underlined, apparently, every unfamiliar word. He also m
arked, among other things, the translator’s description of Dostoevsky: “The shy, unknown youth found himself instantly something of a celebrity. A brilliant and successful career seemed to open before him, but these hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he was arrested.”35

  His respect for language and conviction of his own limitations in relationship to it was something Brando never lost. He wrote in a notebook sometime in the early sixties: “So here I am, in the middle way having had twenty years largely wasted the years of l’entre des guerres trying to learn to use words and every attempt is a wholly new start and a diffreent kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words for the thing one no longer has to say or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture is a new beginning a raid on the inarticulate—with shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feelings, undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer by strength and submission has already been discovered once or twice by men who one cannot hope to emulate.” Beneath these reflections is a typical selection of titles and phrases separated by tag signs, including: “#Burnt Norton/#and call this day Good friday/#I can’t imagine that Christ could have taught you that.”36

  While at Shattuck, Brando sketched a clean profile for his parents and grandmother of the resolute young man struggling to stay afloat amid great challenges, but his profound alienation from the place came through. In one letter from 1942 to his parents, he reports that he had made the Crack Squad, the school’s highly prestigious drill team, and he says that it made him “realize more than ever how far from an honor it is too me. I don’t give a damn for football teams, swimming teams, and crack squads. . . . I have set my goals and I am hard at them. . . . Duke [the English teacher] has help me a great deal. We have been studying men like Ben Johnson (who at 18 translated Pope’s ‘Messiah’ into Latin verse) and men like Sam Richardson. A study of these men’s lives has made me realize what excruciating mental work it takes to get to the sort of development that they did.” He writes to his grandmother in February of that year: “I’ve got lots and lots of questions to ask you about the life stuff. Being up here has given me an opportunity to figure it out for myself, and although I’ve done well (I think) there are still a lot of answers that I’d like to put the finger on.” He writes in an April letter that he has been “busier than a cat on a hot tin roof” (invoking a colloquial expression—Williams’s 1955 play was years away) and that “spring is here with all her intoxicating facalties.” He wonders whether they have “been to the woods lately” and asks them to “tell me about the animals.”37