Brando (18 page)

   After I returned from Paris, there were a lot of proposals for new plays and movies, and I accepted one of them—a one-picture deal, not a seven-year studio contract. It was
The Men
, a story about a group of paraplegic and quadriplegic soldiers in a California Veterans Hospital after World War II. The producer was Stanley Kramer, and the director was Fred Zinnemann. The script by Carl Foreman was a good one. I played a young army lieutenant, Ken Wilocek, whose spine had been smashed by a German sniper’s bullet in the closing days of the war. I had no idea what it was like to be confined to a wheelchair or to spend the rest of my life in one, so I asked to be admitted to the Birmingham Veterans Hospital in southern California as a paralyzed veteran with a background similar to Ken Wilocek’s. A few patients and members of the staff were informed, but most of the patients didn’t know I was an actor, and because it was my first movie, no one recognized me. For three weeks I tried to do everything the patients did and learn what their lives were like. The first thing I discovered was that they hated pity. Once we went out for dinner to an Italian restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, all of us in our wheelchairs, and a woman came over and said to us, “I’m so proud of you, boys. I know what you’ve done for your country.”

She kept repeating herself, going on and on while the guys became increasingly uncomfortable. They didn’t want her pity. They weren’t interested in what she had to say; the only thing they wanted to do was enjoy their night out.

“I know you boys will be able to walk someday. You just have to work hard and you’ll do it. I have faith in God that he will help you and you’ll be all right. You’ve got to believe because you are with the Lord and the Lord is with you and will help you.”

They were really getting sick of her, so I said, “You know, ma’am, I believe you. I believe in the Lord.”

“Well,” she said, “I
want
you to believe. You should believe it, soldier, because I know that with the Lord’s work you can recover.”

I said, “I
do
believe! I
do
believe! I feel the Lord has come right into this room and into my body. The Lord is in my body! I feel it …”

I got up and started tap dancing, then ran around the restaurant and sprinted out the door shouting,
“Hallelujah!”

The guys in their wheelchairs cracked up. Unfortunately they didn’t get many laughs. They were young, virile men—some of them seventeen- or eighteen-year-old boys with good brains who were trapped in inoperative bodies and would never be able to move their arms or legs or make love. Many fought like tigers to make the most of their broken bodies; some put paintbrushes in their teeth and created beautiful paintings. But it was excruciatingly difficult; many were upbeat and determined to get on with their lives, while others gave up. Perhaps the saddest aspect of these men was that they believed they had let their wives down; in most cases, they had lost their capacity for
sexual performance, and it ate at them. Some told me that the emotional pain of knowing that their wives did not want to be dishonest and disloyal, yet realizing that eventually they would succumb to temptation, was worse. Some of the friends I made at Birmingham killed themselves, unable to take it anymore.

I don’t know whether making
The Men
had anything to do with it, but when the army tried to draft me for the Korean War, I wasn’t interested. During World War II I’d been ready, but by 1950 I was more savvy about the world—or so I thought. I had read enough to become more skeptical about what my government did in my name.

Notified that my draft status had been changed from 4-F to 1-A, I went to the induction center in New York. I’d had an operation on the knee I injured at Shattuck, and was no longer lame enough to be excluded from the draft. I was given a questionnaire and instructed to fill it out.

Race?

“Human,” I wrote.

Color?

“Seasonal—oyster white to beige.”

When an army doctor asked me if I knew of any reasons why I shouldn’t be inducted into the armed services, I answered, “I’m psychoneurotic.”

He referred me to a psychiatrist, who asked, “Why do you think you are psychoneurotic and unsuitable for military service?”

“I had a very bad history in military school,” I answered, “I don’t respond well to authority and I got kicked out. Besides, I have emotional problems.”

Skeptically the doctor asked if I was being treated for any psychological problems, and I told him that I was seeing Dr. Bela Mittelman.

He gave me a funny look and said, “Who?”

“Bela Mittelman.”

“Bela Mittelman! For Chrissake, where is he?”

I said he had an office down the street about two blocks away.

“I’ll be goddamned,” he said. They were old friends. Then he scribbled on my induction papers: “Not suited for military service.”

We chatted a few more minutes, and then as I was going out the door, he gave me his card and said, “Tell Bela to call me.”

I answered, “He’s in the book, but I’ll tell him …”

And that was why I didn’t go to Korea.

MY SECOND MOTION
picture was
A Streetcar Named Desire
. Although Hollywood censors sapped Tennessee’s story of some of its sting, I thought it was better than the play. Vivien Leigh, who had played Blanche in the London stage production, was brought over from England for the movie, and I’ve always thought it was perfect casting. In many ways she
was
Blanche. She was memorably beautiful, one of the great beauties of the screen, but she was also vulnerable, and her own life had been very much like that of Tennessee’s wounded butterfly. It had paralleled Blanche’s in several ways, especially when her mind began to wobble and her sense of self became vague. Like Blanche, she slept with almost everybody and was beginning to dissolve mentally and to fray at the ends physically. I might have given her a tumble if it hadn’t been for Larry Olivier. I’m sure he knew she was playing around, but like a lot of husbands I’ve known, he pretended not to see it, and I liked him too much to invade his chicken coop.

Making the movie reinforced my decision not to take on another Broadway play. I’ve heard it said that I sold out to Hollywood. In a way it’s true, but I knew exactly what I was doing. I’ve never had any respect for Hollywood. It stands for avarice, phoniness, greed, crassness and bad taste, but when you act in a movie, you only have to work three months a year, then you can do as you please for the rest.

Although I decided not to make another long-term commitment to the stage, I was glad to get back to New York after the filming of
Streetcar
. I lived in an apartment at Sixth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street near Carnegie Hall and dropped in from time to time at the Actors Studio to meet girls. One of them was Marilyn Monroe, who was being exploited by Lee Strasberg. I had first met her briefly shortly after the war and bumped into her again—literally—at a party in New York. While the other people at the party drank and danced, she sat by herself almost unnoticed in a corner, playing the piano. I was talking to someone with a drink in my hand, having a good time, when someone tapped me on the shoulder; I spun around quickly and hit her with a sharp elbow to the head. It was a solid knock and I knew it must have hurt.

“Oh, my God,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. It was an accident.”

Marilyn looked me in the face and said, “There are no accidents.”

She meant it to be funny and I laughed. I sat down beside her and said, “Let me show you how to play a piano. You can’t play worth a damn.”

I did my best for a few bars; then we chatted, and thereafter I called her from time to time. Finally one night I phoned her and said, “I want to come over and see you right now, and if you can’t give me a good reason why I shouldn’t—maybe you just don’t want me to—tell me now.”

She invited me over, and it wasn’t long before every soldier’s dream came true.

Marilyn was a sensitive, misunderstood person, much more perceptive than was generally assumed. She had been beaten down, but had a strong emotional intelligence—a keen intuition
for the feelings of others, the most refined type of intelligence. After that first visit, we had an affair and saw each other intermittently until she died in 1962. She often called me and we would talk for hours, sometimes about how she was beginning to realize that Strasberg and other people were trying to use her. She was becoming a much healthier person emotionally. The last time we spoke was two or three days before she died. She called from her home in Los Angeles and invited me to come over for dinner that night. I said I had already made plans for the evening and couldn’t, but I promised to call the following week to set a date for dinner. She said, “Fine,” and that was it. It’s been speculated that she had a secret rendezvous with Robert Kennedy that week and was distraught because he wanted to end an affair between them. But she didn’t seem depressed to me, and I don’t think that if she was sleeping with him at the time she would have invited me over for dinner.

I’m pretty good at reading people’s moods and perceiving their feelings, and with Marilyn I didn’t sense any depression or clue of impending self-destruction during her call. That’s why I’m sure she didn’t commit suicide. If someone is terminally depressed, no matter how clever they may be or how expertly they try to conceal it, they will always give themselves away. I’ve always had an unquenchable curiosity about people, and I believe I would have sensed something was wrong if thoughts of suicide were anywhere near the surface of Marilyn’s mind. I would have known it. Maybe she died because of an accidental drug overdose, but I have always believed that she was murdered.

   Another friend from that era who died sadly and prematurely was Montgomery Clift. We were both from Omaha and broke into acting about the same time. We had the same agent, Edie Van Cleve, and, although he was four years older than me, we were sometimes described as rivals for the same parts. There
may have been a rivalry between us—in those days I was a competitive young man determined to be the best and he was a very good actor—but I don’t remember ever feeling that way about him. In my memory he was simply a friend with a tragic destiny.

We met while I was in
Truckline Cafe
. By then Monty had been in several plays, and I was curious about how good he was and went to see him in
The Searching Wind
. He
was
good, and after the play I introduced myself and we went out for dinner. Since we shared a lot of similar experiences, there was a lot to talk about and we became friends, though not close ones. There was a quality about Monty that was very endearing; besides a great deal of charm, he had a powerful emotional intensity, and, like me, he was troubled, something I empathized with. But what troubled him wasn’t evident. Later on, I went out with a girl he had dated, and she said she thought he might be a bisexual or a homosexual, but I found it hard to believe. I never asked him and never suspected it, but if he was a homosexual, I imagine he was torn asunder by it. Whatever the reason, he was a tortured man, and to deaden his pain he began drinking chloral hydrate and then became an alcoholic.

At the time I didn’t understand what was happening or why Monty wanted to destroy himself, but it was tragic to watch. By 1957, when I was in
The Young Lions
, nobody wanted to hire him, but I encouraged the producers to give him a job. It had been hard for him to find work after being injured in a bad car wreck not far from my house, and his upper lip was paralyzed. He’d had plastic surgery, but the doctors hadn’t been able to repair the damage completely. He could smile with his eyes, but his upper lip wouldn’t move, giving him a twisted, confused look. He had always taken great pride in his looks, and he was self-conscious about the injury.

When Monty showed up in Paris for
The Young Lions
, he was consuming more chloral hydrate and alcohol than ever. His face was gray and gaunt, and he had lost a lot of weight. I saw
he was on the trajectory to personal destruction and talked to him frankly, opening myself completely to him; I told him about my mother’s drinking and my experiences with therapy and said, “Monty, there’s awful anguish ahead for you if you don’t get hold of yourself. You’ve got to get some help. You can’t take refuge in chemicals, because that’s a wall you can’t ever climb. You can’t get around it, you can’t drive through it. You’re just gonna die sitting up huddled in front of that wall.”

I gave him the name of a therapist I thought might be able to help him, encouraged him to join Alcoholics Anonymous and talked to him for hours trying to persuade him to stop taking dope and alcohol. But when we shot the picture, he often slurred his lines. I tried to shore him up and did the best I could to get him through the picture, but afterward his descent continued until he died in 1966 at the age of forty-six.

I do not know for a fact that Monty was a homosexual. Afterward, some people told me he was, but I have heard so many lies told about myself that I no longer believe what people say about others. I do know he carried around a heavy emotional burden and never learned how to bear it.