Brando (19 page)

WHEN I LIVED
in the apartment at Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue, someone began making anonymous telephone calls to me that always followed the same pattern: the phone would ring, I would pick it up and say “Hello,” there would be silence and then the caller would hang up. Then a few minutes later, the phone would ring again and the caller would listen silently while I kept repeating, “Who is this? Why don’t you say something? Look, I think it would be advisable for you to see a psychiatrist at your earliest convenience.”

After about three months, the caller, a woman, spoke for the first time in frightened, tremulous low tones. I asked her who she was and why she kept calling me, and finally wheedled some answers out of her; she said she had been fixated on me for years, ever since
A Streetcar Named Desire
was on Broadway. I asked her what she did for a living and she said that she was a hold-up artist—that is, she masterminded robberies, mostly of liquor stores; she planned the “jobs,” as she put it, while a deaf-and-dumb friend who drove a motorcycle did the dirty work. After a three-hour conversation, she revealed that for months she and this friend had been making plans to kidnap me and take me to Long Island, where she was going to imprison and cannibalize me.

I didn’t know if she was crazy or serious, but realized that whether it was fact or fantasy, I was dealing with a very disturbed mind. I finally decided that she was deadly serious; she explained in great detail how she was going to kidnap me, and she clearly had an intimate knowledge of my life and routine. She said that she had made her deaf-and-dumb friend tear down a billboard of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and had papered her entire bedroom with it—walls, ceiling and floor. Sometimes she locked herself in her room without food or water and spent days just looking at the pictures, she said; she also kept a picture of me beneath her pillow and talked to it. After she captured me, she said she was going to eat me because she loved me.

I decided to meet this woman face-to-face. I was interested to find out why anyone could develop such a fixation, the depth of her disorder and the seriousness of her imbalance. I invited her to my apartment, and when she arrived I opened the door, with the chain still in place, and looked past her to see if her deaf friend was hiding behind her. I told her to stick her hands through the opening, held them with one hand, and reached out and frisked her with the other to make sure she didn’t have a gun. She didn’t, but when I unbolted the chain I half-expected her friend to appear out of nowhere and grab me.

After she entered the room, she sat on a small ottoman and her first words to me were, “I bet you could beat up anybody.”

“Nobody can beat up
anybody,”
I said. “There’s always somebody who can beat you up, and he’s probably just around the corner at the next tavern.”

She argued with me. “Oh, no, no, no. You can beat anybody up. Don’t say you can’t, because I know you can.”

“Well, all right,” I said, “I can beat anybody up. Now what?”

“Do you need any money?”

“No,” I said.

“Because if you do, I have lots.” She pulled a wad of hundred-dollar
bills out of her purse that would have choked a rhino—at least the top bills were hundreds—and offered them to me.

“I really don’t need any money.”

As she sat there, I tried to size her up. She was in her early twenties and wearing a jacket with a fringe on it; she was possibly Italian, big-busted and attractive. She said her name was Maria, and I asked her more questions.

She answered a few, then interrupted me. “I want to ask
you
a question. You won’t be mad at me if I ask you something, will you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Are you sure you won’t be mad?”

I said: “I promise you I won’t be mad.”

She said: “Can I do something?”

“Well, what is it?”

“May I wash your feet?”

I did about a twelve count after the question, then said, “You want to wash my feet?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It’s just something I want to do. I don’t know why.”

I found myself saying, “Yes.”

She went into the kitchen, filled a big basin with warm water and then began washing my feet. I was surprised, a little frightened and unfortunately a little excited, but curious at the same time. I wanted to see how far she’d go. There is nothing more seductive than understanding the dynamics of the human mind and its odd ways.

Maria washed my feet slowly, deliberately, reverentially, and then dried them lovingly with her hair. Unfortunately it felt wonderful. Of course I understood what was going on; she was fantasizing that I was Jesus and that she was Mary Magdalene. As I looked down at her, the carnal aspect of my personality
began to take over, and when she sat on my bed, it overwhelmed anything that was reasonable, rational, moral or decent in me. Without anticipating it, I put my hands on her breasts. I realized I was going over the falls in a barrel. The first thing I knew I was groping with her on the bed, and she was terrified because she was very passionate, and in the grip of her delusion must have thought she was being seduced by Jesus Christ.

When it passes a certain point, the penis has its own agenda that has nothing to do with you, especially in those days when I was young, uncontrolled, passionate and determined. One is led around by one’s lust and a lot of one’s decisions are not made by one’s brain. When I penetrated Maria, she said, “I’m dying, I’m dying …”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re living. This is the first time you’ve ever come to life.” I realized she was having an orgasm, and I reassured her that it was all right. She was, I had discovered, a virgin.

Afterward I felt remorse and asked myself how I could have done this; I had just seduced a girl who thought I was Jesus and who wanted to eat my body. I told her, “I think you need help.”

I suggested the name of a psychiatrist, and after a lot of salesmanship persuaded her to go see him. A week or two later, I called him because I knew I was involved in something that could be very dangerous.

“There’s nothing I can do for her,” he said. “She’s fixated on you, and the only reason she came to see me was because you instructed her to. She doesn’t want help. She wants you.” He went on to say that her disturbances were of such a character that he couldn’t treat her. I asked him if he thought she was serious about kidnapping me or was potentially dangerous in other ways. He said he couldn’t be sure, but that in her obsessive state of mind anything was possible, so I should be careful. I decided never to see her again, but was fascinated by her, though no
longer in a sexual way, because she was wounded and likable and I felt compassion for her. Still, I realized I had to break the tie between us and I tried hard. For months she called, saying she wanted to see me, and I refused, trying to be evasive and kind at the same time. Then she began sending food and expensive presents to my apartment and imploring me to go to bed with her again. She would come to the apartment and pound on the door and I wouldn’t answer.

Six months later I decided to employ a new tactic. “Listen,” I told her gruffly when Maria called the next time, “I don’t want you ever to call me ever again. You’re making a mess out of your own life and you’re boring the hell out of me. I don’t want you in my life. I’ll never want you. I never want to see your face again.”

I felt bad saying this. She cried, screamed and pleaded with me: “Don’t say that, please don’t say that …”

She was calling from a telephone booth at a drugstore not far from my apartment. This I learned because one of my friends, who knew the story and had seen her before, happened to be in the store, heard her screaming at me and saw her smash her fists into the glass of the booth, breaking it and cutting her wrists until blood was dripping all over her. Then she went out into the fifteen-degree night and vanished. When he called to tell me what he’d seen, I had already called her home and spoken to her brother, who said her family knew all about her fixation on me but hadn’t been able to help her. He said Maria had seven locks on her bedroom door, had been spending more and more time in her room staring at my pictures without eating, and that other members of the family were intimidated by her.

Four hours later I called the house again, and her brother told me Maria had come home.

“How is she?” I asked.

He said she had arrived with her clothes covered with blood, and that she had smashed everything in the living room—pictures, the television set, chairs, glassware; then she had gone to
her room, taken down all her
Streetcar
posters and set fire to them.

“What’s she doing now?” I asked.

“She’s down on the street staring at the ashes of the billboard.”

“Is she still bleeding?”

“Yeah.”

I was afraid she might have cut the arteries in her wrist, but he said he had bandaged her wounds and that she would be all right.

“Okay,” I said, “treat her as best as you can and let me know what happens.”

I didn’t see or hear from Maria for several months until I was walking down the street one day on my way home with a woman who had been staying with me. Maria came up to us and I realized she had been waiting for me outside my apartment. This was long before celebrities entertained thoughts that they might be shot by a stalker—it wasn’t in fashion yet—so I wasn’t worried when I saw her. She matched our stride step by step, then turned to me and said, “That bitch can’t take care of you. I’m the only person who knows how to …”

I said, “Maria, you’ll have to go away. Don’t come around here anymore.
I mean it.”

Her step slowed then and she faded behind us as we walked into the apartment building. That was the last I saw of Maria, though she sent me a card wishing me well after I moved to Los Angeles.

   When I was twenty-six, I had a casual affair with Lisa, a designer, who was half Filipino and half Swedish and lived around the corner from my apartment above Carnegie Hall. After I moved to California, she came by my old apartment occasionally and asked the elevator operator—a man from Barbados named Susho—if he ever saw me.

Susho, who had designs on Lisa, said, “Yes, but very infrequently. You know, it’s very sad about Mr. Brando.”

“What do you mean?”

Susho told her that I had cancer and now came to New York only for my treatments.

Lisa said she was horrified and asked him what kind of treatment I was receiving.

“It’s experimental cancer therapy,” he said, “in which he is injected with live sperm. But they’re having trouble because live sperm is so hard to get.”

The next time Lisa saw Susho, she asked him about me again and he said I was scheduled to come to New York shortly for a treatment, but that my doctors didn’t know where they would find the live sperm they needed. “I was wondering,” he said, “if you would like to help me make a contribution to Marlon.”

For months Susho took her into the supply room at Carnegie Hall apartments and had intercourse with Lisa while holding a plastic bag under her to capture his semen. Then he’d thank her and said he had to rush it to my doctor. She thought she was helping me by doing it.

This story seems staggeringly implausible, but it is absolutely true. After it had been going on awhile, Lisa said, Susho told her that he had seen me and that I looked wonderful, but that the treatments were so expensive that I was going broke, so she started giving him money and jewelry for me.

Though I didn’t see Lisa again for ten years, she became convinced that I was communicating with her after an anonymous caller started phoning her and breathing heavily. She decided it must be me and began talking about our relationship, the sex we had shared, my cancer and so forth. The other person never spoke, but using a code suggested by Lisa, communicated by making kissing sounds with his lips: one kiss meant “Yes,” two meant “No,” three meant “I love you.”

I don’t know who was on the other end of the line, but Lisa
was convinced that it was me, and this went on for years. She said that she had a spirit on her shoulder who told her that it was me and what she should say. Lisa was exceptionally intelligent and the only person I’ve ever known who could multiply three numbers by three numbers in her head instantaneously, and yet was not an idiot savant.

Because I was living in California, I didn’t know about Susho’s cancer “treatments” or the phone calls. But several years later, I was in New York, walking down Fifty-seventh Street at about 1:30
A.M
., when I thought about Lisa and wondered if she still lived in the same apartment. I asked the man at the desk and he said she did.

I went upstairs and rang the bell. Lisa was in shock when she saw me. She opened the door hesitantly, then started talking fast about my cancer and how happy she was to have helped save my life. Then she talked about the love affair she thought we had carried on via the telephone for almost ten years.

“Lisa,” I said finally, “none of this ever happened. I never had cancer, and I never called you on the phone.”