Brando (23 page)

Gadg had to justify what he had done and gave the appearance of sincerely believing that there was a global conspiracy to take over the world, and that communism was a serious threat to America’s freedoms. Like his friends, he told me, he had experimented with communism because at the time it seemed to promise a better world, but he abandoned it when he learned better. To speak up before the committee truthfully and in defiance of his former friends who had not abandoned the cause was a hugely difficult decision, he said, but though he was ostracized by former friends, he had no regrets for what he’d done.

I finally decided to do the film, but what I didn’t realize then was that
On the Waterfront
was really a metaphorical argument by Gadg and Budd Schulberg: they made the film to justify finking on their friends. Evidently, as Terry Malloy I represented the spirit of the brave, courageous man who defied evil. Neither Gadg nor Budd Schulberg ever had second thoughts about testifying before that committee.

At that time, Gadg was the director on the cutting edge of changing the way movies were made. He had been influenced by Stella Adler and what she had brought back from Europe, and he always tried to create spontaneity and the illusion of reality. He hired longshoremen as extras. He shot most of the picture in the most rundown section of the New Jersey waterfront. He was pleased because the weather was really cold. The chill added reality, and he was delighted with the fact that our breath showed on the screen. The irony of all this was that he had to get permission from the Mafia to shoot there. When they invited him to lunch, he dragged me along, and I didn’t know until afterward that the gentleman we had lunch with was in fact the head of the Jersey waterfront. Although Gadg turned his friends in to the House committee over communism, he didn’t even blink at having to cooperate with the Costa Nostra. By his own standards, it would seem that this was an act of remarkable hypocrisy, but when Gadg wanted to make a picture and had to move some furniture around to do so, he was perfectly willing. Actually, I met a number of people from the Costa Nostra at that time, and I would prefer them any day to some of the politicians we have.

The cast included my longtime friend Karl Maiden, Eva Marie Saint, Lee J. Cobb and Rod Steiger. One of the reasons Gadg was an effective actors’ director was because he was able to manipulate people’s emotions. He tried to find out everything about his actors and participated emotionally in all the scenes. He would come up between takes and tell you something to excite feelings in you that fit the scene. Still, he did create mischief with his technique. In
Viva Zapata!
I played Tony Quinn’s brother, and Gadg told Tony some lies about what I had supposedly said behind his back. This intensified Tony’s emotional state and was very good for the picture because it brought out the conflict between the brothers; unfortunately, Gadg never bothered to tell Tony afterward that he had made up those remarks. I didn’t learn about it until fifteen years later on a talk show, where Tony expressed himself on the subject. I called him up and told him that I never said those things, and that Gadg was just manipulating him. It was a relief to be able to clear up this fifteen-year deceit. From then on, Tony and I started speaking again.

Gadg was wonderful in inspiring actors to give a performance, but you had to pay the price.

   People have often commented to me about the scene in
On the Waterfront
that takes place in the backseat of a taxi. It illustrates how Kazan worked.

I played Rod Steiger’s unsuccessful ne’er-do-well brother, and he played a corrupt union leader who was trying to improve my
position with the Mafia. He had been told in so many words to set me up for a hit because I was going to testify before the Waterfront Commission about the misdeeds that I was aware of. In the script Steiger was supposed to pull a gun in the taxi, point it at me and say, “Make up your mind before we get to 437 River Street,” which was where I was going to be killed.

I told Kazan, “I can’t believe he would say that to his brother, and the audience is certainly not going to believe that this guy who’s been close to his brother all his life, and who’s looked after him for thirty years, would suddenly stick a gun in his ribs and threaten to kill him. It’s just not believable.”

This was typical of the creative fights we had. “I can’t do it that way,” I said, and Gadg answered, “Yes, you can; it will work.”

“It’s ridiculous,” I replied. “No one would speak to his brother that way.”

We did the scene his way several times, but I kept saying, “It just doesn’t work, Gadg, it really doesn’t work.” Finally he said, “All right, wing one.” So Rod and I improvised the scene and ended up changing it completely. Gadg was convinced and printed it.

In our improvisation, when my brother flashed the gun in the cab, I looked at it, then up at him in disbelief. I didn’t believe for a second that he would ever pull the trigger. I felt sorry for him. Then Rod started talking about my boxing career. If I’d had a better manager, he said, things would have gone better for me in the ring. “He brought you along too fast.”

“That wasn’t
him
, Charlie,” I said, “it was
you
. Remember that night at the Garden you came down to my dressing room and said, ‘Kid, this isn’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson’? Remember that? ‘This ain’t your night.’
My night!
I could have taken Wilson apart. So what happened? He gets the shot at the title outdoors at a ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville. You was my brother, Charlie,
you should have looked out for me a little bit. You should have taken care of me better so I didn’t have to take the dives for the short-end money … I could have had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been
somebody
instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was
you
, Charlie …”

When the movie came out, a lot of people credited me with a marvelous job of acting and called the scene moving. But it was actor-proof, a scene that demonstrated how audiences often do much of the acting themselves in an effectively told story. It couldn’t miss because almost everyone believes he could have been a contender, that he could have been somebody if he’d been dealt different cards by fate, so when people saw this in the film, they identified with it. That’s the magic of theater; everybody in the audience became Terry Malloy, a man who’d had the guts not only to stand up to the Mob, but to say, “I’m a bum. Let’s face it; that’s what I am.…”

On the day Gadg showed me the completed picture, I was so depressed by my performance I got up and left the screening room. I thought I was a huge failure, and walked out without a word to him. I was simply embarrassed for myself.

None of us are perfect, and I think Gadg has done great injury to others, but mostly to himself. I am indebted to him for all that I learned. He was a wonderful teacher.

   I had a great conflict about going to the Academy Awards and accepting an Oscar. I never believed that the accomplishment was more important than the effort. I remember being driven to the Awards still wondering whether I should have put on my tuxedo. I finally thought, what the hell; people want to express their thanks, and if it is a big deal for them, why not go? I have since altered my opinion about awards in general, and will never again accept one of any kind. This doesn’t mean that what other people believe has any less validity; many people I know and care about believe that awards are valuable and involve themselves in the process of the Academy Awards and others. I don’t look down upon them for doing so, and I hope that they do not look down upon me.

If I regretted anything, it may have been that Duke Wagner wasn’t around for that evening. By that time he was dead.

   I don’t know what happened to the Oscar they gave me for
On the Waterfront
. Somewhere in the passage of time it disappeared. I didn’t think about it until a year or so ago, when my lawyer called and told me that an auction house in London was planning to sell it. When I wrote a letter to them saying that they had no right to do so, they replied that they would abide by my wishes, but that the person who had put it up for sale wouldn’t relinquish it because supposedly I had given it to him or her. This is simply untrue.

WHEN I MUMBLED
my lines in some parts, it puzzled theater critics. I played many roles in which I didn’t mumble a single syllable, but in others I did it because it is the way people speak in ordinary life. I wasn’t the first actor to do it. Dame May Whitty, who, like Eleonora Duse, was a fine actress who deviated from the traditional acting school’s techniques of declaiming, superficial gesture and stilted dialogue, was famous for muttering and mumbling. In her day it was unheard of for actors to mumble or slur their words and speak like ordinary people, but she got away with it.

If everyone spoke according to the rules of the old school of acting, we’d never pause to search for words, never slur a word, never say something like, “Uh …” or “What did you say?”

In ordinary life people seldom know exactly what they’re going to say when they open their mouths and start to express a thought. They’re still thinking, and the fact that they are looking for words shows on their faces. They pause for an instant to find the right word, search their minds to compose a sentence, then express it.

Until Stella Adler came along, few actors understood this; they recited speeches given to them by a writer in the style of an
elocution school, and if audiences didn’t instantly understand them or had to work a little to do so, the performers were criticized. The audience was conditioned to expect actors to speak in a way seldom heard outside a theater. Today actors are expected to speak, think and search for words to give the impression that they are actually living in that moment. Most actors in America now strive for this effect. However, there are other affectations that have crept in. For example, many actors rely on cigarettes to convey naturalness. When smoking was in vogue, Stella criticized some actors’ behavior and would refer to it as cigarette-acting. Generally actors don’t realize how deeply affected the technique of acting was by the fact that Stella went to Russia and studied with Stanislavsky. This school of acting served the American theater and motion pictures well, but it was restricting. The American theater had never been able to present Shakespeare or classical drama of any kind satisfactorily. We simply do not have the style, the regard for language or the cultural disposition that fosters a tradition of presenting Shakespeare or any other classical drama. You cannot mumble in Shakespeare. You cannot improvise, and you are required to adhere strictly to the text. The English theater has a sense of language that we do not recognize and a capacity for understanding Shakespeare that we do not. In the United States the English language has developed almost into a patois. Not long ago, perhaps only fifty years or so ago, there was a style of classical acting in England in which Shakespeare was declaimed with an ample distribution of spittle. Even today there are English actors and directors who, to their artistic peril, choose to ignore the precise instructions that Shakespeare gave them in his speech to the players in
Hamlet
. This not only pertains to acting but to all forms of art. I quote it here:

The evolution of English theater came to full flower in Kenneth Branagh’s production of
Henry V
. He did not injure the language; he showed a reverence for it, and followed Shakespeare’s instructions precisely. It was an extraordinary accomplishment of melding the realities of human behavior with the poetry of language. I can’t imagine Shakespeare being performed with more refinement. In America we are unable to approach such refinements, and of course we have no taste for it. If given the choice between Branagh’s production of
Henry V
or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
The Terminator
, there’s hardly a question of where most television dials would be turned. If the
expenditure of money for entertainment in America is any indication of taste, clearly the majority of us are addicted to trash.