Brando (30 page)

For the long shot in that scene, Huston used a stunt rider, and for the close-up he put me in a saddle mounted on a pickup truck and photographed me with a lot of fright on my face.

I also got to ride a horse in
One-Eyed Jacks
, my first picture after
The Young Lions
. In its first four years, Pennebaker had spent almost as much money trying to develop a good script for a western as it had on the story about the United Nations, but none of the projects, including a western based on the plot of
The Count of Monte Cristo
, worked out for various reasons. Then I heard about a novel by Charles Neider,
The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones
, which eventually became
One-Eyed Jacks
, one of my favorite pictures. It was the first and only picture I directed, although I didn’t intend to. Stanley Kubrick was
supposed to direct, but he didn’t like the screenplay. “Marlon,” he said, “I’ve read the script and I just can’t understand what this picture is about.”

“This picture is about my having to pay two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a week to Karl Maiden,” I said. I’d signed him for the picture, and each week of delay meant another $250,000 lost.

“Well,” Stanley said, “if that’s what it’s about, I think I’m doing the wrong picture.”

I sent the script to Sidney Lumet, then Gadg, then two or three other directors, but no one wanted to do it, so I had to direct it myself. We shot most of it at Big Sur and on the Monterey peninsula, where I slept with many pretty women and had a lot of laughs.

On the first day of shooting, I didn’t know what to do, so the cameraman handed me one of those optical viewfinders that directors use to compose a scene. I looked into it, then shook my head and said, “I don’t know.… It’s hard to tell what this scene’s going to look like because it’s so far away.…”

The cameraman came over and gently turned it around. I’d been looking through the wrong end.

“If you think this is bad, wait until we get to the fifth week,” I said and laughed. I wasn’t embarrassed, although there were a lot of muffled titters behind me. By the fifth week, and even the fifth month, I was still trying to learn. I thought it would take three months to do the picture, but it stretched to six, and the cost doubled to more than $6 million; naturally this didn’t please Paramount, which was paying for it.

I tried to figure out what to do as I went along. Several writers worked on the screenplay—Sam Peckinpah, Calder Willingham and finally Guy Trosper—and he and I constantly improvised and rewrote between shots and setups, often hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute. Some scenes I shot over and over again from different angles with different dialogue
and action because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was making things up by the moment, not sure where the story was going. I also did a lot of stalling for time, trying to work the story out in my mind while hoping to make the cast think I knew what I was doing.

Maybe I liked the picture so much because it left me with a lot of pleasant memories about the people in it—Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens and especially Karl Maiden, who played Dad. I don’t want to do it again—a director has to get up too early in the morning—but it was entertaining to try to create reality, make a story interesting and to work with actors. Sometimes I played tricks on them. In one scene Ben Johnson had an argument with one of his compatriots, then shot him. I didn’t like the expression on the other man’s face before he was shot because it didn’t show a fear of death. I wanted him to show shock and terror, so I said, “Let’s rehearse this one more time.” I put him on a saddle mounted on a piece of wood and, without telling him, kept the camera rolling. I walked over to him and said, “Larry, in this scene I want you to—” Then, boom! I slapped him hard and jumped out of the scene.

He had a wonderful expression on his face, just what I wanted, but I had slapped him so hard that I knocked off his mustache, and so I couldn’t use the shot. In another scene I was supposed to get drunk, come in out of the rain and rape a Chinese girl. You can’t fake drunkenness in a movie. You can in a play, but not in a close-up, so I figured the scene would work better if I really got drunk. I started drinking about 4:15 in the afternoon of the day I was going to shoot the scene after telling the other actors what I wanted them to do. It has never taken much alcohol to put me over the edge, so in no time at all I was staggering around, grabbing hold of the girl. Unfortunately I was too drunk to finish the scene, so a few days later I got drunk again and reshot it. It still wasn’t right, and I had to do it on a number of afternoons until it was right.

When we got back to Hollywood, someone said we had enough footage to make a movie six or eight hours long. I started editing it, but pretty soon got sick of it and turned the job over to someone else. When he had finished, Paramount said it didn’t like my version of the story; I’d had everybody in the picture lie except Karl Maiden. The studio cut the movie to pieces and made him a liar, too. By then I was bored with the whole project and walked away from it.

   Several years before
One-Eyed Jacks
, Tennessee Williams had told me he had written a new play,
Orpheus Descending
, with me in mind to play opposite Anna Magnani. I told him I didn’t have any interest in returning to the stage, and Cliff Robertson and Maureen Stapleton played the parts. But when Tennessee and Sidney Lumet invited me to be in the movie
The Fugitive Kind
, which was based on the play, I was divorcing my first wife and needed money. I was a guitar-playing drifter who wandered into a small town in Mississippi and got involved with an older woman, played by Anna, who had been a powerful actress in the Italian film
Open City
and later in Tennessee’s movie
The Rose Tattoo
. She was a troubled woman who I thought was miscast in
The Fugitive Kind
.

In a letter to Lady Maria St. Just while we were shooting the picture, Tennessee wrote: “Magnani is obsessed with her age; she thinks that her neck is gone, and they are putting tapes on the back to pull it up and together. She regards this as a terrible insult and yet she rages whenever she sees a neck line in the rushes.” Tennessee was also growing more troubled at the time, plunging frequently into fits of depression and using alcohol and pills to pull himself out. What haunted him I don’t know, though he was deeply worried about the health of his mother and sister. I’ve always thought of Tennessee as one of the greatest American writers, but I didn’t think much of this play or the movie. Like most great American writers, he turned black people into windowpanes. In
The Fugitive Kind
, they were rendered almost invisible, as if they were props. Blacks were in the story, but they were incidental figures who had nothing to do with the central themes, just as in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and it seemed to me a subtle form of racial discrimination. I don’t mean to say that Tennessee was insensitive. He was acutely sensitive, but he expressed the prevailing perspective of virtually all American authors. The black experience was all but ignored. No one, I believe, wrote well on the subject until Jim Baldwin and Toni Morrison came along. Hollywood was even worse; the black experience was a topic it never touched unless it was bigoted claptrap like
The Birth of a Nation
, with its undisguised contempt for black people.

Tennessee warned me that Anna Magnani, who was sixteen years older than me and had a reputation for enjoying the company of young men, had told him that she was in love with me, and before we left for upstate New York to film the picture she confirmed it. After we had some meetings in California, she tried several times to see me alone, and finally succeeded one afternoon at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Without any encouragement from me, she started kissing me with great passion. I tried to be responsive because I knew she was worried about growing older and losing her beauty, and as a matter of kindness I felt I had to return her kisses; to refuse her would have been a terrible insult. But once she got her arms around me, she wouldn’t let go. If I started to pull away, she held on tight and bit my lip, which really hurt. With her teeth gnawing at my lower lip, the two of us locked in an embrace, I was reminded of one of those fatal mating rituals of insects that end when the female administers the coup de grâce. We rocked back and forth as she tried to lead me to the bed. My eyes were wide open, and as I looked at her eyeball-to-eyeball I saw that she was in a frenzy, Attila the Hun in full attack. Finally the pain got so intense that I grabbed her nose and squeezed it as hard as I could, as if I were squeezing a lemon, to push her away. It startled her, and I made my escape.

A FEW YEARS AFTER
my mother died in 1953, my father remarried, and at seventy he had an affair with one of my secretaries. He changed little as he grew older; always handsome, always a miser, always a charmer, always a philanderer. He never lost the shyness that people, especially women, liked about him. It was something he came by naturally. Though he was very masculine, he also had a gentleness, humility and quietness that people liked, along with a very genuine sense of humor. He was unsuited to do anything in the movie business, but I had given him a salary, a desk, an office, a secretary and an opportunity to look busy and feel useful. Then one day, without telling me about it, he fired one of my friends. When I heard about it, I went to his office and told him that my friend was not going to be fired, and from somewhere inside me a tidal wave rose, crested and flooded, and I reduced him to a heap of shambling, stuttering, fast-blinking confusion.

I said he should consider himself fortunate to have a job, since anybody else with his qualifications would be in a poor-house. I went over the history of our family and told him that he had ruined my mother’s life and had used every opportunity to belittle me and make me feel inadequate. I took him apart
with pliers, bit by bit, hunk by hunk, and distributed his psyche all over the floor. I was cold, correct and logical—no screaming or yelling—just stone frozen cold, and when he tried to make excuses, I slammed down an iron gate and reminded him what a shambles he had made of our lives. I told him that he was directly responsible for making my sisters alcoholics and that he was cold, unloving, selfish, infantile, terminally despicable and self-absorbed. I made him feel useless, helpless, hopeless and weak. I assaulted him for almost three hours and when he tried to end the conversation I said, “Sit down if you expect to be paid any money from this day forward. You will listen to what your employer is telling you. I am your employer and you are something of an employee—at least you bear that name—and you will do what I tell you.”

In three hours I did what in thirty-three years I had never been able to, yet the whole time I was scared. I was frightened of what
he
would do to
me
. I had always been overwhelmed and intimidated by him, but the more I talked, the more strength and conviction I gained of my rightness and justification. It was like Joe Louis with Max Schmeling in their second fight: I hit him everyplace. He was naked and I was all over him like a cheap suit. Then, when I’d finished saying what I wanted to get off my chest, I dismissed him.

Afterward, I called everybody in the family and told them what I had done and they congratulated me. “Well, it’s about time,” my sisters said. But inside I felt tremendous aftershocks from what I had done. I thought the sky was going to fall on me because of what I had said.

A few days later I got a call from a psychiatrist who said that my father was seeing him and that he needed my cooperation because his patient was in a serious depression and “on the edge of a precipice.”

“Well, Doctor,” I said, “I appreciate your calling. When my father has gone over the edge of that depression and smashed
himself on the rocks below—when he’s hit bottom—please call me and I’ll see if I can arrange something.…”

After that, I always kept my father on a tight leash so that he could never come near me and never get too far away. I had him under control and never let him go.

   In the spring of 1965 I visited the Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona and met an old medicine woman. She was charming, with intelligent dark eyes, and I asked her if she could tell anything about me simply by looking at me. Through an interpreter, she said yes, she could, and she dipped her hand into a box of flowers beside her and sprinkled yellow cornflowers over my head and shoulders, letting them fall around me. She said alcohol had played a very important part in my life, and that I was about to be struck by lightning. As she said it, I felt a strange sensation streak through my nervous system.

“Both your parents are dead,” she went on.

“No,” I said, “one of them is dead—my mother—but not my father.”

Within minutes, I was informed that there was a telephone call for me at the tribal office. It was one of my sisters calling, to tell me my father had just died. We both laughed, and I said, “And not a moment too soon.”