Brando (39 page)

She answered, “But I’m married.”

A few days later, she called and told me her husband had gone for a few days to their home in Palm Springs. We were upstairs in bed when we heard a car come up the driveway and then the garage door open and close. We knew it was him, so there wasn’t anything for me to do except climb out the window. I lowered myself over the edge, grabbed some ivy hanging from the wall and tried to descend cat-burglar style to the ground, but I lost my grip and fell about seven feet into a huge bush that broke my fall and stabbed my legs with branches as sharp as spears.

   For thirteen years I had an affair with a very attractive Beverly Hills woman. She is still alive, so I’ll call her Lenore. Our kids grew up together, and I knew her and her husband very well. He was a physicist with a medical degree, as well as five or six others, and he owned a lot of patents that made him extremely wealthy. I used to park my car a few blocks from their house in the middle of the night and in my tennis shoes stroll leisurely down the street, vault over their back fence and open the back door, which she left unlatched for me. Her husband was usually asleep upstairs in his room, and I would walk up the back stairs, where she’d be waiting for me, sometimes in the shower. For some reason we conducted a lot of our sex in the bathroom, where she was both athletic and imaginative. Then we’d either go to bed or I’d leave. Being upstairs with her husband so close by added excitement to the adventure. Before dawn I usually got up and hid under her bed in case he came in,
and sometimes I would fall asleep, which was taking a chance because sometimes I snored. Lenore’s children occasionally came in, and after a while they knew what was going on, but they were good soldiers about it. Since our kids used to play together, we had almost a familial relationship.

Lenore’s husband, Arthur, was very intelligent but affected an aw-shucks persona. He pretended to be unsophisticated and said things like “Gosh!” “Gee whiz!” “Golly!” and “For heaven’s sake!” On the other hand, he kept a loaded Saturday night special in his room.

One summer night, I climbed over the fence and found the door unlatched as usual. After opening it, I turned to tighten the latch; I was supposed to lock the door after entering. While I was doing so, Arthur walked out of the kitchen and was standing two or three feet away from me in the dark when I turned around. I jumped about four feet, and he beat me by at least two feet. “Oh my gosh!” he said. “You scared me.”

I was paralyzed and couldn’t think of anything to say. My brain simply stopped working, though it functioned enough to remember Arthur’s gun. A headline flashed through my mind:
ACTOR KILLED—MIDNIGHT INTRUDER SHOT, MISTAKEN FOR BURGLAR
. It had happened to more than one playboy. After a few seconds I said the first thing that came out of my mouth: “Boy, am I glad to see you.”

Then I tried to find the right face to go along with the words, whatever they meant, but there wasn’t an expression I could come within a mile of, so more words came out of me like bubbles: “God, Arthur. I’m really glad to see you. I’ve got to talk to
somebody
about this …”

These words flew out of my mouth as if they were coming from someone else, and I thought to myself, What are you talking about, you maniac?

Finally I said, “Arthur, can we talk?” I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’ve got a problem.” I went on. “Can we talk?”

“Why, sure,” Arthur said.

“Let’s go out to the sunporch,” I said. I knew the house well and that a walk to the sunporch would give me about forty-three feet and thirty seconds to come up with something to explain why I was in his house at 2:50
A.M.
, to say nothing about the door being unlatched.

When we got there, I slumped down in a chair, looked over at him and said gravely that one of my sons was missing from home. “Have you seen him?”

“My gosh, no.”

“You haven’t seen him at all today?”

“No.”

Now I had a toenail grip on a theme, but only a toenail; if I made a slip, it was a straight drop about nine hundred feet down. But I gained a little more ground by saying, “You know, he’s not home. I don’t know where he is. He hasn’t been home all day. I’ve been worried sick.”

My son was home asleep, of course.

“Well, we sure haven’t seen him around here,” Arthur said sympathetically.

“I don’t know whether to call the police or what,” I said. “Maybe he’s just out joyriding with some friends, or maybe he’s in trouble, but I’m worried. The only thing I could think of was that he might be here—you know, the kids are always staying overnight with each other. I thought of telephoning, but I didn’t want to wake everybody up.”

Then I realized I had taken the wrong road; instead of telephoning, I had merely jumped over his fence, climbed up his driveway and opened his back door with the apparent intention of waking up the whole household. I wanted to escape from this cul-de-sac as fast as I could, but before I could say anything, Arthur said, “Well, maybe Lenore might know where he is.”

“Lenore? She’s probably dead asleep.”

But Arthur said, “Well, gee, let me wake her up. I think she’d want to know about this …”

At that moment, Lenore came down the stairs in a sexy peignoir, looking radiant, with her hair beautifully combed, ready to receive the paramour who had climbed over her fence. As she descended the stairs, she looked at Arthur and me sitting in the sunporch and burst out laughing, howling one of those laughs that go on and on and knock you to your knees. The sight of me looking up at her with my worried, second-hand Hertz-Rent-a-Face and Arthur trying to look compassionate, with his chin arched and his eyebrows pointed to the ceiling, made her explode, and she couldn’t control herself. She grabbed a potted palm near the foot of the stairs, desperately trying to remain erect, choking on the sad news conveyed by my face, and still couldn’t stop laughing.

My heart was pounding like a jackhammer and my blood pressure must have been 200 over 6. Why was she laughing? Was she hysterical? She couldn’t possibly think the situation was amusing. There she was in her lovely nightgown, with her hair combed, at three
A.M
. howling with laughter. How could she be behaving this way? Ignoring her laughter, I asked with a straight face if she had seen my son recently.

At this, the potted palm Lenore was clinging to fell over; she couldn’t hang on to it. I was so frozen with terror that I didn’t see what Arthur was doing as this was going on. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the doorknob in the hall. That’s where I was looking. He was on my right. She came from the left into the sunporch, and I was staring past her at the doorknob, thinking that I was going to be attacked by the same hysterics if I looked at her, so finally I said, “I don’t think there’s anything funny to laugh at.”

Somehow, in her mind it was uproarious to see two men sitting in her sunporch in the middle of the night, especially one who was as guilty as a safecracker caught in the act, looking desperately for a reason to be in her house, and whose only excuse was, “Have you seen my son?” Eventually she stopped laughing, threw herself in a chair and said, “No, I haven’t seen
him.” And with that Lenore, a very nimble-minded woman, launched into a performance that would have delighted Stella Adler. What temerity she demonstrated: if I had been a daredevil for jumping over her fence, imagine what she became, a collaborator and partner in bringing the escapade to a conclusion. Once she stopped laughing, she quickly grasped the picture. She could read it in our faces, and what she couldn’t read, she imagined, and joined Arthur in expressing her support for me and for my fatherly concern.

Finally I said, “I’d rather not call the police. You know what I think I’ll do? I’ll just go home and wait. He’ll come home. I’ll just be patient instead of panicking. What do you think, Arthur?”

Arthur agreed that this was probably the best thing to do, so I got up and thanked them profusely while my chin quivered a little and Lenore nearly went into spasms while trying to keep from laughing.

“Where did you park your car?” Arthur asked.

“It’s down around the corner,” I said, and thought to myself that if I had to run into another patch of stupidity and make up another unbelievable story, I wasn’t going to make it.

I said good night, and tried to reach the door as fast as I could while Arthur was saying, “Well, gosh now, you be sure to let us know …”

I walked out the door a free man, and maybe even did a little jig at the corner.

In hindsight I’m sure Arthur knew what was going on all along. Like Lenore and me, he was very good at playing a part. Eventually he killed himself, not because of Lenore or me, but because of a long illness that wasted him.

AT HOME ONE NIGHT
, before leaving to visit a woman in Beverly Hills whose husband was spending the night in the hospital for some tests, I ate a quart of ice cream. That wasn’t unusual, but at the time I was getting ready to start a new movie and was on a strict diet, so after I ate it, I stuck my finger down my throat and threw up. (No, I am not a bulimic, but occasionally I do things like that.) The vomit was pink, but it didn’t alarm me, and I drove down Benedict Canyon to my friend’s house. After Sylvia and I did the usual wrestling around, we watched television until she got sleepy and went upstairs to bed. I finished watching the program, then got up to go home, but suddenly felt as if I were standing on the edge of a trembling precipice, inches from falling into the void. Through the fragile mists of overwhelming dizziness, I remembered the pink vomit and thought, Uh, oh, I must be bleeding internally.

I knew I needed help, so I crawled up the stairs on all fours to Sylvia’s bedroom; it was a narrow spiral staircase that was almost vertical, and I can still see the fuzzy carpeting looking up at me a few millimeters from my nose. All the while I kept thinking, If I die here, her husband’s going to know what she’s been doing. Then the same voice in my head said, Finally, Marlon, somebody’s going to make you pay for your sins.

I struggled up the spiral staircase one step at a time, then crawled down the hall to the side of Sylvia’s bed and said, “You’ve got to get me to a doctor, I’m sick.”

We both understood the situation: if I passed out there, she’d have to call the paramedics and her husband would discover I had been in the house at three
A.M
. If she took me to the hospital, people would see her with me. If I died, it would be even worse. Sylvia did something rather brave that I’ll always be grateful for; without a beat, she said she was taking me to the hospital. Maybe she didn’t have much choice, but she saved my life and it was courageous of her. She drove me to the UCLA Hospital, where emergency-room nurses sat me on a gurney and started asking me questions. A doctor came in, asked more questions, shook his head and said he didn’t think anything was seriously wrong with me.

“Doctor,” I said, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me. I’m bleeding internally. Stick a tube down my throat into my stomach, and you’ll see that there’s blood in there.”

“Well, we’re not certain of that.”

“You’ll never know until you try it,” I answered.

They did what I suggested and pulled out a lot of black fluid from my stomach. I suspected I had split my esophagus doing my imitation of a bulimic, so by then I must have been bleeding internally for at least four hours.

“What happens if you can’t stop the bleeding?” I asked.

“We’ll take you upstairs and operate on you.”

“How can you operate on me if I’m already going into shock?”

“Well, we don’t know how much blood you’ve lost, so we’re going to pump your stomach.” They pumped the blood out, then pumped ice water down my esophagus, which stopped the bleeding. The next day they ran a tube with a camera lens down my throat and confirmed what I had thought: there was a tear in my esophagus. They put me on soft foods for ten days, and I
was fine, but the experience left me with a herniated esophagus, which in later years I’ve tried to control with biofeedback and meditation.

   I’ve gone on and off diets for years, usually before starting a new movie. When I have to lose weight, I can do it. It wasn’t unusual to drop thirty-five or forty pounds before a picture. I ate less, exercised more and it came off. The hard part was putting myself in the right psychological mode, so that eating stopped serving as an avenue of pleasure. I’m not fat by nature. I got fat mostly because I loved brownies, ice cream and everything else that makes you fat. One reason for this, I suspect, is that when I was a kid, I’d come home from school to find my mother gone and the dishes in the sink. I’d feel low and open the icebox, and there would be an apple pie, along with some cheese, and the pie would say: “C’mon, Marlon, take me out. I’m freezing in here. Be a pal and take me out, and bring out Charlie Cheese, too.” Then I’d feel less lonely.

Food has always been my friend. When I wanted to feel better or had a crisis in my life, I opened the icebox. Most of my life, I weighed about 170 pounds, though when I had my nervous breakdown in New York, I dropped to 157. After forty, my metabolism shifted gears, but I kept eating as much as ever while spending more and more time in a sedentary relationship with a good book.