Brando (42 page)

I also realized that if I were ever to forgive myself for all the things that I had done, I had to forgive my mother. I didn’t know it at the time, but when I forgave Weonna she symbolized my mother, and I was forgiving her at the same time. Ever since then, I have had good relationships with women.

After I sent that letter to Weonna, we saw each other again, and while not all the wounds were healed, I think we both knew that we would be getting back together. But as we waited for fate to deal us our hand, Weonna died. She was riding a horse she loved, which stumbled, fell and crushed her. She sustained grave head injuries and died within forty-eight hours.

At the funeral I looked down at Weonna in her coffin, put a bouquet of flowers in her hand, whispered to her that I loved her and then kissed her. I’ve missed her every day since. She gave me the gift of laughter.

Weonna had told me that when she died she wanted to be buried near her father in a Catholic cemetery in South Dakota. I told her mother about it, but she said that Weonna’s uncle, a priest, said that she didn’t deserve to be buried in a Catholic cemetery because she had left the Church. I wanted to strangle him, but her mother followed his wishes and Weonna was
buried in a nondenominational cemetery in the San Fernando Valley, where she lies today. Sometimes I drive down the hill from my home and put flowers on her grave. Her mother is also dead now, and I’ve often thought of having Weonna’s casket moved so that she can be with her father. I know that one day I’ll do it.

STARTING WITH MY
nervous breakdown in New York, I went off and on to psychiatrists for many years, especially during recurring moments in my life when I felt depressed, anxious and frightened but didn’t know why. I wasted a lot of money on them, but finally found one who could help me, Dr. G. L. Harrington. But while he helped me in ways I’ll never understand, in the end I had to solve my problems myself.

Besides suffering from depression, anxiety and fear, I had another problem much of my life: until about twenty years ago, I was a bomb waiting to go off. Once, while I was driving on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, a bus driver began honking at me from behind. I was driving at the speed limit and didn’t want to go faster, but he kept pounding on his horn and finally raced around me and cut in sharply, nearly sideswiping me. I stepped on the gas and chased him for five blocks until I got a chance to swing in front of him, ram the bus and force him to the side of the road. Then I jumped out of my car and began smashing the glass door of the bus with both fists and screamed at him to open it because I wanted to dismember him. He cowered inside, and when I couldn’t force the door open, I drove off, convinced that I had made my point.

Another time, when I was in Cannes, I heard that Elizabeth Taylor, whom I liked, and Richard Burton, whom I didn’t, were there. I wanted to ask them to be in a show I was producing for UNICEF, and arranged to have lunch with them on a yacht. It was only noon but Richard was already drunk. He was a mean drunk, and soon he started making racial slurs about my Tahitian children.

At first I overlooked them, but when he kept it up, I turned to him and said, “If you make one more comment of any kind about my children, I’m going to knock you off this boat.”

Burton looked up at me foolishly and silently with swollen, bleary eyes while Elizabeth said, “Oh, Richard, stop that now …” He didn’t accept the challenge, but if he had, I was ready to throw him into the harbor.

On another occasion I was in a nightclub in Hollywood listening to a singer who was not very good; her voice sounded a little like a goose with a sore throat, and she was overweight and considerably past her prime physically. She wasn’t a pretty sight, but she was singing gamely. At the table next to mine, several people were ridiculing her with snide comments loud enough for her to hear them, and I thought, That poor woman is up there doing the best she can, at the age she is, trying to earn a living, and those men are humiliating her.

As they kept it up, I grew angrier and angrier. Finally, one of them recognized me and reached over and touched my arm, either to introduce himself or to ask for an autograph. In an instant I had overturned my table, then I went over to his and said, “If you want to live, don’t ever touch me again.”

He was frightened by my outburst, which even I hadn’t seen coming. In those days there was a latent anger a few millimeters beneath the surface of my skin just waiting to explode, and it happened so fast on this occasion that I was nearly out of control.

Until five or six years ago, I had a temper that sometimes erupted unconsciously, though it was always against men and
often directed against paparazzi, those pathetic predators with cameras who prowl the gutters of the world. I hated anyone who tried to invade my privacy, but them especially, particularly if it involved my children. Once after a party in Rome, I went to the front door to say good-bye to some of my guests, holding my son in my arms, when there was an explosion of flashbulbs. I went berserk. After taking my son back to the living room, I charged out of the apartment like Attila the Hun and threw a haymaker at one of the photographers, missed him by a yard and fell on the pavement, injuring my pride but nothing else because I was anesthetized by adrenaline. I went back to the apartment, got a champagne bottle and went after one rat-faced paparazzo. He ran down the street, jumped on the hood of a car, vaulted over its roof and climbed a wall. I chased him step-by-step for almost a block, holding the bottle like a cudgel. I’d almost caught him when he jumped onto a streetcar and escaped. If I’d caught him, I might have killed him with that champagne bottle. Later that night some of his friends, a gang of toughs, started banging on my door at about 2:30
A.M.
I got a butcher knife in the kitchen and prepared for a bloody battle, but the woman I was with said she was afraid I was going to kill someone and started wrestling with me for it. She was the strongest woman I ever knew, and held on to my wrist with both hands. Finally I came to my senses and thought, This is crazy. I’m not going to go around killing people with a butcher knife. I called the U.S. Embassy and demanded to speak to the ambassador.

The night-duty officer said, “He’s asleep.”

I said, “Wake him up or he’s going to read about himself in the morning.” I was really furious.

When the ambassador came on the line, I said, “I demand that I get some kind of protection from the Italian government. I’ve been intimidated and assaulted, my family has been harassed and I want some action.”

The next morning a couple of carabinieri were posted outside
my door. When I opened the door, a flashbulb went off in a sneak attack by one of the paparazzi, but a policeman put a hand the size of a ham over the lens and took him away. At the police station they opened his camera, pulled out the film, and said, “We don’t see anything wrong with this,” and returned the spoiled, exposed film to him. No more paparazzi bothered me during that visit to Rome, but I nearly choked another photographer at the airport after he started taking pictures of my children.

Now I don’t care, but in those years I was constantly in combat with the paparazzi. Once I hit a photographer, who was waiting outside a club in Hollywood with his face pressed against his camera, and knocked him out; when he came to, he looked around and saw the pieces of his camera on the sidewalk beside him. I felt sorry for what I’d done, bent over and collected the pieces for him. “Sorry,” I said, and he said, “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Looks to me like your camera just exploded.”

On my way to a restaurant in Chinatown in New York with Dick Cavett, I told one paparazzo who had been following us around most of the day, “Look, I’m here with a friend and you’ve been taking a lot of pictures all day long. I’d really appreciate it if you’d let us have a quiet dinner and leave us alone.”

“Well,” he answered, “if you’ll take off your dark glasses and let me take a good picture, I’ll think about it.”

Faster than I imagined possible, I planted my feet, swung and broke his jaw. When he fell, I flexed my foot to kick him, when I suddenly thought, Marlon, stop this. Don’t do it.

The next morning my hand was as big as a catcher’s mitt. Figuring I’d broken it, I went to a doctor who X-rayed it, then said, “It’s not broken.”

“Well, thank God for that. Thanks a lot, Doc, I’ll keep it bandaged and soak it in something.”

“No,” he said, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to go to the hospital. See those little red lines running up your wrist? That’s blood poisoning. If you don’t take care of it, you could lose your arm.”

The photographer’s teeth had cut the sheath of a tendon, and the doctor told me there were more dangerous bacteria in the mouth of a human than in almost any other animal except a monkey. This didn’t surprise me; I had assumed that the mouth of a paparazzo was a cesspool of bacteria. I spent several days in the hospital on my back with my arm soaking in hot compresses, but made sure that no one heard I’d put myself in the hospital by hitting a paparazzo.

   Before finding one who could help me, I was a patient of five different psychiatrists. Based on my experience, most psychiatrists are people who feel comfortable trying to control other people because they can’t handle themselves. Their experiences have overwhelmed them and they believe they will be able to cope only if they are in a controlling position over others. I’ve known a lot of them, and some have been among the nuttiest people I’ve ever met. My experience began with the Freudian analyst recommended by Elia Kazan, and continued with several therapists in California, including one in Beverly Hills whom I saw for many years. He was a neurotic, frightened man who wouldn’t admit to having any fears, and who had read everything and knew nothing. He was spooked by anybody and anything, including his own hair; it was tight and curly, and he kept it cut short because he said he didn’t want people to think he had any Negro blood. Once when we were discussing the Vietnam War, I asked, “What if we bomb Haiphong Harbor and China comes into the war on the side of the North Vietnamese?” to which he replied that there was nothing troublesome about the Chinese that couldn’t be taken care of with three atomic bombs. He spent a lot of our sessions asking for money. If my business manager was a day late in paying his bill,
the first thing he did was remind me. He made me see him five days a week, and he ended each session by saying, “We have to stop now; I have another customer.” He pried into my brain and made me feel worse than I ever had, and when I needed him most he abandoned me.

This happened a few years ago when I thought I was in love with a Jamaican woman named Diana, who was vivacious and funny but at heart was vulgar and unrefined, a would-be actress with more ambition than talent. In the midst of an extended affair she told me that she had accepted an acting job in England, where she had once lived. When I told her I didn’t want her to take the job, she said, “Oh, I’ll be back.”

“No, you won’t,” I said, “because if you go out that door, you’ll never have a chance to come back through it.”

Diana cried but said she was determined to be in the movie. I took her to the airport and kissed her good-bye, then went home and burned her picture and everything else she had ever given me. After Diana arrived in England, she sent me several telegrams, but I didn’t answer them. I was devastated but couldn’t let her know it.

My psychiatrist had been away on a long vacation when she left, and when he returned I walked into his office and sat down prepared to spill my guts and tell him how miserable I was. But he said, “You know, I don’t think I can help you anymore.” I had been his patient for ten or twelve years, and was desperately in need of assistance, but he rejected me. I had trusted him, but he was just one more analyst who got you hooked, then felt no accountability or responsibility for you. Even most auto mechanics guarantee their work, but not a psychiatrist. I had kept this man in groceries and cars for years, but now he rejected me.

“You can’t turn me away,” I said. “I have no place else to go.” I didn’t have enough sense to realize that I would have been better off never having met him. He got out of his chair,
circled the room like an absentminded dog, and put his foot in his wastebasket while gazing out the window. The contents spilled all over the floor, but he was so preoccupied that he didn’t place the basket right side up. It made me realize that he was as nervous and as frightened as I was, so I left in emotional pain.

Diana kept writing from England saying she missed me and wanted to see me, but I didn’t reply. Then I went to London, where I was invited to a party and saw her there. I didn’t look at her, but could see peripherally that she was watching me. I tried to get away before we bumped into each other, but when I got on the elevator, there she was. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, don’t we?” I said and tried to make jokes. In the lobby I went left and she went right, but feeling guilty, I turned, called to her and said, “Diana, I’m sorry things didn’t go well this evening.” She said something cordial and we each went our own way.