Hollywood Hellraisers (4 page)

There was little direction in the life of Jack. He sported a DA hairstyle, wore blue jeans and a motorcycle jacket, sort of bummed around, counting the days till the end of school. ‘It’s crazy,’ said classmate Gil Kenney, later a local chief of police. ‘We never thought Jack would go anywhere. He was a clown, wasn’t serious about anything.’

I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.

H
aving burned his bridges at Shattuck Military Academy, the question for Marlon Brando was what to do now. There was some vague notion about maybe trying something in the theatre. ‘That’s for faggots!’ his father scoffed. ‘Who’d want to pay to see a shitkicking Nebraska boy on stage?’ It was an attitude that seemed to sum up their relationship. Nothing Marlon did ever pleased or interested his father, who took malicious pleasure in telling his son he’d never amount to anything. Marlon was determined to get the hell out and prove him wrong.

Both his sisters had already fled to New York and Marlon soon joined them in that cultural maelstrom of the war years, clay ready to be moulded, but moulded into what? He’d no clear idea when he landed on the doorstep of Frances in Greenwich Village in 1943. He enjoyed the bohemian lifestyle all right: parties, late nights — women. A South American señora who lived across the hall, ten years his senior, had a young son and a husband away fighting in the war. Marlon pounced, but saw other women quite flagrantly, immune to the hurt he caused. A few years later when the flat was taken over, the new occupier was kept up all hours of the day and night by girls beating on the door after Marlon. To preserve her sanity she attached a sign outside: ‘Marlon Brando doesn’t live here any more.’

Work was plentiful in the bustling city and for short stretches Marlon was a cook, a nightwatchman, a truck driver till he crashed it and an elevator operator at a department store, quitting after four days because it embarrassed him to call out such words as ‘lingerie’. His other sister Jocelyn was studying drama under the brilliant Stella Adler, a proponent of a new naturalistic form of acting called the method, which emphasised that authenticity in acting is achieved by drawing on inner reality to expose deep emotional experience. At her suggestion, Marlon joined the class. Why the hell not — he’d nothing else to do — though there was an ulterior motive involved: fellow graduate Walter Matthau said Marlon only wanted to be an actor ‘so that he could get fucked from here to Timbuktu’.

It didn’t take Stella long to home in on Brando’s raw talent; she was mesmerised by his sheer energy and sex appeal. ‘In those days Marlon looked as if he might hump you at any moment like a beast in the field.’ Also by his creative originality. One day she told her class to act like chickens alerted to an atomic bomb strike. Everyone started flapping and clucking maniacally, except Marlon, who just squatted on the ground, miming laying an egg. ‘What the hell does a chicken know about nuclear fission?’ he said. Soon Stella was telling anyone who’d listen that this nineteen-year-old student would be ‘the best young actor in the American theatre’.

Suddenly Marlon’s mother Dodie arrived in New York. Marlon Sr had tried to get them both to join Alcoholics Anonymous; she’d chosen the booze over her marriage and fled. Brando often visited her apartment and delighted in shocking her, camping it up in her frilly bathrobe or pissing in the kitchen sink while she watched. ‘Oh Buddy,’ she cried out. ‘Why don’t you stop this shit?’ The close bond they shared was plain for all to see, but Dodie’s drinking remained out of control and Marlon would once again be forced to search the streets and alleyways for her. Some nights when he couldn’t find her he’d crash into a state of depression. She even missed her son’s triumphant Broadway debut in October 1944 because she was nursing a hangover.

It was a nothing role, anyway, ironically in a play called
I Remember Mama
, a rather anodyne affair about an immigrant family. To alleviate the boredom Marlon played practical jokes on the cast, like pouring salt in the coffee veteran actress Mady Christians had to drink on stage, making her violently sick. He also aroused himself in the wings so as to arrive on stage with a full-blown erection that couldn’t be missed by ladies in the front stalls.

As for his dressing room, it was a den of iniquity. Marlon boasted that his ‘noble tool’, as he was wont to call his cock, had never been so busy. Broads were queuing up outside his door. One night after the show Marlene Dietrich waltzed in and without saying a word dropped to her knees and gave him an expert blow job.

Just as Marlon was tasting stage success Dodie returned to his father. Marlon knew deep down that she ‘was mad about the bastard’, but couldn’t help but see her leaving him as desertion, as choosing her husband over her son. ‘My love wasn’t enough. She went back.’ Over the next few weeks Marlon lost his appetite, shed twenty-five pounds and began to stammer. After the curtain fell at the theatre he’d wander the streets for hours on end, lost in thought. It was, ‘a kind of nervous breakdown’ that lasted for months.

Stella Adler came to his rescue, taking Marlon into the bosom of her family. ‘She may have saved my sanity.’ Along with her husband, theatre director Harold Clurman, Stella listened for hours as Brando talked and explored his angst. Clurman later wrote. ‘Marlon suffers untold misery because of his mother’s condition. The soul-searing pain of his childhood has lodged itself in some deep recess of his being.’ Clurman also revealed that Brando said he smoked pot and admitted, with a measure of guilt, his rabid sexual promiscuity.

Living in close proximity for weeks on end inevitably drew Marlon and Stella closer together and a great deal of flirtatiousness entered the relationship. Often Marlon deliberately went into Stella’s bedroom while she was changing and stared at her in her bra and knickers. ‘Oh, Marlon, please,’ she’d complain while coyly covering herself up. ‘I’m getting dressed.’ He’d say, ‘That’s why I’m here, to see that you’re dressed properly. ’ He’d even sit next to her at moments like this, a few times cupping her breasts in his sweaty palms. ‘Marlon, don’t do that or I’ll slap you.’ Brando would playfully look at Stella and reply, ‘You know you don’t want to do that to me.’

As luck would have it, Clurman was preparing to direct a new play on Broadway,
Truckline Café
, and Stella recommended Marlon for the important role of a psychopathic war veteran who murders his cheating wife. His audition was a disaster. ‘He mumbles,’ complained producer Elia Kazan. ‘They won’t be able to hear him past the fifth row.’ Clurman remained insistent: ‘Look, this boy’s got real talent.’

Kazan would soon become a major force in Brando’s life, but at that first meeting the two men circled each other like competing predators, each sizing the other out and then moving off, not a single word exchanged.

When
Truckline Café
opened in early 1946 Broadway had never seen such raw, naturalistic acting. For the dramatic scene in which his character confesses his crime, Marlon ran up and down the basement stairs of the theatre each night while stagehands doused him with a bucket of cold water so he appeared on stage in an effectively frenzied demeanour, out of breath, wet and trembling. Movie critic Pauline Kael was in the audience one night and thought the young actor was in the middle of a genuine convulsion. ‘Then I realised he was acting.’

Kazan was dazzled by it, too. ‘It’s like he’s carrying his own spotlight.’ Brando literally stopped the show. The audience shouted, they screamed, they stamped their feet. ‘In fifty years in the business, I’ve never seen it happen before,’ said co-star Karl Malden. ‘And it’s never happened since.’ The play itself, however, didn’t find public favour and closed within a week. But Brando had announced himself.

Marlon found other jobs, starring in a touring production of
Candida
in Washington, DC, where he spent most of his spare time wandering the nation’s capital covering the heads of famous statues with paper bags. If he encountered one with an outstretched hand he’d place a coffee cup in it. The local police thought a nutter was on the loose. He also seemed to take a perverse pleasure in turning down work. When a top Broadway producer offered him a major role in Noël Coward’s comedy
Present Laughter
, Marlon said he couldn’t possibly appear in such fluffy nonsense when millions of people were starving in Europe and Asia. Besides, he detested it, telling Coward to his face that his play was like ‘having a diarrhoea attack with no toilet in sight’.

He said yes, though, to working opposite former screen legend Tallulah Bankhead, by then so faded as to be virtually invisible. She’d casting approval for her new play, a wretched thing called
The Eagle Has Two Heads
by Jean Cocteau, and wanted to interview Marlon at her mansion. An enthusiastic boozer, she was well tanked up by the time he arrived. ‘Are you an alcoholic?’ said Brando, not giving a damn for protocol. ‘No, darling, just a heavy drinker.’ She was also a nymphomaniac who seduced her young leading men and was very quickly trying to grope at the bulge in Brando’s jeans. ‘I would rather be dragged over broken crockery than make love to Tallulah,’ he wrote to his sister afterwards. But it’s generally accepted he did.

When the play opened on tour Brando proceeded to upstage the diva at every opportunity: he picked his nose, scratched his balls and leered at the audience, even mooned them. Then he ate garlic before his big love scene with Tallulah, ‘Avoiding her tongue as best I could’. He drove the poor woman nuts and was fired when one night he stood at the back of the stage and pissed against the scenery. ‘The next time Miss Bankhead goes swimming,’ Marlon declared. ‘I hope that whales shit on her!’

Unemployed again, things were about to change radically for Marlon. Tennessee Williams had written a new play about a repressed Southern belle raped and driven mad by her brutal brother-in-law. Elia Kazan was set to direct it on Broadway. Convinced Brando was perfect for the lead role, Kazan thrust twenty dollars into his palm and told him to go and see Williams out at his holiday home on Cape Cod, where he was vacationing with his gay lover. The cash went straight on food and booze because Marlon was broke so he hitchhiked all the way and arrived three days late. The house was in chaos when he got there; the power was out and the toilets blocked and overflowing. Williams was in a dreadful panic. Brando astonished him, first by mending the fuses and sorting out the plumbing, then with his audition. ‘I had never seen a man of such extraordinary beauty,’ Williams gushed. He’d found his Stanley Kowalski. The play was
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

When
Streetcar
went into rehearsals Brando was erratic. Unable to get a fix on the character, he fell back on his familiar mumbling. ‘Speak up!’ one actor yelled at him. ‘I can’t hear a bloody word you’re saying.’ Another smashed his fist against a wall in sheer frustration. Few in the production quite knew what to make of him, this wild man who sometimes slept at the theatre and once disappeared for days on end, returning unshaven and looking like shit.

By opening night, 3 December 1947, bang, Brando was there, totally in the zone, to such an extent that, smashing a dinner plate during one scene, he continued his dialogue while picking shards of china from his bloodied fingers. ‘Once on stage, he became a character so much he wasn’t Marlon any more,’ said co-star Karl Malden.

Streetcar
quickly became the hottest ticket in town. When Marlon made his first appearance in tight-fitting blue jeans and ripped T-shirt people simply gasped, nothing quite so threateningly sexual had been unleashed before on an American stage; some women in the audience began hyperventilating. It was a performance that redefined acting, practically revolutionised it overnight. This wasn’t an actor merely acting, this was an actor
being
.

Brando’s dressing room was undoubtedly the social centre of the theatre; young actors were drawn to him like moths to a flame. Starlets too fell at his feet, and he took ruthless advantage. Kazan said he was like ‘a fuck machine’. Parades of women of all races, creeds and colours passed through; some he serviced during the twenty-minute interval in which he was off stage. It was not unusual either for some girl to crash through the stage door ranting and raving that Marlon should pay for her abortion. He also, ahem, ‘entertained’ the rich and famous, including Ingrid Bergman, Joan Crawford, Wendy Barrie (a raging nympho and former girlfriend of gangster Bugsy Siegel), Veronica Lake and Hedy Lamarr, whose previous shagmates included Hitler and Mussolini, so he was in good company.

His apartment door was open most of the time, too, for the odd bit of skirt or devotee to come calling. Sometimes upwards of fifteen actors or down and outs he’d picked up would cram inside. He was their leader, no question, helping them out with food and money; he liked to feel needed. It was a pretty squalid flat, no hot running water and just a few tables and chairs, plus a mattress thrown on the floor amongst piles of books. A Broadway star he may have been, but he didn’t live like one, preferring to eat peanut butter straight from the jar and wear slovenly clothes until they started to stink, and then throw them away and buy new ones.

His only concession to fame was the Harley-Davidson motorcycle that he was seen roaring around the back alleyways of the theatre district or giving colleagues lifts home on. One night he was arrested for dangerously overloading the machine. Another time he was hauled over by a traffic cop in Times Square and asked for his licence. He didn’t have one. As he vainly searched his pockets some unanswered parking tickets fell out. It was off to jail and the play’s producer had to bail him out. ‘Why’d you do that?’ Marlon complained. ‘I was having a fine time in there. Met a lot of interesting people. Great experience.’

As
Streetcar
settled down into a long run Brando grew restless and started playing up, putting dog shit in the food on stage, stuff like that. The main target of his childish japes was leading lady Jessica Tandy; God knows what she’d done wrong. He once told a bunch of sex-crazed sailors he met in the street that if they visited Jessica’s dressing room after the show she’d satisfy the lot of them. They actually turned up, but were prevented from getting inside by security. Another time a mysterious voice on a phone informed theatre management that if Jessica appeared on stage that night she’d be shot. Police mingled amidst theatregoers as Jessica bravely gave her performance. No one ever found out who made the call, but fingers pointed in Marlon’s direction. Asked to sum up Marlon, Jessica did so in four words: ‘A selfish, psychopathic bastard.’