Robert Sellers Read online

  Growing up, Warren was the moody type, introverted and withdrawn, someone who, in the words of his sister, ‘always had a private world no one could penetrate where he could hide away and be alone’. His love for books and writing cruelly marked him out as bully fodder. Incapable of fighting back, it was Shirley’s fists that got him out of jams, until she discovered such butch behaviour didn’t get her many dates. So the tomboy became a beautiful young woman and poor Warren had to fend for himself.

  He didn’t get much help from his father, with whom he never developed a truly close relationship. Ira could be distant and unapproachable, a bit too schoolmasterly in the household. A drinker, Ira often passed out in front of the television and on one occasion, in a drunken stupor, accidentally set the house on fire. Warren’s main influences came from women, from his mother, his sister and aunts, all of whom had a strong and positive effect on his development. ‘And I was fortunately not smothered by them.’ By his own admission Warren came to trust women far more than men.

  By the time Warren reached high school things were radically different. No longer bullied, the blistering looks that would make him a sex symbol were emerging and girls were starting to take note. He had his pick of them, and became something of a flirt. ‘Warren always loved the opposite gender,’ former classmate Art Eberdt told People magazine in 1990. ‘What he does in Hollywood, he was just like that in high school. He dated everybody he could date,’ even the senior girls. Whether he lost his virginity at this point is debatable, but Warren told friends that he believed he’d marry the first girl he fucked and that they’d always stay together. He also thought that the only reason for marriage was to have children, and that fatherhood would satisfy his ego. He’d have to wait some forty years to find out.

  He ditched his precious books, too, replacing them with football boots. The abandonment of creative aspirations was because ‘I was too occupied in proving myself a male.’ ‘Mad Dog Beatty’, as they called him, excelled on the sports field to such a degree that in his senior year Warren was elected class president.

  This desire to achieve merely hid the fact that Warren was still a resolute loner, fearing commitment of any kind. It may also have had something to do with a drive to compete with his big sister’s recent successes. After graduating Shirley had gone off to New York to be a dancer, hoofing it like mad in Broadway chorus lines. She was spotted by a talent scout and cast in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955), quickly establishing herself as the new darling of Hollywood, winning the ultimate accolade of membership into Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack, as their sort of sexually off-limits mascot.

  Warren was still at school when Shirley hit the big time. He ditched sports and took up the arts again. This was a big gamble, since spurning his fellow jocks could have backfired nastily, but Warren was no longer a wimp who needed his sister to bail him out of fights: his masculinity went unquestioned. But eyebrows were raised when, following graduation, he turned down ten college sports scholarships. Athletes, he said, ‘get their nose splashed all over their faces and their teeth knocked down their throats’. Ignoring his father’s advice to study law, Warren wanted to follow in Shirley’s footsteps and go into show business, even taking a holiday job at a theatre in Washington as a rat catcher. ‘I was supposed to stand in the alley to keep the rats from going in the stage door. I never saw any rats, except on stage.’

  Then it was off to Chicago and drama school, but after just a year he dropped out, convinced they’d nothing left to teach him and that he was ready to strike out on his own.

  I’m a goddamn marvel of modern science.

  When he reached the age of seventy Jack Nicholson announced he’d been thinking about writing his memoirs. All he’d got so far, he confessed, was the first line. He flashed his devilish trademark grin as he recited: ‘It seems to me that my life has been one long sexual fantasy,’ he paused, leering for effect. ‘But more of that later . . .’

  Jack was born in Neptune, New Jersey, on 22 April 1937 in extraordinary circumstances. For the first thirty-eight years of his life he never realised that his sister was in fact his mother and the woman he’d grown up calling Mom was actually his grandmother. How the hell did that happen?

  Back in the thirties you’d be less of a social pariah as a child molester than as a teenage single mum, but that’s exactly what faced seventeen-year-old June Nicholson. Desperate to avoid a local scandal, her family secretly bundled June off to a hospital in New York to have the child and did the cinema-going public a big favour by deciding against an abortion. When she returned with the baby boy a charade began that was to last almost four decades as June’s mother, Ethel May, took over the raising of her grandson, passing him off as her own. As for June, she slipped quietly into the role of Jack’s older sister until he was two, then she left home to try her luck in show business, ending up marrying a dashing test pilot, starting a new family and settling down on Long Island, where Jack visited on school holidays.

  The cover-up was discovered in 1974 by a reporter for Time magazine, who confronted Jack with the facts. After shaking off his disbelief he called his other sister Lorraine to see if it was true, June and Ethel May by this time both having passed away. Lorraine confirmed it: yes, June was his real mother. ‘Such is the price of fame,’ he later said. ‘People start poking around in your private life, and the next thing you know your sister is actually your mother!’

  On the surface Jack seemed to take the news on the chin, remaining controlled, getting on with his life. ‘By that time I was pretty well psychologically formed.’ But those closest to him were only too aware that the revelation had deeply wounded him. According to his friend Peter Fonda it gave him a, ‘real deep hurt inside; there’s no way of resolving it, ever’. And Michelle Phillips, Jack’s girlfriend at the time, told Vanity Fair in 2007 that the news ‘was horrible for him. Over the weeks, the poor guy had a very tough time adjusting to it. He’d been raised in this loving relationship, surrounded by women. Now I think he felt women were liars.’

  Of course, the great Nicholson family secret spewed up one further question: who the hell was the father? Accusing fingers pointed at Don Furcillo-Rose, a handsome vaudevillian who performed with bands at holiday resorts on the New Jersey shore. He and June shared a brief romance, despite the fact he was ten years her senior and already married with a young child. When Ethel May learned of the affair she told Furcillo-Rose to stay away from her daughter or she’d have him thrown in jail for corruption of a minor.

  For years Furcillo-Rose kept tabs on little Jack, attending his school plays and watching him run back home after classes, sighing, ‘That’s my son.’ Despite the circumstantial evidence, Jack has always declined to accept Rose as his father, or to submit to a blood test, preferring to let the matter rest. For good or for bad Ethel May’s ne’er-do-well husband, John J. Nicholson, was Jack’s dad, in his memories at least, however sour they were. The guy was practically out of the door by the time he arrived. A devout Catholic and upstanding local citizen, John Nicholson descended into alcoholism and became something of a bum, reappearing for holidays or special family gatherings, then taking off again. Maybe sometimes he’d take little Jack to a baseball game or a movie, and there were trips to bars where the kid drank eighteen sarsaparillas to his dad’s thirty-five shots of neat brandy. ‘He was an incredible drinker.’ Strangely, there was no hostility towards John from other family members; they just accepted the way he was — ‘a quiet, melancholy, tragic figure’, in the words of Jack. ‘I felt sorry for him because he couldn’t help it.’ So peripheral was his father in his life that when he died in 1955 Jack, then a poverty-stricken young actor in California, declined to fly back home for the funeral.

  It was Ethel May, a formidable and resourceful matriarch, whose resolve and great self-sacrifice kept the family’s head above water in those lean post-Depression years. Her thriving beauty business, conducted from the living room of her home, allowed them to live in one of Nept
une’s more favoured neighbourhoods. There Jack grew up surrounded and suffocated by the adoration of women, his mother, his sisters, aunts and female customers, hearing them all gossip beneath hair dryers; ‘It’s a miracle that I didn’t turn out to be a fag.’

  It’s hardly surprising that in adult life Jack constantly sought the company of women, why he fixated on them, desperate to please them, ‘because my survival depended on it’. He knew also how to exploit his status as the only male in the household, turning on the charm like a car stereo, but there was a temper, too, ‘that rocked the house like an earthquake’ when he didn’t get his way, said sister Lorraine. One Christmas, as punishment for sawing a leg off the dining-room table, his present was a piece of coal. He hollered the place down until a proper gift was forthcoming.

  At school Jack was a mischief maker par excellence, suspended three times: for smoking, swearing and vandalism. He later bragged that during his sophomore year he had to stay after class every day. ‘I was the toughest kid in my area.’ There was also an anger in him that’s never truly gone away. Jack has confessed to having ‘a tremendous violence in me’, and said that all through his life he’s had to learn to subdue it. Even playing golf it’s there, waiting to burst out. ‘I’m not a very Zen guy. I’ve laid in sand traps and cried, and hurled clubs in lakes.’

  Some teachers saw behind this rebellious façade to a deeply unhappy boy, disappointed by his father’s absence, though Jack claimed he was only doing what most adolescents did at school, ‘making a big show that they don’t give a fuck’. When he needed to knuckle down he was capable of producing skilled work; he merely chose to hide his not inconsiderable intelligence since it wasn’t cool to be seen as a geek.

  If Jack wasn’t a geek, by no stretch of the imagination was he ever going to be a jock, though he loved sport and hung around the periphery of the school basketball team. After one away game, incensed at the opponents’ dirty tactics, he snuck back into their gym and trashed the electrical scoreboard equipment. That was Jack’s first moment of notoriety — and boy did it feel good.

  Such clowning around was perhaps his first realisation of a desire to perform. Whatever, he joined a drama group, not initially out of any theatrical bent but because it was a chance to hang around with ‘chicks’. Although he never got the chance to do much with them. The school prom was the only time Jack was seen arm in arm with a girl. And she wasn’t terribly amused when he spent the bulk of the evening in a bathtub while his friends poured cold water over his head in an effort to sober him up.

  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.’

  2

  The Methody Fifties

  I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.

  Having 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.’