Robert Sellers Read online

  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.’

  To keep fit Marlon organised boxing matches down in the theatre’s boiler room. One night — crack — he took a surprise punch that busted his nose real good. Doctors pumped him full of anaesthetic and reset it, and the thing healed pretty quickly, much to Marlon’s dismay. Streetcar had been running for about a year now and he was pretty sick of it and fancied a longer convalescence. When he heard the play’s producer Irene Selznick was coming to visit he went to work on himself with bandages, iodine, the lot. ‘When she walked in the door, I looked like my head had been cut off and sounded as though I were dying.’ Irene was aghast. ‘Oh, Marlon, you poor boy!’ Struggling to sit up, he replied, ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll be back in the show tonight!’ ‘Don’t you dare!’ she said. ‘You’re in no condition, you poor darling. I forbid you to come to the theatre.’ So Marlon got to stay in hospital, ‘and had myself a ball’.

  Playing Stanley Kowalski night after night was now sheer tedium to Marlon, nor could he deal with what was happening to him in terms of celeb
rity. Fame when it arrived caused massive problems; he began suffering from insomnia, got searing headaches, even anxiety attacks, which forced him to lie down in the street on a couple of occasions until they passed. He hated the attention his acting success had brought, running away from people in the street when they recognised him. He confided to Kazan that he succumbed to dark and powerful rages and was terrified he might seriously injure someone while under their influence. The director suggested he see an analyst; psychoanalysis was all the rage at the time, Kazan even told his actors to turn their trauma into drama. For the next eleven years Brando was to see a psychiatrist five days a week whenever he was in New York.

  The bizarre behaviour continued, though. He collected manure from police horses and dropped bags of the stuff from his roof onto unsuspecting passers-by. He enjoyed hanging out of his apartment window until friends screamed in terror for him to get back inside, and took delight in creeping unannounced into the homes of his friends, either just to borrow a book or to camp down for the night. Sometimes an unknowing house guest would watch terrified as a window slid open and the figure of Marlon appeared. He’d also be deliberately rude. The morning after an elegant dinner party the hostess phoned to ask if he’d enjoyed himself. ‘I had a terrible time,’ said Brando. ‘Why?’ said the hostess. ‘Because you’re dull and your guests are repulsive.’

  When he wasn’t insulting his swanky friends he was thieving from them. After one high-society party he’d attended the hostess noticed her collection of miniature antique clocks was missing. Convinced the culprit was Marlon, word was put around and that very evening the items miraculously showed up outside her apartment door with a note: ‘Oops! (signed) a thief.’

  Marlon was glad when he finally left the cast of Streetcar; he’d given everything to the production and now turned his back on the theatre for good. Years later, when asked why he never pursued a theatrical career and if he missed the spontaneous applause from a live audience, Marlon snapped, ‘Who cares about applause? God, do I have to turn into an applause junkie in order to feel good about myself?’

  For a bit of rest and recuperation Marlon holidayed in Europe, getting up to his usual tricks, seducing a local gangster’s convent-reared daughter in Italy, taking her virginity. The guy erupted like Vesuvius. Since he had vowed that ‘even if her own husband attempts to fuck my daughter, I’ll have his dick cut off’, Marlon knew he was in trouble and legged it.

  Hollywood was the obvious next destination, although Marlon was to treat the place with utter contempt for the rest of his life, calling it a ‘cultural boneyard’, a place that stood for ‘greed, avarice, phoniness and crassness’. He agreed to star in The Men (1950), as an embittered paraplegic war veteran, only ‘because I don’t yet have the moral strength to turn down the money’. Arriving wearing his only suit, with holes in the knees and a rip up the arse, no one quite knew what to make of him, or his unusual working methods. In order to feel what it was like to be completely immobilised in a wheelchair Brando asked to be admitted to a veterans’ hospital. There he was able to blend in and make friends with real amputees and lend his characterisation unprecedented authority.

  Most nights Marlon joined the guys when they went out in their wheelchairs to a nearby bar. A woman, obviously pissed, approached them one time babbling on about the healing powers of Jesus Christ. Brando couldn’t resist it and urged the woman to try an on-the-spot conversion on him. Gradually he struggled to his feet. ‘I’m cured!’ he shouted. ‘It’s a miracle!’ before tap dancing round the bar, much to the amusement of his crippled buddies.

  When Marlon returned to New York he moved into classier digs, but his slovenly habits soon turned the place into a dump. A guy arriving to deliver a vacuum cleaner declared, ‘That boy doesn’t need a vacuum cleaner, he needs a plough.’ Setting about decorating the place, Marlon gave up after painting just one wall and for the next year buckets of paint and brushes lay on the living-room floor. Guests just stepped round them.

  His old school friend Wally Cox shared the place with him, along with a third flatmate, a pet raccoon called Russell, a gift from Dodie. Marlon had a way with animals, though not this furry little bastard. So vicious was it that poor Wally was eventually forced out. Brando couldn’t help but love the critter though, and they were practically inseparable for the next two years. It accompanied him onto the sets of movies and at parties would perch on his shoulder. Marlon once asked a press agent, ‘Do you know where my raccoon can get laid?’ Another time he held up a flight because he wanted to bring Russell aboard the plane as a passenger.

  But even the Great One’s patience wore thin as the animal became more uncontrollable. Arriving home from vacation to discover it had pissed over his entire record collection — ‘the apartment looked as though it had been through a drug raid’ — he booted out the moth-eaten shit ball.

  Though reluctant to return to Hollywood, Marlon had little choice when Kazan wanted him for the screen version of Streetcar, although he wasn’t sure if he wanted to revisit Stanley and all the incumbent psychological baggage. At least he had a new and exotic leading lady, Scarlett O’Hara herself, Vivien Leigh, whose personal life at the time horribly mirrored that of Williams’s character Blanche. Haunted by depression, Vivien was a notorious nymphomaniac and on the fast track to a full mental collapse.

  People were nervous how the pair would get on. One afternoon Brando asked why she always wore perfume. ‘I like to smell nice, don’t you?’ Evidently not; Brando said he didn’t even take regular baths, instead ‘I just throw a gob of spit in the air and run under it.’ As filming got under way there was raw tension between them, but an undeniable chemistry. Marlon prowled around Vivien like a caged animal and in letters to Wally Cox admitted he wanted to fuck her so much his teeth ached.

  It was, however, rumoured that around this time Marlon began an affair with Marilyn Monroe that lasted on and off for several years. After one date back at Marlon’s place he said, ‘For God’s sake, Marilyn, get out of that dress. Those tits of yours look like they need to be liberated. ’ The two of them remained close friends and Marlon was one of the last people to talk to Marilyn before her untimely death in 1962.

  Another blonde bombshell, Shelley Winters, was a regular visitor to the Streetcar set. One day Brando locked her in his trailer and began to simulate lovemaking by violently shaking the room, pounding the walls and screaming with delight. Shelley was perplexed, to say the least, and when she refused to yell loud enough for him he whispered, ‘You’re not helping my image enough. For God’s sake, you studied voice projection. Use it!’

  Brando’s playfulness had certainly not subsided in the spotlit environs of Hollywood. He once drove down Sunset Strip with a fake arrow through his head, enjoyed painting moustaches on statues in parks, shook hands vigorously with a powerful producer while holding an egg and laughed as the executive instinctively rubbed his messy hand down his expensive Italian silk suit, and kept his neighbours up all night pounding on African drums.

  He was no respecter of Hollywood tradition either. When the legendary showbiz reporter Hedda Hopper arrived to interview Marlon, he couldn’t give less of a fuck, paying her no attention at all. ‘Do you care to answer my questions?’ she finally said, exasperated. ‘I don’t believe so.’ She stormed off, never to interview Brando again. Along with Louella Parsons, who wrote that Marlon had ‘the manners of a chimpanzee and a swelled head the size of a navy blimp’, Hedda was Hollywood’s premier gossipmonger; both could ruin careers with one stroke of a pen, such had been their influence over decades. But Brando was a tornado that couldn’t be stopped, and besides, they represented the past, Brando the future.

  Marlon never would be a conventional interview subject. He might suddenly ask the reporter, ‘What kind of underwear do you wear?’ Or, ‘Who would you have been in the eighteenth century?’ He hated the whole idea of self-promotion: ‘I don’t want to spread the peanut butter of my personality on the mouldy bread of the commercial p
ress.’ In publicity handouts he’d tell whopping fibs about having been born in Outer Mongolia and that he ate gazelle’s eyes for breakfast. Or claim he’d been born in Rangoon during a zoological expedition and that his father was a leader in the Chinese revolution, sometimes a big-game hunter, an English diplomat or a cattle rustler.

  The film of Streetcar opened in September 1951 and was a smash hit. Watching in the stalls was a whole generation of actors who’d be influenced by Brando’s breathtaking performance. ‘It was shocking to see an actor with that vitality and that reality; no one had ever done it before,’ says Godfather producer Albert Ruddy. Streetcar ended up with twelve Oscar nominations, including Brando for best actor. Ever the joker, Brando informed the press that he wouldn’t be attending the ceremony but sending a cab driver in his place to pick up the award, should he win. He didn’t, losing out to Humphrey Bogart’s infectious turn in The African Queen, though one columnist did actually see a cabby sitting in his place.

  Eager to work with Brando again, Kazan searched for a suitable vehicle for them both, finding it with Viva Zapata (1952), a historical drama based on the life of the great Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. Darryl F. Zanuck, who owned 20th Century Fox and was paying the bills, wanted anyone but Brando in the lead; he would probably have preferred Russell the raccoon to the great mumbler. Zanuck swore he couldn’t understand a word that came out of Brando’s mouth and his fee of $100,000 was a joke. Marlon hit back, saying the tycoon with his buck teeth resembled Bugs Bunny. ‘When he entered a room his front teeth preceded him by about three seconds.’ Kazan wouldn’t budge and began the picture with Brando but Zanuck continued to butt in; the film was falling behind schedule, said the tycoon, Brando’s moustache was stupid, and he still couldn’t understand a bloody thing the actor said.