Fifties (44 page)

Brando was, of course, always a great original. He was the new American rebel, rebelling not against physical hardship or harsh economic conditions but rather against conventionality and the boredom engendered by his boyhood in the Midwest and a strict father. Marlon Brando, Sr., a limestone salesman in Omaha, was a man much given to setting strict rules at home. Yet when he himself was off on sales trips in Chicago or elsewhere, he strayed from his puritan ethic to drink and chase women. Brando’s mother, Dodie, was talented, charming, and almost fey—a would-be actress who was a leader in local amateur theater. Caught in this unsuccessful marriage, she found her own manner of freedom in alcohol. Later when
Dodie would visit her children in New York, they would hide her liquor. But she always foiled them by sneaking the bottles under the bath towels they had dropped on the bathroom floor. This, she said, was the perfect hiding place: “One thing I know, none of my children ever picks up the towels from the bathroom floor.” The respective influence of the parents on their three children can be judged by the fact that Marlon became an actor, Jocelyn became an actress, and Frances became a painter. No one went into conventional careers in business or sales.

Brando’s resentment of his father’s authoritarianism would stay with him throughout his life. “I hate ultimatums,” Marlon would say later. That would be obvious in his work and his career from the start. At school he appeared in a number of plays, and in 1943, at the age of nineteen, he came to New York City. He intended to be an actor. Though most young men his age were eager to have their chance to fight against Germany and Japan, Brando was definitely not: “I watched the war in the Trans-Lux at 42nd and Broadway,” he told friends. To him the real war was not that taking place overseas, but the one that took place in so many homes, between generations.

If a counterculture existed anywhere in America in the forties and early fifties, it was in Greenwich Village. Here were Italian restaurants with candles stuck in old Chianti bottles, coffeehouses with poets and artists, small theaters and clubs that featured modern jazz; here were interracial couples and homosexual and lesbian couples living rather openly. The battle cry was the rejection of commercialism and materialism. In one of his first important films,
The Wild One,
Brando plays a member of a motorcycle club. “What are you rebelling against?” asks a girl in the small town. “Waddya got?” asks Brando.

He loved the Village from the start. It was everything that Omaha was not. Here he could get by in T-shirts, blue jeans, ragged sneakers and, if necessary, a leather jacket. Even for the Village he lived like a gypsy, moving around constantly, rarely having an apartment of his own. Anyone who wanted him would have to find him. There were always women, but his relationships were casual, a forerunner of the kind that would flower in the sixties. If by chance he had money, he spent it or gave it away. If he didn’t have money, he borrowed it. Material possessions seemed to mean little to him. He seemed to covet something different: personal freedom. That meant, for him, a lack of personal possessions and obligations. His was not so much a political rebellion as a restlessness with the conventions of
the American middle class. He was suspicious of the world around him and broke the rules at every opportunity. Years later, he liked to boast that he had been expelled from every school he ever attended. He scorned authority not so much because he wanted to replace it with something else, but because he instinctively disliked authority.

But at this point in his career there was already a sense that he was going to make it. From the very start he got work, more, it sometimes seemed, than he needed or wanted. “This puppy thing will be the best actor on the American stage,” Stella Adler, the actress and teacher, said. Unlike most young actors, he quickly found a first-rate agent, Edith Van Cleve. A year after arriving, he was working in a play called
Hannele’s Way to Heaven,
and shortly after that he got a good part in
I Remember Mama.

Yet he was oddly ambivalent about his talent and the search for success. He hated auditions, for they meant pleasing a person in authority. He was at once ambitious and not ambitious. He was almost deliberately provocative at readings—it was almost as if he tried to read as poorly as he could, and sometimes he would even join his friends after a reading and boast of how badly he had done.

The ambivalence came from both fear of failure and fear of success, which might force him toward a place in a world he was already rejecting and present him with too many choices. Success led inevitably to materialism, he was sure, and that was not something he sought. Thus he was the first in a tradition of new American rebels that would include James Dean and Jack Kerouac. Essentially, the dissidence of Brando and the other rebels was social rather than political. By staying outside traditional straight society, they projected how much they were misunderstood. Implicit in this was the need for more love. “Marlon,” said Truman Capote, who wrote knowingly about him, “always turns against whatever he’s working on. Some element of it. Either the script or the director or somebody in the cast. Not because of something very rational—just because it seems to comfort him to be dissatisfied, let steam off about something. It’s part of his pattern ...”

Brando brought a new dimension to narcissism as well: The rules did not please him, so he reinvented a society in which he set the rules. Inevitably, it all led to becoming only more self-obsessed. In his mind he owed nothing to anyone, and accepted no larger obligations. At one point Robert Mitchum was asked on a talk show if he had ever made a movie with Brando. He answered mordantly, “Brando’s never made a movie with anyone.”

On some level, though, he knew it all worked for him, and his provocative behavior made his looks and sexuality seem even more remarkable and powerful. The overall effect assured that he was going to get what he wanted, if perhaps, in his own mind, for the wrong reason. As such he was disrespectful of both the very charisma that enabled him to succeed so easily and of those upon whom it worked so readily. He was like a beautiful girl who wants to be known for her intelligence but instead is known for her looks.

Yet no one doubted his talent and appeal, which was due to an almost perfect balance between toughness and angelic beauty. His powerful muscular physique belied an oddly delicate sensibility. Self-obsessed he might be, but he was aware of the foibles of others, and he was a brilliant mimic. Stella Adler once said of him, “Marlon never really had to learn to act. He knew. Right from the start he was a universal actor. Nothing human was foreign to him.” Indeed, she later said of him, “I taught him nothing. I opened up possibilities of thinking, feeling, experience, and I opened these doors, he walked right through. He never needed me after that.... He lives the life of an actor, twenty-four hours a day. If he is talking to you he will absorb everything about you, your smile, the way your teeth grow. His style is the perfect marriage of intuition and intelligence.” For the New York theater world he was a breath of fresh air, the man who broke the rules and thereby achieved a more natural kind of acting. Not everyone, of course, understood. When Stella Adler told Clifford Odets of Brando’s genius, he was completely puzzled. “He looks to me like a kid who delivers groceries.”

Streetcar
opened in December 1947. The confluence of these three outsiders reflected a changing America and changing sensibilities. It represented a new and more tolerant social order, where words and images once banned were now permitted. Ten years earlier America might not have been ready for Williams’s plays, an immigrant like Kazan might not have been able to have gone to the best colleges and then found his way to Broadway, and Brando might have been rejected by those running the theater. But now they had all arrived at the same place at the same time.

The synergy of talents was extraordinary. Each strengthened and amplified the others’ talent: Williams without Kazan might have been too poetic and not sufficiently dramatic; Kazan without Williams might have been too political and raw; and both without Brando might have lacked the star who brought their work to the very center of American cultural life, first in the theater and even
more remarkably in Hollywood, which reached far beyond a narrow cultural elite. Each of the three was in his own way rebelling against the puritanism of American life and the conventional quality of the American dream. Thanks to Hollywood, they could now bring it to an audience of millions.

TWENTY

A
MONG THOSE DEEPLY MOVED
by
A Streetcar Named Desire
was a college professor from Bloomington, Indiana. His name was Alfred Kinsey, and in 1950, when he first saw it on Broadway, he had already published the first of his two pioneering works,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,
in fact popularly known as the Kinsey Report. Kinsey knew immediately that he and Williams were, in different ways, doing something very similar—they were tearing away the facade that Americans used to hide their sexual selves. As a result of his work, Kinsey was both fascinated and troubled by the vast difference between American sexual behavior the society wanted to believe existed and American sexual practices as they actually existed; in other words it was one thing to do it, but it was quite another thing to admit doing it. For example, at least 80 percent of successful businessmen, his interviews had shown, had
had extramarital affairs. “God,” he noted. “What a gap between social front and reality!”

Therefore, his response to Williams’s play was not merely emotional. He proposed that he and Williams get together, and the two began a steady correspondence. “As you may know we are making an extensive study of the erotic element in the arts,” he wrote Williams. “This covers painting, music, writing, the stage, etc. One of the plays we have studied in some detail has been your
Streetcar.
We have been fortunate enough to obtain histories from a high proportion of the actors and two of the companies which have put on the play and it has made it possible to correlate their acting with their sexual backgrounds. There are a great many points in the play which we should like to discuss with the author to find out his original ideas and intentions. This is one of the reasons why we should get together.” Eventually, Kinsey and Williams became good friends. Though he was in many way the very embodiment of the Middle American square, Kinsey had no problem with Williams’s homosexuality. He was immensely tolerant of all sexual variations, but he was prudish enough to keep the interviews that his staff did on homosexuality under a file that was known as the H-histories, and he could not bring himself to actually write the word
homosexual.

Alfred Kinsey was no bohemian. He lived in the Midwest, had married the first woman he ever dated, and stayed married to her for his entire life. Almost surely, his close friends thought, he had had no extramarital affairs. Because he was an entomologist and loved to collect bugs, he and his bride went camping on their honeymoon. In his classes at the University of Indiana he always sported a bow tie and a crew cut. He drove the same old Buick for most of his lifetime and was immensely proud of the fact that he had more than 100,000 miles on it. On Sundays, he and his wife invited faculty and graduate-student friends to their home to listen to records of classical music. There, the Kinseys served such homey desserts as persimmon pudding. They took these evenings very seriously—Kinsey was immensely proud of his record collection. When the wife of one faculty member suggested that they play some boogie-woogie, the couple was never invited back.

His values were old-fashioned, and he did not like debt. His house was the only thing he had not paid hard cash for. He bought it with a small down payment and took on a mortgage of $3,500. He boasted at the time of the publication of his landmark book,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,
that he had never been paid more than $5,000 from the University of Indiana; indeed, doing his income tax
at the very last minute one year, he could not remember what his salary was (this was before W-2 forms) and he had to wake the head of his department to find out. He was extremely careful about money and almost everything else. He once gave some wonderfully Victorian advice to Ralph Voris, a younger colleague who was about to get married: “Years ago my banker ... gave me this advice about investments and savings. Diversify. Buy life insurance and annuities. Pay for your home. Have a thousand dollars in cash or instantly convertible securities on which you can draw for emergencies. After each and every one of these items has been achieved (in order), put the next few thousand in sound 3% investments (do not look for bigger returns; if buying stocks or bonds, put it all in investment trust shares which give the small investor the same diversification that the big investor enjoys). For you and Geraldine I should hesitate to advise any serious inroads on your savings until you are well along on the above program.” He once told a colleague, Wardell Pomeroy, to drive back from New York at 35
MPH
with some large models showing the reproductive process: “Anything faster than that is not safe for such a heavy load. You cannot stop in a hurry and you dare not bounce on roads that have been damaged by winter freezes.” The mother superior, Pomeroy called him.

Kinsey did not smoke and he rarely drank. Relatively late in his career he decided to try smoking, since it might make him more like the men he was interviewing and help put them at their ease. Try as he might, he never quite got it right and his assistants finally suggested that the prop was hurting rather than helping him. When he drank it was much the same. After his death, Wardell Pomeroy wrote, “To see him bringing in a tray of sweet liqueurs before dinner was a wry and happy reminder that Alfred Charles Kinsey, the genius, the world figure, was a simple and unsophisticated man in the true sense of that word.”

As a boy he was seriously religious and he walked to church with his family every Sunday, though as he grew older he distanced himself from organized religion and a belief in God. Nonetheless, his children were made to go regularly to Sunday School. Still, the scientist in him was always present. Once his son Bruce pointed to a flower and told his father that God had made it. “Now, Bruce,” Kinsey said. “Where did that flower really come from?” “From a seed,” Bruce Kinsey admitted. Kinsey was driven by curiosity, not prejudice. He rejected those who came to him with preconceptions. To one young man who applied for a job as a researcher, he said, “Well, you have just said that premarital intercourse might lead to
later difficulties in marriage, that extramarital relations would break up a marriage, that homosexuality is abnormal, and intercourse with animals is ludicrous. Apparently you have all the answers. Why do you want to do research?”