Hollywood Hellraisers (5 page)

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 celebrity. 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 press.’ 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.

Zanuck wouldn’t be the only one. During rehearsals for
The Fugitive Kind
(1960), the actors all sat round a table to read the script, speaking their lines in a low mumble, taking the lead from Marlon. Finally, cast member Maureen Stapleton couldn’t take it any longer. ‘What the fuck are you doing, Marlon? I can’t hear a word anyone is saying. Have I gone deaf or what? For all that money you’re getting you ought at least to let everyone hear what you’re saying.’ Marlon burst into laughter and everyone felt a huge release. Sitting at the back was the author Tennessee Williams, ‘Thank God, darling,’ he said. ‘I haven’t heard a bloody thing all week.’

While filming
Viva Zapata
Marlon got up to his usual tricks, setting off firecrackers in a hotel lobby, dropping tarantulas into the dressing room of the actresses and serenading leading lady Jean Peters from a treetop at three in the morning. Kazan also recalled the amazing number of women who hung around the set, making themselves very available to him, though he rarely responded. His warmest relations seemed to be with the men. Well, not all of them, certainly not Anthony Quinn, cast as his brother. The two hardly spoke at all. Quinn was pissed off that Kazan asslicked Brando constantly, attending always to his needs to the detriment of everyone else’s. One day the two actors took a walk, during which Marlon got his dick out and started pissing. He suggested Quinn do the same. ‘At least we can relieve ourselves together.’ After that the pair had contests to see who could piss the furthest.

Then all hell broke loose. In the climactic fight between the two brothers Kazan wanted authenticity, he wanted his actors at each other’s throats for real, so spread malicious lies to Quinn that Marlon had badmouthed him and vice versa. When the cameras rolled both men went wild. Marlon especially lost it, yanking out tufts of hair. ‘I wanted to stick my sword in him,’ Quinn said later. Kazan kept his deception secret and as a result the two actors didn’t speak to one another for fifteen years until the misunderstanding was resolved. ‘He inspired a lot of actors,’ Brando said of Kazan. ‘But you paid a price.’

Over the past few years Kazan had become a mentor for Brando, an integral part of his creative life, which made what the director was about to do all the more shocking. This was the age of the McCarthy witchhunts, of Reds-under-the-bed paranoia, and after going through private torture for months Kazan agreed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), naming former colleagues who, like himself, had once been communist sympathisers. Many in Hollywood would never forgive Kazan such treachery. Could Brando? He was working on a new film,
Julius Caesar
(1953), when someone told him what Kazan had done and he was poleaxed by the revelation. The director, Joe Mankiewicz, later recalled Brando coming to him on the set virtually in tears, saying, ‘What’ll I do when I see him, bust him in the nose?’