Hollywood Hellraisers (8 page)

His co-star was Frank Sinatra, still pissed at Brando for stealing
On the Waterfront
from under his nose and now even more narked because he was giving his old lady Ava Gardner a good seeing-to on a regular basis. One morning Marlon got a call from Frank. ‘Listen, creep, and listen good. Stay away from Ava. You got that? First offence, broken legs. Second offence, cracked skull. If you live through all that, cement shoes.’

Inevitably tensions surfaced between the two men on set. Sinatra’s nickname for Brando was ‘Mumbles’. Marlon said of Sinatra’s voice, ‘I’d prefer a castrated rooster at dawn.’ On set one day Marlon asked Frank to run through lines with him. ‘Don’t pull that Actors Studio shit on me,’ blasted the singer. Their working methods certainly differed. Sinatra liked things done swiftly, if it was a good take, that’s it, let’s move on. ‘That was not Marlon’s way of working,’ says Tom Mankiewicz. ‘And it wasn’t my father’s way of working either.’

Brando’s rivalry with Sinatra never boiled over into open hostility in public, his best put-down about the crooner being, ‘He’s the kind of guy that, when he dies, he’s going up to heaven and give God a bad time for making him bald.’ The nearest it came to blows was during the filming of a scene in a restaurant booth with Sinatra eating a slice of cheesecake. ‘Just for fun, Marlon kept blowing his line,’ says Mankiewicz. ‘And of course every time he blew his line they’d start again and they’d put a new piece of cheesecake in front of Sinatra. And Frank didn’t want to eat a lot of cheesecake, and during a break Brando said to Dad, “I’m gonna make this son of a bitch eat till he starts shitting in the booth.” Frank knew Marlon was fluffing his lines intentionally just to irritate him because he had a show to do that night in Vegas.’

A substantial box-office hit,
Guys and Dolls
remained the one and only musical Marlon ever made, believing as he did that his voice sounded ‘like the wail of a bagpipe through wet tissues’.

In an interview Marlon once declared his intention of marrying within the year and was predictably inundated with offers from women in various states of desperation. One postcard arrived from a sixteen-year-old Eskimo girl who ended: ‘Me make best wife, know how to keep husband warm in very cold.’ Brando replied. ‘No good in California.’

When he did finally marry, Marlon chose a suitably exotic creature, Anna Kashfi, who claimed to have been born in Calcutta of pure Indian parentage. She was just another of his numerous girlfriends until struck down with tuberculosis, whereupon Marlon, a sucker for the helpless, nursed her back to health and then claimed he was smitten, presenting Kashfi with the ring he’d taken from his dead mother’s finger and declaring, ‘I’m glad she’s dead! If she was alive, I never could have loved you. She wouldn’t have let me go.’

Then it was off to Europe to film the war drama
The Young Lions
(1958), in which Brando played a Nazi. To help him get into the part director Edward Dmytryk hired an ex-Wehrmacht officer and every day he and Brando hurled German abuse at each other. During one meeting with Dmytryk Marlon announced he needed to take a leak. Instead of going to the bathroom Marlon removed some flowers from a vase, opened his flies and, ‘In front of me,’ Dmytryk later recalled, ‘he took a horse piss into the vase.’

While filming in Paris Marlon was mobbed; fans tore off his coat and ripped his shirt. Fame was still very much a Kafkaesque nightmare and he grew increasingly paranoid that people used him just for money or status. He described himself as ‘a bomb waiting to go off’. Much of his anger was directed at the paparazzi. In Hollywood he knocked a camera out of a photo journalist’s hand, while in Rome half throttled a paparazzo who dared take a picture of him with a girlfriend. (By the seventies his antipathy for them hadn’t dimmed, as evidenced when he broke a photographer’s jaw. Undaunted, the paparazzo wore a football helmet next time he went snapping photos of Brando.)

With
The Young Lions
in the can Brando’s marriage to Kashfi could go ahead. Marlon Sr was not amongst the invited. ‘I’ll bury him first,’ he told friends. If it were possible, relations between father and son were worse than ever. At a party given by Marlon for his father, Sr complained about the noise some of his son’s friends were making and told him to ask them to leave. When Marlon refused he was treated to a vicious slap across the face. Though seized with anger, Marlon did not retaliate. Many people have speculated that it was Marlon’s hatred for his father that fuelled his acting, and that it was Stella Adler who showed him how to focus that anger and channel it creatively. Marlon claimed that one of the few positive aspects of playing the motorcycle thug in
The Wild One
was that it released some of his inner violence. ‘Before
The Wild One
I thought about killing my father. After
The Wild One
, I decided that I shouldn’t actually kill him, but pull out his corneas.’

Marlon and Anna Kashfi were married in October 1957. After a brief honeymoon the happy couple returned to Hollywood. Bizarrely, on that first night back Marlon clambered through the window of his sister Jocelyn’s house, crashing on the sofa and telling her, ‘Well, I did it. I got married. Now what do I do?’

In May 1958 Kashfi gave Marlon a much-longed-for son, despite the trauma of being forced to change delivery rooms to avoid press photographers dressed as doctors who were roaming the ward. Tears welled up in Marlon’s eyes as he held the child, whom they named Christian. But parenthood couldn’t save the marriage, and the couple argued and fought constantly. Kashfi claimed that Marlon insisted on behaving like a ‘bachelor’ at weekends, and at other times took off at all hours, returning early in the morning without explanation — ‘None of your business where I’ve been,’ he’d growl.

Brando found solace from marital woes in his pet project, a revenge western called
One-Eyed Jacks
(released in early 1961 after a lengthy delay), which he wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct. For months they sweated over a script that never quite worked. ‘Marlon, I still can’t figure out what this movie is about,’ Kubrick said one day. ‘It’s about the $350,000 I’ve spent so far,’ replied Brando. Kubrick walked and made
Spartacus
instead. ‘So there wasn’t anything for me to do except direct it myself,’ said Marlon. ‘Or go to the poorhouse.’ This news was met with consternation by Paramount’s terrified executives, weary of Brando’s erratic behaviour. But he was a star, one the studio’s top brass believed could be controlled; big mistake.

Out on location Brando out-Leaned David Lean, waiting hours for the right kind of light or cloud formation before shooting. A two-month schedule dragged on to nearer six, and the budget ballooned from $2m to $6m. Brando was out of control and the studio got nervous, very nervous. In the end the head of Paramount himself, Y. Frank Freeman, arrived on the set to personally read the riot act to Brando, since no one else could summon up the courage. ‘You’re going to see how to deal with Marlon Brando.’ Freeman told his fellow executives.

Marlon was sitting on a fence as Freeman approached, the crew looking on and waiting for the fireworks to begin. ‘Marlon,’ said Freeman. ‘I saw the dailies.’ There was a pause, the tension was unbearable. ‘They’re brilliant. I want to tell you what a great job you’re doing.’ The crew nearly died laughing. Freeman was so intimidated by coming face to face with Marlon, who hadn’t even opened his mouth, he couldn’t say anything bad. ‘Everyone forgets Marlon was a big powerful man,’ says
Godfather
producer Albert Ruddy. ‘Believe me, you wouldn’t try to push him around; this guy was a boxer, he had fucking arms on him bigger than most people’s legs. No one ever tried to intimidate him. And they didn’t, because his presence overwhelmed them.’

When Brando got back to Hollywood his first cut of the movie ran five hours. Agonising for months trying to trim it down, in the end Marlon gave up and let Paramount make the final edit. The film never found an audience. ‘Marlon admitted to me that he found directing tough, an ass-breaker,’ says Tom Mankiewicz. ‘Very few actors have become really good directors because it’s a completely different deal. You see, when you’re acting, everybody takes care of you; when you’re directing, you have to take care of everybody else. It’s just a totally different job. And Marlon said, “I did the one picture and never again.”’

According to Karl Malden, during the shooting of
One-Eyed Jacks
Brando would have, ‘two steaks, potatoes, two apple pies and a quart of milk’ for dinner, necessitating constant altering of his costumes. Even before he let himself get obese and ballooned up to Hindenburg proportions, over 350 pounds, Marlon’s eating habits were legendary. Close friend Carlo Fiore told how as early as the late fifties and early sixties Brando went on crash diets before shooting movies, but when he lost his willpower would gorge himself on huge breakfasts consisting of corn flakes, sausages, eggs, bananas and cream, and a huge stack of pancakes drenched in syrup. During a birthday party for Brando on
One-Eyed Jacks
a sign was placed below the cake saying, ‘Don’t feed the director.’ It was an amusing aside, but Marlon’s battle with his weight had only just begun.

Had to shoot me a Mexican.

When
Rebel Without a Cause
hit cinemas James Dean had been dead for only a month, but the legend was already growing out of control. Elvis Presley saw the film forty-four times; he was obsessed with it and when he came to Hollywood sought Dennis Hopper’s friendship because he’d been close to Dean. After two weeks of hanging out Elvis asked Hopper for some acting advice. He’d just read the script for his debut movie
Love Me Tender
and saw major problems over a fight scene involving his leading lady. ‘I’ve never hit a woman and I never will,’ Elvis fretted. ‘I don’t know how I’m gonna do that scene.’ Gently Dennis tried to explain. ‘Well, Elvis, we don’t really hit people in the movies. We fake all that.’ Elvis was convinced Dennis was pulling his leg. ‘Yeah, next thing you’re gonna tell me is those ain’t real bullets I see hitting the ground.’ ‘No, Elvis,’ said Dennis, dumbfounded at the pelvis thruster’s utter naivety. ‘I’m gonna let that one slide.’

Not long after
Rebel
came the premiere of
Giant
. The studio demanded Dennis take Natalie Wood as his date, but he refused, escorting instead the then unknown and future Mrs Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, who he had the hots for. Afterwards Dennis insisted on taking Joanne home, and then tried to sweet-talk himself through the door of her apartment. Joanne barred the entrance with her arm but Hopper wouldn’t budge. Finally she’d no choice but to physically throw him down the stairs. For years Dennis never figured out why, until Newman told him that he was waiting for Joanne inside that night. ‘I was behind the door. We both had a good laugh.’

Bewildering as it may have been to him that Joanne preferred Paul Newman, female company was hardly a problem for Dennis; there were rumours of romantic trysts with Joan Collins and Ursula Andress. ‘None of these affairs were too serious,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think there was a starlet around who could have been had in those days that I didn’t have.’

With Dean dead, Dennis saw himself as the natural inheritor of his rebellious mantle. He made this very obvious to Dean’s old friend John Gilmore when they bumped into each other again. ‘Dennis was peeing in the long trough in a men’s room on the Warners lot one afternoon. He was coming on very strange, like, fuck Warner Brothers, they’re not gonna tell me what to do, blah, blah. He was doing a Jimmy Dean kind of thing, but it didn’t work at all.’ Dennis was determined to be the new rebel in town and give the executives hell. ‘Only they don’t know it yet,’ he said to Gilmore, wagging his cock in the direction of the front office. ‘But they’re going to find out, man.’

Dennis had plenty to rebel against, like the old-timers who’d been running the movie business for decades and grown fat and complacent on past successes. He was going to give it to ’em, but good. ‘I was temperamental,’ he later confessed. ‘I figured I knew a hell of a lot more about acting than they did. Which was probably true.’ Not just Dean, Hopper also looked to the likes of John Barrymore and Errol Flynn, the rebels of Hollywood’s golden age, and saw that it was a great actor’s responsibility to raise hell. Maybe the studio would take you more seriously the more outrageously you behaved.

Quickly Dennis acquired a reputation as a perfectionist and screwball. When he was late on set one time, according to Gilmore, Warners sent a letter detailing the expense this had cost the studio in the cast and crew having to hang around, a not inconsiderable sum. Dennis framed it. He revelled in his nickname of ‘Dennis the Menace’, bragging that Warners now knew they had another volatile talent on their hands who needed special handling the same as Jimmy Dean.

Not everyone thought this rebellious attitude was a good idea. Jack Nicholson was at a party at Dennis’s house once, listening to the man rant and rave, condemning his paymasters, the fat, useless moguls, and clearly saw that this wasn’t an ideal course of action. When Dennis left the room to find more dope, Jack turned to Gilmore and said, ‘Man, this is suicide! What the fuck’s he doing?’ Other friends felt the same way. Gilmore recalls noticing a silver tray at the home of
Rebel
screenwriter Stewart Stern that had a peculiar dent in it. ‘Joanne Woodward told me that at a dinner party there one evening she’d become so impatient with Dennis’s “moaning drivel” about cutting Hollywood down to size that she grabbed the tray and smacked him on top of the head as hard as she could, “Hoping in some way,” she said. “To knock sense into him.”’

A head-on collision was inevitable and it arrived when Dennis was loaned out to 20th Century Fox to work for Henry Hathaway on a movie called
From Hell to Texas
(1958). Hathaway was just the sort of old-school director Dennis abhorred, the kind who didn’t understand, or want to understand, new approaches in acting. ‘I walked off the picture three times,’ said Dennis. ‘I wouldn’t take direction.’ What cheesed off Dennis the most was Hathaway’s habit of telling his actors where to move, how to walk, how to talk. Inspired by Dean, Dennis was now trying to, ‘live in the moment’, do things with his acting without preconceived ideas. ‘Look,’ said Dennis, ‘I’m a method actor. I work with my ears, my sight, my head, and my sense of smell.’ Hathaway must have thought he had a real nutcase on his hands.