Brando (15 page)

Admittedly it is impossible for anyone to judge themselves objectively, but I have never believed that I played the part of Stanley successfully. I think the best review of the play was written by a critic who said I was miscast. Kim Hunter was terrific and well cast as Stella, and so was Karl Maiden—a fine actor who, despite enormous success, has always remained one of the most decent men I’ve ever known. But I think Jessica and I were both miscast, and between us we threw the play out of balance. Jessica is a very good actress, but I never thought she was believable as Blanche. I didn’t think she had the finesse or cultivated femininity that the part required, nor the fragility that Tennessee envisioned. In his view, there was something pure about Blanche DuBois; she was a shattered butterfly, soft and delicate, while Stanley represented the dark side of the human condition. When Blanche says to Stella, “Don’t hang back with the beasts,” she was talking about the animalistic side of human beings. It’s true that Blanche was a liar and a hypocrite, but she was lying for her life—lying to keep her illusions alive. When she said, “I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be true” and “I didn’t lie in my heart,” Tennessee meant those words. He told Kazan he wanted the audience to feel pity for Blanche. “Blanche,” he said, “must finally have the understanding and compassion of the audience … without creating a black-dyed villain in Stanley.”

I think Jessica could have made Blanche a truly pathetic person, but she was too shrill to elicit the sympathy and pity that the woman deserved. This threw the play out of balance because the audience was not able to realize the potential of her character, and as a result my character got a more sympathetic reaction than Tennessee intended. Because it was out of balance, people laughed at me at several points in the play, turning Blanche into a foolish character, which was never Tennessee’s intention. I didn’t try to make Stanley funny. People simply laughed, and Jessica was furious because of this, so angry that she asked Gadg to fix it somehow, which he never did. I saw a flash of resentment in her every time the audience laughed at me. She really disliked me for it, although I’ve always suspected that in her heart she must have known it wasn’t my fault. I was simply doing what the script called on me to do; the laughter surprised me, too.

But we had a wonderful play under us and it was a big success. An actor can never act his way out of a bad play; no matter how well he performs, if he doesn’t have real drama beneath him he can act his best all day and it won’t work. He could have the twelve disciples in the cast and Jesus Christ playing the lead and still get bad reviews if the play is poorly written. An actor can help a play, but he can’t make it a success. In
A Streetcar Named Desire
, we had under us one of the best-written plays ever produced, and we couldn’t miss.

THE INTERVALS
of anxiety and depression that began when my mother left New York City continued off and on through the run of
A Streetcar Named Desire
and for long afterward. It would take years for me to escape my acceptance of what I had been taught as a child—that I was worthless. Of course, I had no idea then that I even had such feelings about myself. Something was chewing on me and I didn’t know what it was, but I had to hide my emotions and appear strong. It has been this way most of my life; I have always had to pretend that I was strong when I wasn’t. Nonetheless, sometime after the play opened I realized I needed help, and Gadg referred me to his psychiatrist, a well-known Freudian analyst in New York named Bela Mittelman, the coldest man I’ve ever known. I saw him for several years, seeking empathy, insight and guidance, but all I got was ice. He had absolutely no warmth. Even the furnishings in his office were frigid; I almost shivered every time I walked into it. Maybe he was following the rules of his particular school of psychiatry, but to me he had no insight into human behavior and never gave me any help. I was still on my own, trying to deal alone with emotions I didn’t yet understand.
Why these feelings surfaced when they did, I don’t know, although I suppose they had something to do with my mother going away. In New York I’d had another chance to offer her my love, which I did, but it hadn’t been enough for her.

I didn’t begin to understand the reason for any of these things until I was in my forties. Until then, I usually responded to emotions that I didn’t understand with anger.

   I’ve always thought that one benefit of acting is that it gives actors a chance to express feelings that they are normally unable to vent in real life. Intense emotions buried inside you can come smoking out the back of your head, and I suppose in terms of psychodrama this can be helpful. In hindsight, I guess my emotional insecurity as a child—the frustrations of not being allowed to be who I was, of wanting love and not being able to get it, of realizing that I was of no value—may have helped me as an actor, at least in a small way. It probably gave me a certain intensity I could call upon that most people don’t have. It also gave me a capacity to mimic, because when you are a child who is unwanted or unwelcome, and the essence of what you are seems to be unacceptable, you look for an identity that
will
be acceptable. Usually this identity is found in faces you are talking to. You make a habit of studying people, finding out the way they talk, the answers that they give and their points of view; then, in a form of self-defense, you reflect what’s on their faces and how they act because most people like to see reflections of themselves. So when I became an actor, I had a wide variety of performances inside me to produce reactions in other people, and I think this served me as well as my intensity.

   I was always very close to my sisters because we were all scorched, though perhaps in different ways, by the experience of growing up in the furnace that was our family. We each went our own way, but there has always been the love and intimacy
that can be shared only by those trying to escape in the same lifeboat. Tiddy probably knows me better than anyone else.

Not long ago, she wrote me a letter about my early years in New York:

“You were a twenty-three-year-old when all the ‘Streetcar’ stuff hit the fan—a kid—and you were just trying to get along. In the beginning, you really didn’t have much control of your craft. You could only follow your instincts—good ones as it turned out—but how were you to know if the choices you were making were the right ones? Can anyone remember how insecure [it is to be] twenty-three and be suddenly saddled with all the kudos and the notoriety you received? It was embarrassing. You couldn’t think it was deserved. You couldn’t believe you were actually responsible, and Poppa had always said you’d never amount to a tinker’s damn. What the hell was going on? Sure, it’s nice to know you’re doing something right for once, but can it rate all that? You became an actor because acting seemed to be the only thing you had any aptitude for, the only place you’d found where people said, ‘You’re pretty good at that.’ And it was fun and a good place to hide. Most actors hide behind the characters they play. It’s a way of exploring life from a lot of other folks’ point of view. It is exciting to get to ‘be’ all those other people without the responsibility for their actions. The trouble is that the public identifies the actor with the characters he plays, and that creates a schism right there.… Certainly the perks and the money aren’t bad. They can grease the skids, but everyone should know that money and perks can’t buy the important things.”

Was Jocelyn right when she said that rapid success and, more important, other people’s reactions to it, were hard to handle for an uncertain kid from Illinois? It’s difficult for me to remember exactly what I felt so long ago. What I remember most about
A Streetcar Named Desire
was the emotional grind of acting in it six nights and two afternoons a week. Try to imagine
what it was like walking on a stage at 8:30 every night having to yell, scream, cry, break dishes, kick the furniture, punch the walls and
experience
the same intense, wrenching emotions night after night, trying each time to evoke in audiences the same emotions I felt. It was exhausting. Then imagine what it was like to walk off the stage after pulling these emotions out of yourself and waking up in a few hours knowing you had to do it all over again a few hours later. In sports I was always a very competitive person, and there was a fundamental part of me that was determined not to fail as Stanley Kowalski, to excel and be the best, so I applied pressure on myself to act the part well every time. But it was emotionally draining, wearisome, mentally oppressive, and after a few weeks I wanted out of it. I couldn’t quit, however, because I had a run-of-the-play contract.

What I hated most was matinee days, when I’d wake up, look at the clock, discover I was late, and have to run across town to get to the theater on time. Several times I ran all the way from my apartment at Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue to Forty-second Street and Broadway for a matinee only to discover that it was the wrong day: it wasn’t Wednesday or Saturday, and I could have slept longer. Most days, I got up about two in the afternoon after an adventure or two the night before, then fell asleep about an hour before I was supposed to be at the theater; when I woke up, I had to dash across town in a sweat. I was due there no later than eight-fifteen to put on makeup, but I liked to arrive a little earlier to lift some weights and work up a sweat to give Stanley the appearance I wanted for him. I usually showed up as late as I possibly could and sometimes got there late. I hated going to work.

   Of course there were advantages to success in a Broadway play, and not merely the $550-a-week paycheck, which I suppose was equivalent to about $5,000 now. Although I’d told my
father when I was rehearsing for
The Eagle Has Two Heads
that I wanted to look after my own financial affairs, he persuaded me that I was not only too busy, but too inexperienced with money to handle it properly, so I turned my check over to him; he paid my rent, gave me pocket change and invested the rest. The money that came with
A Streetcar Named Desire
was less important to me, however, than something else: every night after the performance, there would be seven or eight girls waiting in my dressing room. I looked them over and chose one for the night. For a twenty-four-year-old who was eager to follow his penis wherever it could go, it was wonderful. It was more than that; to be able to get just about any woman I wanted into bed was intoxicating. I loved parties, danced, played the congas, and I loved to fuck women—any woman, anybody’s wife. Sometimes I did insane things. When I lived on the eleventh floor of an apartment building on Seventy-second Street, I gave a party one night where just about everyone, including me, was smashed or close to it, and I went over to a window, opened it and shouted to my guests: “I’m sick of this world and everything in it. I can’t stand you people, I’m sick of this life.” I stepped out the window and disappeared. I stood on a ledge about six inches wide beneath the window, ducked and lay flat against the wall, and clung to the windowsill with my hands. Then I held onto a cement balustrade on the side of the building with one hand and let go of the windowsill. My guests screamed. They thought I’d become a blotter on Seventy-second Street. I hid under the window giggling, then looked down, saw the street and gulped. Everyone was still screaming, and one girl finally ran over to the window and looked up and down Seventy-second Street, searching for my body before spotting me. Then she said, “Go ahead, drop. See if I care.” I crawled back up, laughing. Everybody was red in the face. Their veins were popping out of their foreheads, and everyone shook their fists at me. It was nuts; I was fearless after two or three drinks.

We did a lot of crazy things in that apartment. Sometimes my friends and I took boxes of old-fashioned kitchen matches and emptied them out the window. When they hit the street, they would all ignite at once and create a spectacular show. Several times we tore the New York City telephone book to shreds and threw it out the window, or we’d rip
The New York Times
apart and fling the pieces out the window. I had many adventures when I lived in that apartment. One night a friend called and said, “I’ve got a couple of great groovy broads. They’re driving around in a black Cadillac, they’re well-heeled and lookin’ good. You can have either one you want, but I think they’ve both ‘got eyes.’ ” (In those days that was jargon for accommodating women.) The girls picked us up and I agreed with my friend Freddie that he was right. They were black, very attractive and wore sweet-smelling perfume that almost made me dizzy.

“Where should we go?” one of the girls asked, and I answered, “I don’t know. I’m happy as a pig where I am.” I was already starting to fool around with the girl in the backseat.

“How about going to our pad?” she said, and I said, “That’s cool. Where is it?”

“Harlem.”

A red light went off somewhere in my head, but I said, “Let’s go, what the hell.”

Her apartment was a third-floor walk-up. After we finished what we’d come there to do, I started playing cards with one of the girls in the kitchen while my friend and her friend returned to the bedroom. Suddenly I heard something outside that sounded like the footsteps of a raging dinosaur. I thought it was my imagination, but the dinosaur got closer and louder, then stopped in front of the door and started pounding, making me wonder fleetingly if dinosaurs had fists. The attractive woman sitting opposite me in her underwear suddenly looked at me with enormous eyes, her mouth forming a huge O. We heard
louder and louder pounding on the door, and each time it caved in another inch.