Brando (16 page)

“Who’s that?” I asked, trying to seem calm.

“That’s my
daddy,”
she answered.

I said, “Your father?”

“Baby, that’s my
daddy.”

I had never heard the phrase; I didn’t know that some women referred to their boyfriends as their “daddies” or “my old man,” but I got the drift. I looked at her as calmly as I could and said, “Do you have a fire escape in this building?”

She glanced in the direction of the bedroom, and I grabbed my clothes and shoes, shook Freddie and said, “I’m going out the fire escape because her
daddy’s
at the door. I’ll meet you down the block if you’re not coming right now.”

But Freddie also got the drift and broke off what he was doing, and we ran down the fire escape as fast as we could. When we reached the bottom and the ladder lowered us to the sidewalk, we looked up three stories and saw a head shouting, “Hey, motherfuckers, you wait right there! Don’t you be running!”

We ran like hell, but it had been well worth it. They were very attractive girls.

My pal that night was a friend I’d met in an acting class at the New School, Carlo Fiore, although he had changed his name to Freddie Stevens because he thought it would make it easier for him to get acting jobs. He was one of my first friends in New York, and we shared a lot of girls; he’d get one and I’d try to move in on him, or I’d get one and he’d try to get her in his bed.

Freddie had a huge Roman nose, spoke from the bowels of Brooklyn and didn’t have much acting talent, all of which conspired to work against his becoming a star. He had his nose operated on two or three times, the last time by a surgeon who must have used a can opener instead of a scalpel, but it didn’t help. He fancied himself an intellectual and budding member of
the New York literati, and was so full of himself that one of our friends, paraphrasing Shakespeare, described the stories he told as “tales told by an idiot full of sound and Fiore, signifying nothing.” Later I tried to get Freddie jobs, but never had much luck unless I could give him one myself. He was charming and funny but troubled; I don’t know whether his lack of success as an actor contributed or not, but he became a junkie and tried hard to get me to take heroin—a “skin pop,” as he called it. When I refused, he always said, “You don’t know how to live.” I watched him fall deeper and deeper into the abyss of addiction while doing whatever I could to make him stop. I was with him once when he tried to go cold turkey, and it was awful. He shook, shivered and threw up, and finally said he had to go home to his Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn and ask his family to help him. A couple of hours later he called me from home and told me frantically that he needed some Seconal. I bought some and went to his house, where I saw something very touching. He had once told me that his mother was mentally deranged, and when I arrived I could see in his face that he was ashamed of her, but he stood next to her lovingly and put his arms around her because he didn’t want to reject her.

   After I’d had some success as an actor, things began to sour between Freddie and me. He became envious then resentful of me, a problem I was starting to have with other friends, a lot of whom were actors or writers, especially if their careers weren’t going well. It was hurtful to experience this because I was too young to understand it. Many years later, Janice Mars told me she thought Freddie in some ways was a victim of his friendship with me. “Poor Carlo just couldn’t survive being your sidekick, and he never carved out a life for himself.… The attraction of your fame and money was too much for him. To be too close to you could be fatal. You were quicksand for anyone without the strength to pull out. It wasn’t your fault. You wanted to help
people, but at the same time their availability to you took priority over their own best interests. They lost themselves. Carlo ended up being expendable, involved in drugs, a hostage to failure.”

Freddie finally got off dope, but then he became an alcoholic and wrote a book about me, probably all that he had left to sell. He continued on his path of self-destruction until he died.

IT STILL PLEASES ME
to be awake during the dark, early hours before morning when everyone else is still asleep. I’ve been that way since I first moved to New York. I do my best thinking and writing then. During those early years in New York, I often got on my motorcycle in the middle of the night and went for a ride—anyplace. There wasn’t much crime in the city then, and if you owned a motorcycle, you parked it outside your apartment and in the morning it was still there. It was wonderful on summer nights to cruise around the city at one, two or three
A.M
. wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a girl on the seat behind me. If I didn’t start out with one, I’d find one. There was a lovely Jewish girl named Edna whose father was very rich. She was bright, well educated and beautiful, with lovely brown hair and skin that was almost Oriental in color, and she lived with her father in a deluxe apartment on Park Avenue. For some reason, what I remember best about it were the drapes: the windows were covered with two layers of gossamer white curtains, first a lush tier of pleated satin, then floor-length folds of feathery white silk with the texture of a bridal veil. About two o’clock one morning, when I pulled up to her building on my motorcycle, the doorman looked at me as if I were a longshoreman
who’d taken a wrong turn on his way to the docks. I climbed off the motorcycle and asked him to call Edna on the house telephone and tell her that Mr. Brando wanted to see her.

“Do you know what time it is?” he asked.

I told him Edna was expecting me, which was not true, and said she would be very put out if she were informed later that I had called and not been allowed to come up.

With a doubtful look, the doorman dialed her apartment and woke her up. Over the phone, pressed to his ear, I heard a frail, sleepy voice say,
“Who?”

“Mr. Brando.”

I couldn’t hear the next exchange, but the man hung up the phone and said, “Take the elevator to the left.”

“I know it well,” I said and turned my back on him to express how annoyed I was at the delay.

Edna’s father was asleep in his bedroom and we went into hers. There was a soft breeze, and the silk and satin curtains billowed behind her like the canopy of a silken parachute. She was wearing a very attractive soft satin nightgown. I pulled the sheets back and was almost paralyzed by the fragrance of her warm body.

Edna didn’t say anything while I got undressed. I got into bed and she put a soft, lovely arm around me. After we made love, she asked, “Would you like something to eat?” It was about four
A.M
. and still dark outside, although a narrow shaft of yellow moonlight pierced the curtains, casting a glow across the room. When I nodded, she went into the kitchen and fixed a tray set with Irish linen, English silver, French crystal, orange juice, eggs and perfectly done toast, all wonderfully arranged. I remember eating that breakfast with her beside me, the silver and crystal in front of me, thinking, This is the life, boy. If this ain’t it, you’re never gonna find it.

I had many romantic experiences like this, but I’ll always remember that particular one. I don’t know where Edna is now.
It’s been years since I’ve spoken to her, but I’ve often wondered what became of her.

   After the opening of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, Shattuck Military Academy began sending me letters inviting me to return. The commandant said that I was the most famous Shattuck man ever. “Please come back,” he said, “we’re really proud of you.”

I always thought it was unstylish of them to do this after they had kicked me out, and I ignored the letters. I’ve never gone back to Shattuck and never intend to.

FOR A LONG TIME
I had the adolescent notion that I was a tough guy. I liked to box because of a silly idea that it would make me more of a man. I wanted to be tough like my father, who was not only a good boxer but a mean barroom fighter. I’m not saying I consciously wanted to be
like
my father—that was the last thing I wanted because I hated him—but I probably absorbed some of his characteristics inadvertently. He was a strong man; I may have believed that being strong meant being worthy, and, in my twenties, I considered myself a pretty decent boxer. During the run of
Streetcar
, I often persuaded a member of the crew to spar with me between acts. I bought some gloves and we threw a few punches at each other in a room underneath the stage. It helped to pass the time and to relieve the boredom when I wasn’t onstage. One night during the intermission between the second and third acts, I had about forty minutes before going on, but none of my regular partners wanted to box. I asked a stagehand I’d never sparred with if he’d join me, but he refused.

“C’mon,” I said, “we’re not going to
fight
, we’re just gonna box a little.”

He was a big guy in his early twenties with a thick mop of
wavy black hair, about six foot four and 220 pounds. “I don’t feel like it,” he said.

“You need some exercise, and so do I,” I said.

“No.”

I kept it up, but he kept refusing until finally I talked him into it, probably because he’d decided I wouldn’t stop pestering him until he did. We went downstairs, put on the gloves and started sparring, but he was lethargic, so I said, “Come on, give me something I can work with. I’m trying to work on defense.
Hit me
. I’m not going to hurt you, for Chrissake.”

But he kept up his little patter of soft thrusts against my gloves until I said,
“Come on, would you please throw a real punch? I’m not going to hurt—”

I don’t remember exactly what happened next, but I felt his fist smash into my nose like a sledgehammer, and the next instant blood poured out of it in a crimson deluge. Until then I’d never been hurt while boxing, but now I was really in pain. I went upstairs to my dressing room, looked in the mirror and saw my face covered with blood. As I tried to wipe it away I took a drag on a cigarette and saw something startling: the smoke from my cigarette was billowing out of my forehead in a big, white cloud.

It struck me that something was drastically wrong. I looked again in the mirror and saw that my nose was split across the bridge and that the smoke was taking the path of least resistance.

How did I get into this mess? I asked myself, In less than a minute, I had to go out onstage. According to the script, I was coming home after having gotten drunk celebrating the birth of my child, and after arguing with Jessica I was going to pick her up and carry her off to bed. With not much choice, I wiped my face and walked onstage.

Jessica, who had always disapproved of my boxing between acts, looked up at me from behind the desk where she was sitting and ad-libbed,
“You bloody fool.”

We finished the scene and the third act as if nothing had happened, though when I picked her up and laid her down on the bed, I felt so nauseous for a moment from swallowing blood that I nearly passed out on top of her. But apparently no one in the audience knew the difference; they probably assumed I’d gotten into a bar fight or other mischief while I was offstage celebrating fatherhood, and that my blood was makeup.

When we took our curtain call, blood was still cascading out of my nose and falling on my shoes, shirt, pants and onto the stage. Then I went to the hospital, where I was treated by a butcher and sadist. He began by trying to put my nose back together by squeezing the bones in his fingers without giving me any anesthesia. I have a high threshold of pain, but he quickly surpassed it: he kept squeezing and pressing until I was barely conscious. Finally he got the nose stabilized, put a piece of tape over it and that was that. For a long time, I wanted to break the nose of that son of a bitch, even though he did me a favor by ordering me to spend a week in the hospital so my bones could heal. I was delighted to have a vacation. Jack Palance took over the part and I had a lot of fun taking the nurses up to the roof. I didn’t have to go to work, but still got paid for it.