Brando (25 page)

Still, the reverse is often true: sometimes actors are given a nearly impossible challenge because a story is poorly written or not realistic, and when they do a good job, they don’t get the credit they deserve. I’ve seen many great performances go unrecognized because audiences don’t realize how difficult they were.

Of course, different actors apply different techniques to attain their goals. Laurence Olivier is an example. After the sun set on the British Empire, England began to lose touch with Shakespeare and the great traditions of the British theater that were the legacy of the greatest writer the world has ever known. But almost single-handedly Olivier revived the classical British theater and helped to stabilize English culture. His contributions were unequaled, though of course he had the help of the wonderful repertory actors at the Old Vic. While I believe that Larry did his best acting toward the end of his life, when I think of him as an actor, I perceive him mostly as an architect. He designed his parts beautifully, but they were like sketches engraved with an etching tool on a sheet of copper. He said every line the same way every time. He hated the thought of improvising and said, “I’m an ‘outside-in’ actor, not an ‘inside-out actor.’ ” Everything he did had to be structured in advance, and he always stuck to the blueprint. He was uncomfortable with me and other actors influenced by Stella Adler and the Russian school of acting, and probably felt a much deeper kinship with performers whose roots were more traditional. This kind of acting can be effective on the stage because audiences
are far away, but it becomes absurd in movies, in which audiences can see actors’ expressions magnified hundreds of times in close-ups.

Larry shared one characteristic with other British actors I’ve known who wouldn’t “play down.” In
The Entertainer
, for example, he played a decrepit Cockney vaudeville song-and-dance man, Archie Rice, but he refused to talk in a Cockney accent, even though the part called for it. He wouldn’t use an accent beneath his own station in life; he simply spoke in perfect English.

   I’ve heard it said that I should have devoted my life to the classical theater as Olivier did. If I had wanted to be a great actor, I agree that I should have played Hamlet, but I never had that goal or interest. For the reader who has gotten this far in the book, I hope that by now it is apparent that I have never had the actor’s bug. I took acting seriously because it was my job; I almost always worked hard at it, but it was simply a way to make a living.

Still, even if I had chosen to go on the classical stage, it would have been a mistake. I revere Shakespeare, the English language and English theater, but American culture is simply not structured for them. Theatrical ventures ambitious enough to accomplish something truly worthwhile seldom survive. The British are the last English-speaking people on the planet who love and cherish their language. They preserve it and care about it, but Americans do not have the style, finesse, refinement or sense of language to make a success out of Shakespeare. Our audiences would make a pauper of any actor who dedicated his career to Shakespeare. Ours is a television and movie culture.

IN 1955
, I took the part of Sky Masterson, the gambler who falls in love with a Salvation Army sergeant played by Jean Simmons, in
Guys and Dolls
. When the director, Joe Mankiewicz, asked me to be in the picture, I told him I couldn’t sing and had never been in a musical, but he said he’d never directed one before, and that we’d be learning together. Frank Loesser, who wrote the music for the Broadway show on which it was based, recruited an Italian singing coach to teach me to sing, and after a couple of weeks with him I went to a recording studio with Frank to record my songs, which were to be synchronized later with shots of me mouthing the words on film. I couldn’t hit a note in the dubbing room with a baseball bat; some notes I missed by extraordinary margins. But the engineers kept telling me to do them over again, and they would stitch together a word here, a note there, until they had a recording that sounded like I’d sung the bars consecutively. They sewed my words together on one song so tightly that when I mouthed it in front of the camera, I nearly asphyxiated myself because I couldn’t breathe while trying to synchronize my lips. The audience never realized that when I sang a song, it was a product of many, many attempts.

When the picture was finished, Sam Goldwyn conned me into attending the picture’s premiere in New York by giving me a car. I had always refused to go to one, but when he offered me the car I felt obligated to go. I didn’t realize that such gifts didn’t cost him a cent because he could charge them to the picture’s budget.

Jean Simmons and I were picked up at the Plaza Hotel by a limousine and driven to Times Square, which was aglow with searchlights and floodlights and jammed with people and police who were trying to restrain them behind wooden barricades. As we approached the theater, the crowd suddenly surged forward, broke through the barricades and attacked the limousine like a horde of Mongol warriors. Screaming hysterically, they engulfed the car, flattening their noses and cheeks against the windows until they looked like putty that had been softened in a warm oven. One girl was pushed so hard by the people that her head broke a window in the car, panicking the driver, and he stepped on the gas and almost ran over a bunch of other teenagers. Finally several policemen on horseback pushed through the melee to clear a path, but there were still so many people that we had to stop across the street from the theater.

Measuring the distance, I figured we were at least fifty yards from the goal line and wondered how we were going to make it the rest of the way. Then six big cops came up to the car, opened the door, grabbed Jean, lifted her in the air and carried her into the theater. Then it was my turn: six other cops grabbed me, lifted me up and began steamrolling toward the theater. There was so much screaming I couldn’t hear anything. One cop lifted me by one arm and another got under my other shoulder, and others lifted my feet off the ground. We inched through the crowd and pretty soon hands from all sides were pinching me and grabbing my groin. Then someone got my tie and held it, but the cops didn’t know this and kept forging ahead like a team of draft horses on extra rations. I became
dizzier and dizzier. I couldn’t scream because I was being strangled; but even if I had, there was so much noise the cops wouldn’t have heard me.

Finally the cops won the tug-of-war and the tie puller had to let go. They carried me into the lobby, where I sat on a flight of stairs, shaking and muttering to myself, “Jesus Christ, what the hell am I doing here?”

As I wiped my brow I saw there was a piece of paper in my hand. I unfolded it and saw that it was a summons with my name on it, a subpoena to appear to testify in a lawsuit involving Sam Spiegel, who was being sued by someone who claimed he was owed money from
On the Waterfront
. That process server is a man I’d like to meet. How he got that subpoena in my hand, I’ll never know.

I’ve always been amazed by the qualities in human nature that can turn crowds into mobs. Those people with hungry, glazed eyes looking at us through those car windows were in a trance. They were like helpless robots swaying to a magic flute. Much the same sort of thing happened when Frank Sinatra bewitched bobby-soxers at the same theater a few years earlier, and ten years later the Beatles would similarly mesmerize a different generation. For some reason celebrities of a certain kind are treated as messiahs whether they like it or not; people encapsulate them in myths that touch their deepest yearnings and needs. It seems to me hilarious that our government put the face of Elvis Presley on a postage stamp after he died from an overdose of drugs. His fans don’t mention that because they don’t want to give up their myths. They ignore the fact that he was a drug addict and claim he invented rock ’n’ roll when in fact he took it from black culture; they had been singing that way for years before he came along, copied them and became a star.

Of course mythologizing isn’t limited to celebrities or political leaders. We all create myths about our friends as well as our
enemies. We can’t help it. Whether it’s Michael Jackson or Richard Nixon, we run instinctively to their defense because we don’t want our myths demolished. When the news broke about Watergate, many Americans who worshiped Nixon refused to believe what they had heard. Years later, some began to admit that he had orchestrated a coverup, but said he wasn’t so bad. “Sure, people stumble in their lives,” they rationalized, “but taken all and all, he was a great president.” They refused to acknowledge the lies and deceit that were so much a part of the character of a man who called himself a law-and-order president. Some people who have heard his recorded voice on the Oval Office tapes proving that he abused the presidency and the trust of the people who elected him justify him by arguing that presidents are under great pressure and what he did was perfectly understandable. By the time he died in 1994, it seemed history had been totally rewritten by the mythmakers. As one newspaper columnist put it during the days of mourning for Nixon, it was if he had suddenly been canonized.

We make up any excuse to preserve myths about people we love, but the reverse is also true; if we dislike an individual we adamantly resist changing our opinion, even when somebody offers proof of his decency, because it’s vital to have myths about both the gods and the devils in our lives.

I WAS GETTING READY
to sing in
Guys and Dolls
when Elia Kazan invited me to visit him on the set of a new movie he was filming called
East of Eden
. Several months earlier he had asked me to be in the movie, John Steinbeck’s retelling of the Cain and Abel story set in California’s Salinas Valley, playing opposite Montgomery Clift as my brother. But I was busy and I think Monty was, too. Instead, Gadg cast as one of the brothers a new actor named James Dean, who, he said, wanted to meet me. Before introducing us, Gadg told me that his new star was constantly asking about me and seemed bent on patterning his acting technique and life after me—or at least on the person he thought I was after seeing
The Wild One
.

Jimmy was then about twenty, seven years younger than me, and had a simplicity that I found endearing. When we met, I sensed some of the same aspects of the midwestern farm boy who had suddenly been transplanted to the big city that I’d had when I went to New York—as well as some of the same anxieties I’d felt after being thrust into the status of celebrity at a young age. He was nervous when we met and made it clear that he was not only mimicking my acting but also what he believed was my lifestyle. He said he was learning to play the
conga drums and had taken up motorcycling, and he obviously wanted my approval of his work.

As I’ve observed before, acting talent alone doesn’t make an actor a
star
. It takes a combination of qualities: looks, personality, presence, ability. Like Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo wasn’t much of an actress, but she had presence. She probably played the same character in every film she ever made, but she was beautiful and had an unusual personality. Mickey Rooney, on the other hand, is an unsung hero of the actors’ world. He never became a leading man—he was too short, his teeth weren’t straight and he didn’t have sex appeal—but like Jimmy Cagney he could do almost anything. Charlie Chaplin was also one of the best. But a lot of people became movie stars simply by playing themselves. Their looks and personalities were so interesting, attractive or intriguing that audiences were satisfied by these qualities alone.

Jimmy Dean, who made only three pictures,
East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause
and
Giant
, had everything going for him. He was not only on his way to becoming a good actor, but he had a personality and presence that made audiences curious about him, as well as looks and a vulnerability that women found especially appealing. They wanted to take care of him. He was sensitive, and there were elements of surprise in his personality. He wasn’t volcanic or dynamic, but he had a subtle energy and an intangible injured quality that had a tremendous impact on audiences.