Brando (29 page)

“Oh, I think they’re great magazines,” I said, “but there’s a few corrections they should make, and I’ve gone on several programs to set the record straight. I’m going to keep doing it because I feel it’s my civic duty to correct the press when it’s wrong. Actually I think they should appreciate it. They have a letters-to-the-editor column, and in a sense this is just a letter to the editor. It’s a continuing letter that will go on and on until they don’t feel they have the right to ruin the reputation of America …”

Then I lowered her into the bushes, intending to act the beast with two backs with the emissary of my enemy, but I was so awash in alcohol, so immobilized and out of ammunition that I couldn’t tell the ivy from her earlobes. She returned to New York with her virtue intact. But from that day to this,
Time
has
seldom mentioned my name, and if it has, it’s been in a cursory way. Time Inc. is a big company, but it was the old story of David and Goliath: it takes only one well-placed stone in the middle of the forehead.

   In late 1957 I went to Europe to make
The Young Lions
, a movie based on Irwin Shaw’s novel about three soldiers—two Americans and a German—whose lives intersected before and during World War II. Monty Clift played the Jewish-American soldier, Noah Ackerman, and I played the German, Christian Diestl. Jay Kantor told me that Dean Martin, whose career had been in decline after his breakup with Jerry Lewis, was desperate to play Michael Whiteacre, an American entertainer reluctantly drafted into the war, to prove that he could handle a serious dramatic role, so I helped him get the part. When we met at a restaurant in Paris before the filming started, someone spilled a pot of scalding water on my crotch. The pain was excruciating and sent me to a hospital for several days, where I thought about the script and decided to exercise the right in my contract to change it.

The original script closely followed the book, in which Shaw painted all Germans as evil caricatures, especially Christian, whom he portrayed as a symbol of everything that was bad about Nazism; he was mean, nasty, vicious, a cliché of evil. Like many books and movies produced by Jews since the war, I think it was a perfectly understandable bias that, consciously or unconsciously, Jews felt would ensure that the world would never forget the Holocaust and, not coincidentally, would increase sympathy and financial support for Israel. Indirectly Shaw was saying that
all
Germans were responsible for the Holocaust, which I didn’t agree with. Much to his irritation, I changed the plot entirely so that at the beginning of the story my character believed that Hitler was a positive force because he gave Germans a sense of purpose. But as the story developed,
he gradually became disenchanted and struggled to turn his back on these beliefs. Like many Germans, Christian had been misled by Hitler’s propaganda and believed he would bring a lasting peace to Europe by conquering it—the same rationalization that Napoleon had employed by saying he wanted to unify Europe to bring peace. I thought the story should demonstrate that there are no inherently “bad” people in the world, but that they can easily be misled.

I’m uncomfortable with generalizations about anything because they are rarely accurate. At the time, we were just coming out of the McCarthy era, when many people’s lives had been ruined because so many Americans accepted the myth that every Communist—or anyone who’d ever had a drink with one—was the devil incarnate, while overlooking the malignancy of Joe McCarthy, who was a greater menace than the people he targeted.

In
The Young Lions
I wanted to show that there were positive aspects to Germans, as there are to all people. Depending on your point of view, there are positive and negative elements in everyone. Hitler propagated the myth that the Germans were a superior race and the Jews inferior, but accepting the reverse of this is equally wrong; there are bad Jews and Germans, and decent Jews and Germans. I decided to play Christian Diestl as an illustration of one element of the human character—that is, how, because of their need to keep their myths alive, people will go to enormous lengths to ignore the negative aspects of their beliefs.

It happens all the time. I’ve watched parents tell television interviewers how proud they were of their son who died in Vietnam because he had been fighting to defend freedom, his country and American ideals, when I am sure they must have known in their hearts what a foolish war it was and that their son’s life had been squandered for nothing. Memories and myths were all they had to cling to; they couldn’t admit that
their son was dead because of the senseless and destructive policies of Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara and the rest of the “Best and the Brightest.”

In Christian Diestl I also wanted to show how people like Johnson and McNamara often have such a misguided sense of righteousness and idealism that they sincerely believe that what is inherently immoral or wrong is justifiable, will commit terrible acts to achieve their goals, and then find it easy to rationalize their actions. The perpetrators of the CIA program in Vietnam called Operation Phoenix were responsible for torturing and assassinating hundreds of people. I was once told by a CIA man who was closely associated with the program that if someone’s name was put into a computer identifying him as a member of the Vietcong, it was sent out to various assassination squads and the person was killed; yet a lot of these weren’t really in the Vietcong, and their names were listed by mistake or because someone had a grudge against them. The CIA man said he had complained about this to a top official of the agency and was told, “Look, innocent people get killed in all wars. If we get one right out of four, it’s okay. The rest just have to be sacrificed; this is a
war.”
This leader was a devout Catholic who had become conditioned to do his job without any pangs of conscience, but how different was he from Heydrich or Himmler?

People can be conditioned to do anything. If you commit murder in the name of your country, it is called patriotism. Before sending them to Vietnam, the army brainwashed young men into believing that they were on the side of God. The marines sent young people to Camp Pendleton, isolated them and put them in a kind of trance through indoctrination, conditioning and training. If they were told to do something, they did it, just like the marines in World War II on Saipan who, when told to fire phosphorus bombs into caves where women and children were hiding, did it without question, remorse or guilt. They used flamethrowers to burn people alive, just as our pilots
exterminated Vietnamese civilians with napalm and antipersonnel bombs that riddled their bodies with tiny barbed arrows designed to tumble inside them violently, with enhanced killing power. The soldiers who massacred the villagers at My Lai were no more inherently evil than the German soldiers who committed atrocities in World War II. They had simply been programmed into becoming murderous predators. At places like Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, our soldiers had been conditioned by much the same creed drummed into Christian Diestl: “My country right or wrong; when my country calls me, I will do my duty; I will do
anything.”

WES MICKLER GAVE ME
one of the best lessons of an actor’s life: never trust a horse, he said, because you’ll never find a smart one. He used to lean back in his old spindle chair in Libertyville, give me a long, knowing look and tell me that all horses were dumb. He was right. I’ve never met a smart horse. I’ve also known a lot of dumb riders, including me. The worst place for an actor to be when he’s making a western, I discovered, is on top of a charging horse with a bunch of other horses chasing you from behind. You can’t see them and they can’t see you. Because of the dust, visibility is about five feet, and the horses behind you will run over you if anything goes wrong. In
Julius Caesar
I was leading an army across a field when the tongue of my shoe got caught in a stirrup. I leaned over and tried to pull it out, but couldn’t reach it, so I thought I’d leave it until the take was over. It was dumb. After riding quite a distance, I looked back and saw the whole field of horses racing fast toward me, bucking and kicking and leaping; some of them were rolling on the ground. I tried to get my horse to run, but because my foot was stuck, it was impossible to convey this to the horse except in a loud, nervous voice. The horse wouldn’t go any faster, I couldn’t get out of the way of the ones behind
me and I came within a hair of falling in front of the galloping herd, still secured neatly to my stirrup. I kept my head down while the horses stampeded past me and tried to figure out what had happened. Then I learned that I’d ridden over a hornets’ nest and they had taken their revenge on the riders and horses behind me.

On
Viva Zapata!
I was in a scene in which four horsemen holding me prisoner galloped up a road and suddenly found themselves facing an army of troops loyal to me. The man holding my horse, a big stallion with a huge neck, was meant to let go of the reins after realizing that he was about to be slaughtered, and I was supposed to take off down the road and escape. But as the four men turned their horses to look at the troops, they blocked the path in front of me and my horse simply ran over them. At another point a bit player on that picture was supposed to ride up to me, jump off his horse and deliver important news to me. Wes Mickler had warned me that when you walk behind a horse who doesn’t know you, you should stay close enough to it so that it can’t reach out and kick you. If you pass within the outer radius of his hooves, he said, the horse can fire a knockout punch at you. Unfortunately nobody had given such advice to this bit player, and when he ran around the back of the horse, he was in exactly the wrong place. The horse kicked him in the back of the head and he went down like a shot, dead.

When we were making
Viva Zapata!
I sometimes took a ride to savor the beauty of the desert. Once, a few days after I had gone riding and had encountered an extraordinary migration of butterflies, I hopped on a horse and was barely in the saddle before it started bucking and kicking wildly. In about three seconds, I was airborne. As I sprawled on the ground, checking for broken bones, one of the studio wranglers came up and said, “Marlon, you shouldn’t have gotten on
that
horse; nobody’s ever ridden him before.” It turned out that he’d been saddled as
a kind of equine extra for the first scene after lunch, but wasn’t meant to be ridden.

One of the things I always did before working with a new director was to call another actor who knew him and ask, “What’s the lowdown on this guy?” Before working with John Huston on
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, I called John Saxon and asked the usual question.

“He’s good,” John said. “He doesn’t get on your back and he leaves you alone, and near the end of the picture he’ll disappear. But if you have a scene with horses in it, get a double because he’ll kill you if you don’t.”

He was right about Huston leaving actors alone. He didn’t give us any direction. He hired good actors, trusted them and let them improvise, but never helped shape a characterization the way Kazan did. He sat at the edge of the set and said, “Yeah, all right, kids, that’s good, that’s a good start, now why don’t we try it over.” He was always vague and we took our own cues. John did a lot of heavy pot smoking on that picture, and before he filmed one scene he gave me some marijuana, which I smoked. Before long, I had no idea who or where I was or what I was supposed to be doing. The only thing I knew was that everything seemed okay, that the world was very funny and that John thought so, too. I could barely stand up, and if somebody asked me a question I’d say “What?” about five seconds later, but somehow I managed to get through the scene.

At the end of the picture, Huston did what I’d been told he would: he disappeared. Some days he didn’t show up on the set at all, and one of the assistant directors would have to take over; on others he came to work, then walked away after an hour or so, or we might see him off in the distance by himself. For some reason he became moody and depressed when he approached the end of a picture.

Unfortunately I didn’t take seriously what John Saxon had told me about Huston and horses. I had a scene in which a
horse was supposed to run away with me, and when he asked me if I could do it without a double I said, “Sure.” I’d spent a lot of time on Hollywood horses and wasn’t afraid of them. But when I came out of my dressing room for the scene, I saw a big stallion waiting for me, and it was shaking and shuddering so much it might have been wired to an electrical plug. John had instructed a groom to heat it up, and the man had done his job; he had trotted the horse back and forth until it was awash with perspiration and trembling with eagerness to move. I looked up at him and said to myself, “You know, Marlon, that’s a lot of horse.” I knew stallions had minds of their own and could be aggressive, sometimes dangerous, but I got on him anyway, and as soon as I did, he took off like a jet fighter catapulted from an aircraft carrier.

Before he’d taken four or five steps, I knew I was on the wrong horse. He was so charged up with adrenaline that I expected him to run me into a barn or a fence. I took my feet out of the stirrups, lifted my right leg and jumped, landing with both heels in the mud, then said, “John, if you need me, I’ll be in my dressing room. I think I need a different horse or else a double.”