Brando (35 page)

After King’s murder and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Medgar Evers, black people could rightly say that they no longer had any reason to have faith in nonviolence and passive resistance. Mayor John Lindsay asked me to walk with him through the streets of Harlem to cool things down after Dr. King’s assassination, and I agreed, not realizing it was a political act meant to court black votes. The mayor’s staff alerted the press, so as soon as we arrived we were surrounded by photographers. People from Harlem began pushing and shoving me; I thought they wanted to ask me for an autograph, but instead they were pleading for jobs.

After I returned to California, I read an article about the Black Panther party, whose members the year before had invaded the state capitol in Sacramento. I didn’t know anything about them or their agenda, but I was curious, and so I called their headquarters in Oakland and spoke to one of the leaders—either Bobby Seale or Eldridge Cleaver, I don’t remember—who invited me to Oakland. I was met at the airport by a contingent of Panthers, who took me to Eldridge’s apartment, where I stayed most of the night with him, his wife, Kathleen, a man named Crutch, Bobby Seale and a seventeen-year-old Black Panther named Bobby Hutton.

I was hungry for information about the Panthers and still trying to understand what it was like to be a black man in America. Other than my friendship with Jim Baldwin, I had no frame of reference and felt I had to know. Eldridge spoke with incisive and impressive intelligence about poverty, prejudice and white resistance to black equality. He was a sensitive man but, like a lot of Black Panthers whose masculinity had been threatened by racism, he spoke with bravado. He said that by being aggressive in pursuing their constitutional rights, the Panthers wanted to give younger black men more pride in themselves. At a fundamental level I believe that all they really wanted was respect as human beings; one of the realities of being young and black in America, Cleaver said, was not having any black heroes to worship or identify with. All the history books, all the movies and television shows, he said, were about white people. However, it wasn’t this kind of prejudice that hurt blacks the most, he said; it was that in a white-dominated society, it was as if blacks didn’t count.

We talked until almost four
A.M.
, and I learned a great deal about a variety of subjects, but especially about the day-to-day experiences of being a black man in Oakland—of being stopped and searched by policemen simply because he was black, of being degraded, belittled and called “nigger” by cops, of applying for a job and seeing in the eyes of employers that as soon as he entered their doors the job no longer existed.

About two weeks later, Bobby Hutton and Eldridge Cleaver were trapped in a house and surrounded by the Oakland police. The house caught fire, and when Bobby Hutton walked outside, the police shot him, killing a beautiful boy. Eldridge, who was still inside, took his clothes off when he saw what had happened, then came outside with his hands up and his fingers spread, totally naked. It was an intelligent move because there were too many witnesses for the police to assassinate a man who plainly had no weapons. I’m sure this act saved his life.

The killing of Bobby Hutton confirmed everything I’d heard during that long night in Oakland. The next day I flew back to Oakland. Jim Farmer, the founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, was also there that day, and it was one of the few times in my life I have felt real danger. There was so much tension in Oakland that I sensed the police would use any excuse to kill someone sympathetic to the Black Panthers. The Cleaver house still reeked of tear gas and it made my eyes water, even though the doors and windows had been thrown open. Glancing around, I saw Farmer, whom I knew only slightly, looking at me with hatred in his eyes. They told me that he despised me because I was just another knee-jerk white liberal to him.

At Bobby Hutton’s funeral, I began to sense why Jim Farmer had looked at me that way and to understand—as I have at other moments in my life in other places when I was among people I wanted to help—that I was an outsider. I sat in the second row at the church. Behind me women were sobbing, and in front of me, in the first two rows of pews, the Black Panthers sat silently and stoically. Bobby Seale spoke about Hutton and was fearless in denouncing the Oakland Police Department. The coffin lay open, and on its handle was a bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums; as Seale spoke, a few chrysanthemum petals dropped and fell on Bobby’s face and chest. Then the Panthers lined up to pass by his coffin in their black uniforms, black berets, dark glasses and leather jackets. Most simply paused, looked down at him and raised their fists in a salute. Then one came forward, took a cartridge out of a carbine and placed it in Hutton’s hands. Not one of them cried, though I couldn’t contain myself. There was a coldness in the church that was palpable and formidable, rooted in a long history of suffering; they were beyond tears.

Those Panthers made me realize how protected my life had been as a white person, and how, despite a lifetime of searching, curiosity and empathy, I would never understand what it was to be black. There were limits to empathy; it was impossible for me to walk in their shoes. I had been determined to join them in their battle, but I was an outsider and always would be. Later this was brought home to me when several blacks told me they disliked me because I was a white man trying to fight a black man’s war. Among them was Rap Brown, who lambasted me as a shallow liberal poking his nose into a world he didn’t know and in which he didn’t belong. Brown’s point was well taken; white people would never be able to understand what it is like to be black in America, and to live the kind of life Toni Morrison writes about so eloquently in her books. They are books of genius, but for all the beauty of her prose, for all its anguish, pain, perception, humor and devotion to the black race, and no matter how touchingly and explosively she communicates, white people are never going to understand what it is like to be conditioned from childhood into believing that you are hated, unwelcome and inferior.

   When Congress finally began to pass civil rights legislation, I wrote to Jimmy Baldwin that it wasn’t because of “Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey or any of the rest of them. It was Bessie Smith, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, yourself, Rosa Parks, James Meredith … many who were, as you’ve often said, ‘witnesses who managed to survive.’ ”

After the passage of the civil rights bill, the Black Panthers
seemed to become less relevant, and there was a split in the party leadership. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale gave up violence to achieve the Panthers’ goals, while Eldridge Cleaver went into exile. With the passage of the bill, everybody hoped that life would improve for blacks, and in some ways it has; they now have a little more opportunity than they once did. One thing hasn’t changed, however: what is most crippling for a young black child to realize is that he has little chance of achieving his hopes because unconsciously he is still trained to believe that he has no chance. It is not the racism of the Ku Klux Klan, which everybody recognizes is a ship of fools, that debilitates blacks, but the subtle, insidious racism that robs black children of pride and self-esteem so that they never have a chance.

SOME OF THE PICTURES
I made during the sixties were successful; some weren’t. Some, like
The Night of the Following Day
, I made only for the money; others, like
Candy
, I did because a friend asked me to and I didn’t want to turn him down. I was ridiculous in that picture, and everyone else in it was diminished by it. Some of the movies made a lot of money; some didn’t. I was interested in other things, but I had to make a living and took what was available.

What I remember most about the pictures during those years was the fun of traveling to different places and making new friends.
Bedtime Story
, my first movie after
The Ugly American
, was the only one I ever made that made me happy to get up in the morning and go to work. I couldn’t wait for the day’s shooting to begin. I’ve never been a comic actor and am not very good at it, but this script about a couple of con men who happily preyed on women for money and sex on the French Riviera was hilarious, and working with David Niven was a treat. How he made me laugh. David was one of those British actors who, like Laurence Olivier, refused to play down—that is, use an accent beneath his station. He had a wonderful, understated, sophisticated wit that reduced me to a guffawing bowl of Jell-O. The first day on the set, I noticed that David seemed nervous; when he read his lines, his hands were trembling so much that the pages of his script were shaking. I asked him about it later, but instead of admitting that he was nervous he responded with a hilarious zinger that bowled me over. I think Niven was born with a curse, a voice in his head that constantly told him, “You’d better make everyone laugh today and charm them too, because if you don’t, you’re dead.” He wanted to be thought of as an aristocrat, and he liked to hang out with the sort of gentry who owned chalets in Gstaad and berthed their yachts in Nice. In some funny way, I think he felt inadequate, and his ability to charm and make people laugh gave him confidence and strength. His humor was very English. I couldn’t act well on that picture because I was always breaking up. Together we wasted a lot of film. After I blew six or seven takes in one scene, I tried looking over his shoulder so I couldn’t see him, but I still couldn’t deliver my lines. Out of frustration, the director went to a close-up of David and put me off camera; even then, I couldn’t stop laughing, so he pleaded with me to go to my dressing room; I did, and put my face into a pillow to stifle the sound, but David told me later that on the set he could still hear me laughing.

These were the kinds of memories, along with travel and experiencing new cultures, that made making movies fun. I also enjoyed a picture called
The Saboteur: Code Name Morituri
because my pals Wally Cox and Billy Redfield were in it. I played a World War II saboteur sent on a secret mission aboard a ship commanded by Yul Brynner, who wasn’t a great actor but who taught me a lesson about making movies. Yul was a nice man, but like David Niven, he liked to hang out at chic places and be seen with fashionable people, which didn’t appeal to Wally, Billy or me. Someone, probably Wally, joked, “I wonder what Yul would look like if he ever put his legs together.” This was because he was constantly striking the magisterial
pose he used in
The King and I
, with his legs separated, planted firmly on the ground, and his hands on his hips. But Yul did something in that picture that impressed me. In one scene I thought his acting was very stagy and artificial, but when I saw the scene on film it succeeded because the lighting was effective, and I learned he had suggested to the lighting man how to light the scene. I had never paid much attention to lighting, and it made me realize that the man who sets it up can do a lot for your performance or break your neck if he wants to. With lights, he can add drama to your face, make it dull, or put you in darkness. From then on, I began checking with the lighting man before doing a scene, using a mirror to see what effect different lighting gave my appearance and performance.

   Another picture I enjoyed making was
The Nightcomers
, a 1971 thriller based on Henry James’s
The Turn of the Screw
that was directed by Michael Winner, an Englishman who, like David Niven, had an arch sense of humor as well as a stout, characteristically British sense of class. In a big country house near Cambridge that he used for the filming, he outfitted a beautiful dining room with expensive china, linen and cutlery, and said it was to be used only by me, Alice Marchak, Jay Kantor, my friends Philip and Marie Rhodes and himself. I said I didn’t find that type of class distinction appropriate and wanted to eat with the other actors and members of the crew, but Michael said, “Marlon, I am sorry to say this, but the crew do not wish you to eat with them. They are much happier in the next-door canteen eating on their own and not worrying about the overpowering presence of their employers and a major star.”

I left and went into the canteen room, sat down at the table, and when the other actors and crew members entered holding their lunch trays, I held up my hand urging them to sit near me, but they all walked on. “Marlon,” Michael said, “it’s no good
waving your arms about; none of these people are going to sit with us. They’d all much rather gossip among themselves and they’re all terrified of you.” Apparently he was right, because no one would sit near me except him and my friends from the other room. The next day, when we had to shoot some scenes in a churchyard, Michael again arranged a special dining room for me and my friends—this time in a local vicarage. I invited two of the actresses in the picture, Stephanie Beacham and a famous old English character actress, Thora Hird, to join us. At first they didn’t say much, but after I kept asking them questions and encouraging them to talk, Thora began speaking virtually nonstop in a thick northern English accent that I couldn’t penetrate.