Brando (41 page)

MOST OF MY LIFE
, I was a very jealous person, but I tried hard to hide it. I was afraid that if someone knew I was jealous, he or she would use it against me. I’m different now; I’ve realized that jealousy is a pointless, wasteful emotion I can’t afford, but it wasn’t easy for me to give up the emotions of a lifetime.

Weonna was as jealous and mistrustful as I was, and the other women in my life made her angry—sometimes, though not always, with justification. Late one night, before I installed barbed wire and an electrified security fence around my house, we were awakened by a noise and saw a woman standing at the foot of the bed.

“Who are you? What do you want?” I asked, holding the covers up around my neck like ZaSu Pitts in an old movie.

“Who am
I?”
she responded. “Who is
she?”

She pointed her finger at Weonna, who was as startled as I was. I couldn’t collect my thoughts and kept saying, “Who are you? What do you want? Who are you?”

“What do you mean, who am I? I suppose you’re just saying that because you don’t want her to know who I am.”

Weonna was starting to look at me suspiciously.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here.”

“I suppose you didn’t see me at the bus stop this afternoon.”

“What bus stop?”

“What
bus stop?” She laughed sarcastically.

“Look, you’re going to have to get out of my house right now.”

“I’m not going anyplace,” she said. “You’re getting rid of
her
, that’s what’s going to happen.”

“Okay, I’m calling the police.”

Weonna got out of bed shaking her head in disgust; she thought that I knew the woman. I grabbed her and said, “Wait a minute, Weonna … 
wait one minute
. I don’t know this woman. I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

Then the bed jiggled and I turned back and saw that the woman had stripped off her clothes and slipped naked into bed beside me.

“Would you get out of here?” I said.
“Now
. How dare you?”

I was mustering the most theatrical show of vocal force and righteous indignation that I could manage at that hour of the night, but Weonna said wearily, “Never mind, I’ll go. There’s no sense getting excited, I understand. I’ll go.”

“Weonna, Weonna … I do not … I …” I was as tongue-tied as if I’d been hit over the head with a skillet by a linebacker. Finally I managed to pick up the phone beside the bed, wave it at Weonna to show her I was serious, and said, “I’m going to call the police, who will come here and remove this woman. You have to believe me.”

I reached over and pushed the naked body out of my bed. She fell halfway to the floor as I said, “Get out of here,” then dialed the police station, told the desk officer that someone had broken into my house and wouldn’t leave, and asked him to send a policeman to take her away.

In five minutes, a patrol car arrived with two policemen. “Do
you want to press charges?” one asked as they escorted the woman out of the bedroom after she’d put her clothes on.

“No,” I said, “just take her away.”

I spent the next fifteen minutes insisting to Weonna that I didn’t know the woman. Her response was an ever-so-slight curl of her lips denoting suspicion and disbelief, as if the incident confirmed her conviction that I was unfaithful and a masterful liar and manipulator. I couldn’t blame her because in those days that’s exactly what I was. Still, I finally managed to calm her down and we drifted back to sleep. We were snuggled together an hour later when we heard another noise and woke up simultaneously to find that the woman was back in the room, her face ablaze with anger. She glared at Weonna and said, “Haven’t you gotten rid of her yet?”

I said, “Look, we’re not going through this again. I’m going to call the police, and this time you’re going to go to jail; this time I’m going to press charges. Do you understand?”

I dialed the police department and talked to the same sergeant I’d spoken to the first time. “Excuse me, Officer, this is Marlon Brando calling again. The woman you took off the property is back and she’s annoying me, so please come and get her.” I was stuttering and stammering like Edward Everett Horton.

Very slowly and with deliberation, the policeman said, “Mr. Brando, we have a lot of things to do tonight; we’re having a pretty busy night. A lot of things that we have to deal with are really serious, and coming and getting women out of your house is not one of them.”

I put a stern look on my face, glanced at the woman and said, “All right, Officer, thank you very much. Thank you,” and hung up the phone.

“They’ll be here in twelve minutes,” I said. “Now this time you’re going to jail. I will press charges, you should know that, and you’ll go to jail for at least a year.”

At that the woman ran out of the room and I never saw her again.

   Another time, Weonna and I were in bed when she woke me with a hard poke in the ribs. Startled, I was about to complain when she mouthed,
“There’s someone in the house.”

“How do you know?”

Weonna had extraordinary hearing. She shook her head to indicate that she knew she was right. I got out of bed and went to a closet to get a shotgun I used to keep in the house; then, naked, I walked into the hall, unclear what I was looking for or what I would do if I found it. I remember thinking, You’re naked, Marlon, and what’s going to happen if they see you like this? They’re not going to take you very seriously. I certainly wouldn’t take a naked guy seriously if I was a burglar.

I walked down the hall into the living room, still gripped by this thought, but couldn’t find anybody, so I returned to the bedroom with my shotgun and told Weonna that the coast seemed clear. She looked at me with a frightened expression and mouthed,
“They’re in the bathroom …”

In the bathroom I found an attractive young woman hiding behind the door. The sliding glass door to the deck was open, and she had come through it. I pointed the gun at her and said, “As quietly and quickly as you can, lie down and put your face in the rug—
now
.” She started to say something, but I said, “Do as I tell you.” She followed orders and went down on the floor and pressed her face into the carpet. Her purse was in her hand and I said, “Push your purse toward me very gently,” which she did. I opened it and looked through her wallet, which was very neat. I found a Screen Actors Guild card and said, “Are you an actress?”

The woman, whose nose and mouth were buried in the carpet, mumbled a muffled, “Yes.”

“What are you doing in my bathroom at three
A.M.
?”

Still mumbling, she answered “I thought you might have some work for me.”

“This is probably the least likely place to find work,” I said. “What you’ve chosen to do is highly inefficient and very unprofessional. Stand up. Here’s your purse and there’s the door. Don’t ever come back here again and don’t ever, for your own welfare, do this to anybody else because it’s dangerous.”

I don’t know if she ever found a job in the movies.

Those two weren’t the only women who have shown up at my doorstep. The lure of celebrity does strange things to people. One woman camped outside my house in the rain for three days while a young Tahitian boy named Alphonse was visiting me. Because of an accident at birth, one of Alphonse’s feet had turned inward, and I had arranged for him to come with his grandmother to Los Angeles to have corrective surgery. Actually she was not his real grandmother, but an elderly woman who looked after him and whom he called grandmother. One day she told me a woman was waiting outside to see me. I told her I wasn’t expecting anybody, and that I made it a rule never to talk to strangers who showed up at my door. But I looked out the window with my binoculars and, sure enough, there was a woman standing in the driveway. Deciding that she was another nut, I told Grandmother that I didn’t want to see her. Three days later, despite a tremendous rainstorm, the woman hadn’t moved, and by now Alphonse’s grandmother was very upset. She didn’t understand it; she had never seen anything like it and pleaded with me, “Please let her in, she must be very cold and wet. I want to give her some food.”

Grandmother was so compassionate that I knew I had to do something, so I went outside and spoke to the woman. She was very striking-looking, a mulatto in her early thirties who spoke with a clipped British accent. Her clothes were wet and she was chilled, so I invited her into the den at one end of my bedroom where a fire was blazing. Grandmother gave her a blanket and
a cup of coffee, and as she warmed herself, she told me her story. After seeing
One-Eyed Jacks
, she said she had gone to a cafe and ordered a cup of coffee. While she was sipping it, she said she saw the reflection of her eyes in the coffee, then a reflection of
my
eyes—her eyes changed to mine as she was looking into the coffee—and thereafter she saw my eyes everywhere she went and believed that some kind of spirit had turned her into me. She told me all this in a very formal and dignified way.

I asked where she was from and she said, “I was born in New York City.”

“Where?”

“Harlem.”

“Then how is it that you speak with a British accent? Have you been living in England?”

“No, I’ve never been there.”

“Have you been around English-speaking people?”

“My boyfriend is from England.”

Apparently she was affecting his accent, and she did it so well that she could have probably gotten a job as an announcer with the BBC. She said that she had come to my house under orders from her psychiatrist. After she told him she was me, he advised her to see me in the flesh and then she would know she was wrong.

“It must have taken a lot of courage to do this,” I said. “As you can plainly see, I am not you, I am somebody else; I’m a different person. For some reason, you needed to imagine that I was you.”

At first she was disbelieving and confused, but slowly she began to relax. She was quite attractive, and for a moment or two I had evil fantasies, since my bed was only a few steps away. But I’d grown up a smidgen by then and chased such thoughts out of my mind, and eventually she left. I gave her my phone number and she called several times afterward, usually
frantically, when she’d had a relapse and again thought she was me, so her psychiatrist would advise her to call me to confirm that it wasn’t true. She also called after she read that I was in the hospital, and I assured her that I was all right and that she didn’t have anything to worry about.

These calls went on for years and years, then gradually tapered off. The last one was several years ago, and now she was speaking with a German accent. I asked her, “Have you got a new boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Is he German?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

   For several years I saw Weonna off and on and we loved a lot and fought a lot. She was a tough woman and gave as good as she got. She had an unerring sense of how to prick my insecurities and jealousies, and we had ferocious fights. I suppose neither of us was willing or able to change our ways. At our last meeting we stood toe-to-toe and really destroyed each other emotionally. It was a grisly collision: Weonna, to get back at me because she said I had hurt her, had seduced one of my sons. I didn’t explode. I simply realized that it was over, and that there was no possibility of anything between us again. After what she did, it was impossible to patch it up. I reassured my boy that he should not feel guilty, that what happened had been a maneuver by her to stick a dagger in my heart, and that he had no reason to feel any remorse.

For about five years, I didn’t see Weonna, though I thought about her often and from time to time heard news about her: she had moved to New Mexico, had given up acting, had done well in real estate and had entered law school. Then I heard that she had moved back to Los Angeles and that someone had seen her at a party. I suspected our paths would cross and I wondered
with some excitement what would happen if they did. When I saw her at a party at a friend’s home, my stomach jumped as if I’d been punched in the gut by a heavyweight. I screwed up my courage, went over, put my hands around her softly and said, “I’m very glad to see you, Weonna.” She blushed, gave me her telephone number and we started talking on the phone again. She was as funny as ever, and to me there’s nothing in this world as seductive, or that gives me such a sense of life, as laughing. It’s medicinal.

Most of the women in my life have been women of color, like Ermi: Latin American, Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Japanese. Weonna was the exception, an Irish potato, and unlike the others we had a lot in common because we grew up in the same part of the country, spoke the same cultural language, had similar histories, liked the same jokes—and fought the same way.

After that party, I saw Weonna two or three more times at others, and as always she killed me with her jokes. She was sensitive but had a lot of street smarts; she was also naïve and childlike. Finally, after we’d spoken several times on the phone and I’d bumped into her a few times, she said, “What’s going to happen now … to us?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just as bewildered as you are.” I hadn’t touched her since that first party, and I too didn’t know where we were headed.

Weonna told me she wanted to see a psychiatrist because there were problems she hadn’t been able to work out, and I encouraged her. I also wrote her a letter saying that I forgave her for all the things she had done to me, and that I hoped she would forgive me for everything I had done to her. I said that I thought we had been cruel to each other out of ignorance and anguish, longing and fear, anxiety and stress, and that I realized it was important for me to forgive her. I didn’t know then why I wrote that letter, but now I realize that in doing so, by forgiving
her for having put a sword in my heart, I was gaining my freedom.

Up to then I had spent my life searching for a woman who would love me unconditionally, a woman whom I could love and trust never to hurt or abandon me, a woman who would make amends for the pain inflicted on me by my mother and Ermi. But from that moment on, I started to accept all women without doubt. They were no longer my enemy, nor were they archangels whom I could count on to give me a perfect life. If I was ever going to be happy, I realized, it was up to me to achieve it and not to some woman who would enter my life with a holy grail filled with a magic elixir guaranteeing me a full and happy life.