Marlon Brando is crazier than you are
The Peccant Rejuvenator Mr. Hole
#894 April 25, 2002, with Cameron Diaz on the cover. I just had to
share this with everyone if only for Marlon's unique way of hiring
help. You should really go out in get the mag though, the photos make
it worth the price alone.
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The Oddfather
By JOD KAFTAN
At seventy-eight, Marlon Brando is hard up, pissed off and stranger
than ever. His latest project: a series of self-produced acting
lessons - co-starring the likes of Leonardo Dicaprio, Sean Penn and
Michael Jackson - that he hopes to sell on video
Career changes are never easy, especially when you're in your late
seventies and especially when you're Marlon Brando. These are lean
times, and like any dogged old kingpin with sprawling estates to
maintain and kids to support, Brando is not above making a buck off
his own legend. Late last fall, he shot a fifteen-day acting workshop
called Lying for a Living. Brando is tackling the project with his
usual gusto. He financed it himself, wheeled in friends such as Sean
Penn and Leo DiCaprio for cameos and, in an effort to show the kinds
of risks an actor should be comfortable taking, he even dressed up as
a woman.
Today is supposed to be Brando's penultimate class, and as the
project's official hagiographer I have been invited to attend.
But Brando cancels at the last minute. He has a bad cough. He is sick,
but not too sick to make the short walk from his bedroom to his office
to view the class footage for the first time, curious to see the
fruits of his labor.
I await Brando with the editor of the tapes. The office is located in
the gatehouse of his Beverly Hills compound, shrouded in a bamboo
thicket off the driveway. The phone beeps. There's a mumble. A raspy,
congested voice announces, "Coming down." Soon I hear the distant
approach of flapping sandals, a Rottweiler's baritone bark and then
the rustle of bamboo. I'm sitting on a couch with my legs crossed,
fighting the urge to look over my shoulder; I know I shouldn't, since
the actor once told me that he hates being stared at (especially by
men).
Marlon Brando steps through the sliding glass door in a tropical
terry-cloth robe, a faded black T-shirt and boyish white briefs.
Without a word he drops himself on the couch next to me, coughs,
stretches out his bare, pallid legs and pans the room as if to root
out anything unfamiliar. I can feel his eyes stop at me.
The film editor asks Brando if he's ready to view the tapes. "What do
you think?" snaps Brando.
"Of course," the editor replies.
"Don't 'of course' me," Brando says sternly under his breath. The
tapes roll. There is Brando's still-handsome seventy-eight-year-old
profile, in close-up.
I can't keep my eyes from drifting from the screen to the man sitting
on my right. He is looking serious, almost pissed off. "Can you make
it louder?" he asks.
I look at him again, nervous that he hasn't yet acknowledged my
presence. While still watching the tape, he sticks out his arm and
extends a pinkie. It is a special Brando handshake. I respond, and our
pinkies entwine. The first time he offered this handshake, I thought
he was afraid I had germs. But soon I learned it was a sign of
affection. I existed.
I first met Marlon Brando in 1983, when I was thirteen. I had dated
his daughter Rebecca for about half an hour, but we'd stayed friends
and spent a lot of time together watching basic cable, eating chili
burgers and making the occasional trip to Disneyland.
One day we were sitting in the den in front of MTV when she said,
"Turn it down. I think my dad's coming."
"How do you know?" I asked.
"I just do."
I noticed that the tropical fish were no longer swimming but idling.
There was the slow, heavy slap of bare feet on tile in the hallway. I
scooted over on the sofa. A bear of a man lumbered in, wearing only a
Japanese robe. He plunked himself down between us. I stared. I
couldn't help it. It was Marlon fucking Brando. After a few moments of
listening to him rip into MTV -- he was imagining the shallow internal
monologues of people such as Duran Duran's Simon Le Bon and Dexy's
Midnight Runners -- he turned to me and said, "You know, you have a
very wide antenna, a large antenna. Most people hide their antennas,
but yours is very active, very open."
What could I say but "thanks"? Only, he wasn't through: "I'm not
really sure, but my gut feeling is that you're a homosexual. Am I
right?"
He wasn't, but his massive frame and intimidating cadence caused me to
fearfully answer, "Yes." Yanking a pen from his pocket, Brando asked
me to draw him a picture on a linen napkin. I complied. He took the
drawing, looked at it for two minutes and then muttered, "Paul Klee,
do you know him?"
"Yes," I replied. He nodded meaningfully and left the room without
another word.
The second time I met him, almost ten years later, was also in the
den. I was playing video games with his then-twenty-nine-year-old son,
Teihotu, when the phone let out an anxious beep.
"Mr. Brando wants to see you in the living room."
I looked to Teihotu. "Don't look at me, dude," he said. "He's asking
for you."
The living room was spare and elegant. On the mantle, a bust of a
golden Buddha glowed in the afternoon light. A huge window framed the
San Fernando Valley. Brando was sitting on the couch, clad in the same
robe. A giant Rottweiler was curled at his feet.
"Sit down," he said, patting the empty cushion on the couch. "What do
you want to do for a living?" he asked.
"I was thinking psychology," I replied.
"That's a good gig," he said. He snatched a walnut from a bowl on the
table and fondled it thoughtfully for a few minutes, studying the
grooves in the shell. Finally he spoke. "I'm prepared to offer you
employment here at my home. I thought of you because you don't seem to
be overly neurotic."
"Thanks," I said.
"Now, the job could involve things like building a doghouse for my
mastiff, Tim. Or I might just walk up to you and ask you to take apart
a radio and put it back together again. The job will have various
benefits, like trips to my house in Tahiti. I might ask you to manage
surveillance on the island. I may ask you to run down to Casa Vega and
pick up a dozen tacos. Or I could ask you to plant some tulips near my
teahouse."
Things went south after a month, when Brando's Argentinian houseman
cornered me with a menacing, pointed finger and announced, "Marlon say
you work for me now."
Though I had been hired simply to be the house Kato Kaelin -- Brando
had me labeling Jackie Mason tapes in his video library -- I was soon
asked to assume different kinds of duties. Brando asked me to build a
deck on his Japanese pond, and when I expressed dismay he referred me
to the Time-Life series on home improvement. ("Don't worry, they're
illustrated.") I was fired when I refused to cut down all the sick
forty-foot-tall bamboo trees. They were crawling with bugs, and, let's
face it, I was just a dandy.
In February 2000, nearly a decade later, though I had seen him
intermittently through the years, he called to ask whether I'd be
interested in editing a magazine on acting; the idea was that Brando
would conduct all the interviews with actors himself. I declined, but
late last year he called again to ask whether I'd be interested in
writing an article about his latest acting project, Lying for a
Living.
I would have said no again, but the next day I was laid off from my
job in New York, and the prospect became interesting.
A couple of days later, I arrive in L.A. for my first day of
interviews, down a five-dollar smoothie at Jamba Juice and swerve up
Mulholland Drive to Brando's hilltop estate. After passing two
high-voltage gates, I hear the Glenn Miller Band swooning from a
jacaranda tree. Jazz grooves all day long from tiny speakers in the
trees that surround his modest Japanese-style home -- a tip he picked
up from his friend Michael Jackson, who has installed speakers
throughout his Neverland Valley Ranch. After gingerly stepping past
two salivating attack dogs, I find an empty seat in the living room
and wait for Brando. Brando bought this house, built by Howard Hughes,
in the late Fifties. He also owns a private island, Tetiaroa, near
Tahiti. But the island, which he's reportedly trying to sell, was hit
by two hurricanes in the early Eighties that caused millions of
dollars in damages. Here his days seem to consist of an occasional
swim, reading Scientific American and sleep. For a while, he could
often be found in online chat rooms; once, five years ago, he
instant-messaged me, jokingly pretending to be my sister, who has
worked for him on and off over the years. As a boss, he can be very
generous; a year and a half ago, our mother suffered a heart attack
and was taken to a hospital that wouldn't admit her because she had no
insurance. Brando drove over in his Lexus and got the man in charge on
the phone right away. The next day, she had a suite with a view and a
plant.
When in L.A., Brando almost always has his meals delivered. Today he's
eating Greek, and he has ordered enough for a wedding. I wait for the
tropical fish to signal his entrance, and soon enough he ambles in,
dressed as if he just left Mount Olympus.
It is the last day of taping for Lying for a Living, but Brando had
called Harry Dean Stanton at 3 a.m. the night before to ask whether
Stanton could stand in for him. Brando had a bad cough, and didn't
seem to think this would be a problem. He later admitted to me that he
had no idea what he was going to do or say for all fifteen classes
other than slowly transforming himself into a bosomy Englishwoman.
Aside from the cough, Brando's health appears to be sound. His diet is
simple, not lavish. And it does seem to be shaped by some informed
medical advice. I once saw him dutifully eating a cantaloupe for
breakfast and wishing he could have something with a little more
"jazz."
Finally he ambles in, and before I have a chance to greet him or even
ask about his project, he rolls into a rant about the media, provoked
by a copy of the Los Angeles Times I am carrying. As he attacks a
steaming plate of moussaka, he says, pointing to my paper, that he
boycotts television and newspapers because "I don't want that shit
floating around in my neurons. And besides, look around you. It's a
beautiful day out. That crap will ruin it."
Though requests pour in every day, Brando has not given a major
interview since 1996, when he went on Larry King Live and lauded the
Jews for their significant contributions to American culture but then
noted that Hollywood "is owned by Jews, and they should have a greater
sensitivity about the issue of people who are suffering."
I ask him why he's so phobic about interviews.
"Because once I do one, they all come," he says with a sigh. "It's
like sticking your toe in the Amazon thinking that it won't attract
piranhas. I'd rather they just portray me as a fat slob and a hoot,
and just leave it at that."
When I get up to help his female staff clear the table, he tells me to
sit down. "I'm old-fashioned," he says. "I bring home the meat, and
they make the meat." Everything Brando says is deadpan. You're never
sure whether to laugh or nod academically. Around him, I invent some
combination of both. He continues, "Women have had the same brain for
the last 15 million years. They're built with a certain disposition."
I think of the time I brought my Brazilian girlfriend by for an
introduction. He sprang from his chair, ran his hand down the length
of her ballerina's back and said, "Well, aren't you the sweetest
thing?" Then, out of earshot, he whispered to me, "Nice rack.
Obviously you like dark meat. She's very nice, but she doesn't seem
like the kind of girl you could read Schopenhauer to."
Our meal over, we get down to business. I ask Brando why he decided to
call his project Lying for a Living. He insists the title is more than
just mere provocation; Brando says that lying is a "social lubricant"
we cannot live without.
"I've been lying all my life," he tells me. "Everybody does."
I ask him whether he thinks he's a good liar.
"Oh, Jesus," he says. "I'm fabulous at it."
If Brando sees acting as a form of lying, he considers show business a
form of torture: "I hate this shit," he told me as he was shooting his
most recent film, The Score. Brando received modestly good reviews in
The Score, but his performance was overshadowed by much-publicized
histrionics with director Frank Oz. They ranged from calling Oz "Miss
Piggy" to demanding that he receive direction only through co-star
Robert De Niro. In view of his tumultuous history, it's no surprise to
hear Brando encourage students to outsmart directors by allowing them
to feel brilliant while discreetly trying to advance their own
creative agendas.
At this stage in his life -- and with his track record of acting up on
the set - Brando himself doesn't have many roles to choose from.
Still, he needs to earn a living: He maintains a separate household
for Cristina Ru'z (his Guatemalan ex-maid) and their three kids, and
he's still on the hook for the island in Tahiti. He gets by with a
little help from his friends. Brando seems to genuinely like Michael
Jackson. They have been friends since the mid-1980s, and Brando's son
Miko is actually on Jackson's payroll; he "handles" things, Miko once
told me. It was Miko who put out Jackson's hair when it caught fire,
during the filming of a Pepsi commercial in January 1984.
Still, when he was asked to introduce Jackson at the pop star's
thirtieth-anniversary tribute in September, Brando didn't do it for
free. It was on this night that Brando took to the stage and launched
into a fairly mystifying speech about tortured children: "That's what
this evening is about." He looked at his watch and continued. "I took
one whole minute because I wanted to realize that in that minute,
there were hundreds if not thousands of children who were hacked to
death with a machete." Boos came soon afterward, but so did a check
from Jackson, who had flown Brando and three of his guests to New
York.
When Brando asked me in his hotel room after the tribute what I
thought of Jackson, I said (without knowing they were friends), "I
think he's talented, but so what? He's just doing an impression of
himself from 1983." Brando replied diplomatically, "Well, he does work
hard." He also joked about how easy it would be to avoid a
second-night encore by heating up a thermometer.
When he was considering doing Lying for a Living, Brando was often
seen walking around the house with a -- in this house, there's
seemingly always one within reach - punching numbers compulsively and
muttering about "billions." His plan was to film all the classes and
sell the tapes through his Web site, the currently dark
marlonbrando.com. Brando says he is bankrolling the project himself.
Why he needs money can only be conjectured. He may still be paying off
monumental legal bills that accrued after his son Christian in 1990
killed a man named Dag Drollet, the boyfriend of Marlon's daughter
Cheyenne. But profits aside, it's also true that Brando actually
enjoys teaching. For the first time in years, there's a real
possibility that he could earn money from something he doesn't
despise. "I was really inspired," he tells me, "to the extent that the
actors really made a contribution. [Actors] can get you out of a bad
emotional rut. They can give you perspective and cheer you up." Though
Brando has disparaged show business for years, calling it "dumb," he
reserves praise for some films: He says he's fond of Akira Kurosawa
and really admired Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes. He also highly
recommends the Sidney Lumet film Q & A, with Nick Nolte and Armand
Assante. "Nick Nolte scared the shit out of me," Brando says in the
tapes.
On the third day of class, Brando makes good on his promise to
incarnate himself as an Englishwoman. He saunters onto the soundstage
wearing lipstick, blush, Chinese silk pajamas and a cobalt-blue scarf
knotted coquettishly around his neck. A sultry makeup girl kneels at
his feet applying fire-red nail polish to his hands while two students
labor through an improv. The tapes are, to say the least,
star-studded, with Brando's guest list including the likes of Sean
Penn, Jon Voight, Leonardo DiCaprio, Nick Nolte, Edward James Olmos,
Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and even Michael Jackson. The
project's seven cameras capture the stars' awestruck faces as they
hang on Brando's every word. They have good reason: Brando hardly ever
discusses his craft, and for the first time in years he speaks of
acting as if it matters. On his overstuffed armchair throne, he sits
at the head of the class, his bare feet dangling languidly off an
ottoman, and says some interesting things, such as, "Your whole face
is a stage" and "Let the drama find you." Brando does a totally
convincing improv on a prop telephone, and when some of the other
actors try it, including Penn, DiCaprio and Voight, Brando's boundless
talent seems obvious.
The tapes yield some great anecdotes. "I had never played an Italian,"
Brando says, "and I was supposed to play an Italian in this movie
called The, uh, Godfather."
For a moment it seems he has forgotten
the name of the film. "And they didn't want me for the part. Francis
Coppola wanted me for that part, so I thought, 'Well, if you do a
really wonderful picture, you're good for about five flops in a row.'
I needed the part at that time. And, uh, I don't know who it was,
someone over there at Paramount wanted a screen test. I said forget
it. But I wasn't sure that I could play that part, either. I put some
cotton there [points to his lip and begins to slip into Don Corleone]
and, uh, I didn't know what to say. I didn't know any Italians." He
slips out of character and mentions producer Dino De Laurentiis. "He
took a shot in the throat and he [slips into Corleone again] spoke
like that. But, uh, I was a little scared of big Italian gestures."
(Brando later notes as an aside that he was paid only $50,000 for his
work on The Godfather.)
The purpose of sharing this anecdote is to encourage the students "to
make asses" of themselves: "If you're not willing to fall on your face
-- if you're not willing to do something that's really stupid,
embarrassing -- then you're not going to do it."
Method actors like to imagine their character's motives when they're
getting revved up for a role. Brando seems to borrow heavily from his
studies with the legendary acting teacher Stella Adler by encouraging
his students to "build a life" for their characters and to always
think about everything their does -- even down to "whether you like
sex and in what way you like it."
Many of the tapes reveal a Brando who is
extremely sensitive and supportive of his students. His trademark
comment after most scenes is "Good. Damn good."
Philippe Petit, who tightroped between the World Trade Center towers
in 1974, gave up a job and came to L.A. with no money just to attend
the classes. "I could talk for hours about the richness of Marlon and
his workshop," Petit told me. "At some point he said, 'Give me the
respect of stillness,' because people were crouching their heads and
moving their feet too much. He's an incredibly talented, profound man,
and a great teacher."
I ask Brando if he ever thought of himself as a teacher.
"No," he says, going on to express the frustrations all teachers have.
"I've had these students out there who don't hear what I'm saying, and
I repeat it, repeat it and repeat it, and they'll come up and make the
same fucking mistakes, because they're in need of vocabulary. You
can't absorb anything unless you're on the edge of perception."
I suggest that not all student actors are good at improv.
"My opinion would be, if you're not good at improv you're not an
actor," he says. "There's a speech from Hamlet that applies to all
artists, but it certainly applies to actors: 'To hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature.' To be natural."
Suddenly he recites the entire soliloquy -- Act III, Scene 2 -- from
memory: " 'Let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to
the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that
you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was
and is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature.' And it goes on,"
Brando adds. "It says it all."
Brando's eccentricities are prominently displayed on the uncut tapes.
"I want to sing the actor's national anthem: 'Me, me, me, me, me, me
[thirty "me's," in fact], you,' " he suddenly says on day two. Another
time, he asks a very beautiful female student, a competitive runner
and model despite having lost her legs, to come to the front of the
class and tell her story of healing and accomplishment. The surreal
high point of her story comes when she says she realized that she
could run faster if she fashioned her prosthetic limbs after those of
a cheetah. Perhaps it wouldn't seem so weird if Brando weren't sitting
behind her on his throne looking totally poker-faced, like the
facilitator at an AA meeting. (The scene is weirder still since the
testimonial seems so random and unrelated.) After she tells her story
and is returning to her chair, Brando chimes in, "And she looks pretty
good going away." The room erupts with laughter.
Occasionally the tapes reveal a codger's unwitting political
incorrectness -- ironic for a man once known as a staunch activist for
Native Americans and other causes. Brando says to me that he wanted to
stock the class with plenty of non-actors for a reason: His tapes
weren't just about acting, they were about life. Students from a local
acting workshop populated the classes; others admitted they were there
through connections. Aside from the stars, most of the students look
to be everyday people, give or take a few sideburned L.A. types.
Brando found one, Jim, rummaging through the trash in front of the
studio as his limo pulled into the parking lot. Brando proudly
introduces Jim on the first day of class; "a special surprise," he
calls it. The camera swivels to Jim, a bearded black man looking
cleaned up and nervous. "Jim was outside here monkeying with trash
containers. What do you do, Jim?"
"Recycling," he says.
Brando admits to me that he was short of actors that day. "Jim was
actually one of the most interesting men in the group," Petit
remembers. "I thought it was beautiful to invite this man in."
Another bizarre demonstration comes on day fourteen, when Brando
imports two dwarfs and a giant Samoan (actually one of Michael
Jackson's bodyguards) for an improv. At one point the dwarfs start
punching each other, and the Samoan separates them like two unleashed
puppies. At the end of the scene, Brando lavishly praises the
performance: "When something's good, it hits you. I get chicken skin
when something's really right."
Then he addresses the class. "What I was pleased with was that you
people never thought of these people as being small. They disallowed
you to think in terms of cliches."
About half the class is black, which is relevant only because of what
happens on day four, when Brando declares as the improv du jour that
all the white students will act black and all the black students will
act white. As deliberately provocative as that sounds, the results are
actually interesting: The white men portray black men as angry, and
the black men portray whites as petty and wimpy.
Though Brando calls in sick the day I arrive, there is one final class
planned at Jackson's Neverland Valley Ranch, where the guest list is
to include Elizabeth Taylor, Drew Barrymore and Jackson himself.
Brando told me he also called Bill Clinton to invite him to the
Neverland master class; I guess Brando can get anyone on the phone.
These days, the phone seems to be his principal form of expression,
his primary instrument of intimacy and control. He often uses it to
wake up friends such as Penn or Stanton in the middle of the night.
Around his house, the phone takes on Orwellian overtones, because with
the intercom feature Brando can listen in on any conversation in any
room -- and often does. During my visit, I ask if I can call New York
from his office, but I'm warned by his staff that "someone" may listen
in. I call anyway. In the middle of my conversation, I faintly detect
a receiver fumbling in someone's hands and the sound of breathing. I
say, "Hello?" More breathing. Hearing what sounds like the crunch of a
potato chip, I end the call.
Tony Kaye, a successful British commercial director, does not fit the
profile of Brando's male friends. Perhaps Brando sees in Kaye a fellow
provocateur, since he is a big fan of Kaye's film American History X.
"It made me drawn to him instantly," Brando says in class. So Brando
hired Kaye as the project's director. And he apparently acted in good
faith. In one class, he says he "looked forward to a very long and
involved course of action" with Kaye.
It lasted three days.
On the first day of class, Kaye shows up as Osama bin Laden, which, he
reportedly explained to a friend, was meant as "a performance-art
piece" meant to teach people "not to be frightened of terrorism." (Jon
Voight says he found no humor or purpose in the outfit, confessing on
tape that it makes him uncomfortable.)
The third day of shooting is more Jerry Springer than Stanislavsky.
Two black women volunteer for a challenging but ultimately
melodramatic improv. But Kaye will have none of it: While one of the
student actors is crying in the scene, Kaye twists his handheld camera
to within an inch of her face. The actress holds her ground as best
she can until Kaye interrupts with, "Cut. Terrible. Boring."
Brando pounces: "Let me tell you, what's boring is sticking that
camera four inches from their nose and walking around like a police
dog."
Kaye stokes the fire when he turns to the audience and says, "It was
boring. Who was bored with that shit?" One student in the skit wonders
aloud whether Kaye should be ejected and finally says to him, "Do I
gotta be a goddamn ghetto bunny for you to like this?"
The circus goes on for a good twenty minutes. Why Brando lets it
continue for so long is uncertain. Eventually he cuts in, asking
whether his audience feels Kaye's intrusion is "chaotic and
interruptive and inappropriate." The camera pans the room. Strikingly,
the class is half working-class black, half white L.A. demimonde, and
it happens that most of the white people are friends of Kaye's. One of
them, a Perry Farrell look-alike, sticks up for Kaye, saying that by
telling the actors they are boring, Kaye is "getting it to an organic
place."
Suddenly Brando says, "Can I ask how you happen to be here?"
"I was invited by Tony," the young man responds.
"Well, I disinvite you." Kaye -- and his entourage -- follow the man
out the door in a show of thespian solidarity. Later, at a restaurant
where the group has repaired for lunch in self-imposed exile, Kaye
says, "Marlon Brando should be with the Taliban. I think he'd be very
comfortable in that world, with a hundred wives, 14,000 children, no
music, and no one's allowed to speak."
Two weeks later, we are watching the tapes in Brando's office. "I look
like Grandma Moses," jokes Brando. "Can you crop it? Jesus, I look
pregnant."
The next thing I know, Brando's hand is groping my knee. It's not a
sexual advance but a curious one, as if he were examining a Rottweiler
for purchase. "You've got big, strong legs," he says.
The footage continues, and I feel his hand move on to my humble bicep.
"You're solid, man." At that point, the camera shows DiCaprio
improvising on a phone: "I don't even want to get into the whole
sexual thing," he's saying.
"He looks like a girl," says Brando, in a grouchy mood. After the
class, Brando tells me how DiCaprio called to invite him out to
dinner. "Let me be frank: I don't do dinner," Brando remembers telling
him. He then said to the star, "Maybe you think you're interesting,
but that's hardly the point."
Brando turns his attention back to the footage. "Who wants to see a
fat eighty-year-old man pontificate?"
I tell him that with some solid editing I think the tapes will sell.
He's unfazed. A baby in the office begins to cry, and Brando shifts
into an inspirational mood. He describes an invention he thought of
for mothers that would prevent babies from throwing up on them - too
complicated to describe here, but it seems remotely viable. I tell him
of my own idea for "a phone condom," basically a latex cover for pay
phones. His eyes suddenly grow wide and adolescent. He points to me
and says, "Now that's a great idea! Brilliant. That's something that
has a truly practical purpose. We could sell it on my Web site and go
fifty-fifty. What d'ya say?"
I'm not sure whether he's serious, but then I realize he is.
"Sure, why not?" I say.
My eyes browse the eclectic assortment of titles in the bookcase --
from The Poems of Emily Dickinson to How to Raise a Rottweiler. On the
middle shelf sits a video collection, unwrapped and dusty, from
financial guru Suze Orman: The Power to Attract Money.
Once Brando is preoccupied with his tapes, I decide it is a good time
to steal away and finally complete my call to New York. When I hang
up, the phone beeps from the other room and Brando's voice comes over
the intercom: "It's Marlon." He coughs hard. I asked him earlier
whether I could attend his final class at Neverland. He is calling to
tell me I can't go, even though he'd already said I could. There's no
use asking him why, but I can't help it.
"No," he replies curtly. The conversation wanders to the subject of
acting. I suggest that ego is what drives many actors to plod on in
the face of the odds.
"Acting is the dumbest profession in the world," Brando replies.
"Fact: One percent of actors make a living. And it is not constant.
They make a living for a given amount of time."
"Then why do it?" I ask.
"Uh, I don't know. Why do you want to be a writer?" He puts on a
stodgy, bureaucratic voice: " 'Uh, Jod, we are representatives for the
Pulitzer board, and we'd like to present you with this award for your
work.' You wouldn't say, 'Well, get the fuck outta here.'"
Then, stupidly, I challenge him, pointing out that he himself once
famously walked away from an award: In 1973, Brando sent an Apache
woman named Sacheen Littlefeather -- a.k.a. actress Maria Cruz, a
former Miss American Vampire -- to the Oscars, to turn down Brando's
Best Actor statuette for The Godfather. There is an uncomfortable
silence. I can't take it.
"Well, I think if I won I'd at least get a date," I say, and he
laughs. Brando's laugh is contagious. It's bronchial and mulelike, and
it slowly gathers momentum. "That's why we do anything," I add,
projecting my neurosis.
"No, it isn't. That's why you do everything. How old are you now?"
"I'm thirty-two."
"OK. When you're sixty-two, you're not gonna care."
I ask what it is he wants me to write about, since I won't actually be
seeing any of the classes in person.
"Just about what I'm doing," he answers. I inquire further, but he
seems bored with the subject. We hang up. I go back into his office,
expecting to see him there. He's gone, except for his crumpled
Kleenex. I think about how much he hates the press and that if I write
anything short of an advertisement he'll be furious. But I remember
the speech from Hamlet and hope he has a copy at hand when this comes
out: "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action. To hold, as
'twere, the mirror up to nature."
=========================================
&&
Mr. Hole
Tyler D.
> The following article appears in the current issue of "Rolling Stone"
> #894 April 25, 2002, with Cameron Diaz on the cover. I just had to
> share this with everyone if only for Marlon's unique way of hiring
> help. You should really go out in get the mag though, the photos make
> it worth the price alone.
>
Thanks for posting this, Hole. I really enjoyed it.
I think people who are that brilliant/eccentric are fun to read about,
and he qualifies as one of the world's strangest celebrities.
Tim May
<tyler...@yahoo.com> wrote:
I agree. I started reading that article and then couldn't stop. I saved
the article for my own files.
I wonder who'll play Brando in the film? De Caprio, maybe, if he puts
on a few more pounds.
--Tim May
Jaime M. de Castellvi
Sounds as if, when he is not acting, he is totally spontaneous.
Cheers,
Jaime
