Brando (2 page)

I watched them float all the way down, sitting with my neck craned back until my mouth opened and holding out my hand just in case, but they never landed on it. When one hit the ground I’d look up again, my eyes darting, waiting for the next magical event, the sun warming the yellow hairs on my head.

Waiting like that for the next magic was as good a moment as any other that I can remember in the last sixty-five years.

•  •  •

As I sit at home now, winnowing the remembrances, they often come across my mind as unrelated images and feelings with smoky edges. I remember the sweet aroma of fresh-cut hay, the fragrance of burning leaves and the redolence of leaf dust as I scuffed through them. I remember the fragrance of the lilies of the valley in the garden where I often slept on the hot afternoons in Omaha, and I suppose the fragrance will always be with me. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the smell of lilacs or wild roses or the almost chic appearance of the trees in our neighborhood dressed in the silver lamé of a spring ice storm. Or the unforgettable sound that grates on me even today, the squeak of midwestern snow beneath my boots when the temperature was fifteen below. Nor can I forget the smoky fragrance of toast and burning bacon with grits and eggs that drifted up the stairwell of our house on Sunday mornings.

We had an old-fashioned cast-iron wood-burning stove that always embarrassed me. It was a wonderful stove, but in those days I was ashamed of it because it made me feel that we were poor. If I ever invited friends over and we passed through the kitchen, I tried to engage them and lock their eyes on me so they wouldn’t notice the stove.

When my mother drank, her breath had a sweetness that I lack the vocabulary to describe. It was a strange marriage, the sweetness of her breath and my hatred of her drinking. She was always sipping surreptitiously from her bottle of Empirin, which she called “my change-of-life medicine.” It was usually filled with gin. As I got older, occasionally I would find myself with a woman whose breath had that sweetness that still defies description. I was always sexually aroused by the smell. As much as I hated it, it had an undeniable allure for me.

As her drinking increased, it became more and more difficult for my mother to disguise the fact that she was simply an off-the-shelf drunk. The anguish that her drinking produced was that she preferred getting drunk to caring for us.

My mother was always unconventional. Sometimes when it
rained, she wore a shopping bag over her head with a little visor she had torn at the corners; it looked absurd, but she thought it was funny. I was embarrassed by it, though if she did it today, I’d be gasping with laughter.

The memories of those times drift in and out of my mind like the hoboes who used to come and go near the railroad tracks not far from our house. It is surprising that those remembrances visit my mind and that most of the time, pain and shame are mercifully absent.

I have been told that I was born one hour before midnight, April 3, 1924, in the Omaha Maternity Hospital. It was a breech birth, but otherwise unremarkable. My family had lived for generations in Nebraska and was mostly of Irish ancestry. My mother, Dorothy Pennebaker Brando, was twenty-seven; my father, Marlon Brando, Sr., was twenty-nine. I rounded out the family and made it complete: my older sister, Jocelyn, was almost five when I was born, my sister Frances almost two. Each of us had nicknames: my mother’s was Dodie, my father’s, Bowie, although he was Pop to me and Poppa to my sisters, Jocelyn was Tiddy, Frances was Frannie and I was Bud.

Until I was seven, we lived in a big wood-shingled house on a broad street in Omaha lined on both sides with houses much like our own, and with leafy elm trees that at the time seemed taller than anything that a young boy could imagine. Some of my memories of those days are pleasant. At first I was unaware of my mother’s nipping from the bottle or the unhappiness of my father, who was also an alcoholic, which probably was the cause of his vanishing so often, getting drunk himself and looking for hookers.

When I was very small, I remember carrying a tiny pillow around everywhere, a talisman of childhood. Hugging it, I went to sleep at odd times and odd places, and as I grew older, I even carried it when I started climbing trees and laying claim to empty lots in our neighborhood as my own private kingdom.

It’s hard—probably impossible—to sort out the extent to which our experiences as children shape our outlook, behavior and personalities as adults, as opposed to the extent to which genetics are responsible. One has to be a genius to give a simple or absolute answer to anything in this world, and I don’t know any tougher question than this one, although I suspect it’s a subtle mixture of both. From my mother, I imagine I inherited my instinctual traits, which are fairly highly developed, as well as an affection for music. From my father, I probably acquired my strength of endurance, for he was truly a tough monkey. In later years, he reminded me of a British officer in the Bengal Lancers, perhaps a Victor McLaglen with more refinement. He was a traveling salesman who spent most of his time on the road selling calcium carbonate products—materials from the fossilized remains of ancient marine animals used in building, manufacturing and farming. It was an era when a traveling salesman slipped $5 to a bellboy, who would return with a pint of whiskey and a hooker. Then the house detective got a dollar so that the woman could stay in his room. My pop was such a man.

Most of my childhood memories of my father are of being ignored. I was his namesake, but nothing I did ever pleased or even interested him. He enjoyed telling me I couldn’t do anything right. He had a habit of telling me I would never amount to anything. He was far more emotionally destructive than he realized. I was never rewarded by him with a comment, a look or a hug. He was a card-carrying prick whose mother deserted him when he was four years old—just disappeared, ran off someplace—and he was shunted from one spinster aunt to another. I think he deeply resented women because of that experience. I loved him and hated him at the same time. He was a frightening, silent, brooding, angry, hard-drinking, rude man, a bully who loved to give orders and issue ultimatums—and he was just as tough as he talked. Perhaps that’s why I’ve had a lifelong aversion to authority. He had reddish, sandy hair, was
tall and handsome and had an overwhelming masculine presence. His blood consisted of compounds of alcohol, testosterone, adrenaline and anger. On the other hand, he could make any room fill with laughter. Women found him fetching, strong and handsome. And surprisingly, he had an extraordinary sense of the absurd.

But my father could also slip quickly into the role of a bar fighter. I imagine him as the fellow at the bar who, when you look over at him, says, “Who the fuck do you think you’re looking at?” I remember a story—I don’t remember who told it to me—that once he got drunk in San Francisco in a bar, and Sunday-punched his fighting partner out of the door and onto the trolley tracks, where they continued to exchange knuckle sandwiches until a streetcar nearly ran them over. I never actually saw him fight, but I remember him coming home with a shiner. He was a man whose emotional disorders took the form of pathological stinginess: he wouldn’t spend a nickel if he didn’t have to, and he socked away his cash like a miser. He insisted on controlling people, which—who knows?—may have something to do with why I’ve spent much of my life trying to control other people. Once I remember his putting his arm around my shoulder and playing with my earlobes at a movie, and there was always a perfunctory kiss when he returned from one of his trips, but such moments were exceptional. Perhaps he didn’t know how, or was too proud or too frightened to do it. I don’t remember him being affectionate with anybody except maybe our dogs.

After his mother disappeared, my father was brought up by his aunts, who were very Victorian in their outlook, and by my equally Victorian grandfather, whom we called Pa, an imposing man in celluloid collars who was stiff, frugal and cautious.

My father fell in love with my mother when they were in high school, I think because she was vivacious, funny and unconventional and enjoyed a good laugh like he did. He was a man who had known great pain and had never forgiven his mother for
her desertion, and the residue of that anger had to be absorbed by my mother, by us three children and by whoever tried to stare him down at a bar.

Recently, Frannie sent me a letter in which she said that growing up in our family was “in a way like having four parents, or six, or eight. When Poppa wasn’t beset by his inner irrational fears, he could be sweet and loving and considerate, amusing and amused, charming and sensitive, and then all this could be blotted out by black moods, thunderous silences, and anger that could burst out furiously over what seemed to us to be minor infractions. It was a lonely, friendless household. I don’t think Poppa wanted to be such an abusive person, but he had no means to escape the consequences of the abuse and abandonment that he had suffered.”

What was absent most conspicuously in our family was forgiveness. “I don’t remember forgiveness,” Frannie wrote. “No forgiveness! In our home, there was blame, shame, and punishment that very often had no relationship to the ‘crime,’ and I think the sense of burning injustice it left with all of us marked us deeply.”

My mother was a delicate, funny woman who loved music and learning, but was not much more affectionate than my father. To this day, I don’t understand the psychodynamics and pathology of her disorder or the forces that made her an alcoholic. Perhaps it was genetic, or perhaps alcohol was the anesthesia she required to numb the disappointments in her life. I always wondered about the reasons, but never learned the answer. She was seldom home when I was growing up, although I have a few good memories of lying in bed with her, with her light brown curls strewn over the pillows, while she read a book to me and we shared a bowl of crackers and milk. And occasionally we all stood around the piano and sang while she played, one of the few times I remember any sort of family activity.

My mother knew every song that was ever written, and for
reasons that are unclear to me—perhaps because I wanted to please her—I memorized as many as I could. To this day, I remember the music and lyrics to thousands of songs my mother taught me. I have never been able to remember the number of my driver’s license, and there have been times when I couldn’t even remember my own telephone number, but when I hear a song, sometimes only once, I never forget the melody or the lyric. I am forever humming tunes in my head. I know African songs, Chinese songs, Tahitian songs, French songs, German songs and, of course, the songs my mother taught me. There is hardly a culture whose music I am not familiar with. Surprisingly, I can’t remember a single song that was written after the seventies.

SOME OF MY EARLIEST
and best memories of childhood are of Ermi and of moonlight cascading through the window of my bedroom late at night. I was three or four when Ermi came to live with us in Omaha as my governess, and I see her as vividly now as I did then; she was eighteen years old, slightly crosseyed and had fine, silky dark hair. She was Danish, but a touch of Indonesian blood gave her skin a slightly dusky, smoky patina. Her laugh I will always remember. When she entered a room, I knew it without seeing or hearing her because she had a fragrant breath that was extraordinary. I don’t know its chemical composition but her breath was sweet, like crushed and slightly fermented fruit. During the day, we played constantly. At night, we slept together. She was nude, and so was I, and it was a lovely experience. She was a deep sleeper, and I can visualize her now lying in our bed while the moonlight burst through my window and illuminated her skin with a soft, magical amber glow. I sat there looking at her body and fondling her breasts, and arranged myself on her and crawled over her. She was all mine; she belonged to me and to me alone. Had she known of my blinding worship of her, we would have married on the pinnacle of Magellan’s cloud and then, bejeweled in our
love, I would have taken her in my chariot made of flawless diamonds beyond the stars, beyond time, and farther than light to eternity.

Ermi had a boyfriend named Wally. When I was seven, I was playing by myself near a stream when I saw them kissing in a car. I was mystified, but had no idea of the disaster that this event foreshadowed. When Ermi left me not long after that to get married—not to Wally, but to a boy named Eric—I was devastated. She never told me she was going to leave or to be married. She merely said one day that she was leaving on a trip and would return soon. (In fact, she did return—twenty years later.)

The night I realized Ermi was gone forever, I looked up and saw a buttermilk sky. There was a full moon behind the clouds and as it seemed to skip overhead across the saffron universe, I felt my dreams die. It had been weeks since she had gone. I’d waited and waited for her. But I finally knew that she wasn’t coming back. I felt abandoned. My mother had long ago deserted me for her bottle; now Ermi was gone, too. That’s why in life I would always find women who were going to desert me; I had to repeat the process. From that day forward, I became estranged from this world.