Brando (21 page)

THE WILD ONE
, my fifth picture, was based on a real incident, a motorcycle gang’s terrorizing of a small California farm town. I had fun making it, but never expected it to have the impact it did. I was as surprised as anyone when T-shirts, jeans and leather jackets suddenly became symbols of rebellion. In the film there was a scene in which somebody asked my character, Johnny, what I was rebelling against, and I answered,
“Whaddya got?”
But none of us involved in the picture ever imagined that it would instigate or encourage youthful rebellion. Stanley Kramer, the producer, Laslo Benedek, the director, and John Paxton, who wrote the script, may have thought it would illustrate how groups of men—in this case the bikers and townspeople—can be transformed spontaneously into predatory bands by a kind of fraternal herd instinct that enables them to cast aside whatever moral principles they have, the same instinct that led American soldiers to massacre unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. But I think they were really interested only in telling an entertaining story. If anything, the reaction to the picture said more about the audience than it did about the film. A few nuts even claimed that
The Wild One
was part of a Hollywood campaign to loosen our morals and incite
young people to rebel against their elders. Sales of leather jackets soared, reminding me of
It Happened One Night
, when Clark Gable took his shirt off and revealed that he wasn’t wearing an undershirt, which created a disaster for the garment industry.

In this film we were accused of glamorizing motorcycle gangs, whose members were considered inherently evil, with no redeeming qualities. Judeo-Christian values categorize people as good or evil, and society then punishes the evil. But this is absurd. Most people who commit crimes do so because they have been deprived socially, emotionally and economically. To cure this problem, society in its wisdom punishes them, and when they commit other crimes, it is inspired with the brilliant idea of putting three-time losers away forever. All we need to do is build more prisons and the problem is solved!

As I’ve grown older I’ve realized that no people are inherently bad, including the bullies portrayed in
The Wild One
. In this regard I agree with the words Tennessee Williams wrote to Elia Kazan (which Gadg quoted in his autobiography) about the characters in
A Streetcar Named Desire:
“There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people,” Tennessee wrote. “Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts … nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition—all such distortions within our own egos—condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions in our
own
egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of
others
, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts. Such cases seem purely theoretical to me.…”

•  •  •

The public’s reaction to
The Wild One
was, I believe, a product of its time and circumstances. It was only seventy-nine minutes long, short by modern standards, and it looks dated and corny now; I don’t think it has aged well. But it became a kind of cult film, and it certainly helped my career, though once again it was a matter of luck. I’ve always been amazed at how lucky I’ve been, and that picture is a good example. For one thing, the part was actor-proof. Also, I never knew that there were sleeping desires and feelings in our society whose buttons would be hit so uncannily in that film. In hindsight, I think people responded to the movie because of the budding social and cultural currents that a few years later exploded volcanically on college campuses and the streets of America. Right or wrong, we were at the beginning of a new era after several years of transition following World War II; young people were beginning to doubt and question their elders and to challenge their values, morals and the established institutions of authority. There was a wisp of steam just beneath the surface when we made that picture. Young people were looking for a reason—any reason—to rebel. I simply happened to be at the right place at the right time in the right part—and I also had the appropriate state of mind for the role.

More than most parts I’ve played in the movies or onstage, I related to Johnny, and because of this, I believe I played him as more sensitive and sympathetic than the script envisioned. There’s a line in the picture where he snarls, “Nobody tells
me
what to do.” That’s exactly how I’ve felt all my life. Like Johnny, I have always resented authority. I have been constantly discomfited by people telling me what to do, and have always thought that Johnny took refuge in his lifestyle because he was wounded—that he’d had little love as a kid and was trying to survive the emotional insecurity that his childhood had forced him to carry into adulthood. Because of the emotional pain of
feeling like a nobody, he became arrogant and adopted a pose of indifference to criticism. He did everything to appear strong when inside he was soft and vulnerable and fought hard to conceal it. He had lost faith in the fabric of society and had made his own world. He was a rebel, but a strong part of him was sensitive and tender. At the time I told a reporter that “I wanted to show that gentleness and tolerance is the only way to dissipate the forces of social destruction” because I viewed Johnny as a man torn by an inner struggle beyond his capacity to express it. He had been so disappointed in life that it was difficult for him to express love, but beneath his hostility lay a desperate yearning and desire to feel love because he’d had so little of it. I could have just as easily been describing myself. It seemed perfectly natural for me to play this role.

   After
The Wild One
was finished, I couldn’t look at it for weeks; when I did, I didn’t like it because I thought it was too violent. I couldn’t wait to get back to New York, but wasn’t anxious to return to work. Instead, I wanted to return to my friends—Billy Redfield, Maureen Stapleton, Janice Mars, Sam Gilman, Wally Cox and others—so I organized a summer stock company and took a George Bernard Shaw play,
Arms and the Man
, on a tour of small towns in New England.

In her recent letter to me, Janice has these memories of the tour: “It was a wild summer. You and Billy cut a swath through the waitresses and apprentices all along the route. I sat pained, feeling outcast, in backseats of cars while you and Billy cuddled your pickups in the front seat. I thought you were good in your part, although you enlarged the image to the size of a blown-up cartoon. You seemed really disturbed when you showed me a review that was … unfair and mean, and which said, ‘Marlon Brando opened last night in “Arms and the Man” and made a fool of himself.…’ But you were marvelous when you blew your lines; you would improvise double talk that was completely convincing and exit with a flourish. Once there was a terrific commotion outside the theater—the sound of ambulances or police cars honking—and the dialogue was totally drowned out. You filled in our dumb show by walking around me, directing attention to my rear end, as if to locate the source of the honking. At other times, to entertain yourself and dispel boredom, you invented games for us to play—games with your own rules. When I objected and asked what right you had to change rules to suit yourself, you laughed and said in self-mockery, ‘Because I’m a star.’ ”

As the following passages from a letter I wrote my parents indicate, we apparently did have some fun—but these lines also tell me that I was still lying to them about the state of my mental health.

ONE DAY
about this time my mother gave me a raccoon, which she named Russell. For as long as I can remember, the Brando family had pets. At different times throughout my life, I’ve had horses, cows, rabbits, uncountable cats, dogs and a goose named Mr. Levy that my mother once dressed up as Santa Claus, perhaps to distract from the skimpy presents that were under the tree. I’ve also had monkeys, white doves that had the freedom to fly around the house, snakes, rats, gerbils, an anteater named Chuck, margays and even three electric eels. Someday I am looking forward to getting a four-hundred-pound Yorkshire pig. Pig intelligence has been widely overlooked. They can be housebroken, and they’re clean animals by nature. I’ve always had the sense that animals are not fundamentally different from humans, and have treated them accordingly. It’s been my feeling that they have greater intelligence in some ways—as, of course, we are superior to them in other ways. The lines between intelligence get fuzzier every day with new claims about dolphins, whales and apes who can speak through computers or in sign language. Genetically there is less than 1 percent difference between ourselves and chimpanzees, and only a 2 percent difference that distinguishes us from mice.

When I was making
The Wild One
, in between camera setups one afternoon I was lying on the grass outside the sound stage when I noticed a man nearby, sitting with a chimpanzee.

“What’s its name?” I asked.

“Peggy.”

“How old is she?”

“Six.”

“Is it all right if I touch her?”

“Sure,” her keeper said, “she likes people.”

I sat down in front of Peggy and put my face a few inches from hers. I was close enough to kiss her. She didn’t move, except for her eyes, which roamed over my face. She stared back at me in the same way I was staring at her; I imagined that she was thinking, Who is this nut? What does he want? We sat this way for perhaps four minutes before she gently took hold of my motorcycle jacket and pulled me toward her. She inspected me thoroughly, then hooked one finger inside my T-shirt and took a gander at my chest. Next she looked into my eyes, and ever so gently reached up with one finger and removed some sleep crystals that were in the corner of one eye. She studied her find curiously for a moment or two, then put her nail in her mouth, licked the sandman’s gifts off her nail and chewed them up with her front teeth. I chuckled at this. Next Peggy unzipped my jacket and started going through the pockets, occasionally glancing up at me to see if I objected. I wondered how strong she was, so I took her wrists and held them apart. At first she let her hands hang limply, but then she began to pull them together; she had decided that enough was enough and did it with ease, as if I didn’t exist. She was ten times stronger than me. When I touched her nose and tickled her neck, she pulled her neck close to her chest and started to laugh:
cac cac cac
. It was startlingly human, but when she’d had enough she reached up with one foot and grabbed my wrist. I used all my strength to keep on tickling her, but to no avail.