Brando (26 page)

Like me, he became a symbol of social change during the 1950s by happenstance.
Rebel Without a Cause
was a story about a new lost generation of young people, and the reaction to it, like that to
The Wild One
, was a sign of the tremors that were beginning to quake beneath the surface of our culture. I always think of the years leading up to that period as the Brylcreem Era, when people wore pompadours and society’s smug attitudes and values were as rigidly set in place as the coiffure
of a ladies’ man. Rock ’n’ roll, the Beatles, Woodstock, the civil rights movement, rioting in the streets because of racial injustice and the Vietnam War were just around the corner. A sense of alienation was rising among different generations and different layers of society, but it hadn’t openly manifested itself yet. Old traditions and venerated institutions were distrusted and the social fabric was being replaced by something new, for better or worse.

Because we were around when it happened, Jimmy Dean and I were sometimes cast as symbols of this transformation—and in some cases as instigators of alienation. But the sea change in society had nothing to do with us; it would have occurred with or without us. Our movies didn’t precipitate the new attitudes, but the response to them mirrored the changes bubbling to the surface. Some people looked in this mirror and saw things that weren’t there. That’s how myths originate. They grow up around celebrities almost by spontaneous generation, a process over which they have no control and are usually unaware of until they are trapped by them.

Laurence Olivier became a legend as Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights;
with his beautiful face, he was perfect for the part and a very good actor. But Emily Brontë’s novel about star-crossed lovers moved half the world to tears, and it was another of those actor-proof roles. Nobody knew at the time that the picture would make Olivier a larger-than-life figure and shape the world’s perception of him for the rest of his life. The public retained in its collective memory the mythic image of Olivier as Heathcliff, just as they remembered Jimmy Dean drag-racing in an old Mercury coupe or me riding off on a motorcycle. Actors have no way of anticipating the myths they may create when they take on a role. Humphrey Bogart was an effective performer, but no great shakes as an actor. I doubt if he understood the subtext of
Casablanca
or gave any thought to the possibility that it would become a cult film, but his role in that movie
affected the public’s perception of him forever. Charlie Chaplin was one of the few actors who had the intuitive sense to consciously create a myth about himself as the Tramp, and then he exploited it.

The closer you come to the successful portrayal of a character, the more people mythologize about you in that role. Perception is everything. I didn’t wear jeans as a badge of anything, they were just comfortable. But because I wore blue jeans and a T-shirt in
Streetcar
and rode a motorcycle in
The Wild One
, I was considered a rebel. It’s true that I always hated conformity because it breeds mediocrity, but the real source of my reputation as a rebel was my refusal to follow some of the normal Hollywood rules. I wouldn’t give interviews to Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons because the practice seemed phony and degrading. Every actor was expected to butter up the columnists. You were supposed to put on a happy face, give them tidbits about your life, play the game because they would help sell tickets to your movies and determine the course of your career. But I didn’t care if I got publicity. When I first became an actor, I had tried to be open and honest with reporters, but they put words in my mouth and focused on prurience, so after a while I refused to do it anymore. I was tired of being asked the same inane, irrelevant questions, then seeing my answers distorted. It grated on me that movie stars were elevated into icons; Hollywood was simply a place where people, including me, made money, like a mill town in New England or an oil field in Texas.

   After we met on the set of
East of Eden
, Jimmy began calling me for advice or to suggest a night out. We talked on the phone and ran into each other at parties, but never became close. I think he regarded me as a kind of older brother or mentor, and I suppose I responded to him as if I was. I felt a kinship with him and was sorry for him. He was hypersensitive, and I could
see in his eyes and in the way he moved and spoke that he had suffered a lot. He was tortured by insecurities, the origin of which I never determined, though he said he’d had a difficult childhood and a lot of problems with his father. I urged him to seek assistance, perhaps go into therapy. I have no idea whether he ever did, but I did know it can be hard for a troubled kid like him to have to live up to sudden fame and the ballyhoo Hollywood created around him. I saw it happen to Marilyn, and I also knew it from my own experience. In trying to copy me, I think Jimmy was only attempting to deal with these insecurities, but I told him it was a mistake. Once he showed up at a party and I saw him take off his jacket, roll it into a ball and throw it on the floor. It struck me that he was imitating something I had done and I took him aside and said, “Don’t do that, Jimmy. Just hang your coat up like everybody else. You don’t have to throw your coat in the corner. It’s much easier to hang it up than pick it up off the floor.”

Another time, I told him I thought he was foolish to try to copy me as an actor. “Jimmy, you have to be who you are, not who I am. You mustn’t try to copy me. Emulate the best aspects of yourself.” I said it was a dead-end street to try to be somebody else. In retrospect, I realize it’s not unusual for people to borrow someone else’s form until they find their own, and in time Jimmy did. He was still developing when I first met him, but by the time he made
Giant
, he was no longer trying to imitate me. He still had his insecurities, but he had become his own man. He was awfully good in that last picture, and people identified with his pain and made him a cult hero. We can only guess what kind of actor he would have become in another twenty years. I think he could have become a great one. Instead he died and was forever entombed in his myth.

IN A FADED BROWN ENVELOPE
saved by my sisters are the remains of a long-ago romance that some readers may find as touching as one by Shakespeare. It’s the story of a boy and a girl in their teens who were very much in love, told in their own words in letters to each other.

“Sweetheart,” the boy writes, “if you should be taken away from me, I don’t know what I’d do. Do you know that you mean everything to me? A fellow can do most anything, dear, if he has a little girl like you to back him up. With you backing me up, I feel as if I could go through the seven fires of hell and come out rather cool.…”

“I love you every second,” the girl responded. “I love and adore you. There couldn’t be anyone else in the world for us but each other … it was ordained from the first that we should be together. I have always known it. You will never, never know how I love you … you are everything in the world I hold dearest. If anything should happen to you, I think I should go insane.…”

“Dearest, I’m the most fortunate man in the world, and I can’t see how I deserve it at all,” the boy wrote after landing in France, bound for the trenches of World War I. “I am so happy
in knowing that you are mine, that I seem to be walking on air. You’re the only one I could ever marry and to think that you’re mine is wonderful. It’s us for the rest of our life that is going to be the happiest that ever was.”

“You are as necessary to me as air and water,” she wrote on the eve of her wedding day. “I love and adore you.… I have now and since the first time I saw you a feeling of absolute security whenever I think of you. I know that whatever happens, you’ll always be there to help me, and you know, dearest, I would move the world for you.… I am absolutely yours and you are mine. I don’t think the ceremony will be necessary as far as we are concerned, for we are honestly married as two people could be. It was ordained from the first that we should be. I have always known it and so has everyone who has ever known us.…”

There are scores of these letters, passionate and brimming with love, all written by my mother and father.

Like other things in life, what people glean from their words will vary according to their own experiences, values and prejudices. I do not find these letters moving, but I have read them searching for answers to what went wrong in their lives. I have spent almost seven decades examining every aspect of my life trying to understand the forces that made me what I am, and while I never expect to find the final answer, because I realize it is impossible to be objective about oneself, I’ve tried to reconcile the sweet, hopeful, passionate people in these letters with the parents I knew—one an alcoholic whom I loved but who ignored me, the other an alcoholic who tortured me emotionally and made my mother’s life a misery. I mourn the sadness of their lives while looking for clues to their psyches and, by extension, my own.

My father, the letters tell me, was kicked out of the University of Nebraska for drinking, and when she was away at college in New England my mother wrote him, “I drank half a quart of
whiskey with ginger ale, smoked six cigarettes, drank port wine and more whiskey.… I’ve been sick ever since.… I wanted to get stewed once to see what it was like. I wouldn’t do it in public and I couldn’t at home, and I wouldn’t when I was married because if I ever thought you’d see me in the state I was in last night, I’d get under a bed and stay there for the rest of my natural life. Dearest, that’s one thing we’ll never, never do is get stewed. I think it’s horrible.”

Is there a clue to why my father behaved as he did in a letter written to them by one of his aunts on the eve of their wedding? “Marlon,” she wrote,
“be the boss
. Dodie will be happier for having someone who makes her do the thing as it should be done, and don’t think that giving in to her is an action of love, for it isn’t.…”

Clues, but no answers.

   After my mother left New York, she reconciled with my father, and with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous they both stopped drinking. They then had almost ten years together. I bought them a ranch in the sand hills of Nebraska, which my mother called a frozen ocean because in the winter the broad, sweeping plains were glazed with vast sheets of snow and ice. The ranch was near Broken Bow, not far from where Crazy Horse was assassinated, and she named it Penny Poke Farm as a joke. In the Midwest, a poke was where you kept your money, as in a pig in a poke.

I don’t know if my dad gave up the whoremongering that brought so much sadness to my mother’s life, but she loved the ranch and the two of them shared a life of sorts, though I never knew its inner dynamics. They went to AA and somehow muddled through, taking the shards of their broken lives and fitting them into a sort of mirror that reflected their togetherness and allowed them to live free of alcohol.

When my mother became seriously ill during a trip to Mexico with my father in 1953, she was brought to California, and I was beside her hospital bed with her hand in mine when she died. She was only fifty-five years old. After hearing her death rattle, I took a lock of her hair, the pillow she died on, and a beautiful aquamarine ring from her finger and walked outside. It was about five
A.M
. on a spring morning in Pasadena, and it seemed as if everything in nature had been imbued with her spirit: the birds, the leaves, the flowers and especially the wind, all seemed to reflect it. She had given me a love of nature and animals, and the night sky, and a sense of closeness to the earth. I felt she was with me there, outside the hospital, and it helped get me through the loss. She was gone, but I felt she had been transformed into everything that was reflective of nature and was going to be all right. Suddenly I had a vision of a great bird climbing into the sky higher and higher and I heard Ferde Grofé’s
Mississippi Suite
. Now I often hear the music and see her in the same way, a majestic bird floating on thermals of warm air, gliding higher and higher past a great stone cliff.

I keep my mother’s ring close to me. For a long while after she died, the stone was vibrant and full of color, pigmented with deeper and deeper shades of blue, but recently I’ve noticed that the colors have begun to fade. With each year it fades more; now it’s not blue anymore, but a misty, foggy gray. I don’t know why.