Brando (36 page)

Afterward, I said to Michael, “I couldn’t understand a word she said. Why didn’t you help me?”

“Well, Marlon,” he said, “you invited them, and since they’re very nice people I thought you would deal with them splendidly.” Thereafter, I ate in my dressing room or trailer while Michael used the dining room with the linen tablecloths. On the last day of filming, however, when he arrived for lunch I was seated there with all my friends. For a moment he looked pleased, but then we all got up at once and walked into the canteen to join the other actors and crew for lunch. He joined us.

   Six years later, when I went to London for the filming of
Superman
, I invited Michael for dinner at a house that had been rented for me in Shepperton, a house that was colder than the ice cave in the picture; if the water heater was turned on, for some reason the furnace wouldn’t function. When Michael noticed that I’d stuffed the inside of my clothes with newspaper he asked about it and I told him that it was a trick I’d learned long ago as a hobo.

During the evening I asked him, “How do you pronounce the word ‘integral’?”

“Integral,” he answered.

“No, I think it’s pronounced intigral.”

“That’s not how it’s pronounced in England,” he said.

I responded that there must be only one proper pronunciation for the word, and repeated that I thought it was intigral. He insisted he was right, so I said, “Let’s have a bet.”

“All right, Marlon—a hundred pounds,” he said, and walked toward me offering his hand.

“No,” I said, “let’s think of something else … I know: the loser has to sell French ticklers in Piccadilly Circus for one hour.”

“Come on, Marlon,” he said, “you know you’ll never do that. I think a bet is important and has to be honored, and I don’t want to lose our friendship because you lose the bet, which you’re definitely going to, and then won’t go down to Piccadilly.”

“I promise you I’ll go, there’s absolutely no question of it,” I said, and we shook on it.

Late the next afternoon, which was the first day of filming on
Superman
, Michael telephoned. “Why didn’t you call sooner?” I asked, and told him I’d already figured out how I was going to pay off the bet: by selling French ticklers in Piccadilly Circus disguised as a blind beggar.

“Unfortunately you don’t have to,” Michael said.

He had checked the Oxford English Dictionary and established that there was only one pronunciation of the word: intigral. A few months later, after asking his chauffeur to buy a large number of French ticklers of various shapes and sizes from a chain of London sex shops for £2, he stood in Piccadilly for an hour offering them for £1. Despite the bargain price, he sold only a couple—and those to friends who happened by. Disposing of the rest of his inventory, he told me, was daunting. Too embarrassed to ask his staff—a religious lot—to destroy them, he spent an evening cutting and shredding them in a waste basket.

•  •  •

Besides traveling often to Tahiti, I spent a lot of time during the sixties exploring New Mexico, Arizona, South Dakota, remote parts of California and other places. I would get on a motorcycle and ride off by myself, or with a girl, in search of somewhere interesting. Once I bought a new bike, left the highway and rode across Death Valley, racing across the desert as fast as I could. The temperature was at least 115 degrees and the engine gave out; it hadn’t been broken in properly and simply died from heat exhaustion. I couldn’t restart it and had to walk out several miles. A park ranger told me I had been lucky to survive and pointed out a spot not far from the ranger station where two people not long before had expired from the depletion of fluids and electrolytes in their bodies.

While I was making a western called
The Appaloosa
near St. George, Utah, Lisa, the designer from New York who thought she had saved my life with sperm therapy, came to see me. I offered her a ride on my motorcycle. We were steaming across the desert when we came upon the shriveled cadavers of thirty or forty cows lying in the sagebrush. It was an eerie tableau. Later I realized they must have died from radiation blown north from a nuclear test in Nevada or by nerve gas from a military installation in Utah. This was in the same area where John Wayne had made a movie in which several members of the cast and crew were exposed to radiation and later died of cancer. I’ve always found it ironic that John Wayne, the gung-ho proponent of nuke ’em American militarism, may have died as a result of radiation from atomic weaponry.

I drove Lisa a few more miles and decided that the desert was a perfect place to make love. The desert, and beyond it a backdrop of rose-colored mountains, were beautiful; except for a few birds, the two of us could have been alone on the moon. But as I started to climax, the earth began to shake; suddenly it seemed as if a million tons of TNT were being detonated beneath us, and as the earth shook, an enormous, vibrating tremor swept through my entire body. What kind of an orgasm is this? My God, this is magical! I thought. This is the orgasm to end my life; I’m going to die of orgasm right here in the middle of the desert. Then there was a tremendously loud blast.

Lisa looked up at me and asked, “What was that?”

Then it occurred to me that the sound had probably been from some young air force pilot in a supersonic jet flying fifty feet off the ground. It happened so fast that I never saw the plane—if there was one. But if there had been, the shock waves and sonic boom washed over us at exactly the right moment. I’ve never had an orgasm like that before or since. For a moment I thought I was going to die. What a way to go!

YEARS AFTER OUR
troubles over
The Egyptian
, I saw Darryl Zanuck humiliate his son Richard unmercifully. He had hired Richard to run Twentieth Century-Fox, then fired him and announced his dismissal as if it were a personal triumph. He said things no son should ever hear from his father. Later, when I ran into Zanuck at the Stork Club in New York, I stood beside his table and said in a voice that everyone could hear that he should be ashamed of himself.

I saw this happen again when I worked with Charlie Chaplin on
A Countess from Hong Kong
. Chaplin was an actor I had always admired greatly. Some of his films, such as
City Lights
, still move me to tears as well as laughter. In the beginning of that movie, he introduces himself and establishes his character in a hilarious scene by having the camera discover him asleep in the arms of a statue. At the end of the film, after he has been sent to jail for stealing money to pay for a blind girl’s operation to give her sight, he passes her flower shop. He recognizes her, but of course she does not know him because previously she was blind. He is now a tramp with holes in his shoes and the ragged tail of his shirt sticking out of his trousers. He is stunned when he sees her. As he starts to walk past, she runs out from
the shop and pins a rose in his buttonhole; then when she feels his suit and shoulders, her face brightens, and the audience realizes that she recognizes with her fingers the man who helped give her sight and whom she loves. The viewer experiences not only her love but his shame as she realizes that he is a tramp. The moment is magical, one that reaches into the audience’s unconscious, which only the best acting can do. Chaplin knew exactly what the audience would experience. I don’t know if it was conscious or instinctive, but he understood the myth he had created with the Little Tramp and attached himself to it tenaciously.

Comic genius or not, when I went to London to work with him late in his life, Chaplin was a fearsomely cruel man. He was almost seventy-seven when he offered me the part of a diplomat named Ogden Mears in
A Countess from Hong Kong
. In this comedy set aboard a luxury liner sailing between Hong Kong and San Francisco, Sophia Loren played an impoverished former dance-hall girl who stowed away in my room. Although I revered Chaplin, who had written the story based on a voyage he had taken from Shanghai in 1931, when he offered me the part in 1966, I told him I didn’t believe I was right for it. I’ve always been leery of comedies, but he insisted that I could do it, and since I regarded him as a genius, I agreed to be a marionette in his hands. I figured he must know something I didn’t, that he thought I could add something to the picture not apparent to me, and that I could help him achieve it.

But
A Countess from Hong Kong
was a disaster, and while we were making it I discovered that Chaplin was probably the most sadistic man I’d ever met. He was an egotistical tyrant and a penny-pincher. He harassed people when they were late, and scolded them unmercifully to work faster. Worst of all, he treated his son Sydney, who played my sidekick, cruelly. In front of everybody, he humiliated him constantly: “Sydney, you’re so stupid! Don’t you have enough brains to know how to place your hand on a doorknob?
You know what a doorknob is, don’t you?
All you do is turn the knob, open the door and enter.
Isn’t that easy, Sydney?”

Chaplin spoke to his son this way again and again and reshot his scenes over and over for no reason, berating him and never speaking to him with anything except sarcasm. Oona O’Neill, Charlie’s wife, was always there but never defended her stepson. It was painful to watch, especially after Sydney told me that Chaplin treated all his children this way. He said that one of Charlie’s sons had gone to Paris over his objections, returned home at Christmas and knocked on the door. Charlie opened it and broke his nose with one punch, then slammed the door, leaving his son bleeding on the ground, and refused to let him in. He was a very rich man, but from what Sydney said, he never gave his children any money to speak of. For example, Sydney dreamed of opening a restaurant, but his father, who was worth millions, wouldn’t lend him anything.

“Sydney, why do you take this?” I asked him one day. “Why don’t you walk off the set? Why don’t you tell him off? Why do you accept this kind of humiliation? There’s no reason for it.”

“He’s getting old,” Sydney said, and made excuses for his father: he was having problems with the picture, he had the flu, he was worried about this or that.

I said, “None of that’s an excuse for being so sadistic, especially to your own son.” But I could never persuade Sydney to stand up to his father, and he continued to take the abuse.

One day I arrived on the set about fifteen minutes late. I was in the wrong and I shouldn’t have been late, but it happened. In front of the whole cast Chaplin berated me, embarrassing me, telling me that I had no sense of professional ethics and that I was a disgrace to my profession.

As he went on and on, I started to fume. Finally I said, “Mr. Chaplin, I’ll be in my dressing room for twenty minutes. If you give me an apology within that time, I will consider not getting
on a plane and returning to the United States. But I’ll be there only twenty minutes.”

I went to my dressing room, and after a few minutes, Chaplin knocked on the door and apologized. Thereafter he never got in my way, and we finished the picture without further incident.

Charlie wasn’t born evil. Like all people, he was the sum of his genetic inheritance and the experiences of a lifetime. We are all shaped by our own miseries and misfortunes. He knew what was touching, funny, sad, pathetic and heroic; he knew how to tap the emotions of his audiences to arouse them, and he had an intuitive knowledge of the workings of the human personality. But he never learned enough to understand his own character.

I still look up to him as perhaps the greatest genius that the medium has ever produced. I don’t think anyone has ever had the talent he did; he made everybody else look Lilliputian. But as a human being he was a mixed bag, just like all of us.

ASIDE FROM ELIA KAZAN
and Bernardo Bertolucci, the best director I worked with was Gillo Pontecorvo, even though we nearly killed each other. He directed me in a 1968 film that practically no one saw. Originally called
Queimada!
, it was released as
Burn!
I played an English spy, Sir William Walker, who symbolized all the evils perpetrated by the European powers on their colonies during the nineteenth century. There were a lot of parallels to Vietnam, and the movie portrayed the universal theme of the strong exploiting the weak. I think I did the best acting I’ve ever done in that picture, but few people came to see it.