Brando (40 page)

There probably isn’t a diet I haven’t tried. During the seventies, one of them limited me to a quart of lemon juice and a few ounces of feta cheese daily. After spending the night at a woman’s house in Santa Monica while on this diet, I woke up after she’d gone out to do some errands and had a terrible pain deep in my stomach. I drove home, swallowed some antacid pills and fell asleep even though I was almost doubled up with pain. When I woke up an hour or so later, I had a bad case of diarrhea and threw up. My vomit was black, so was my stool, and I
felt dizzy. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I had the presence of mind to know I should do something before I passed out. I went to the bedroom to call for help and distinctly remember asking myself, after I fell face first on it, What is the telephone doing down here? Falling down must have provided my brain with enough blood to keep me going because I managed to tell the telephone operator that I was afraid I might pass out while we were speaking, gave her my name, address and telephone number in case I did, then asked her to call my psychiatrist and tell him I needed help. He drove over, and as he walked me to his car all I could think of was that he wasn’t strong enough to pick me up if I lost consciousness. Finally, as we were driving to the hospital, I realized I must have a bad case of internal bleeding again; I hadn’t eaten anything except lemon juice and feta cheese for three weeks, and the acidic citrus juice must have cut a hole in my stomach.

By the time the doctor got me to the hospital, I’d lost half my blood. My blood type is O-positive, and for some reason the nurses couldn’t find any supplies of it; if I remember correctly, all the O-positive blood was frozen. They sat me up on a bedpan and took my blood pressure every two or three minutes. I suspected I was in shock and dying from a loss of blood. From the way the nurses acted, I also suspected they were worried that I could go any second. They were overly polite, talked a little too loud and moved a little too rapidly while assuring me that everything was going to be all right. When Alice, my secretary, arrived at the hospital, I saw fear in her eyes. A doctor gave me several injections, and after what seemed like an hour or more, they came up with the blood needed for my transfusion. Once they did, I was okay. Later Alice said the doctors had told her I came within inches of dying. She also swears she saw me praying in the emergency room, but I’ve never believed her.

NONE OF US
EVER
fully understands the psychological forces that motivate us, nor can we—not yet, at least—understand all the biochemical reactions that occur in our brains and direct us to make one choice rather than another, to follow one path and spurn others. But I think one thing is certain: everything we do is a product of these biochemical reactions. As Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, wrote recently, “ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

It is risky, even foolhardy, to ascribe adult behavior to a single event or even a series of events in childhood; there are more grays in the palette of human behavior than blacks and whites, and I know this. But as I grew older and pursued one exotic, dark-skinned woman after another, I couldn’t help but wonder if I wasn’t always trying to replace Ermi, my governess, whose soft, dusky skin has seldom been far from my mind since I was seven. She was the ideal embedded in the emotional concrete of my soul. Once I lost her, I suppose I spent most of the rest of my life trying to find her. Along with my mother, Ermi may also
have had a lot to do with my refusal—or was it my inability?—to trust women after I grew up. If you’ve never had warmth, love or affection, it is hard to give it, or if you’ve had it and it has been stolen from you, if you think you’ve been rejected and abandoned, you fear being hurt again. My mother abandoned me for a bottle when I was little more than an infant; then Ermi deserted me. True, she was simply leaving to live her own life and to get married, but to my seven-year-old mind, after having lived with her so intimately, after devoting my young life to her, after being abandoned by the only other woman in my world, her disappearance was desertion, and my world collapsed.

After that, I always wanted several women in my life at the same time as an emotional insurance policy to protect myself from being hurt again. Because I didn’t want to be hurt again, I found it difficult to love and to trust. So, like a vaudeville juggler spinning a half-dozen plates at once, I always tried to keep several romances going at the same time; that way, if one woman left me there would still be four or five others.

I enjoyed the women’s company, but a someone named Harvey was always standing in the corner, an invisible rabbit called a relationship. All but a few women wanted me to promise that their love would be returned in equal measure, and that it would be forever and undying. Sometimes I told them what they wanted to hear, but I have always thought that the concepts of monogamy, fidelity and everlasting love were contrary to man’s fundamental nature. Sure, adolescent, childish myths tell us what love ought to be, and so do the songs we sing; they all proclaim one way or another: I love you … you love me … we’re going to love each other forever … I’m going to love you till I die and after I die I’m still going to love you, until you die and we’re together again in heaven. The songs are part of our cultural mythology, promulgating values that collide with our fundamental nature, which is the product of billions of years of evolution.

I don’t think I was constructed to be monogamous. I don’t think it’s the nature of
any
man to be monogamous. Chimps, our closest relatives, are not monogamous; neither are gorillas or baboons. Human nature is no more monogamous than theirs. In every human culture men are propelled by genetically ordained impulses over which they have no control to distribute their seed into as many females as possible. Sex is the primal force of our and every other species. Our strongest urge of all is to replicate our genes and perpetuate our species. We are helpless against it, and are programmed to do as we do. There may be variations from culture to culture, but whether it is in Margaret Mead’s Samoa or modern Manhattan, our genetic composition makes our sexual behavior irresistible.

   Although I let some women believe I loved them—and in some cases I may have meant it at the time—there was one woman I loved more than any other.

I was in my early forties when I met Weonna in Rome. She had a part in
Candy
and was with a friend of mine. He and I had the same rivalry I’d had with Carlo Fiore; we both tried to seduce each other’s girl. After he introduced me to Weonna in a hotel lobby, he went off and I put it to her succinctly.

“Why don’t we go upstairs and fuck?” She answered, “Why not? Let’s go!”

That was the beginning and the end of the seduction.

Weonna was born only about a hundred miles from my birthplace. She had written a little, done some acting, modeled for a while, made some money in real estate. She was an extraordinary piece of construction, with white skin, soft, natural blond hair, freckles, a lot of moles, green eyes, and a voice with the slightest hint of an Irish accent, a hand-me-down from her mother, who was from Ireland. She made me laugh harder than any woman I’ve ever known. She was quick to understand and laughed at me a lot, too. Like my mother and grandmother, she
had a sense of the absurd, thought the outrageous and imposed no limits on her imagination. She was amusing, witty, intelligent, eccentric. But she was also troubled. She distrusted people, drank too much and occasionally used drugs—not hard drugs, but pills. It was spasmodic; she would use them awhile, then swear off them, be clean for a while, then start again, and I’d have to take her to a hospital because it was the only place where she could stop. Still, we had a lot of fun together, and even now I often laugh at what we laughed at then.

One night I took Weonna on a mission to steal a stack of pipe, and before the night was over, she nearly had a heart attack. Not far from where I lived in California, a large parcel of land owned by the Teamsters’ Union had remained undeveloped for years while contractors erected houses all around it; and if I didn’t feel like going to sleep yet, sometimes I’d drive over there in my Jeep and cruise around the property with my lights out for the fun of it. One day construction crews arrived, set up equipment on the property and started work on what looked like a big development. But after a while, everything stopped abruptly and the workers left, leaving behind stacks of building materials, including a pile of three-inch irrigation pipe. I was doing some work on my house and needed some pipe, so I took Weonna to the site at about two
A.M.
, hooked up my Jeep’s winch to several pieces of pipe and began reeling it in. Within a few minutes, a helicopter was overhead sweeping a bright spotlight back and forth across the construction site. I dropped my pipe wrench, and when the wavering cone of light settled on the Jeep, I waved frantically to it, as if to say, “Please come down here, I need help.”

I had no idea what I was going to say to the cops, but it was the first thing I could think of. Then an amplified voice boomed out of the sky: “Stay where you are. Do not move. You are under police surveillance.”

I kept waving and smiling like a stranded sailor who has been
spotted by a passing ship after spending half his life on a desert island. A minute or two later, a police car with flashing lights skidded to a stop about fifty feet from us.

Among the problems I had to deal with was the fact that the cable from the winch on my Jeep was still attached to the stack of pipe. I whispered to Weonna, “Whatever I say, agree with me. Agree with me when I tell them what happened. We’re going to have to tell a few lies.”

“I’m not lying,” she said.
“You’re
the one who got us into this, and I’m not going to be part of it.”

I thought her disloyalty unbecoming, but I didn’t get a chance to argue with her, for just as I was about to say something, the police car hit us with a spotlight and neither of us could see anything. I tried to put a look of happy relief on my face and hollered, “Thank God you found us! I thought we’d be here all night.”

When they saw that a woman was with me it apparently eased the cops’ sense of alarm, and one of them approached the Jeep. I thanked him profusely and said, “I took a wrong turn on Mulholland and ended up out here in the boondocks and got stuck in the sand. I tried to use the winch by tying up to that stack of pipe to see if I could bootstrap myself out, but the wheels kept spinning. Would you call a tow truck to get us out of here? I’d be very grateful.”

All the while, I was hoping he wouldn’t look at the ground, because if had he would have realized that no one could get stuck in a quarter inch of sand. He started walking back to the police car to call a tow truck, but before he’d taken four steps, I said, “Wait a minute, Officer. Before you call, maybe I should try it one more time.”

I started the Jeep, pressed the throttle all the way to the floor until the engine roared like a threshing machine at harvest time, then put it in gear and let out the clutch very slowly with one foot still firmly on the brake. The Jeep shook, shuddered,
rocked and slowly started to move as I let out the clutch. After I’d driven a few feet, I got out and told the officer, “I think I made it. Boy, that was lucky. Thanks a lot, I really appreciate your help. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come.”

He accepted my thanks and drove away. I followed him back to the road and we went in opposite directions on Mulholland Drive while Weonna’s cold silence let me know what she thought of me. I was feeling really pleased with myself until in my mirror I saw the police car do a U-turn and start coming after us. Oh, shit, I thought, he’s figured it out.

The car raced up behind us with its flashing lights and I stopped. By now Weonna was bug-eyed, almost shaking. One of the policemen came over to my window with a flashlight and said, “You know, Mr. Brando, my wife would never forgive me for not getting your autograph.”

“Why, sure, Officer,” I said, wanting to kiss him, “do you have a pen and a piece of paper?”