At that moment, in the Miyako, Brando was presented with something Japanese to enjoy: an emissary of the hotel management, who, bowing and beaming and soaping his hands, came into the room saying “Ah, Missa Marron Brando—” and was silent, tongue-tied by the awkwardness of his errand. He’d come to reclaim the “gift” packages of candy and rice cakes that Brando had already opened and avidly sampled. “Ah, Missa Marron Brando, it is a missake. They were meant for derivery in another room. Aporogies! Aporogies!” Laughing, Brando handed the boxes over.
The eyes of the emissary, observing the plundered contents, grew grave, though his smile lingered—indeed, became fixed. Here was a predicament to challenge the rightly renowned Japanese politeness. “Ah,” he breathed, a solution limbering his smile, “since you rike them very much, you muss keep one box.” He handed the rice cakes back. “And they”—apparently the rightful owner—“can have the other. So, now everyone is preased.”
It was just as well that he left the rice cakes, for dinner was taking a long while to simmer in the kitchen. When it arrived, I was replying to some inquiries Brando had made about an acquaintance of mine, a young American disciple of Buddhism who for five years had been leading a contemplative, if not entirely unworldly, life in a settlement inside the gates of Kyoto’s Nishi-Honganji Temple. The notion of a person’s retiring from the world to lead a spiritual existence—an Oriental one, at that—made Brando’s face become still, in a dreaming way.
He listened with surprising attention to what I could tell him about the young man’s present life, and was puzzled—chagrined, really—that it was not all, or at all, a matter of withdrawal, of silence and prayer-sore knees. On the contrary, behind Nishi-Honganji’s walls my Buddhist friend occupied three snug, sunny rooms brimming with books and phonograph records; along with attending to his prayers and performing the tea ceremony, he was quite capable of mixing a martini; he had two servants, and a Chevrolet in which he often conveyed himself to the local cinemas. And speaking of that, he had read that Marlon Brando was in town, and longed to meet him.
Brando was little amused. The puritan streak in him, which has some width, had been touched; his conception of the truly devout could not encompass anyone as du monde as the young man I’d described. “It’s like the other day on the set,” he said. “We were working in a temple, and one of the monks came over and asked me for an autographed picture. Now, what would a monk want with my autograph? A picture of me?”
He stared questioningly at his scattered books, so many of which dealt with mystical subjects. At his first Tokyo press conference, he had told the journalists that he was glad to be back in Japan, because it gave him another chance to “investigate the influence of Buddhism on Japanese thought, the determining cultural factor.” The reading matter on display offered proof that he was adhering to this scholarly, if somewhat obscure, program. “What I’d like to do,” he presently said, “I’d like to talk to someone who knows about these things. Because—” But the explanation was deferred until the maid, who just then skated in balancing vast platters, had set the lacquer table and we had knelt on cushions at either end of it.
“Because,” he resumed, wiping his hands on a small steamed towel, the usual preface to any meal served in Japan, “I’ve seriously considered—I’ve very seriously thought about—throwing the whole thing up. This business of being a successful actor. What’s the point, if it doesn’t evolve into anything? All right, you’re a success. At last you’re accepted, you’re welcome everywhere. But that’s it, that’s all there is to it, it doesn’t lead anywhere. You’re just sitting on a pile of candy gathering thick layers of—of crust.” He rubbed his chin with the towel, as though removing stale make-up.
“Too much success can ruin you as surely as too much failure.” Lowering his eyes, he looked without appetite at the food that the maid, to an accompaniment of constant giggles, was distributing on the plates. “Of course,” he said hesitantly, as if he were slowly turning over a coin to study the side that seemed to be shinier, “you can’t always be a failure. Not and survive. Van Gogh! There’s an example of what can happen when a person never receives any recognition. You stop relating; it puts you outside. But I guess success does that, too. You know, it took me a long time before I was aware that that’s what I was—a big success.
I was so absorbed in myself, my own problems, I never looked around, took account. I used to walk in New York, miles and miles, walk in the streets late at night, and never see anything. I was never sure about acting, whether that was what I really wanted to do; I’m still not. Then, when I was in Streetcar, and it had been running a couple of months, one night—dimly, dimly—I began to hear this roar. It was like I’d been asleep, and I woke up here sitting on a pile of candy.”
Before Brando achieved this sugary perch, he had known the vicissitudes of any unconnected, unfinanced, only partly educated (he has never received a high-school diploma, having been expelled before graduation from Shattuck Military Academy, in Faribault, Minnesota, an institution he refers to as “the asylum”) young man who arrives in New York from more rural parts—in his case, Libertyville, Illinois. Living alone in furnished rooms, or sharing underfurnished apartments, he had spent his first city years fluctuating between acting classes and a fly-by-night enrollment in Social Security; Best’s once had him on its payroll as an elevator boy.
A friend of his, who saw a lot of him in those pre-candy days, corroborates to some extent the rather somnambulistic portrait Brando paints of himself. “He was a brooder, all right,” the friend has said. “He seemed to have a built-in hideaway room and was always rushing off to it to worry over himself, and gloat, too, like a miser with his gold. But it wasn’t all Gloomsville. When he wanted to, he could rocket right out of himself. He had a wild, kid kind of fun thing. Once he was living in an old brownstone on Fifty-second Street, near where some of the jazz joints are.
He used to go up on the roof and fill paper bags with water and throw them down at the stiffs coming out of the clubs. He had a sign on the wall of his room that said ‘You Ain’t Livin’ If You Don’t Know It.’ Yeah, there was always something jumping in that apartment—Marlon playing the bongos, records going, people around, kids from the Actors’ Studio, and a lot of down-and-outers he’d picked up. And he could be sweet. He was the least opportunistic person I’ve ever known. He never gave a damn about anybody who could help him; you might say he went out of his way to avoid them.
Sure, part of that—the kind of people he didn’t like and the kind he did, both—stemmed from his insecurities, his inferiority feelings. Very few of his friends were his equals—anybody he’d have to compete with, if you know what I mean. Mostly they were strays, idolizers, characters who were dependent on him one way or another. The same with the girls he took out. Plain sort of somebody’s-secretary-type girls—nice enough but nothing that’s going to start a stampede of competitors.” (The last-mentioned preference of Brando’s was true of him as an adolescent, too, or so his grandmother has said. As she put it, “Marlon always picked on the cross-eyed girls.”)
The maid poured sake into thimble-sized cups, and withdrew. Connoisseurs of this palely pungent rice wine pretend they can discern variations in taste and quality in over fifty brands. But to the novice all sake seems to have been brewed in the same vat—a toddy, pleasant at first, cloying afterward, and not likely to echo in your head unless it is devoured by the quart, a habit many of Japan’s bons vivants have adopted. Brando ignored the sake and went straight for his filet. The steak was excellent; Japanese take a just pride in the quality of their beef.
The spaghetti, a dish that is very popular in Japan, was not; nor was the rest—the conglomeration of peas, potatoes, beans. Granted that the menu was a queer one, it is on the whole a mistake to order Western-style food in Japan, yet there arise those moments when one retches at the thought of more raw fish, sukiyaki, and rice with seaweed, when, however temptingly they may be prepared and however prettily presented, the unaccustomed stomach revolts at the prospect of eel broth and fried bees and pickled snake and octopus arms.
As we ate, Brando returned to the possibility of renouncing his movie-star status for the satisfactions of a life that “led somewhere.” He decided to compromise. “Well, when I get back to Hollywood, what I will do, I’ll fire my secretary and move into a smaller house,” he said. He sighed with relief, as though he’d already cast off old encumbrances and entered upon the simplicities of his new situation.
Embroidering on its charms, he said, “I won’t have a cook or maid. Just a cleaning woman who comes in twice a week. But”—he frowned, squinted, as if something were blurring the bliss he envisioned—“wherever the house is, it has to have a fence. On account of the people with pencils. You
