Brando began to weave his fingers in the air, as though hoping that gestures would describe what he could not precisely articulate. “Acting is such a tenuous thing,” he said. “A fragile, shy thing that a sensitive director can help lure out of you. Now, in movie-acting, the important, the sensitive moment comes around the third take of a scene; by then you just need a whisper from the director to crystallize it for you. Gadge”—he was using Elia Kazan’s nickname—“can usually do it. He’s wonderful with actors.”
Another actor, I suppose, would have understood at once what Brando was saying, but I found him difficult to follow. “It’s what happens inside you on the third take,” he said, with a careful emphasis that did not lessen my incomprehension. One of the most memorable film scenes Brando has played occurs in the Kazan-directed On the Waterfront; it is the car-ride scene in which Rod Steiger, as the racketeering brother, confesses he is leading Brando into a death trap. I asked if he could use the episode as an example, and tell me how his theory of the “sensitive moment” applied to it.
“Yes. Well, no. Well, let’s see.” He puckered his eyes, made a humming noise. “That was a seven-take scene, and I didn’t like the way it was written. Lot of dissension going on there. I was fed up with the whole picture. All the location stuff was in New Jersey, and it was the dead of winter—the cold, Christ! And I was having problems at the time. Woman trouble. That scene. Let me see. There were seven takes because Rod Steiger couldn’t stop crying. He’s one of those actors loves to cry. We kept doing it over and over. But I can’t remember just when, just how it crystallized itself for me. The first time I saw Waterfront, in a projection room with Gadge, I thought it was so terrible I walked out without even speaking to him.”
A month earlier, a friend of Brando’s had told me, “Marlon always turns against whatever he’s working on. Some element of it. Either the script or the director or somebody in the cast. Not always because of anything very rational—just because it seems to comfort him to be dissatisfied, let off steam about something. It’s part of his pattern. Take Sayonara. A dollar gets you ten he’ll develop a hoss on it somewhere along the line. A hoss on Logan, maybe. Maybe against Japan—the whole damn country. He loves Japan now. But with Marlon you never know from one minute to the next.”
I was wondering whether I might mention this supposed “pattern” to Brando, ask if he considered it a valid observation about himself. But it was as though he had anticipated the question. “I ought to keep my mouth shut,” he said. “Around here, around Sayonara, I’ve let a few people know the way I feel. But I don’t always feel the same way two days running.”
It was ten-thirty, and Murray called on the dot.
“I went out to dinner with the girls,” he told Brando, his telephone voice so audible that I could hear it, too; it spoke above a blend of dance-band rumble and barroom roar. Obviously he was patronizing not one of the more traditional, cat-quiet Kyoto restaurants but, rather, a place where the customers wore shoes. “We’re just finishing. How about it? You through?”
Brando looked at me thoughtfully, and I, in turn, at my coat. But he said, “We’re still yakking. Call me back in an hour.”
“Okay. Well … okay. Listen. Miiko’s here. She wants to know did you get the flowers she sent you?”
Brando’s eyes lazily rolled toward the glassed-in sun porch, where a bowl of asters was centered on a round bamboo table. “Uh-huh. Tell her thanks very much.”
“Tell her yourself. She’s right here.”
“No! Hey, wait a minute! Christ, that’s not how you do it.” But the protest came too late. Murray had already put down the phone, and Brando, reiterating “That’s not how you do it,” blushed and squirmed like an embarrassed boy.
The next voice to emanate from the receiver belonged to his Sayonara leading lady, Miss Miiko Taka. She asked about his health.
“Better, thanks. I ate the bad end of an oyster, that’s all. Miiko? … Miiko, that was very sweet of you to send me the flowers. They’re beautiful. I’m looking at them right now. Asters,” he continued, as though shyly venturing a line of verse, “are my favorite flowers …”
I retired to the sun porch, leaving Brando and Miss Taka to conduct their conversation in stricter seclusion. Below the windows, the hotel garden, with its ultra-simple and soigné arrangements of rock and tree, floated in the mists that crawl off Kyoto’s water-ways—for it is a watery city, crisscrossed with shallow rivers and cascading canals, dotted with pools as still as coiled snakes and mirthful little waterfalls that sound like Japanese girls giggling. Once the imperial capital and now the country’s cultural museum, such an aesthetic treasure house that American bombers let it go unmolested during the war, Kyoto is surrounded by water, too; beyond the city’s containing hills, thin roads run like causeways across the reflecting silver of flooded rice fields.
That evening, despite the gliding mists, the blue encircling hills were discernible against the night, for the upper air had purity; a sky was there, stars were in it, and a scrap of moon. Some portions of the town could be seen. Nearest was a neighborhood of curving roofs, the dark façades of aristocratic houses fashioned from silky wood yet austere, northern, as secret-looking as any stone Siena palace. How brilliant they made the street lamps appear, and the doorway lanterns casting keen kimono colors—pink and orange, lemon and red. Farther away was a modern flatness—wide avenues and neon, a skyscraper of raw concrete that seemed less enduring, more perishable, than the papery dwellings stooping around it.
Brando completed his call. Approaching the sun porch, he looked at me looking at the view. He said, “Have you been to Nara? Pretty interesting.”
I had, and yes, it was. “Ancient, old-time Nara,” as a local cicerone unfailingly referred to it, is an hour’s drive from Kyoto—a postcard town set in a show-place park. Here is the apotheosis of the Japanese genius for hypnotizing nature into unnatural behavior. The great shrine-infested park is a green salon where sheep graze, and herds of tame deer wander under trim pine trees and, like Venetian pigeons, gladly pose with honeymoon couples; where children yank the beards of unretaliating goats; where old men wearing black capes with mink collars squat on the shores of lotus-quilted lakes and, by clapping their hands, summon swarms of fish, speckled and scarlet carp, fat, thick as trout, who allow their snouts to be tickled, then gobble the crumbs that the old men sprinkle.
That this serpentless Eden should strongly appeal to Brando was a bit surprising. With his liberal taste for the off-trail and not-overly-trammeled, one might have thought he would be unresponsive to so ruly, subjugated a landscape. Then, as though apropos of Nara, he said, “Well, I’d like to be married. I want to have children.” It was not, perhaps, the non sequitur it seemed; the gentle safety of Nara just could, by the association of ideas, suggest marriage, a family.
“You’ve got to have love,” he said. “There’s no other reason for living. Men are no different from mice. They’re born to perform the same function. Procreate.” (“Marlon,” to quote his friend Elia Kazan, “is one of the gentlest people I’ve ever known. Possibly the gentlest.” Kazan’s remark had meaning when one observed Brando in the company of children.
As far as he was concerned, Japan’s youngest generation—lovely, lively, cherry-cheeked kids with bowlegs and bristling bangs—was always welcome to lark around the Sayonara sets. He was good with the children, at ease, playful, appreciative; he seemed, indeed, their emotional contemporary, a co-conspirator. Moreover, the condoling expression, the slight look of dispensing charitable compassion, peculiar to his contemplation of some adults was absent from his eyes when he looked at a child.)
Touching Miss Taka’s floral offering, he went on, “What other reason is there for living? Except love? That has been my main trouble. My inability to love anyone.” He turned back into the lighted room, stood there as though hunting something—a cigarette? He picked up a pack. Empty. He slapped at the pockets of trousers and jackets lying here and there.
Brando’s wardrobe no longer smacks of the street gang; as a dresser, he has graduated, or gone back, into an earlier style of outlaw chic, that of the prohibition sharpie—black snap-brim hats, striped suits and somber-hued George Raft shirts with pastel ties.
Cigarettes were found; inhaling, he slumped on the pallet bed. Beads of sweat ringed his mouth. The electric heater hummed. The room was tropical; one could have grown orchids. Overhead, Mr. and Mrs. Buttons were again bumping about, but Brando appeared to have lost interest in them. He was smoking, thinking.
Then, picking up the stitch of his thought, he said, “I can’t. Love anyone. I can’t trust anyone enough to give myself to them. But I’m ready. I want it.
