(At this time Brando was, of course, a bachelor, who had, upon occasion, indulged in engagements of a quasi-official character—once to an aspiring authoress and actress, by name Miss Blossom Plumb, and again, with more public attention, to Mlle. Josanne Mariani-Bérenger, a French fisherman’s daughter. But in neither instance were banns ever posted.
One day last month, however, in a sudden and somewhat secret ceremony at Eagle Rock, California, Brando was married to a dark, sari-swathed young minor actress who called herself Anna Kashfi. According to conflicting press reports, either she was a Darjeeling-born Buddhist of the purest Indian parentage or she was the Calcutta-born daughter of an English couple named O’Callaghan, now living in Wales. Brando has not yet done anything to clear up the mystery.)
“Anyway, I have friends. No. No, I don’t,” he said, verbally shadowboxing. “Oh, sure I do,” he decided, smoothing the sweat on his upper lip. “I have a great many friends. Some I don’t hold out on. I let them know what’s happening. You have to trust somebody. Well, not all the way. There’s nobody I rely on to tell me what to do.”
I asked if that included professional advisers. For instance, it was my understanding that Brando very much depended on the guidance of Jay Kanter, a young man on the staff of the Music Corporation of America, which is the agency that represents him. “Oh, Jay,” Brando said now. “Jay does what I tell him to. I’m alone like that.”
The telephone sounded. An hour seemed to have passed, for it was Murray again. “Yeah, still yakking,” Brando told him. “Look, let me call you … Oh, in an hour or so. You be back in your room? … Okay.”
He hung up, and said, “Nice guy. He wants to be a director—eventually. I was saying something, though. We were talking about friends. Do you know how I make a friend?” He leaned a little toward me, as though he had an amusing secret to impart. “I go about it very gently. I circle around and around. I circle. Then, gradually, I come nearer. Then I reach out and touch them—ah, so gently …” His fingers stretched forward like insect feelers and grazed my arm.
“Then,” he said, one eye half shut, the other, à la Rasputin, mesmerically wide and shining, “I draw back. Wait awhile. Make them wonder. At just the right moment, I move in again. Touch them. Circle.” Now his hand, broad and blunt-fingered, traveled in a rotating pattern, as though it held a rope with which he was binding an invisible presence. “They don’t know what’s happening. Before they realize it, they’re all entangled, involved.
I have them. And suddenly, sometimes, I’m all they have. A lot of them, you see, are people who don’t fit anywhere; they’re not accepted, they’ve been hurt, crippled one way or another. But I want to help them, and they can focus on me; I’m the duke. Sort of the duke of my domain.”
(A past tenant on the ducal preserve, describing its seigneur and his subjects, has said, “It’s as though Marlon lived in a house where the doors are never locked. When he lived in New York, the door always was open. Anybody could come in, whether Marlon was there or not, and everybody did.
You’d arrive and there would be ten, fifteen characters wandering around. It was strange, because nobody seemed to really know anybody else. They were just there, like people in a bus station. Some type asleep in a chair. People reading the tabs.
A girl dancing by herself. Or painting her toenails. A comedian trying out his night-club act. Off in a corner, there’d be a chess game going. And drums—bang, boom, bang, boom! But there was never any drinking—nothing like that.
Once in a while somebody would say, ‘Let’s go down to the corner for an ice-cream soda.’ Now, in all this Marlon was the common denominator, the only connecting link. He’d move around the room drawing individuals aside and talking to them alone. If you’ve noticed, Marlon can’t, won’t, talk to two people simultaneously.
He’ll never take part in a group conversation. It always has to be a cozy tête-à-tête—one person at a time. Which is necessary, I suppose, if you use the same kind of charm on everyone. But even when you know that’s what he’s doing, it doesn’t matter.
Because when your turn comes, he makes you feel you’re the only person in the room. In the world. Makes you feel that you’re under his protection and that your troubles and moods concern him deeply. You have to believe it; more than anyone I’ve known, he radiates sincerity.
Afterward you may ask yourself, ‘Is it an act?’ If so, what’s the point? What have you got to give him? Nothing except—and this is the point—affection. Affection that lends him authority over you. I sometimes think Marlon is like an orphan who later on in life tries to compensate by becoming the kindly head of a huge orphanage. But even outside this institution he wants everybody to love him.”
Although there exist a score of witnesses who might well contradict the last opinion, Brando himself is credited with having once informed an interviewer, “I can walk into a room where there are a hundred people—if there is one person in that room who doesn’t like me, I know it and have to get out.” As a footnote, it should be added that within the clique over which Brando presides he is esteemed as an intellectual father, as well as an emotional big brother.
The person who probably knows him best, the comedian Wally Cox, declares him to be “a creative philosopher, a very deep thinker,” and adds, “He’s a real liberating force for his friends.”)
Brando yawned; it had got to be a quarter past one. In less than five hours he would have to be showered, shaved, breakfasted, on the set, and ready for a make-up man to paint his pale face the mulatto tint that Technicolor requires.
“Let’s have another cigarette,” he said as I made a move to put on my coat.
“Don’t you think you should go to sleep?”
“That just means getting up. Most mornings, I don’t know why I do. I can’t face it.” He looked at the telephone, as though remembering his promise to call Murray. “Anyway, I may work later on. You want something to drink?”
Outside, the stars had darkened and it had started to drizzle, so the prospect of a nightcap was pleasing, especially if I should have to return on foot to my own hotel, which was a mile distant from the Miyako. I poured some vodka; Brando declined to join me. However, he subsequently reached for my glass, sipped from it, set it down between us, and suddenly said, in an offhand way that nonetheless conveyed feeling, “My mother. She broke apart like a piece of porcelain.”
I had often heard friends of Brando’s say, “Marlon worshipped his mother.” But prior to 1947, and the première of A Streetcar Named Desire, few, perhaps none, of the young actor’s circle had met either of his parents; they knew nothing of his background except what he chose to tell them. “Marlon always gave a very colorful picture of home life back in Illinois,” one of his acquaintances told me. “When we heard that his family were coming to New York for the opening of Streetcar, everybody was very curious.
We didn’t know what to expect. On opening night, Irene Selznick gave a big party at ‘21.’ Marlon came with his mother and father. Well, you can’t imagine two more attractive people. Tall, handsome, charming as they could be. What impressed me—I think it amazed everyone—was Marlon’s attitude toward them. In their presence, he wasn’t the lad we knew. He was a model son. Reticent, respectful, very polite, considerate in every way.”
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, where his father was a salesman of limestone products, Brando, the family’s third child and only son, was soon taken to live in Libertyville, Illinois. There the Brandos settled down in a rambling house in a countrified neighborhood; at least, there was enough country around the house to allow the Brandos to keep geese and hens and rabbits, a horse, a Great Dane, twenty-eight cats and a cow. Milking the cow was the daily chore that belonged to Bud, as Marlon was then nicknamed. Bud seems to have been an extroverted and competitive boy. Everyone who came within range of him was at once forced into some variety of contest: Who can eat fastest? Hold his breath longest? Tell the tallest tale?
Bud was rebellious, too; rain or shine, he ran away from home every Sunday. But he and his two sisters, Frances and Jocelyn, were devotedly close to their mother. Many years later Stella Adler, Brando’s former drama coach, described Mrs. Brando, who died in 1954, as “a very beautiful, a heavenly, lost, girlish creature.”
Always, wherever she lived, Mrs. Brando had played leads in the productions of local dramatic societies, and always she had longed for a more brightly footlighted world than her surroundings provided. These yearnings inspired her children. Frances took to painting; Jocelyn, who is at present a professional actress, interested herself in the theater.
Bud, too, had
