The one and only exclusive interview I had with Marlon Brando lasted half an hour. As the minutes ticked by he sat posed like Rodin’s “Thinker” contemplating a bust of Stanislavski. He paid no more heed to me than if I’d been a ladybug squatting on the back of his canvas chair. With a snap of the fingers, I brought him out of his trance. “Have you been listening, Mr. Brando?”
“Sure.”
“Do you care to answer my questions?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“Then may I tell you that I didn’t want this interview? Your producer, Stanley Kramer, insisted that I do it. You needn’t submit yourself to further agony. Thanks for nothing, and good day.”
I walked off the set of The Men, and I haven’t set foot on any Brando set from that day on. Every studio he has worked for has tried to coax me back. But I can’t be insulted twice, not if I know what’s going to happen.
I regard him as a supreme egotist, for want of a better term, whose good performances, like those in On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire, I recognize. I understand that he refers to me as “The One with the Hat.” He has been known variously as “the male Garbo” and “Dostoevski’s Tom Sawyer.” He’s doing extremely well without my support in piling up millions. He’s a dedicated ringleader in a current melodrama which can be called “Viva Brando; or, The Actor’s Revenge.”
When he originally landed here in 1950, he carried his entire wardrobe in a canvas satchel: two pairs of blue jeans, four T shirts, two pairs of socks, and the works of the philosopher Spinoza, who teaches that everything is decreed by God and is therefore necessarily good. Marlon immediately labeled Hollywood a “cultural boneyard.”
He said then: “My objective is to submit myself to what I think and feel until I’m in a position to think and feel as I please.” It took ten years to do it, but he made it in spades in Mutiny on the Bounty. He also said: “The only reason I’m here is because I don’t yet have the moral strength to turn down the money.”
When Stanley Kramer telephoned him in Paris about doing The Men, Marlon had two questions: “Do you want me for more than one film? How much will you pay?” From a $50,000 fee for The Men, he went, via Streetcar, to $150,000 in Viva Zapata. More recently, he held out for every cent of net profits, leaving the studio to collect nothing more than a percentage of the gross as distributor. His asking price now is a million dollars a performance.
The town should have known what to expect on the strength of reports from Broadway and his nerve-racking portrayal in the theater of Stanley Kowalski, the cave-man lover of Streetcar. Irene Selznick, who produced the play, gave an opening-night party at “21” which Marlon reluctantly attended. Jerome Zerbe, the society photographer and columnist, was there, and Irene asked if he’d invite Marlon over to be photographed with her, not for publicity but for her personal album.
Crossing the room, Zerbe passed on the request to Marlon, who turned him down flat. “Why should I be photographed with her?”
“Well, she’s your producer, after all.”
“Means nothing to me,” said the newest sensation of Broadway, aged twenty-three. Zerbe broke the news to Irene and exchanged no more words with Marlon until Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie, arriving late, picked their way through the crowd to Zerbe and made a fuss over him.
Now Marlon could see that Jerome was socially “in”; he made a beeline for him. “I’ll pose for that picture now,” he offered.
Zerbe, a proud man, was halfway toward the door on his way out. “You won’t pose for me,” he said flatly. “I wouldn’t photograph you if you were the last man on this earth.”
I once put a question to Marlon asking his opinion of acting as a profession. “If you’re successful,” he replied, “it’s about as soft a job as anybody could ever wish for. But if you’re unsuccessful, it’s worse than having a skin disease.”
Social ailments of various kinds hold a strange attraction for him. When reporters used to ask him about some chapters of his younger days, he would tell them he couldn’t give an adequate answer because at the time he wasn’t feeling too well. The favorite theme cropped up again when he was making Mutiny on the Bounty in Tahiti. By then, the joke was on him, but he was drawing $5000 a day overtime and spouting another favorite thought in slightly altered words: “After you’ve got enough money, money doesn’t matter.”
He arrived in Hollywood with a hole in the knee of his only pair of pants, and a large-sized chip on his shoulder. Though there were stories of such generosity as tipping a New York shoeshine boy with a five-dollar bill “because I felt sorry for him,” he appeared to resent spending money, even a dime. If he could get an agent or reporter to buy him a dinner, a drink, or even a cup of coffee, he was in a good mood for hours. He refused to load himself down with a house, swimming pool, convertible, fancy wardrobe, or any such items which the “cultural boneyard” usually regards as the accompaniments to a soaring career.
Producers, if they can, cultivate extravagance on the part of the stars. They see to it that their puppets stagger under piles of possessions and towering stacks of bills. Studios will lend money so it seems easy to buy the house with the swimming pool at $200,000. The debt becomes a sword to dangle over the star’s head if he shows signs of resentment about making a particular picture. Arguments about “artistic integrity” are as effective as paper darts against a studio that holds the mortgage.
To his credit, in more ways than one, Marlon was in no danger on that score. “Just because the big shots were nice to me,” he told a reporter, “I saw no reason to overlook what they did to others and to ignore the fact that they morally behave with the hostility of ants at picnics.”
He is turning the picnic tables with a vengeance on the “ants.” Their one-sided admiration of Brando (they used to call him “the best actor in the world” on weekdays and a “genius” on Sundays) got chipped when Twentieth Century-Fox cast him in a stinker called The Egyptian. He objected, but they imagined they had soothed him and went ahead building sets, making costumes, signing other players. When the first day of shooting arrived, Brando did not. Instead, his New York psychoanalyst sent a telegram: BRANDO VERY SICK.
* * * * *
Breaking a contract is a refined art, which skillful performers conduct with the finesse of brain surgeons. A classic case is provided by Jerry Lewis after he broke with Dean Martin when they were under contract to make three more pictures for Hal Wallis.
Wallis had the legal right to have them complete the contract, no matter what carnage would have resulted. Martin and Lewis’ agents, the Music Corporation of America, talked to him but they got nowhere. Attorneys tried to argue with him, but Wallis is, among other things, a stubborn man. It took a press agent to recall the time-tested formula.
“You call Mr. Wallis,” the agent told Jerry, “and invite him to lunch at the Hillcrest Country Club. Sit him down and say: ‘Have you ever had a picture that began, Scene one, take eighty-five?’ Tell him that you’re ready to devote six months of your life to his next Martin and Lewis picture; that you understand his problem, so you’ve reserved a suite at Mount Sinai Hospital for him as your guest. Because you know he’s going to get a coronary from the aggravation that’s coming to him.”
The press agent continued: “Also tell Wallis: ‘You know my own medical history. I only pray to God we don’t get in the middle of this thing before I have to take to my bed again.’”
Jerry took Hal Wallis to lunch at Hillcrest and said his piece. Wallis heard him out, then conceded: “I get your point. I’ll start with you alone in a new picture next month.” No further movie with Dean Martin was discussed.
Marlon didn’t get off so lightly when he tangled with Fox. The studio pushed Edmond Purdom into The Egyptian, which was a great mistake, and sued Brando for two million dollars. He settled by agreeing to play Napoleon in a turgid flop called Desirée.
The studio bosses are proof positive that you can fool yourself most of the time over stars who, when the fancy strikes them, delight in doing in the people who put up the money. The producers ignore any flop these highly prized players make and hypnotize themselves by repeating over and over: “We can’t go wrong this time; it’s our turn to be lucky.” They blind themselves to the fact that these stars jeer at the money men, make fools of them, regard them deep down as their sworn enemies with the I.Q. of idiots.
Marlon got into stride when he made One-Eyed Jacks, a simple Western that was going to cost no more than $1,800,000 and a few months to complete. First casualty was the director, Stanley Kubrick, who retreated in the early stages of production and abandoned the field to Brando. On his first day as director, Marlon threw away the script and announced: “We’re going to improvise.” For the next half year, he and his crew ran up production bills of $42,000 a day.
He had them spending hours on the shores of the Pacific waiting for the water to “look more dramatic.” He’d start the cameras, then sit with his head between his knees for twenty minutes or more until he got in the mood. As a good democrat, he let his actors vote for the last reel they liked best, and that was the ending he used, though he didn’t care for it himself.
When the front office at Paramount got uneasy and costs passed the $6,000,000 mark, Marlon turned surly: “I’m shooting a movie, not a schedule.” There were days, I’m sure, when Y. Frank Freeman, head of Paramount, would have liked to clobber him, while Marlon went on playing his favorite mumbling, lurching, behind-scratching character—himself. Paramount has long since given up hope of getting its money back, much less of making a profit.
But when Mutiny came around, Metro recited the old mumbo jumbo: “We can’t go wrong on this.” Sol Siegel, who ran the studio, would settle for nobody but Marlon as top star. That little decision, along with several other lulus along the way, cost well over $20,000,000 before the picture was wound up. Marlon enjoyed $1,250,000 for his contributions, along with ten per cent of the gross and an incredible contract giving him the final word on scenes taken on Tahiti.
Screen rights to the original novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall were bought by the late Frank Lloyd, a fine, free-lance director, for only $12,000. In order to make the picture and gather the cast he’d set his heart on, he was compelled to sell those rights back to Irving Thalberg at Metro for precisely what they had cost.
Metro’s first flash of creative genius called for Wallace Beery to play Captain Bligh in the breath-catching tale of eighteenth-century mutiny on the high seas aboard the British merchantman Bounty. They envisaged the sadistic captain as a comical old coot pursued by his wife and twelve children. Talked out of that, Thalberg signed Charles Laughton, who for weeks had to be rowed slowly around Catalina Island, flat on his back on the floorboards, to teach his protesting digestion that seasickness was not permissible during working hours.
Louis B. Mayer didn’t think much of the script: “Where’s the romance?” he demanded. Gable didn’t like the idea of playing Fletcher Christian, leader of the mutineers and his finest role up to that date. Eddie Mannix talked him around: “You’re the only guy in the picture who gets anything to do with a dame.” I’ll never know why they didn’t reissue the old Mutiny after Clark’s death—it would have made $5,000,000 and saved Metro a truckload of ulcers.
Frank Lloyd’s picture was ten months in the making, from his first background shooting on Tahiti to its presentation in November 1935. The bills amounted to $1,700,000, the most expensive MGM production of those days. Front-office opposition grew stronger month by month. To satisfy Nick Schenck, a rough cut was sent to New York with the strict understanding that it would be run only for him to see. He had it screened before an audience of four hundred people and afterward delivered himself of this undying judgment: “Tell Thalberg it’s the worst picture MGM ever made.”
* * * * *
The second version of Mutiny got under way when an MGM expedition arrived on Tahiti at the height of the rainy season. It had to run before the weather and go back later for another try. The first of the thirty scripts to be completed by five writers, including Eric Ambler and Charles Lederer, was meantime coming hot off the typewriters.
Life on French Tahiti, where society is very proper and the caste system very strong, livened up considerably when Marlon debarked. He unearthed a series of hide-outs to which he would retire when the mood came upon him. On bad days hours would roll by while messengers tracked him down so that filming could resume.
His taste in girls has always been off-beat, from the Hindu impersonator, Anna Kashfi, whom he married and divorced; through the fisherman’s daughter, Josanne Mariana-Berenger, to a barefoot waitress whom he found on Tahiti.
The first major casualty among the company was Oscar-winning Hugh Griffith, who was eased off the island by the French authorities after some spectacular high jinks. Another Briton, Sir Carol Reed, hired to direct, was replaced when it developed that he saw Captain Bligh as the hero, not Fletcher Christian. At the speed at which he was shooting, it would have taken years to finish the picture.
Sir Carol had also made the basic error of believing that when he told Marlon to do something in front of the camera, Marlon would obey. Reed was succeeded by Lewis Milestone, director and diplomat, who grew accustomed to handling difficult situations with kid gloves.
There were plenty to handle. The movie makers hit the South Seas like a typhoon. Liquor poured over the island like the Johnstown flood. A French naval lieutenant ran off with the second native lead halfway through filming, so that in one version two girls mysteriously alternated in playing the romantic scenes without a word of explanation being offered.
Marlon at one point was bowled over in a double feature by a popular local infection and a virus, forcing him to take to his bed for three weeks.
Aaron Rosenberg, the producer, couldn’t make a move without being balked and countermanded by cable and telephone from Metro’s front office, where Siegel found his reputation at stake. On Tahiti there was panic at the lack of a script. A succession of writers, concluding with Lederer, worked against the clock to get out scenes, often only one day in advance of shooting, sometimes rewriting lines at lunch time for the afternoon shift.
“In one two-week period we shot only two small scenes,” Richard Harris told me during filming—he came close to stealing the picture as one of the mutineers. “That wasn’t surprising since Brando was constantly demanding that scenes be rewritten. You never knew where the hell you were.” Marlon added his own seasoning to the stew by toying with the idea at one point of abandoning the part of Christian and taking on a different role in the picture.
Trevor Howard, playing Captain Bligh, left for home swearing: “Never again will I take part in an epic,” and to prove his point he turned down Cleopatra. He thought it was “the greatest travesty in the world to allow Brando to snap and snarl at me.”
In their steamy tents the sweating writers invented a game to preserve their sanity. They made up imaginary labels to hang on the cast. Trevor Howard: “a deafening answer to no question.” Aaron Rosenberg: “the persistent marshmallow.” For Brando, they had a tag so obscene that he brooded for days, trying in vain to think of some way to strike back at them.
At work, on a typical morning, he’d stand on the Bounty deck, draw his cutlass, and yell at the ship’s company: “I now take command of this....” At that second, his memory would falter. The crew and other cast members filled in for him. “Train?” somebody suggested. Marlon nodded his thanks and take eighteen began. This time he got it right ... “command of this ship.”
Charles Lederer insisted: “Brando is responsible for a great deal of whatever brilliance the picture has. But neither he nor anybody else I know can improvise and be better in five minutes on the set than a writer with three weeks at a typewriter.”
Marlon’s enthusiasm touched rock bottom when it came to playing scenes supposedly on Pitcairn Island, where the Bounty mutineers landed. Rosenberg ordered him to perform. Richard Harris related the rest of the story: “Brando fouled it up good. He came to work for a few days, but I thought he was acting as though he wanted to scuttle it. So I finally told him: ‘When you’re willing to perform like a pro, I’ll be in my dressing room.’ The picture was suspended for three days, while they tried to get him to resume, but not a word about it got into print—it was all suppressed.”
The cast didn’t know what they were doing most of the time because the next scene usually contradicted whatever they were trying to play. Harris had another clash with Brando. He told me: “Brando said: ‘This is the final script. I want nothing changed, not a line, not a comma.’ On the strength of that, I memorized eight pages. We rehearsed it in the morning, went to lunch, and prepared to shoot in the afternoon.”
The company returned after the break, and the cameras rolled. Then “Cut!” Harris related: “They told me I was wrong. When I asked why, I found out they’d changed the script during lunch. I demanded that the producer be brought to the set.”
Aaron Rosenberg didn’t know that changes had been made. “Actors,” said Brando to Harris, “are paid to do their jobs without opinion.”
Harris exploded. “You like to pull the strings as though others are puppets. This scene was changed because you demanded it.” At that point Lewis Milestone walked off the set. So did Harris, who’s an outspoken Irishman. “When Mr. Brando is ready to perform, I’m available,” he said once more.
“It was a long way to my dressing room. You’d have thought I was radioactive the way everybody backed away from me. I lay down on my couch and closed my eyes. Presently the director stuck his head in the door to say sotto voce: ‘Everybody in the company wants to applaud. You were great.’ But still no one came in until Rosenberg shook my hand, said he was sorry this had happened, and added: ‘Thank you.’”
Eighteen months after the start, when MGM had poured more than $20,000,000 into this bounty on the Mutiny, Marlon was still acting up. The final scenes, months behind schedule, were being shot in Hollywood, costing still another two million. With the financial future of Metro itself at stake, with millions tied up in a picture which still had no ending, Marlon played Fletcher Christian in such a manner that, although the cameras turned, the film was unusable. He overplayed; he underplayed; he mumbled; he minced. It was a unique moment in our town’s history. Nobody before him had dared take hold of a mammoth studio, swing it by the tail, and make the bosses like it. The actors’ revenge was complete.
It takes avaricious agents with calculating machines for hearts to encourage stars like Brando to behave as they do. Now that no studio any longer has its own roster of stars tied by contracts, the agents and actors run Hollywood, as they always threatened to. The studio has to go cap in hand to the agent to sign up the big star for a single picture. No more than a half dozen actors and actresses alive today can attract an audience big enough to give a picture a hope of success at the box office.
The first giant among ten per centers hated producers and made no secret of it. Myron Selznick held it a point of honor to wring every dollar he could get out of the studios to settle the score for the wrong that had been done his father, Lewis J. The louder the bosses yelled “Murder!” the harder Myron squeezed.
Lewis J. was nicknamed “C.O.D.” for “cash on delivery” by starlets he lured to that notorious item of studio furniture, the casting couch. He lured plenty when he owned a $60,000,000 film corporation in the silent twenties. But as a financier he overreached himself. His sons, Myron and David, blamed rival movie makers for plotting the ruin that overtook old “C.O.D.”
Myron’s first client was Lewis Milestone, who must have smiled philosophically to himself when he saw what Brando was doing to MGM. Acting for Milestone, Myron left his mark on the Howard Hughes studio when, in 1927, he squeezed out of them exactly twice the salary the then young director had anticipated receiving. Alva Johnston recalled the time when Myron went home rejoicing: “Remember what those bastards did to my father? They paid more than a million dollars for it today.”
Bill Wellman was Selznick’s second client. After him, everybody who was anybody—Carole Lombard, William Powell, Pat O’Brien, to name just a sample—rushed to get Myron to do battle for them.
But neither he nor the mob of imitators who followed him in business managed to hold the entire industry up to ransom as it is being done today. One reason was that under the star system of that era, contracts came up only once a year for negotiation, not before every picture. Another reason: producers and directors, to a great extent, could make or break a star.
As a tribe, actors and actresses seldom know what’s good for them. They usually judge any script solely by the number of lines of dialogue they get. Greer Garson announced to one and all that she wouldn’t be playing in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, one of the finest pictures that came her way, because “I’m only in a few scenes.”
The day before she left town for England to make the picture, she poured out her woe to me. “I’ve sat here for months doing nothing,” she said, “and now I’m going back to my native land in a picture that gives me a very small part. When I left England, I was a star there; my friends will think I’m coming home a failure.”
I wrote the story, but before she stepped on the train the next day, she begged me to kill it: “What if the picture’s a hit? I’d look like a fool.” So I kept a friend by sitting on the interview. Mr. Chips made her an international name.
Vanity takes all kinds of shapes. In one of his earliest pictures Gary Cooper played a location scene so well that it was shot in a single take. That night Coop went diffidently to the director’s tent. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to do that scene over again in the morning,” he said. “I seem to remember at one point I picked my nose I was so nervous.”
The director knew better. “Listen,” he said. “You were so damn nervous you were great. You keep acting that way and you can pick your nose into a fortune.” That bit of advice registered with Coop. After he’d belly-flopped trying to dive into the deep end of acting with pictures like Saratoga Trunk, he saw his old director again. “Guess I’ll have to go back to my nose,” he said.
It took an eye doctor from South Bend, Indiana, to set up in the agency business and put the hammer lock on Hollywood; by comparison Myron only twisted arms. Dr. Jules Caesar Stein is the founder and board chairman of MCA, a flesh-peddling octopus with approximately one thousand clients ranging from actors to zither players, before it got rid of them all in a hurry under pressure from Washington’s trust busters. He and his wife, Doris, are also devout collectors of antiques; European furniture dealers used to rub their hands when they saw them coming, but they were soon crying in their porcelain teacups, because Jules had set up his own antique shops.
Dr. and Mrs. Stein have climbed so high since his college days—he worked his way through by playing the violin in little jazz bands—that they are now helping to refurnish the White House. Mrs. John F. Kennedy was pleased to announce last year that the Steins, as a gift to the nation, “will contribute pieces from their collection of eighteenth-century antiques as well as new acquisitions.”
Soon after the Steins moved to California—they now live in a beautiful Beverly Hills hilltop mansion—the good doctor told me at a party: “I’m going to be king of Hollywood one day.”
“You and who else?” I laughed. But I underestimated him. He succeeded, thanks to the shortsightedness of the producers when big stars are in short supply and desperate demand.
Besides Brando, MCA spoke for Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Dean Martin, Jack Benny. That’s just a sample. Agents used to hustle for salary and billing. Jules Stein’s poker-faced assistants demanded lots more than that. They often weren’t satisfied until they got a fat slice of the picture’s profits for their clients.
The first deal like that was made for Jimmy Stewart, whom I originally recommended to MGM after he and I played on Broadway together with Judith Anderson in Divided by Three. The slice that MCA carved for him out of Universal-International’s Winchester ’73 brought him more than $600,000. Now he’s a millionaire on the investments he made on the advice of a keen-brained business friend from Texas and he’s become a sober-sided industrialist as well as a fine actor.
With Kirk Douglas as a client Jules Stein did even better at Universal. After running up costs of $12,000,000 on Spartacus in which Douglas starred and also produced with Universal’s money, the huge, 400-acre studio fell into a situation where it had to sell out, lock, stock, and acreage. MCA bought the place for $11,250,000 and set to work churning out television series. Now it’s called Revue Productions and it’s the best-run studio in Hollywood. If MCA plans work out now it has beaten the anti-trust suit—it is concentrating on production and stripping itself of the agency business—millions more dollars will be invested in an effort to make Hollywood the movie capital of the world once more.
Once an actor has seen his agent put the pressure on and turn a geyser of cash into Old Faithful itself, the sky’s the limit where his greed for money is concerned. Everything else is forgotten, including, of course, gratitude. William Holden, an MCA prize winner, did mighty well with The Key, though Trevor Howard stole the notices; and much, much better before that from Bridge on the River Kwai, which brought him millions. The producer of The Key was Carl Foreman.
When Foreman had another picture in the works, The Guns of Navarone, he wanted Holden for his hero. “My price,” Holden declared, “is now $750,000, plus ten per cent of the gross.”
“But not with me, not after The Key,” Foreman said.
“With you or anybody else, that’s my price,” Holden replied.
Foreman had a few forceful words to say on the subject of gratitude, then hired Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn together for less than Holden demanded. To keep his bulging bank account safe from the hands of tax collectors, Holden moved his family to Switzerland, that temporary haven of fugitive American fortunes—temporary because I understand that President Kennedy has some fancy plans for correcting that state of inequity.
William doesn’t spend much time in his Swiss home, though his wife, formerly Brenda Marshall, does, together with their two sons. Her daughter by a previous marriage preferred staying behind in Hollywood as an interior decorator. When Brenda Marshall married, she was a happy, fun-loving woman. The last time I saw her, at a party Norman Krasna gave for me at Lausanne, Switzerland, her old contentment had gone bye-bye.
* * * * *
When Tony Curtis was fourteen, he wrote me a six-page letter from his family’s one-and-a-half-room flat in the Bronx, where his father worked as a tailor. The boy was then Bernie Schwartz, and he wanted to know how to become a movie actor. He’d beaten a path to Hollywood, but he wasn’t rated as much more than a curly haired pretty boy by most people when MCA started to steer him. No matter how hard he was asked to work to promote his career, he gave the same answer: “I’d love to.” He was eager and fun to be with, and I invited him to all my parties. There he got to know, among others, suave, immaculate Clifton Webb, whom he looked up to as the epitome of social form.
“You’re getting up there,” Clifton cautioned him as the months rolled by, “so you must dress better. That suit isn’t good enough for you, and your tie is awful.”
As soon as Tony could afford it, he bought himself a custom-tailored suit, which he christened at another party of mine where Webb was a guest. “Look, Hedda,” Tony said with pride, “isn’t it wonderful? All hand-sewn.”
“Lovely,” I agreed, “and that’s a good-looking pair of shoes, too.”
“A producer I know couldn’t wear them, so he gave them to me. They pinch a little, but aren’t they beautiful? They cost him $75.”
Clifton wandered over to add a word of praise for the suit. “But you can’t wear that tie with it.”
“What kind should I wear, Mr. Webb?”
“Come over to my house tomorrow and I’ll give you some.”
Tony found a wife who was used to being kept on a tight financial rein when he married Janet Leigh in 1951. Her father, Fred Morrison, who ten years later took an overdose of pills that ended his life, held the purse strings after her career got going. I remember coming across her at Rex, the mad hatter, where she was aching to buy a sweater for $75, but her dad said no. When he died, she was o