The Books: “Marlon Brando” (Patricia Bosworth)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Marlon Brando, by Patricia Bosworth

This tiny book is part of the absolutely wonderful Penguin Lives series (article about it here) – short condensed little biographies – which certainly will not take the place of more extensive works, but are great additions to any library. Patricia Bosworth is a writer, playwright, member of the Actors Studio, and wrote what I consider to be one of the best biographies out there – her work on Montgomery Clift. It is absolutely magnificent. She knows her way around that era, certainly, and knows intimately how to speak about what genius is as an actor, and why some people have it and some people don’t. I’ve read the Peter Manso Brando biography – (more on that later) – and Bosworth’s book does not break new ground – at least not for Brando fanatics – all of the anecdotes in the book are well-known, you’ve heard them before, they are now in the pantheon of Hollywood legends. But her writing is so good, so spare and yet also so emotional, that it doesn’t feel like a re-tread. It feels like a re-examination of the nature of Brando’s talent, and also his torment. What drove him? Where does talent lie? Where did his contempt come from? How was he able to use it? Or … not use it, as the case increasingly was in his life? Who was he?? Did he love acting? Or was it something he just happened to be good at? Marlon Brando is, of course, a complex person, not always easy to like, but always interesting. There are times when you want to shake him. There are times when you want him to change his attitude. But then: the stories about his acting, when he was at his peak, and how he worked – how intuitive it was – you really never caught him TALKING about it a lot … he just knew how to do it, not a lot of chatter or intellectualization … These stories are so so dear to me. I encountered many of them in my earliest years, during my James Dean research period … and I had seen Streetcar Named Desire by the time I was 14, 15 years old. It was some of the best acting I had ever seen in my life.

And two stories from the shooting of Waterfront illustrate, to me, now and forever, just what it was about Brando that was so special and unique as an actor. The “glove” scene and how he re-did the “taxicab” scene. It is not just that he knew how to act – that’s a given. It’s that there was so much thought behind it … and that is something he certainly does not get enough credit for. And he was lucky that in Kazan he got a director who so trusted Brando’s instincts that if Brando said, “This doesn’t feel right,” he listened. Because Brando knew. He may have been an asshole in his personal life, a wreck, a self-destructive womanizer, whatever … who cares. He knew what was real and what wasn’t.

The story of shooting On the Waterfront is well-known. They shot it in Hoboken, on the docks, in the frigid winter Kazan preferred to shoot on location. That fact gives On the Waterfront such a sense of documentary-film reality that it just wouldn’t have had if a set had been built on a soundstage somewhere.

The excerpt below has to do with On the Waterfront.

Like I said, for someone like myself who has been hearing these stories – from this person’s biography, from that person’s biography – since I was a teenager, this is all well-trod ground, but Bosworth’s writing is so nice and clear and powerful when it needs to be – that this book was a pleasure to read.

EXCERPT FROM Marlon Brando, by Patricia Bosworth

The first read-through of On the Waterfront was held at the Actors Studio on November 15, 1953. The entire cast was present: Lee J. Cobb as the corrupt union boss, Karl Malden as the chain-smoking waterfront priest, Rod Steiger as Terry’s two-faced older brother, other actors from the studio – Martin Balsam, Leif Erickson, Rudy Bond, Ward Costello – and Brando, of course, chewing gum and looking very serious. Then there was a fragile twenty-one-year-old blond actress named Eva Marie Saint, who’d been cast only two days before as Terry’s girl, Edie Doyle, after Kazan decided against using Joanne Woodward. Malden had suggested Eva Saint. He’d worked with her in a scene at the studio and thought she’d be perfect. She’d auditioned for Kazan with Brando. Together they’d done a little improvisation. “Marlon just asked me to dance and then he took me in his arms and we twirled around the floor, and there was so much at stake for me and it was so emotionally powerful, I burst into tears,” Saint recalled.

The day-by-day shoot of Waterfront was brutal. Temperatures hovered below zero on the frigid Hoboken piers, where most of the movie was shot. There were constant problems with waterfront thugs. The word was out that the script was actually very critical of the Mafia. After a while Kazan hired a bodyguard. Brando, dressed in a greasy plaid jacket and old work pants, took the subway every morning with Saint; he thought if he traveled the tube with a lot of other regular joes, he’d soak up more atmosphere. As soon as they arrived on the docks, they huddled by big bonfires flaring in steel drums, or they escaped into the local hotel, inappropriately named the Grand, for hot coffee.

In the beginning of Waterfront, Brando, as Terry Malloy, appears semiconscious, unaware of the struggle that appears to be going on inside him. He doesn’t even seem to be listening at first; this is about a man who starts to hear after being psychologically deaf.

“The real action for Terry is an inner one. The drama is internal,” Kazan kept saying. “He tries to swagger and appear jaunty, but what betrays him are his eyes.” The way Brando uses his eyes in Waterfront is the key to his characterization. When Terry realizes he’s being used by union bosses to set up the murder of a dockworker, you see him struggling to think for the first time. His sidelong glances and faraway looks signal character confusion as the tug-of-war inside himself between conscience and complacency develops into a full-scae battle. There is a double drama going on between what Terry says and what Terry feels and thinks, and Brando always shows us how the character thinks, without saying a word. You can see the thoughts passing across his face and eyes, and you can hear how “his insides jam up his voice … His furtive looks complement the fractured speech patterns he develops,” wrote Foster Hirsch in his detailed study Acting Hollywood Style.

***

Eva Marie Saint remembers how kind Brando was to her. It was her first picture; she was nervous and scared. “Marlon and I would have lunch every day,” and when she got cold, he would wrap her up in blankets and give her back rubs, but always in character as Terry. “He was Terry,” she said. Their relationship on-screen is fragile and physical and truly beautiful to watch. There is intimacy between them because they don’t touch until the middle of the movie, when they have that explosive embrace in her bedroom after he has broken down the door to force her to admit she loves him.

The two of them have many memorable scenes together, especially the celebrated glove scene, which started off as an improvisation. Saint says, “In that scene there was no reason for me to talk to him because he was implicated in my brother’s murder. And then Marlon suggested, ‘Drop your glove,’ and I did, and he picked it up and put it on his own hand. If he hadn’t done that, I would have walked off, but it was freezing cold, and I wanted my glove back, so we started to talk.”

Throughout the movie Brando seemed to work off Saint, and she in turn worked off him. The intensity between them is magnetic. “Marlon was involved, which is different from being committed,” Kazan said. “Most of it was underneath. His immersion in Terry was complete.”

This was most vividly expressed in the justly famous taxicab scene between Rod Steiger and Brando. Peter Manso describes this scene, which was shot on an especially chaotic day. They’d originally planned to film it in traffic, but it proved too time-consuming. Then they discovered that Spiegel had been too cheap to get them a real cab, and they had to improvise in the shell of an old one, on a sound stage, with no rear projection to provide a background. So cinematographer Boris Kaufman hung up some venetian blinds in the back of the cab and shot through them, while two crew members rocked the shell of the cab back and forth to simulate a moving vehicle, and electricians spun sticks and brushes in front of the lights to simulate the headlights of oncoming traffic.

Brando did not like the scene as written and told Schulberg. The screenwriter was already annoyed because Brando had been ad-libbing a lot of his dialogue during the shoot. Kazan called a hasty meeting. “So what don’t you like, Marlon?”

“Well, I don’t th ink I could be saying, ‘Awww, Charley, I coulda been a contender,’ when a gun is being pressed against my ribs and the guy sticking me with the gun is my brother.”

There was a long pause, and then Kazan suggested, “Why don’t you improvise?”

What followed became one of the most unforgettable expressions of self-awareness on the part of a male hero in the history of American film, “the contrast of the tough-guy front and the extreme delicacy and gentle cast of his behavior,” Kazan wrote in A Life. “What other actor, when his brother draws a pistol to force him to do something shameful, would put his hand on the gun and push it away with the gentleness of a caress? Who else could read, ‘Oh, Charley,’ in a tone of reproach that is so loving and so melancholy, and suggests that terrific depth of pain? I didn’t direct that; Marlon showed me, as he often did, how the scene should be performed. I never could have told him how to do that scene as well as he did it.”

As soon as Brando’s close-up was done, “Marlon left to keep his daily appointment with the shrink,” Kazan says. Steiger didn’t know why Brando walked off, so he took it as a personal affront. Kazan then stepped forward and read Brando’s lines for Steiger’s close-up, “which Rod did brilliantly.” But Steiger was furious and never forgave either man.

Playing Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront was the peak of Brando’s career, but after filming he’d sometimes wander the streets till dawn, or he’d go back to his apartment and hang on the telephone with someone till he dozed off. Occasionally he’d appear at a Mailer party and just sit there “like a buddha”. Sometimes he’d play his congas for hours, hoping he’d find relief, beating out the rhythms he’d learned at Dunham’s.

It kept getting harder and harder to act, to pull the emotional internal stuff out of him, although Kazan marveled at his surprising delicacy. When Brando filmed one of the most powerful scenes in the movie, in which he discovers his brother’s dead body, left by union thugs to hang from a hook, at first he barely touches him. Then he puts his hands on the wall on either side of him but doesn’t look at him. When he lifts him off the hook, he drapes his brother’s hands around his neck; it’s almost like an embrace. “It’s a kind of symmetry that gives a mythic feeling to the entire picture,” Jeff Young writes. But afterward Brando, exhausted by what the scene had taken out of him, visited the actress Barbara Baxley and kept repeating, “I don’t think I’m good enough. I don’t think I’m good enough.”