Songs My Mother Taught Me

311 Pages·1994·1.37 MB·English

by  Marlon Brando

Copyright © 1994 by Marlon Brando
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United
States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto.
PLAYBILL ® covers printed by permission of PLAYBILL Incorporated.
PLAYBILL ® is a registered trademark of PLAYBILL Incorporated, New York, N.Y.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brando, Marlon.
Brando: songs my mother taught me / Marlon Brando with Robert Lindsey.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78673-9
1. Brando, Marlon. 2. Actors—United States—Biography.
I. Lindsey, Robert. II. Title.
PN2287.B683A3 1994
791.43’028’092—dc20
[B] 94-15281
v3.1
To my sisters, Tiddy and Frannie;
to G. L. Harrington, Clyde Warrior,
and Bobby Hutton;
and to my children, who brought me up.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
About the Coauthor
INTRODUCTION
, I received a telephone call from an old friend, the wife of a Hollywood actor
IN 1988
and a gifted writer and actress. She asked me if she could give my private
telephone number to one of her friends, but didn’t explain who it was or why. A
few moments later, my telephone rang again and I heard a familiar voice say
slowly: “This is Marlon Brando.”
It really wasn’t necessary for him to identify himself. Like millions of people
who had spent a sizable portion of their lives in a darkened motion picture
theater, I recognized his voice. Like millions of other people during the past
forty years, I had grown up with it.
He said he wanted me to write a book about a passage in his life during which
he believed someone had terribly wronged someone he loved.
A few days later I arrived at a locked gate beside Mulholland Drive in Beverly
Hills. The gate swung open, and I followed a winding road lined with pepper
trees, uncertain where I was going. Then something almost ghostly happened: it
seemed that a part of the forest of bamboo next to me began to move. A gap
appeared in this leafy tangle as an electric gate, camouflaged with dense foliage,
suddenly swung open. It might have been a wall of granite peeling open in an
Arabian Nights fantasy.
The gap in the forest widened, inviting me not only to Marlon Brando’s home
at the top of a mountain, but into his life. After my first visit, I returned many
times to the house on Mulholland Drive and he and I became close friends. We
are an odd couple: I am a journalist with an ordinary past who has been married
to the same woman for over thirty years and who, while reporting from Los
Angeles as a correspondent for The New York Times, acquired a passionate
disdain for the shallow and self-centered egotism and puerility that afflicts most
movie actors I had encountered; he is an unconventional and reclusive actor
who, after nearly fifty years of public life, despises the press, has had hundreds
of women in his life and told me that he hadn’t “spent more than two minutes”
with any one of them.
Within twenty minutes of our first meeting, he had my shoes off, my belt
loosened and my fingers wired to an instrument that measured my galvanic skin
response, all the while explaining that it was a technique he sometimes used to
get a personality profile of people by asking questions and observing the reaction
of the meter. I was more puzzled than jittery. At our first meeting, I discovered
that he was the most curious man I had ever met and that he felt uncomfortable,
possibly even embarrassed, to be thought of as a movie star. The movies, he said,
were the least important aspect of his life, a thought that he would repeat over
and over. As a writer, I was accustomed to asking people questions, but he
turned it around and bombarded me with endless questions about my family, my
childhood, my marriage, my ideas. I felt as if I were being debriefed by a CIA
interrogator. He was inquisitive about everything and informed about many
topics—physics, Shakespeare, philosophy, chess, religion, music, chemistry,
genetics, scatology, psychology, shoe making, or whatever else he might suggest
we discuss.
To my surprise, I learned that we had much in common, and our friendship
deepened. The one thing that he didn’t like to talk about was show business. He
never touched on the subject unless I brought it up. We talked for hours at a time
—sometimes late into the night via long-distance telephone, other times sitting
across from each other in the living room of his home overlooking the wide
swath of the San Fernando Valley. Some of the conversations lasted until dawn
and ended in his heated swimming pool or with the two of us amicably arguing
about something in his superheated sauna.
I never wrote the book that was the topic of our first conversation. He began
to change, and told me that he was beginning to see things in less polarized
dimensions and that he no longer felt the need he once had to exact revenge on
his enemies.
As curious as he was about me, he was remarkably candid about his own
intimate thoughts, experiences and vulnerabilities, which initially made me
suspicious, but I learned during the course of our friendship that it was genuine.
At first he told me he intended never to write his autobiography: to make
available his private musings to satisfy what he regarded as the public’s prurient
curiosity about a movie star, he said, would be crass and degrading. But over
time, as he changed in other ways, his attitude about recounting the story of his
life shifted as well. He had persuaded himself, he told me, that there were
“useful aspects in setting down the facts of my life,” and he set about to write his
autobiography for Random House. But after almost two years and little progress,
he told me that he didn’t have the emotional reserve to write a full-blown
autobiography and asked me to help him. At first I declined. I said it was unwise
for a journalist to deal professionally with a friend because it is impossible under
such circumstances to maintain objectivity. But he promised to hide nothing, to
be completely honest with me and to answer any questions I asked him about
any topic I wanted except his marriages and his children—a promise he kept. I
agreed to help him and began to make notes of our conversations, then to tape-
record them. Our hours of talks stretched into days, then weeks. Inevitably, I told
him, it would be necessary for him to talk about his experiences in films if he
were going to tell the story of his life; he agreed, but with a reluctance that has
never changed. He never relented, however, in his determination to say nothing
about his children or his former wives, and he insisted that none of the other
women in his life be identified in the book by their real names, except for a
handful who are now dead. To do otherwise, he said, would be in bad taste.
Our conversations are the basis of this book, along with some of Marlon’s
own writings and meanderings he has committed to paper. I’ve taken the stories
he told me, his writings, thoughts, reflections and experiences, and attempted to
create from them a concise and accurate account of his life. Inevitably, in
deciding on the structure of the book and selecting the words, events, metaphors
and anecdotes in it, I have filtered the story of Marlon’s life through the prism of
my own perceptions, experiences and interests. When the preliminary draft of
the manuscript was finished, he edited and revised it to confirm its accuracy and
then added additional recollections, observations and insights. He also decided
what would remain in the manuscript and what would be omitted.
R L
OBERT INDSEY
1
across the years of my life trying to recall what it was about, I find
AS I STUMBLE BACK
that nothing is really clear. I suppose the first memory I have was when I was too
young to remember how young I was. I opened my eyes, looked around in the
mouse-colored light and realized that Ermi was still asleep, so I dressed myself
as best I could and went down the stairs, left foot first on each step. I had to scuff
my way to the porch because I couldn’t buckle my sandals. I sat on the one step
in the sun at the dead end of Thirty-second Street and waited. It must have been
spring because the big tree in front of the house was shedding pods with two
wings like a dragonfly. On days when there wasn’t any wind, they would spin
around in the air as they drifted softly to the ground.
I watched them float all the way down, sitting with my neck craned back until
my mouth opened and holding out my hand just in case, but they never landed
on it. When one hit the ground I’d look up again, my eyes darting, waiting for
the next magical event, the sun warming the yellow hairs on my head.
Waiting like that for the next magic was as good a moment as any other that I
can remember in the last sixty-five years.
• • •
As I sit at home now, winnowing the remembrances, they often come across
my mind as unrelated images and feelings with smoky edges. I remember the
sweet aroma of fresh-cut hay, the fragrance of burning leaves and the redolence
of leaf dust as I scuffed through them. I remember the fragrance of the lilies of
the valley in the garden where I often slept on the hot afternoons in Omaha, and
I suppose the fragrance will always be with me. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the
smell of lilacs or wild roses or the almost chic appearance of the trees in our
neighborhood dressed in the silver lamé of a spring ice storm. Or the
unforgettable sound that grates on me even today, the squeak of midwestern
snow beneath my boots when the temperature was fifteen below. Nor can I
forget the smoky fragrance of toast and burning bacon with grits and eggs that
drifted up the stairwell of our house on Sunday mornings.
We had an old-fashioned cast-iron wood-burning stove that always
embarrassed me. It was a wonderful stove, but in those days I was ashamed of it
because it made me feel that we were poor. If I ever invited friends over and we
passed through the kitchen, I tried to engage them and lock their eyes on me so
they wouldn’t notice the stove.
When my mother drank, her breath had a sweetness that I lack the vocabulary
to describe. It was a strange marriage, the sweetness of her breath and my hatred
of her drinking. She was always sipping surreptitiously from her bottle of
Empirin, which she called “my change-of-life medicine.” It was usually filled
with gin. As I got older, occasionally I would find myself with a woman whose
breath had that sweetness that still defies description. I was always sexually
aroused by the smell. As much as I hated it, it had an undeniable allure for me.
As her drinking increased, it became more and more difficult for my mother to
disguise the fact that she was simply an off-the-shelf drunk. The anguish that her
drinking produced was that she preferred getting drunk to caring for us.
My mother was always unconventional. Sometimes when it rained, she wore a
shopping bag over her head with a little visor she had torn at the corners; it
looked absurd, but she thought it was funny. I was embarrassed by it, though if
she did it today, I’d be gasping with laughter.
The memories of those times drift in and out of my mind like the hoboes who
used to come and go near the railroad tracks not far from our house. It is
surprising that those remembrances visit my mind and that most of the time, pain
and shame are mercifully absent.
I have been told that I was born one hour before midnight, April 3, 1924, in
the Omaha Maternity Hospital. It was a breech birth, but otherwise
unremarkable. My family had lived for generations in Nebraska and was mostly
of Irish ancestry. My mother, Dorothy Pennebaker Brando, was twenty-seven;
my father, Marlon Brando, Sr., was twenty-nine. I rounded out the family and
made it complete: my older sister, Jocelyn, was almost five when I was born, my
sister Frances almost two. Each of us had nicknames: my mother’s was Dodie,
my father’s, Bowie, although he was Pop to me and Poppa to my sisters, Jocelyn
was Tiddy, Frances was Frannie and I was Bud.
Until I was seven, we lived in a big wood-shingled house on a broad street in
Omaha lined on both sides with houses much like our own, and with leafy elm
trees that at the time seemed taller than anything that a young boy could
imagine. Some of my memories of those days are pleasant. At first I was
unaware of my mother’s nipping from the bottle or the unhappiness of my father,
who was also an alcoholic, which probably was the cause of his vanishing so
often, getting drunk himself and looking for hookers.
When I was very small, I remember carrying a tiny pillow around everywhere,
a talisman of childhood. Hugging it, I went to sleep at odd times and odd places,