Marlon Brando: The Gilded Image

As a Recruit in the Army I was thrown together in friendship with a fellow named Eddie Szemplenski; half a year later at another base I became buddies with a soldier named John J. Wodarski. Edward Szemplenski was a hulking, rough-looking drugstore cowboy from Hamtramck, Michigan, the place the men who make the automobiles come from. I had hardly heard of it before I met him; before long, I was to hear enough from him to fill a couple of novels. Johnny Wodarski was a shorter, chestier, far more handsome laughing boy from Paterson, New Jersey, a famous hard-boiled town that in those days meant nothing more to me than that it was across the river from my own New York. Wodarski had a white-gold shock of hair which inevitably gained for him, wherever he went, the nickname Whitey. There was a typically scrappy St. Louis Cardinal third baseman of that era named Whitey Kurowski. I always associated the two of them.

Whether either of those enlisted men is now alive – whether they even survived the combat for which we were preparing – I do not know. I hope so, and rather suppose so, for each was a young man of strength, stamina, adaptability, intelligence (not education), and each was far more than generously endowed with a ferocious appetite for life. Also with the loud indelicate snort of life, which they were given to expressing and acting on, irreverently, coarsely, sometimes brutally, wherever and whenever the G.I. strait jacket offered a gaping seam.

Yet they were not brutes. If Johnny Wodarski could love the ladies and leave them and even gladly boast about them, I also once saw him go in against a larger man than he (a snotty Ivy League washout named Aten) just to teach him the impropriety of some very sustained and nasty anti-Semitic talk directed at Whitey's comrade Isadore Lieberman. Whitey emerged not unmarked, but Whitey taught him. It was like a scene from a lot of the movies of the same period, only it happened to be for real. And if Eddie Szemplenski could cut a rampaging track through every bar and whorehouse and Polish dance hall of East St. Louis, Illinois, with me like a wide-eyed kid brother on his heels, there were also those dozens of other times when, back in the barracks or in the mess hall or on guard, we would talk all through the night about America, Germany, Poland, Roosevelt; about the Negroes, the Catholics, the Jews; about rich and poor; about factories, unions, colleges, movies, sports; about Hamtramck and New York; about non-coms, officers, airplanes, radios; about ack-ack; about bombs; about death; about the world after the war.

And then one fine day the war was over (continued on page 60) Marlon Brando(continued from page 55) and without announcement there came walking in on me, from stage-right, fresh from the bowling alley, the sweat still drying on his neck and forearms, the most living breathing Szemplenski-Wodarski that I'd laid eyes on since the Army had separated me from the originals: a phenomenon, a sheer, fabulous, heartstopping phenomenon. He had their brow, their jaw, their mouth, their shoulders; his stance was theirs, his walk, his temper, his pride; certainly his crassness, and that snorting hoot; certainly also his unabashed and thrusting masculinity. He even had their thickness of speech, Eddie Szemplenski's anyway, and from his lips there seemed to issue every word and attitude they had ever mumbled or proclaimed. He even had their name, or next thing to it . . . he had the name of Stanley Kowalski, and though I had been going to theatre, or been taken there, more or less regularly since the age of ten, I had never before in all my days seen anything on any stage (or any screen) that equaled this. There he was, down there in the dark, fifty feet away from me, with that poor sick crazy woman planting herself in his house and bathroom – and I knew him! I knew everything about him. Hadn't I lived with him, even closer than that deranged invader, in some ways even closer than her sister Stella who was his wife, during the four entire years immediately preceding? How he must detest that Blanche Dubois . . . and be bugged by her. Like an inside straight, a come-hither smile on Water Street, a gnawing itch. I knew him and I understood.

Since then I have had professional reason to see a great deal of theatre. Only once or twice, before or since, have I seen anything on Broadway to match the brilliance and verisimilitude and freedom of Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.

It was indeed so brilliant a performance, and such a "new truth" for the American (or any) theatre, that it effected a certain displacement in the reactions of many of us to the play. I do not mean in the official, authorized, routine reactions of the drama critics. Among these experts and their wild hallelujahs (or, in a few instances, chill upper-egghead condemnations) there was only one, Harold Clurman, who recognized even then, despite his own lavish praise for Brando, how much the Brando magnetism and theatrical fearlessness might be pulling the average spectator more toward Stanley than toward the bedeviled Blanche who stood at the real heart of this great new play by Tennessee Williams. (You can look it up, and it is worth it, in the Clurman pieces collected under the title Lies Like Truth.) I know that I myself, on that first viewing, felt far more empathic with Stanley than with his temptress-victim. I was sorry for her; but I could share far more of what was going on inside him. And when, on whichever side I turned, I was perpetually seeing Stanley categorized as some simple type of beast or brute, something hardly more than animal and surely less than man, I believed that either I had taken leave of my senses or they had – those who in such blind chorus were impressing the mark of Cain, of Caliban, and that alone, on Stanley Kowalski's turbulent forehead. For to me the Stanley Kowalski of Marlon Brando was (before they went on to make the movie) nothing more nor less than the precise opposite. Taking him for all in all, for better and for worse, he was nothing more nor less than a man, a human man, a Wodarski, a Szemplenski, a rough-hewed young chunk of typical workaday American maleness; and therefore to some irrefutable extent nothing more than a chunk of myself. Now, with the distance of time and thought, I have partially, but only partially, revised that opinion. It would not be possible for me, even today, to un-identify with Stanley entirely, but I have through the years become willing to read much greater destructiveness into his character and conduct by allowing in retrospent for the overstrength of Brando's performance as one allows for the cant of a rifle to left or right.

The other day I asked for a think-back evaluation of that original (i.e., pre-movie) Brando performance from an up-and-coming New York director whose productions (off Broadway) have seemed to me to have shown unusual awareness of what theatre is all about. He is roughly Brando's age, and my own.

"Fantastic!" the director replied. "It was simply fantastic. To be able to start with such incredible ease. I'd almost say psychotic ease: he just didn't know he should be nervous on stage. Because, don't kid yourself, everybody's always nervous on stage. But Brando just didn't know. I don't think it was really any kind of unparalleled skill; it was just the ease, the rubbing, the rubbing. I see it as a sort of rubbing, like someone rubbing for pleasure against a desk. Call it what you will, however, that's something you don't get in the theatre – and we all look for it, all the time – more than once in a generation. He came along when The Method was just coming along, and it worked for him: that's all you can say. His sickness became a style. The tragedy is what's happened since.

"Marlon Brando," he continued, "was the greatest new actor this country has produced, or will produce, in my lifetime. What he did in Streetcar, and in On the Waterfront, has changed everything that's followed. Liberated it. Liberated us. But the only person it hasn't liberated is Marlon Brando. He's done to himself just what Stanley did to Blanche Dubois; it's weird, it's almost mystical."

I said: "Uh-huh, but let's stay on the subject of Streetcar."

He thought a minute. "In Streetcar," he said, "Marlon Brando broke the box of the American theatre and threw away every restriction we'd been nursing for as long as we'd had a theatre. He came to it with a sort of, I dunno, gigantic super-naiveté: the naiveté of absolute self-reliance. Let's see if I can phrase this. There's plenty of self-aassurance in the theatre, whatever the actuality underneath. But self-reliance is something else; something of a higher order completely. Carried to extremes, of course, it means something terrible. It means . . . what was his name? that fellow in New Jersey . . . Unruh, Howard Unruh . . . it means walking down the street with a .22 in your hand and blasting everybody in sight because you don't need any of them. But Brando needed Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan and Stanley Kowalski, and Stanley needed his Stella, so it wasn't dreadful then but . . . a miracle. A miracle still relating to other people and still under control."

I said: "Like Waterfront?"

"Like Waterfront," the director said, and as he said it I was visited with perhaps my ten-thousandth mental flashback of how the kid that Brando played in Waterfront still had, no matter how punchy, this urgent need to relate to the girl, the crooked brother, the priest, the Lee J. Cobb mobster, and even the pigeons on the roof. Even to that Hoboken scenery, and the river – there was something working back and forth between him and those roofs and those streets and that river which to this day I can't forget and won't forget, and neither will any of you who ever saw it. Relatedness? Nobody in any Hollywood movie ever related more to the texture of the place and situation of his movie.

"And then," said the director, "it all stopped. Just as with. Howard Unruh. Or bit by bit it all stopped, movie by movie, headline by headline, kook by kook, gossip item by gossip item, until at last it had absolutely all stopped and there was nothing left but the boy with the .22 and the universe his oyster and a lot of dead people everywhere. Only not a boy any more. And no more of that free-flowing self-reliance. Just some kind of unbelievable self-indulgence, and the hell with everyone else in the world, on or off the movie screen. Or (continued on page 126) Marlon Brando (continued from page 60) the stage. I will be kind enough not even to mention the American stage."

Now the director stopped to stare bleakly into his coffee. "Grandiosity," he said. "It's as if he were permitting nothing but his grandiosity to really move him. You seen his latest mishi-gass, Orpheus Descending?" (He meant the movie version of the Williams drama, retitled by Hollywood The Fugitive Kind) "It's like something that at last is absolutely entirely frozen, like a huge giant frozen custard of self-indulgence. The face! the lips! the walk! the pose! the slow gargle that has nothing to do with New Orleans or the South or fugitives or rebels or anything else in reality or otherwise. The absolute enforced subservience of the camera, and the drama, and Magnani, and Lumet [director Sidney Lumet] and even the props and lights and music. Everything subservient to this one enormous baroque self-image. If it were only that, an actual self-image. But it isn't even that. It's an image of an image of an image. It is nothing laid on nothing laid on nothing, and the outright murder of a play that wasn't the best in the world to begin with, but had its points

"It's tragic," he said again, "it's very sad." He did not say these last three words with the quotation marks of irony that many of us now so often put around them. "What greater tragedy is there in life than to stop growing? And Brando hasn't grown an inch in almost ten years. I don't think he ever grew as an actor, after the first few successes. If he'd only been pushed, had pushed himself, into things where he'd have had to reach, to strain. Well, he wasn't. He didn't. And it's our loss, believe me, more than his, because he was the beacon and the standard. I don't have to tell you all the crappiness that's come down on us merely in imitation of Marlon Brando. Or in imitation of this empty set of mirror images, one facing the other into eternity. But just think what might have been, for him, for every other actor, had he chosen to go right on breaking boxes."

. . .

The decline and fall of the artistry of Marlon Brando is a classic case straight out of what is by now almost the cliché American myth on the fate of the creative personality in our society. One thinks immediately of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, of The Big Knife and Clifford Odets himself, of The Last Tycoon and Scott Fitzgerald himself, of Budd Schulberg's several cotton-pickin' inquests into the Fitzgerald corpus, and of a whole minor tide of variations on the theme which each season floods onto our national bookshelves, magazine stands, movie screens, 21-inch picture tubes. The myth runs as follows: As the career goes up, and the fame, the man and his integrity must go down.

Often enough it is true enough – so sickeningly often that some not only buy the myth but start to live up to it, to conform to it, even before their careers stagger aloft on anything firmer than the bamboo stilts of press-agentry. Where it is always truest of all is when some young talent manifests itself among us like a sunburst a few years too soon for its own good – not that it knows its own good or can properly be blamed for its God-granted abilities – and this is what happened with Marlon Brando.

I have seen virtually everything Brando ever acted in. I did not see his very early Broadway effort as March-banks, the demanding little poet of Bernard Shaw's Candida; only a handful of in-group theatre professionals still remember it, and these rather strongly disagree as to its merits, but all reports concur that in any event it was of a fragility and fineness at startling remove from what he would soon (with the myth not yet upon him, the growth still there inside him) display to the world in Streetcar. I did not see his yet earlier walk-on in Truckline Café, where, under Stella Adler's tutelage, he is said to have accomplished the next-to-impossible feat (even for the most experienced of actors) of making a first, "cold" entrance on stage in the midst of tears. I did not see him in one of his latest epics, Sayonara, because I could not bring myself to. And of course I have not yet seen what at this writing has not yet been finished (edited down, that is, from sixteen trillion minutes of – self-indulgence – excess footage): the film One-Eyed Jacks in which for the first time he serves as his own director. (The disciplines of time and cash are subsidiary to none, beneath no one's contempt, in the collaborative arts; ask any architect.)

But between these extremes I think I have seen everything: Streetcar, four times (twice, flabbergasted, in a movie house), and The Men and The Wild One and On the Waterfront (three times) and Desirée and Julius Caesar and Viva Zapata! and Teahouse of the August Moon and Guys and Dolls and The Young Lions and The Fugitive Kind and . . . were there any others?

I'll tell you where I first became aware that the paralysis had set in (I learn slow). It was about a third of the way through Viva Zapata! (an ingenious Kazan production, stolen from the imagery of Eisenstein, André Malraux, many others) when it gradually began to dawn on me that Zapata was none other than the motorcycle boy of The Wild One with a Leo Carrillo accent and a whole country on his hands. What he had most essentially was the same wounded psyche, the same morbid grudge against one-to-one human intercourse, with the last word taken any way you wish. Then I realized he was also the even blacker-browed paraplegic brooder of The Men (whose blackness had at the time seemed only appropriate for the role) and that the cinema (or belly-button and beer-foam) version of Stanley Kowalski had also now transferred operations to the Rio Grande. The movie version of Streetcar had bothered me so much, with its Stanley so constantly thrust down your craw in huge and violent close-up, its poetic intentions so ruthlessly disintegrated, that I had simply entered that state of shock which for some years may cause the suspension of all coherent counter-intelligence. If I had viewed the Broadway play and the printed text through some sort of private distorting glass, the motion picture had taken it and turned it around and magnified Stanley into a ghoulish cross between Gargantua, Bluebeard and Huey Long. What price Johnny Wodarski now? What price Eddie Szemplenski, or any other such American I had ever encountered outside of the sorriest brands of whodunits and comic books? But Kazan had also staged the play. It was what they call confusing.

And then we began to get all those other films, one following the next, and then at last, as I say, it finally penetrated: what we were watching on our screens was no longer an actor but a Hollywood Star.

Then things became still further confused, because it was a little difficult to fit into that new cosmology the nutty private kicks which Brando seemed bent on savoring, whatever the cost, as the cryptic, whispering, certainly un-stellar Napoleon that was next unfurled to us in Desirée – until I learned from the usual disreputable and public sources that Brando had hated being assigned to the picture and had done his excellent best to foul it up. It was yet more difficult to comprehend his oddball, pre-beatnik Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, all fits and starts and unique irrational inflections, until I presently caught up with other examples of the incapacities of director John Houseman to steer an actor beyond his ego. And it was altogether impossible to fit in, and still is, an intervening performance so superb that it may well constitute one of the two or three high points of all movie acting since the invention of the talkies.

I suppose it is easier, especially for Method actors, to study up on living American longshoremen than on dead Mexican revolutionaries or French emperors or Roman avengers of assassinated colossi. Nevertheless there is a kind of glory which endures even for "easier" portrayals if they are of the calibre of those introduced into the American commercial film by Marlon Brando and his colleagues (Kazan, Rod Steiger, Lee Cobb, Karl Malden, Eva Marie Saint) of On the Waterfront.

What they pumped into Hollywood movies was the priceless, the unbelievable fresh air of spontaneity. Everything else grew from this spontaneity as love might grow in a summer garden. The story outline (by Schulberg) was, at best, an expedient tidying-up of a heap of dockside crud so mountainous that every schoolboy from the Bronx to Walla Walla, Washington, knew it could never even be dented by either a Congressional investigating committee (as in the film) or (as in the film) a quick spot of happy-ending Pier 6 brawl. This mattered not to Brando's betrayed, corrupted, cauliflower-cortexed young protagonist: he gave birth to himself within these multiple rings of betrayal (not least the scenario's) as if something new and clean and questing had just set foot into the world. It gave him those rarest of all qualities in the flat kingdom of celluloid: tenderness, vulnerability, possibility. Once again I knew his prototype: an Irish boy from a longshore family who lived two doors from where I lived for ten recent years, and the prospective lightweight champion of the world until the mob started to make him take his dives. To this day he is a hero to all the kids on those blocks; to this day, as you pass him on the sidewalk, you can see on his clobbered features the vulnerable and desolating glance of a man looking for something he knows not how he lost. The tenderness I can't testify to; or against. Brando imparted that to him on his own; nor can I ever recall seeing toughness and tenderness so organically fused in any American film, though a certain kind of Hollywood picture (Gable, Tracy, Cagney, et al.) has been trying to do it for as long as pictures have been made.

It is what in turn imparted to the love affair between Brando and Eva Marie Saint the truest sense of reality that we may know outside reality itself, and not often there. Do you remember where Brando, on the walk from the church, picks up the girl's glove and idly shoves as much of it as he can onto his own big fingers and hand? Do you remember how the beginning of love aches through, and how ten seconds later, by the fence, momentarily rebuffed, he conveys with a single negligent grinning shrug at least fifty-seven varieties of C'mon, what's to be scared of? Somebody once told me, or I once read, that this happened by accident: the actress dropped her glove by accident, and Brando picked it up as a fellow, that fellow in the movie (and he, Brando himself) would do, and put it on his hand that way, and kept on walking and talking the girl along, and she talking him along, until they crossed over to the fence and the river and the shrug; and Kazan kept it in. Things like that occur fairly frequently amid the errata of the legitimate stage, but you will just have to believe it when I tell you that they never happend in the ordinary prefabricated American film. More power to the Brando, the Kazan, of this bold pure isolated venture of nearly a decade ago, a venture which neither was ever to repeat. Since then, for Brando, Brando the serious actor, everything has been downhill. The machine rolls only in reverse. Brando had become a commodity, even to himself.

It rolls through the comedy phase, when he tries (Teahouse) to turn himself into a David Wayne: an elephant sent to mime the flea, and an elephant who with his every particle should have known better than to make the effort. It rolls through the musical phase, when he tries (Guys and Dolls) to turn himself into a breezy Robert Alda: the elephant doing the racetrack tout. Versatility is an admirable acquisition for the actor, but the goal here was not versatility; it was Box Office. And that goal, one addits, was attained. The only thing somehow misplaced was Brando.

It rolls then through his famous diehard insistence in making a sympathetic character of the Nazi in The Young Lions . . . for when a person becomes a Movie Star how can he afford to grant the masses any opportunity not to love him? (Some movie stars fortunately know better.) If the final product we saw on screen was not merely not sympathetic but completely numb and inexplicable, a golden boy from outer space – well, so much for the masses, and for us, and for the human brain, and even, if anyone cares, for Irwin Shaw. For who does care? The masses are dimwits and they'll forget. Who cares if the Orpheus Descending of Tennessee Williams exudes from the screen as nothing more than a heavily shadowed camera study of the hips, nipples, cheekplanes, firebrand eyes of the inarticulate monolith (shot always upward from the floor) that is its ostensible protagonist and spokesman for freedom, grace and understanding?

It rolls on through One-Eyed Jacks (should it turn out a masterpiece then come and shoot me). It will probably roll on through all eternity, unimpeded by yours truly. There will be movie after movie, epic after epic, and then one fine day somebody will dare to inquire: "When is Marlon Brando going to do another play?" and the myth will be complete. Just like poor Charlie Castle of The Big Knife, who was always talking about the return to Broadway and never quite pulling it off, just like all the dozens and dozens of others in fact or fiction who have sought out the Great American Myth and hurled themselves ardently into its maw, Marlon Brando is not going to come back. It is too late. La commèdia è finita.