Charles Bronson ain't no Pussycat

A few days with a man who gives time to nobody

Charles Branson walked away from the crew and cast off down the railroad track, across the high trestle, and stood with his back turned to the place where the next shot was being set up for a movie called Breakheart Pass. When he is shooting in the studio, he will--if he is not in his dressing room--take a chair to the farthest corner and sit there alone, looking apparently at nothing. But here at the tag end of the Bitterroot mountains, high above a little town called Reubens in northern Idaho, he habitually simply walked away from the train and waited to be called to do the shot when it was ready. Everybody saw a lot of Charles Branson's back. His characteristic gesture was to show his back to the largest number of people possible. I never heard anybody say he thought Bronson did this to be offensive or hostile or even unfriendly. It was just part of who Charles Bronson is. A very large part. So while dozens of property men and make-up men and wranglers and grips and cameramen shouted and wrestled with lights and reflectors and generators, Bronson quietly walked back down the Union Pacific track, across the trestle and stood looking into the valley below, several hundred feet almost straight down, where a little stream breaking over white rocks caught the brilliant sun.

He stood utterly still and I tried to remember what that way of standing reminded me of. And then I knew. Charles Bronson stands like a pit bulldog. He somehow manages that kind of balance with only two feet. It is the kind of balance only the very finest athletes the world-beaters, have. As a matter or fact, some world-beaters were on that train with us--one of the world's great fighters, Archie Moore; Joe Kapp, who was always known as a man who would stick his head in the fire and because of it took the Minnesota Vikings to the Super Bowl; Ben Johnson, who set a calf-roping record of 12.5 seconds at the Pendleton Round-Up in 1949; and Yakima Canutt, World Champion Cowboy in 1917, 1919, 1920 and 1923--but the greatest natural athlete on that train was Charles Bronson. Or so I became convinced in the time I spent with him.

So symmetrical is he that it is impossible for him to make an ungraceful move, and it is from that symmetry that his bulldog balance comes. It begins, though, in his bones, the balance does. His bone structure is straight and true and absolutely without flaw. Don't let anybody ever tell you he is bandy-legged or bowlegged, because he is not, even though some writers have described him so. His legs are the most heavily muscled part of his body and the fully developed quadriceps might make him appear slightly bowlegged to someone who did not know what he was looking at. But I did know, and he is not.

"May we have the actors, please?"

It is Ron Schwary, assistant director, the man responsible for setting up the shot, getting, things ready for the director, Tom Gries. He thinks he has it now and is calling for the players: Bronson, Ben Johnson and Charles Durning. They've done this scene before. Better than half the day has gone into shooting an action that will take less than a minute on the screen. A couple of lines have been blown. A couple of marks have been missed. The cameras were wrong for whatever reason at least once. But then Bronson on noticed that the scene itself was being played wrong. Or so he thought:

Bronson: "The audience can see there's no use for this rope. It makes more sense for me to go down the embankment at the end of the trestle "

"If that's the way you think it ought to be played," said Gries. "Yeah OK. Just make it look good."

"But," said Johnson, "it's a line here Durning's s'possed to say about he might slip off the rope and escape. Hell we ain't got a rope now."

Gries smoothed down his scalp with the palm of his hand (his head is shaved slick as a baby's ass). "A1l right. Here. Durning can say something like: 'He might try to get away'" --Gries looks up now toward Johnson, smiling--"and you just give him a cowboy answer."

The crew repositioned the cameras and the lights or the shot. Now Schwary was calling for the scene to be shot. Far down the track, I saw Bronson's shoulders lift. He often breathed deeply before starting a scene. Then he turned and came directly toward us down the track. He had may be 25 yards to walk. The trestle was very uneven, with crossties and broken rock. But Bronson, coming across it, could have been walking over a ballroom floor. He came as smoothly as a model with a book on her head. And he never looked down. He never does. No matter how rough the ground. And yet his feet go unerringly to the place where they need to be. No bounce. No wobble. No hitch in his gait. But he does not glide. Or float. He seems to be suctioned to the earth, growing from it, joined to it even when he's moving over it. And as he comes straight toward you, you see that his center of gravity is very low in his body. Truly, his center of gravity must be in his cock or directly behind it. He does not smile. He rarely does, and when he does, it looks like it hurts him. Since his features are so distinct--heavy, even--you'd think they would also be mobile. Not so. No expression is his habitual expression.

He stopped on his marked spot. Shook his shoulders. Breathed. Relaxed inside that incredible cock-of-the-walk posture. The director went over and stood head to head with him for a brief moment. Then he looked u at Johnson.

"Are we already?" he asked.

"I think I got the line " said Johnson.

"The line?' Gries said

"The one I give to Durning when he says he might try to escape."

Gries held his hands up, palms out. "Don't tell me," he said "Just let me hear it when we shoot it."

The assistant director raised his megaphone. "Kill all radios. Kill the A.C. generator. Could we have quiet on the set, gentlemen? Roll'em!"

The director leaned slightly behind the camera and called: "Action!"

Bronson went down the slope like running water.

Durning: "He might try to get away."

Johnson: "He might shit too. "

"Cut!" said Gries. "Good. We'll play it just like that."

"You're gone keep it like that?" said Johnson.

"I thought the line was great," said Gries.

"Well," said Johnson, "there's another movie I cain't take my old mother to see."

"All right, once more, please!"

Charles Bronson came back and lined up to shoot the scene again. While they made some last-minute adjustment with the cameras, he held his spot, looking to neither the left nor the right. He spoke to nobody. Nobody spoke to him. All around him, men were laughing and joking and talking. Only he was still his eyes so hooded he could have been asleep. The grab-ass went on. Johnson had found a turd that had dropped from one of the train's toilets onto the track. He said: "I believe they got yore spot marked right here, Durning." Bronson does not turn to look. He almost never does.

Gries calls over their heads: "We seem to be having too much fun, gentleman. A little more seriousness please." But his tone says he is joking, too. Everybody laughs. Except Bronson. They all look like they're having a hell of a lot of fun. Except Bronson Not only does he look like he is not having any fun, he looks as though he has never had any.

•

Everybody has something to say about Charles Bronson Everybody. Sometimes it's very short: "Can't act." Or: "I don't like violence; I don't like Bronson." Or: I don't like violence; I don't like Bronson." Or: "Sumbitches say he cain't act. But he can." They come, opinions do, from all directions.

When my 12-year-old boy, Byron, found out I was going to see Bronson, he raced to his room and came back with a Mad comic: "Give that turkey this and see what he says." After admonishing him about calling distinguished people turkeys, I looked at it. The cover was Bronson. Death Wish Bronson binging death to muggers, turning on the steps in Central Park, firing his evil hearts everywhere, all the while squinting like 1t was the end of the world.

A couple of hours later, a college professor I know, who is just so goddamned intellectual he won't eat onions, sighed, looked out of his office window and said sadly: There must be something wrong with me, I love Charles Bronson. If Robert Redford was over there under a tree jerking off, I wouldn't walk across the street to see it. But Bronson? Well..."

The next morning, going through the Atlanta airport, I stopped by Benny's for a drink. Benny is a great fat fag friend who always gives me a drink when it's too early for the bars to be open at the airport. We sat in the back of his little shop, I drinking vodka, he drinking some abomination before the Lord called a tequila sunrise.

Benny, a little breathless, said: The French call him le sacré monstre."

"Run that by again, Benny. You know I don't speak that shit.

"The sacred monster. Le sacré monstre. That's they call him. Only the French could have hit it straight on like that. The Italians call him Il Brutto; that means the brutal one or the ugly one something like that. Whatever it is, it's not as good as a sacre fuck1ng monster."

How come you know so much about him?"

"I see all this movies. I read every single word written about him." He swallowed his tequil a sunrise and made another. "Doesn't everyone

"Why?" I said. "Why do you read that stuff and see all the movie?"

He help up his hand. "One: I think he's a great actor. And two: I admire him for the money he makes."

How much does he make?"

"I don't know for sure, but I read somewhere a million dollars a picture. See if you can find out for me, will you?"

"I'll try," I said.

(Note: I don't know for sure, either, Benny, but here is the best information I could get: On Breakheart Pass he got $1,000,000 for showing up. All expenses are covered: the house he and his wife, Jill Ireland rent in Lewiston, Idaho, cars, food, two governesses for their four-year-old daughter, Zuleika, and so on. Plus ten points of the picture. Now Benny, even allowing for your 20-to-40 percent Hollywood hype, that's still a lot of cheese, any way you cut it.)

When I was about to go, Benny said: (continued on page 150)Charles Bronson(continued from page 116) "Somebody Playboy doesn't like you."

"Everybody loves me everywhere, I said.

"So maybe they'll send you to interview Mount Rushmore next," he said. "From everything I've read the second head from the left on Mount Rushmore talks more than Charles Bronson."

I wouldn't have taken it if it had been an interview," I said. "I'm just supposed to hang out and see what happens."

We had a couple of more drinks and I left. Ten day later, when I got back home, I was met at the airport by a guy named Jingo, whom I've kown for maybe four years. He's a kind of reject from someplace like Oakland, California. He wanted big-time degeneracy but couldn't handle the freight and so ended up in a small north Florida town wearing a lot of tattoos, riding a greasy Harley 74, a chain around his waist mouthful of blunted and yellow teeth and a compulsion to get into fight she couldn't win. He's always beat up bad: swollen eyes and cut lips, and nostril sclogged with black blood.

There's only one flight a day into the little town where I live. He had been meeting the plane from Atlanta for the past three days.

"I got the whole thing figure," he said.

"What whole thing?" I said.

"Jesus" he said, "didn't you go see Bronson?"

"How'd you know that? I said.

"Then you did?"

"Yeah."

"We're gonna sell him," Jingo said.

"Sell who?"

"Bronson, for Christ's sake."

He'd caught me at the place where you get your luggage. I had my bag now. "Tell me tomorrow, Jingo. Or, better, wait until next week. I'm tired."

He grabbed my arm. "You know what we can get for Bronson's sock?"

"His what?"

"Sock. Sock, damn it. One sock."

I could only stare at him.

"Fifty, maybe sixty bucks."

"Jingo, I don't have Bronson's sock."

"Who's gonna know? Tell me that. Who? We can say you ripped off his dirty-cloths bag. Right? We can also take a bite out of a piece of bread. Say you got it off his plate when he wasn't looking, after he was through, you know? A fucking piece of stale bread, we get sixty, maybe a hundred dollars. His mouth touched it, you see?"

"Jingo, go home," I said.

He gave his little I'm-only-shitting smile, which was not funny at all but had much of the malice of the world in it, and said: "You can put out a contract on a man's hand in New York for six hundred dollars. You realize what we could sell his knucklebones for?"

It was quite a long time before I could convince Jingo we were not going to peddle the knuckles of Saint Bronson or any other bogus mementos.

He kept saying everybody else was selling Bronson and there was enough for everybody to have a piece of the action. Everybody was selling him. Yeah. I was reminded of the publicity man who sat in the screening room at Burbank with me three days earlier while I watched a movie called Breakout. When it was over and the lights came up, the guy said: "Stripped to the waist, Bronson's money in the bank." It wasn't so much what he said as how he said it. He positively leered. I felt like rearranging his teeth for him. But I let it pass, because I didn't think it would have pissed Bronson off if he'd been standing there. After all, he refers to himself as a product that has to be packaged and sold a certain way, just like--as he is fond of saying--a bar of soap.

•

I met Bronson the first time standing beside the flat-bed railroad car the housed the kitchen on the picture train. He was yelling up to the cook that he wanted a bacon-and-egg sandwich. The kitchen had a sign on it that said: You can whip our taters, but you can't beat our meat. And another that said: Keep the west alive; Ball a cowboy today.

It's just a chuckle a minute, folks, when you are around your heavyweight movie people

Bronson's publicist, a delightful and generous man by the name of Ernie Anderson, introduced me to Bronson. We shook hands and Bronson went back to the business of getting his sandwich.

Ernie took me by the sleeve and pulled me aside. "Now, don't crowd him. For God's sake, don't crowd him. Because if you do, see...."

Ernie only told me that about 900 times. We left the Lewis and Clark Hotel that morning at daylight, loaded into minibuses with the rest of the crew and drove southeast about 20 miles, out past Culdesac, through the Nez Percé Indian reservation, finally stopping at Reubens, where the train was waiting. On the drive out, Ernie kept telling me how hard Bronson was to talk to, that he might not talk at all.

"Listen," he said, "when Charlie is in a bad mood, I'm just like a piece of furniture."

Frankly, I didn't give a shit if he talked or not, because I was at death's door after coming down with a severe case of drunk the night before. I'd managed to cleverly secrete a flask of medicine on my person, however, and was only looking for the right moment to get well. Bronson doesn't drink, though--except two pictures--and I didn't want to blow the whole goddamn assingment on the first day just because I needed a drink. I probably should not have has the vodka out there to start with. I'd already had to sign a release saying that if I got hurt accidentally or otherwise, I couldn't sue the production company. But it was a cold mother up there in the snow and wind and ice of Idaho, and I couldn't bring myself to go off to the mountains dry and unprotected from the chill. I was determined to keep it to myself, though, since Ernie had gone to some trouble to impress upon me Bronson's aversion to alcohol.

"Listen," he said," when we were shooting Breakout, the character Charlie plays always has a beer in his hand. All the time. One beer after another. Well, for Charlie, we had to put mineral water in the cans. You know how much it costs to put mineral water in beer cans?"

I told him I did not. What I didn't tell him was that I found the ideal a depressing perversion of the natural order of thing. Mineral water, for God's sake? Isn't that what little old ladies drink so their bowels'll move?

"OK," said Ernie. "It's all right. We can get in his car."

Apparently, Bronson had given him some sign that he wasn't in such a bad mood that we'd have to be pieced of furniture. We walked along the track, following Bronson, who was now chewing away on his sandwich.

He stopped by a gun-metal-gray boxcar that was spotted with blisters of peeling paint. He reached up and took hold of the sliding side door--the same kind of sliding door you see on all boxcars--and pulled it back. Voilà ! The star is home! I could see before I got inside that it was heavy gravy, at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars' worth of boxcar. Red carpeting, color-coordinated kitchen with yellow cabinets, stove and refrigerator, color television, electric lights, walls paneled in heavy black wood, acoustical ceiling. The middle of the car was a kind of living room. At each end was a rather large dressing room complete with bed, lighted mirrors and bath.

I eased myself down at a table and tried not to show how shaky I was. Bronson went immediately to the stove and started making coffee. He turned and squinted at me through the smoke of a cigarette dangling from his lips.

"Coffee?"

"Yeah", I said, "I'll have a cup."

I could see the cups at the end of the counter and I started to get up to get one.

"No," he said, "sit still. I'll get it."

"Someplace I can take a piss?" I said.

Standing at the sink, he motioned with his head. "Back there."

It was a large bathroom, done in an off green, containing your basic chemical shitter. I doctored myself and came back out feeling better about myself, the day and the world at large. Bronson had left the sliding door open and I stood in the doorway looking out. The steam engine gave two blasts of the whistle and we started to move forward.

Behind me, Bronson said: "This used to be a hunting car used by railroad executives." Hunting comes out in two distinct syllables--hunt-ing--betraying his years of work at the Pasadena Playhouse and elsewhere, trying to get rid of his Russian-Lithuanian accent. He got rid of the accent, only to replace it with a way of talking that suggests he learned English as a foreign language. But the choppy way he separates words into distinct syllables gives a strange and considered force to what he says. "They left the outside of the car the way it was so they could leave it on sidings and nobody would be tempted to break into it."

He brought a cup of coffee to the table. Then he took a chair over to the open door and sat staring out at the snow and broken rock slipping past as the train climbed into the mountains. Unlike most people, Bronson has no trouble letting a conversation fall to silence. There is no such thing as an awkward silence around him, because you come to understand early on that silence is his natural state, or so it was with me, and I was content to sit and listen to the rhythmic clack of the train wheels and watch him burn up cigarettes, which he does with a certain single-mindedness. He does not chainsmoke, but almost, and has since he was nine years old.

But he says as soon as Breakheart Pass is in the can he'll quit permanently. For a man whose discipline makes him climb ropes at the age of 53, work with a speed bag and a heavy bag, do flying karate kicks, abstain from alcohol, eat vitamins like candies, his addiction to cigarettes and coffee does seem strange. But such discipline also means he will probably succeed in quitting now that he has decided to do it.

I had been talking to Ernie, who was sitting quietly at the table across from me, when Bronson turned from his place at the door and said: "Where do you come from with that accent?"

"South Georgia," I said. "Down around the Okefinokee Swamp. A farm." And then, in the garrulous way I have that would make me the world's worst interviewer if I ever tried to interview anybody, I went from talking about farming to talking about mules, about how I didn't learn to drive a car until I was 21, because we never owned a car. "I still don't know anything much about cars, but I know a hell of a lot about mules."

"So do I," Bronson said. "They still had mules in the mines when I was a boy in Scooptown, Pennsylvania."

When I mentioned the mules, his face changed. He smiled, but not with his mouth. It was all done with his eyes. When you are close enough to see the green specks that float in his eyes, you suddenly realize what amazing eyes they are. He can smile with them, snarl with them, make an absolutely indifferent wall with them or use them to make himself accessible--or at least to the extent that he is ever accessible, which is not often and not very.

"But it's all changed there now," he was saying. "The mules are gone, the slag heaps, for the most part, are gone. Hell, they've even got grass planted in the yards, green growing things everywhere. All different than it was."

The mules are gone from Bacon County, too. I told him that there had not been any mules there since I left to go into the Marine Corps when I was 17 years old. Then, for whatever reason, I got into telling a story about a drill instructor brutally and literally beating the shit out of a boy on Parris Island.

"Yeah," he said. "There are a lot of bastards like that. I met my share of son of a bitches in the Service. I remember back during World War Two, when I was in gunnery school at Kingman, Arizona, the squadron had a party. This sergeant's wife wanted to dance with me. Great big fat woman. Hell, I didn't want to dance with her. Nobody'd want to dance with her. I told her no. Little later, the sergeant comes over to me and wants to know why I've been propositioning his wife. Apparently, she'd gone over and told him I'd been after her. I told him I hadn't propositioned her and I wasn't interested in her that way or any other way. So he wants to fight. Fight a sergeant, when I'm a private? I didn't need that, and I knew it. I back off. He follows. I back. He comes on. I back all the way down the dance floor, until I'm against the wall and I can't back any farther. So I picked the bastard up and threw him. For some screwy reason, I thought if I didn't hit him, I wouldn't get in trouble. So I threw him. When he landed, he broke his arm. I got six months' hard labor, carrying sides of beef into the mess hall and cans of garbage out of it." He stops talking and an introspective, almost bemused look comes into his eyes. He turns to stare into the deep valley below the trestle we're crossing high in the mountains.

In the time I was with Bronson, I came to believe that, while he would not back off from trouble, he would go to considerable trouble to avoid bullshit. To fight over a fat lady you don't know and have no interest in is bullshit and Bronson knew it, so he let the guy back him down the floor. There is so little bullshit in the man that he will do almost anything to keep from having to deal with the bullshit in somebody else. But after he's backed as far as he can go, if pressed, he will break your arms for you. He is, in fact, the straight-on, tear-your-balls-off kind of guy that he so often portrays with such power on the screen.

"You cannot lie to the camera," Gries told me. "It ultimately sees through to who you are, touches the basic quality of your character. That's why Nixon came off so badly in the debates with Kennedy. And that's why Bronson can so successfully play the kind of roles he plays. He brings tremendous authenticity to them. He makes you believe."

When he was telling the story of the fight, I realized that when he has something he wants to talk about, he is articulate and talks with great animation. He just doesn't seem to want to talk much with very many people. And, particularly, he doesn't want to talk to every Tom, Dick and jag-off sent by some newspaper or magazine to interview him. When a reporter is sent out by, say, The New York Times, or some other equally prestigious publication, the reporter thinks Bronson ought to fall down in a faint, slobbering to please him. When he doesn't, the reporter writes that Bronson is inarticulate and hostile. The truth is no more spectacular than this: He doesn't talk when he doesn't want to and he is hostile only when he has something to be hostile about--which seems to me a damn fine way to be.

Bronson was smoking and drinking coffee and staring at the snow-crusted countryside. I was talking with Ernie about critics--in this case, literary critics. "I think a hell of a lot of writers quit writing or don't write any more than they do because they can't stand what critics write about them. A guy named James Boatwright reviewed a novel of mine in The New York Times and he wasn't just unhappy that I had written the novel, he seemed unhappy that I was alive." I looked over at Bronson, the weight of whose gaze I had felt fall upon us, and said, "I think some actors have probably been run off the screen for the same reason."

"You have to ask yourself who you wrote the book for," Bronson said. His voice was more violent than it had been, because it had gone utterly flat and laconic. "Did you write it for the critic in Los Angeles? For the one in Rome? In New York? In Hong Kong?"

I allowed as how I had known what he was driving at for a long time.

"You won't satisfy them all," he said, "so to hell with them."

Did he read what critics had to say about him?

"Sometimes reviews are sent to me by my agent or somebody and I'll glance at them. But I don't make any effort to see reviews. No, I actually don't read them much."

"I stopped reading reviews of my novels," I said, "except for one or two lousy fuckers I compulsively read because they are such bad critics and bad people. They obviously don't like books at all. That's probably why they became literary critics, so they could say shitty things about books."

"Some men make their reputations like that," he said. One massive shoulder tightened under his jacket. "And they all have their little pet bitches. There's a lot of pear-shaped guys, like that Jay Cocks, who think if an actor is in shape he can't be any good." He turned to look through the door again, his glowering stare more hooded than ever.

Time magazine's Jay Cocks tends to turn up in conversations with Bronson, who is already on record as saying, "One way or another, I'll get that man. Not physically, but I'll get him." If I were Jay Cocks, I'd leave the country. Or, better, volunteer for the astronaut program and leave the world.

The train came to a banging, couple-rattling stop on the edge of a high trestlebetween Craigmont and Craig Junction, about 4000 feet above where we had started two hours earlier. Bronson caught the edge of the door and dropped lightly to the ground. He was already halfway back to where the scene would be shot before Ernie, who went out ahead of me, could get out of the car.

They were shooting at the very back of the train, which meant I could sit in the caboose and watch the action and stay warm. The caboose was paneled in heavy, carved, hand-fitted wood. Comfortable couches lined the walls. When I got there, Kapp and Moore were talking. Shortly, Richard Crenna, who plays the governor of Nevada in the picture, and Ed Lauter, who plays an Army colonel, came in. It was warm and I took off my jacket. Kapp saw the hinge tattooed on the inside of my elbow and fell out.

"You got it wrong," I said. And I tried to explain that some guy had mistakenly put that on me in Alaska while I was hurt bad from alcohol, that I had no other tattoo and that I had not consented to the hinge.

Joe Kapp said: "That's what you think you did. That's the way you remember it. But as soon as I saw you, I knew you were the kind of guy who would get a tattoo on the head of his dick."

Which only goes to show that a man can be a great quarterback, a natural leader of men, and still badly misjudge character.

Ben Johnson came through in an enormous sheepskin-lined coat, a cud of tobacco in his cheek, his U. S. marshal's gun strapped tight to his leg, and demanded, "Where you boys got that goddamn shitter hid? I cain't find it." Somebody directed him deeper into the car, where the dressing rooms were, and he bulled on through, chewing and wheezing.

Gries, who had just come in and sat down, waiting for the cameras and lights to be positioned outside, laughed and said, "When I called Ben and told him I needed him for this picture, he said, 'Do I git to ride a horse?' I said yes. He said, 'Do I have to talk much?' I said no. He said, 'I'll take it.' "

Outside, the wind had picked up. I could hear it and knew that out there in that weak sunlight, with the thin mountain wind whistling down the valley, it was one cold mother. Everybody who could ducked into the caboose from time to time, if only to stay for a minute, trying to warm the ends of their fingers and their freezing noses.

Except Bronson. He stayed outside, with all apparent patience, waiting to be called to give his lines. He had walked back down the track and stood by himself, throwing rocks, some of them as big as a five-pound bag of sugar, at a target only he could see. He threw them as though it were a workout, regularly and without stopping.

Crenna was in his first picture, Red Skies of Montana, back in 1952, with Bronson. He had one line. He was allowed to say, "I could eat a hamburger." Bronson didn't have any lines at all.

I told Crenna what Bronson had said about critics. "Oh, yeah. Sure," he said. "You know right off that some critics will pan this film simply because it's a Western. Other critics will pan it because it has Bronson in it. Only because it has Bronson in it. A knee-jerk reaction. Some critics will start out by having fun with the title, Breakheart Pass. 'Don't break your heart with boredom by seeing Break-heart Pass,' something like that." He slopped talking and watched Bronson for a moment through the window. "I don't think reviews get to Charlie much, though, unless they're especially personal. In the twenty-five years or so I've known him, he's not changed much. He's his own man. Stays pretty much to himself. If he cares what other people think of him, he doesn't show it."

Kenny Bell, a still photographer, came in and sat down. He had been on four pictures with Bronson. I asked him about Branson's reputation for being temperamental on the set, for blowing up.

"Almost never," he said. "Charlie's a professional. I've been on eighty-four features and I've never seen an actor who was more professional than Charlie. He always comes on the picture knowing his job. He's always got his lines. And he expects everybody else to be the same way. But there is one thing, and you can put this in caps. When somebody fucks up and keeps on fucking up, Charlie doesn't hesitate to let him know about it. But if the picture's right, Charlie's right. That's the way he is."

I went outside and walked down the track. Bronson gave me a quick, uninterested glance. He threw another rock and then turned toward me. He watched me, and it is difficult to convey the feeling Bronson gives when he looks directly at you. He has a way of focusing himself on you, and it is literally a pressure you can feel on the surface of your skin. As I walked toward him, I didn't have the slightest notion of what I would say to him. Certainly, I did not know I was going to ask him a question; there is ample evidence on the record to show that he does not much like pointed and direct questions. And it was too early to risk putting him off. But there was something that I did badly want to ask him and it popped out before I knew I'd say it.

"I've read where you said, 'I don't have any friends and I don't want any friends. My children are my friends.' Did you say that?"

He looked at me for a long four-beat, which is a thing he often does, as though he were considering very carefully what he wanted to say. "Yeah," he said finally, "I said that."

"Doesn't that strike you as a strange thing to say?"

"No."

"Jesus, come on," I said. "It is strange, too. Everybody has friends. What reason is there not to have friends?"

"There's no reason not to have friends. Just the opposite is true. There's every reason to have friends. But I don't think you ought to have friends unless you're willing to give them time. I give time to nobody."

•

It was cold and dark, though still early, and I was tired, too tired to sleep, so I walked around Lewiston, thinking of what were purported to be the facts of Bronson's life, at least what I had been able to find out from him and from others.

He was born Charles Buchinsky, a name that he used in the first 11 of his pictures. He changed it to Bronson during the McCarthy years, because Buchinsky sounded Eastern European and therefore suspect. The Pennsylvania coalmining town where he spent his early years was ugly and dirty and poverty-stricken. There was never enough money and never enough food for him and his 14 brothers and sisters. If he talks about anything at all, he will sooner or later get back to those early, terrible years. You don't have to listen very closely to what he says to know that as a child he felt nobody loved him, that nobody cared whether he lived or died. He worked in the mines until he was old enough to escape by joining the Army during World War Two, in which he served as a tail gunner in a B-29. (There have been writers who have maintained he did not serve as a tail gunner in World War Two, that it is all a fabricated publicity story. I believe he did. I even know he did, even though I have no hard evidence to prove it. My evidence is the sound of his voice and the look in his eyes when we were telling sea stories, I about the Marine Corps, he about flying. At some point, he raised his hands and began to talk about the placement of his thumbs on the cool, curved firing mechanism of the gun. It was enough for me. He has had such a weapon in his hands. And he has heard shots fired in anger.)

After the Service, he fell in love not with acting but with the money actors made. He didn't have to be very smart to know that it beat the hell out of shoveling coal. He became attached first to the Philadelphia Play and Players Troupe, where he designed scenery. From there, he went to study and work in the Pasadena Playhouse. Starting with something called You're in the Navy Now, he became the guy who held the horses. He held the horses in 52 pictures before anything much happened. He was the presence, the muscle, the body that rarely spoke, always the menace in the background. The heavy, but not the superheavy. He didn't become superheavy and, consequently, his star didn't really begin to shine until 1968, when he starred in a French production called Adieu, I'Ami. It was a huge success in Europe, and it was in Europe that Bronson came into his own. Today, he is bigger in Europe, the Orient and the Middle East than any other actor, and in the United States he is as big as anybody. I am, of course, talking about box office, selling tickets. How good an actor he is is another thing. Some of his pictures have just torn my ass with boredom--Mr. Majestyk and The Stone Killer, to name two. In others, I loved him. He made the hair get up on my neck, made me want to eat tacks, in pictures like Rider on the Rain, which still has to be the best thing he's ever done, and Hard Times, which I saw before it was released while on this assignment. Hard Times is a simple, stark, gutsy, down-but-not-out, back-against-the-wall melodrama. I thought the story had enormous holes in it, that the relationships between the characters were not clear--particularly the relationship between Bronson and the character played by Jill Ireland--but Bronson didn't write the story, he only acted in it. Somebody else has to take the responsibility for the story. His responsibility is to make a character named Chaney believable. He does. Or at least he did for me.

Chaney is a bare-knuckles fighter. He will fight anybody, anywhere, and the only money he makes is money he makes betting on himself. The fights are not legal, are not staged in arenas. They take place anywhere--in warehouses, train yards--and anything goes, including biting, kicking, gouging, as long as the fighters are on their feet. James Coburn, a fine journeyman actor, turns in a creditable performance, and Strother Martin gives what I think is his best performance ever, even superior to his role as the prison warden in Cool Hand Luke. It is a testament to Bronson's work in this picture that when the three of them are onscreen at the same time, Branson simply blows them away. Even as hard and as well as Coburn and Martin work, they remain little more than props to Bronson's performance. But while Bronson's acting is superior, the story is vapid; and while it will undoubtedly do tremendously well at the box office, Bronson himself will catch a huge ration of shit because of the way the picture is put together. But that is the nature of critics. Even when they know something is wrong, they rarely know where to place the blame.

I was thinking all of that while walking through the damp, wintry streets of Lewiston, more than a little mystified by the phenomenal, inexplicable success of this not-so-good ole boy from Scooptown, Pennsylvania, when it occurred to me that Lewiston made Bronson. If his success lives anywhere, it lives in Lewiston. Isn't Lewiston middle America? Doesn't middle America force-feed the rest of the world its values and aspirations? Doesn't the rest of the world lust after what Lewiston has already acquired? The rest of the world says it is not true. But wouldn't Frenchmen and Germans and Japanese sell their souls to slip into suburbia down by the Clearwater River on the outskirts of Lewiston? Of course they would.

So I thought: The town must be pretty well stirred up because Bronson is here. Why don't I go listen? Hollywood is a huge, extremely complex, multimillion-dollar machine whose sole purpose is to put the skin on baloney. Surely, Lewiston has as many baloney eaters per capita as anyplace else in the world. I determined to spend an evening among the wild baloney eaters, and immediately I felt better.

In Lewiston, on a Saturday night, you can go to Bullwinkles Tavern out on Main Street, where you can drink a little beer or wine or win a little money on one of its six pool tables. Or you can truck on out of town on the N and S Highway to a great bar called The Stables, where the John Horse band is working out, putting down some tight, inside sounds. It's a place where you can get a little vodka to clean you up and, at the same time, be hassled by the guy who owns the place if you happen to have a tape recorder with you and no papers saying you're on assignment from Playboy. After you give the guy at The Stables about as much shit as you figure you can without being arrested, you can move back into town to Effie's, a great little place that serves nothing hard but where you can lie back in a booth with a Coors and what has to be the biggest hamburger in the world. (One of the guys from the picture went down and photographed the thing. Incredible. Big as a plate and thick as your wrist. Lady told me Ben Johnson had been in there twice to scoff on one.) Or you can go to Curley's in North Lewiston, or The Huddle, or the Long Branch Saloon, or Smitty's (The Barrel) across the Snake River in Washington. There is no shortage of bars, and if you make a few and listen closely on a Saturday night, you'll hear the voice of the world talking on about how it is to be in love with Bronson.

•

"Come here. Hell, you can see it from here. I'll show it to you." The lady is wearing what looks like a nurse's uniform and is an absolute lake of fat. I've watched her drink seven cans of Coors. She takes a can down in two hits. Her body is never at rest. Her shoulders slosh and gurgle. Fat runs down and laps like waves when it hits the shore line of what must be a girdle at her waist. She gets off the bar stool and leads us to the back door. She has three friends with her, two ladies and a man. The two ladies are tiny, hurt things with spots of mustard and catsup on the front of their dresses. I figure they must be waitresses. The man is the husband of one of them, but I never find out which one. The fat lady goes through the door sideways and out into a dark little alley full of hungry cats and rusting water heaters.

She points. "Him and Jill lives right up there."

"Where?"

"Up there on the hill, looking down. You can see it."

"Where the light is?"

"Right there."

"Jesus, he's up there right now."

"What you think he's doing up there?"

"God, I don't know, he----"

"Doing what everybody else does, I imagine." The man's thin, reedy voice comes out of the dark unconvincingly. You know he does not believe it. Neither does one of the ladies.

"Charles Bronson don't have to do what everybody else does."

"No, I guess he don't, at that," says the man.

"When you got what he's got, you do just what you damned well please."

"He can take him a bath or eat him a steak or him and Jill can go up in a airplane and look down. He ain't like you and me."

"Let's git us another Coors. At least we can do that."

•

It's getting on toward midnight now. The bar is heavy with smoke. The drinkers are tired and a little stunned. You can see them beginning to fade toward Sunday. But suddenly everything is stirred up, everybody's awake, calling to one another across the dance floor. Somebody has come in with Bronson's autograph.

"I was in the Pay Less, the wife and me, when I seen him over in radios. He was in there with his wife and his little girl, just a tiny little thing----"

"Zuleika. Her name's Zuleika."

"I walked over there to him and----"

"What'd he do?"

"I almost give 'm my pipe to sign this paper with, but I didn't. Damn, was I nervous. The closer I got to him, the more my chest closed up. I got next to him, I could hardly breathe."

They are all crowded around the bar now, where the paper with his signature is spread out.

"Writes messy, don't he?"

"I think it's beautiful," says a young barmaid, her fine blonde hair caught at her neck with a clip. "Just beautiful." Her hand goes out and her fingers touch the name. Her nails are red as blood and the paint is chipping on her thumbnail. Her fingers tremble slightly as they touch the paper and her chapped mouth goes soft and slack and lovely.

"Don't git that French-fry grease on it."

"I wouldn't ruin that name for nothing in the world."

•

"I'd like to come up against him just one time."

"I don't know if you would or not, Ted."

"He ain't tough. Hell, you can look at him and tell he ain't tough."

"You go to all his pictures, Ted, you know you do. Every last one of them."

"I didn't say I didn't go to see his movies. I said I'd like to come up against him one time. I'd like to break his goddamn face for him, that's what I'd like to do."

•

"We ain't drunk. Not real drunk, anyway."

"Why's she got her head on the table?"

"She's tired. She worked hard today. I ain't seen you in here before."

"I ain't been in here before. I'm here to write a thing about Charlie Bronson. I came up from Florida."

"Write a thing?"

"A piece for a magazine."

"You lying son of a bitch."

"No, it's true. Really."

"Have you seen him?"

"Talked with him today the first time."

"I got a picture of him. Got it out of a magazine when I found out he was coming. Got it in my room. I got a room over by the tissue factory."

"What do you think of him?"

"And you talked to 'm today, huh, just today?"

"Right."

"You know, you got eyes just like his. You're both all wrinkled and ruined around the eyes."

"Neither one of us can see. So we squint. He wouldn't be Charles Bronson in Coke-bottle glasses, would he?"

"He cain't see?"

"I don't think very well. He's got glasses, but I've never seen 'm wear them. But he's got 'm."

"You cute and you got eyes just like his. You got the same cute eyes. Where you staying?"

"Over at the Lewis and Clark Hotel."

"Did you see that sign they got in the bar over there? Says, Please don't hit the actors in the face."

"They're clever as hell, those movie people."

"I went over there, hoping I'd see him, but he never showed up. I did meet a fella from the picture, though. He was a [deleted]. His name was [deleted]. He didn't wanta do nothing but butt-fuck me, though. Said if I'd butt-fuck him, he'd take me out there on the train and innerduce me to him. I'da done it if I thought it was the truth. But it was a lie and I known it for a lie."

"You cain't believe ever'thing you're told, all right."

"But you really are writing about him? Been right up close to him and all?"

"Close as I am to you right now. That's what this is for. It's a tape recorder."

"A tape recorder? I thought it was a radio. You got me on there?"

"Yep."

"You got him on there?"

"His tapes is back in the room."

"I wouldn't mind going back to your room and hearing them tapes. And, to boot, I wouldn't mind fucking them cute eyes of yours right out of your head."

"I'm working. I never mess around when I'm on a job."

"You always drink this much when you working?"

•

I went back to the bar in the hotel and had one drink. When I got up to the room, I needed to put down some notes before I went to sleep, so I took off my clothes, broke out a bottle of vodka and climbed up in the bed. But before I did, I turned on the television. I lay there writing and sipping. But then a voice, a disturbingly familiar voice, impinged on what I was doing. In a way that I am not able to explain, it was scary, like a nightmare, like something unnatural and unreal, as though you had got a letter and opened it up and found it was from God.

I reluctantly raised my eyes and there full-screen on the television was Crenna's face looking straight at me. I had spent a long time talking to Crenna that day. He is originally from Los Angeles, but he might have been from the Okefinokee Swamp in Georgia, so well did I get on with him. My kind of people.

But now he was in the box! His face was coming through the wire. His voice was all fantasy and hard-edged diamonds. I had spoken to him as a man only that day, but now, in a celluloid and plastic alchemy, he had become part of my dreams. He was staring at me. I snatched the cover off, got up, stumbled over and hit the off button. I stood at the window, looking out over the darkened city of Lewiston. It is fantasy. It is magic. And none of our dreams are safe from it. We are all--all of us--part of the wild tribe of baloney eaters.

•

Each time they reshoot the scene, Bronson has to climb the steps of the tender, jump down to where the fuel is, walk over that to the locomotive and appear in the doorway, where he squats. It doesn't sound like much, but after you've done it ten or twelve times, it becomes a little much. A few times the trouble has been the camera. Scott Newman, Paul Newman's son, who is playing a young soldier, has run out of frame twice and missed his mark once. Earlier, he leaned too far out the window and went right offcamera. And yet each time, Bronson does it again, nothing showing in his face.

"I give time to nobody." That line has been running through my head ever since he said it and particularly today, watching him work. It was said by one of the world's most famous husbands and fathers. He insists that Jill and their six children (all but Zuleika are from earlier marriages) travel with him. The time and energy he devotes to travel arrangements, tutors, governesses, sometimes as many as 100 pieces of luggage and negotiating whole floors of hotels to accommodate such a family, is phenomenal. Jill told me that Bronson insists upon the entire family having dinner together every evening. A full slow dinner. She said it is one of his happiest, most contented moments.

"I give time to nobody." He has been working at a frantic, almost hysterical pace. Remember, for 20 years nothing happened. Then things began to break, but it all didn't really get off the ground until Death Wish, which in terms of a long career was only yesterday. Now he's working like there's no tomorrow. As I write this, Breakout has just been released in Europe. It was supposed to begin showing in theaters in this country in July. I had to rush out to Burbank to see his next film, Hard Times, because they were sending the only print they had to Europe to be shown to theater owners there. And he was already shooting Breakheart.

Standing in Colgems Square outside Producers Building Number Three, where we had just seen Hard Times, Bronson's agent, Paul Kohner, was talking to Larry Gordon, who was the producer of the film. They had a fine cut on the picture, but it was not color coordinated, the music for the sound track was not ready and there were jumps and bleeps in some of the dialog. But I had flown there on a few hours' notice, because they were shipping it off to market.

Kohner was not entirely happy about it. "You're releasing this picture too early," he said, "after Breakout has had only five weeks. A Bronson picture needs more than five weeks. It deserves more than five weeks."

"As long as there's a nickel left in Breakout," said Gordon, "the theater owners are not going to run Hard Times. But we've got to get it to them. They're hot for it and we've got to get it to them."

Kohner demurred for another moment, but with a marked lack of conviction, and then changed the subject. "All right. The picture's fine. All you have to do now is find another one for Charlie."

"We've already got it," Gordon said.

"Good. I hope so," said Kohner, "because we have nothing for the fall."

Meanwhile, Bronson is in Idaho, shooting Breakheart Pass.

Meanwhile, he's got to have made $5,000,000 in the past 18 months.

Meanwhile, they have nothing for the fall.

What, one asks oneself, is the goddamn hurry? Is Bronson a bubble the men around him believe will finally burst? Did the man wait 20 years to be a flash in the fucking pan? Must they send his pictures out like baloney on a production line, feeding the public as many as it can possibly swallow before throwing up? It is, as any fool can see, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bronson deserves better. Even if he doesn't want better, he deserves better. When he is genuinely interested in the script, as he was in Rider on the Rain, and when the story plays to his strong suit, he is an excellent actor. Strother Martin, a fine actor himself, is on record as saying, "Many years ago, I saw Charlie play an immigrant who was learning to read and write for his citizenship. Most eloquent. I've always admired him very much."

They had taken a break. Thirty or 40 people headed for the coffeepots. I happened to be in front of Bronson. I drew a cup and offered it to him.

"No," he said, "you waited in line. I'll get my own."

After he had his coffee, I followed him out to the edge of the gorge, where he was staring at the ground, making patterns in the snow with his boot. I was still thinking about "I give time to nobody." And I was wondering how it felt to have waited this long for what had come to him. Because I knew from my own experience that when you wanted to do a thing, whether you were very good at it or whether you were only a journeyman craftsman, if you could not do it, it was a kind of death.

The day before, Jill Ireland had told me, "You get caught in this acting thing and you almost can't do without it. You want a job. But you can't get one. You know you can do it, but, damn it, you can't do it unless someone asks you to. It's enough to drive you to suicide when you can't work."

And I was standing beside a man who had waited as long as anybody had ever waited for stardom in the history of the movies. I decided to try the sort of direct thing he doesn't like.

"You mind talking?" I said.

"No," he said, "I don't mind."

"Are you bitter about holding all those horses, man? About having to wait so long to make it?"

"No, I'm not bitter. That's all gone. I don't think about it."

"I read somewhere ... I seem to be always telling you I read something and----"

"It's all right," he said. "I don't care."

"I read about your saying your ma sold you. You wouldn't tell me about that, would you?"

"Not a lot to tell. I don't even know it for sure. But as far as I'm concerned, I know it. She was always threatening to sell us. Then one summer, she said she knew where I could get a job. She took me to Upstate New York. I saw the money change hands. It was two Polish onion farmers she sold me to. When she left, I knew, I mean I knew it right away, I wasn't just working for these men, they owned me. It showed in everything they did with me."

He said it all in a flat, even voice, without emotion. Which I found profoundly moving. So I watched him make patterns in the snow with the toe of his boot, until I remembered that Yak Canutt had said that Bronson was one of the greatest natural stunt men he had ever seen. It was a way to change the subject, so I did.

"Do you ever consciously study films in an effort to learn ways of doing certain physical things on the screen--falling, rolling, things like that?"

He actually smiled, the only time I saw him do so in the time I was with him. "I watch films to see what not to do."

It fit what I thought of him at that moment. Bronson's been around enough blocks to find out whatever he needs to know. He does not suffer advice gladly. Ernie Anderson said that when they were filming Hard Times, they brought a consultant on location to show Bronson how to jump out of a moving boxcar. He told them to get the guy the hell out of his way, saying, "I know more about jumping out of boxcars than he does."

The director called for the actors. Bronson turned and walked away. Anybody else would have said something like "See you later" or "Take care" or something, but Bronson simply walked off. But it did not bother me at all. He says only what is necessary to say, and I like that. I like it a lot.

One of the last things Jill Ireland said to me was, "I hope he has a long life and time to do all the things ... and enjoy the money he's made."

So do I.