Brando (13 page)

   In those days the Hollywood studios all had scouts in New York who kept an eye out for new faces on Broadway. It was the twilight of the old system when the studios all kept large stables of actors, directors, writers and producers under contract. I got feelers from several that wanted me to sign a standard seven-year contract, but I said I wasn’t interested; if a good story came along, I said, I might sign for a single picture.

One of the talent scouts got word to Joe Schenck, a Twentieth Century-Fox executive who was one of the pioneers in the movie business, that there was a young actor he might be interested in. I went over for an interview, and Schenck, a frail near-octogenarian who had all but been put out to pasture by the studio, looked at this young kid in front of him and said, “What have you done, son?”

“I’ve done a couple of plays—”

“Why don’t you get your nose fixed?” he asked.

“Why should I get my nose fixed?”

“Because you’ll look better,” he said. Then he turned around and looked at a huge picture of Tyrone Power covering the entire wall behind him. “Well, we’ll talk some other time,” he said, and that was the end of my interview.

   Broadway producer Edward Dowling told me that the American Theatre Wing was going to produce a new play by Eugene O’Neill and asked me to try out for it. Although I had read several of O’Neill’s plays, including
Desire Under the Elms
, I’d always thought he was dour, negative and too dark, and I couldn’t understand the philosophical import of what he was trying to say. But I told Mr. Dowling I’d come over for an audition. The night before, he sent me a copy of the script, which was about an inch and a half thick. I started reading it, but couldn’t get through it because I thought the speeches were too long and boring. After reading about a tenth of it, I fell asleep. The next day I went to the theater and argued with Mr. Dowling and Margaret Webster, the coproducer, for about half an hour about why I thought the play was ineptly written, poorly constructed and would never be a success. “What did
you
think of it?” I finally asked. “Tell me its virtues.”

I had to ask the question because even though I was spouting off with self-assurance, I hardly knew anything about it, since I hadn’t even read all of the first act.

Patiently, Eddie told me why he thought it was a good play and what he thought O’Neill was trying to say. I continued bluffing, still not having any idea of what the story was about, and finally told him that I didn’t want to do it.

Of course when it opened
The Iceman Cometh
was called O’Neill’s masterpiece.

INSTEAD OF
The Iceman Cometh
, I acted in a play directed by Stella’s brother Luther,
A Flag Is Born
. It was a powerful, well-written pageant by Ben Hecht with music by Kurt Weill, although it was essentially a piece of political propaganda advocating the creation of the state of Israel and indirectly condemning the British for stopping the Jewish refugees en route from Europe to colonize Palestine. At that time, September 1946, the New York Jewish community and Jews throughout the world were fixated on the future of Palestine and Zionism. I wanted to act in the play because of what we were beginning to learn about the true nature of the killing of the Jews and because of the empathy I felt for the Adlers and the other Jews who had become my friends and teachers and who told me of their dreams for a Jewish state. In hindsight, I think it was also because I was starting what would become a journey to try to understand the human impulse that makes it not only possible but easy for one group of people to single out another and try to destroy it. It was the beginning of a lifelong interest in the dark side of human behavior.

Everyone in
A Flag Is Born
was Jewish except me. Paul
Muni, the star, gave an astonishing performance, the best acting I have ever seen. I was onstage with him and he gave
me
goose-bumps. His performance was magical and affected me deeply. He was the only actor who ever moved me to leave my dressing room to watch him from the wings. He never failed to chill me with one particular speech. I played a young Jewish firebrand named David struggling to find his way to Palestine; in a graveyard he meets the wounded and dying Tevya, a prophetlike man, played by Muni, who tries to help him but dies. David covers him with a Jewish flag, then exits, presumably to carry on the fight to make a homeland in Palestine. At the beginning of the second act I had a speech during which a sharp light came down from above and two other lights hit me from the side. It was a fiery, accusatory speech that began with a pause. I waited a long time after the curtain went up, then quietly said, “Where were you?” I paused again and said, “Where were you, Jews?” Another long pause, and then I started to yell at the top of my lungs, “Where were you Jews when six million Jews were being burned to death in the ovens? Where were you?” It sent chills through the audience, which was almost always all-Jewish, because at the time there was a great deal of soul-searching within the Jewish community over whether they had done enough to stop the slaughter of their people—some argued that they should have applied pressure on President Roosevelt to bomb Auschwitz, for example—so the speech touched a sensitive nerve. At some performances, Jewish girls got out of their seats and screamed and cried from the aisles in sadness, and at one, when I asked, “Where were
you
when six million Jews were being burned to death in the ovens of Auschwitz?” a woman was so overcome with anger and guilt that she rose and shouted back at me, “Where were
you?”

At the time, I was outraged along with most people, Jews and gentiles alike, that the British were stopping ships from carrying the half-starved survivors of Hitler’s death camps to a new
life—people with little food, nothing to go on except a few dried-up handfuls of hope, including children still suffering from typhus and bleeding internally. That people fresh out of Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz should be stopped on the open sea by British warships and interned again behind barbed wire on Cyprus was enraging. I did not know then that Jewish terrorists were indiscriminately killing Arabs and making refugees out of them in order to take their land; nor did I understand that the British had taken it upon themselves to authorize the forced removal of millions of Arabs who had lived on that land as long as the biblical Jews had.

The play, as well as my friendship with the Adlers, helped make me a zealous advocate for Israel and later a kind of traveling salesman for it. I explained my plans in this letter to my parents shortly after the play closed:

After volunteering to raise money, I realized that the American Jewish community was divided over the issue of just how militant Jews should be in pursuing their aspirations for a homeland. Some supported David Ben-Gurion, who while publicly seeming to acquiesce to Britain’s insistence that Jewish refugees be interned on Cyprus and other places, was secretly smuggling boatloads of them into Palestine. Others were more impatient and supported Jewish underground groups such as the Stern Gang and the Irgun Zvai Leumi, whose leaders believed that terrorism and military action were necessary to wear down British resistance and lead to the early creation of Israel. I sided with the militants, as did a lot of my Jewish friends. Seeing the films made during the liberation of the Nazi death camps had been a searing experience for me, and I thought that Jews, who had suffered so much, had to do whatever was necessary to acquire a safe place where they could not be punished further by the world. I contributed as much money as I could to the Irgun and helped raise money to buy food for the internment camps, then became a member of one of about twenty two-man teams that traveled around the country soliciting support for the League for a Free Palestine, which in fact was a front for the Irgun. In Jewish schools, synagogues and other places, we described how European Jews who had been lucky enough to survive Hitler’s death camps were being imprisoned in displaced-person camps nearly as inhumane as those the Nazis operated. And we argued that the British had to be pushed out
of Palestine. There was always a lot of yelling at the temples we visited between the Jews who favored Ben-Gurion’s approach and those favoring the terrorists whom I supported and who at the time were called “Freedom Fighters.” Now I understand much more about the complexity of the situation than I did then.

IN A LETTER
written to my parents from Washington while I was helping the Irgun, I told them: “Washington is strongly anti-Negro and I’m getting awfully mad, so I hope we leave soon. Saw in the newsreel that the Ku Klux Klan is beginning to function en masse again.… It makes you gape in awe to think about it. When I get to Chicago, I’m going out to Libertyville to speak on the food drive. I send almost all my salary over to Europe, but I can’t feel that it’s enough.… No definite plans for the summer yet, but a thousand possibilities, maybe a play with Tallulah Bankhead …”

Edie Van Cleve wanted me to try out for a production of Jean Cocteau’s
The Eagle Has Two Heads
, starring Tallulah, who was a close friend of Edie’s. I would have done just about anything Edie asked me to because she was kind, extremely generous and helpful to me during those formative years. Besides, I needed the money.

Before Edie sent me to up to Tallulah’s home in Westchester County for an audition, a friend told me that she was gay, but I quickly discovered otherwise. Tallulah was an example of a performer who wasn’t much of an actress but who became a star because of a distinctive and unusual personality. She had an
engaging deep voice, smelled of Russian Leather perfume and smoked English cigarettes, which she pulled out of a red box, pressed into a long silver holder, and lit slowly and deliberately, as if she were doing it onstage. She had a sharp nose and chin and a slash mouth—perfect casting for the Wicked Witch in
The Wizard of Oz
. With her low, alcohol-fouled voice, Tallulah could be very entertaining. She was intelligent and witty and told funny stories. She informed me she’d recently been involved with a man with a huge nose that was covered with warts; he was truly a monument to ugliness, she said, and after she spent a weekend with him, she told a friend she had performed fellatio on him.

Her friend, who knew how ugly the man was, said she was astonished. “How could you possibly have done that?”

“Darling,” Tallulah said, “anything to get away from that face.”

As soon as I finished the reading, Tallulah asked me to be in the play, but I think she was more interested in me for sex than for the part of Stanislas. After rehearsals started I discovered that she usually got sloshed early in the day and spent the remaining hours getting drunker. She began inventing reasons for me to visit her at the Elysee Hotel, supposedly to go over the script, and I dreaded it, but she was the star of the show and I needed the money. She would spend the early part of these evenings with her eyes at half-mast, her lips lurking around the fracture of a smile, and then begin the arabesque of seduction. She was forty-three, I was twenty-two, and apparently she liked young men. I have more compassion for her now than I did then. I’ve since met other actresses whose beauty and attractiveness was the core of their sense of self-esteem and have had difficulty accepting the loss of it as they grew older; like Tallulah, some of them have turned to younger men to restore what they think they’ve lost. Tallulah was like that, although I didn’t understand it then.