Show Business: Down Beatnik

The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn . . .

—Jack Kerouac, in On the Road, defining the Beat Generation

Hollywood Housewife Anna O’Callaghan Kashfi Brando was burned, burned, burned with her husband. Last week, less than a year after her sudden marriage to Actor Marlon Brando, Anna announced that she and Marlon were bust. Sighed she: “I can no longer take his indifference and his strange way of living.” Commented Hollywood Seer Hedda Hopper: “He has a terrific following among members of the Beat Generation. He loves the adulation of a mob. After that, going home to a family must seem humdrum.” Thus the handy Beat Generation label, a device more literary than lifelike that has been applied to everything from Godot* to Bardot, was formally pinned on Brando. But the experts disagreed violently about whether the actor with the sweatshirt and the lyric lunkishness really could boast the credentials of a true beatnik. Certain habits are in his favor: he has been known to greet visitors in his underwear, date hash-house waitresses, play the bongo drums. In Beatnik Kerouac’s phrase, he seems to want everything at the same time. On the other hand, he has been living in a pleasant split-level Hollywood house instead of a way-out pad in San Francisco’s North Beach; he has extensive investments; he has never said a single kind word for dope and has expressed interest—grammatically—in what happens to the world tomorrow.

As Brando hummed and / or drummed in some secluded hideaway, a friend argued that “beat” is not the proper word for Brando: “It is a misunderstood term and is used as a demeaning handle.” Even if it is demeaning, one inhabitant of The Place—a badly beat San Francisco joint —announced last week that it is too good for Marlon. “The beats think Brando’s a slob,” he cried. Not so, retorted a denizen of the Co-Existence Bagel Shop. “He comes up here and pals on weekends. Makes the parties. He represents us in regions where we can’t go. We’re in revolt against modern society, and Brando fights our fight for us in the middle of all that Hollywood junk.”

* For news of Godot’s creator and another avant-garde beatnik, see BOOKS.