Cinema: A Tiger in the Reeds

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One day when he was 17, Marlon Brando took a bottle of hair tonic to school. When nobody was looking, he dribbled a thin stream of the stuff down a corridor, into an empty study room, and up the front wall. On the wall he scrawled, with the almost invisible liquid, a shocking word. Next period, when the room was full, he set a match to the hair tonic. Blue flame whooshed through the room, and the handwriting on the wall that day was nothing short of illuminating.

A little more than a decade later, Bad Boy Brando, still something of a showoff, has pulled the trick again. But this time his wall is a hundred thousand movie screens, his performance is distinctly more artistic, and his audience is the popeyed world. Six pictures in four years—The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, Julius Caesar, The Wild One, On the Waterfront—have branded the Brando name and face blue-hot on the public mind.

In a business where money talks, Brando is now being hailed as “a real drag-’em-in big-tenner like nobody since Clark Gable.” And his pictures have won loud, critical huzzahs as well as some stentorian box-office grosses. Last week Brando completed a seventh, Désirée, a film version of Annemarie Selinko’s 1953 bestselling novel, in which he plays Napoleon. Twentieth Century-Fox boldly predicts that it may take in up to $10 million. “Two more like Brando,” said one producer, “and television can crawl back in the tube.”

Byron from Brooklyn. One like Brando, as a matter of fact, is more than Hollywood has been able to handle, or even figure out. The big studios, which are capable of taking endless pains to exploit either a valuable property or an eccentric personality, have not yet been able to answer the basic question: What is Brando, and what does he have that the U.S. public seems to want more of?

It could hardly be conventional good looks. Brando has a nose that drips down his face, according to a make-up man, “like melted ice cream” (it caused him to flunk his first screen test ten years ago). But then again, as one fan tried to explain, he does have a kind of “lyric lunkishness—he looks like a Lord Byron from Brooklyn.” Is sex appeal his secret? No doubt about it, said one producer: “He’s a walking hormone factory.” An exhibitor, musing about his own business, said: “He’s everybody between 10 and 20 that comes into my theater, and they’re really coming to see themselves. He’s the Valentino of the bop generation, and he’s bringing the kids back to the movies.”

Nonsense, says Elia Kazan, who directed him in Streetcar and Waterfront. “Brando is just the best actor in the world today.” Many experts agree. Not since John Barrymore first hauled on his buskins has a young actor’s fire brought such a light to so many critics’ eyes. Almost all his Broadway performances have won rave reviews (“our most memorable young actor”), and he has backed the cinema critics into the adjective bin. They have felt in Brando’s acting a kind of abysmal reality that not even Barrymore, who in all technical respects was far and away Brando’s superior, could plumb. At moments he can vanish into the character he is portraying like a salamander into stone—or a tiger in the reeds. Said one thoughtful playgoer: “The only other place I’ve ever seen such a terrifying shift of identity is in a schizophrenic ward. But this man has control of what he’s doing. He has the power of total camouflage, like a dweller in the third day of creation.” A moviemaker sighed last week: “I thought I’d seen everything, but it looks as if we’ve got a genius for a matinee idol.”

The Slob. The realization that the public could go for an actor who was neither beautiful nor dumb shook Hollywood hard. Brando himself was even more of a shock. When he landed in town in 1950 to make The Men, Hollywood stood there with wide-open arms and a dazzling smile of welcome. But Brando, a sullen kid who went everywhere in blue jeans and a soiled T shirt, stubbornly resisted the town’s professional charm. He snorted at the “funnies in satin Cadillacs” and told them precisely, in Miltonic periods of incomprehensible jive talk, what to do with their “putrid glamour.” He wanted to be left strictly alone, he snarled, and as for that “cultural boneyard” called Hollywood: “The only reason I’m here is because I don’t yet have the moral strength to turn down the money.”

Hollywood reacted with hurt confusion, and clouds of columnists began buzzing about Brando’s head. Day after day, the brightest color in many a gossip column was Brando blood. They called him “the male Garbo,” and “a Dostoevsky version of Tom Sawyer.” They built up a legend in the public mind that, true or false, is sure to stick. Where Barrymore was “The Great Profile,” Valentino “The Sheik” and Gable “The King,” Marlon Brando is known to millions who read about Hollywood every day as “The Slob.”

The Slob is by no means all he is wisecracked up to be. Two simple examples: he takes his work seriously and he pays his debts. But some of the legends have been so often repeated, even by Brando’s admirers, that they are hard to separate from the historical facts.

The Legend. Brando’s closest friends admit that he often needs a shave, and that regardless of the company he is in, he belches or scratches as the need arises. Although he now makes as much as $200,000 a picture, he is often without matching trousers and jacket; until very recently he preferred blue jeans for all social gatherings. The day he arrived in Hollywood, Marlon honored the occasion by dressing up in his only suit, but somehow failed to notice that the trousers had a hole in the knee and a slit in the seat, through which the tail of his shirt was showing. Shirts are a nuisance, anyway; when one gets dirty, he just rolls it up in a ball, stuffs it in a closet and buys another. At table, Marlon often drops his head to plate level and shovels it in, and if ketchup splatters on the tablecloth—let it. Once, so the story runs, he was found holding a piece of bread and dreamily buttering his sleeve.

The frequent condition of his living quarters—in Hollywood a five-room bungalow in Benedict Canyon, in New York City a vast studio in Carnegie Hall—was perhaps best described by a man who came to deliver a vacuum cleaner. “That boy doesn’t need a vacuum cleaner,” he said. “He needs a plow.” The mess was at its worst in the days when Marlon had a pet raccoon, but even before that, it sometimes got pretty bad. Actress Shelley Winters reports that when Marlon and Comic Wally Cox shared a Manhattan apartment, they once undertook to paint the walls of the place. Says Shelley: “They painted one wall and then, for one solid year, the canvas, the buckets of paint and the brushes lay on the living-room floor. They just stepped around them.”

Nothing Sacred. Be it ever so rough and tumble, Marlon’s home is his castle. He seldom answers the phone before it rings 20 times, often lets invited guests batter wearily at the door for long periods before he casually lets them in.

Worst of all, in many a moviemaker’s mind, is Brando’s habit of teasing Hollywood’s sacred cows, the gossip columnists. Actress Jessica Tandy once went to Marlon’s dressing room with a powerful woman who, as everybody in the entertainment business knows, likes to think of herself as still quite youthful-looking. Said Marlon to Jessica in his silkiest tone: “Ah, this must be your mother.” Columnist Hedda Hopper also went to interview him. “She talked for half an hour solid,” says a Hollywood reporter, “and in all that time Marlon gave exactly one and a half grunts.” He now calls Hedda “The One with the Hat,” and Louella Parsons “The Fat One.” The two influential lady writers naturally feel some resentment, and frequently express it in their columns.

More Sinned Against. But by other members of the sex, The Slob is more amiably known as a Don Juan. (“Done one!” punned a Broadway actress. “He’s done ’em all.”) He is a hit with the ladies, moreover, despite the fact that (as one of his girls panted) “he does things to you in public that you hardly expect even in private.” Still, as a loverboy, Marlon is almost more sinned against than sinning. Many women find it hard to keep their hands off him. A famous middle-aged actress threw herself into his arms the first time they met, and sobbed: “Be my last, great love!” To Hollywood’s astonishment, he passes up most of the professional beauties and contract cuties, dates waitresses and secretaries instead. Says one of them: “Marlon is very much of a man. All his former girl friends are still waiting for him.”

In rehearsals, Marlon is said to “flob around” so indifferently that the other actors get no benefit from the reading. During a Streetcar rehearsal, Actor Karl Malden once smashed his fist into a wall in sheer frustration. Marlon refuses to change, says he has to feel himself into the part that way. Once when a woman tried to compliment him on a screen performance, Marlon broke in coldly: “You’ve got a run in your stocking.”

The depth of what one actress calls “marlishness” came last February, when Brando complained to Fox that he did not like his role in The Egyptian. A Fox executive talked him out of his objections, or thought he had. Came the day when the first scene was to be shot. As Fox later protested: sets were built, costumes on, extras standing by, cameras ready to roll. No Brando. Then came a telegram from his psychoanalyst in New York: Marlon was “a very sick and mentally confused boy,” and in absolutely no condition to work. Fox threw Edmond Purdom into the Brando part, sued Marlon for $2,000 damages. Marlon settled the suit by agreeing to make Désirée, later gloated openly about his success in “copping a medical plea.” After that, a Fox executive remarked: “The only good thing I can say about this twerp is that he doesn’t like marijuana.”

Brando on Brando. Last week Actor Brando, interviewed by a TIME correspondent in his dressing room on the Désirée set, tried hard to scotch such talk and to explain his behavior. “I’ll be damned if I feel obliged to defend myself,” he burst out in a cultured and fervent half-whisper, “but I am sick to death of being thought of as a blue-jeaned slobbermouth and I am sick to death of having people come up and say hello and then just stand there expecting you to throw a raccoon at them. I have always hated the fact that I have been obliged to conform. I agree that no man is an island, but I also feel that conformity breeds mediocrity. I think this country needs, in addition to a good five-cent cigar, a little five-cent investment in tolerance for the expression of individuality.”

Marlon conceded that “when I came to Hollywood I had a rather precious and coddled attitude about my own integrity. It was stupid of me to resist so directly the prejudice that money is right. But just because the big shots were nice to me I saw no reason to overlook what they did to others and to ignore the fact that they normally behave with the hostility of ants at a picnic. The marvelous thing about Hollywood is that these people are recognized as sort of the norm, while I am the flip. These gnarled and twisted personalities see no other way to live except on a pedestal of malicious gossip and rumor to be laid on the ears of unsuspecting people who believe them.

“Well, I really did feel I had every right in the world to resist the insipid protocol of turning my private life into the kind of running serial you find on bubble-gum wrappers. You can’t just take sensitive parts of yourself and splatter them around like so much popcorn butter. Personal freedom has always been terribly important to me, and I have carried aloofness as a sort of banner to my sense of freedom.”

What horrified Brando most: “People have asked me if I’m really Stanley Kowalski. Why, he’s the antithesis of me. He is intolerant and selfish. Kowalski is a man without any sensitivity, without any kind of morality except his own mewling, whimpering insistence on his own way. I can’t think—I can’t believe—that we are here for one terrible, gnashing, stomping moment and that’s all.”

Marlon’s friends insist that he is a thoroughly misunderstood young man. “If this is a slob,” says Producer George Glass, “it should of happened to me.” Director Kazan calls him “one of the gentlest—every possibly the gentlest—person I have ever known.” A girl friend claims that until recently he was so sensitive that he hated to eat lettuce because it was so noisy. Wally Cox says he is “a creative philosopher, a very deep thinker. He’s a real liberating force for his friends.”

His openheartedness is attested to on every side. Taken as a whole, his life suggests strongly that the heart of the matter was expressed in a crudely chalked sign that he once nailed up in his flat. It read: “You Ain’t Livin’ If You Don’t Know It.”

Quicksand & Old Corsets. Marlon Brando Jr. was born on April 3, 1924 in Omaha, Neb., the third child, first son of a salesman of limestone products. His mother, described years later by Actress Stella Adler as “a very beautiful, a heavenly, lost, girlish creature,” played leads for the local dramatic society and burned for a larger stage of life. Her children caught fire. “She was a wonderful, wonderful woman,” says daughter Jocelyn, now a Broadway actress (Mister Roberts), “with a great capacity for understanding and giving.” Marlon, says Jocelyn, was “a blond, fat-bellied little boy, quite serious and very determined.” He showed his sense of drama early. Whenever anybody would look, the little ham would shinny up on the mantelpiece, pose there like a general, clutch his heart all at once as if shot, and topple like a corpse to the floor.

To young Marlon, better known in those days as Bud, life was an unbroken series of contests: Who could eat fastest, hold his breath longest, open his mouth widest, tell the biggest lie, do the least homework? One day he and some other boys invented the best game of all: Who can sink farthest in the quicksand along the river bank without hollering for help? (Luckily, nobody won.) Bud and sister Frances (now Mrs. Richard Loving, a painter, living in Mundelein, Ill.) ran away from home regularly every Sunday afternoon. On Saturdays Bud rummaged devotedly through the neighbors’ rubbish, came home bearing old corsets, broken umbrellas, German helmets, lopsided baby coaches, “just in case.”

After they moved to Libertyville,* near Chicago, the Brandos had a horse, a cow, a great Dane, a goose, a pair of bantams, several rabbits and 28 cats. Bud was the only one who could milk the cow. To this menagerie he would occasionally add a wounded snake or broken bird he had found somewhere. Once, when Bud’s favorite chicken died, Mrs. Brando buried it in the garden. Bud dug it up and brought it back into the house. Mrs. Brando buried the chicken again. Bud dug it up. This went on for some time.

At the age of eight, Marlon brought home a live woman. “I found her lying near the lake, Mother,” he said. “She’s sick, and doesn’t have any place to stay.” (Mother put her up for the night in the local hotel.) Later he brought home a whole series of charity cases: his girl friends. Sighed his grandmother: “Marlon always fell for the cross-eyed girls.”

Out the Window. Free as a bird at home, Marlon never took kindly to the cage of formal education. When his father sent him to Shattuck Military Academy—”the military asylum,” he still calls it—Marlon tried hard to be a good soldier. The first two years went pretty well. He got parts in two school plays, but in both cases (he played a corpse on the gallows at midnight and an explorer in an Egyptian tomb) it was too dark to tell whether he was really any good. Then, all at once he was expelled. One of the reasons: late one night he emptied a chamberpot out the dormitory window, saw too late that there was somebody passing below.

Marlon thought for awhile that he would like to enter the ministry. Talked out of that, he spent the summer of 1943 as a tile fitter in a drain factory (he was turned down for the draft because of a trick knee). In the fall he went to New York to live with sister Frances, then studying painting at New York’s Art Students League. After four days as an elevator operator at Best’s department store (he quit because it embarrassed him to call out things like “lingerie”). Marlon went to study dramatics with Stella Adler at Manhattan’s New School. Before the first week was over, Teacher Adler told friends that this “puppy thing”—he was only 19—would be, within a year, “the best young actor in the American theater.”

Into the Theater. For the first time in his life, Marlon worked hard. In his first Broadway part, playing a 15-year-old in I Remember Mama, he struck the critics as merely “charming,” but theater people began to take notice. “Incredibly good,” exclaimed Director Robert Lewis, and the offers began to pour in. In Truckline Cafe (“quite effective”), Candida (“superb”) and A Flag Is Born (“the bright, particular star”), Brando raised high hopes; and in A Streetcar Named Desire he fulfilled them.

Streetcar’s Stanley Kowalski, as Brando conceived him, was a man to match the blast furnaces and the man-killing mines of an industrial age—”one of those guys who work hard and have lots of flesh with nothing supple about them. They never open their fists, really. They grip a cup like an animal would wrap a paw around it. They’re so muscle-bound they can hardly talk. Stanley didn’t give a damn how he said a thing. His purpose was to convey his idea. He had no awareness of himself at all.” As he lived the part, Brando dragged his audience back by the hair of their heads to the Neanderthal cave of human origin, and made them stare at the animal leavings on the floor. “It was awful and it was sublime,” said one director. “Only once in a generation do you see such a thing in the theater.”

Complete Scale. How could a youngster of 23, with only four Broadway parts behind him, strike so deep and come up with so much? His teacher, Stella Adler, has an answer: “Marlon never really had to learn to act. He knew. Right from the start he was a universal actor. Nothing human was foreign to him. He had the potential for any role. It’s incredible how large the scale of his emotions is—he has complete scale. And he has all the external equipment—looks and voice and power of presence&$151;to go with it.” Right from the beginning, says Director Robert Lewis, Marlon’s instinct was to fit himself to a character, not the character to himself-“to work from the inside out.” “He has an inner rhythm that never fails.” says Director Erwin Piscator; and Lewis speaks of “a natural dangerousness and unpredictability that’s always exciting in the theater”All these qualities, his friends say, are symptoms of an almost frighteningly susceptible nature. “He’s like a glob of the yeast of creation,” says one. He picked up a working knowledge of French and Spanish in a matter of days. He can imitate someone precisely after watching him for two minutes. He almost never answers the phone in his own voice, usually convinces the caller that he is someone else. His sense of humor is as graphic as an otter’s. One day a woman columnist walked up to him and said in a sugary voice: “Why, you look like everybody else!” Marlon stared at her for a moment in silence, then turned without a word to the nearest corner and stood on his head.

Lao-tse & Yoga. Marlon’s physical co ordination is equal to almost any task his imagination sets. He can play the bongos well enough to take a Saturday night seat in a Latin combo. He can box and fence and do an interpretive dance with all but the pros, and he has mastered enough yoga to demonstrate an exercise in which the abdominal muscles are rotated in a flowing movement around the navel.

Along with the rest, even though Marlon never quite made a high-school diploma, goes an impressive intellect. He reads constantly (e.g., Nietzsche, Lao-tse, psychoanalytical textbooks), and has quite a flair for verbal imagery (he once described Wally Cox as “an old. fragile, beautifully embroidered Chinese ceremonial robe, with a few little Three-in-One oil spots on it”).

All his talents were brought by the current On the Waterfront to a deep-burning focus in the characterization of Terry Malloy. The role demanded all that Kowalski had, and far more. Kowalski was a brute, and to understand him Brando’s heart had to die a little. Terry Malloy was a brute who was turning, in agony and wonder, into a human being, and to interpret him Brando had to take the more painful brunt of being born.

Throughout the entire film there is not a break in Brando’s almost magical lifelikeness. At times the audience feels it is being sucked into a painful situation that it had only intended to observe from a safe distance, and there are moments of sudden, nervous recoil. At several of the most painful points, when Brando makes a gesture almost too natural to be borne, the spectators do not dare to gasp—they giggle. There could be no higher tribute.

Firmer Grip. Waterfront, in short, suggests strongly that Brando is getting too big for his blue jeans. But the question arises: What else is he to wear? From Brando’s precocious eminence, the future may well look less like a land of dreams than a highly promising nightmare. If, as he professes, he cares chiefly about acting as an art, there will hardly be enough opportunity in commercial Hollywood to keep him there much longer. Désirée, for instance, which will be released next month, is another big slick costume historical with no artistic nonsense about it. Producer Darryl Zanuck claims that Brando turns in one of his greatest performances as Napoleon, but Marlon modestly doubts it. “Most of the time,” he says. “I just let the make-up play the part.” Marlon’s next role, Sky Masterson in the film version of Guys and Dolls, will give him a chance to show how well he can warble and hoof, but it hardly brings him any closer to Hamlet. And after Hollywood, where can Brando go? Broadway? In the last 15 years the New York stage has sunk to a historical low in which whole seasons pass without a single first-rate play appearing. Furthermore, there is no U.S. repertory theater in which a young actor can try the great roles for size, and build his technique while he wins his public.

As a result, while Brando’s counterparts in England and France—Laurence Olivier, Jean-Louis Barrault, Gerard Philipe—play a number of important roles on the stage every year as well as one or two in the movies, Brando has only created 14 roles in his entire career of ten years. Furthermore, in five of those parts he played variations on the Kowalski theme. His intimates claim that he can do high comedy, low farce and classic tragedy just as well, but the world has had small chance to judge for itself. One director believes “there’s a Faust in this kid, but he may never get to play it.”

And Brando has personal as well as professional problems, or so the Slob stuff would indicate. But since his mother’s death last year, he seems to have taken a firmer grip on his private life. There is less talk of a two-year trip around the world or “a nice long school in Paris,” or a quick retirement to his Nebraska cattle farm, which is managed by his father. He still murmurs about an island paradise where he could concern himself exclusively with “eating and sleeping and the reproduction of the race,” but he says less often that “I still don’t know whether I want to be an actor.”

Facing Up. In the opinion of many of his intimates, psychoanalysis has helped too. Like many a creative person, Brando seems to be by nature so sensitive to impressions—from within as well as from without, of his own emotions as well as of the world around him—that he often has a hard time handling them. He claims, for instance, that “if I go into a room where there are a hundred people, and one of them doesn’t like me, I’ll know it, and I have to get out of there.” This is possibly a somewhat morbid and perhaps flamboyant exaggeration of his condition, but his friends say that he often does seem to flounder in a sea of impressions. It is to resist them, they say, that he puts up his arbitrary, antisocial front.

“It goes further than that,” says one acquaintance. “Somewhere in childhood Marlon got the idea that he didn’t really have to face the facts about himself if he didn’t want to. Then too, somebody apparently gave him an idealized picture of reality, and when he found he couldn’t measure up to it, part of Marlon turned renegade. It’s the renegade, you’ll notice, that Marlon has come to personify to the public. He needs to find something in life, something in himself, that is permanently true, and he needs to lay down his life before it. For such an intense personality, nothing less than that will do.”

The analysis seems to have taken Marlon part way to the goal. He now seems to realize, his friends think, that he did not want freedom so much as he wanted irresponsibility. Now, they say, he is more ready to face life for what it is,—to live it with what he’s got. If they are right, and if Brando can really “lay down his life” before his art, the U.S. stands to witness some spectacular histrionics before this prince of players says good night.

* Other famed Libertyvillians: Adlai Stevenson, Publisher Alicia Patterson (TIME, Sept. 13).