Ping
Wow. Steyn spares no words on Brando.
My goodness, that was brutal!
The biggest of them all
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: July 4 2004)
The man who once embodied male beauty ended his career as the fattest star in motion picture history. But despite the debauchery, the legend of Brando endured.
A few years back, The New Yorker published a cartoon in which two ladies discussed the appeal of Marlon Brando: "He plays galoots really well," suggested the first woman, "galoot" being American slang for a big, uncouth, rough-hewn kind of a fellow - "ya big galoot", "ya big lug", etc.
"No, he's not a galoot," says the second. "Like in On The Waterfront, he's much more sensitive than a galoot."
"He's a sensitive galoot," offers the first.
"Isn't that our ideal?" says the second. "A sensitive galoot?"
For a while, the sensitive galoot was everyone's ideal - raw, physical, bluecollar, but also tender, vulnerable, noble. The biggest night of his life was December 3, 1947, when he opened on Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. The crowd cheered for half an hour, and by the time they stopped applauding it wasn't just a great first-night performance but a template for a generation of American actors. The publicity shots for the play remained the iconic image of Brando's career - a muscular man in white T-shirt and blue jeans, a new dress code for a new acting style. It's difficult 57 years later to appreciate just what a startling sight it was in 1947, when the big male stars were Ronald Colman, Cary Grant, Fredric March, Bing Crosby. It advertised Brando's authenticity.
But what it was was a costume. The audience, insofar as they thought about it, assumed Brando had pulled on a pair of jeans and grabbed a T-shirt. But the show's designer, Lucinda Ballard, invented the look - the skin-tight undershirt sculpted to Brando's torso, and the first fitted jeans in American history. He was a big galoot, but he was a bespoke one: brutal but beautiful. And that's what he played in that first stellar decade - sensitive toughs, dignified oafs, a Broadway notion of a working-class stiff.
Even as the man himself decayed, the legacy of that look - Streetcar cred - endured for decades, in movies, in photography, in advertising, in American habits of dress. But, if it's authenticity you're after, Brando had a lot more of it half a century later as the fattest star in motion picture history - a huge, wobbling, blubber-ass pushing 400lb and wheezing his way through sight-read dialogue written on his shirt. And, with Brando's shirt size, that's a lot of dialogue. In Don Juan De Marco (1995), playing Johnny Depp's psychiatrist, he finally dresses in the ordinary clothes he only pretended to wear in Streetcar - the shapeless, loose-fitting plus-sizes you find in any suburban mall. The man who once embodied male beauty ended his career doing the first Hollywood sex scene in which it's the man who has the sheet tucked discreetly round his neck like a demure 1950s starlet and it's left to the woman, Faye Dunaway, to get her leg over, an expression which in Marlon's case took on a certain daunting literalness. But what can you do? You can't get a body double for someone whose body's already quadruple.
There are plenty of stars who die young, fade into character roles, stop working, or turn into beloved comic figures, like Marlon's onetime paramour Zsa Zsa Gabor. But Brando's career is unprecedented in Hollywood - a James Dean who turned into Zsa Zsa, ballooned into a grotesque blob uncastable in anything other than toga romps about the later Roman emperors and yet somehow kept working in smaller and smaller roles for bigger and bigger fees. Usually, no matter how bad they get, stars still look great. Brando looked terrible, picked awful movies, and yet retained his legend: the ultimate movie star and the ultimate lardbutt, all in one.
He was born in 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska, hometown of another Hollywood colossus, Fred Astaire. They're not as dissimilar as you might think: they both moved well, which is the most important quality in a movie star. We think of Astaire in white tie and tails singing Cole Porter on a fabulous Art Deco set; we think of Brando as a boxer and longshoreman. But it was Astaire who had the tougher childhood, and Brando who grew up in a middle-class family with an artsy, bohemian side. His mother had time and money to help found the Omaha community theatre and persuade another local boy, Henry Fonda, to try acting.
In his autobiography, his parents get short shrift and the material comforts of his middle-class upbringing are buried under a mountain of psychological damage. Both mom and dad were alcoholics, his pa dismissed him and was too busy whoring, etc. "Most of my childhood memories of my father are of being ignored," wrote Brando. "He was far more emotionally destructive than he realised. I've often thought I would have been much better off if I had grown up in an orphanage."
Maybe. But, no matter how drunk and abusive they were, Brando survived his parents, which is more than two of his own children can claim: his son Christian was jailed for shooting and killing the boyfriend of his half-sister Cheyenne, and emerged from prison his life shattered; Cheyenne later committed suicide. Named for one of Brando's great causes, the plight of American Indians, she seemed to symbolise the way her dad found it easier to care about entire, distant races than the specific, particular people around him. He fathered, officially, 11 children by his three wives and the family "maid". There are said to be another 10 or so by other women. And there were many more who never saw the light of day: at his sexual peak, he kept two abortionists on retainer. And, despite nailing almost every desirable broad of the era, he managed to find time in his hectic schedule for some guys, too.
He preferred Asian babes to Hollywood blondes, a taste for exotic women supposedly acquired under the tutelage of his governess. "I was three or four when Ermi came to live with us in Omaha," he wrote. "I see her as vividly now as I did then; she was 18 years old, sightly cross-eyed and had fine, silky dark hair. She was Danish, but a touch of Indonesian blood gave her skin a slightly dusky, smoky patina. Her laugh I will always remember. When she entered a room, I knew it without seeing or hearing her because she had a fragrant breath that was extraordinary. I don't know its chemical composition, but her breath was sweet, like crushed and slightly fermented fruit. At night, we slept together. She was nude, and so was I, and it was a lovely experience."
By the time he wrote those words, Brando was doing a passable imitation of a crushed and slightly fermented fruit himself. The man credited with bringing - via the Method - Stanislavskian psychological realism to Hollywood had descended into his own psychologically unreal caricature of South Sea seigneurial debauchery, spending his days on the beach of his Tahitian island making love to native women and eating junk food.
He had eight great years, from his first stage appearances in I Remember Mama and Truckline Cafe to Elia Kazan's film On The Waterfront in 1954. Roger Ebert, the dean of American film critics, described Brando's turn in Waterfront as a "riff on reality", rather than the real thing. That seems right: at one point, Eva Marie Saint drops her white glove and, before handing it back, Brando absentmindedly slips it on his own hand. When you look at all his bits of business, the performance seems to exist at a level of heightened reality trembling on the brink of the ridiculous. Even at his peak, the great one can seem like a mid-century, dress-down, self-consciously cool version of a Victorian ham actor.
After Waterfront, no one - least of all the star himself - seemed to know what to do with Brando. He was paired with Sinatra in Guys And Dolls, wound up with the best songs, and didn't have a clue what to do with them. Adding insult to injury, the director, Joe Mankiewicz, asked Frank if he could maybe run through the numbers with Marlon. Sinatra once gave me an entertaining demonstration of trying to teach Brando Luck Be A Lady:
Frank: "They call you lady luckkkk!"
Marlon: "Day cawwoo lehyluh."
"I can't teach this boy nuttin'," said Frank.
It's strange seeing the two of them together. Sinatra was a two-take actor; Brando liked to take all day. As Frank told Mankiewicz, "Don't put me in the game, Coach, until Mumbles is through rehearsing." Fifty years on, Brando's reading of Sky Masterson is a bland nothing, whereas Sinatra's Nathan Detroit is about what you'd expect - and in its own two-take way much closer to the spirit of Damon Runyon. Mumbles turned to stumbles through the Sixties, until Francis Ford Coppola rescued him with The Godfather. The following year, 1972, Last Tango In Paris was a harrowing take on lost middle age whose big sex scene gave Brando's career its last big quotable line: from "Stelllllaaaaaa!!!" via "I couldda binna contenduh" and "I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse" to "Get the buttah!"
Last Tango took so much out of Brando he decided thereafter only to work for money. So he became famous as the guy who got millions of dollars to do one crummy scene as Superman's dad. He rationalised it by expressing contempt for his profession. "If a studio offered to pay me as much to sweep the floor as it did to act," he said, "I'd sweep the floor." By then he was in no condition to, and, even if he had, it's not as effective for pulling chicks. And what did he do with the money anyway? And if being an actor is a nothing job anyone can do, why should we listen to an actor lecturing us on the environment and Native Americans?
But at one level Brando was right. Sometimes an actor can create a persona so strong it lives independent of any particular vehicle. His fellow Nebraskan Fred Astaire did. You can watch a third-rate Astaire movie, The Belle Of New York or Royal Wedding, and still understand his importance to film. That's not true of Brando, for whom despite his "genius" (as The New York Times put it yesterday) entire decades are total write-offs.
In a last moment in the spotlight, he made the papers a year or two back when it emerged that he and Jack Nicholson had temporarily moved in together. "Get the buttah!" was no longer a roar of sexual liberation to a Parisian bedmate but a reminder to Jack as he headed out to the supermarket.
If Brando regretted consciously self-detonating his career three decades ago, he didn't regret it enough to do anything about it. On that first night of Streetcar on Broadway, his mother sent a telegram: "Try not to make an ass of yourself. Mom." By the time he waddled into frame on Don Juan De Marco, he'd made himself literally the biggest ass in Hollywood. He should have listened to mum.
I had a 6th grade teacher who used to call me a "big
galoot." Judging by the definition here, I think she
was right.
This is the problem with many people who espouse a "cause", on the left or right.
Marlon Brando was one messed up individual, but he had talent. He was perfect in "Streetcar" (I don't think Vivien Leigh cared for him too much) and in "On the Waterfront", and whatever went on behind the scenes of "Guys and Dolls", I thought he was a very sexy Sky Masterson. I thought "Apocolypse Now" was pretty stupid. But in "The Godfather", he was...well, what can you say? You completely forget he's Marlon Brando and totally believe he's Don Corleone. That's the mark of a great actor, IMO.
I'd much rather remember his good film roles and just forget the pathetic, self-absorbed weirdo he was in real life.
Steyn bump
Steyn writes so often and so well it is hard to believe he is just one man.
Steyn let it loose. Brando was so uneven (poor script judgment at the least) that any attempt to lable him the greatest is truly unwarranted.