Marlon Brando Revealed

Marlon Brando won his first Oscar for his performance in On the Waterfront. Susan Mizruchi writes in her new book, Brando’s Smile, that Brando rewrote dialogue for one pivotal scene, something he frequently did in his films. Photo courtesy of On the Waterfront

When actor Marlon Brando died at age 80 in 2004, he was hailed as one of the greatest film actors of his time. The Nebraska native shot to fame at 23 playing Stanley Kowalski in the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. That performance jettisoned him to Hollywood where he quickly amassed a series of indelible performances that would influence generations of actors. Following his film debut as a bitter paraplegic veteran in Stanley Kramer’s 1950 drama The Men, Brando had four consecutive Oscar nominations for performances notable for their breadth: reprising his role as Kowalski in Streetcar’s film version, the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata!, the title role in Julius Caesar, and longshoreman Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, a role that won him his first Academy Award. He was nominated four more times over the next four decades, winning—and famously refusing—his second for his iconic role as Don Corleone in The Godfather.

Despite that success, by the time he died, Brando was derided by some critics who argued that his appetite for food and women had long outstripped his integrity as an actor. He was often compared to Orson Welles, whose later career failed to live up to his early brilliant performances.

Brando was adept at letting the public see only what he wanted them to see. What few realized was his insatiable curiosity. At the time of his death, he left a library totaling 4,000 books about things ranging from religion, history, and nature to 700 volumes on Native Americans. He also left a trove of carefully annotated scripts; these, along with his library, were auctioned off by Christie’s in 2005.

Those books and papers—along with personal letters, audio recordings, and other documents provided by the Brando estate, form the core of a fascinating new book by Susan Mizruchi, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English, titled Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work (W. W. Norton, 2014). A renowned cultural scholar and the author of Becoming Multicultural: Culture, Economy, and the Novel and The Rise of Multicultural America, Mizruchi had been a fan of the actor’s work since she was 12, when she saw him on TV in the 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty.

“I was drawn to the complexity of his sexuality and personality in films,” she says. “He played macho characters but he also played thoughtful, even bookish ones. He had charisma, amazing charm, and sex appeal.”

After the auction of Brando’s papers, Mizruchi wrote to the individual buyers and spent two years traveling the world, tracking down the material, photographing “every drop of marginalia” that Brando wrote in his books and all of the annotations in his scripts. When the Brando estate saw the amount of scholarship she had amassed, she was granted access to the estate’s papers.

Drawing on material unavailable to previous biographers, Mizruchi presents the mind at work behind the performances. “It has been difficult for us to see how much more the actor was than any one part, and how different the man was from all of them,” she writes in her introduction to Brando Smiles.

The author disputes the notion that Brando was indifferent to acting, arguing persuasively that he kept acting seriously up until his death. She also portrays Brando as a superb technician, one who could use a single prop to convey layers about his character’s feelings and psyche. Brando, Mizruchi writes, did exhaustive preparation and background reading before shooting. Prior to tackling the Zapata role, he read dozens of books about the history of conquest and traveled to southern Mexico, where Zapata was from, to learn about the revolutionary firsthand. He used the trip to study local accents and gestures. To prepare for his role as Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty, he amassed a collection of more than 100 books on Polynesia’s languages, history, and culture and visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York to seek out images of the region. He even studied Tahitian, translating some of the love scenes into the language for authenticity.

BU Today spoke with Mizruchi about Brando, the materials she had access to that previous biographers hadn’t, and what she discovered about the actor that surprised her. She will discuss Brando’s life and sign copies of her new book at a faculty author event tonight, Wednesday, October 1, in the fifth floor reading room at Barnes & Noble @ BU at 7 p.m.

BU Today: There have been so many biographies written about Brando. Why did you feel another one was warranted? 

Mizruchi: My book is based on a vast range of new materials that became available after Brando’s death in 2004, materials that yield an entirely new side of the human being and actor. No previous biographer has seen what I’ve seen: Brando’s personal film scripts and notes on films and his 4,000-book library.

What does your book set out to do?

To get as close to the truth about the man as possible by doing primary research and documenting every claim I make. I used my skills as a cultural historian to reveal the person behind the myth. Brando was very private, even secretive. He tended to compartmentalize his life and liked to control access to himself on the part of friends, family, and lovers. He kept people in the dark about each other and about different parts of himself. He was also of course an actor, with a great sense of humor, and he enjoyed disguising who he was and pulling peoples’ legs. The book also shows why his acting has been so widely admired, so influential: because there was real deliberateness and thought behind the performances.

Brando refused to be the icon that Broadway and Hollywood wanted to market once he was discovered at age 23—the inarticulate thuggish Stanley Kowalski. He insisted on being a studied character actor. I show that this is why the iconic image of Brando is so unstable—when you think of Brando the icon, you could think of the brutish Stanley K., the biker of The Wild One, the Godfather, the rogue Vietnam officer from Apocalypse Now. My book is about the deliberateness he brought to every role. Brando worked hard on his acting, building the characters he played, investing each one with specific characteristics—walks, voices, accents, gestures–rewriting their scripted lines (the only two authors he believed beyond his own revising capacities were Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams), creating their costumes, doing his own makeup (a rare skill for an American actor, but commonplace for Brando’s Yiddish Theatre forebears).

You argue that Brando was the victim of sexism. How so?

My point is that we have missed Brando’s mind and imagination because we have been so obsessed with his body—that’s a form of sexism. Brando has been consistently viewed as an actor and public figure who emblemized male beauty (and machismo) in his youth, and then became fat and self-indulgent as he aged. There’s some truth to the trajectory, though it’s always exaggerated (like a lot of actors and prizefighters, Brando was as good at losing weight as he was at gaining it—for instance, he had to wear padding to play Don Corleone in The Godfather because he’d lost too much weight for the role—but he simply gave up the battle when he was older), but the focus on the body misses a whole dimension of the person. That Brando loved language and poetry, that he was a wordsmith from a young age and with his childhood friend, actor Wally Cox, would compose lists of his favorite words, that he was fascinated by psychology and religion and especially admired the work of political philosopher Hannah Arendt, whose books he read cover to cover.

Brando was famous for conveying an ambivalence toward acting. But you found evidence to suggest otherwise. Can you talk about that?

One reason that Brando often sounded so hostile toward acting is that he was so anti-institutional. This is what made him a terrible student in school, especially military school, and it’s what made him dislike Broadway as much as Hollywood. He was drawn intuitively to the flaws, the hierarchies, and the injustices of institutional life. He also disliked the fact that Broadway and Hollywood were both driven by market considerations—something he later took advantage of in the most cynical way. But Brando’s views of acting were actually quite idealistic for a significant part of his career, but his idealism often came into conflict with institutional aspects of filmmaking. From his first Hollywood role, playing a paraplegic war veteran in Stanley Kramer’s social problem film The Men, to a much later example, the 1994 antiapartheid film A Dry White Season, Brando demonstrated his conviction that films could enlighten and elucidate social issues without sacrificing quality or entertainment value.

You write about his sense of humor and yet that was never conveyed in his on-screen work. Why not?

Brando loved humor and owned many books about the humor of different cultures. His playfulness and sense of humor were something that everyone I interviewed emphasized. He enjoyed cutting up, and he had a great time, for example, making the comedy Bedtime Story with David Niven. The two actors had such a wonderful time putting each other on that the filming often had to stop in order to get the two stars to stop laughing. But the film is pretty bad, and it’s clear that Brando’s deepest sense of human experience was tragic. When he talked about humor, he was most impressed by the grimness and bitterness that underwrote so much comedic work. He also recognized that risk was inherent in humor and the best comedians had to be fearless—the greater the risks they took, the greater the comedic payoff.

You provide some fascinating examples of Brando rewriting scenes. What struck you about his ear for dialogue and his revisions?

The main principle that Brando adhered to was: less is more. He never used an utterance if a gesture, shake of the head or wave of the hand, would do. And he regularly wrote or improvised some of the best lines for his characters after crossing out paragraphs of dialogue he considered overdone. He understood how expressive silence could be and the value of conciseness.

He came up with many film lines that have become colloquial. From The Godfather: “Bonasera, Bonasera, what did I ever do to make you treat me so disrespectfully?” “We’re not murderers, despite what this undertaker says.” From Mutiny on the Bounty: “I was just thinking, sir, that our little errand for groceries might end up in a page of naval history if we succeed in negotiating the Horn in the dead of winter.” From One-Eyed Jacks: “Get up, you scum-sucking pig!” “Well, you know me, Dad, if I didn’t feel right about it, we’d be out there splattering each other all over that front yard…a man can’t stay angry for five years. Can he?”

After all of your research, what did you come to admire most about him?

His curiosity, as well as his skepticism. Judging from his book collection, he was someone who wanted to understand deeply whatever it was that interested him. One of the most typical comments in the margins of his books was, “get,” which was a reminder to get a book that was mentioned in what he was reading and that sounded interesting or important. In his direct encounters with people, too, he was someone who studied other human beings with the concentration of a zoologist. Brando’s hunger to know and understand the world and people in it was as great, I found, as his more legendary hungers for women and food. At the same time, he was a person who was always questioning, doubting. He argued with authors he deeply admired (signaled by his calling them up, or buying all their books—examples, Hannah Arendt, Lewis Thomas) in the margins of their books, writing, “how do you know?” or “was you dere Charlie?” He wanted to know all sides of an issue.

Susan Mizruchi will discuss her new book, Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work, and sign copies at a faculty author event tonight, Wednesday, October 1, at Barnes & Noble @ BU, 660 Beacon St., fifth floor reading room, from 7 to 8 p.m.