Modern Screen (Jan-Dec 1960)

Casanova's Ladies (Continued from page 57) me. And I let her fall. I just couldn't take it any more — watching her break apart in fi-ont of me, like a piece of porcelain. I stepped right over her. I walked right out. Since then, I've been indifferent — " Actually, Marlon was and is far from "indifferent." When an emotional experience of such intensity occurs, it cannot be sloughed off or forgotten. The memory of it remains in the mind, and so do the guilty feelings about what happened. For one as sensitive as Marlon, the result may be continuing remorse, even self-torture — until finally it seems there is only one thing to do, one way to rid himself of his guilty feelings, and that is by finding another woman like his mother and this time not failing her. Doesn't this explain why, with all the women in the world to choose from, this handsome Casanova continually selects someone who is in some way physically or emotionally sick? Let us look briefly at the three women pictured here with Marlon, the three most important love-figures in his recent life: Anna Kashfi, born Joan Mary O'Callaghan, is a strange girl who, while working as a cashier in a butcher shop in Wales, deluded herself into thinking she was an Indian. She borrowed an Indian mother from some Indian friends (Selma Ghose, listed as Anna's parent on her wedding certificate, really exists), and she created an Indian father out of her interesting imagination. In order to do this she must have been in some way emotionally disturbed, deeply dissatisfied with the way she really was in reality, and Marlon, sensing this as soon as they met, was sympathetic. They liked each other, were conversational soul-mates, then suddenly a few months later Anna developed tuberculosis. Odd as it may seem, this was the point at which all of Marlon's sympathies were engaged, as they had never been with any girl since his mother. Here was the chance he needed, to redeem himself, to not fail the sick woman he loved, as he had once failed Dorothy Pennebacker Brando. He sent flowers, he phoned the hospital, he was sheer kindness, he married her, they had a son together, they lived together, and then Anna began to be well again and happy, and as she became happier and happier Marlon became more and more restless. For somehow the guilty feelings about his mother remained; though he had not failed Anna he was still not sure inside himself that he had done enough to redeem his behavior with his mother. Unable to control himself, he left Anna and the baby at home alone in the house high in the hills, frightened, huddled together, listening to the mountain lions that roamed around in the dark wind, and forced on by his powerful and terrible memory, he began searching again for a woman wounded and sick whom he could help. He found her in France Nuyen, a beautiful little half-Chinese, half-French girl who at twenty was as broken inside as his mother had been at forty. A child of the second World War, surviving on handouts in the slums of Marseilles, France, ended her formal education when she was eleven years old, and learned to exist from moment to moment in a world with no past, no future. Friendless, ambitionless, gloomy, even as a Broadway and Hollywood star, she said: "I am a stone, I go where I am kicked." Marlon picked up the stone, held it tenderly, and the stone bled tears. "Come live with me and be my love," he said, as he had said to Anna and to his mother long ago — and off they went together to Haiti. The nights were beautiful, their happiness pounded like the bongos and stretched as clean and far as the sandy beaches, then suddenly it began to happen again — that strange restless feeling in Marlon, that feeling that this wasn't it after all, that this wasn't enough to make up for what he had done to his mother, to erase that bitter memory forever. Good-bye, France, he said, and flew to Hollywood, to search again. He went to Cyrano's, a coffee house on Sunset Strip. It was late, after midnight. A dark-eyed beauty named Barbara Luna was at a nearby table. "I could feel his eyes penetrate through me," Barbara told us. "Finally he came over. We drank wine, we talked about the world, about books, about politics. There was a strange immediate bond between us . . ." The bond was deeper than either of them knew. Like Dorothy Brando, Anna Kashfi and France Nuyen, Barbara Luna was bits and pieces of broken porcelain. Another tortured soul — a girl who in 1953 brought assault charges against a young Turkish exchange student, and two years later appeared in juvenile court on a dope charge. Marlon loved her in his way, and Barbara loved him enough to say later when it was all over that she could understand how a girl who had been loved by Marlon could never love another man as long as she lived. As it turned out, though Barbara had been emotionally disturbed as a child, she wasn't any longer, and so their romance never achieved any real intensity, but it did receive enough publicity for France to read about it in the Hong Kong papers — France, the girl who, despite all, somehow remained in love with Marlon. As she read the items and waited in vain for mail from Marlon, she began having attacks of nausea, developed laryngitis, couldn't say her lines, became nasty to everyone on the set of the movie The World of Suzie Wong in which she had the lead. In the grip of an emotion larger than she had ever known, she began stuffing herself with food, crazily, desperately, trying to fill the emptiness that Marlon had left in her life. She stuffed herself right out of the part in the picture and almost into the hospital. Was it some strange feminine instinct that told her if she became sick, really sick again, Marlon would want her again? Whatever it was, whatever name we psychoanalysts might give it, I prefer to call it Love. A love so powerful and selfsacrificing that it brought Marlon back to her side and will, I truly believe, do what all of Marlon'-s previous loves plus a battery of psychiatrists could not do — erase the bitter memory of his mother, and give these fine, sensitive, tortured human beings the share of normal love and companionship to which all of us are entitled. END Marlon stars in The Fugitive Kind and in One-Eyed Jacks, both films United Artists releases. Bring Me Back to Your House, Oh Lord (Contimied from page 32) within a matter of moments. So close, in fact, that one of the young men who'd come out of the car with Elvis, a bodyguard, no doubt, was annoyed. "Hey oldtimer, step back a li'l bit, will you?" he said. The old man did not move. "Hey, old boy — c'mon." He said it loudly now, harshly. "Git movin'. C'mon." It was at this point that Elvis turned to see what was going on; at this point that the old man, still smiling, raised his hand and showed a small passel of papers he was holding. With his thumb, he slipped one of the papers forward. "That for me?" Elvis asked. The old man nodded. Elvis began to reach for the paper. The bodyguard intercepted it. "This geezer's a crackpot, El boy," he said. "Here, let me have that." Elvis looked over at the old man. He saw that the smile was gone from his face now. He put out his hand. "Give it back," he said to the body The bodyguard looked at Elvis and did. Elvis looked down at the paper and read the few words printed on it. Easter is coming, it read. Are you coming to church? "Ha!" said the bodyguard, reading it over Elvis' shoulder. "Mister," Elvis started to say, looking up from the paper, over towards where the old man was standing, "why do you — " But he stopped. Because the old man, in those few moments, had taken one step back into the crowd. Another step. And then, as quickly as he'd come, he'd disappeared. . . . Another Easter It was about an hour later. Elvis was in the bedroom of his huge suite, lying on his bed. Outside, in the living room, he could hear the others — members of his retinue; the bodyguard, a few musicians, an agent, a couple of hometown buddies — talking, some of them; playing cards, a couple of others; one of them strumming away on his old guitar, humming as he strummed. But, actually, Elvis barely heard them at all. For he was thinking, thinking hard, about a little something he couldn't seem to get out of his mind — about the strange and silent old man who'd come up to him before, about the paper he'd handed him. "I wonder," Elvis thought, after a while, "how long it's been since I've been to church, at all — Easter or any other time." He closed his eyes. And he began to remember, for some reason, an Easter a long time ago, back in Mississippi, when he was just a little snip of a boy. He remembered it clearly. His ma and his daddy, he remembered, had bought a brand new suit for him, for that day, from money they'd been saving for well on a year now. And ca _ ' the day, and they'd dressed him up in the new suit and then, each holding him by a hand, they'd left the tiny house where they lived and they'd walked a couple of miles down the dusty road, towards town, and to the building there which they'd told him was called a church — "a house of God," as they'd said. The church, he remembered, was a small place. But crowded. Crowded with lots and lots of people who, like his ma and like his daddy, were poor people, hard-working and sad and impoverished people.