Screenland (Nov 1950-Oct 1951)

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This is a great trick if you can do it, but no one can — and Brando is the first to say so. "I'm tired of all the talk and phony gossip items, and some of the magazine interviews that are so often very misleading. It's not that the interviewers misunderstand you; they write what they think their readers want to hear. I guess it would be pretty dull copy if they wrote what an actor really does with himself each day. But where they get some of the lulu's they come out with is beyond me." (It's easy! You just toss in bed all night, smoke three packs of cigarettes, bite your nails down to the elbow, and if you're lucky you come up with the same idea that thirty other writers have come up with at the same moment.) "They ask you what you eat for breakfast, and what size shorts you wear — and did you get a 'message' from "Winnie The Pooh" when you were a child? This is usually followed by — do you like girls, betting the horses or playing with yo-yos for relaxation? It embarrasses me! I don't know what to answer. Even if I answer — straight 'yes' or 'no,' it will come out in print to the effect that I only eat Yogurt, that I'm planning to adapt "Winnie The Pooh" for a musical Mike Todd will present on Broadway this Fall, and that I'm investing in a new kind of yo-yo that will only go sideways and which will be named for Shelley Winters because I'm secretly in love with her." (Aside to Farley Granger: Brando hardly knows the girl.) "I used to be ingenious and scrupulously honest about everything, but I invariably got hurt. I don't think I'm dishonest now, but I've learned to take people and what happens to them in my stride, and that includes myself. Yet I still haven't gotten used to the preposterous things I read about myself." Bud Brando has a very soft voice and you find yourself leaning towards him to hear what he has to say. His manner of speaking, which was commented on by almost every movie reviewer, would be hard to trace to any locale or class. Although coming from a relatively well-todo Middle West family, Brando sounds at times as if he were a fugitive from a Tenth Avenue pool hall. This slurred tone is not an affectation, though, and he is the first to admit it has become a crutch. "I'm doing something about it now. I don't know how I got it, but it's actually become a part of me and I'm not making like Humphrey Bogart or Sam Spade, as some people choose to believe." This same guy has been accused of being an extrovert, egocentric, affected and a show-off. He has also been termed an introvert, recluse, sensitive, shy and inhibited. Whizzing around Manhattan on a motorcycle, playing a hot set of drums in Broadway jive joints, dating pretty waitresses on Fire Island, riding the 8th Ave. Subway in jeans and Tshirt, and doing just about whatever he wants to — if and when the spirit moved him. All this has gained him the reputation of being the only guy to make Montgomery Clift look like a piker, as far as being conservative is concerned. (They are constantly being compared to one another, which is a source of irritation to them both.) But to say any of this has been an intentional bid for publicity or attention would be unfair and completely untrue. Actually, he has become more conservative in the last year or so, but for the one reason that he wanted to, not because public opinion or studio execs demanded it. "As far as changing goes, I might even end up with the well-known swimming pool and mile-long convertible, having dinner at Ciro's or wherever it is they're always having dinner. No one can possibly know what he's going to end up with, or give in to. I know what I'm going to fight against, though." Just what Bud meant by that I'm not sure, but I have a feeling it has a great deal to do with his refusal to go along with the accepted Hollywood theories and traditions. As a boy, he often didn't see eye to eye with his teachers. When he was earning $300 a week in the Broadway show, "Truckline Cafe," he quit to take a $40 a week role in Ben Hecht's "A Flag Is Born." Flat broke, he hitchhiked up to Cape Cod to read for Tennessee Williams for the part of Stanley Kowalski in "Streetcar" and when Williams gave him the part he borrowed bus fare back to the city, this after having known the author only a few minutes. While making his first picture, "The Men," for Stanley Kramer, Brando went to Birmingham Veterans' Hospital in a suburb of Los Angeles and made himself at home there for four weeks in a ward with thirty-one paraplegics, observing their problems. One evening they were all in their chairs having a drink at a local bar when they were approached by one of those well-meaning but annoying characters who love to make speeches to veterans. This particular bore, a middleaged woman, was sure that with a little faith the boys would regain the use of their limbs. As she droned away, her attention was drawn to Marlon, who was quivering from head to toe in what appeared to be a sort of spasm. . Then, with agonizing motions and groans, clutching desperately at the sides of his wheelchair, he rose, fell back, rose again, and broke into a mad version of the Lindy hop. The woman fainted dead away and was removed from the scene of the crime. Needless to say, Brando has had at least thirty-one ardent fans ever since. There are some who will say that Bud Brando is putting on a big act and that he's not fooling anyone but himself when it comes to this "individualism" stuff. Frankly, I don't think he gives a hoot what they think. And I'd like to say for Marlon Brando's benefit, and not the readers', "there are some who greatly admire the intelligence and courage it