Six
The one and only exclusive interview I had with Marlon Brando lasted half an hour. As the minutes ticked by he sat posed like Rodin’s “Thinker” contemplating a bust of Stanislavski. He paid no more heed to me than if I’d been a ladybug squatting on the back of his canvas chair. With a snap of the fingers, I brought him out of his trance. “Have you been listening, Mr. Brando?”
“Sure.”
“Do you care to answer my questions?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“Then may I tell you that I didn’t want this interview? Your producer, Stanley Kramer, insisted that I do it. You needn’t submit yourself to further agony. Thanks for nothing, and good day.”
I walked off the set of The Men, and I haven’t set foot on any Brando set from that day on. Every studio he has worked for has tried to coax me back. But I can’t be insulted twice, not if I know what’s going to happen.
I regard him as a supreme egotist, for want of a better term, whose good performances, like those in On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire, I recognize. I understand that he refers to me as “The One with the Hat.” He has been known variously as “the male Garbo” and “Dostoevski’s Tom Sawyer.” He’s doing extremely well without my support in piling up millions. He’s a dedicated ringleader in a current melodrama which can be called “Viva Brando; or, The Actor’s Revenge.”
When he originally landed here in 1950, he carried his entire wardrobe in a canvas satchel: two pairs of blue jeans, four T shirts, two pairs of socks, and the works of the philosopher Spinoza, who teaches that everything is decreed by God and is therefore necessarily good. Marlon immediately labeled Hollywood a “cultural boneyard.”