He said then: “My objective is to submit myself to what I think and feel until I’m in a position to think and feel as I please.” It took ten years to do it, but he made it in spades in Mutiny on the Bounty. He also said: “The only reason I’m here is because I don’t yet have the moral strength to turn down the money.”
When Stanley Kramer telephoned him in Paris about doing The Men, Marlon had two questions: “Do you want me for more than one film? How much will you pay?” From a $50,000 fee for The Men, he went, via Streetcar, to $150,000 in Viva Zapata. More recently, he held out for every cent of net profits, leaving the studio to collect nothing more than a percentage of the gross as distributor. His asking price now is a million dollars a performance.
The town should have known what to expect on the strength of reports from Broadway and his nerve-racking portrayal in the theater of Stanley Kowalski, the cave-man lover of Streetcar. Irene Selznick, who produced the play, gave an opening-night party at “21” which Marlon reluctantly attended. Jerome Zerbe, the society photographer and columnist, was there, and Irene asked if he’d invite Marlon over to be photographed with her, not for publicity but for her personal album.
Crossing the room, Zerbe passed on the request to Marlon, who turned him down flat. “Why should I be photographed with her?”
“Well, she’s your producer, after all.”
“Means nothing to me,” said the newest sensation of Broadway, aged twenty-three. Zerbe broke the news to Irene and exchanged no more words with Marlon until Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie, arriving late, picked their way through the crowd to Zerbe and made a fuss over him.
Now Marlon could see that Jerome was socially “in”; he made a beeline for him. “I’ll pose for that picture now,” he offered.
Zerbe, a proud man, was halfway toward the door on his way out. “You won’t pose for me,” he said flatly. “I wouldn’t photograph you if you were the last man on this earth.”
I once put a question to Marlon asking his opinion of acting as a profession. “If you’re successful,” he replied, “it’s about as soft a job as anybody could ever wish for. But if you’re unsuccessful, it’s worse than having a skin disease.”
Social ailments of various kinds hold a strange attraction for him. When reporters used to ask him about some chapters of his younger days, he would tell them he couldn’t give an adequate answer because at the time he wasn’t feeling too well. The favorite theme cropped up again when he was making Mutiny on the Bounty in Tahiti. By then, the joke was on him, but he was drawing $5000 a day overtime and spouting another favorite thought in slightly altered words: “After you’ve got enough money, money doesn’t matter.”