Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando by Stefan Kanfer

Author:Stefan Kanfer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Film & Video, Performing Arts, History & Criticism, Marlon, Communication Studies, Actors - United States, Television, Entertainment & Performing Arts, General, United States, Actors, Biography & Autobiography, Brando, Biography
ISBN: 9781400042890
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: 2008-11-04T10:00:00+00:00

1960–1963

Stockholders, Man the Lifeboats!

1

Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was released between the terminals of The Fugitive Kind and One-Eyed Jacks, and like many of his colleagues, Marlon failed to recognize its significance. James Dean was dead and Montgomery Clift incapacitated, but an important new actor had entered the global scene. In 1960 Marcello Mastroianni appeared in his breakthrough role as a world-weary journalist surrounded by materialistic excess. Together, he and Fellini struck a nerve and created a worldwide hit. The Italian performer refused to be taken in by the sudden rush to fame. He told interviewers that Federico had selected him for the role because the picture needed “a face with no personality.” Here, Marcello’s attitude toward the professional actor posing as artiste coincided with Marlon’s. Brando: “An actor’s a guy who, if you ain’t talking about him, he ain’t listening.” Mastroianni: “An actor is someone who goes out to recite ‘To be or not to be’ while he’s thinking about his lawyer or worrying about the money he has to send to his first wife.”

But with all his self-deprecation, Mastroianni knew he was onto something vitally different, just as the young French directors knew that they had just tapped into a fresh kind of cinema with Nouvelle Vague—New Wave—movies like François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.

Had Marlon been more focused, had his career guides been more leery of the collapsing studio system, he might have been a part of these foreign experiments. At the very least he could have found work in challenging, intelligent epics. For despite the recent box-office disappointments, Sam Spiegel believed that Marlon would be an ideal Lawrence of Arabia, made him an offer, and sent him Robert Bolt’s vivid scenario. To Peter O’Toole’s undying gratitude, Marlon responded: “I’ll be damned if I’ll spend two years of my life out in the desert on some fucking camel.”

He made misjudgments in his personal life as well. The separation from Anna Kashfi had gone from bad to impossible. After their divorce became final she tried to prevent Marlon from seeing Christian, and he went to court to gain access to his son. He called her “emotionally disturbed.” She said he was a lout, whose behavior “tended to degrade himself and his family in society.” Most of her accusations centered on Marlon’s habit of bringing his latest girlfriend around and showing her off to Christian. The judge restored Marlon’s visitation rights, provided that he didn’t do anything to provoke his ex-wife or disturb their child. Marlon promised to do as instructed—and then promptly took up flamboyantly with his old flame Movita Castaneda. Anna dismissed this as a cheap gesture, done only to make her jealous. Actually, there was more to the affair than that; in June 1960, he and Movita were secretly married in Mexico. They returned to Los Angeles, but declined to live as man and wife. Movita was pregnant and soon delivered a child, Miko. Marlon installed wife and baby in a spacious Coldwater Canyon house and continued to live bachelor-style on Mulholland Drive.

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