Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me by Marlon Brando

Author:Marlon Brando [Brando, Marlon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780679410133
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 1994-09-03T07:00:00+00:00

36

IF I HADN’T BEEN an actor, I’ve often thought I’d have become a con man and wound up in jail. Or I might have gone crazy. Acting afforded me the luxury of being able to spend thousands of dollars on psychoanalysts, most of whom did nothing but convince me that most New York and Beverly Hills psychoanalysts are a little crazy themselves, as well as highly motivated to separate patients from their money while making their emotional problems worse. I think I’d have made a good con man; I’m good at telling lies smoothly, giving an impression of things as they are not and making people think I’m sincere. A good con man can fool anybody, but the first person he fools is himself. It occurs to me that when I was thinking about becoming a preacher I believed the talents I thought would make me a good tent-show evangelist were the same ones that would have made me a good con man.

Having had the luck to be successful as an actor also afforded me the luxury of time. I only had to do a movie once a year, for three months at the most, which paid me enough so that I didn’t have to work again until my business manager called and said, “We’ve got to pay your taxes at the end of the year, so you’d better make another movie.” When that happened, I’d look around and grab something.

After Teahouse of the August Moon, my father, who thought of himself as my manager even though I’d only put him on the payroll so he’d have an office to go to after my mother died, started pressing me to make another picture. Pennebaker Productions, he said, was facing serious financial problems. As always, he was preoccupied with money. He complained I was spending too much on the UN picture and on a western I wanted to make, and he claimed that a friend I’d put on the Pennebaker payroll was exploiting me. He said if I didn’t make another picture soon, I’d be in trouble with the IRS. He urged me to sign for a picture based on a novel by James A. Michener that Joshua Logan wanted to direct and that Warner Brothers, with producer William Goetz, had offered to finance in a joint venture with Pennebaker. I read the novel, Sayonara, which was set in postwar Japan, and thought it raised interesting issues about human relations, but I didn’t like the script. In the script and the novel, the character Logan wanted me to play, Major Lloyd Gruver, a Korean War–era U.S. Air Force pilot, fell in love with a beautiful Japanese woman, Hana-ogi, a member of a distinguished and elite dance troupe, but their interracial romance was doomed by the tradition in both cultures of endogamy, the custom of marrying only within one’s own race or caste. In accepting this principle, I thought the story endorsed indirectly a form of racism. But with a different ending,

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