Hostage of His Own Genius

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

There's no room for genius in the theater," Laurence Olivier once remarked. "It's too much trouble." He was right. For all the Sturm, Drang and general lunacy that so often attend the production of a play or film, the aim is to mobilize genial craft and polished technique to make something that's easy for producers to budget and schedule, something that clutches the audience's heart but does not send it spiraling into cardiac arrest.

For an important time in his life--and ours--Marlon Brando was touched by genius, by which we mean that he did things in his art that were unprecedented, unduplicable and, finally, inexplicable. And sure enough, for a much longer time, he was "too much trouble" for everyone to bear--including, possibly, himself. The road from self-realization to self-parody is always shorter than we realize.

But let's not talk about that--not yet. Let's think instead about brutal Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, about yearning Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, about the rough voice and silky menace of The Godfather and the noble and ignoble ruin of Brando's Paul in Last Tango in Paris. Then let's think about how in a minor but still palpable way our lives--especially our imaginative lives--would have been diminished if Brando had not been there to play them. Sometimes in those movies, and in others too, he gave us moments of heartbreaking behavioral reality in which he broke through whatever fictional frame surrounded him and gave us not just the truth of his character but also the truth about ourselves.

One example out of dozens will have to suffice. Waterfront's Terry is shyly courting Eva Marie Saint's convent girl. She drops her glove. He picks it up and casually, talking about other things, tries to wriggle his fingers into it. What else of hers might he similarly, clumsily like to invade and possess? And how, we wonder, have we similarly, unconsciously betrayed our truest intentions while pretending that we were just kidding around?

Elia Kazan, who brought Brando to fame in the Broadway production of Streetcar (1947) and directed him in Waterfront, never took credit for that or any of the other moments Brando achieved for him. "The thing he wanted from me," Kazan later said, "was to get the machine going. And once that machine was going, he didn't need a hell of a lot more." It was, of course, quite a complicated mechanism. Kazan spoke of the contrast, in Brando's work, between "a soft, yearning girlish side to him and a dissatisfaction that is violent and can be dangerous," and observed that it was true of the man himself. "He never knew where the hell he was going to sleep. You didn't know who he was running away from or who he was angry with. You never knew."

No wonder the devotees of Method acting so eagerly claimed him. They believed he was pulling all that conflict out of himself, out of his troubled and rebellious past (cruel and drunken father, wistful and drunken mother) and using it--just as their great guru, Lee Strasberg, preached. In the first years of his fame, that was O.K. with Brando. It saved him a lot of tedious explanations. And it was more than O.K. with the crowd at the Actors Studio, which he briefly joined. It was the headquarters of Stanislavskian acting in America, inheritor of the Group Theater tradition (where in the 1930s Strasberg first came to controversial prominence). They had long needed a star to lead their revolution--against the well-spoken, emotionally disconnected acting style that had long prevailed on stage and film, indeed against the whole slick, corrupt Broadway-Hollywood way of doing show business.

Brando was their stud, possibly the most gorgeous (and authentically sexy) male the movies had ever seen. But he was in his nature ill suited to superstardom. Maybe he didn't want to be anyone's figurehead. He said, truly, that he had an attention span of about seven minutes. Besides, he didn't like delving too deeply into himself. He called that activity "pearl diving," and it upset and scared him. "Actors have to observe," he once said, "and I enjoy that part of it. They have to know how much spit you have in your mouth and where the weight of your elbows is. I could sit all day in the Optimo Cigar Store on Broadway [which he often did] and just watch the people go by."

His first acting teacher, Stella Adler, who also wasn't much for "affective memory" (Strasberg's fancy phrase for pearl diving), agreed. "He's the most keenly aware, empathetic human alive. He just knows. If you have a scar, physical or mental, he goes right to it. He cannot be cheated or fooled. If you left the room, he could be you." In those days, he truly loved acting and was fully devoted to it. His mother said to Adler, "Thank you. You've saved Marlon. He had no direction. Now he has direction."

But not for long. The movies changed. In the '50s, the screen widened to CinemaScope proportions while the audience shrank more than 50% and a panicky Hollywood pretty much abandoned small, tight character-driven dramas. But Brando didn't change. He remained an adolescent idealist, loving the art that had redeemed his incorrigible flakiness but becoming increasingly lost and miserable in this new context. The daring of this work somehow made people laugh uncomfortably. And Hollywood, which will first indulge those it intends to humble, turned against him, blaming him, sometimes unfairly, for cost overruns and box-office failures. Now self-loathing seeped into his interviews. "I've got no respect for acting," he would say. Or, "Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse." Or, "You get paid for doing nothing, and it all adds up to nothing."

He threw himself distractingly into the great causes of his time, like civil rights. He chose bad movies in which he was trying to be not a leading man but a character actor, hiding in plain sight under pounds of makeup and talking in weird accents. That led directly to the greatness of The Godfather. But it was his one full, belated embrace of the Method that led to Last Tango, in which he improvised yards of dialogue, based on his own history, to explain his desperately sad character.

That was in 1972. He had 32 more years to live, encased in fat and cynicism, enduring personal tragedies (notably the killing of his daughter's lover by one of his sons), emerging occasionally to grab some bucks for reading a few lines off cue cards. It was sad and to some of us infuriating. For if you were young and impressionable in the '50s, he was forever Our Guy--a man whose inarticulate yearnings, whose needs and rages somehow spoke for a silent generation, privately nursing our grievances at the bourgeois serenity of our elders. We would get mad at his fecklessness, but we never quite lost our faith in him, which was occasionally rewarded by the anarchic craziness of The Missouri Breaks, by the dainty befuddlements of another Mafia don in The Freshman.

Now that he's gone, that faith abides. No, he never did Hamlet or Lear or Uncle Vanya--those were someone else's dreams, not Brando's. He did, without quite knowing it, something grander than that. He gave generations of actors permission to make metaphors of themselves, letting their public find something of themselves in those private moments that, before Brando, no one dared bring forth. Maybe his greatest legacy is named Sean Penn. Or Johnny Depp. Or some nutsy kid whose name we don't yet know. But maybe not. In the end, most acting careers consist of no more than half a dozen great performances and an equal number of near-misses. Those he gave us. The work will abide--while the often foolish and more often misspent life that these performances mysteriously drew upon will fade away, lost at last in the hum and buzz of our infinitely distractible media age.