Lying for a Living

The late Marlon Brando, born 95 years ago this month, was a true titan of screen. Yet posthumous access to private letters and his personal library revealed a misunderstood depth to the actor, who honed a natural talent for portrayal – and harboured total disdain for fame

WORDS: SUSAN L. MIZRUCHI

Marlon Brando as he appears in A Streetcar Named Desire, for MGM Studios, 1951

Marlon Brando loved watching people, a habit that supported a genius for impersonation and characterisation. Though it came naturally, he pursued it with an almost scientific zeal.

“The face is an extraordinarily subtle instrument,” he noted. “I believe it has 155 muscles in it. The interaction of those muscles can hide a great deal, and people are always concealing emotions. Some people have very non-expressive faces… In such cases I try to read their body posture, the increase in the blink rate of their eyes, their aimless yawning or a failure to complete a yawn—anything that denotes emotions they don’t want to display.”

Brando made a lifelong study of emotions and the differences of personality and culture that inhibited their expression, which he managed to exploit in a remarkable variety of film roles. His interest in human faces went beyond their function as measures of diversity. He was also aware of how they revealed, in profit-driven Hollywood, an actor’s marketability, or the lack thereof.

The smiles accorded celebrities by the local cognoscenti were calibrated to their earning power. “You can figure which salary bracket a Hollywood actor is in by the kind of smile he gets. When I first came out here I got USD40,000 a picture. The smiles people gave me showed two teeth. Now, I’m paid around USD125,000 and more, I get both uppers and lowers, but they’re locked together. The smile goes up at the corners, but the teeth are set. I’ll never get the kind of big fat grins that go with USD250,000 a picture. They only pay that kind of money to cowboy stars.”

Brando’s sense of what smiles could expose explains why the characters he played were unaccustomed to happiness. But equally important was his understanding of smiles as indices of vulnerability or manipulation. When he does smile in films, it’s usually compromised in some way – it’s a half-smile, or an ironic smile, or a smile threatening to collapse into something sad or sinister.

Abe Vigoda and Robert Duvall watch Brando and Al Lettieri shake hands in a scene from The Godfather, 1972

Consider Stanley Kowalski of A Streetcar Named Desire , covered with automobile grease, shooting an uncharacteristically diffident grin at his wife, Stella, hoping to reassert, against her sister Blanche’s scheming, his masculinity and erotic appeal. The wistful smile of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, as he straightens his nose with a finger to remind Edie of his early profile before the boxing career, before he had compromised himself by betraying her brother. The unctuous smile of the splendidly arrayed Lieutenant Fletcher Christian of Mutiny on the Bounty , accompanied by paramours as he meets the unsophisticated captain whom he considers beneath him. The Godfather’s wedding-photograph smile, classic Brando, on the verge of a grimace; Paul’s smirk in Last Tango in Paris, responding to his lover’s exasperated speech: “Do you really think that an American sitting on the floor in an empty flat eating cheese and drinking water is interesting?” Or the desperate at-your-service smile of Max in The Score, barely a step ahead of the mob.

Brando carefully controlled his smiles: he knew their price. He knew the commodity status of body parts, none more so than his own. As soon as he achieved fame on Broadway, he saw that an actor, like an athlete, could become a slave to his image. Smiles, he recognised, were never free.

His reading of body language was so adept, according to his nephew, that “it was almost supernatural. He would know more about you than you could imagine just by the way you sat down in a chair.”

Once, at a social gathering, Brando asked a woman her age, and she demurred. “It doesn’t matter,” he responded, “I can tell from your teeth.” He guessed accurately. He honed these skills with such habits as frequenting the criminal courts in Brooklyn for the human spectacle they provided.

Another New York pastime was sitting in the Optima Cigar Store phone booth watching people walk by, and he was “wrecked,” a friend recalled, when his freedom to observe was ruined by the fact that he had become an object of scrutiny. Both the actor and the man were obscured by this public obsession. He created characters so powerfully authentic that audiences refused to believe that these creations were not real.

While many considered him a great actor, they missed how denying him distance from his roles qualified that greatness. Even the most astute analysts overlook the conscious observant mind behind the work. It has been difficult for us to see how much more the actor was than any one part, and how different the man was from all of them. As the actor and idol who made it all right for men to be tongue-tied or incoherent, he became so synonymous with an inarticulate masculinity that it was impossible for audiences to accept that the physique was inseparable from an equally formidable intellect. Brando has been a victim of sexism.

Because he was so charming and physically appealing, his equally energetic mind tended to be negated. So dazzled are his most admiring critics that they can’t reconcile his attractiveness with the idea of a man who loved language let alone owned a book collection that outstripped those of most academics.

Thus, Daphne Merkin opened a 2004 obituary with her memory of being “struck by libidinal lightning” after first seeing Brando on screen, and pronounced him “an untutored philosophe” who liked to dabble in reading while engaging in what Paglia called “epic womanising.”

This is not to deny Brando’s attractiveness or his womanising. One of his friends described Brando as having “the kind of face artists are always interested in... It was as if a klieg light had been shoved up his ass and was shining out his pores.”

Though it’s worth emphasising that Brando considered himself only “reasonably attractive,” attributing his magnetism to his energy and strangeness as a Nebraska farm boy in cosmopolitan settings.

But our preoccupation with the looks that helped to bring Brando fame and fortune has clouded our appraisal of his contributions as an actor and as a public citizen who took to heart Hannah Arendt’s ideal of independent thinking. The excessive focus on his romantic affairs – what was most common about him – has limited our appreciation of what was most unique and enduring.

Brando reads paper in a scene from The Formula, 1980.

All images: Getty Images

The worst thing that can happen when someone becomes famous is to believe the myths about himself"

Among celebrities with iconic status, those whose single name alone conjures an image – Garbo, Marilyn, Sinatra, Olivier – Brando is distinctive for his ambiguity. Garbo in profile, Sinatra crooning, Marilyn above a subway grate in billowing white skirt, Olivier in evening dress.

The name Brando invites a question: Is he the charismatic brute in a white tee; the biker in a black leather jacket and gray cap; the Godfather; the father of Superman; or the bald phantom of the Vietnamese jungle in Apocalypse Now?

There are many Brandos, early and late. In contrast to most cultural icons, he eludes the prospect of a persona. Brando was more fluid, more wily than others who achieved comparable fame. This is attributable to the diverse identifications of a lead actor who preferred character roles and foiled expectations in choosing film parts. He had a wide-ranging curiosity and was suspicious of absolutes and rigidity of any kind, rejecting the pressure to conform to a single likeness.

While some have suggested that Brando’s disdain for the celebrity that transformed his life was motivated by self-hatred, its more obvious roots were his bohemian tendencies and democratic politics. Along with Zapata, whom he played in a movie, Brando believed that the masses were doomed when they projected their own power onto idealised objects of worship.

No one was worthy of such idolatry, least of all actors and entertainers. What has been overlooked is the seriousness of his thinking on these subjects, how deeply he lamented the adulation that he considered so misplaced. Partial to Talmudic wisdom, Brando surely would have appreciated the aphorism, 'If you want truth, shun fame.'

“The worst thing that can happen when someone becomes famous,” Brando observed, “is for him to believe the myths about himself –and that, I have the conceit to say, I have never done. Still, I am stung by the realisation that I am covered with the same muck as some of the people I have criticised because fame thrives in the manure of the success of which I allowed myself to become a part.”

Celebrity was a dirty business, Brando recognised almost as soon as he achieved it at 23, and he never came to terms with its consequences. The invasion of his privacy, the constant distortions of his views in the press, and the conviction on the part of so many that they knew him – his resentment toward these downsides of celebrity remained surprisingly fresh until he died at the age of 80.

As for his acting, during the 2008 presidential campaign, when asked to identify their favourite movies, both John McCain and Barack Obama named Brando films. That the two candidates could not have been more different – from a cultural, class, and generational standpoint – was a tribute to Brando’s iconic longevity as well as his wide-ranging appeal.

This was underlined by their choices: McCain cited Viva Zapata!, reflecting that Republicans multiculturalism and personal ethic of self-sacrifice; Obama picked The Godfather, affirming the broad appeal of the film’s patriarchal mythology, that a black boy raised by a single white mother in Hawaii could cherish the same compromised familial ideal as any other American.

Their responses illustrate the continuing importance of an actor whose contributions to theatre and film have been widely recognised by other actors, and appreciated by large audiences – but rarely well understood.

Abridged excerpt from Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought and Work – by Susan L. Mizruchi, and published by W. W. Norton & Company. Available for purchase from books.wwnorton.com