Hostage of His Own Genius

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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.