Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [107]
Strange as it may seem, it was nights like these that made being in the movies worthwhile. They gave me a chance to meet people like Justice William O. Douglas, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dag Hammarskjöld, Sukarno, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Robert and John Kennedy.
When JFK ran for president, I believed he was a new kind of politician whom I could admire, so I supported him, even though I have rarely voted in my life. He was not only charming but bright, and he had a sense of history and curiosity and an apparent sincerity about wanting to right some of the wrongs in our country.
At a fund-raising dinner I attended, Kennedy began working the room, table-hopping and shaking hands with everyone. “You must be pretty bored by all this,” I said when he got to me.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, a little startled and perhaps offended, “I’m not bored at all. I’m interested in what people have to say, what their opinions are and—”
“C’mon,” I said. “You mean you’re thrilled to death to sit here and make cracker-crumb conversation with a lot of purple-haired ladies?”
“I like those ladies,” Kennedy said.
“Oh, c’mon.”
Kennedy looked at me with undisguised hostility and suspicion until I smiled at him and said, “You really can’t be all that serious.”
He smiled back, and it was a lovely smile, when he realized that I was not being critical, that I was simply saying, in effect, that just once I’d like to hear a politician tell the truth.
After dinner a Secret Service agent came over and told me the president wanted to see me.
This will be interesting, I thought, and followed the man upstairs to Kennedy’s hotel room. He hadn’t eaten at the fundraiser because he was so busy shaking hands, so he was going to have dinner now and invited me to join him. But before that we proceeded to get drunk.
Kennedy was unbridled, spirited and full of zest and curiosity about the women I knew in Hollywood. Then he changed the subject, looked at me suspiciously and said, “We know what you’ve been doing with the American Indians,” wagging a finger at me.
“Well,” I said, “I know what you’ve not been doing with the American Indians.”
Changing the subject again, he said, “You’re getting too fat for the part.”
“What part? “I asked.
“That’s not important. It’s the fat that’s important.…”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “Have you looked in the mirror lately? Your jowls won’t even fit in the frame of the television screen. When they have to go in for a close-up, they lose half your face. You look like the moon on television. I can hardly see your face, it’s so fat.”
Kennedy said he weighed a lot less than I did, and I said, “No, you don’t.” So we headed for the bathroom, both of us weaving, and I got on the scale. I can’t remember what my weight was, but when he got on it I put my toe on the corner and made him about twenty-five pounds heavier, so that he weighed more than I did. “Let’s go, Fatso, you lost,” I said.
A few years later, while the Vietnam War was beginning to blossom into the tragedy it became, I went back to Asia for a UNICEF emergency-food program in the northeastern Indian state of Bihar, which had been struck by a devastating famine. The suffering moved me to make a forty-five-minute movie about it, which I filmed with a sixteen-millimeter camera. I traveled with UNICEF workers from village to village by Jeep over such rutted, muddy roads that it took longer to drive seventy-five miles on some of them than to fly between Los Angeles and New York. Most of the villages were laid out in a figure eight: on one side lived the Brahmans and the Indians