Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [114]
Six years later, when I went to London for the filming of Superman, I invited Michael for dinner at a house that had been rented for me in Shepperton, a house that was colder than the ice cave in the picture; if the water heater was turned on, for some reason the furnace wouldn’t function. When Michael noticed that I’d stuffed the inside of my clothes with newspaper he asked about it and I told him that it was a trick I’d learned long ago as a hobo.
During the evening I asked him, “How do you pronounce the word ‘integral’?”
“Integral,” he answered.
“No, I think it’s pronounced intigral.”
“That’s not how it’s pronounced in England,” he said.
I responded that there must be only one proper pronunciation for the word, and repeated that I thought it was intigral. He insisted he was right, so I said, “Let’s have a bet.”
“All right, Marlon—a hundred pounds,” he said, and walked toward me offering his hand.
“No,” I said, “let’s think of something else … I know: the loser has to sell French ticklers in Piccadilly Circus for one hour.”
“Come on, Marlon,” he said, “you know you’ll never do that. I think a bet is important and has to be honored, and I don’t want to lose our friendship because you lose the bet, which you’re definitely going to, and then won’t go down to Piccadilly.”
“I promise you I’ll go, there’s absolutely no question of it,” I said, and we shook on it.
Late the next afternoon, which was the first day of filming on Superman, Michael telephoned. “Why didn’t you call sooner?” I asked, and told him I’d already figured out how I was going to pay off the bet: by selling French ticklers in Piccadilly Circus disguised as a blind beggar.
“Unfortunately you don’t have to,” Michael said.
He had checked the Oxford English Dictionary and established that there was only one pronunciation of the word: intigral. A few months later, after asking his chauffeur to buy a large number of French ticklers of various shapes and sizes from a chain of London sex shops for £2, he stood in Piccadilly for an hour offering them for £1. Despite the bargain price, he sold only a couple—and those to friends who happened by. Disposing of the rest of his inventory, he told me, was daunting. Too embarrassed to ask his staff—a religious lot—to destroy them, he spent an evening cutting and shredding them in a waste basket.
• • •
Besides traveling often to Tahiti, I spent a lot of time during the sixties exploring New Mexico, Arizona, South Dakota, remote parts of California and other places. I would get on a motorcycle and ride off by myself, or with a girl, in search of somewhere interesting. Once I bought a new bike, left the highway and rode across Death Valley, racing across the desert as fast as I could. The temperature was at least 115 degrees and the engine gave out; it hadn’t been broken in properly and simply died from heat exhaustion. I couldn’t restart it and had to walk out several miles. A park ranger told me I had been lucky to survive and pointed out a spot not far from the ranger station where two people not long before had expired from the depletion of fluids and electrolytes in their bodies.
While I was making a western called The Appaloosa near St. George, Utah, Lisa, the designer from New York who thought she had saved my life with sperm therapy, came to see me. I offered her a ride on my motorcycle. We were steaming across the desert when we came upon the shriveled cadavers of thirty or forty cows lying in the sagebrush. It was an eerie tableau. Later I realized they must have died from radiation blown north from a nuclear test in Nevada or by nerve gas from a military installation in Utah. This was