Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [115]
I drove Lisa a few more miles and decided that the desert was a perfect place to make love. The desert, and beyond it a backdrop of rose-colored mountains, were beautiful; except for a few birds, the two of us could have been alone on the moon. But as I started to climax, the earth began to shake; suddenly it seemed as if a million tons of TNT were being detonated beneath us, and as the earth shook, an enormous, vibrating tremor swept through my entire body. What kind of an orgasm is this? My God, this is magical! I thought. This is the orgasm to end my life; I’m going to die of orgasm right here in the middle of the desert. Then there was a tremendously loud blast.
Lisa looked up at me and asked, “What was that?”
Then it occurred to me that the sound had probably been from some young air force pilot in a supersonic jet flying fifty feet off the ground. It happened so fast that I never saw the plane—if there was one. But if there had been, the shock waves and sonic boom washed over us at exactly the right moment. I’ve never had an orgasm like that before or since. For a moment I thought I was going to die. What a way to go!
45
YEARS AFTER OUR troubles over The Egyptian, I saw Darryl Zanuck humiliate his son Richard unmercifully. He had hired Richard to run Twentieth Century-Fox, then fired him and announced his dismissal as if it were a personal triumph. He said things no son should ever hear from his father. Later, when I ran into Zanuck at the Stork Club in New York, I stood beside his table and said in a voice that everyone could hear that he should be ashamed of himself.
I saw this happen again when I worked with Charlie Chaplin on A Countess from Hong Kong. Chaplin was an actor I had always admired greatly. Some of his films, such as City Lights, still move me to tears as well as laughter. In the beginning of that movie, he introduces himself and establishes his character in a hilarious scene by having the camera discover him asleep in the arms of a statue. At the end of the film, after he has been sent to jail for stealing money to pay for a blind girl’s operation to give her sight, he passes her flower shop. He recognizes her, but of course she does not know him because previously she was blind. He is now a tramp with holes in his shoes and the ragged tail of his shirt sticking out of his trousers. He is stunned when he sees her. As he starts to walk past, she runs out from the shop and pins a rose in his buttonhole; then when she feels his suit and shoulders, her face brightens, and the audience realizes that she recognizes with her fingers the man who helped give her sight and whom she loves. The viewer experiences not only her love but his shame as she realizes that he is a tramp. The moment is magical, one that reaches into the audience’s unconscious, which only the best acting can do. Chaplin knew exactly what the audience would experience. I don’t know if it was conscious or instinctive, but he understood the myth he had created with the Little Tramp and attached himself to it tenaciously.
Comic genius or not, when I went to London to work with him late in his life, Chaplin was a fearsomely cruel man. He was almost seventy-seven when he offered me the part of a diplomat named Ogden Mears in A Countess from Hong Kong. In this comedy set aboard a luxury liner sailing between Hong Kong and San Francisco, Sophia Loren played an impoverished former dance-hall girl who stowed away in my room. Although I revered Chaplin, who had written the story based on a voyage he had taken from Shanghai in 1931, when he offered me the part in 1966, I told him I didn’t believe I was right for it. I’ve always been leery of comedies, but he insisted that I could do it, and since I regarded him as a genius, I agreed