Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [121]
All of the above to the contrary, however, Gillo was one of the most sensitive and meticulous directors I ever worked for. That’s what kept me on that picture because, despite the grief and strife, I had the deepest respect for him. Later, when I wanted to make a movie about the Battle of Wounded Knee, he was the first director I thought of to do it.
47
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN lucky with women. There have been many of them in my life, though I hardly ever spent more than a couple of minutes with any of them. I’ve had far too many affairs to think of myself as a normal, rational man. But somehow I always thought there must be something—someone—out there. There was something: huge alimony payments, and if not that, enough trouble for fifty men.
With women, I’ve had what you might call a Rolodex life. I enjoy identifying and pushing the right emotional buttons of women—which usually means making them feel that they are of value to me and offering them security for themselves and their children. The less likely I was to seduce a woman, the more I wanted to succeed. Doing rude things to nuns was always a fantasy. In a hospital once, I tried; her name was Sister Raphael and she was quite beautiful. She often came to my room to see how I was feeling, and because there was something unusually extroverted about her, I thought, Somewhere in her there’s got to be a touch of the tart. So I tried—and failed. Whatever human responses may have been stirring beneath her habit, she was committed to God, and no force on earth is more powerful than a strong belief system, religious or otherwise.
When my timing was off and two women crossed paths, it often led to problems because of their presumption of exclusivity. Once when I fled my house after two women had discovered each other there at the same time, I remember thinking, Marlon, you’re fifty-six years old and are cowering in a stand of bamboo; aren’t you ridiculous?
In such situations honesty is not an effective remedy. One woman, an actress who had the notion that I was planning to spend the rest of my life with her, was naked in my bedroom when she asked, “Where were you last weekend?” As she walked toward me, I flinched and covered myself like a boxer. She smiled and said, “What are you afraid of? I’m not going to hit you!”
“Just a reflex,” I said. Then it occurred to me that it was time to quit lying. This is absurd, I thought, why not tell her the truth? It’s stupid to lie to her.
So I told her I had spent the weekend with a woman she knew, and she grabbed my hair and started pummeling me. She was screaming and I couldn’t get away because of her grip on my hair. Finally I grabbed her with both arms, shoved her across the room, ran down the hall stark naked, grabbed my car keys and scampered out the door, cutting my feet on the walkway. It was December and very cold; I was naked, my lips were blue and my feet were bleeding. After I started the car, I suddenly worried that the woman might be hurt, so I skulked back to the house, peeked in the bedroom window and saw her sitting on the bed speaking on the telephone. I went to a neighbor’s house, borrowed a blanket, put it around me and, still freezing, started driving without a destination in mind. Then I thought of my friend Sam Gilman, who didn’t live far away, and decided to seek sanctuary with him for the night. On my way to his house, I remember asking myself, Is this the way you want to live, Marlon? Driving down Ventura Boulevard in the middle of the night without any clothes on?
I banged on Sam’s door, and when he saw me standing there holding a blanket over my private parts, he roared with laughter. I said, “Sam, have you got any Valium?”
At this he howled.
“Sam, have you got any clothes?” He gave me a pair of Jockey shorts and an army shirt and socks, and when his wife got up and saw me, she started laughing, too. I said, “Sam, it’s not funny.” At this he almost