Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [125]
My heart was pounding like a jackhammer and my blood pressure must have been 200 over 6. Why was she laughing? Was she hysterical? She couldn’t possibly think the situation was amusing. There she was in her lovely nightgown, with her hair combed, at three A.M. howling with laughter. How could she be behaving this way? Ignoring her laughter, I asked with a straight face if she had seen my son recently.
At this, the potted palm Lenore was clinging to fell over; she couldn’t hang on to it. I was so frozen with terror that I didn’t see what Arthur was doing as this was going on. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the doorknob in the hall. That’s where I was looking. He was on my right. She came from the left into the sunporch, and I was staring past her at the doorknob, thinking that I was going to be attacked by the same hysterics if I looked at her, so finally I said, “I don’t think there’s anything funny to laugh at.”
Somehow, in her mind it was uproarious to see two men sitting in her sunporch in the middle of the night, especially one who was as guilty as a safecracker caught in the act, looking desperately for a reason to be in her house, and whose only excuse was, “Have you seen my son?” Eventually she stopped laughing, threw herself in a chair and said, “No, I haven’t seen him.” And with that Lenore, a very nimble-minded woman, launched into a performance that would have delighted Stella Adler. What temerity she demonstrated: if I had been a daredevil for jumping over her fence, imagine what she became, a collaborator and partner in bringing the escapade to a conclusion. Once she stopped laughing, she quickly grasped the picture. She could read it in our faces, and what she couldn’t read, she imagined, and joined Arthur in expressing her support for me and for my fatherly concern.
Finally I said, “I’d rather not call the police. You know what I think I’ll do? I’ll just go home and wait. He’ll come home. I’ll just be patient instead of panicking. What do you think, Arthur?”
Arthur agreed that this was probably the best thing to do, so I got up and thanked them profusely while my chin quivered a little and Lenore nearly went into spasms while trying to keep from laughing.
“Where did you park your car?” Arthur asked.
“It’s down around the corner,” I said, and thought to myself that if I had to run into another patch of stupidity and make up another unbelievable story, I wasn’t going to make it.
I said good night, and tried to reach the door as fast as I could while Arthur was saying, “Well, gosh now, you be sure to let us know …”
I walked out the door a free man, and maybe even did a little jig at the corner.
In hindsight I’m sure Arthur knew what was going on all along. Like Lenore and me, he was very good at playing a part. Eventually he killed himself, not because of Lenore or me, but because of a long illness that wasted him.
49
AT HOME ONE NIGHT, before leaving to visit a woman in Beverly Hills whose husband was spending the night in the hospital for some tests, I ate a quart of ice cream. That wasn’t unusual, but at the time I was getting ready to start a new movie and was on a strict diet, so after I ate it, I stuck my finger down my throat and threw up. (No, I am not a bulimic, but occasionally I do things like that.) The vomit was pink, but it didn’t alarm me, and I drove down Benedict Canyon to my friend’s house. After Sylvia and I did the usual wrestling around, we watched television until she got sleepy and went upstairs to bed. I finished watching the program, then got up to go home, but suddenly felt as if I were standing on the edge of a trembling precipice, inches from