Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [131]
Very slowly and with deliberation, the policeman said, “Mr. Brando, we have a lot of things to do tonight; we’re having a pretty busy night. A lot of things that we have to deal with are really serious, and coming and getting women out of your house is not one of them.”
I put a stern look on my face, glanced at the woman and said, “All right, Officer, thank you very much. Thank you,” and hung up the phone.
“They’ll be here in twelve minutes,” I said. “Now this time you’re going to jail. I will press charges, you should know that, and you’ll go to jail for at least a year.”
At that the woman ran out of the room and I never saw her again.
Another time, Weonna and I were in bed when she woke me with a hard poke in the ribs. Startled, I was about to complain when she mouthed, “There’s someone in the house.”
“How do you know?”
Weonna had extraordinary hearing. She shook her head to indicate that she knew she was right. I got out of bed and went to a closet to get a shotgun I used to keep in the house; then, naked, I walked into the hall, unclear what I was looking for or what I would do if I found it. I remember thinking, You’re naked, Marlon, and what’s going to happen if they see you like this? They’re not going to take you very seriously. I certainly wouldn’t take a naked guy seriously if I was a burglar.
I walked down the hall into the living room, still gripped by this thought, but couldn’t find anybody, so I returned to the bedroom with my shotgun and told Weonna that the coast seemed clear. She looked at me with a frightened expression and mouthed, “They’re in the bathroom …”
In the bathroom I found an attractive young woman hiding behind the door. The sliding glass door to the deck was open, and she had come through it. I pointed the gun at her and said, “As quietly and quickly as you can, lie down and put your face in the rug—now.” She started to say something, but I said, “Do as I tell you.” She followed orders and went down on the floor and pressed her face into the carpet. Her purse was in her hand and I said, “Push your purse toward me very gently,” which she did. I opened it and looked through her wallet, which was very neat. I found a Screen Actors Guild card and said, “Are you an actress?”
The woman, whose nose and mouth were buried in the carpet, mumbled a muffled, “Yes.”
“What are you doing in my bathroom at three A.M.?”
Still mumbling, she answered “I thought you might have some work for me.”
“This is probably the least likely place to find work,” I said. “What you’ve chosen to do is highly inefficient and very unprofessional. Stand up. Here’s your purse and there’s the door. Don’t ever come back here again and don’t ever, for your own welfare, do this to anybody else because it’s dangerous.”
I don’t know if she ever found a job in the movies.
Those two weren’t the only women who have shown up at my doorstep. The lure of celebrity does strange things to people. One woman camped outside my house in the rain for three days while a young Tahitian boy named Alphonse was visiting me. Because of an accident at birth, one of Alphonse’s feet had turned inward, and I had arranged for him to come with his grandmother to Los Angeles to have corrective surgery. Actually she was not his real grandmother, but an elderly woman who looked after him and whom he called grandmother. One day she told me a woman was waiting outside to see me. I told her I wasn’t expecting anybody, and that I made it a rule never to talk to strangers who showed up at my door. But I looked out the window with my binoculars and, sure enough, there was a woman standing in the driveway. Deciding that she was another nut, I told Grandmother that I didn’t want to see her. Three days later, despite a tremendous rainstorm, the woman hadn’t moved, and by now Alphonse’s grandmother was very