Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [134]
Besides suffering from depression, anxiety and fear, I had another problem much of my life: until about twenty years ago, I was a bomb waiting to go off. Once, while I was driving on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, a bus driver began honking at me from behind. I was driving at the speed limit and didn’t want to go faster, but he kept pounding on his horn and finally raced around me and cut in sharply, nearly sideswiping me. I stepped on the gas and chased him for five blocks until I got a chance to swing in front of him, ram the bus and force him to the side of the road. Then I jumped out of my car and began smashing the glass door of the bus with both fists and screamed at him to open it because I wanted to dismember him. He cowered inside, and when I couldn’t force the door open, I drove off, convinced that I had made my point.
Another time, when I was in Cannes, I heard that Elizabeth Taylor, whom I liked, and Richard Burton, whom I didn’t, were there. I wanted to ask them to be in a show I was producing for UNICEF, and arranged to have lunch with them on a yacht. It was only noon but Richard was already drunk. He was a mean drunk, and soon he started making racial slurs about my Tahitian children.
At first I overlooked them, but when he kept it up, I turned to him and said, “If you make one more comment of any kind about my children, I’m going to knock you off this boat.”
Burton looked up at me foolishly and silently with swollen, bleary eyes while Elizabeth said, “Oh, Richard, stop that now …” He didn’t accept the challenge, but if he had, I was ready to throw him into the harbor.
On another occasion I was in a nightclub in Hollywood listening to a singer who was not very good; her voice sounded a little like a goose with a sore throat, and she was overweight and considerably past her prime physically. She wasn’t a pretty sight, but she was singing gamely. At the table next to mine, several people were ridiculing her with snide comments loud enough for her to hear them, and I thought, That poor woman is up there doing the best she can, at the age she is, trying to earn a living, and those men are humiliating her.
As they kept it up, I grew angrier and angrier. Finally, one of them recognized me and reached over and touched my arm, either to introduce himself or to ask for an autograph. In an instant I had overturned my table, then I went over to his and said, “If you want to live, don’t ever touch me again.”
He was frightened by my outburst, which even I hadn’t seen coming. In those days there was a latent anger a few millimeters beneath the surface of my skin just waiting to explode, and it happened so fast on this occasion that I was nearly out of control.
Until five or six years ago, I had a temper that sometimes erupted unconsciously, though it was always against men and often directed against paparazzi, those pathetic predators with cameras who prowl the gutters of the world. I hated anyone who tried to invade my privacy, but them especially, particularly if it involved my children. Once after a party in Rome, I went to the front door to say good-bye to some of my guests, holding my son in my arms, when there was an explosion of flashbulbs. I went berserk. After taking my son back to the living room, I charged out of the apartment like Attila the Hun and threw a haymaker at one of the photographers, missed him by a yard and fell on the pavement, injuring my pride but nothing else because I was anesthetized by adrenaline. I went back to the apartment, got a champagne bottle and went after one rat-faced paparazzo. He ran down the street, jumped on the hood of a car, vaulted over its roof and climbed a wall.