Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [137]
That Beverly Hills psychiatrist had no real insight about people, though it cost me a substantial amount of money to learn this. Back then, I was overly impressed with sheepskins. It took me a long time to realize that just because someone went to medical school and papered his walls with diplomas, it didn’t mean he was a good analyst. It requires a rare and special talent to understand people, and it is hard to find.
A couple of years later I met G. L. Harrington, a wonderful and insightful man who, sadly, is now dead, a victim of liver cancer. It is a disease that usually kills within months but he battled it for five years before it took him. He was crippled in body but not in mind. His hip and one leg had been smashed in a car accident, and because he refused to let doctors amputate the leg, it was two or three inches shorter than the other one. It gave him a lot of pain, but he never complained. He was a handsome, rugged man with a low husky rumble for a voice and a lot of male hormones. In some ways he reminded me of my father. He was the kind of man I thought I would never like. I had always bridled in the presence of masculine men like him and frequently got into fights with them. I felt I had to be aggressive with men like him, that I had to defeat them. Harrington was such a man. He had been a pilot during the war, and to judge by the medals and decorations on his wall, a brave one. But while he had a masculine aura, he was also one of the funniest, wittiest, most creative, sensitive and insightful people I’d ever met. After spending years on couches, I was familiar with analysis when I first went to see him. Whenever I started therapy with a new doctor, I always tried to give him a list of my neurotic dysfunctions, which was what most of them wanted to hear. After a grace period, I decided it was time to give my list to Harrington. My wheelbarrow full of analytic misinformation, I wheeled it up to his door and said, “I want to get into some of the things that happened to me in the past.”
“Oh, we’ll get to them when the time comes,” Harrington said, but we never did; he talked and laughed me out of it. We would discuss anything because he had great curiosity: electricity, airplanes, genetics, evolution, politics, botany and every other subject under the sun. I saw him once a week and always looked forward to it because he made me laugh at myself. Once I told him I had always been fascinated by writers like Kant and Rousseau, and that I gravitated to women with similar tastes, those with whom I had something in common.
With a straight face, Harrington said, “Tell me about this Japanese girl you’ve been seeing …” It was his way of telling me that what I had just said was idiotic: you’ve got a girlfriend who can’t speak English, you have nothing in common with her, and yet you chose her.
Once I told Harrington, “I think I’ve got a lot of rage because of my father.”
“What do you mean ‘rage’? Because you’re mad at your father?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re not mad now, are you?”
“Well, not right this minute.”
He said, “Okay,” and that was it, but for some reason it helped disarm my anger.
Another day I walked into his studio, a small room with a desk, table and two chairs, and sat down, and as usual he gave me a cup of coffee. Every morning his wife put a fresh rose on his desk, and on this day I noticed that it was magnificent. Two petals had fallen off and were lying next to it on the desk. I was entranced by it and said, “That’s the most beautiful rose I’ve ever seen.