Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [157]
A few years after The Godfather, I went back to Little Italy for The Freshman, a comedy in which I played a benign gangster with a striking resemblance to Don Corleone. When I was dining one night with some of the crew, a man came over and said, “Mr. Gotti would like to see you and say hello. He’s right across the street.”
“That’s nice,” I said. I was curious, and with four or five other people from the picture, I went across the street to a shabby storefront or club house of some sort filled with mafiosi and decorated with a big sign that proclaimed THIS ROOM IS BUGGED.
With a silver pompadour as sleek as his silk suit, John Gotti was playing cards with several other men, and I went over to his table and said, “How do you do.”
Gotti extended his hand but didn’t get up. I think he didn’t want to lose face in front of the others by appearing to be respectful, so he sat there with a smile and introduced me to his friends, an extraordinary group of characters straight out of the Mafia yearbook.
I’ve always liked to do magic tricks and often carry around a deck of cards with me, so I pulled one out of my pocket—it was a shaved deck used by magicians and card sharks—and said, “Take a card, John.”
When he did so I told him to put the card back and then shuffle the cards. While he shuffled, I said I wanted to borrow a handkerchief, and instantly all of the mafiosi pulled out white handkerchiefs and waved them at me so that the place looked like a washline on Monday morning. I chose one, held the deck in my hand and told Gotti to pull away the handkerchief. When he did the only card left was the one he’d picked. As he looked at it, I said something like “You know, you could make a living this way.”
I didn’t say anything more because suddenly the whole room had become as quiet as a tomb at midnight; the only noise was some shuffling of feet.
Suddenly I realized what everyone was thinking: had I tried to make a fool out of the boss in front of his crew? They didn’t know what to believe. They looked back and forth at each other, trying to decide how to respond. I could feel the cerebral energy in the room as they mentally threw back their shoulders and asked themselves, Is this guy trying to show disrespect to John? Apparently no one thought it was funny.
“Thanks a lot, Mr. Gotti,” I said after an awkward pause. “It was nice to talk to you,” and I left without saying anything except good-bye.
Later one of the mafiosi called and said Gotti wanted to invite me to be his guest at a prizefight, but I told him I was too busy and couldn’t make it.
Many articles about The Godfather called it my “comeback.” I never understood what they meant except that it was a picture in which I played the title role and it made a lot of money, while several of my last pictures hadn’t. Everything in Hollywood is measured in terms of money. If I had been in a stupid picture and it made millions of dollars, I would have been congratulated everywhere I went on my success. But because a good picture like Burn! didn’t make money it was considered unsuccessful. In Hollywood they congratulate you on your ability to transfer currency from the pockets of the audience to theirs because that’s their only measure of success. Any picture that makes money, no matter how stupid, vulgar, childish or inane, is embraced as a triumph.
It is different in other parts of the world, where making pictures of quality is as important as the box office. It has always been a mystery to me why countries like Italy, France and England, which have produced fine directors