Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [158]
56
IN LAST TANGO IN PARIS, my first picture after the The Godfather, I played a recently widowed American named Paul who has a quirky, anonymous affair with a French girl named Jeanne, played by Maria Schneider. The director was Bernardo Bertolucci, an extremely sensitive and talented man although, unlike Kazan, he wasn’t trained as an actor and didn’t address himself to the development of characters. This simply happens or it doesn’t, though Bernardo did do something unusual on this picture. Usually actors have to conform to the writer’s story and take on the characteristics he creates, but in Last Tango Bernardo tailored the story to his actors. He wanted me to play myself, to improvise completely and portray Paul as if he were an autobiographical mirror of me. Because he didn’t speak much English and knew nothing about American slang, he had me write virtually all my scenes and dialogue, and we communicated in French and sign language.
Some of the lines I wrote for the picture may have a certain resonance to the readers of this book: “I can’t remember very many good things about my childhood … my father was a drunk, a screwed-up bar fighter. My mother was also a drunk. My memories as a kid are of her being arrested. We lived in a small town, a farming community.… I used to have to milk a cow every morning and every night, and I liked that, but I remember the time I was all dressed up to take a girl to a basketball game, and my father said you have to milk the cow … and I didn’t have time to change my shoes and I had cow shit all over my shoes when I went to the basketball game.…” I made up the dialogue from my memories of events, though not everything was accurate and they didn’t necessarily happen in the sequence I told them. For example, my father didn’t order me to milk a cow before a date, but as mentioned earlier I did take girls to games mortified that they might smell cow dung on my galoshes.
I had one of the more embarrassing experiences of my professional career when we were making this film in 1972. I was supposed to play a scene in the Paris apartment where Paul meets Jeanne and be photographed in the nude frontally, but it was such a cold day that my penis shrank to the size of a peanut. It simply withered. Because of the cold, my body went into full retreat, and the tension, embarrassment and stress made it recede even more. I realized I couldn’t play the scene this way, so I paced back and forth around the apartment stark naked, hoping for magic. I’ve always had a strong belief in the power of mind over matter, so I concentrated on my private parts, trying to will my penis and testicles to grow; I even spoke to them. But my mind failed me. I was humiliated, but not ready to surrender yet. I asked Bernardo to be patient and told the crew that I wasn’t giving up. But after an hour I could tell from their faces that they had given up on me. I simply couldn’t play the scene that way, so it was cut.
This scene was one of several in which Bernardo wanted me to make love to Maria Schneider to give the picture more authenticity. But it would have completely changed the picture and made our sex organs the focus of the story, and I refused. Maria and I simulated a lot of things, including one scene of buggering in which I used butter, but it was all ersatz sex.
Last Tango in Paris received a lot of praise, though I always thought it was excessive. Pauline Kael in particular praised it highly, but I think her review revealed more about her than about the movie. She is the best reviewer I know, but I think she became too subjectively involved in the story and critiqued the film from her own unique set of values and biases. Her review was flattering, but I don’t think the