Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [31]
These are matters I have been interested in since I was a child. I was determined to know, to guess and to assess quirks that people did not know about themselves. I have tried to push and probe until I learned their potential for loving, for hating, for anger, for self-interest, for their taste in the things they wanted in life and how much they wanted them, to discover their perimeters and limits and find out how they were truly constituted. I have always been equally curious about my own potential and limits, and tested myself to learn how much I could stand of one thing or another—how honest I could be, how false, how materialistic or otherworldy, how frightened, to what extent I could take a risk and what terrified me most.
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After I had some success, Lee Strasberg tried to take credit for teaching me how to act. He never taught me anything. He would have claimed credit for the sun and the moon if he believed he could get away with it. He was an ambitious, selfish man who exploited the people who attended the Actors Studio, and he tried to project himself as an acting oracle and guru. Some people worshiped him, but I never knew why. To me he was a tasteless and untalented person whom I didn’t like very much. I sometimes went to the Actors Studio on Saturday mornings because Elia Kazan was teaching, and there were usually a lot of good-looking girls. But Strasberg never taught me acting. Stella did—and later Kazan.
13
MY MOTHER followed Frannie, Tiddy and me to New York a few months after I got there; my parents had split up again. She got an apartment on West End Avenue, and the three of us moved in with her, along with Tiddy’s year-old son, Gahan. She promised to stay sober, but she couldn’t manage it, and before long it was like Libertyville and Evanston all over again. She hid bottles under her bed and in the kitchen cabinets and started disappearing again. We tried to get her to stop, and sometimes she did for a few weeks, but then she would go on another bender. For us it was an emotional seesaw.
During my year at the New School, I was a conscientious student, if unschooled in many aspects of life. Once, during rehearsals for a play, another member of the Dramatic Workshop came over to me and said he wanted to help me. Since I was eager to do my best, I listened intently to him. He said I should play my part with dignity.
“Yes,” I agreed, “I’m trying to.”
“But you should stand up a little straighter,” he said. “Put your shoulders back, your chest out, lower your shoulders.”
I tried to do all that.
Then he patted my crotch. “Pull this in a little.”
I was horrified and stood motionless in stunned silence. When he did it again, I was almost paralyzed. Then he said, “What do you like? Men, women or children?”
Planting my foot for leverage against a scenery board nailed to the floor, I unleashed a punch that sent him sailing across the room and to a hospital with a smashed face. When I was chastised for this by Erwin Piscator, I told him that the man had made sexual advances to me. He replied that hitting people wasn’t the way people in the theater dealt with such matters.
At the end of the school year, Piscator took our group to Sayville, Long Island, to reprise several productions in summer stock, including Twelfth Night, in which I played Sebastian. A lot of unbridled fornication occurred during that summer of 1944, and I was in the thick of it. One day Piscator lifted up the trapdoor to the loft where I was sleeping above a garage, found me with a girl and said I had to leave because