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By Root 395 0

I’d broken the “Rules of Summer Stock.” I was disappointed because I was enjoying myself, but in those days I was like a newspaper blowing down the street in a strong wind: I went this way or that way depending on the gale. As luck would have it, because I was expelled I got my first acting job about three weeks later in I Remember Mama. I simply stepped off one lily pad onto another. It has been that way most of my life. I’ve had lots of problems, but also lots of luck; in many ways I have led a charmed life. Subsequently I learned that one of the ladies in our company had been servicing Piscator all that summer, This tickled me; what an act of hypocrisy it was to send me home!

It was an agent, Maynard Morris, who suggested me for I Remember Mama, a play by John Van Druten and the first nonmusical produced by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. I was twenty, but he thought I could play Nels, the son of two Norwegian immigrants, who was fourteen during most of the play. He sent me over for an audition at the office of Rodgers and Hammerstein. When I got there, Richard Rodgers looked up at me skeptically with dark, hooded eyes, shirtsleeves rolled up and a nasty expression. It was my first interview for an acting job, and I didn’t know what to say or how to behave.

Rodgers looked at me impatiently and asked, “What’s your name?”

“Marlon Brando.”

“What have you done?”

“Well, I was in summer stock and played in Twelfth Night and I—”

“C’mon, what have you done?” he said, raising his voice unpleasantly.

I said, “Besides that, nothing.”

After I read for the part, Rodgers told Hammerstein that he hated my audition and didn’t want to use me, but John Van Druten liked me; he prevailed and I got the part.

I Remember Mama opened October 19, 1944, at the Music Box Theatre and I got a few fair reviews, but nothing special. The play was a hit and ran for two years. I remember it mostly for my fun offstage. On a questionnaire for my biography for Playbill, I made up stories about myself, including my birthplace: Calcutta, India. Later on I told Playbill I’d been born in other places—Bangkok, Thailand, and Mukden, China. I have always enjoyed making up bizarre stories to see if people would believe them. Generally they do.

Oscar Homolka, who played my father in the play, was a brusque, unpleasant, pompous man, which made him enjoyable to irritate. In one scene, as he got into a car that was pulled across the stage by a wire, he was supposed to blow the horn to summon the rest of the family. As he honked the horn, a prop man was supposed to blow a trumpetlike horn offstage loud enough to be heard in the back of the house. But every so often Homolka honked his horn and the prop man missed his cue and was several seconds late. This made Homolka furious; sometimes he would turn around and shout into the wings at the poor old cricket of a stagehand so loudly that the audience could hear him, and matters became very tense between them. The prop man kept promising to get it right, but one day when he wasn’t looking, I stuffed his horn with Kleenex, and the next time Homolka honked his horn onstage and the prop man, with perfect timing, blew his, there was complete silence. He blew harder and harder. Still no sound. Homolka got red in the face and started bellowing at him from the stage while the prop man reached deeper and deeper into his lungs and blew with all his heart—so hard that he blew his false teeth out of his mouth. It was uproarious to see him fighting to get a grip on his choppers with his lips while still trying to blow the horn, and I almost had apoplexy.

In another scene Mama’s sister had to say, “You certainly make a wonderful cup of coffee. It’s so delicious I think I’ll have another cup.” On one occasion I poured salt and some Tabasco sauce into the coffee, and she had to drink a cup of this witches’ brew, keep a straight face and ask for another cup.

Shortly after the play opened, I started stammering again. When I was supposed to say words like “the,” “that,” “there” or “those,” my tongue got stuck on “th”