Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [37]
Well, my sweet ones, good night for now.
Love, Bud
• • •
The play opened on February 17, 1946, at the Belasco Theatre. I got good reviews and so did Ann and Karl Maiden, who became my lifelong friends, but the critics didn’t like it and it closed after less than two weeks. Still, short-lived though it was, Truckline Cafe changed my life. Nothing, I learned, attracts women more than fame, money and success.
I was out of work only a few weeks. After Truckline Cafe, other job offers came in, including one from Guthrie McClintic, a producer, director and the husband of Katharine Cornell, who, with Helen Hayes and Lynn Fontanne, was one of the reigning queens of Broadway. Guthrie had seen Truckline Cafe and offered me the part opposite his wife, of Eugene Marchbanks, a young poet who falls in love with an older woman in George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. Guthrie was an entertaining, emphatic man with a bizarre sense of humor and a hernia that kept popping out when he laughed; when it did, he punched himself in the groin and pushed it back, which made him laugh even harder. Katharine Cornell was proper, quite empty-headed and very beautiful. She had the kind of stage presence that made her a star without having to be good, and there was a nebulous quality to her acting that I found difficult to relate to onstage; performing with her was like trying to bite down on a tomato seed. She acted and spoke lines in ways that were sometimes inconsistent with the character she was playing, but I tried to keep up with her. It was like two people dancing to a different beat, one of them constantly struggling to get in step with the other. Still, I enjoyed the play, which opened on my twenty-second birthday. Sir Cedric Hardwicke was in the cast, along with Wesley Addy and Mildred Natwick, whom I adored. Hardwicke was a Johnny One Note actor who had a single expression throughout the play and his career. He never blinked or flinched. Once he stood offstage watching me act, muttering and shaking his head in disapproval, and one of my friends heard him say, “Must be sex appeal.” He was probably right because I was hopelessly miscast in the role.
After Truckline Cafe and Candida, more offers came in, including some from television and Hollywood. I was in one television show called Come Out Fighting in which I played a boxer, but which required the talents of a sprinter. Because the show was live, I had to make a twenty-five-yard dash every few minutes from one set to another without missing a beat. In the script, after supposedly losing a boxing match, I had to take a shower and create the impression that I was depressed. I stood in my shorts waiting for the water to hit me, but the prop man missed his cue and forgot to turn it on. The camera kept rolling, but no water came out of the spigot. I didn’t know what to do, so I thought, “Well, I’ll look up forlornly and regretfully at the showerhead and think about how awful it was to lose the fight.” Meanwhile I tried to will water to flow out of the shower. Then suddenly a deluge of water hit my face and my body that was so cold that the prop man must have gotten it out of the freezing compartment of a refrigerator. The shock took my breath away and I wasn’t sure I could live through it. But the camera was on me and I had to keep going. I yelled, “Jesus Christ,” completely dropping out of character. Afterward, someone complimented me for a fine job of acting in the shower scene. This was my last experience with live television.
In those days the Hollywood studios all had scouts in New York who kept an eye out for new faces on Broadway. It was the twilight of the old system when the studios all kept large stables of actors, directors, writers and producers under contract. I got feelers from several that wanted me to sign a