Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [45]
But we had a wonderful play under us and it was a big success. An actor can never act his way out of a bad play; no matter how well he performs, if he doesn’t have real drama beneath him he can act his best all day and it won’t work. He could have the twelve disciples in the cast and Jesus Christ playing the lead and still get bad reviews if the play is poorly written. An actor can help a play, but he can’t make it a success. In A Streetcar Named Desire, we had under us one of the best-written plays ever produced, and we couldn’t miss.
18
THE INTERVALS of anxiety and depression that began when my mother left New York City continued off and on through the run of A Streetcar Named Desire and for long afterward. It would take years for me to escape my acceptance of what I had been taught as a child—that I was worthless. Of course, I had no idea then that I even had such feelings about myself. Something was chewing on me and I didn’t know what it was, but I had to hide my emotions and appear strong. It has been this way most of my life; I have always had to pretend that I was strong when I wasn’t. Nonetheless, sometime after the play opened I realized I needed help, and Gadg referred me to his psychiatrist, a well-known Freudian analyst in New York named Bela Mittelman, the coldest man I’ve ever known. I saw him for several years, seeking empathy, insight and guidance, but all I got was ice. He had absolutely no warmth. Even the furnishings in his office were frigid; I almost shivered every time I walked into it. Maybe he was following the rules of his particular school of psychiatry, but to me he had no insight into human behavior and never gave me any help. I was still on my own, trying to deal alone with emotions I didn’t yet understand. Why these feelings surfaced when they did, I don’t know, although I suppose they had something to do with my mother going away. In New York I’d had another chance to offer her my love, which I did, but it hadn’t been enough for her.
I didn’t begin to understand the reason for any of these things until I was in my forties. Until then, I usually responded to emotions that I didn’t understand with anger.
I’ve always thought that one benefit of acting is that it gives actors a chance to express feelings that they are normally unable to vent in real life. Intense emotions buried inside you can come smoking out the back of your head, and I suppose in terms of psychodrama this can be helpful. In hindsight, I guess my emotional insecurity as a child—the frustrations of not being allowed to be who I was, of wanting love and not being able to get it, of realizing that I was of no value—may have helped me as an actor, at least in a small way. It probably gave me a certain intensity I could call upon that most people don’t have. It also gave me a capacity to mimic, because when you are a child who is unwanted or unwelcome, and the essence of what you are seems to be unacceptable, you look for an identity that will be acceptable. Usually this identity is found in faces you are talking to. You make a habit of studying people, finding out the way they talk, the answers that they give and their points of view; then, in a form of self-defense, you reflect what’s on their faces and how they act because most people like to see reflections of themselves. So when I became an actor, I had a wide variety of performances inside me to produce reactions in other people, and I think this served me as well as my intensity.
I was always very close to my sisters because we were all scorched, though perhaps in different ways, by the experience of growing up in the furnace that was our family. We each went our own way, but there has always been the love and intimacy that can be shared only by those trying to escape in the same lifeboat. Tiddy probably knows me better than anyone else.
Not long ago, she wrote me a letter about my early years in New York:
“You were a twenty-three-year-old when all the ‘Streetcar’ stuff