Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [48]
But Freddie also got the drift and broke off what he was doing, and we ran down the fire escape as fast as we could. When we reached the bottom and the ladder lowered us to the sidewalk, we looked up three stories and saw a head shouting, “Hey, motherfuckers, you wait right there! Don’t you be running!”
We ran like hell, but it had been well worth it. They were very attractive girls.
My pal that night was a friend I’d met in an acting class at the New School, Carlo Fiore, although he had changed his name to Freddie Stevens because he thought it would make it easier for him to get acting jobs. He was one of my first friends in New York, and we shared a lot of girls; he’d get one and I’d try to move in on him, or I’d get one and he’d try to get her in his bed.
Freddie had a huge Roman nose, spoke from the bowels of Brooklyn and didn’t have much acting talent, all of which conspired to work against his becoming a star. He had his nose operated on two or three times, the last time by a surgeon who must have used a can opener instead of a scalpel, but it didn’t help. He fancied himself an intellectual and budding member of the New York literati, and was so full of himself that one of our friends, paraphrasing Shakespeare, described the stories he told as “tales told by an idiot full of sound and Fiore, signifying nothing.” Later I tried to get Freddie jobs, but never had much luck unless I could give him one myself. He was charming and funny but troubled; I don’t know whether his lack of success as an actor contributed or not, but he became a junkie and tried hard to get me to take heroin—a “skin pop,” as he called it. When I refused, he always said, “You don’t know how to live.” I watched him fall deeper and deeper into the abyss of addiction while doing whatever I could to make him stop. I was with him once when he tried to go cold turkey, and it was awful. He shook, shivered and threw up, and finally said he had to go home to his Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn and ask his family to help him. A couple of hours later he called me from home and told me frantically that he needed some Seconal. I bought some and went to his house, where I saw something very touching. He had once told me that his mother was mentally deranged, and when I arrived I could see in his face that he was ashamed of her, but he stood next to her lovingly and put his arms around her because he didn’t want to reject her.
After I’d had some success as an actor, things began to sour between Freddie and me. He became envious then resentful of me, a problem I was starting to have with other friends, a lot of whom were actors or writers, especially if their careers weren’t going well. It was hurtful to experience this because I was too young to understand it. Many years later, Janice Mars told me she thought Freddie in some ways was a victim of his friendship with me. “Poor Carlo just couldn’t survive being your sidekick, and he never carved out a life for himself.… The attraction of your fame and money was too much for him. To be too close to you could be fatal. You were quicksand for anyone without the strength to pull out. It wasn’t your fault. You wanted to help people, but at the same time their availability to you took priority over their own best interests. They lost themselves. Carlo ended up being expendable, involved in drugs, a hostage to failure.”
Freddie finally got off dope, but then he became an alcoholic and wrote a book about me, probably all that he had left to sell. He continued on his path of self-destruction until he died.
19
IT STILL PLEASES ME to be awake during the dark, early hours before morning when everyone else is still asleep. I’ve been that way since I first moved to New York. I do my best thinking and writing then. During those early years in New York, I often got on my motorcycle in the middle of the night and went