Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [50]
“C’mon,” I said, “we’re not going to fight, we’re just gonna box a little.”
He was a big guy in his early twenties with a thick mop of wavy black hair, about six foot four and 220 pounds. “I don’t feel like it,” he said.
“You need some exercise, and so do I,” I said.
“No.”
I kept it up, but he kept refusing until finally I talked him into it, probably because he’d decided I wouldn’t stop pestering him until he did. We went downstairs, put on the gloves and started sparring, but he was lethargic, so I said, “Come on, give me something I can work with. I’m trying to work on defense. Hit me. I’m not going to hurt you, for Chrissake.”
But he kept up his little patter of soft thrusts against my gloves until I said, “Come on, would you please throw a real punch? I’m not going to hurt—”
I don’t remember exactly what happened next, but I felt his fist smash into my nose like a sledgehammer, and the next instant blood poured out of it in a crimson deluge. Until then I’d never been hurt while boxing, but now I was really in pain. I went upstairs to my dressing room, looked in the mirror and saw my face covered with blood. As I tried to wipe it away I took a drag on a cigarette and saw something startling: the smoke from my cigarette was billowing out of my forehead in a big, white cloud.
It struck me that something was drastically wrong. I looked again in the mirror and saw that my nose was split across the bridge and that the smoke was taking the path of least resistance.
How did I get into this mess? I asked myself, In less than a minute, I had to go out onstage. According to the script, I was coming home after having gotten drunk celebrating the birth of my child, and after arguing with Jessica I was going to pick her up and carry her off to bed. With not much choice, I wiped my face and walked onstage.
Jessica, who had always disapproved of my boxing between acts, looked up at me from behind the desk where she was sitting and ad-libbed, “You bloody fool.”
We finished the scene and the third act as if nothing had happened, though when I picked her up and laid her down on the bed, I felt so nauseous for a moment from swallowing blood that I nearly passed out on top of her. But apparently no one in the audience knew the difference; they probably assumed I’d gotten into a bar fight or other mischief while I was offstage celebrating fatherhood, and that my blood was makeup.
When we took our curtain call, blood was still cascading out of my nose and falling on my shoes, shirt, pants and onto the stage. Then I went to the hospital, where I was treated by a butcher and sadist. He began by trying to put my nose back together by squeezing the bones in his fingers without giving me any anesthesia. I have a high threshold of pain, but he quickly surpassed it: he kept squeezing and pressing until I was barely conscious. Finally he got the nose stabilized, put a piece of tape over it and that was that. For a long time, I wanted to break the nose of that son of a bitch, even though he did me a favor by ordering me to spend a week in the hospital so my bones could heal. I was delighted to have a vacation. Jack Palance took over the part and I had a lot of fun taking the nurses up to the roof. I didn’t have to go to work, but still got paid for it.
After several days, the discoloration around my eyes started to fade and my swollen nose got smaller. When I began looking fit enough to go back to work, the doctor said, “Mr. Brando, I have some good news for you: I think you should be getting out of here in a day or two.”
I didn’t want to leave yet. I was enjoying it too much. Then I heard that Irene Selznick was coming to the hospital to see me. I asked a friend to go a theatrical supply store