Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [52]
A lot of people who don’t have it lust after fame and find it impossible to imagine that someone else wouldn’t be interested in being famous; they can’t envisage anyone turning his back on fame and all its appurtenances. But fame has been the bane of my life, and I would have gladly given it up. Once I was famous, I was never able to be Bud Brando of Libertyville, Illinois, again. One of my consistent objections to my way of making a living has been that I have been forced to live a false life, and all the people I know, with the exception of a handful, have been affected by my fame. To one degree or another everybody is affected by it, consciously or unconsciously. People don’t relate to you as the person you are, but to a myth they believe you are, and the myth is always wrong. You are scorned or loved for mythic reasons that, once given a life, like zombies that stalk you from the grave—or newspaper-morgue files—live forever. Even today I meet people who think of me automatically as a tough, insensitive, coarse guy named Stanley Kowalski. They can’t help it, but it is troubling. We are all voyeurs to one degree or another, including me, but with fame comes the predatory prowl of a carrion press that has an insatiable appetite for salaciousness and abhors being denied access to anyone, from pimps to presidents (a journey that becomes shorter every year), and, confused and resentful because it can’t get what it wants, resorts to inventing stories about you because it is part of a culture whose most pressing moral imperative is that anything is acceptable if it makes money.
I’m not an innocent: I do things for money, too. I’ve made stupid movies because I wanted the money. I’m writing this book for money because Harry Evans of Random House offered it to me. He said that if his company published a book about a movie star, the profits would enable him to publish books by talented unpublished authors that might not make money. At least he was honest, although I thought it was odd for him to admit that he published trashy books so that he could issue those that had real value. In his own way, Harry is a hooker just like me, looking for a way to make money any way he can. I’m only a hooker who has been working the other side of the street. A little self-hatred? I think not, but I admit to perhaps a touch of vanity in being able to see it clearly and confess it.
Alice Marchak, my secretary for over thirty years, once said she thought I had a kind of split personality: one side of me enjoys the recognition and power of being a movie star while the other side hates the part of me that enjoys it. I doubt this, but it’s impossible to understand oneself. There are yogis and swamis who have lived close to their unconscious, who have a sense of their own character and know themselves deeply, but most people cannot allow themselves to see what they actually are because everybody has a mythological sense of himself. The person Alice sees is not the person somebody else would see. Wally Cox, who was like my brother, would not see me that way. Everyone we know in our lives views us through a slightly different prism. These are Alice’s impressions, and they are right in respect to the lens through which she looks at me. Everything is perception. There is no such thing as being able to judge anything objectively. It is a pose that scientists have foisted upon the world.
Other than the money, have I enjoyed being a movie star? I don’t think so, regardless of Alice’s opinion. I have always examined myself with precision and determination. Ever since I was young, I have attempted to find out what was unbalanced about myself. I’ve had to take hard looks at my vanities and sullied ambitions in order to find solutions to a pattern of behavior that seems difficult to change. But I don’t see anything in my career, or in the manner in which I pursue