Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [53]
No, I don’t think I have ever liked being a movie star. I think of myself as one of a race apart from other actors. Not that I condemn them or what they have done; I simply don’t want to be considered among them. When I was thirty, I tried to express some of my feelings in a letter to a young woman who’d sent me an adoring letter about The Wild One: “Dear Cleola … thanks for your kind letter. It really was very flattering. You shouldn’t make such a fuss about me, though, because I am simply a human being just like you. I am happy and sad, quiet and gay—in short, nothing more or less than one of some four billion human animals on the earth. Don’t make something out of me that I am not.”
But I’ve learned that no matter what I say or do, people mythologize me. The greatest change that success has brought me has nothing to do with my concept of myself or my reaction to fame, but of other people’s reactions to it. I haven’t changed. I have never forgotten my life in Libertyville when I felt unwanted, and my formative years when I didn’t have the advantages I do now. I have always been suspicious of success, its pitfalls and how it can undo you.
All in all, I think it would have been better not to have been famous because my entire adult life’s experience, my view of life, and the lives and outlook of my friends and family, have been colored and distorted by it. If Janice Mars was right in believing that intimacy with a famous friend can victimize those around him, there is also a flip side: people without fame try to attach themselves to it, making it difficult to trust anyone. Ever since I became famous, it’s been difficult for me to judge if a potential friend was attracted to me or to my fame and to the myths about me. It is the first thing I notice. And even though they may say it doesn’t, my fame affects them. I’ve given jobs to friends, then discovered they were using me, or worse, stealing from me. I have also been disappointed when former friends like Carlo Fiore, having led empty lives and with nothing else to sell, have chosen to publish intimate, private accounts about our friendship. But I suppose they were simply trying to pay their bills and survive.
Once you are famous, everything and everybody changes. Even my father. After A Streetcar Named Desire, he started doing something that really annoyed me: he began calling me Marlon. Until then he’d always called me Bud or Buddy like everyone else in the family. Ever since then, it has annoyed me deeply whenever somebody who once called me Bud begins calling me Marlon or somebody who called me Marlon begins calling me Bud.
The worst thing that can happen when someone becomes famous is for him to believe the myths about himself—and that, I have the conceit to say, I have never done. Still, I am stung by the realization that I am covered with the same muck as some of the people I have criticized because fame thrives in the manure of the success of which I allowed myself to become a part. Though I am not directly responsible, I could have chosen a less putrid trail to walk, but without a high school education, and with no sense that becoming famous would put me next to a sewage plant, I was obliged to develop indifference to the consequences.
I never planned or aspired or had any ambition to become a movie star. It just happened. I never felt a passion to act for any other reason than to supply myself with the needs of life. When it happened, I was grateful to find something at which I could make a living. I didn’t have anything better to do, acting didn’t grate on me, and after a while I could do it without expending a lot of effort. Later, when it became less enjoyable, it was still the best way I knew to make a lot of money in a short time. To me, acting has always been only a means to an end, a source of money for which I didn’t have to work very hard. The hours are short, the pay good, and when you’re done, you’re as free as a bird. Acting is like playing house. I don’t look down on it,