Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [54]
“Just fine, thank you. See you next week when you bring more money.”
After I returned from Paris, there were a lot of proposals for new plays and movies, and I accepted one of them—a one-picture deal, not a seven-year studio contract. It was The Men, a story about a group of paraplegic and quadriplegic soldiers in a California Veterans Hospital after World War II. The producer was Stanley Kramer, and the director was Fred Zinnemann. The script by Carl Foreman was a good one. I played a young army lieutenant, Ken Wilocek, whose spine had been smashed by a German sniper’s bullet in the closing days of the war. I had no idea what it was like to be confined to a wheelchair or to spend the rest of my life in one, so I asked to be admitted to the Birmingham Veterans Hospital in southern California as a paralyzed veteran with a background similar to Ken Wilocek’s. A few patients and members of the staff were informed, but most of the patients didn’t know I was an actor, and because it was my first movie, no one recognized me. For three weeks I tried to do everything the patients did and learn what their lives were like. The first thing I discovered was that they hated pity. Once we went out for dinner to an Italian restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, all of us in our wheelchairs, and a woman came over and said to us, “I’m so proud of you, boys. I know what you’ve done for your country.”
She kept repeating herself, going on and on while the guys became increasingly uncomfortable. They didn’t want her pity. They weren’t interested in what she had to say; the only thing they wanted to do was enjoy their night out.
“I know you boys will be able to walk someday. You just have to work hard and you’ll do it. I have faith in God that he will help you and you’ll be all right. You’ve got to believe because you are with the Lord and the Lord is with you and will help you.”
They were really getting sick of her, so I said, “You know, ma’am, I believe you. I believe in the Lord.”
“Well,” she said, “I want you to believe. You should believe it, soldier, because I know that with the Lord’s work you can recover.”
I said, “I do believe! I do believe! I feel the Lord has come right into this room and into my body. The Lord is in my body! I feel it …”
I got up and started tap dancing, then ran around the restaurant and sprinted out the door shouting, “Hallelujah!”
The guys in their wheelchairs cracked up. Unfortunately they didn’t get many laughs. They were young, virile men—some of them seventeen- or eighteen-year-old boys with good brains who were trapped in inoperative bodies and would never be able to move their arms or legs or make love. Many fought like tigers to make the most of their broken bodies; some put paintbrushes in their teeth and created beautiful paintings. But it was excruciatingly difficult; many were upbeat and determined to get on with their lives, while others gave up. Perhaps the saddest aspect of these men was that they believed they had let their wives down; in most cases, they had lost their capacity for sexual performance, and it ate at them. Some told me that the emotional pain of knowing that their wives did not want to be dishonest and disloyal, yet realizing that eventually they would succumb to temptation, was worse. Some of the friends I made at Birmingham killed themselves, unable to take it anymore.
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