Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [57]
When Monty showed up in Paris for The Young Lions, he was consuming more chloral hydrate and alcohol than ever. His face was gray and gaunt, and he had lost a lot of weight. I saw he was on the trajectory to personal destruction and talked to him frankly, opening myself completely to him; I told him about my mother’s drinking and my experiences with therapy and said, “Monty, there’s awful anguish ahead for you if you don’t get hold of yourself. You’ve got to get some help. You can’t take refuge in chemicals, because that’s a wall you can’t ever climb. You can’t get around it, you can’t drive through it. You’re just gonna die sitting up huddled in front of that wall.”
I gave him the name of a therapist I thought might be able to help him, encouraged him to join Alcoholics Anonymous and talked to him for hours trying to persuade him to stop taking dope and alcohol. But when we shot the picture, he often slurred his lines. I tried to shore him up and did the best I could to get him through the picture, but afterward his descent continued until he died in 1966 at the age of forty-six.
I do not know for a fact that Monty was a homosexual. Afterward, some people told me he was, but I have heard so many lies told about myself that I no longer believe what people say about others. I do know he carried around a heavy emotional burden and never learned how to bear it.
23
WHEN I LIVED in the apartment at Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue, someone began making anonymous telephone calls to me that always followed the same pattern: the phone would ring, I would pick it up and say “Hello,” there would be silence and then the caller would hang up. Then a few minutes later, the phone would ring again and the caller would listen silently while I kept repeating, “Who is this? Why don’t you say something? Look, I think it would be advisable for you to see a psychiatrist at your earliest convenience.”
After about three months, the caller, a woman, spoke for the first time in frightened, tremulous low tones. I asked her who she was and why she kept calling me, and finally wheedled some answers out of her; she said she had been fixated on me for years, ever since A Streetcar Named Desire was on Broadway. I asked her what she did for a living and she said that she was a hold-up artist—that is, she masterminded robberies, mostly of liquor stores; she planned the “jobs,” as she put it, while a deaf-and-dumb friend who drove a motorcycle did the dirty work. After a three-hour conversation, she revealed that for months she and this friend had been making plans to kidnap me and take me to Long Island, where she was going to imprison and cannibalize me.
I didn’t know if she was crazy or serious, but realized that whether it was fact or fantasy, I was dealing with a very disturbed mind. I finally decided that she was deadly serious; she explained in great detail how she was going to kidnap me, and she clearly had an intimate knowledge of my life and routine. She said that she had made her deaf-and-dumb friend tear down a billboard of A Streetcar Named Desire, and had papered her entire bedroom with it—walls, ceiling and floor. Sometimes she locked herself in her room without food or water and spent days just looking at the pictures, she said; she also kept a picture of me beneath her pillow and talked to it. After she captured me, she said she was going to eat me because she loved me.
I decided to meet this woman face-to-face. I was interested to find out why anyone could develop such a fixation, the depth of her disorder and the seriousness of her imbalance. I invited