Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [61]
“I didn’t bring you here.”
“I’m confused. You told me you wanted me here, so I came …”
“You’re mistaken. Where are you from?”
“Philadelphia.”
“What brought you here?”
“You called me,” she said, “you told me to come.”
“No, I didn’t. How did you get in?”
“Through the transom above the door.”
She was a prim-looking, plain girl with dark hair close-cropped in twenties style. I couldn’t see her figure because she was wearing a winter coat. “Are you religious?” I asked her because something about her suggested that she was.
“Yes.”
“Do you have a priest?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you go home and tell this to the priest? Tell him what you’ve done and what happened.”
I must have been convincing, because she went out the door without another word. I watched her walk down the hall and disappear into the elevator. Two years later, when I was living in Hollywood, a woman, wearing a tam-o’-shanter topped by a fuzzy white ball, approached me as I was walking up the sidewalk toward my house. I ignored her and started to open the front door, but she followed me right up the steps and stood next to me. I still hadn’t recognized her.
“What do you want?” I asked. Then I realized it was the woman who had climbed over the transom of my apartment. “Why have you come here?”
“I have a message for you,” she answered.
“Who is it from?”
“From God.”
I was quick with an excuse about needing a root canal and said, “I have to go now. Just tell God I was too busy to listen to his message. Thank him but tell him I had to go to the dentist.”
I went out to the garage as if to leave in order to get rid of her. But when I got into my car she followed me. “You’ll have to go,” I said.
“But what about the message from God?”
“All right,” I said. “What is the message?”
She stuck her finger an inch from my crotch and said, “This.”
“That’s the message from God?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” I said, “tell God I’m very glad that he gave me the message, and I’ll certainly take care of it.” I said good-bye, drove away and never saw her again.
Another time, three teenage girls knocked at my door and asked for a photograph of me. I asked, “How did you find out where I live?” After they gave a garbled explanation, I was polite to them, but I didn’t have any photographs of myself to give them, and they left. But then—I guess they were sixteen or seventeen—they began appearing in my life wherever I went, either in California or New York. I don’t know how they were able to afford it, but they followed me from coast to coast and appeared at restaurants, hotels and other places I visited. “Please, girls,” I told them, “don’t follow me. I can’t go through this anymore. I don’t want to see you.” On one occasion I was at the Plaza Hotel in New York and heard a knock at the door. When I opened it, there they were. I said, “I’m going to have the manager of the hotel send up a detective and have you arrested.” In unison, they pleaded: “Please, Marlon, please,” but I’d had enough and called the desk. The house detective came up to my room and said he had searched the floor but hadn’t been able to find any girls. Five minutes later, they pounded on my door again; they had been hiding under some sheets in a linen closet.
This went on for another year and a half or so. Years later I got a letter from one of them with an apology for pestering me; they hadn’t been able to help themselves, she said. She asked to be forgiven and I wrote her a letter saying as kindly as I could that I was glad they’d come to their senses. But not long after that, I opened my door, and one of the other girls was standing there. She too apologized and said that all three of them were seeing psychiatrists. I praised her for tackling her problem and then she left.
24
WHILE WE WERE MAKING the movie of Streetcar, Elia Kazan directed a love scene between Karl Maiden and Vivien Leigh from a rolling camera dolly. While they acted in front of the camera, he sat on the moving dolly and unconsciously acted their parts with them, moving his hands with theirs, raising his