Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [63]
After A Streetcar Named Desire, Gadge asked me to be in Viva Zapata!, a film that he wanted to direct, written by John Steinbeck and based on the life of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, whom I played. It was a pretty good picture, but I think Kazan made a mistake in not requiring everyone in the cast to speak with a Mexican accent. I affected a slight one, but it wasn’t well done, and most of the other actors spoke standard English, which made it seem artificial.
Tony Quinn, whom I admired professionally and liked personally, played my brother, but he was extremely cold to me while we shot the picture. During our scenes together, I sensed a bitterness toward me, and if I suggested a drink after work, he either turned me down or else was sullen and said little. Only years later did I learn why.
The film was produced by Twentieth Century-Fox, and until it was a hit, Darryl F. Zanuck, who ran the studio, was lukewarm about it. An absurd-looking man, Zanuck bore a striking resemblance to Bugs Bunny; when he entered a room, his front teeth preceded him by about three seconds. He also had a tremendously inflated opinion of himself; he considered himself larger than life, was totally self-absorbed, was cruel to many of the people who worked for him and always had a new bimbo in tow. When we made Viva Zapata!, he complained constantly to Gadg about the color of Jean Peters’s skin. He was a bigot of the old Hollywood school, when studios often cast whites as blacks or Asians, and he kept warning Gadg that Jean looked too dark in the rushes and that no one would buy a ticket to see a movie whose leading lady didn’t look white. Time after time he made her change her makeup, and he kept ordering Gadg to reshoot scenes with different lighting so that she wouldn’t “look so dark.”
Jean was seeing Howard Hughes at the time, and he had sent a woman with her to Mexico to accompany her twenty-four hours a day as a kind of security guard, chaperone and lady-in-waiting. Since nothing ever energized my libido more than a well-guarded target, I was determined to have her. We did a little casual flirting, but her chaperone was always in watchful attendance, so I didn’t get anywhere. Deciding to bring the matter to a head, one night about two A.M., I climbed up on the roof of the house she was living in, intending to implement my plan of seduction. But just as I was about to lower myself on a rope to Jean’s window, the chaperone woke up and saw me, so I had to make a quick exit. Undaunted, I tried other ways to effect my plan, but was never able to get past Howard Hughes’s security.
• • •
After being a Mexican revolutionary, I played Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the director, assembled a good cast, including Louis Calhern, James Mason, Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr, Edmond O’Brien and John Gielgud, who played Cassius. Though English actors generally are far superior to American actors in their style, speech and familiarity with Shakespeare, many British actors, like Maurice Evans, are no better than we are in his plays. It takes someone of Gielgud’s stature to perform with authority because he has played most of the important Shakespeare roles. But for me to walk onto a movie set and play Mark Antony without more experience was asinine.
25
THE WILD ONE, my fifth picture, was based on a real incident, a motorcycle gang’s terrorizing of a small California farm town. I had fun making it, but never expected it to have the impact it did. I was as surprised as anyone when T-shirts, jeans and leather jackets suddenly became symbols of rebellion. In the film there was a scene in which somebody asked my character, Johnny, what I was rebelling against, and I answered, “Whaddya got?” But none of us involved in the picture ever imagined that it would instigate or encourage youthful rebellion. Stanley Kramer, the producer, Laslo Benedek, the director, and John Paxton,