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By Root 456 0

Johnny, and because of this, I believe I played him as more sensitive and sympathetic than the script envisioned. There’s a line in the picture where he snarls, “Nobody tells me what to do.” That’s exactly how I’ve felt all my life. Like Johnny, I have always resented authority. I have been constantly discomfited by people telling me what to do, and have always thought that Johnny took refuge in his lifestyle because he was wounded—that he’d had little love as a kid and was trying to survive the emotional insecurity that his childhood had forced him to carry into adulthood. Because of the emotional pain of feeling like a nobody, he became arrogant and adopted a pose of indifference to criticism. He did everything to appear strong when inside he was soft and vulnerable and fought hard to conceal it. He had lost faith in the fabric of society and had made his own world. He was a rebel, but a strong part of him was sensitive and tender. At the time I told a reporter that “I wanted to show that gentleness and tolerance is the only way to dissipate the forces of social destruction” because I viewed Johnny as a man torn by an inner struggle beyond his capacity to express it. He had been so disappointed in life that it was difficult for him to express love, but beneath his hostility lay a desperate yearning and desire to feel love because he’d had so little of it. I could have just as easily been describing myself. It seemed perfectly natural for me to play this role.

After The Wild One was finished, I couldn’t look at it for weeks; when I did, I didn’t like it because I thought it was too violent. I couldn’t wait to get back to New York, but wasn’t anxious to return to work. Instead, I wanted to return to my friends—Billy Redfield, Maureen Stapleton, Janice Mars, Sam Gilman, Wally Cox and others—so I organized a summer stock company and took a George Bernard Shaw play, Arms and the Man, on a tour of small towns in New England.

In her recent letter to me, Janice has these memories of the tour: “It was a wild summer. You and Billy cut a swath through the waitresses and apprentices all along the route. I sat pained, feeling outcast, in backseats of cars while you and Billy cuddled your pickups in the front seat. I thought you were good in your part, although you enlarged the image to the size of a blown-up cartoon. You seemed really disturbed when you showed me a review that was … unfair and mean, and which said, ‘Marlon Brando opened last night in “Arms and the Man” and made a fool of himself.…’ But you were marvelous when you blew your lines; you would improvise double talk that was completely convincing and exit with a flourish. Once there was a terrific commotion outside the theater—the sound of ambulances or police cars honking—and the dialogue was totally drowned out. You filled in our dumb show by walking around me, directing attention to my rear end, as if to locate the source of the honking. At other times, to entertain yourself and dispel boredom, you invented games for us to play—games with your own rules. When I objected and asked what right you had to change rules to suit yourself, you laughed and said in self-mockery, ‘Because I’m a star.’ ”

As the following passages from a letter I wrote my parents indicate, we apparently did have some fun—but these lines also tell me that I was still lying to them about the state of my mental health.

July 28, 1953

Dear Ma and Pop:

At long, long last. I am sitting on the edge of a lovely lake with a card table and a typewriter and a thousand twittering little creatures. I am bound and determined to build up our correspondence to some sensible proportion. Time slips away so fast that we are certainly years ahead of ourselves in our plans.…

I have the following plans: to go to Europe and to be in a film by around fall, either here or in Europe. A report is out that I have been offered $200,000 for a film in Italy. Jay [Kantor, my agent then] read “The Egyptian” and wasn’t too enthusiastic. I am reading same. Will be in New York by late winter, if not sooner.

“Arms