Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [78]
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IN 1955, I took the part of Sky Masterson, the gambler who falls in love with a Salvation Army sergeant played by Jean Simmons, in Guys and Dolls. When the director, Joe Mankiewicz, asked me to be in the picture, I told him I couldn’t sing and had never been in a musical, but he said he’d never directed one before, and that we’d be learning together. Frank Loesser, who wrote the music for the Broadway show on which it was based, recruited an Italian singing coach to teach me to sing, and after a couple of weeks with him I went to a recording studio with Frank to record my songs, which were to be synchronized later with shots of me mouthing the words on film. I couldn’t hit a note in the dubbing room with a baseball bat; some notes I missed by extraordinary margins. But the engineers kept telling me to do them over again, and they would stitch together a word here, a note there, until they had a recording that sounded like I’d sung the bars consecutively. They sewed my words together on one song so tightly that when I mouthed it in front of the camera, I nearly asphyxiated myself because I couldn’t breathe while trying to synchronize my lips. The audience never realized that when I sang a song, it was a product of many, many attempts.
When the picture was finished, Sam Goldwyn conned me into attending the picture’s premiere in New York by giving me a car. I had always refused to go to one, but when he offered me the car I felt obligated to go. I didn’t realize that such gifts didn’t cost him a cent because he could charge them to the picture’s budget.
Jean Simmons and I were picked up at the Plaza Hotel by a limousine and driven to Times Square, which was aglow with searchlights and floodlights and jammed with people and police who were trying to restrain them behind wooden barricades. As we approached the theater, the crowd suddenly surged forward, broke through the barricades and attacked the limousine like a horde of Mongol warriors. Screaming hysterically, they engulfed the car, flattening their noses and cheeks against the windows until they looked like putty that had been softened in a warm oven. One girl was pushed so hard by the people that her head broke a window in the car, panicking the driver, and he stepped on the gas and almost ran over a bunch of other teenagers. Finally several policemen on horseback pushed through the melee to clear a path, but there were still so many people that we had to stop across the street from the theater.
Measuring the distance, I figured we were at least fifty yards from the goal line and wondered how we were going to make it the rest of the way. Then six big cops came up to the car, opened the door, grabbed Jean, lifted her in the air and carried her into the theater. Then it was my turn: six other cops grabbed me, lifted me up and began steamrolling toward the theater. There was so much screaming I couldn’t hear anything. One cop lifted me by one arm and another got under my other shoulder, and others lifted my feet off the ground. We inched through the crowd and pretty soon hands from all sides were pinching me and grabbing my groin. Then someone got my tie and held it, but the cops didn’t know this and kept forging ahead like a team of draft horses on extra rations. I became dizzier and dizzier. I couldn’t scream because I was being strangled; but even if I had, there was so much noise the cops wouldn’t have heard me.
Finally the cops won the tug-of-war and the tie puller had to let go. They carried me into the lobby, where I sat