Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [86]
In The Teahouse of the August Moon, I played an interpreter on Okinawa named Sakini, who spends most of the movie dueling with Glenn Ford, an American army officer assigned to bring democracy and free enterprise to the island. The Broadway play, in which David Wayne had been marvelous as Sakini, was a delicate, amusing comedy of manners set against the backdrop of a stormy clash of cultures. As I’ve said, a well-written play is nearly actor-proof, but in Teahouse Glenn Ford and I proved how easily actors can ruin a good play or movie when they’re so absorbed with themselves and their performances that they don’t act in concert. It was a horrible picture and I was miscast.
Still, I enjoyed working again with Louis Calhern, whom I had met on Julius Caesar. He was an imposing, hard-drinking old actor with a classic profile, and he knew every trick in the book, had played virtually every part on Broadway and was full of stories about the theater. Once, he told me, he was getting ready to open in a new play and the producers were so frightened that he would not be sober for opening night that they locked him in a room on the fourth floor of the Lambs Club, the actors’ club in New York. After they had gone, Calhern looked out the window and saw a waiter from the Lambs walking down below. He hailed him, floated a twenty-dollar bill to the sidewalk and asked him to bring up a bottle of whiskey and a straw. When the man knocked on the locked door, Louis said, “Put the straw through the keyhole and the other end in the bottle.”
He emptied the bottle using the straw and was soon snockered. When the producers, who had frisked him and searched the room for liquor before locking him in, came to get him, they couldn’t believe it, and Louis said they never figured out how he had gotten the booze. It was like one of those English mysteries in which a dead body is found in a drawing room but all the windows and doors are locked from the inside. Nonetheless, on opening night Louis got wonderful reviews for his performance. He was a merry drunk, full of laughter and fun, but underneath an unhappy, lonely man. His wife had just left him, which was shattering, and he was suffering because of it, which made him drink even more. A few weeks after we got to Tokyo, he died from a heart attack, but I think he died happy and full of laughter.
Someone decided we should have a religious funeral for Louis, and selected a Catholic church with wooden pews, kneeling benches, tatami mats on the floor and no heater. It was freezing when we filed into the place, which, comically, was according to our billing in the movie. Glenn began the eulogies with an actor’s performance. He described effusively how much he missed Louis, looked to the heavens with his chin quivering and seemed to be trying to address Calhern directly as if he were already up there. Meanwhile the priest had kept giving us cues to stand up, sit down, kneel, rise, kneel. For non-Catholics, it was very confusing, as we kept going up and down like a bank of express elevators. I noticed Glenn rubbing his knees in pain, and the next time the priest signaled for us to kneel again, he responded with a look of disgust and a barely audible sound of resentment. At first he wouldn’t go down, then he knelt halfway, then finally all the way, and for some reason this struck me as very funny and I started laughing. People turned around and looked at me, so I tried to disguise my laughter as the choked, tearful bereavement of someone suffering a great loss. I clamped my hands over my eyes in sorrow and tried to stop giggling, but I was in the clutches of a sustained and serious laughing attack, the kind that can take the wind out of you and tighten the