Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [88]
Glenn looked at me as if he had been struck with an anvil. He didn’t know what to think, because with all his trickery and my letting him get away with it initially, he didn’t understand what I was doing. I wore him out; he thought I was too dumb to see through him, which made it even more fun to play tricks on him on and off the set. He was a miser about food, and at one of the locations we shared a dressing room in which he kept a cache of candies and desserts he had bought at an army PX and that he was tightfisted about sharing. After he brought back a box of cookies, I saw him hide it in our room and I pinched some. When Glenn discovered that some of them were missing, he stormed out the door and blamed a group of Japanese kids from the neighborhood who were hanging about and were only about two feet high. He screamed at them, “No cookies. No cookies. Do not eat cookies. No go in there.”
I didn’t like how he treated the kids, and I thought he should have given them the cookies in the first place because in those days there weren’t many sweets to go around. Later that day, I ate a few of the remaining cookies, then threw several others on the floor and stomped on them. When he came in and saw the crumbs, he exploded. It must have been about $1.75 worth of cookies, but it sent him into a rage, and he demanded that the producers post guards outside our dressing room, which led to a lot of jokes about the “Cookie Watch.”
When he discovered more cookies crushed on the floor the next day, Glenn asked me if I knew anything about it, and I told him in my most convincing manner that it was a mystery to me. How did those kids get into the trailer past the guards? he asked.
He never found out. Again it was one of those English drawing-room mysteries—like Louis Calhern, the whiskey and the straw.
36
IF I HADN’T BEEN an actor, I’ve often thought I’d have become a con man and wound up in jail. Or I might have gone crazy. Acting afforded me the luxury of being able to spend thousands of dollars on psychoanalysts, most of whom did nothing but convince me that most New York and Beverly Hills psychoanalysts are a little crazy themselves, as well as highly motivated to separate patients from their money while making their emotional problems worse. I think I’d have made a good con man; I’m good at telling lies smoothly, giving an impression of things as they are not and making people think I’m sincere. A good con man can fool anybody, but the first person he fools is himself. It occurs to me that when I was thinking about becoming a preacher I believed the talents I thought would make me a good tent-show evangelist were the same ones that would have made me a good con man.
Having had the luck to be successful as an actor also afforded me the luxury of time. I only had to do a movie once a year, for three months at the most, which paid me enough so that I didn’t have to work again until my business manager called and said, “We’ve got to pay your taxes at the end of the year, so you’d better make another movie.” When that happened, I’d look around and grab something.
After Teahouse of the August Moon, my father, who thought of himself as my manager even though I’d only put him on the payroll so he’d have an office to go to after my mother died, started pressing me to make another picture. Pennebaker Productions, he said, was facing serious financial problems. As always, he was preoccupied with money. He complained I was spending too much on the UN picture and on a western I wanted to make, and he claimed that a friend I’d put on the Pennebaker payroll was exploiting me. He said if I didn’t make another picture soon, I’d be in trouble with the IRS. He urged me to sign for a picture based on a novel by James A. Michener that Joshua Logan wanted to direct and that Warner Brothers, with producer William Goetz,