Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [90]
When the press fabricated stories about me, I feigned indifference over what was said and what others thought about me. I think I was convincing in this pose of detachment, but it was a mask. Newspapers and magazines invented things that were not only untrue, but were often gratuitously salacious and they offended me greatly. I became particularly annoyed by stories in Time and Life. I engaged a research organization to dig up all the negative unassailable facts it could find about Time Inc., the parent company, spent about $8,000 for a long profile on the company’s history of distorting and slanting the news, and then went on one television and radio program after another to slam Time and Life. I was after their advertising. I wanted revenge. I intended to hurt them, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it because I was only repeating facts of how skewed the magazines’ presentation of the news was as a result of the political biases of Henry Luce. On radio and television, I said his magazines were ruining the reputation of the United States, that they were unpatriotic and injuring the stature of our country abroad, and that they insulted other countries with distorted stories for which our nation would ultimately have to pay a price. I relished doing this. That’s how I was during a large part of my life; if I thought anybody had wronged me, I hit back.
Time Inc. sent a woman out to see me who was related to a friend of mine. She called on a pretext of some sort and I invited her to dinner. We had several martinis, and by the time we headed back to my house I was driving an S pattern across the highway and she was even worse off. I pulled into my driveway, but before we got out of the car, she tried valiantly to carry out her mission. In slurred tones, she said, “Marlon, what’s all this about you attacking Time? What’s behind it? What’s going on here?”
“Oh, I think they’re great magazines,” I said, “but there’s a few corrections they should make, and I’ve gone on several programs to set the record straight. I’m going to keep doing it because I feel it’s my civic duty to correct the press when it’s wrong. Actually I think they should appreciate it. They have a letters-to-the-editor column, and in a sense this is just a letter to the editor. It’s a continuing letter that will go on and on until they don’t feel they have the right to ruin the reputation of America …”
Then I lowered her into the bushes, intending to act the beast with two backs with the emissary of my enemy, but I was so awash in alcohol, so immobilized and out of ammunition that I couldn’t tell the ivy from her earlobes. She returned to New York with her virtue intact. But from that day to this, Time has seldom mentioned my name, and if it has, it’s been in a cursory way. Time Inc. is a big company, but it was the old story of David and Goliath: it takes only one well-placed stone in the middle of the forehead.
In late 1957 I went to Europe to make The Young Lions, a movie based on Irwin Shaw’s novel about three soldiers—two Americans and a German—whose lives intersected before and during World War II. Monty Clift played the Jewish-American soldier, Noah Ackerman, and I played the German, Christian Diestl. Jay Kantor told me that Dean Martin, whose career had been in decline after his breakup with Jerry Lewis, was desperate to play Michael Whiteacre, an American entertainer reluctantly drafted into the war, to prove that he could handle a serious dramatic role, so I helped him get the part. When we met at a restaurant in Paris before the filming started, someone spilled a pot of scalding water on my crotch. The pain was excruciating and sent me to a hospital for several days, where I thought about the script and decided to exercise the right in my contract to change it.
The original script closely followed the book, in which Shaw painted all Germans as evil caricatures, especially Christian,