Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [95]
When we got back to Hollywood, someone said we had enough footage to make a movie six or eight hours long. I started editing it, but pretty soon got sick of it and turned the job over to someone else. When he had finished, Paramount said it didn’t like my version of the story; I’d had everybody in the picture lie except Karl Maiden. The studio cut the movie to pieces and made him a liar, too. By then I was bored with the whole project and walked away from it.
Several years before One-Eyed Jacks, Tennessee Williams had told me he had written a new play, Orpheus Descending, with me in mind to play opposite Anna Magnani. I told him I didn’t have any interest in returning to the stage, and Cliff Robertson and Maureen Stapleton played the parts. But when Tennessee and Sidney Lumet invited me to be in the movie The Fugitive Kind, which was based on the play, I was divorcing my first wife and needed money. I was a guitar-playing drifter who wandered into a small town in Mississippi and got involved with an older woman, played by Anna, who had been a powerful actress in the Italian film Open City and later in Tennessee’s movie The Rose Tattoo. She was a troubled woman who I thought was miscast in The Fugitive Kind.
In a letter to Lady Maria St. Just while we were shooting the picture, Tennessee wrote: “Magnani is obsessed with her age; she thinks that her neck is gone, and they are putting tapes on the back to pull it up and together. She regards this as a terrible insult and yet she rages whenever she sees a neck line in the rushes.” Tennessee was also growing more troubled at the time, plunging frequently into fits of depression and using alcohol and pills to pull himself out. What haunted him I don’t know, though he was deeply worried about the health of his mother and sister. I’ve always thought of Tennessee as one of the greatest American writers, but I didn’t think much of this play or the movie. Like most great American writers, he turned black people into windowpanes. In The Fugitive Kind, they were rendered almost invisible, as if they were props. Blacks were in the story, but they were incidental figures who had nothing to do with the central themes, just as in A Streetcar Named Desire, and it seemed to me a subtle form of racial discrimination. I don’t mean to say that Tennessee was insensitive. He was acutely sensitive, but he expressed the prevailing perspective of virtually all American authors. The black experience was all but ignored. No one, I believe, wrote well on the subject until Jim Baldwin and Toni Morrison came along. Hollywood was even worse; the black experience was a topic it never touched unless it was bigoted claptrap like The Birth of a Nation, with its undisguised contempt for black people.
Tennessee warned me that Anna Magnani, who was sixteen years older than me and had a reputation for enjoying the company of young men, had told him that she was in love with me, and before we left for upstate New York to film the picture she confirmed it. After we had some meetings in California, she tried several times to see me alone, and finally succeeded one afternoon at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Without any encouragement from me, she started kissing me with great passion. I tried to be responsive because I knew she was worried about growing older and losing her beauty, and as a matter of kindness I felt I had to return her kisses; to refuse her would have been a terrible insult. But once she got her arms around me, she wouldn’t let go. If I started to pull away, she held on tight and bit my lip, which really hurt. With her teeth gnawing at my lower lip, the two of us locked in an embrace, I was reminded of one of those fatal mating rituals of insects that end when the female administers the coup de grâce. We rocked back and forth as she tried to lead me to the bed. My eyes were wide open, and as I looked at her eyeball-to-eyeball