Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [96]
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A FEW YEARS AFTER my mother died in 1953, my father remarried, and at seventy he had an affair with one of my secretaries. He changed little as he grew older; always handsome, always a miser, always a charmer, always a philanderer. He never lost the shyness that people, especially women, liked about him. It was something he came by naturally. Though he was very masculine, he also had a gentleness, humility and quietness that people liked, along with a very genuine sense of humor. He was unsuited to do anything in the movie business, but I had given him a salary, a desk, an office, a secretary and an opportunity to look busy and feel useful. Then one day, without telling me about it, he fired one of my friends. When I heard about it, I went to his office and told him that my friend was not going to be fired, and from somewhere inside me a tidal wave rose, crested and flooded, and I reduced him to a heap of shambling, stuttering, fast-blinking confusion.
I said he should consider himself fortunate to have a job, since anybody else with his qualifications would be in a poor-house. I went over the history of our family and told him that he had ruined my mother’s life and had used every opportunity to belittle me and make me feel inadequate. I took him apart with pliers, bit by bit, hunk by hunk, and distributed his psyche all over the floor. I was cold, correct and logical—no screaming or yelling—just stone frozen cold, and when he tried to make excuses, I slammed down an iron gate and reminded him what a shambles he had made of our lives. I told him that he was directly responsible for making my sisters alcoholics and that he was cold, unloving, selfish, infantile, terminally despicable and self-absorbed. I made him feel useless, helpless, hopeless and weak. I assaulted him for almost three hours and when he tried to end the conversation I said, “Sit down if you expect to be paid any money from this day forward. You will listen to what your employer is telling you. I am your employer and you are something of an employee—at least you bear that name—and you will do what I tell you.”
In three hours I did what in thirty-three years I had never been able to, yet the whole time I was scared. I was frightened of what he would do to me. I had always been overwhelmed and intimidated by him, but the more I talked, the more strength and conviction I gained of my rightness and justification. It was like Joe Louis with Max Schmeling in their second fight: I hit him everyplace. He was naked and I was all over him like a cheap suit. Then, when I’d finished saying what I wanted to get off my chest, I dismissed him.
Afterward, I called everybody in the family and told them what I had done and they congratulated me. “Well, it’s about time,” my sisters said. But inside I felt tremendous aftershocks from what I had done. I thought the sky was going to fall on me because of what I had said.
A few days later I got a call from a psychiatrist who said that my father was seeing him and that he needed my cooperation because his patient was in a serious depression and “on the edge of a precipice.”
“Well, Doctor,” I said, “I appreciate your calling. When my father has gone over the edge of that depression and smashed himself on the rocks below—when he’s hit bottom—please call me and I’ll see if I can arrange something.…”
After that, I always kept my father on a tight leash so that he could never come near me and never get too far away. I had him under control and never let him go.
In the spring of 1965 I visited the Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona and met an old medicine woman. She was charming, with intelligent dark eyes, and I asked her if she could tell anything about me simply by looking at me. Through an interpreter, she said yes, she could, and she dipped her hand into a box of flowers