Broadway to the Oscars
For its two-year run, Streetcar was a sell-out sensation until Brando’s sudden abandonment of Broadway for Hollywood. The myth held that he had jumped ship for financial gain alone, but the tapes revealed a critical bid to save his sanity – the channelling of his father’s violence every night had driven him to the point of a nervous breakdown.
"He began seeing lies everywhere, and lost touch with reality and his sense of identity"
Brando burst on to the screen with a string of inspired performances, culminating in an Oscar for On the Waterfront in 1955. Exploding the myth that he was unstudied and lazy in his craft, the audio archive revealed a meticulously prepared artist and idealist, committed to representing truth in motion pictures. Film, he preached, ought to be a force for good, educating audiences on the follies of human nature: discrimination, hatred, prejudice and bigotry. But Brando’s determination to bring a positive message to cinema didn’t easily fit into Hollywood’s commercial agenda.
With his insistence that Mutiny on the Bounty be a philosophical exploration of how to build a perfect society, Brando locked horns with the producers, and was made a scapegoat for a overrunning budget that was to nearly bankrupt MGM.
I found Brando in meditative mood on the tapes, questioning the notion of absolute truth and the veracity of his profession. ‘Any pretension I’ve had of being an artist is now just a long, chilly hope. Actors are just merchants and there is no art.’
But as the recordings so often taught me, there were multiple forces at play. Standout performances in Reflections in a Golden Eye and Burn! reveal a man in inner conflict, see-sawing between idealism and disenchantment. Brando was struggling to cope at the centre of Hollywood’s goldfish bowl. Who could he trust? He began seeing lies everywhere, and lost touch with reality and his sense of identity.
There were other, more practical, pressures. Despite being one of the highest-paid stars in town, he was constantly on the brink of bankruptcy. By the mid-1960s, his roving eye had left him three families to support. Legal bills and alimony payments threatened to swamp him. Come the early 1970s, he was in dire need of a job, but with a run of 19 box-office flops, his career was on the scrap-heap. The stage was set for The Godfather and the biggest cinematic comeback of all time.
As the Academy prepared to award him a second Oscar that would welcome him back into the Hollywood fold, Brando was in no mood to please. For him there was no such thing as a comeback, just a chance for the studios to cash in and pat themselves on the back. He devised a stunt, sending a woman in Apache dress to refuse his Oscar and denounce the depiction of the American Indians by Hollywood. But he was no fair-weather idealist. His defence of the weak predated his fame and was, I believe, his true vocation.
The hypnotherapy tapes took me back to Brando the young boy, highly sensitive to the suffering of others. He recalled the latchkey kid who, stigmatised in his community by the sins of his parents, would bunk off school to roam railway tracks alone.
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