Did Brando Demand Publishers Kneel Before Him?



Freak! (Brando in Dr. Moreau via scifi)

Fucking Brando. Eccentricity, thy name is Marlon. Brobdingnagian was thy massive girth, which you carried, regally, with the air of exiled cosmic nobility (The Corsair sips a glass of Chateaux d'Y'quem, 1811). Brando was such a elemental force; a freak of Nature, if you will, improvising a sweaty masculinity in his wake that bewitched a generation. And yet this Sorcerer wielded a gentle touch with fragile man-boys such as Michael Jackson, whose youth had been devoured by the vast Hollywood machine.

Hollywood -- America's Babylon -- since then, has seemed incapable of summoning any such similar personality remotely as volcanic up to the lip of its cauldron. Camille Paglia, in Sexual Personae, made the acute observation that since the 1950s (post-War), Hollywood actors have essentially been derivative templates laid by Brando and James Dean. Naught else, says Paglia, has been original since. Add Jack Nicholson onto that lot. Christian Slater went so far as to imitate Nicholson's persona almost entirely -- down to the frequency of the farts -- in the early part of his career. Post-Brando there has been an intellectual poverty in the portrayal of masculinity on the Hollywood screen (studied bows and curtsies to American geniuses Russell Crowe, Denzel Washington and Daniel-Day Louis)Sir Harry Evans, in The Daily Beast, recounts his own legendary attempts at getting the monumentally self-indulgent Brando to actually sit down for a long expanse of Time and write his memoirs (fat chance, Harry; fat chance).

Brando was a goddam bully. Remember reading the stories about how he used to make asses of directors, undermining their authority on the set? Delicious! How does a young director stand up to an American icon such as Brando when he menacingly lisps that he can make the film better? As when Brando bullied John Frankenheimer on the subject of his Kabuki-style post-apocalyptic makeup in "The Island of Dr.Moreau (can anyone say self-indulgent?)."

And how pimp was Brando, a great, big fucking musk-ox of a man, collecting $3 million for less that 15 minutes of screen time in the original Superman (playing, we cannot fail to note, the father of the Man of Steel). His pimp hand was strong, but never stronger than in this anecdote by Sir Harry:

"Reading Stefan Kanfer’s excellent new biography of Marlon Brando, Somebody (Knopf), reminds me of one adventure that isn’t there: my own trying to secure Brando’s memoir for Random House during my time as president and publisher.

"I was one of any number of New York supplicants who trekked to Los Angeles in February 1991 to persuade the reclusive 66-year-old star that their imprint was the only one capable of doing justice to his life story. Before I flew to L.A., I’d been warned by others that Brando had contempt for anyone suggesting he was an acting genius. In his eyes, acting was a commonplace skill, and the whole admiring East Coast establishment was populated by phonies. He proved it to himself, I heard, by inviting publishers to show their enthusiasm by going down on their knees in front of him."

Methinks there's method to Brando's bullying buffoonery. More here.