Part 2

Marlon Brando
by Patricia Bosworth

(Page 2 of 2)

He was starting to date. One of his first girlfriends, Carmelita Pope, remembers inviting him over for pasta; after they'd eaten, he would go out on the sunporch with her father, who was a lawyer, and ask him all sorts of questions. Brando was insatiably curious about everything. He was quite fat then, and Senior insisted he work out with barbells and bench presses until he transformed himself into the body beautiful.

He kept on playing the drums and founded a band called Keg Brando and His Kegliners. But his grades got worse. At school he excelled only in sports and in dramatics, especially pantomime. He failed all his other subjects and was held back a year. He was close to sixteen and still a sophomore. It was humiliating; he became a truant.

When his father found out, there were more violent shouting matches. Brando did not remind him that often instead of attending classes he went to Chicago to hunt for his mother, whom he usually found slumped in some bar passed out in her own vomit. One time he dragged her naked into a cab and brought her home; again Senior started to beat her, and again Brando managed to stop him.

In May 1941 Brando was expelled from Libertyville High for chronic misbehavior. His last prank had been pouring hydrosulfate into the blower at school so a rotten-egg smell pervaded the classrooms. He possessed a love of mischief other students found admirable.

Senior was hopping mad. After much deliberation he packed his son off to his alma mater, Shattuck Military Academy in Fairbault, Minnesota, where he had been an honor student. The same would not hold true for Brando; he had poor study habits, and his concentration span was short. He simply could not conform. He was sixteen then, startlingly handsome, with a Roman nose and a sensual mouth, and his taut, muscled body practically undulated when he moved, like a graceful tomcat on the prowl.

He was funny; he had no pretenses. He refused to kowtow to the school bullies, and he acted tough, often insolent. He would fight anyone who came on to him; he had a hair-trigger temper. He loved challenging authority and could not be controlled. Once he wrote "shit" on the blackboard and then lit a fuse doused in Vitalis, which contained alcohol, and poof! the word became indelible on the board. Another time he stole all the silver from the dining room so the cadets couldn't eat their breakfast; classes were delayed until the silver was found. The student body thought his pranks were audacious; he became very popular. (Brando says his favorite prank was his disabling of the school's bell. The noise so maddened him that one night he shimmied up to the bell tower and cut the clapper off, then buried it.)

He writes, "I had a great deal of satisfaction challenging authority successfully. I had no sense of emotional security. I didn't know later why I felt valueless or that I responded to worthlessness with hostility."

He has said he was encouraged by only one teacher, Duke Wagner, who taught him Shakespeare and the glory of language and who perceived his great natural gift for mimicry. Once Brando transformed himself into the gangster John Dillinger and had all the students squirming in their seats. On Thanksgiving in 1941 he performed in three one-act plays at Shattuck. The school newspaper wrote, "The new boy shows enormous talent."

However, his grades continued to be poor. Every week he wrote to his parents, asking them to believe in him and telling them over and over how much he loved them, hoping his words would persuade them to say they loved him. But Senior and Dodie never wrote him back or visited him in the two years he was at Shattuck.

The summer of 1942 Brando did not go home to Libertyville right away. Instead he rode the rails and lived in hobo camps, sitting by campfires with the drifters, eating mulligan stew, listening to their stories, how some were hiding out from police or irate wives. He learned their lingo and their sign language; a certain sign marked in chalk on a fence meant the neighbor down the road was hospitable.

Back on the farm, he and his mother had a disjointed conversation about his going into the theater later on when he'd finished high school. But he was thinking he might become a minister, he writes in his autobiography, "Not because I was a religious person, other than having an inexhaustible awe and reverence for nature, but because I thought it might give me more of a purpose in life." Actually he had no idea what he wanted to do.

Returning to Shattuck, he dyed his hair red. He made twelve visits to the infirmary (he faked a fever by holding the thermometer to a hot-water bottle). He was the school's reigning clown and rebel, loved and admired by everybody. That fall he won the lead role in Four on a Heath and was able to show off his remarkable ability to take on an accent (in this case, English). In the final scene of the play he hanged himself and did it so realistically that, after the curtain came down, the audience burst into frenzied applause and his performance was the talk of the school.

But he continued to flunk all his courses. He'd hide out in the study hall, reading National Geographic. One afternoon he came across some color photographs of the island of Tahiti, with its pure white sands and thick, rustling palms. And the expression on the Polynesian natives' faces-it was an expression he'd never seen: "happy, unmanaged faces," he wrote, open maps of contentment. He vowed he would go to Tahiti someday.

In May 1943 Brando was put on probation at Shattuck for talking back to an officer during maneuvers. It was considered insubordination, so he was confined to campus. But after a couple of hours he got bored and took off for downtown Fairbault. Of course, his absence was discovered. When he returned to the school, hours later, he was sent to his room, and the faculty met to decide his fate. He was promptly expelled.

Brando recalls that it was a shock. He wandered from room to room in a daze, saying good-bye to all his friends. When he reached Duke Wagner's office, the teacher reassured him that everything would be all right and that the world would hear from him someday. Brando has said that he will never forget those words; no one had ever expressed confidence in him before. Then Wagner hugged him tightly, and Brando found himself sobbing uncontrollably in the teacher's arms.

He took the train home almost immediately. His parents seemed bitterly disappointed in him.

Meanwhile, at Shattuck, the entire student body was up in arms about his expulsion, feeling it was both extreme and unfair. Eventually the students went on strike and stayed on strike until the faculty agreed that he be reinstated. The principal then wrote to Brando, inviting him to complete his studies and be graduated the following year. But he hated the military academy so much he refused to go back. He never graduated from high school, but for years he kept the cadets' letter of support framed in the bedroom of his home in Beverly Hills. He has always felt embarrassed by his lack of education.

For the next six weeks after leaving Shattuck, Brando dug ditches for the Tile Drainage Company. His father had arranged the job for him, and he loathed every minute of it, although he did enjoy earning money on his own. But home life on the farm was lonely. His sister Frances was in New York, trying to be a painter, and Jocelyn was there too; she'd already appeared in one Broadway play. By fall Brando had decided to join them. He'd visited Frannie in New York briefly the previous Christmas and had written her afterward that he wanted to live there.

He might even try acting, he thought. His father's response was to scoff, "The theater? That's for faggots! It's not man's work." Then he added that Brando could never be a success anyway: "Take a look in the mirror and tell me if anyone would want to see a yokel like you on the stage!" Hearing the contempt in Senior's voice, knowing he had no faith in him, made Brando want all the more to excel at something to prove himself. But at what?

© 2001 Viking Press, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Patricia Bosworth's books include her critically acclaimed biographies of Diane Arbus and Montgomery Clift and a memoir, Anything Your Little Heart Desires. She is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and writes regularly for The New York Times.