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1. Brando By Eve Berliner |
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By Eve Berliner Ermi with her dusky smoky patina and her
breasts, hiding out in some instinctual corner of his mind, Marlon three or
four years of age when she came to live with the Brando family in Omaha,
Nebraska, as his 18-year-old governess, a hot-house blending of Danish
Indonesian that surreptitiously stirred the little boy. "Her
laugh I will always remember. When she entered a room, I knew it without
seeing or hearing her because she had a fragrant breath that was
extraordinary ... sweet, like crushed and slightly fermented fruit. During
the day we played constantly. At night, we slept together. She was nude, and
so was I, and it was a lovely experience. She was a deep sleeper, and I can
visualize her now lying in our bed while the moonlight burst through my
window and illuminated her skin with a soft-magical amber glow. I sat there
looking at her body and fondling her breasts, and arranged myself on her and
crawled over her. She was all mine; she belonged to me and to me alone." His
world of fantasy and innocence and aroma and moonlight all suffused into one
with Ermi. He loved her so, little Bud, a certain sweetness, a beauty to the
child, but something wounded in the eyes, something tender in the core. The
free-spirited and unabashed Ermi had a boyfriend named Wally and one day when
seven year old Bud was happily playing in a stream, he witnessed Ermi kissing
Wally in a car. He
suffered over it. He could not understand it. Then
the bombshell detonated -- Ermi quite suddenly left him to get married -- not
to Wally -- but to a young man named Eric. She did not inform the little boy
of her impending marriage nor could she bear to tell him the heartbreaking
news of her departure. She simply told him that she was off on a brief trip
and would return soon. "The
night I realized Ermi was gone forever...I felt my dreams die. It had been
weeks since she had gone. I'd waited and waited for her. But I finally knew
that she wasn't coming back. I felt abandoned. My mother had long ago
deserted me for her bottle; now Ermi was gone too...From that day forward I
became estranged from this world." * * * It
was to be his father who would fuel the inner rage, the dagger thrusts of his
father, Marlon Brando, Sr., a travelling salesman who spent most of his time
on the road. It
was a relationship of walls and angers and internal violence. The father
would never acknowledge the son - not in a lifetime. He never gave him a hug.
Never. He was never tender with the kid. Never shared with him, father to
son. He simply lashed out and shot him down. "I
was his namesake, but nothing I did ever pleased or even interested
him," Marlon would write in his moving, soul-searching memoir,
"Songs My Mother Taught Me." " He enjoyed telling me I
couldn't do anything right. He had a habit of telling me I would never amount
to anything." The
words inflicted their desired pain. "He
was a card-carrying prick whose mother deserted him when he was four years
old - just disappeared, ran off someplace - and he was shunted from one
spinster aunt to another...I loved him and hated him at the same time. He was
a frightening, silent, brooding, angry, hard-drinking man, a bully who loved
to give orders and issue ultimatums - and he was just as tough as he talked.
Perhaps that's why I've had lifelong aversion to authority." *
* * The
scene came out of the deepest darkest recesses of his being, the bottled up
explosion of "Last Tango in Paris," 1972, Brando, a volcanic erotic
beast, the film a sensation. Under the unorthodox direction of
Bernardo Bertolucci, the film was performed entirely by improvisation. There
was no written script; the character portrayed by Brando brutal, a man who
enjoyed acts of degradation, taunting, instilling fear, a man very much like
his own father. At a key moment, he speaks with a raw
sensuality and a wounded animal's cry: "My
father was a drunk, tough, whore-fucker, bar-fighter supermasculine and he
was tough. My mother was very, very poetic, and also a drunk. All my memories
of when I was a kid was of her being arrested, nude. We lived in this small
town, a farming community. I'd come home after school. She'd be gone, in jail
or something, and then I used to have to milk a cow every morning and every
night, and I liked that. But I remember one time I was all dressed up to go
out to take this girl to a basketball game and my father said, 'You have to
milk the cow.' I asked him 'Would you please milk it for me?' And he said,
'No. Get your ass out there.' I was in a hurry, didn't have time to
change my shoes, and I had cow shit all over my shoes and on the way to the
basketball game it smelled in the car." He grew quiet with the hurt.
"I can't remember very many good things." Brando
emerged from the film feeling exposed and he was livid. He told Bertolucci
that he would never again make such a film and that he had felt violated
every moment, every day. *
* * It
was to be the great Stella Adler, Brando's long-time drama teacher and
mentor, who would sum up Dodie Brando, Marlon's mother, in this fashion:
"A very beautiful, a heavenly, lost, girlish creature." Dodie
had her dreams. Petite and fragile, she was a creative spirit, a Bohemian at
heart who loved music and books and laughter and imagination. With her high
cheekbones and delicate sculpted face, deep-set blue eyes and blond hair, she
exhibited a rare and sensitive beauty in her performances at the Omaha
Community Playhouse where she threw herself into the world of the theatre.
Otto Kahn, a visiting patron and president of the New York Metropolitan
Opera, urged her to depart Omaha for Broadway. Her
husband was not interested in her pursuits. Marlon
Sr., taciturn and forbidding, a man who dispensed discipline at home and
consorted with prostitutes and liquor on the road and in the dark corners of
the small town of Omaha, Nebraska where he slept around in the early to mid
1920's. The
rumors and innuendos of his affairs and drunken spectacles reached Dodie. She
took refuge in the bottle. In
the end, she gave up her dreams and he crushed her. Her descent into alcoholism was steep
and merciless and her life hit the pits and disintegrated into drunken promiscuity,
fragility and darkness. *
* * Buried memories that would haunt him,
searching for his mother near the stables of Libertyville, tortured nights
that she never came home, searching the saloons, the streets, the hotels, prowling
after her, hunting her down outside the city limits on the west side of town
where she would hide out and drink herself into a stupor. Dodie,
she broke his heart. *
* * "My
mother. She broke apart like a piece of porcelain," Brando would confide
to writer Truman Capote, in his gripping 1957 New Yorker portrait entitled,
"The Duke in His Domain." "...My
mother was everything to me. A whole world. I tried so hard, I used to come
home from school. There wouldn't be anybody home. Nothing in the ice box.
Then the telephone would ring. Somebody calling from some bar. And they'd
say, 'We've got a lady down here. You better come get her.'" "I
thought if she loved me enough, trusted me enough, I thought then we can be
together in New York; we'll be together and I'll take care of her. Once,
later on, that really happened. In New York, when I was in a play. I tried so
hard. But my love wasn't enough. She went back. "And
one day I didn't care anymore. She was there. In a room. Holding on to me.
And I let her fall. Because I couldn't take it anymore, watch her breaking
apart, in front of me, like a piece of porcelain. I stepped right over her. I
walked right out." *
* * His mother, his tragic heroine,
sacrificed on the altar of brutality. His
father, a brute, an ape. His
mother, a porcelain doll. His
father, Stanley Kowalski. His mother, Blanche DuBois. |
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