Status Updates From The Duke in His Domain

A month earlier, a friend of Brando’s had told me, “Marlon always turns against whatever he’s working on. Some element of it. Either the script or the director or somebody in the cast. Not always because of anything very rational—just because it seems to comfort him to be dissatisfied, let off steam about something. It’s part of his pattern.”

“I’ve seriously considered—I’ve very seriously thought about—throwing the whole thing up. This business of being a successful actor. What’s the point, if it doesn’t evolve into anything? All right, you’re a success. At last you’re accepted, you’re welcome everywhere. But that’s it, that’s all there is to it, it doesn’t lead anywhere. You’re just sitting on a pile of candy gathering thick layers of—of crust.”

In the course of the last five years he has played a Mexican revolutionary (Viva Zapata!), Mark Antony (Julius Caesar) and a motorcycle-mad juvenile delinquent (The Wild One); earned an Academy Award in the role of a dockyard thug (On the Waterfront); impersonated Napoleon (Désirée); sung and danced his way through ... (Guys and Dolls); and the Okinawan interpreter in The Teahouse of the August Moon.

he’d become, ... —turned into such a world celebrity that when he went out in public here in Japan, he deemed it wise to hide his face not only by wearing dark glasses but by donning a surgeon’s gauze mask as well. (The latter bit of disguise is not so outré in Japan as it may sound, since numerous Asians wear such masks, on the theory that they prevent the spreading of germs.)

[This is 1956 Japan]

And books, a deep-thought cascade, among which one saw Colin Wilson’s The Outsider and various works on Buddhist prayer, Zen meditation, Yogi breathing and Hindu mysticism, but no fiction, for Brando reads none. He has never, he professes, opened a novel since April 3, 1924, the day he was born, in Omaha, Nebraska. But while he may not care to read fiction, he does desire to write it.