Brando by Marlon Brando

came to the theater, saw me reading in my corner in the short pants I wore onstage, and came over to say hello.
    “Boy, you’ve got a lot of books there,” he said.
    “Hello, Mr. Rodgers,” I said.
    “What are you reading?”
    He leaned over and peered at the book in my hands. It was the
Discourses of Epictetus;
then he scanned the other titles in the bookcase—Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
and books by Thoreau, Gibbon and Rousseau. Then he looked at me with a perplexed expression and walked away without saying another word. He never knew how to say hello to me again.
    Edith Van Cleve, of the New York office of the Music Corporation of America (later MCA, Inc.), was now my agent. After I had been in
I Remember Mama
about a year, she said that Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were about to produce a new play and she arranged for me to read for it. When I arrived at the theater, I discovered it was a cattle call. Dozens of young actors were waiting to compete for the same part. Every few minutes the stage manager called one to the stage where he recited a few lines and was then dismissed. When it was my turn, I walked onstage and an invisible voice said, “What is your name?”
    “Marlon Brando.”
    “Have you been in a play recently?”
    “Yes.”
    The lights were on me. It was pitch dark on the other side of the footlights.
    “What play, Mr. Brindel?” the disembodied voice asked.
    “I’m in
I Remember Mama.”
    There was a long pause in which I didn’t say anything.
    “Would you mind saying something?”
    I thought the situation utterly stupid and absurd. After a lengthy pause, I said: “Hickory, dickory, dock, the mouse ranup the clock. The clock struck one, the mouse ran down, hickory, dickory, dumb.” I accentuated the word
dumb
.
    There was another long pause, then a lot of muttering in the dark, and finally someone said, “Well, thank you, Mr. er-ah, Brindle, we’ll be in touch with you.”
    That was my career with the Lunts.
    During those early years in New York, I made friendships that would last a lifetime: Janice Mars, William Redfield, Sam Gilman, Maureen Stapleton, Philip and Marie Rhodes, Carlo Fiore and others. Janice, who was from Lincoln, Nebraska, and had the same sense of humor I did, was an extraordinary singer, the host and main performer at a place called the Back Room, and in her view, we were like a family of waifs. “Flouting all the conventions, we were like orphans in rebellion against everything,” she recalled in a letter to me recently. “None of us had emotionally secure family backgrounds, but we gravitated to each other and created a family among ourselves. I’ve never gotten over the feeling of family we had, even if it was all in my imagination. I’m nostalgic for it—that feeling—youth, our mutual support system, uncritical acceptance of each other—foibles, faults and all. Orphans of the storm clinging together.”
    Janice said I preferred women who were older than me, like Estrelita: “You were always looking for a substitute mother. You used to go to her when you got sick. Sometimes she’d come looking for you as if you were a bad boy. You hid from her in our closet.… You also had a perverse need to humiliate, to see just how far a female would go to indulge you. For you, sex had as much significance as eating a Mars bar or taking a pill … your attitude toward women was very ambivalent. I felt your power as a palpable aura, a magnetism you knew how to use manipulatively but also protectively. There was a seductive comfort in your touch. Nobody could hold you, then or now.…”
    •  •  •
    In a lifetime of making friends, none was ever closer or more important to me than Wally Cox. We had been playmates in Evanston at seven or eight, and we both moved to New York about the same time. He was making a living as a silversmith and craftsman of fine jewelry, but would entertain us with hilarious monologues. We resumed our friendship and it lasted