Courting Brando

Courtesy Everett Collection With the publication of a new biography of Marlon Brando, Harold Evans recalls the surreal dinners and the moonlight swims he endured to extract a memoir from the legendary actor.

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. I was ready for that: I was going to tell him that declining to kneel was not a mark of disrespect but recognition of physics. A skiing injury, I’d say, meant I’d never be able to get up again and he’d have a problem disposing of the body.

Brando’s go-between, the elegant producer-director George Englund, had said we’d meet for an hour at Brando’s house on Mulholland Drive at 7 pm, but not eat. As Englund put it, “Marlon has a girth problem."

"He gripped me with his Don Corleone eyes, small but extraordinarily clear.”

I was to press a button on a post and the iron gates would swing open. They didn’t. I fretted by the side of the ridiculously long limo the hotel had ordered for the afternoon, and was about to depart when a familiar voice wafted out of the bushes followed by the 300-lb pound bulk of the Godfather, wearing a leather jacket, a red silk square stuffed in the top of his open white shirt, and his hair tied up in a short ponytail. Englund was behind, the beanpole Laurel to Brando’s Hardy. Brando announced we were going straight to Valentine’s for dinner, climbed into my limo, and promptly locked out Englund. When I opened the door, Brando leaned over and playfully goosed the startled Englund’s genitals.

The restaurant was full. “You watch,” said Brando, who made it a policy never to book ahead. “They’ll shove someone out for us.” (They did of course, Brando speaking to the owner in fluent French; nearby, diners whispered loudly that he was behaving like the Godfather. “Fuck ‘em” was Brando’s smiling response).

To curry favor, I mentioned—knowing Native Americans were his passion—that I once lived on a Navajo reservation and published the prizewinning author of Spirit of Crazy Horse, Peter Matthiessen. I expected an immediate paean of praise for Matthiessen and didn’t get it. Instead Brando stared hard at me. "What I tell you here—look me in the eye!—is between us. Look me in the eye! It’s between us…(pause)…Matthiessen is CIA.” I told him I knew Matthiessen well and found that ridiculous.

"CIA!” insisted Brando. “I went to see him at his home and we talked and I said goodbye in the drive. And then I had an instinct. Don't know why I wanted to say something else to him and went back and he’d gone. I had the temerity to open the door of his house and went into magazines and things in the house. He's CIA.” .

Brando was unquestionably suspicious of anything that moved. He was sometimes also right. Fourteen years later in the book just now published about George Plimpton and the Paris Review, I was stunned to find Matthiessen shamefacedly admitting that in his youth he had indeed been recruited by the CIA. (Later, Brando asked me to get his own records from the CIA and FBI.)

In between the servings of salmon, which Brando didn’t touch, I kept trying to get the talk back to the book I’d come to bid for—the great Brando memoir—but the star was a one-man detour artist. He had a habit of linking one thought and then another so that like someone who gets lost in a road system, you find yourself miles from where you began, wondering how the hell you got there. One of these side-turnings from the CIA and the Sioux found us talking about his admiration of the Jewish people, then Jonas Salk, the inventor of polio vaccine, which led somehow to a ramble about genetics and man and music.

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