Free Hollywood Hellraisers by Robert Sellers Page A

hideaway somewhere in the South Pacific, where he could ‘fuck brown-skinned teenage gals until I’ve doubled the island population’.
    Amidst all this wrangling Dodie was taken seriously ill. Marlon and his sisters rushed to her bedside and for the next three weeks held vigil as she slipped in and out of a coma, waking up sometimes to talk with her children, telling Brando to promise her, ‘to try and get along with people. Don’t fight with them, Bud.’
    Then one night she held Marlon’s hand softly and whispered, ‘I’m not scared, and you don’t have to be.’ Then the woman Stella Adler called ‘this heavenly, girlish, lost creature’ was gone. Brando broke down, emotionally spent. Dodie had borne her illness with incredible courage and dignity; Brando later told friends she taught him how to die. Marlon did not fall completely to pieces after Dodie’s death, as friends feared he might, but there were occasions he came mighty close. Like when he drove playwright Clifford Odets home late one night and suddenly started dredging up memories of pulling his mother’s drunken body out of bars as a kid. Tears welled up in his eyes, impairing his vision, and his driving grew erratic, the car swerving from side to side on the perilously steep bends along the Hollywood Hills. Odets was convinced his number was up, but Marlon managed to regain composure and all was well.
    After their fruitful collaboration on Julius Caesar Joe Mankiewicz wanted Marlon to star in the screen version of the Broadway smash musical Guys and Dolls (1955). As Joe’s son Tom recalls, ‘Marlon was in Europe and Dad sent him a telegram saying, “How would you like to play Sky Masterson?” And Marlon sent a telegram back saying, “Actually more terrified than playing Shakespeare for the first time, never have done a musical before.” And Dad sent him back a telegram saying, “Don’t worry about it, neither have I.” And that’s how they started. And they became artistically very close. Marlon once said to me, “Your old man was the only person who would have cast me in Shakespeare and a musical.”’
    His co-star was Frank Sinatra, still pissed at Brando for stealing On the Waterfront from under his nose and now even more narked because he was giving his old lady Ava Gardner a good seeing-to on a regular basis. One morning Marlon got a call from Frank. ‘Listen, creep, and listen good. Stay away from Ava. You got that? First offence, broken legs. Second offence, cracked skull. If you live through all that, cement shoes.’
    Inevitably tensions surfaced between the two men on set. Sinatra’s nickname for Brando was ‘Mumbles’. Marlon said of Sinatra’s voice, ‘I’d prefer a castrated rooster at dawn.’ On set one day Marlon asked Frank to run through lines with him. ‘Don’t pull that Actors Studio shit on me,’ blasted the singer. Their working methods certainly differed. Sinatra liked things done swiftly, if it was a good take, that’s it, let’s move on. ‘That was not Marlon’s way of working,’ says Tom Mankiewicz. ‘And it wasn’t my father’s way of working either.’
    Brando’s rivalry with Sinatra never boiled over into open hostility in public, his best put-down about the crooner being, ‘He’s the kind of guy that, when he dies, he’s going up to heaven and give God a bad time for making him bald.’ The nearest it came to blows was during the filming of a scene in a restaurant booth with Sinatra eating a slice of cheesecake. ‘Just for fun, Marlon kept blowing his line,’ says Mankiewicz. ‘And of course every time he blew his line they’d start again and they’d put a new piece of cheesecake in front of Sinatra. And Frank didn’t want to eat a lot of cheesecake, and during a break Brando said to Dad, “I’m gonna make this son of a bitch eat till he starts shitting in the booth.” Frank knew Marlon was fluffing his lines intentionally just to irritate him because he had a show to do that