My Night With Marlon Brando

By THOMAS CARON

Marlon Brando

Hollywood film shoots tend to have one thing in common, a seemingly inordinate number of people milling about with no discernible purpose. In the summer of 1975, the blisteringly hot, bone-dry prairie outside of Billings, Mont. the location of Arthur Penn’s oddball western The Missouri Breaks, was no different. Having met Mr. Penn the year before, I had prevailed upon his acquaintance to get a front row seat on the set.

On the day Marlon Brando was scheduled to appear before a camera for the first time since Last Tango in Paris, he arrived early. Ambling through the throng of a hundred-odd individuals, all pretending to be ignoring his presence, he personally introduced himself to each and every one of them. I was making small talk with a member of the crew when there he was, as wide as a wall. He had the biggest shoulders I have ever seen, like a pair of

bowling balls beneath his buckskin jacket. Swapping salutations with my companion, he sized me up and said, "Who's the dumb one behind the shades?" I snapped to, we shook hands, I said "Tom," and he said "Marlon."

Brando had his lines printed on strategically posted cards, but after a few takes he stopped referring to them. What interested me most was the disconnect between his public deprecations of acting and his actual approach to the work. This had been his posture for a pretty long time. Compare his contempt for his own performance, as chronicled by Truman Capote in his infamous interview for the New Yorker, during the shooting of Sayonara, with his exquisite, nuanced interpretation in the film. In an article that appeared in Rolling Stone that summer, he likewise belittled his contribution, and maintained that making a western was "shooting fish in a barrel.”

He had a scene in which he impales a rabbit from a galloping horse with what looks like a four-way tire iron, where the lugs have been replaced with sharp points. The illusion of bayoneting the bunny is created in the editing, and the act of throwing the weapon occupies about two seconds' worth of film. Nevertheless, on a typically torrid morning, while another scene was being set up, he repeatedly let fly the steel pinwheel into the side of a barn. The thunks went on at clockwork intervals for over an hour. Was it really necessary? Would anyone else have bothered?

I had made a friend of a photographer who was a friend of Brando’s. Her sister had come from Los Angeles for a visit. The three of us, courtesy of one of the company’s drivers, were heading out of an evening to Grandma’s Discotheque when Brando appeared in the parking lot, still in costume, the picture of a plus-sized Roger Daltrey in his fringed white suede days. Upon inquiring where we were going, Brando declared that he would come along. But first he had to pee, and modestly turning his back to us, he braced his bulk against a car and proceeded to do just that.

Squeezed into the back seat of a Jeep with the two young women, I sat behind Brando, who promptly produced a fat reefer. With the driver declining, the joint went round as I passed it back to him. I literally pinched myself.

We sat at a table no bigger than a large pizza, just off the dance floor. Brando drank tall gin and tonics, one after another, while helping himself to my Winstons, which I lit for him. (David Watson, his dresser, later informed me that he only smoked when he was very drunk.) Не danced with the local women, ripped the stitching from his boots and gave away the mother-of-pearl buttons. At the end of the night he led a group singalong of "Goodnight, Irene." Through the whole of the evening, I had been too timid to speak to him, and other than the nod and grunt I got when I lit his cigarettes — my cigarettes — he seemed incognizant of my existence. When it was time to go, the two girls went to the ladies' room, leaving me alone with him. Alone at a table with Marlon Brando. He brought his mouth close to my ear and asked, "Where have you acted?”

Back outside he fired up another doobie, and monologued about the benefits of Vitamin B. He said he would get a shot of the same from his assistant and be as right as rain to work the next day.

He wasn’t.

Thomas Caron

Player Thomas Caron has made his home in Shanghai for nearly twenty years. He is the founder and artistic director of Shanghai Shakespeare, a mostly Mandarin speaking troupe now entering its second decade. He received his training at the hands of legendary Group Theatre alumni Harold Clurman, Sanford Meisner, Robert Lewis, and Stella Adler. He has played Hamlet three times, King Lear three times, Macbeth, Timon of Athens and Leontes in The Winter’s Tale (both twice), and many other leading Shakespearean and classical roles. In 2024 he had the honor of performing his solo show, Macready, in London, and at the Macready Theatre in Rugby.