Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me Part 8

As I wiped my brow I saw there was a piece of paper in my hand. I unfolded it and saw that it was a summons with my name on it, a subpoena to appear to testify in a lawsuit involving Sam Spiegel, who was being sued by someone who claimed he was owed money from On the Waterfront On the Waterfront. That process server is a man I'd like to meet. How he got that subpoena in my hand, I'll never know.

I've always been amazed by the qualities in human nature that can turn crowds into mobs. Those people with hungry, glazed eyes looking at us through those car windows were in a trance. They were like helpless robots swaying to a magic flute. Much the same sort of thing happened when Frank Sinatra bewitched bobby-soxers at the same theater a few years earlier, and ten years later the Beatles would similarly mesmerize a different generation. For some reason celebrities of a certain kind are treated as messiahs whether they like it or not; people encapsulate them in myths that touch their deepest yearnings and needs. It seems to me hilarious that our government put the face of Elvis Presley on a postage stamp after he died from an overdose of drugs. His fans don't mention that because they don't want to give up their myths. They ignore the fact that he was a drug addict and claim he invented rock 'n' roll when in fact he took it from black culture; they had been singing that way for years before he came along, copied them and became a star.

Of course mythologizing isn't limited to celebrities or political leaders. We all create myths about our friends as well as our enemies. We can't help it. Whether it's Michael Jackson or Richard Nixon, we run instinctively to their defense because we don't want our myths demolished. When the news broke about Watergate, many Americans who worshiped Nixon refused to believe what they had heard. Years later, some began to admit that he had orchestrated a coverup, but said he wasn't so bad. "Sure, people stumble in their lives," they rationalized, "but taken all and all, he was a great president." They refused to acknowledge the lies and deceit that were so much a part of the character of a man who called himself a law-and-order president. Some people who have heard his recorded voice on the Oval Office tapes proving that he abused the presidency and the trust of the people who elected him justify him by arguing that presidents are under great pressure and what he did was perfectly understandable. By the time he died in 1994, it seemed history had been totally rewritten by the mythmakers. As one newspaper columnist put it during the days of mourning for Nixon, it was if he had suddenly been canonized.

We make up any excuse to preserve myths about people we love, but the reverse is also true; if we dislike an individual we adamantly resist changing our opinion, even when somebody offers proof of his decency, because it's vital to have myths about both the G.o.ds and the devils in our lives.

32.

I WAS GETTING READY to sing in to sing in Guys and Dolls Guys and Dolls when Elia Kazan invited me to visit him on the set of a new movie he was filming called when Elia Kazan invited me to visit him on the set of a new movie he was filming called East of Eden East of Eden. Several months earlier he had asked me to be in the movie, John Steinbeck's retelling of the Cain and Abel story set in California's Salinas Valley, playing opposite Montgomery Clift as my brother. But I was busy and I think Monty was, too. Instead, Gadg cast as one of the brothers a new actor named James Dean, who, he said, wanted to meet me. Before introducing us, Gadg told me that his new star was constantly asking about me and seemed bent on patterning his acting technique and life after me-or at least on the person he thought I was after seeing The Wild One The Wild One.

Jimmy was then about twenty, seven years younger than me, and had a simplicity that I found endearing. When we met, I sensed some of the same aspects of the midwestern farm boy who had suddenly been transplanted to the big city that I'd had when I went to New York-as well as some of the same anxieties I'd felt after being thrust into the status of celebrity at a young age. He was nervous when we met and made it clear that he was not only mimicking my acting but also what he believed was my lifestyle. He said he was learning to play the conga drums and had taken up motorcycling, and he obviously wanted my approval of his work.

As I've observed before, acting talent alone doesn't make an actor a star star. It takes a combination of qualities: looks, personality, presence, ability. Like Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo wasn't much of an actress, but she had presence. She probably played the same character in every film she ever made, but she was beautiful and had an unusual personality. Mickey Rooney, on the other hand, is an unsung hero of the actors' world. He never became a leading man-he was too short, his teeth weren't straight and he didn't have s.e.x appeal-but like Jimmy Cagney he could do almost anything. Charlie Chaplin was also one of the best. But a lot of people became movie stars simply by playing themselves. Their looks and personalities were so interesting, attractive or intriguing that audiences were satisfied by these qualities alone.

Jimmy Dean, who made only three pictures, East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and and Giant Giant, had everything going for him. He was not only on his way to becoming a good actor, but he had a personality and presence that made audiences curious about him, as well as looks and a vulnerability that women found especially appealing. They wanted to take care of him. He was sensitive, and there were elements of surprise in his personality. He wasn't volcanic or dynamic, but he had a subtle energy and an intangible injured quality that had a tremendous impact on audiences.

Like me, he became a symbol of social change during the 1950s by happenstance. Rebel Without a Cause Rebel Without a Cause was a story about a new lost generation of young people, and the reaction to it, like that to was a story about a new lost generation of young people, and the reaction to it, like that to The Wild One The Wild One, was a sign of the tremors that were beginning to quake beneath the surface of our culture. I always think of the years leading up to that period as the Brylcreem Era, when people wore pompadours and society's smug att.i.tudes and values were as rigidly set in place as the coiffure of a ladies' man. Rock 'n' roll, the Beatles, Woodstock, the civil rights movement, rioting in the streets because of racial injustice and the Vietnam War were just around the corner. A sense of alienation was rising among different generations and different layers of society, but it hadn't openly manifested itself yet. Old traditions and venerated inst.i.tutions were distrusted and the social fabric was being replaced by something new, for better or worse.

Because we were around when it happened, Jimmy Dean and I were sometimes cast as symbols of this transformation-and in some cases as instigators of alienation. But the sea change in society had nothing to do with us; it would have occurred with or without us. Our movies didn't precipitate the new att.i.tudes, but the response to them mirrored the changes bubbling to the surface. Some people looked in this mirror and saw things that weren't there. That's how myths originate. They grow up around celebrities almost by spontaneous generation, a process over which they have no control and are usually unaware of until they are trapped by them.

Laurence Olivier became a legend as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights; Wuthering Heights; with his beautiful face, he was perfect for the part and a very good actor. But Emily Bronte's novel about star-crossed lovers moved half the world to tears, and it was another of those actor-proof roles. n.o.body knew at the time that the picture would make Olivier a larger-than-life figure and shape the world's perception of him for the rest of his life. The public retained in its collective memory the mythic image of Olivier as Heathcliff, just as they remembered Jimmy Dean drag-racing in an old Mercury coupe or me riding off on a motorcycle. Actors have no way of antic.i.p.ating the myths they may create when they take on a role. Humphrey Bogart was an effective performer, but no great shakes as an actor. I doubt if he understood the subtext of with his beautiful face, he was perfect for the part and a very good actor. But Emily Bronte's novel about star-crossed lovers moved half the world to tears, and it was another of those actor-proof roles. n.o.body knew at the time that the picture would make Olivier a larger-than-life figure and shape the world's perception of him for the rest of his life. The public retained in its collective memory the mythic image of Olivier as Heathcliff, just as they remembered Jimmy Dean drag-racing in an old Mercury coupe or me riding off on a motorcycle. Actors have no way of antic.i.p.ating the myths they may create when they take on a role. Humphrey Bogart was an effective performer, but no great shakes as an actor. I doubt if he understood the subtext of Casablanca Casablanca or gave any thought to the possibility that it would become a cult film, but his role in that movie affected the public's perception of him forever. Charlie Chaplin was one of the few actors who had the intuitive sense to consciously create a myth about himself as the Tramp, and then he exploited it. or gave any thought to the possibility that it would become a cult film, but his role in that movie affected the public's perception of him forever. Charlie Chaplin was one of the few actors who had the intuitive sense to consciously create a myth about himself as the Tramp, and then he exploited it.

The closer you come to the successful portrayal of a character, the more people mythologize about you in that role. Perception is everything. I didn't wear jeans as a badge of anything, they were just comfortable. But because I wore blue jeans and a T-shirt in Streetcar Streetcar and rode a motorcycle in and rode a motorcycle in The Wild One The Wild One, I was considered a rebel. It's true that I always hated conformity because it breeds mediocrity, but the real source of my reputation as a rebel was my refusal to follow some of the normal Hollywood rules. I wouldn't give interviews to Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons because the practice seemed phony and degrading. Every actor was expected to b.u.t.ter up the columnists. You were supposed to put on a happy face, give them tidbits about your life, play the game because they would help sell tickets to your movies and determine the course of your career. But I didn't care if I got publicity. When I first became an actor, I had tried to be open and honest with reporters, but they put words in my mouth and focused on prurience, so after a while I refused to do it anymore. I was tired of being asked the same inane, irrelevant questions, then seeing my answers distorted. It grated on me that movie stars were elevated into icons; Hollywood was simply a place where people, including me, made money, like a mill town in New England or an oil field in Texas.

After we met on the set of East of Eden East of Eden, Jimmy began calling me for advice or to suggest a night out. We talked on the phone and ran into each other at parties, but never became close. I think he regarded me as a kind of older brother or mentor, and I suppose I responded to him as if I was. I felt a kinship with him and was sorry for him. He was hypersensitive, and I could see in his eyes and in the way he moved and spoke that he had suffered a lot. He was tortured by insecurities, the origin of which I never determined, though he said he'd had a difficult childhood and a lot of problems with his father. I urged him to seek a.s.sistance, perhaps go into therapy. I have no idea whether he ever did, but I did know it can be hard for a troubled kid like him to have to live up to sudden fame and the ballyhoo Hollywood created around him. I saw it happen to Marilyn, and I also knew it from my own experience. In trying to copy me, I think Jimmy was only attempting to deal with these insecurities, but I told him it was a mistake. Once he showed up at a party and I saw him take off his jacket, roll it into a ball and throw it on the floor. It struck me that he was imitating something I had done and I took him aside and said, "Don't do that, Jimmy. Just hang your coat up like everybody else. You don't have to throw your coat in the corner. It's much easier to hang it up than pick it up off the floor."

Another time, I told him I thought he was foolish to try to copy me as an actor. "Jimmy, you have to be who you are, not who I am. You mustn't try to copy me. Emulate the best aspects of yourself." I said it was a dead-end street to try to be somebody else. In retrospect, I realize it's not unusual for people to borrow someone else's form until they find their own, and in time Jimmy did. He was still developing when I first met him, but by the time he made Giant Giant, he was no longer trying to imitate me. He still had his insecurities, but he had become his own man. He was awfully good in that last picture, and people identified with his pain and made him a cult hero. We can only guess what kind of actor he would have become in another twenty years. I think he could have become a great one. Instead he died and was forever entombed in his myth.

33.

IN A FADED BROWN ENVELOPE saved by my sisters are the remains of a long-ago romance that some readers may find as touching as one by Shakespeare. It's the story of a boy and a girl in their teens who were very much in love, told in their own words in letters to each other. saved by my sisters are the remains of a long-ago romance that some readers may find as touching as one by Shakespeare. It's the story of a boy and a girl in their teens who were very much in love, told in their own words in letters to each other.

"Sweetheart," the boy writes, "if you should be taken away from me, I don't know what I'd do. Do you know that you mean everything to me? A fellow can do most anything, dear, if he has a little girl like you to back him up. With you backing me up, I feel as if I could go through the seven fires of h.e.l.l and come out rather cool...."

"I love you every second," the girl responded. "I love and adore you. There couldn't be anyone else in the world for us but each other...it was ordained from the first that we should be together. I have always known it. You will never, never know how I love you...you are everything in the world I hold dearest. If anything should happen to you, I think I should go insane...."

"Dearest, I'm the most fortunate man in the world, and I can't see how I deserve it at all," the boy wrote after landing in France, bound for the trenches of World War I. "I am so happy in knowing that you are mine, that I seem to be walking on air. You're the only one I could ever marry and to think that you're mine is wonderful. It's us for the rest of our life that is going to be the happiest that ever was."

"You are as necessary to me as air and water," she wrote on the eve of her wedding day. "I love and adore you.... I have now and since the first time I saw you a feeling of absolute security whenever I think of you. I know that whatever happens, you'll always be there to help me, and you know, dearest, I would move the world for you.... I am absolutely yours and you are mine. I don't think the ceremony will be necessary as far as we are concerned, for we are honestly married as two people could be. It was ordained from the first that we should be. I have always known it and so has everyone who has ever known us...."

There are scores of these letters, pa.s.sionate and br.i.m.m.i.n.g with love, all written by my mother and father.

Like other things in life, what people glean from their words will vary according to their own experiences, values and prejudices. I do not find these letters moving, but I have read them searching for answers to what went wrong in their lives. I have spent almost seven decades examining every aspect of my life trying to understand the forces that made me what I am, and while I never expect to find the final answer, because I realize it is impossible to be objective about oneself, I've tried to reconcile the sweet, hopeful, pa.s.sionate people in these letters with the parents I knew-one an alcoholic whom I loved but who ignored me, the other an alcoholic who tortured me emotionally and made my mother's life a misery. I mourn the sadness of their lives while looking for clues to their psyches and, by extension, my own.

My father, the letters tell me, was kicked out of the University of Nebraska for drinking, and when she was away at college in New England my mother wrote him, "I drank half a quart of whiskey with ginger ale, smoked six cigarettes, drank port wine and more whiskey.... I've been sick ever since.... I wanted to get stewed once to see what it was like. I wouldn't do it in public and I couldn't at home, and I wouldn't when I was married because if I ever thought you'd see me in the state I was in last night, I'd get under a bed and stay there for the rest of my natural life. Dearest, that's one thing we'll never, never do is get stewed. I think it's horrible."

Is there a clue to why my father behaved as he did in a letter written to them by one of his aunts on the eve of their wedding? "Marlon," she wrote, "be the boss "be the boss. Dodie will be happier for having someone who makes her do the thing as it should be done, and don't think that giving in to her is an action of love, for it isn't...."

Clues, but no answers.

After my mother left New York, she reconciled with my father, and with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous they both stopped drinking. They then had almost ten years together. I bought them a ranch in the sand hills of Nebraska, which my mother called a frozen ocean because in the winter the broad, sweeping plains were glazed with vast sheets of snow and ice. The ranch was near Broken Bow, not far from where Crazy Horse was a.s.sa.s.sinated, and she named it Penny Poke Farm as a joke. In the Midwest, a poke was where you kept your money, as in a pig in a poke.

I don't know if my dad gave up the wh.o.r.emongering that brought so much sadness to my mother's life, but she loved the ranch and the two of them shared a life of sorts, though I never knew its inner dynamics. They went to AA and somehow muddled through, taking the shards of their broken lives and fitting them into a sort of mirror that reflected their togetherness and allowed them to live free of alcohol.

When my mother became seriously ill during a trip to Mexico with my father in 1953, she was brought to California, and I was beside her hospital bed with her hand in mine when she died. She was only fifty-five years old. After hearing her death rattle, I took a lock of her hair, the pillow she died on, and a beautiful aquamarine ring from her finger and walked outside. It was about five A.M A.M. on a spring morning in Pasadena, and it seemed as if everything in nature had been imbued with her spirit: the birds, the leaves, the flowers and especially the wind, all seemed to reflect it. She had given me a love of nature and animals, and the night sky, and a sense of closeness to the earth. I felt she was with me there, outside the hospital, and it helped get me through the loss. She was gone, but I felt she had been transformed into everything that was reflective of nature and was going to be all right. Suddenly I had a vision of a great bird climbing into the sky higher and higher and I heard Ferde Grofe's Mississippi Suite Mississippi Suite. Now I often hear the music and see her in the same way, a majestic bird floating on thermals of warm air, gliding higher and higher past a great stone cliff.

I keep my mother's ring close to me. For a long while after she died, the stone was vibrant and full of color, pigmented with deeper and deeper shades of blue, but recently I've noticed that the colors have begun to fade. With each year it fades more; now it's not blue anymore, but a misty, foggy gray. I don't know why.

34.

IN THE MIDDLE YEARS of my life, I spent a lot of time searching for something to dedicate my life to and give it more meaning. Elia Kazan claimed I once told him, "Here I am, a balding middle-aged failure, and I feel like a fraud when I act. I've tried everything-f.u.c.king, drinking, work-and none of it means anything." I don't remember saying that, but I may have. With so much prejudice, racial discrimination, injustice, hatred, poverty, starvation and suffering in the world, making movies seemed increasingly silly and irrelevant, and I felt I had to do what I could to make things better. of my life, I spent a lot of time searching for something to dedicate my life to and give it more meaning. Elia Kazan claimed I once told him, "Here I am, a balding middle-aged failure, and I feel like a fraud when I act. I've tried everything-f.u.c.king, drinking, work-and none of it means anything." I don't remember saying that, but I may have. With so much prejudice, racial discrimination, injustice, hatred, poverty, starvation and suffering in the world, making movies seemed increasingly silly and irrelevant, and I felt I had to do what I could to make things better.

I spent these years of my life in a philosophical quandary, thinking, If I am not my brother's keeper, who am I? Where are the lines between that which is mine, and that which is Caesar's? Where does my life end and my responsibility to others begin?

For a long time I was driven to involve myself in a war against what I perceived as social injustice and political hypocrisy. As I've grown older, I am less sure of many of the things I felt then, but it was another time. For most of my life, a black-and-white world was attractive and convenient for me; it was easier to take sides. As when I sided with Jewish terrorists without acknowledging that they were killing innocent Palestinians in their effort to create the state of Israel, I believed there was right and wrong about everything, with nothing in between, and I wanted to be sure I was always on the right side. There were good people and bad people, and the bad people were my enemies. The human mind finds it difficult to deal with gray areas. It's much more convenient to say, "These people are evil," "This is bad," or "This is good." With age, I've come to realize that nothing is wholly right or wholly wrong, and that everything human beings do is a product of their heritage, perspective, genes and experience. I think a princ.i.p.al fault of our concept of justice is that it is based on the Judeo-Christian beliefs that separate the world into the guilty and the innocent. No child is born evil. People may be born with a genetic disposition toward one characteristic or another-they have a certain level of intelligence, a special talent, a personality feature, a physical ability-but otherwise they are naked when they enter the world. Using the word "evil" is a convenient way to label an enemy. I used to say that Roy Cohn, who spearheaded Joe McCarthy's bloodletting, personified evil more than any other person I knew. Now I realize I don't know what forces made him do what he did. I'm more forgiving now, but it took many years to become that way. Sometimes I still have an impulse to hate and exact vengeance on an enemy, but then I realize that it is a wasted emotion and that I have better things to do with the rest of my life.

However, earlier in my life I often affixed myself to what the press called "causes." What affected me most was the suffering of children. I couldn't understand how the world could let so many children starve to death. Nor could I remain silent when I saw the strong exploit the weak. People pigeonholed me as a knee-jerk liberal and mouthed cliches like, "Brando is a defender of the underdog." I bridled at words like "militant," "radical" and "liberal" because they were so glibly used to confuse and mislabel complex att.i.tudes. Still, to be fair, I can understand, given the natural human proclivity to see things in black and white, how some of the things I did during the middle of my life produced this image in some minds.

I thought about becoming a minister, not because I was a religious person, other than having an inexhaustible awe and reverence for nature, but because I thought it might give me more of a purpose in life. I flirted with the idea for a while, but in the end it never developed sufficient force to make me want to do it. Or maybe it was because I became interested in the United Nations, which for a while I saw as perhaps our last hope for peace, social justice and a more equitable sharing of the earth's resources. For the first time in history, people from different nations with diverse natures, colors, religions and philosophies were working together for the common good. I was impressed by what I read about the UN's technical-a.s.sistance program, which promised to give poor people the know-how and tools to feed themselves, and to create jobs and develop industry. I volunteered to help the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund because it was trying to feed millions of starving children around the world, and I became a roving amba.s.sador for the agency, preaching a different kind of religion: that above all, the world owes its children a decent life. I made television spots for UNICEF and traveled to dozens of countries, holding press conferences to spread the word about the importance of its work and putting on shows to raise money for it. I also decided to make a film about the UN, believing with foolish vanity that I could make a difference by using my movie experience to focus attention on the despair and anguish so many children were enduring. In the spring of 1955, I organized my own movie production company-named Pennebaker Productions after my mother's maiden name-with three objectives: to make films that would be a force for good in the world, to create a job for my father that would give him something to do after my mother died and to cut taxes. He complained constantly that taxes were taking 80 percent of what I earned, and that by forming a corporation we would be able to cut them substantially to put away some money for my retirement.

As I've noted, I had earned $550 a week for A Streetcar Named Desire A Streetcar Named Desire and more later, and I had given almost all of it to my father to invest. Money was never important to me once I'd fed myself, had a place to sleep and had enough to take care of my family and people I loved. My father invested it, but like most misers, he was a poor businessman and lost everything, the equivalent today of about $20 million. Some of the money was spent on bad investments in cattle, but most was squandered on abandoned gold mines, where a slick salesman had convinced him a fortune was waiting to be made by extracting gold ore from the mountains of tailings left behind by earlier generations of miners. My dad was taken in grand style; after investing all of my money, he discovered that the price of gold was too low to make mining the tailings profitable, and so I lost everything. For a long time he hid this from me and wouldn't admit what he had done; when he did tell me, he blamed it on other people. and more later, and I had given almost all of it to my father to invest. Money was never important to me once I'd fed myself, had a place to sleep and had enough to take care of my family and people I loved. My father invested it, but like most misers, he was a poor businessman and lost everything, the equivalent today of about $20 million. Some of the money was spent on bad investments in cattle, but most was squandered on abandoned gold mines, where a slick salesman had convinced him a fortune was waiting to be made by extracting gold ore from the mountains of tailings left behind by earlier generations of miners. My dad was taken in grand style; after investing all of my money, he discovered that the price of gold was too low to make mining the tailings profitable, and so I lost everything. For a long time he hid this from me and wouldn't admit what he had done; when he did tell me, he blamed it on other people.

35.

PARTLY TO RAISE MONEY to finance a film about the UN's technical-a.s.sistance program in Asia, I took a part in to finance a film about the UN's technical-a.s.sistance program in Asia, I took a part in The Teahouse of the August Moon The Teahouse of the August Moon, based on a wonderful play by John Patrick, which in turn was based on a novel by Vern Sneider. En route to Tokyo for the filming in the spring of 1956, I made a detour to Southeast Asia to look for story ideas and visited the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and several other countries. From afar I'd admired the efforts by the industrialized countries to help poorer nations improve their economies, and thought that this was the way the world ought to work. But I found something quite different; even though colonialism was dying, the industrialized countries were still exploiting the economies of these former colonies. Foreign-aid grants were given mostly for self-serving political purposes, and most Westerners never bothered to learn the language of the Asian countries and lived in hermetically sealed capsules of villas, servants, bourbon, air-conditioned offices, expense-account parties and all-white country clubs. A lot of the foreign-aid officials I met seemed arrogant and condescending, with a smug sense of superiority. Apparently because the United States had more television sets and automobiles, they were convinced that our system was infallible and that they had a G.o.d-given mission to impose our way of life on others. I was still unschooled in the ways of the diplomatic world and the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, but I sensed that many of the political leaders we were supporting in these countries were looking out only for themselves and their bank accounts. They lived in palaces while their people lived in huts.

The trip yielded the draft of a script for a movie about the UN a.s.sistance program called Tiger on a Kite Tiger on a Kite that was never made, but that in time led to that was never made, but that in time led to The Ugly American The Ugly American.

Such trips were always among the most appealing reasons for being an actor. The opportunities to meet people and to experience cultures I would never have otherwise balanced some of the negative aspects of my profession. I remember a visit to Bali on that trip with particular affection. It was before large numbers of tourists had invaded the island, so it still had a sweet innocence. I met artisans and artists who worked all day in the rice fields, then came home, took a swim in a river, and taught dancing or worked lovingly on their artwork, and they seemed to lead a marvelous life. Before tourists polluted their culture, Balinese women didn't wear anything over their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, although if you encountered one on a street she usually covered herself up out of courtesy, not that she thought there was anything wrong with being bare-breasted, but as a show of respect. The women had beautiful bodies, and I kept trying to persuade them to be less respectful. Sitting in a stream with my feet braced against a boulder and water splashing over my shoulders, or looking downriver at a group of naked Balinese women bathing, I thought nothing in life could be more pleasant than this. A sailor I met had jumped ship in Bali and had decided to spend the rest of his life there. I understood why. He had learned to speak a rough form of the Balinese language and lived with two beautiful cinnamon-colored girls. A ship's carpenter skilled as a woodworker, he earned his way by making instruments for the orchestras that accompanied the legong legong, a Balinese dance in which the performers moved every part of their bodies, from eyebrows to toes. What a wonderful life he had, I thought, although he said that he had one problem; he was having trouble keeping his girlfriends satisfied. He asked me to send him some testosterone when I got home, and I did.

In The Teahouse of the August Moon The Teahouse of the August Moon, I played an interpreter on Okinawa named Sakini, who spends most of the movie dueling with Glenn Ford, an American army officer a.s.signed to bring democracy and free enterprise to the island. The Broadway play, in which David Wayne had been marvelous as Sakini, was a delicate, amusing comedy of manners set against the backdrop of a stormy clash of cultures. As I've said, a well-written play is nearly actor-proof, but in Teahouse Teahouse Glenn Ford and I proved how easily actors can ruin a good play or movie when they're so absorbed with themselves and their performances that they don't act in concert. It was a horrible picture and I was miscast. Glenn Ford and I proved how easily actors can ruin a good play or movie when they're so absorbed with themselves and their performances that they don't act in concert. It was a horrible picture and I was miscast.

Still, I enjoyed working again with Louis Calhern, whom I had met on Julius Caesar Julius Caesar. He was an imposing, hard-drinking old actor with a cla.s.sic profile, and he knew every trick in the book, had played virtually every part on Broadway and was full of stories about the theater. Once, he told me, he was getting ready to open in a new play and the producers were so frightened that he would not be sober for opening night that they locked him in a room on the fourth floor of the Lambs Club, the actors' club in New York. After they had gone, Calhern looked out the window and saw a waiter from the Lambs walking down below. He hailed him, floated a twenty-dollar bill to the sidewalk and asked him to bring up a bottle of whiskey and a straw. When the man knocked on the locked door, Louis said, "Put the straw through the keyhole and the other end in the bottle."

He emptied the bottle using the straw and was soon snockered. When the producers, who had frisked him and searched the room for liquor before locking him in, came to get him, they couldn't believe it, and Louis said they never figured out how he had gotten the booze. It was like one of those English mysteries in which a dead body is found in a drawing room but all the windows and doors are locked from the inside. Nonetheless, on opening night Louis got wonderful reviews for his performance. He was a merry drunk, full of laughter and fun, but underneath an unhappy, lonely man. His wife had just left him, which was shattering, and he was suffering because of it, which made him drink even more. A few weeks after we got to Tokyo, he died from a heart attack, but I think he died happy and full of laughter.

Someone decided we should have a religious funeral for Louis, and selected a Catholic church with wooden pews, kneeling benches, tatami mats on the floor and no heater. It was freezing when we filed into the place, which, comically, was according to our billing in the movie. Glenn began the eulogies with an actor's performance. He described effusively how much he missed Louis, looked to the heavens with his chin quivering and seemed to be trying to address Calhern directly as if he were already up there. Meanwhile the priest had kept giving us cues to stand up, sit down, kneel, rise, kneel. For non-Catholics, it was very confusing, as we kept going up and down like a bank of express elevators. I noticed Glenn rubbing his knees in pain, and the next time the priest signaled for us to kneel again, he responded with a look of disgust and a barely audible sound of resentment. At first he wouldn't go down, then he knelt halfway, then finally all the way, and for some reason this struck me as very funny and I started laughing. People turned around and looked at me, so I tried to disguise my laughter as the choked, tearful bereavement of someone suffering a great loss. I clamped my hands over my eyes in sorrow and tried to stop giggling, but I was in the clutches of a sustained and serious laughing attack, the kind that can take the wind out of you and tighten the muscles around your chest so that you can barely breathe. That I was reacting this way at a funeral made me even more hysterical. Glenn looked over at me with a surprised look that said, "Jesus, he's sure feeling a lot more grief than I am," which only made me laugh more. It was a nightmare, and I could hardly wait for the Ma.s.s to end. Afterward the priest, thinking I was immobilized by grief, came over to me and said, "My son, let's go into the rectory so we can have a private communication with Louis's spirit." Everyone had to follow or it would have been disrespectful, so we prayed some more there, and I could never stop laughing. On the ride back to the hotel, everybody, even Glenn, expressed sympathy for my loss.

After Louis's death, Paul Ford, a very funny actor, was brought in to replace him, but I, director Danny Mann and Glenn ruined the movie. On the first day of filming, I discovered that Glenn thought of himself as a masterful scene-stealer. He wouldn't be photographed from the left because he thought it was his "bad side," so before every shot he came to the set early and installed himself in the position he wanted, where the camera would see him from the right side; then, after we took our marks, he backed up a step or two, so that the camera had to follow him and he wound up full-faced in the shot, and other actors had to turn and lose three quarters of their faces. Sometimes he would gesture across my face, or as I said a line he would make a quick movement to catch the audience's eye; or he would begin stuttering to draw attention to his character.

I knew what Glenn was doing, but I don't think he ever realized how transparent he was. I had occasionally run into actors who tried to hog the camera, but had never met someone of this caliber. I knew the techniques as well as anyone; they're not mysterious. A lot of actors try to do it and manipulate the audience. Olivia de Havilland had a wonderful trick of breathing deeply to make her b.r.e.a.s.t.s swell in and out; when she did, she made short work of the other actors in the scene because the audience-at least all the males, and probably half the females-was preoccupied with the movement of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. But Ford took scene-stealing to Olympian heights, and in this fragile story, which required the two of us to act in delicate concert, he wanted to be the center of attention in every scene.

At the beginning I tried to rea.s.sure Glenn that I wasn't a threat to his status, and in several scenes turned three quarters around so that he would appear full-faced to the camera. I wanted to let him know we weren't combatants, but he kept it up. Whenever we took our places for a shot, just before the camera started rolling he took a step or two backward, which made me pull my head around to look at him as he went upstage; in the camera's eye, I went from full face to a narrow profile. But he thought I was just stupid. I finally thought, To h.e.l.l with this, and I followed him across the stage the next time he did it. When he backed up, I moved forward; he backed up again and I moved another few inches; we repeated this until we were moving across the stage inches at a time like a couple of dancers doing a tango until finally the camera operator shouted, "Hold it. I can't hold the focus anymore! You're out of focus." Eventually I decided that the picture was a dead horse and that there was no way it could be saved; it was a sensitive comedy and we were wrecking it. I didn't think it was one of Danny Mann's best efforts. Quite apart from everything else, I felt inept as a comedian; David Wayne should have played the part in the movie.

But since the picture was lost anyway, I decided to have some fun with Glenn's performance. Thereafter I made sure to arrive on the set before he did and took a position that made him face the camera from his left side. I began stepping on his lines and blowing mine when he had a big scene and trying to rattle him during his speeches. When an actor has a long take, he hates to be distracted, so before one of his big speeches to a group of Okinawans, I got a flyswatter from the prop man and started following nonexistent flies around in the background, swatting one occasionally, and during his close-ups I stuck my head in and out of the camera as if searching for a fly.

Glenn looked at me as if he had been struck with an anvil. He didn't know what to think, because with all his trickery and my letting him get away with it initially, he didn't understand what I was doing. I wore him out; he thought I was too dumb to see through him, which made it even more fun to play tricks on him on and off the set. He was a miser about food, and at one of the locations we shared a dressing room in which he kept a cache of candies and desserts he had bought at an army PX and that he was tightfisted about sharing. After he brought back a box of cookies, I saw him hide it in our room and I pinched some. When Glenn discovered that some of them were missing, he stormed out the door and blamed a group of j.a.panese kids from the neighborhood who were hanging about and were only about two feet high. He screamed at them, "No cookies. No cookies. Do not eat cookies. No go in there."

I didn't like how he treated the kids, and I thought he should have given them the cookies in the first place because in those days there weren't many sweets to go around. Later that day, I ate a few of the remaining cookies, then threw several others on the floor and stomped on them. When he came in and saw the crumbs, he exploded. It must have been about $1.75 worth of cookies, but it sent him into a rage, and he demanded that the producers post guards outside our dressing room, which led to a lot of jokes about the "Cookie Watch."

When he discovered more cookies crushed on the floor the next day, Glenn asked me if I knew anything about it, and I told him in my most convincing manner that it was a mystery to me. How did those kids get into the trailer past the guards? he asked.

He never found out. Again it was one of those English drawing-room mysteries-like Louis Calhern, the whiskey and the straw.

36.

IF I HADN'T BEEN an actor, I've often thought I'd have become a con man and wound up in jail. Or I might have gone crazy. Acting afforded me the luxury of being able to spend thousands of dollars on psychoa.n.a.lysts, most of whom did nothing but convince me that most New York and Beverly Hills psychoa.n.a.lysts are a little crazy themselves, as well as highly motivated to separate patients from their money while making their emotional problems worse. I think I'd have made a good con man; I'm good at telling lies smoothly, giving an impression of things as they are not and making people think I'm sincere. A good con man can fool anybody, but the first person he fools is himself. It occurs to me that when I was thinking about becoming a preacher I believed the talents I thought would make me a good tent-show evangelist were the same ones that would have made me a good con man. an actor, I've often thought I'd have become a con man and wound up in jail. Or I might have gone crazy. Acting afforded me the luxury of being able to spend thousands of dollars on psychoa.n.a.lysts, most of whom did nothing but convince me that most New York and Beverly Hills psychoa.n.a.lysts are a little crazy themselves, as well as highly motivated to separate patients from their money while making their emotional problems worse. I think I'd have made a good con man; I'm good at telling lies smoothly, giving an impression of things as they are not and making people think I'm sincere. A good con man can fool anybody, but the first person he fools is himself. It occurs to me that when I was thinking about becoming a preacher I believed the talents I thought would make me a good tent-show evangelist were the same ones that would have made me a good con man.

Having had the luck to be successful as an actor also afforded me the luxury of time. I only had to do a movie once a year, for three months at the most, which paid me enough so that I didn't have to work again until my business manager called and said, "We've got to pay your taxes at the end of the year, so you'd better make another movie." When that happened, I'd look around and grab something.

After Teahouse of the August Moon Teahouse of the August Moon, my father, who thought of himself as my manager even though I'd only put him on the payroll so he'd have an office to go to after my mother died, started pressing me to make another picture. Pennebaker Productions, he said, was facing serious financial problems. As always, he was preoccupied with money. He complained I was spending too much on the UN picture and on a western I wanted to make, and he claimed that a friend I'd put on the Pennebaker payroll was exploiting me. He said if I didn't make another picture soon, I'd be in trouble with the IRS. He urged me to sign for a picture based on a novel by James A. Michener that Joshua Logan wanted to direct and that Warner Brothers, with producer William Goetz, had offered to finance in a joint venture with Pennebaker. I read the novel, Sayonara Sayonara, which was set in postwar j.a.pan, and thought it raised interesting issues about human relations, but I didn't like the script. In the script and the novel, the character Logan wanted me to play, Major Lloyd Gruver, a Korean Warera U.S. Air Force pilot, fell in love with a beautiful j.a.panese woman, Hana-ogi, a member of a distinguished and elite dance troupe, but their interracial romance was doomed by the tradition in both cultures of endogamy, the custom of marrying only within one's own race or caste. In accepting this principle, I thought the story endorsed indirectly a form of racism. But with a different ending, I thought it could be an example of the pictures I wanted to make, films that exerted a positive force. I told Logan I'd do the picture if the Madame b.u.t.terfly ending was replaced by one stating that there was nothing wrong with racial intermarriage, and that it was a natural outcome when people fell in love. I wanted the two lovers to marry at the end of the picture, and Logan agreed.

But once we were in j.a.pan, I discovered that Josh was burdened with an overwhelming depression that made him unable to function. I ended up rewriting and improvising a lot of the picture, and we had to limp along as best we could. With Josh's problems and a long run of rainy weather, it was a difficult picture to make, and I don't think Logan knew what was happening most of the time.

My father now called me Marlon instead of Bud, and we were civil to each other, but the friction between us never ended. After he began working for me, I didn't expect him really to do anything, but he constantly wrote memos warning me that my company was wasting money on projects that were going nowhere, and that I was too concerned with making a statement and not enough with making money. "To date," he wrote me before we had received our share of the profits from Sayonara Sayonara, "Pennebaker is almost as far away from producing a picture as it was at the beginning, and we have spent $18,000 in hard dollars contributed by you, $25,000 by MCA, and over $153,000 loaned by Paramount-$196,000. Pennebaker's reputation as a producer has been declining and it can be a.s.sumed that this is not without its reflection on you." He said we'd wasted $72,000 alone on preparations for the UN movie. "Some of the reasons for our diversions were that Pennebaker wanted to be a helpful force in the world. I agree heartily with the thought, but I think there is some question as to whether this sort of program belongs in an embryonic production company...."

Regardless of what he thought, I wanted to make pictures that were not only entertaining but had social value and gave me a sense that I was helping to improve the condition of the world. My father disagreed with my priorities: "The corporation" should be "operated with the prime objective of turning out tasteful, good pictures that are commercial until such a time that it can afford to do something for the emotional satisfaction involved. I think we have put the cart before the horse in some respects. Our purpose, at least the purpose of the industry, is to entertain rather than try to use loaded directive thought...more real lasting good is probably produced by foundations, universities, colleges, medical research, hospitals and even churches, and these are all activated and made possible by the use of dollars earned in a hard commercial way. As you say, I have a money neurosis in one way. I think you have a money neurosis in another way. Someday I think we should discuss our respective tendencies. I personally don't believe there is anything wrong in having money if it is used as an instrument rather than a means...if money can be used properly it can become an instrument for great good. After Pennebaker has earned sufficient money any surpluses above needs can be used as you see fit."

My father also continued to complain that my friends who worked for Pennebaker were using and exploiting me. "You have great perception and knowledge," he said, "but you allow yourself to be conned into doing things emotionally. You can afford this personally, but you cannot afford this in Pennebaker...."

When the press fabricated stories about me, I feigned indifference over what was said and what others thought about me. I think I was convincing in this pose of detachment, but it was a mask. Newspapers and magazines invented things that were not only untrue, but were often gratuitously salacious and they offended me greatly. I became particularly annoyed by stories in Time Time and and Life Life. I engaged a research organization to dig up all the negative una.s.sailable facts it could find about Time Inc., the parent company, spent about $8,000 for a long profile on the company's history of distorting and slanting the news, and then went on one television and radio program after another to slam Time Time and and Life Life. I was after their advertising. I wanted revenge. I intended to hurt them, and there wasn't anything they could do about it because I was only repeating facts of how skewed the magazines' presentation of the news was as a result of the political biases of Henry Luce. On radio and television, I said his magazines were ruining the reputation of the United States, that they were unpatriotic and injuring the stature of our country abroad, and that they insulted other countries with distorted stories for which our nation would ultimately have to pay a price. I relished doing this. That's how I was during a large part of my life; if I thought anybody had wronged me, I hit back.

Time Inc. sent a woman out to see me who was related to a friend of mine. She called on a pretext of some sort and I invited her to dinner. We had several martinis, and by the time we headed back to my house I was driving an S pattern across the highway and she was even worse off. I pulled into my driveway, but before we got out of the car, she tried valiantly to carry out her mission. In slurred tones, she said, "Marlon, what's all this about you attacking Time? Time? What's behind it? What's going on here?" What's behind it? What's going on here?"

"Oh, I think they're great magazines," I said, "but there's a few corrections they should make, and I've gone on several programs to set the record straight. I'm going to keep doing it because I feel it's my civic duty to correct the press when it's wrong. Actually I think they should appreciate it. They have a letters-to-the-editor column, and in a sense this is just a letter to the editor. It's a continuing letter that will go on and on until they don't feel they have the right to ruin the reputation of America..."

Then I lowered her into the bushes, intending to act the beast with two backs with the emissary of my enemy, but I was so awash in alcohol, so immobilized and out of ammunition that I couldn't tell the ivy from her earlobes. She returned to New York with her virtue intact. But from that day to this, Time Time has seldom mentioned my name, and if it has, it's been in a cursory way. Time Inc. is a big company, but it was the old story of David and Goliath: it takes only one well-placed stone in the middle of the forehead. has seldom mentioned my name, and if it has, it's been in a cursory way. Time Inc. is a big company, but it was the old story of David and Goliath: it takes only one well-placed stone in the middle of the forehead.

In late 1957 I went to Europe to make The Young Lions The Young Lions, a movie based on Irwin Shaw's novel about three soldiers-two Americans and a German-whose lives intersected before and during World War II. Monty Clift played the Jewish-American soldier, Noah Ackerman, and I played the German, Christian Diestl. Jay Kantor told me that Dean Martin, whose career had been in decline after his breakup with Jerry Lewis, was desperate to play Michael Whiteacre, an American entertainer reluctantly drafted into the war, to prove that he could handle a serious dramatic role, so I helped him get the part. When we met at a restaurant in Paris before the filming started, someone spilled a pot of scalding water on my crotch. The pain was excruciating and sent me to a hospital for several days, where I thought about the script and decided to exercise the right in my contract to change it.

The original script closely followed the book, in which Shaw painted all Germans as evil caricatures, especially Christian, whom he portrayed as a symbol of everything that was bad about n.a.z.ism; he was mean, nasty, vicious, a cliche of evil. Like many books and movies produced by Jews since the war, I think it was a perfectly understandable bias that, consciously or unconsciously, Jews felt would ensure that the world would never forget the Holocaust and, not coincidentally, would increase sympathy and financial support for Israel. Indirectly Shaw was saying that all all Germans were responsible for the Holocaust, which I didn't agree with. Much to his irritation, I changed the plot entirely so that at the beginning of the story my character believed that Hitler was a positive force because he gave Germans a sense of purpose. But as the story developed, he gradually became disenchanted and struggled to turn his back on these beliefs. Like many Germans, Christian had been misled by Hitler's propaganda and believed he would bring a lasting peace to Europe by conquering it-the same rationalization that Napoleon had employed by saying he wanted to unify Europe to bring peace. I thought the story should demonstrate that there are no inherently "bad" people in the world, but that they can easily be misled. Germans were responsible for the Holocaust, which I didn't agree with. Much to his irritation, I changed the plot entirely so that at the beginning of the story my character believed that Hitler was a positive force because he gave Germans a sense of purpose. But as the story developed, he gradually became disenchanted and struggled to turn his back on these beliefs. Like many Germans, Christian had been misled by Hitler's propaganda and believed he would bring a lasting peace to Europe by conquering it-the same rationalization that Napoleon had employed by saying he wanted to unify Europe to bring peace. I thought the story should demonstrate that there are no inherently "bad" people in the world, but that they can easily be misled.

I'm uncomfortable with generalizations about anything because they are rarely accurate. At the time, we were just coming out of the McCarthy era, when many people's lives had been ruined because so many Americans accepted the myth that every Communist-or anyone who'd ever had a drink with one-was the devil incarnate, while overlooking the malignancy of Joe McCarthy, who was a greater menace than the people he targeted.

In The Young Lions The Young Lions I wanted to show that there were positive aspects to Germans, as there are to all people. Depending on your point of view, there are positive and negative elements in everyone. Hitler propagated the myth that the Germans were a superior race and the Jews inferior, but accepting the reverse of this is equally wrong; there are bad Jews and Germans, and decent Jews and Germans. I decided to play Christian Diestl as an ill.u.s.tration of one element of the human character-that is, how, because of their need to keep their myths alive, people will go to enormous lengths to ignore the negative aspects of their beliefs. I wanted to show that there were positive aspects to Germans, as there are to all people. Depending on your point of view, there are positive and negative elements in everyone. Hitler propagated the myth that the Germans were a superior race and the Jews inferior, but accepting the reverse of this is equally wrong; there are bad Jews and Germans, and decent Jews and Germans. I decided to play Christian Diestl as an ill.u.s.tration of one element of the human character-that is, how, because of their need to keep their myths alive, people will go to enormous lengths to ignore the negative aspects of their beliefs.

It happens all the time. I've watched parents tell television interviewers how proud they were of their son who died in Vietnam because he had been fighting to defend freedom, his country and American ideals, when I am sure they must have known in their hearts what a foolish war it was and that their son's life had been squandered for nothing. Memories and myths were all they had to cling to; they couldn't admit that their son was dead because of the senseless and destructive policies of Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara and the rest of the "Best and the Brightest."

In Christian Diestl I also wanted to show how people like Johnson and McNamara often have such a misguided sense of righteousness and idealism that they sincerely believe that what is inherently immoral or wrong is justifiable, will commit terrible acts to achieve their goals, and then find it easy to rationalize their actions. The perpetrators of the CIA program in Vietnam called Operation Phoenix were responsible for torturing and a.s.sa.s.sinating hundreds of people. I was once told by a CIA man who was closely a.s.sociated with the program that if someone's name was put into a computer identifying him as a member of the Vietcong, it was sent out to various a.s.sa.s.sination squads and the person was killed; yet a lot of these weren't really in the Vietcong, and their names were listed by mistake or because someone had a grudge against them. The CIA man said he had complained about this to a top official of the agency and was told, "Look, innocent people get killed in all wars. If we get one right out of four, it's okay. The rest just have to be sacrificed; this is a war." war." This leader was a devout Catholic who had become conditioned to do his job without any pangs of conscience, but how different was he from Heydrich or Himmler? This leader was a devout Catholic who had become conditioned to do his job without any pangs of conscience, but how different was he from Heydrich or Himmler?

People can be conditioned to do anything. If you commit murder in the name of your country, it is called patriotism. Before sending them to Vietnam, the army brainwashed young men into believing that they were on the side of G.o.d. The marines sent young people to Camp Pendleton, isolated them and put them in a kind of trance through indoctrination, conditioning and training. If they were told to do something, they did it, just like the marines in World War II on Saipan who, when told to fire phosphorus bombs into caves where women and children were hiding, did it without question, remorse or guilt. They used flamethrowers to burn people alive, just as our pilots exterminated Vietnamese civilians with napalm and antipersonnel bombs that riddled their bodies with tiny barbed arrows designed to tumble inside them violently, with enhanced killing power. The soldiers who ma.s.sacred the villagers at My Lai were no more inherently evil than the German soldiers who committed atrocities in World War II. They had simply been programmed into becoming murderous predators. At places like Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, our soldiers had been conditioned by much the same creed drummed into Christian Diestl: "My country right or wrong; when my country calls me, I will do my duty; I will do anything." anything."

37.

WES MICKLER GAVE ME one of the best lessons of an actor's life: never trust a horse, he said, because you'll never find a smart one. He used to lean back in his old spindle chair in Libertyville, give me a long, knowing look and tell me that all horses were dumb. He was right. I've never met a smart horse. I've also known a lot of dumb riders, including me. The worst place for an actor to be when he's making a western, I discovered, is on top of a charging horse with a bunch of other horses chasing you from behind. You can't see them and they can't see you. Because of the dust, visibility is about five feet, and the horses behind you will run over you if anything goes wrong. In one of the best lessons of an actor's life: never trust a horse, he said, because you'll never find a smart one. He used to lean back in his old spindle chair in Libertyville, give me a long, knowing look and tell me that all horses were dumb. He was right. I've never met a smart horse. I've also known a lot of dumb riders, including me. The worst place for an actor to be when he's making a western, I discovered, is on top of a charging horse with a bunch of other horses chasing you from behind. You can't see them and they can't see you. Because of the dust, visibility is about five feet, and the horses behind you will run over you if anything goes wrong. In Julius Caesar Julius Caesar I was leading an army across a field when the tongue of my shoe got caught in a stirrup. I leaned over and tried to pull it out, but couldn't reach it, so I thought I'd leave it until the take was over. It was dumb. After riding quite a distance, I looked back and saw the whole field of horses racing fast toward me, bucking and kicking and leaping; some of them were rolling on the ground. I tried to get my horse to run, but because my foot was stuck, it was impossible to convey this to the horse except in a loud, nervous voice. The horse wouldn't go any faster, I couldn't get out of the way of the ones behind me and I came within a hair of falling in front of the galloping herd, still secured neatly to my stirrup. I kept my head down while the horses stampeded past me and tried to figure out what had happened. Then I learned that I'd ridden over a hornets' nest and they had taken their revenge on the riders and horses behind me. I was leading an army across a field when the tongue of my shoe got caught in a stirrup. I leaned over and tried to pull it out, but couldn't reach it, so I thought I'd leave it until the take was over. It was dumb. After riding quite a distance, I looked back and saw the whole field of horses racing fast toward me, bucking and kicking and leaping; some of them were rolling on the ground. I tried to get my horse to run, but because my foot was stuck, it was impossible to convey this to the horse except in a loud, nervous voice. The horse wouldn't go any faster, I couldn't get out of the way of the ones behind me and I came within a hair of falling in front of the galloping herd, still secured neatly to my stirrup. I kept my head down while the horses stampeded past me and tried to figure out what had happened. Then I learned that I'd ridden over a hornets' nest and they had taken their revenge on the riders and horses behind me.

On Viva Zapata! Viva Zapata! I was in a scene in which four hors.e.m.e.n holding me prisoner galloped up a road and suddenly found themselves facing an army of troops loyal to me. The man holding my horse, a big stallion with a huge neck, was meant to let go of the reins after realizing that he was about to be slaughtered, and I was supposed to take off down the road and escape. But as the four men turned their horses to look at the troops, they blocked the path in front of me and my horse simply ran over them. At another point a bit player on that picture was supposed to ride up to me, jump off