SelfPortrait of an Angel and Monster
What little is known of his true nature comes from a handful of his friends and associates. By their testimony, he is intelligent, warm, charming, compassionate, humorous and unpretentious, as well as undisciplined, boorish, gloomy, supercilious, cruel and downright bent. About the only thing everybody can agree on is that he is a prankster. He delights in disguising his voice in his frequent phone calls to friends, assuming such identities as a job applicant, a woman, or a doctor reporting a comically grotesque diagnosis of some third party. He is also devastatingly adept at mimicry, something he does not only for laughs. "Actors have to observe," he says. "They have to know how much spit you've got in your mouth and where the weight of your elbows is. I could sit all day in the Optimo Cigar Store telephone booth and just watch the people pass by.", Dull Work. In the other moods, though, his thoughts drift offto one of his pet projects, perhaps, or to the South Seas. "Being in Tetiaroa gives me a sense of the one-to-one ratio of things," he says. "You have the coconut in the tree, the fish in the water, and if you want something to eat, you somehow have to get it." Brando still seems to need, as a friend once said, "to find something in life, something in himself, that is permanently true, and he needs to lay down his life for it." The pity is that Brando seems unwilling to accept that he has already found that something his art. To hear him tell it, he is as disenchanted with acting today as he was when he finished One-Eyed Jacks. "A movie star is nothing important," he says. "Freud. Gandhi. Marx. These people are important. But movie acting is just dull, boring, childish work.", Actor Edward Albert, who lived near Brando in Tetiaroa in 1970, says "I don't believe anybody really knows Brando, but I have the feeling that he believes somewhere along the line he missed something he could have done, something he could have been. It's as if somebody had put an angel inside of him, and he's aware of it, and it's more than he can contain.", Brando recently collected a final installment of the 1,500,000 he made for his work on The Godfather. He has hinted that if he can add enough to that with his income from Tango, he will quit acting for good. In fact, a few weeks ago he terminated his contract with his agent, Robin French, telling him, "I don't think I'm going to be needing you much any more.", Yet anybody who sees Brando's performance in Tango will find it hard to believe that this is a man who plans to retire, no matter what he may say. It is a performance that displays what Bertolucci calls Brando's capacity to "destroy himself and re-create himself continuously, in a kind of savage dialectic." After his Don Vito in The Godfather, Brando could have continued indefinitely in the security of similar roles. Instead, he has made new departures, taken new risks, and thus answered the imperative of his talent by regenerating it. In his willingness to confront publicly the fearful ambiguities of sex and death, in his ability to find new ways of exposing himself in flesh and spirit, he seems to be serving notice, in spite of himself, that he is not about to dwindle into being an institution.