Issue 9: Capote Vs. Brando

That time the infamous gadabout interviewed the method-loving actor without his knowledge...

I enjoyed season two of Feud, Capote vs. the Swans, despite my status as a card-carrying Ryan Murphy sceptic (in fairness, he really has nothing to do with this season beyond executive producer, which is the only way Murphy productions should go forward.) As I mentioned in my review for Pajiba, it was the right low-stakes rich people drama for this creative team to tackle. The social downfall of Capote following a scathing story that revealed all his friends’ dirty laundry made for entertaining television. It seemed like the ideal foundation to explore issues of gender and sexuality amid the stifling social elite of post-war America. How was it that an undeniable outsider like Capote – poor, Southern, gay – became the talk of the town in a world where status was everything? And how did his own standing as a gay man impact the way he moved around a world of women?

Naturally, the season got many people, myself included, thinking about Capote. I remember reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s as a teenager and not quite getting it because of how different it was to the Audrey Hepburn film, as well as watching Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote and wondering how true to life this story was (shockingly, I have yet to actually read In Cold Blood despite having a copy of it on my shelf for years.) Reading Answered Prayers for the first time post-Feud – the unfinished novel that brought about all this drama – I just felt kind of sad. Really, that’s my overwhelming sensation regarding Truman Capote: that inescapable sense of loneliness that seeps into even his bitchiest stories. Certainly, Feud portrays him as a man who never found his community and became trapped by the near-parodic raconteur image he’d created for himself as a shield from a judgmental homophobic world. Perhaps that was what made him such an effective infiltrator of this world.  Make yourself too much, too big to ignore, and doors cannot help but open.

The New Yorker. "The Duke in His Domain." November 2, 1957. Truman Capote.

(Read the profile here.)

It worked well enough to get him into the offices of the New Yorker, While attending Franklin School in the early 1940s, Capote managed to wriggle his way into working as a copy boy in the art department at the magazine. He was eventually fired after insulting the poet Robert Frost, which might be the most Capote story ever. Eventually, he made his way back to the magazine as a writer, penning stories and eventually a slew of longform articles. His most famous ones documented his travels through the Soviet Union a touring production of Porgy and Bess. These were eventually compiled into a book titled The Muses Are Heard and helped to define what would eventually become known as New Journalism - narrative nonfiction where the journalist is a major player in the story and has no qualms about sharing their unfiltered opinions on matters. Think Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese. It certainly changed the celebrity profile, leading the way to the likes of “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and this more iconoclastic approach to selling the rich and famous.

The New Yorker sent Capote to Japan to report on the production of the film Sayonara. While the general motive was to write about this America-Japan Hollywood culture clash, it was clear who the real target of Capote’s gaze was: Marlon Brando. In 1957, Brando was one of the biggest stars on the planet. He'd helped to usher in a whole new style of acting, defined by the methods of teachers like Stella Adler, won his Oscar for On the Waterfront, and was considered a genuine box office star. Audiences were obsessed with this star who rejected the studio system’s confines and so thoroughly embodied the fiery rebellion of the time. He didn’t give a ton of interviews and didn’t allow the studio to use him as a sock puppet for fan magazine pieces. Also, he was at the peak of being hot as f*ck. Like, just the hottest man you've ever seen.

(I mean, look at him.)

He was set to star in Sayonara, a drama about an American Air Force pilot who falls in love with a Japanese woman during the Korean War. It was contemporary, romantic, and part of a minor trend of movies about the US's post-WW2 relationship with East Asia. There was a deliberate push for tolerance towards Asians, especially following that whole internment camps mess. Remember that, America? Modern reviews of the movie see it as earnest but mostly dull and still extremely white in its perspective. It's frequently criticized for portraying Asian women as meek and subservient. Also, they put Ricardo Montalbán in yellowface.

Brando apparently wanted to make the film because of its anti-racist themes (although one wonders how that squares with his previous film, The Teahouse of the August Moon, wherein he played a Japanese man in full-blown yellowface and offensive accent.) Still, at least his heart seemed to be in a better place than Capote, who starts off his piece with just straight-up racism. I won’t quote much of it here, because ew, but hoo boy is it tough to read Capote describe Japanese women as endless gigglers who walk with "tiny, pigeon-toed skating steps" and can't pronounce the letter R. Don't worry, he fully demonstrates their speech for the reader. I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to be a Truman Capote fan without spending half your time going, “Jesus dude, what are you doing?”

Sayonara director Joshua Logan wanted Capote to stay as far away from his star as possible. When he spotted Capote checking into the same hotel as Brando (alongside Cecil Beaton, because of course), he panicked and tried to have Capote banned from the set. Capote taunted him by saying, "I'm not going to write anything bad. I'd just like to talk to Marlon for a few moments about the state of the world. You know how funny he can get when he starts pontificating." Logan warned Brando about the writer, but Brando didn’t listen. He seldom did to others, friend or foe, unless he truly wanted to.

Capote managed to get to Brando’s hotel room, where he was trying to write a script with the florid name A Burst of Vermillion. Brando had surrounded himself with friends and family who are nicknamed "Brando's gang" by the Sayonara production team, all of whom are being financially covered by Warner Bros. So mighty is Brando's star power at this moment in time that he can get whatever he wants (this period in his career did not last long.)

This wasn’t supposed to be an interview. Capote himself said later that interviewing Brando hadn’t ever occurred to him, a lie believed by literally nobody. Capote had a good memory and an even better eye for a narrative, so a few hours of drinking and chatting with a Grade-A movie star was like catnip to him. This is probably why the piece feels so casual, so unrehearsed and uncontrolled. The idea of an interview without a publicist on standby, even now, is seldom heard of. For a figure like Brando, who was very political and had no qualms about dropping his verbal filter, you can practically hear Warner Bros. freaking out over the prospect of Capote being in his bedroom.

(It’s amazing how Philip Seymour Hoffman - so tall and sturdy and in control - is SO miscast as Capote but is also SO perfect for the role.)

And Brando loved to talk. As Capote notes in this piece, "Hollywood columnists studded their copy with hostile comments concerning his attitude toward the film business, which he himself summed up soon after he entered it by saying, “The only reason I’m here is that I don’t yet have the moral courage to turn down the money.” He was politically active at a time when it was not necessarily expected of actors (although not uncommon, as the Hollywood blacklist and those who marched for civil rights can attest to.) He talked about preferring film to the stage, but also wanted to move beyond what Hollywood wanted of him, including a chance to write and direct. There was an unpredictability to Brando, both on and off the screen, which made him exciting to watch but less so to control. The end of the old-school studio system was still about seven or eight years away, but Brando’s emergence as “a different kind of star” certainly signalled the beginning of its decline.

So, of course Capote wanted to interview him! He just didn’t exactly let Brando know that it was an interview. Can you imagine if a journalist, even a writer as famous as Capote at his prime, tried to pull that off today with a star of Brando’s level? Then again, that might be the only way to get some of these people to get brutally honest, such as when Brando says he’s "nearly broke" after spending "two hundred thousand dollars of my own money trying to get some writer to come up with a decent script" for a project. Brando also gets incredibly candid talking about his mother, who died in 1954 and whose approval he sought dearly. He says that "She broke apart like a piece of porcelain", which is a gut-wrenching description. You can see why that was the one section of the piece Brando felt most upset by its inclusion.

The whole vibe of the piece is fascinating because the major takeaway is of a very privileged and famous guy who just absolutely hates the phoniness he has found himself surrounded by. At one point, he recalls seeing a monk and being approached by him for an autograph, an experience that seems to have made him all existential ("Now, what would a monk want with my autograph? A picture of me?”) His weariness is hammered home by the presence of Joshua Logan, who fawns over Brando and everything he does on-set, regardless of how good it is. Capote may seem occasionally snarky and irritated by Brando but you get the sense it’s a better option for the actor than the endless sycophancy. "Logan’s belief in whatever project he is engaged in approaches euphoric faith" is viewed by Capote as a shield for Brando, a way to protect him from that self-doubt he expresses to his unexpected interviewer. Granted, it is Capote telling us all of this so, you know, pinch of salt and all that.

So, who is Marlon Brando, or at least Brando through Capote’s eyes? As I said above, Capote’s trademark withering one-liners find a good match with his choice of unwitting subject. While he loved to socialize with the crème de la crème, he remained a staunch outsider to this glitzy world, neither rich nor straight enough to be entirely at home. Brando was no silver spoon kid. He was the son of a travelling salesman and stage actress who never made it big. He wasn't a great student and spent time at a military school until he dropped out. And he worked hard to be good at his craft, studying with Adler (he claimed to hate Lee Strasberg's method) and eager to find a naturalistic approach to both stage and screen performance.

(Come ON!)

Capote is certainly appreciative of his talent. Or, at least he is when Brando seems to give a damn. As mentioned earlier, Brando had no issue with letting people know when something was made for the passion of it and when it was purely for profit. Brando declares that he’s doing Sayonara for the cash, after script changes took the story away from its original hook. It is, admittedly, easy to ding this kind of celebrity, the one who seems ungrateful for the incredible opportunities given to them. Often, Brando seems irritable, self-aggrandizing, even manipulative. But then he comes across as charming, self-deprecating, and a little troubled. "You can say important things to a lot of people. About discrimination and hatred and prejudice. I want to make pictures that explore the themes current in the world today," he says to Capote. It’s admirable, of course, but who hasn’t rolled their eyes at the rich dude who talks about wanting to make Important Art and the nobility of their cause?

Capote did hold his punch a few times. Brando casually mentioned sleeping with men and Capote kindly kept that out of the piece, perhaps as a moment of solidarity for two queer men living under homophobic laws. In Gerald Clarke's Capote: A Biography, Capote said of the interview, "I asked Marlon, and he admitted it. He said he went to bed with lots of other men, too, but that he didn't consider himself a homosexual. He said they were all so attracted to him. 'I just thought that I was doing them a favor,' he said." How generous of him. Brando’s sexuality continues to be a topic of fascination for obvious reasons. Recently, Billy Dee Williams wrote in his memoir that Brando had propositioned him. Richard Pryor’s widow said he and Brando got it on. Later, Capote would claim that he had had an affair with Brando, although the story he tells in this piece of first meeting Brando at a rehearsal for A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway was stolen from the actor Sandy Campbell.

"A phrase that often occurs in Brando’s conversation, “I only mean forty per cent of what I say,” is probably applicable here," says Capote. Brando does seem like the progenitor of Robert Pattinson in terms of trolling but without the manic strain that made RPattz so hysterical. Plus Pattinson does that when he's bored of the typical promo cycle nonsense. Brando doesn't know he's being interviewed here. This is just him, or at least him as Capote wants us to see. Every profile you read is a narrative crafted by someone other than the subject (or at least not solely by them.) Publicists, managers, family, friends, the writer, editors, and so on: the story everyone wants to tell is seldom as riveting or cohesive as the ones we want in print. Capote says everything in this profile is from memory but how much actually happened? Did he insert some drama, as he loved to do (and as infamously destroyed many of his friendships)? He labelled In Cold Blood a "non-fiction novel" partly to get out of having to justify the questionable veracity of his facts and recollections of events that he never witnessed. Having Brando lay out all of his emotional issues and dissonance with his own industry is certainly riveting, but how much of it can you trust?

Brando saw the New Yorker profile and said that Capote had tricked him into an interview. I can understand why he would balk at what he was “quoted” as saying, and not just from a professional point of view (Sayonara did good business and landed him another Oscar nomination, even with his trash-talk. He didn’t win but Miyoshi Umeki did, becoming the first Asian actress to ever take home the award.) Brando would later direct and star in the Western One-Eyed Jacks, but his career in the '60s was a litter of fascinating failures, huge flops, and stuff that didn't befit his status as "the greatest actor of his generation." He had the comeback of the era in 1972 thanks to the one-two punch of The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, the former of which won him his second Oscar, but after that, things get weird. Exceptions like Apocalypse Now and A Dry White Season aside, Brando evolved into a walking punchline, the former sex symbol who got fat and started phoning it in for paycheques (if you've never seen him in The Island of Dr. Moreau, it is both hilarious and kind of tragic.) His personal life became headline news for decades, thanks to many divorces, children, and deaths. As someone who grew up mostly knowing Brando as that joke, I was flabbergasted when I saw him in A Streetcar Named Desire for the first time as a teen. It just didn’t seem like the same person to my adolescent brain. How could it be?

There's a moment in the New Yorker profile that really sticks with me, a quote from Brando that, even if it's embellished, feels authentic in describing what it's actually like to be famous. It's a question most celebrities struggle to answer because how do you truly encapsulate something as life-changing and surreal as fame? For Brando, "Too much success can ruin you as surely as too much failure" and the bind becomes impossible to escape. "There’s an example of what can happen when a person never receives any recognition. You stop relating; it puts you outside. But I guess success does that, too [...] when I was in ‘Streetcar,’ and it had been running a couple of months, one night—dimly, dimly—I began to hear this roar. It was like I’d been asleep, and I woke up here sitting on a pile of candy."

One minute, you’re “normal” then the next you’re not, and with it comes the same problems, just bigger and scarier. It’s no wonder Brando found himself admitting he was too cowardly to turn down the money for projects he disliked. He never stopped being hugely famous, even when the roles dried up and people stopped adoring him. Brando was a game-changing talent but he was also horribly cruel to his romantic partners, including Rita Moreno, who dealt with a botched abortion while dating him, only for him to run off with someone else. He was an ardent political activist who campaigned vigorously for civil rights but also went on some weird anti-Semitic rants on Larry King Live. He lived with immense tragedy and perpetuated a lot of it, particularly towards his wives and girlfriends.

Film critic David Thomson once described him as "a spoiled kid" who all but terrorized those he worked with. Capote ends his piece on a similar metaphor, describing a giant ad he sees for Brando and his yellowface movie where he is posed "in a squatting position, a serene smile on a face that glistened in the rain and the light of a street lamp. A deity, yes; but, more than that, really, just a young man sitting on a pile of candy."

Thanks so much for reading the latest issue of the Gossip Reading Club. You can find my work littered across the internet. Over on Pajiba, I talked about pop culture’s fear of female body hair, why every celebrity seems to be doing mobile game ads now, and offered YET ANOTHER REMINDER that you should stop giving J.K. Rowling your money. For Certified Forgotten, I wrote about the wobbly film version of Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned.

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