THE ODDFATHER

Jod Kaftan

April 25, 2002 - Rolling Stone

At seventy-eight, Marlon Brando is hard up, pissed off and stranger than ever. His latest project: a series of self-produced acting lessons - co-starring the likes of Leonardo Dicaprio, Sean Penn and Michael Jackson - that he hopes to sell on video.

Career changes are never easy, especially when you're in your late seventies and especially when you're Marlon Brando. These are lean times, and like any dogged old kingpin with sprawling estates to maintain and kids to support, Brando is not above making a buck off his own legend. Late last fall, he shot a fifteen-day acting workshop called Lying for a Living. Brando is tackling the project with his usual gusto. He financed it himself, wheeled in friends such as Sean Penn and Leo DiCaprio for cameos and, in an effort to show the kinds of risks an actor should be comfortable taking, he even dressed up as a woman.

Today is supposed to be Brando's penultimate class, and as the project's official hagiographer I have been invited to attend.

But Brando cancels at the last minute. He has a bad cough. He is sick, but not too sick to make the short walk from his bedroom to his office to view the class footage for the first time, curious to see the fruits of his labor.

I await Brando with the editor of the tapes. The office is located in the gatehouse of his Beverly Hills compound, shrouded in a bamboo thicket off the driveway. The phone beeps. There's a mumble. A raspy, congested voice announces, "Coming down." Soon I hear the distant approach of flapping sandals, a Rottweiler's baritone bark and then the rustle of bamboo. I'm sitting on a couch with my legs crossed, fighting the urge to look over my shoulder; I know I shouldn't, since the actor once told me that he hates being stared at (especially by men).

Marlon Brando steps through the sliding glass door in a tropical terry-cloth robe, a faded black T-shirt and boyish white briefs. Without a word he drops himself on the couch next to me, coughs, stretches out his bare, pallid legs and pans the room as if to root out anything unfamiliar. I can feel his eyes stop at me.

The film editor asks Brando if he's ready to view the tapes. "What do you think?" snaps Brando.

"Of course," the editor replies.

"Don't 'of course' me," Brando says sternly under his breath. The tapes roll. There is Brando's still-handsome seventy-eight-year-old profile, in close-up. I can't keep my eyes from drifting from the screen to the man sitting on my right. He is looking serious, almost pissed off. "Can you make it louder?" he asks.

I look at him again, nervous that he hasn't yet acknowledged my presence. While still watching the tape, he sticks out his arm and extends a pinkie. It is a special Brando handshake. I respond, and our pinkies entwine. The first time he offered this handshake, I thought he was afraid I had germs. But soon I learned it was a sign of affection. I existed.

I first met Marlon Brando in 1983, when I was thirteen. I had dated his daughter Rebecca for about half an hour, but we'd stayed friends and spent a lot of time together watching basic cable, eating chili burgers and making the occasional trip to Disneyland.

One day we were sitting in the den in front of MTV when she said, "Turn it down. I think my dad's coming."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"I just do."

I noticed that the tropical fish were no longer swimming but idling. There was the slow, heavy slap of bare feet on tile in the hallway. I scooted over on the sofa. A bear of a man lumbered in, wearing only a Japanese robe. He plunked himself down between us. I stared. I couldn't help it. It was Marlon fucking Brando. After a few moments of listening to him rip into MTV -- he was imagining the shallow internal monologues of people such as Duran Duran's Simon Le Bon and Dexy's Midnight Runners -- he turned to me and said, "You know, you have a very wide antenna, a large antenna. Most people hide their antennas, but yours is very active, very open."

What could I say but "thanks"? Only, he wasn't through: "I'm not really sure, but my gut feeling is that you're a homosexual. Am I right?"

He wasn't, but his massive frame and intimidating cadence caused me to fearfully answer, "Yes." Yanking a pen from his pocket, Brando asked me to draw him a picture on a linen napkin. I complied. He took the drawing, looked at it for two minutes and then muttered, "Paul Klee, do you know him?"

"Yes," I replied. He nodded meaningfully and left the room without another word. The second time I met him, almost ten years later, was also in the den. I was playing video games with his then-twenty-nine-year-old son, Teihotu, when the phone let out an anxious beep. "Mr. Brando wants to see you in the living room."

I looked to Teihotu. "Don't look at me, dude," he said. "He's asking for you." The living room was spare and elegant. On the mantle, a bust of a golden Buddha glowed in the afternoon light. A huge window framed the San Fernando Valley. Brando was sitting on the couch, clad in the same robe. A giant Rottweiler was curled at his feet.

"Sit down," he said, patting the empty cushion on the couch. "What do you want to do for a living?" he asked.

"I was thinking psychology," I replied.

"That's a good gig," he said. He snatched a walnut from a bowl on the table and fondled it thoughtfully for a few minutes, studying the grooves in the shell. Finally he spoke. "I'm prepared to offer you employment here at my home. I thought of you because you don't seem to be overly neurotic."

"Thanks," I said.

"Now, the job could involve things like building a doghouse for my mastiff, Tim. Or I might just walk up to you and ask you to take apart a radio and put it back together again. The job will have various benefits, like trips to my house in Tahiti. I might ask you to manage surveillance on the island. I may ask you to run down to Casa Vega and pick up a dozen tacos. Or I could ask you to plant some tulips near my teahouse."

Things went south after a month, when Brando's Argentinian houseman cornered me with a menacing, pointed finger and announced, "Marlon say you work for me now."

Though I had been hired simply to be the house Kato Kaelin -- Brando had me labeling Jackie Mason tapes in his video library -- I was soon asked to assume different kinds of duties. Brando asked me to build a deck on his Japanese pond, and when I expressed dismay he referred me to the Time-Life series on home improvement. ("Don't worry, they're illustrated.") I was fired when I refused to cut down all the sick forty-foot-tall bamboo trees. They were crawling with bugs, and, let's face it, I was just a dandy. In February 2000, nearly a decade later, though I had seen him intermittently through the years, he called to ask whether I'd be interested in editing a magazine on acting; the idea was that Brando would conduct all the interviews with actors himself. I declined, but late last year he called again to ask whether I'd be interested in writing an article about his latest acting project, Lying for a Living. I would have said no again, but the next day I was laid off from my job in New York, and the prospect became interesting.

A couple of days later, I arrive in L.A. for my first day of interviews, down a five-dollar smoothie at Jamba Juice and swerve up Mulholland Drive to Brando's hilltop estate. After passing two high-voltage gates, I hear the Glenn Miller Band swooning from a jacaranda tree. Jazz grooves all day long from tiny speakers in the trees that surround his modest Japanese-style home -- a tip he picked up from his friend Michael Jackson, who has installed speakers throughout his Neverland Valley Ranch. After gingerly stepping past two salivating attack dogs, I find an empty seat in the living room and wait for Brando. Brando bought this house, built by Howard Hughes, in the late Fifties. He also owns a private island, Tetiaroa, near Tahiti. But the island, which he's reportedly trying to sell, was hit by two hurricanes in the early Eighties that caused millions of dollars in damages. Here his days seem to consist of an occasional swim, reading Scientific American and sleep. For a while, he could often be found in online chat rooms; once, five years ago, he instant-messaged me, jokingly pretending to be my sister, who has worked for him on and off over the years. As a boss, he can be very generous; a year and a half ago, our mother suffered a heart attack and was taken to a hospital that wouldn't admit her because she had no insurance. Brando drove over in his Lexus and got the man in charge on the phone right away. The next day, she had a suite with a view and a plant.

When in L.A., Brando almost always has his meals delivered. Today he's eating Greek, and he has ordered enough for a wedding. I wait for the tropical fish to signal his entrance, and soon enough he ambles in, dressed as if he just left Mount Olympus.

It is the last day of taping for Lying for a Living, but Brando had called Harry Dean Stanton at 3 a.m. the night before to ask whether Stanton could stand in for him. Brando had a bad cough, and didn't seem to think this would be a problem. He later admitted to me that he had no idea what he was going to do or say for all fifteen classes other than slowly transforming himself into a bosomy Englishwoman. Aside from the cough, Brando's health appears to be sound. His diet is simple, not lavish. And it does seem to be shaped by some informed medical advice. I once saw him dutifully eating a cantaloupe for breakfast and wishing he could have something with a little more "jazz."

Finally he ambles in, and before I have a chance to greet him or even ask about his project, he rolls into a rant about the media, provoked by a copy of the Los Angeles Times I am carrying. As he attacks a steaming plate of moussaka, he says, pointing to my paper, that he boycotts television and newspapers because "I don't want that shit floating around in my neurons. And besides, look around you. It's a beautiful day out. That crap will ruin it."

Though requests pour in every day, Brando has not given a major interview since 1996, when he went on Larry King Live and lauded the Jews for their significant contributions to American culture but then noted that Hollywood "is owned by Jews, and they should have a greater sensitivity about the issue of people who are suffering."

I ask him why he's so phobic about interviews.

"Because once I do one, they all come," he says with a sigh. "It's like sticking your toe in the Amazon thinking that it won't attract piranhas. I'd rather they just portray me as a fat slob and a hoot, and just leave it at that."

When I get up to help his female staff clear the table, he tells me to sit down. "I'm old-fashioned," he says. "I bring home the meat, and they make the meat." Everything Brando says is deadpan. You're never sure whether to laugh or nod academically. Around him, I invent some combination of both. He continues, "Women have had the same brain for the last 15 million years. They're built with a certain disposition." I think of the time I brought my Brazilian girlfriend by for an introduction. He sprang from his chair, ran his hand down the length of her ballerina's back and said, "Well, aren't you the sweetest thing?" Then, out of earshot, he whispered to me, "Nice rack. Obviously you like dark meat. She's very nice, but she doesn't seem like the kind of girl you could read Schopenhauer to."

Our meal over, we get down to business. I ask Brando why he decided to call his project Lying for a Living. He insists the title is more than just mere provocation; Brando says that lying is a "social lubricant" we cannot live without.

"I've been lying all my life," he tells me. "Everybody does."

I ask him whether he thinks he's a good liar.

"Oh, Jesus," he says. "I'm fabulous at it."

If Brando sees acting as a form of lying, he considers show business a form of torture: "I hate this shit," he told me as he was shooting his most recent film, The Score. Brando received modestly good reviews in The Score, but his performance was overshadowed by much-publicized histrionics with director Frank Oz. They ranged from calling Oz "Miss Piggy" to demanding that he receive direction only through co-star Robert De Niro. In view of his tumultuous history, it's no surprise to hear Brando encourage students to outsmart directors by allowing them to feel brilliant while discreetly trying to advance their own creative agendas.

At this stage in his life -- and with his track record of acting up on the set - Brando himself doesn't have many roles to choose from. Still, he needs to earn a living: He maintains a separate household for Cristina Ru'z (his Guatemalan ex-maid) and their three kids, and he's still on the hook for the island in Tahiti. He gets by with a little help from his friends. Brando seems to genuinely like Michael Jackson. They have been friends since the mid-1980s, and Brando's son Miko is actually on Jackson's payroll; he "handles" things, Miko once told me. It was Miko who put out Jackson's hair when it caught fire, during the filming of a Pepsi commercial in January 1984.

Still, when he was asked to introduce Jackson at the pop star's thirtieth-anniversary tribute in September, Brando didn't do it for free. It was on this night that Brando took to the stage and launched into a fairly mystifying speech about tortured children: "That's what this evening is about." He looked at his watch and continued. "I took one whole minute because I wanted to realize that in that minute, there were hundreds if not thousands of children who were hacked to death with a machete." Boos came soon afterward, but so did a check from Jackson, who had flown Brando and three of his guests to New York.

When Brando asked me in his hotel room after the tribute what I thought of Jackson, I said (without knowing they were friends), "I think he's talented, but so what? He's just doing an impression of himself from 1983." Brando replied diplomatically, "Well, he does work hard." He also joked about how easy it would be to avoid a second-night encore by heating up a thermometer.

When he was considering doing Lying for a Living, Brando was often seen walking around the house with a -- in this house, there's seemingly always one within reach - punching numbers compulsively and muttering about "billions." His plan was to film all the classes and sell the tapes through his Web site, the currently dark marlonbrando.com. Brando says he is bankrolling the project himself.

Why he needs money can only be conjectured. He may still be paying off monumental legal bills that accrued after his son Christian in 1990 killed a man named Dag Drollet, the boyfriend of Marlon's daughter Cheyenne. But profits aside, it's also true that Brando actually enjoys teaching. For the first time in years, there's a real possibility that he could earn money from something he doesn't despise. "I was really inspired," he tells me, "to the extent that the actors really made a contribution. [Actors] can get you out of a bad emotional rut. They can give you perspective and cheer you up." Though Brando has disparaged show business for years, calling it "dumb," he reserves praise for some films: He says he's fond of Akira Kurosawa and really admired Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes. He also highly recommends the Sidney Lumet film Q & A, with Nick Nolte and Armand Assante. "Nick Nolte scared the shit out of me," Brando says in the tapes.

On the third day of class, Brando makes good on his promise to incarnate himself as an Englishwoman. He saunters onto the soundstage wearing lipstick, blush, Chinese silk pajamas and a cobalt-blue scarf knotted coquettishly around his neck. A sultry makeup girl kneels at his feet applying fire-red nail polish to his hands while two students labor through an improv. The tapes are, to say the least, star-studded, with Brando's guest list including the likes of Sean Penn, Jon Voight, Leonardo DiCaprio, Nick Nolte, Edward James Olmos, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and even Michael Jackson. The project's seven cameras capture the stars' awestruck faces as they hang on Brando's every word. They have good reason: Brando hardly ever discusses his craft, and for the first time in years he speaks of acting as if it matters. On his overstuffed armchair throne, he sits at the head of the class, his bare feet dangling languidly off an ottoman, and says some interesting things, such as, "Your whole face is a stage" and "Let the drama find you." Brando does a totally convincing improv on a prop telephone, and when some of the other actors try it, including Penn, DiCaprio and Voight, Brando's boundless talent seems obvious.

The tapes yield some great anecdotes. "I had never played an Italian," Brando says, "and I was supposed to play an Italian in this movie called The, uh, Godfather."

For a moment it seems he has forgotten the name of the film. "And they didn't want me for the part. Francis Coppola wanted me for that part, so I thought, 'Well, if you do a really wonderful picture, you're good for about five flops in a row.' I needed the part at that time. And, uh, I don't know who it was, someone over there at Paramount wanted a screen test. I said forget it. But I wasn't sure that I could play that part, either. I put some cotton there [points to his lip and begins to slip into Don Corleone] and, uh, I didn't know what to say. I didn't know any Italians." He slips out of character and mentions producer Dino De Laurentiis. "He took a shot in the throat and he [slips into Corleone again] spoke like that. But, uh, I was a little scared of big Italian gestures." (Brando later notes as an aside that he was paid only $50,000 for his work on The Godfather.)

The purpose of sharing this anecdote is to encourage the students "to make asses" of themselves: "If you're not willing to fall on your face -- if you're not willing to do something that's really stupid, embarrassing -- then you're not going to do it."

Method actors like to imagine their character's motives when they're getting revved up for a role. Brando seems to borrow heavily from his studies with the legendary acting teacher Stella Adler by encouraging his students to "build a life" for their characters and to always think about everything their does -- even down to "whether you like sex and in what way you like it."

Many of the tapes reveal a Brando who is extremely sensitive and supportive of his students. His trademark comment after most scenes is "Good. Damn good."

Philippe Petit, who tightroped between the World Trade Center towers in 1974, gave up a job and came to L.A. with no money just to attend the classes. "I could talk for hours about the richness of Marlon and his workshop," Petit told me. "At some point he said, 'Give me the respect of stillness,' because people were crouching their heads and moving their feet too much. He's an incredibly talented, profound man, and a great teacher."

I ask Brando if he ever thought of himself as a teacher.

"No," he says, going on to express the frustrations all teachers have. "I've had these students out there who don't hear what I'm saying, and I repeat it, repeat it and repeat it, and they'll come up and make the same fucking mistakes, because they're in need of vocabulary. You can't absorb anything unless you're on the edge of perception."

I suggest that not all student actors are good at improv.

"My opinion would be, if you're not good at improv you're not an actor," he says. "There's a speech from Hamlet that applies to all artists, but it certainly applies to actors: 'To hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature.' To be natural."

Suddenly he recites the entire soliloquy -- Act III, Scene 2 -- from memory: " 'Let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature.' And it goes on," Brando adds. "It says it all."

Brando's eccentricities are prominently displayed on the uncut tapes. "I want to sing the actor's national anthem: 'Me, me, me, me, me, me [thirty "me's," in fact], you,' " he suddenly says on day two. Another time, he asks a very beautiful female student, a competitive runner and model despite having lost her legs, to come to the front of the class and tell her story of healing and accomplishment. The surreal high point of her story comes when she says she realized that she could run faster if she fashioned her prosthetic limbs after those of a cheetah. Perhaps it wouldn't seem so weird if Brando weren't sitting behind her on his throne looking totally poker-faced, like the
facilitator at an AA meeting. (The scene is weirder still since the testimonial seems so random and unrelated.) After she tells her story and is returning to her chair, Brando chimes in, "And she looks pretty good going away." The room erupts with laughter.

Occasionally the tapes reveal a codger's unwitting political incorrectness -- ironic for a man once known as a staunch activist for Native Americans and other causes. Brando says to me that he wanted to stock the class with plenty of non-actors for a reason: His tapes weren't just about acting, they were about life. Students from a local acting workshop populated the classes; others admitted they were there through connections. Aside from the stars, most of the students look to be everyday people, give or take a few sideburned L.A. types. Brando found one, Jim, rummaging through the trash in front of the studio as his limo pulled into the parking lot. Brando proudly introduces Jim on the first day of class; "a special surprise," he calls it. The camera swivels to Jim, a bearded black man looking cleaned up and nervous. "Jim was outside here monkeying with trash containers. What do you do, Jim?"

"Recycling," he says.

Brando admits to me that he was short of actors that day. "Jim was actually one of the most interesting men in the group," Petit remembers. "I thought it was beautiful to invite this man in."

Another bizarre demonstration comes on day fourteen, when Brando imports two dwarfs and a giant Samoan (actually one of Michael Jackson's bodyguards) for an improv. At one point the dwarfs start punching each other, and the Samoan separates them like two unleashed puppies. At the end of the scene, Brando lavishly praises the performance: "When something's good, it hits you. I get chicken skin when something's really right."

Then he addresses the class. "What I was pleased with was that you people never thought of these people as being small. They disallowed you to think in terms of cliches."

About half the class is black, which is relevant only because of what happens on day four, when Brando declares as the improv du jour that all the white students will act black and all the black students will act white. As deliberately provocative as that sounds, the results are actually interesting: The white men portray black men as angry, and the black men portray whites as petty and wimpy.

Though Brando calls in sick the day I arrive, there is one final class planned at Jackson's Neverland Valley Ranch, where the guest list is to include Elizabeth Taylor, Drew Barrymore and Jackson himself. Brando told me he also called Bill Clinton to invite him to the Neverland master class; I guess Brando can get anyone on the phone.

These days, the phone seems to be his principal form of expression, his primary instrument of intimacy and control. He often uses it to wake up friends such as Penn or Stanton in the middle of the night. Around his house, the phone takes on Orwellian overtones, because with the intercom feature Brando can listen in on any conversation in any room -- and often does. During my visit, I ask if I can call New York from his office, but I'm warned by his staff that "someone" may listen in. I call anyway. In the middle of my conversation, I faintly detect a receiver fumbling in someone's hands and the sound of breathing. I say, "Hello?" More breathing. Hearing what sounds like the crunch of a potato chip, I end the call.

Tony Kaye, a successful British commercial director, does not fit the profile of Brando's male friends. Perhaps Brando sees in Kaye a fellow provocateur, since he is a big fan of Kaye's film American History X. "It made me drawn to him instantly," Brando says in class. So Brando hired Kaye as the project's director. And he apparently acted in good faith. In one class, he says he "looked forward to a very long and involved course of action" with Kaye.

It lasted three days.

On the first day of class, Kaye shows up as Osama bin Laden, which, he reportedly explained to a friend, was meant as "a performance-art piece" meant to teach people "not to be frightened of terrorism." (Jon Voight says he found no humor or purpose in the outfit, confessing on tape that it makes him uncomfortable.)

The third day of shooting is more Jerry Springer than Stanislavsky. Two black women volunteer for a challenging but ultimately melodramatic improv. But Kaye will have none of it: While one of the student actors is crying in the scene, Kaye twists his handheld camera to within an inch of her face. The actress holds her ground as best she can until Kaye interrupts with, "Cut. Terrible. Boring."

Brando pounces: "Let me tell you, what's boring is sticking that camera four inches from their nose and walking around like a police dog."

Kaye stokes the fire when he turns to the audience and says, "It was boring. Who was bored with that shit?" One student in the skit wonders aloud whether Kaye should be ejected and finally says to him, "Do I gotta be a goddamn ghetto bunny for you to like this?"

The circus goes on for a good twenty minutes. Why Brando lets it continue for so long is uncertain. Eventually he cuts in, asking whether his audience feels Kaye's intrusion is "chaotic and interruptive and inappropriate." The camera pans the room. Strikingly, the class is half working-class black, half white L.A. demimonde, and it happens that most of the white people are friends of Kaye's. One of them, a Perry Farrell look-alike, sticks up for Kaye, saying that by telling the actors they are boring, Kaye is "getting it to an organic place."

Suddenly Brando says, "Can I ask how you happen to be here?"

"I was invited by Tony," the young man responds.

"Well, I disinvite you." Kaye -- and his entourage -- follow the man out the door in a show of thespian solidarity. Later, at a restaurant where the group has repaired for lunch in self-imposed exile, Kaye says, "Marlon Brando should be with the Taliban. I think he'd be very comfortable in that world, with a hundred wives, 14,000 children, no music, and no one's allowed to speak."

Two weeks later, we are watching the tapes in Brando's office. "I look like Grandma Moses," jokes Brando. "Can you crop it? Jesus, I look pregnant."

The next thing I know, Brando's hand is groping my knee. It's not a sexual advance but a curious one, as if he were examining a Rottweiler for purchase. "You've got big, strong legs," he says.

The footage continues, and I feel his hand move on to my humble bicep. "You're solid, man." At that point, the camera shows DiCaprio improvising on a phone: "I don't even want to get into the whole sexual thing," he's saying.

"He looks like a girl," says Brando, in a grouchy mood. After the class, Brando tells me how DiCaprio called to invite him out to dinner. "Let me be frank: I don't do dinner," Brando remembers telling him. He then said to the star, "Maybe you think you're interesting, but that's hardly the point."

Brando turns his attention back to the footage. "Who wants to see a fat eighty-year-old man pontificate?"

I tell him that with some solid editing I think the tapes will sell. He's unfazed. A baby in the office begins to cry, and Brando shifts into an inspirational mood. He describes an invention he thought of for mothers that would prevent babies from throwing up on them - too complicated to describe here, but it seems remotely viable. I tell him of my own idea for "a phone condom," basically a latex cover for pay phones. His eyes suddenly grow wide and adolescent. He points to me and says, "Now that's a great idea! Brilliant. That's something that has a truly practical purpose. We could sell it on my Web site and go fifty-fifty. What d'ya say?" I'm not sure whether he's serious, but then I realize he is.

"Sure, why not?" I say.

My eyes browse the eclectic assortment of titles in the bookcase – from The Poems of Emily Dickinson to How to Raise a Rottweiler. On the middle shelf sits a video collection, unwrapped and dusty, from financial guru Suze Orman: The Power to Attract Money.

Once Brando is preoccupied with his tapes, I decide it is a good time to steal away and finally complete my call to New York. When I hang up, the phone beeps from the other room and Brando's voice comes over the intercom: "It's Marlon." He coughs hard. I asked him earlier whether I could attend his final class at Neverland. He is calling to tell me I can't go, even though he'd already said I could. There's no use asking him why, but I can't help it.

"No," he replies curtly. The conversation wanders to the subject of acting. I suggest that ego is what drives many actors to plod on in the face of the odds. "Acting is the dumbest profession in the world," Brando replies. "Fact: One percent of actors make a living. And it is not constant. They make a living for a given amount of time."

"Then why do it?" I ask.

"Uh, I don't know. Why do you want to be a writer?" He puts on a stodgy, bureaucratic voice: " 'Uh, Jod, we are representatives for the Pulitzer board, and we'd like to present you with this award for your work.' You wouldn't say, 'Well, get the fuck outta here.'"

Then, stupidly, I challenge him, pointing out that he himself once famously walked away from an award: In 1973, Brando sent an Apache woman named Sacheen Littlefeather -- a.k.a. actress Maria Cruz, a former Miss American Vampire -- to the Oscars, to turn down Brando's Best Actor statuette for The Godfather. There is an uncomfortable silence. I can't take it.

"Well, I think if I won I'd at least get a date," I say, and he laughs. Brando's laugh is contagious. It's bronchial and mulelike, and it slowly gathers momentum. "That's why we do anything," I add, projecting my neurosis.

"No, it isn't. That's why you do everything. How old are you now?"

"I'm thirty-two."

"OK. When you're sixty-two, you're not gonna care."

I ask what it is he wants me to write about, since I won't actually be seeing any of the classes in person.

"Just about what I'm doing," he answers. I inquire further, but he seems bored with the subject. We hang up. I go back into his office, expecting to see him there. He's gone, except for his crumpled Kleenex. I think about how much he hates the press and that if I write anything short of an advertisement he'll be furious. But I remember the speech from Hamlet and hope he has a copy at hand when this comes out: "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action. To hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature."