Marlon Brando was the unique offended younger man, profitable an Oscar for On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan’s film about union corruption. However anger bought the higher of him on the 1954 Italian premiere of the movie, when he refused to observe it after discovering that his voice had been dubbed, a brand new ebook reveals.
“Why didn’t any individual inform me I used to be going to see a dubbed model?” he spluttered in fury within the darkened cinema. His embarrassed agent, who had anticipated the unique English-language model, recalled him “staggering up from his seat as if from a coronary heart assault”, frantically whispering: “Get me out of right here!”
Brando couldn’t be calmed. “I’ve by no means seen myself dubbed,” he reportedly mentioned. “I’m an actor, not a ventriloquist’s dummy, for Christ’s sake. Are you able to think about what it’s like to listen to any individual else’s voice come out of my mouth? You’re feeling like a goddamn freak in a sideshow. Christ, why didn’t any individual put together me? Didn’t you guys know?”
The incident is among the many revelations in a memoir by Hank Kaufman and Gene Lerner, an American couple who, having arrived in Rome from New York in 1953, turned brokers, buddies and confidants to a number of the largest film stars, together with Anita Ekberg, Ava Gardner and Simone Signoret.
Kaufman and Lerner died in 2012 and 2004 respectively. Now their position as unsung movers and shakers of the trade within the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties is being recognised with the publication of their memoir, Hollywood on the Tiber.
They wrote it within the late Nineteen Seventies, nevertheless it was printed solely in Italian in 1982. The celebs featured in its pages could have objected to revelations that replicate each the highs and lows of movie star, described by Lerner as “toxins”. It options everybody from Charlie Chaplin to Federico Fellini.
The memoir shall be printed subsequent week in English for the primary time by Sticking Place Books, which specialises in publications which were uncared for. Paul Cronin, its writer, mentioned: “After I first encountered this ebook, I believed, ‘This reads like La Dolce Vita meets Name My Agent!’”
He mentioned that, for practically twenty years, Kaufman and Lerner have been intimately concerned, night time and day, with their purchasers’ ambitions, delusions, hopes and loves, on-screen and off.
Of their chapter on Brando’s premiere, they write that once they escorted him to the cinema in a black Cadillac, he was “unprepared for the hysteria” from a “screaming mob” that engulfed him as he emerged from the automotive. As soon as inside, he was overwhelmed with nerves on being seated subsequent to a 19-year-old Italian actor, Sophia Loren.
“Brando had made artwork out of mumble. However in no movie had he but achieved the overall inarticulacy which now overcame him, nor a gasping double-take as extraordinary because the one prompted by Loren’s frontal equipment … Marlon’s efforts to not stare have been as farcical as his preliminary double-take. He was unable to utter a phrase, and out of doors of an occasional smile at one another, the 2 sat in fidgeting silence. Every time Sophia appeared to be trying elsewhere, Marlon turned with open mouth and bulging eyes to stare at Sophia.”
When Brando tried to go away the cinema over the dubbing, Lerner warned him: “Everyone will write about your leaving. They’ll say you hated it, disowned it, no matter. They’ll write reams and say nothing concerning the high quality of the movie.”
Brando was persuaded to go to a close-by bar and sneak again into the cinema 5 minutes earlier than the tip of the movie, so no one can be the wiser, the brokers recalled: “Because the lights went up within the cinema, there was Brando standing, leaning over the mezzanine railing to acknowledge the wild applause and shouts of bravo.”
Within the memoir, the couple additionally recall discovering Ava Gardner in a “hysterical” state as a result of her lover, the Italian actor Walter Chiari, was “hooked” on cocaine. “He sniffs the stuff. He is likely to be on one thing worse,” she cried, begging them to “do one thing”.
Additionally they describe the trade’s sleazy aspect, noting Anita Ekberg’s response to listening to {that a} director wished to fulfill her: “What’s he, one other of these sort who simply desires to make passes at me or ogle my physique?”
When she heard Sean Connery had married Diane Cilento, Ekberg was devastated, telling Lerner: “He instructed me we’d get married … Males take benefit. Relating to actual love, I’m at all times duped.”
The brokers bear in mind Shelley Winters changing into “violently jealous” when she found her husband, Vittorio Gassman, was taking part in “hanky-panky” with one other actor in his dressing room: “Shelley was overcome by a mirror fetish. She smashed a number of towards Gassman’s dressing-room partitions whereas screaming. Thankfully … the shards of flying glass precipitated no damage.”
The memoir has a foreword by Sandy Lieberson, who labored alongside Kaufman and Lerner in Rome and went on to supply Nicolas Roeg’s Efficiency, amongst different movies. He writes: “The parable, the legend, but additionally the abyss and its squalour, one filled with drug dependancy, unrealised desires and sexual favours. Hollywood on the Tiber is all these items collectively. It’s heaven and hell.”
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