Gordon Pinsent's rough laughter echoes down the phone line as he recalls those years in the early 1970s hanging out with Marlon Brando. "Oh, he was a character. He was a riot," Pinsent chuckles. "I never heard him make any complimentary comment towards any other actor. Never. He snorted, in fact. Once I was at the house and I was talking to his makeup man and he walked up and said, 'Who you talking about now?' 'We're talking about John Barrymore.' He just snorted and walked by."
Friends and admirers are recalling Brando again this week, as they did when he died at the age of 80 last July 1, on the occasion this afternoon of the auction of his personal effects at Christie's in New York.
Up for grabs is everything found at his 12900 Mulholland Dr. home in Beverly Hills, Calif.: mementos -- maybe even talismans -- of an extraordinary life and talent. There is a trove of personal correspondence that, though potentially valuable to historians, will now be cast to the four corners of the Earth: letters from fans, journalists, co-stars and directors; a collection of material and correspondence relating to Apocalypse Now, including an anxious letter from Francis Ford Coppola in which he updates Brando on the script's slow and difficult development; Brando's annotated screenplays for films such as Candy, The Chase, Mutiny on the Bounty and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery; an extensive collection of notes and script pages from One-Eyed Jacks; a pair of bongo drums from Cuba (Brando was a drummer); and a January, 1959, letter from Martin Luther King asking Brando to lend his name to a campaign to integrate schools.
A large selection of items related to The Godfather is being sold, including Brando's working script for the film, which Christie's estimates will sell for $10,000-$15,000 (U.S.), though it will likely go for much more; a hand-scrawled letter in red ink from Mario Puzo telling Brando he'd written a book called The Godfather and that he is the only actor, "who can play the Godfather with that quiet force and irony the part requires"; and a belt given to Brando by the cast of The Godfather with the inscription MIGHTY MOON CHAMPION, commemorating the actor's penchant for flashing his rear end on the set.
Pinsent happens to have a special connection to one of the lots being auctioned: It was a gift he gave Brando in 1973. It seems the two men met through Wally Cox, an actor with whom Pinsent was working on the 1970 TV movie Quarantined, which was a sort of medical version of Bonanza. Cox and Brando grew up together in Illinois, and were best friends. An avid hiker, Cox was showing Pinsent around the Hollywood Hills, explaining that he was also trying to persuade Brando to increase his commitment to exercise.
On the day Pinsent met the legendary actor, the three men had arranged an afternoon hike in the hills, starting out from Cox's home a short distance from Brando's place on Mulholland.
Pinsent unspools the story. He and Cox were in the living room when "we heard really loud tramping up to the door and Wally said, 'Ahhh, here he comes now and he's going to pretend that he ran all the way from his place,' says Wally, 'but his car is parked down at the bottom of the hill.' And sure enough, the door opened and in came him, gasping like a fool, gasping, gasping, gasping. He ran straight for the fridge and grabbed a huge piece of chocolate cake and jammed it into his mouth. He said, 'I ran all the way from my place,' and Wally said, 'You did not, you fat bastard!' "
Lot 56 is a memento of those carefree days. Cox, who was best known for playing the title role in the early-1950s live sitcom Mr. Peepers, died suddenly in February, 1973, at age 48. His death devastated Brando. Indeed, charged with spreading Cox's ashes, he instead kept them in his home and sometimes carried them with him. On Brando's death, the two men's ashes were spread together in Death Valley.
When Cox died, Pinsent was up in Winnipeg playing in Guys and Dolls, and he couldn't attend the wake. Some time later, though, he sat down and made five sketches of Cox and sent them off to Brando. "It meant something to me to give something to him. But I have no idea how he reacted and I probably imagined he tore them up or something," he said. He never heard back from Brando: Cox had been the fulcrum of their friendship, and after his death, there was a sense that Pinsent's presence would have only reminded Brando of his loss.
Until a reporter called this week to ask him about the sketches that make up Lot 56, Pinsent didn't know what had been their fate. "He kept them? Boy, that's quite something. I'm glad he kept them, that's good."
The sketches were in the home at Brando's Beverly Hills estate, but in what may have been a sign of his notoriously ambivalent relationship with acting and his own career, almost all of his film-related memorabilia was found in a storage shed on the property that Christie's officials didn't discover until their second day searching the grounds last year. The only memento from his career in the house was a black and white photograph of himself and a naked Rita Moreno in a clinch from The Night of the Following Day.
For those who follow the lives of contemporary Hollywood celebrities in the art-directed pages of In Style and other lifestyle magazines, Brando's personal property going under the hammer is startling in its modesty. True, there is the obligatory white Mercedes and white Lexus. The furniture is unremarkable: a worn black-leather couch, a mahogany table, some rustic wooden lawn chairs and benches, a trio of wicker bergères, an office desk and chair, a burrwood coffee table he made himself.
He was far more interested in Tahitian and American Indian artifacts: testaments to his love of those cultures and his famous commitment to addressing racism. But he also loved silliness, and there are glimpses of the famous jokester behind Brando's mythical reclusiveness. His videotape and DVD collection, which includes a copy of The Godfather ("Own the Godfather's Godfather!" chirped a Christie's official), shows a fondness for slapstick, with dozens of Laurel and Hardy movies. A few small practical jokes (a bloodied fake finger, a plastic bagel with a cockroach underneath) are up for auction. So is a foosball table.
A collection of playbills for three-night summer-stock productions in Sayville, Long Island, N.Y. ( Ladies in Retirement, Dr. Sganarelle, Hannele's Way to Heaven), performed under German director Erwin Piscator, contain fanciful biographies of Brando. Though born in Omaha, Neb., one program states Brando, "was born in Bangkok, Siam, the son of an etymologist. [His father was an insecticide salesman.]. . . Mr. Brando spent his early years in Calcutta, Indo-China, the Mongolian desert and Ceylon."
Brando's real biography is perhaps even more fanciful, and the ephemera on sale testifies to the unusual arc of his life. There are letter awards from his high school in Santa Ana, Calif., copper medals from a summer camp, and yearbooks from Shattuck Military Academy. Then come the playbills recalling his great stage triumphs, including one from his iconic role as Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway, after which he left the stage permanently for film.
The property also attests to Brando's restless intellect. There are thousand of books, including many that he read with red pen in hand, conducting internal dialogues with authors. In the margins of Carl Jung's The Undiscovered Self, one annotation reads: "Where are you Hannah Arendt . . ." But it wasn't always high-minded dialogue. In Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, Brando circled a section about sex and scrawled a dismissive note that suggested the father of psychoanalysis probably didn't get much action in bed.
Simon Houpt