Marlon Brando furious at ‘feeling like a monster’ among revelations in new Hollywood secrets book | Books

Marlon Brando was the first Angry Young Man, winning an Oscar for At the water’s edgeElia Kazan’s film on union corruption. But anger got the best of him at the film’s Italian premiere in 1954, when he refused to watch it after discovering his voice had been dubbed, a new book reveals.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me I was going to see a dubbed version?” » he stammered in fury in the dark cinema. His embarrassed agent, who was expecting the original English version, remembers him “rising up from his seat like he was having a heart attack”, whispering frantically: “Get me out of here! “

Brando couldn’t calm down. “I have never seen myself doubled,” he is said to have declared. “I’m an actor, not a ventriloquist model, for God’s sake. Can you imagine what it feels like to hear someone else’s voice coming out of my mouth? You feel like a damn freak in a show. Damn, why didn’t anyone prepare me? Didn’t you guys know that?

The incident is among the revelations contained in the memoirs of Hank Kaufman and Gene Lerner, an American couple who arrived in Rome from New York in 1953, became agents, friends and confidants of some of the biggest movie stars, including Anita Ekberg, Ava Gardner and Simone Signoret.

Kaufman and Lerner died in 2012 and 2004, respectively. Today, their roles as unsung industry players in the 1950s and 1960s are recognized with the publication of their memoirs, Hollywood on the Tiber.

They wrote it in the late 1970s, but it was only published in Italian in 1982. The stars featured in its pages may have protested the revelations which reflect both the highs and the lows of fame, described by Lerner as “toxins”. It features everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Federico Fellini.

The memoir will be published next week in English for the first time by Sticking Place Books, which specializes in neglected publications. Paul Cronin, its editor, said: “When I first came across this book, I thought, ‘This reads like La Dolce Vita encounter Call my agent! »»

He said that for nearly two decades, Kaufman and Lerner were intimately involved, night and day, with the ambitions, delusions, hopes and loves of their clients, on screen and off.

In their chapter on Brando’s premiere, they write that when they escorted him to the cinema in a black Cadillac, he was “unprepared for the hysteria” of a “screaming crowd” that engulfed him as he got out of the car. Once inside, he was completely nervous about being seated next to a 19-year-old Italian actress, Sophia Loren.

“Brando had made the art of mumbling. But in no film had he yet achieved the total inarticulation that now overcame him, nor a breathless double-take as extraordinary as that provoked by Loren’s frontal camera… Marlon’s efforts not to look were also ridiculous than his initial double-take. He was unable to utter a word, and aside from occasionally smiling at each other, the two men sat in agitated silence. Every time Sophia seemed to look away, Marlon would turn, mouth open and eyes bulging, to look at Sophia.

When Brando tried to leave acting because of dubbing, Lerner warned him: “Everyone will write about your departure.” They’ll say you hated him, you disowned him, whatever. They will write lots of things and say nothing about the quality of the film.

Brando was persuaded to go to a nearby bar and return to the theater five minutes before the end of the film, so that no one would know anything, the agents recalled: “As the lights came up in the theater, Brando was standing, leaning. over the mezzanine railing to greet the enthusiastic applause and shouts of bravo.

In the memoir, the couple also recall finding Ava Gardner in a “hysterical” state because her lover, Italian actor Walter Chiari, was “addicted” to cocaine. “He sniffs things. He might be on to something worse,” she shouted, begging them to “do something.”

They also describe the seedy side of the industry, noting Anita Ekberg’s response when she learned a director wanted to meet her: “What is it, another one of that kind who just wants to making advances at me or ogling my body?”

When she learned that Sean Connery had married Diane Cilento, Ekberg was devastated and told Lerner: “He told me we would get married…Men take advantage of that.” When it comes to true love, I’m always fooled.

Agents recall that Shelley Winters became “violently jealous” when she discovered that her husband, Vittorio Gassman, was playing “hanky-panky” with another actor in his dressing room: “Shelley was overcome by a mirror fetish. She smashed several against the walls of Gassman’s locker room while screaming. Luckily…the flying shards of glass caused no injuries.

The memoir is prefaced by Sandy Lieberson, who worked alongside Kaufman and Lerner in Rome and later produced Nicolas Roeg’s memoir. Performanceamong other films. He writes: “The myth, the legend, but also the abyss and its misery, full of drug addiction, unrealized dreams and sexual favors. Hollywood on the Tiber it’s all of those things together. It’s heaven and hell.