The Contender Quotes

“You’re making an enormous error,” Marlon told Coppola. “This guy Kurtz, don’t misuse him.” The film, a commentary on the Vietnam War, was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Kurtz, Marlon argued, needed to be that terrible, evil beating heart: a justifier of genocide.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“But he’d been through so much his whole life, so much trauma, that he did have some strong coping mechanisms. This was a very psychically strong man. He just got pummeled with one thing after another, and still he came up for air.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“He fascinated Bertolucci. “We are usually dominated by space,” the director observed, “but Brando strangely dominates space. Even if Brando is absolutely still, say, sitting on a chair [he] has already taken for himself that privileged space. And Brando’s attitude toward life is different from that of other people because of this fact.” What Bertolucci was observing was the intensity with which Marlon contemplated his place in that world—the same phenomenon Ellen Adler had once observed herself, when she said she could see Marlon think.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“But here’s something else that often gets overlooked or, even worse, derided: unlike so many others with his history, Brando proactively attempted to understand and overcome his trauma. Sometimes, in his darkest moments, he succumbed to victimhood. But for the most part, he resisted it, seeking help and transformation through psychotherapy, meditation, and other consciousness-raising practices. Journalists and biographers sometimes ridiculed his efforts, portraying him and his various therapists as eccentric or flaky. But how many never attempt to understand their problems at all?”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Brando’s depressions and rages can be fully understood only in this light; his inability to commit and to love, or to allow a woman into his life as an equal, grew out of his eternal desire to find his mother’s love and then reject her for hurting him. His turbulent childhood left lasting damage.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“He has served as a gadfly stinging America’s conscience,” the paper editorialized, “reminding the country of its evil past and urging it to face up to the responsibility to redeem itself. Americans don’t like to be criticized for their racial misdeeds. They falsify their history to bolster their sense of Nordic superiority. The Indians have been deprived of land and culture. Their rates of unemployment, suicide and alcoholism are above the national averages. The family incomes on the reservations are below the accepted poverty levels by nearly half. They need all the publicity they can get. Brando used the right forum, the right audience, the right moment to draw attention to a cause that has been too long neglected.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Why had it become so important in the second half of the twentieth century not just to succeed, but to succeed beyond all expectations? How much did one need?”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Marlon was calling out the media for its increasing focus on trivia and trumpery and its single-minded preoccupation with the bottom line. Money—profits—drove everything. Where did it end? Where was America heading?”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“There was, he said, something pervasive going on that was changing the tone and character of the national discourse. An obsession with celebrity, epitomized by paparazzi chasing down stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, was becoming ubiquitous. Magazines and newspapers that “purport to be responsible organs” were making “these pompous and condescending decisions about lives, about facts and situations.” Where did that lead? As Marlon explained later, “I was concerned that the freedoms enshrined by the First Amendment were being misused to create a press that faced no consequences for diminishing the intelligence of the nation.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“The rise of television made the situation even worse, bringing a glut of celebrities to “inane talk shows,” Marlon said, where they “babble on about nothing.” Meanwhile, in Mississippi, he pointed out, “state troopers were keeping James Meredith,” a black student, from “his constitutional right” of attending his classes at Ole Miss. Was this really the sort of media Americans wanted? Perhaps it was, Marlon realized to his horror. The reason television airtime wasn’t filled with more Shakespeare or more honest political debate was “because the American people don’t want to see it,” he said. The public greedily consumed gossip about the private lives of celebrities while stories of black teenagers being arrested on the streets of Los Angeles went untold. Marlon called it a “peephole impulse,” and concluded that it came from the public’s “naïveté.” Through “immersion in nonsense” fed to them by the media, people were content to live in blissful ignorance of “the painful truths of the world.” By the early 1960s, Marlon made it his mission to open people’s eyes. “I’ve decided,” he told one reporter, “I finally want to speak out against slop-oriented journalism and the conversational scavengers who exploit for profit and libel for entertainment.” That was essential, he said, in any effort to “change the way the public saw the world.” People got their impressions of the world through the media—so the media, in Marlon’s view, needed to be changed.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“She had only one human companion, but a menagerie of dogs and cats. Her only connection to the outside world was a radio. Marlon was in awe. This was exactly the sort of retreat from the world he longed for, the sanctuary he needed to survive.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“trauma takes a very long time to heal, if ever.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“You split yourself down the middle,” he said, when you go against principle for material gain.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“America was embarking on a decade-long crisis of faith, principles, and identity. Long-cherished notions of what was right and what was wrong were being challenged. Ideas about family, race, patriotism, even God—all were up for reconsideration. Not surprisingly, Marlon was in the midst of it. Just as he had personified the cultural moment of the 1950s, when views of masculinity, gender, power, and sexuality were in flux, now he was at the forefront of a movement asking Americans to reconsider their moral priorities. The country was split. Although polls showed a slim majority opposing capital punishment, the minority opinion was loud and emphatic, and it let Marlon know how it felt.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Marlon was distraught. The execution, he wrote to Bud Burdick, had been “an act of vengeance” against a man “suffering from an emotional disease.” In the days that followed, he felt bereft. He missed the regular interactions he’d had with Bud and others in the anti-capital punishment crusade. “There is no one here who understands,” he told Burdick. He longed for the fellowship of people who thought as he did, who prioritized things the way he did, who saw the world the same. Within the circle of activists, Marlon was beloved, a very different experience from what he’d known in Hollywood. “Your visit here did a hell of a lot of people a hell of a lot of good,” Burdick wrote to him. “There was a fearful sense of being isolated and eccentric. You . . . did a lot to evaporate that feeling.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“This business of being a successful actor,” Marlon had mused to Capote in that fateful article. “What’s the point, if it doesn’t evolve into anything? All right, you’re a success. At last you’re accepted, you’re welcome everywhere. But that’s it, that’s all there is to it, it doesn’t lead anywhere.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“The whole point of the entertainment industry is, of course, to make money: that has been its raison d’être ever since P. T. Barnum first put on a show. And Marlon had tried to rack up as much money as he could, too; it was supposed to help him get free of the business. Yet he’d been completely unprepared for the banality of the past five years. During that time, he’d acquired a deep antipathy for the growing culture of celebrity. In a country that had “the highest crime rate in the [Western] world, the highest delinquency rate, the most alcoholics, [where] two billion dollars’ worth of tranquilizers were sold last year and half the hospital beds are occupied by mental patients,” he asked, why did the media waste so much time on celebrity news? It was “madness,” Marlon concluded. But “anyone who objects,” he groused, “is considered to be idiosyncratic, bizarre, uncooperative, dishonest.” He let out a cry. “I can’t win.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“To be an actor,” Capote said, “you have to have absolutely no pride. You have to be a thing, an object.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“I often get terribly discouraged,” Marlon wrote, “when I think that with all the extensive techniques we have at hand to communicate with each other, so remarkably little is accomplished.” He feared the problem was not with the technology, but rather, the fact “that the only thing most of us want to communicate is hatred and distruction [sic].”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Fixing himself meant fixing the world, too. “If I am not my brother’s keeper,” Marlon wrote, “then who am I?”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“He was still holding her hand when Dodie died at 5:20 a.m. Marlon bent over his mother’s body. Carefully, he snipped off a lock of her hair. Then he took her pillow and removed an aquamarine ring from her finger. Clutching these talismans, he made his way outside, where the sun was just coming up. “I felt instantly that she had been transformed into everything that was reflective of nature,” he said. Birds, plants, animals, little children—they were all Dodie. Standing there outside the hospital, in the crisp morning air, Marlon suddenly had a vision (“I actually saw it,” he insisted) of a great bird “floating up and down the face of a cliff.” This was his mother, he believed, rising to the sky. The bird made its ascent to the strains of Ferde Grofé’s “Mississippi Suite,” a stirring orchestral piece Ellen had introduced Marlon to, and which he often found himself humming.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“But what if the work itself was not the artist’s choice? What if the work gave him no such satisfaction as Williams’s writing gave him? What if he had not been born wanting the work as Williams had been born wanting to write, but had instead stumbled upon the work, been proclaimed a genius for it, and been forced to continue producing it?”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“After Julius Caesar, Marlon became, in the words of his friend Billy Redfield, “the only American actor to be seriously thought of as Hamlet,” the great hope of American theater enthusiasts to finally measure up against the English. “We who saw him in his first, shocking days,” said Redfield, “believed in him not only as an actor, but also as an artistic, spiritual and specifically American leader. We flung him at the English as though we owned him and we all but shouted, ‘He does without your damned elocution lessons, your fruity voices, your artificial changings of pitch and stress, your bleeding love of words, words, words, and your high-toned, fustian, bombace technique. He throws away your books and burns your academies. He does it from within. And he is better than all of you!”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Some would try to argue that without that constantly roiling inner turmoil, he might not have become such a great actor. To such arguments, Marlon grew impatient. “What you’re saying,” he replied, “is that unless you irritate an oyster with a sand grain, he will not make the necessary compensations for the purposes of that sand grain, and will [therefore] never create the pearl.” He made a sound of contempt. “Who gives a damn about the pearl?”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Don’t use yourself. You’re too small. Find it in your imagination.’” And Bud—the milk squirter, the door buster, the window jumper, the people watcher—had “more imagination than any human being” Ellen had ever known. “If he’d had to go inside,” she said, “the way Strasberg would have insisted, he would have had a breakdown. It would have been chaos. Chaos, I tell you. And the world would never have known Marlon Brando, the great actor.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“A great disservice was done to American actors,” Stella told her students, “when they were persuaded that they had to experience themselves on the stage instead of experiencing the play.” The answer wasn’t in an actor’s past, Stella argued, but in the writer’s script. “Oh, sweetheart,” she’d counsel a flailing actor, “we don’t need your emotion. We need the text.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“imagination and not emotional memory” was the key to successful acting.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Memories,” Bud said, “get fuzzed over. You think that things happened this way, and then you’re astounded [when] somebody says, ‘No, that never happened.’ Because you invent things in your mind. Think of stories that we tell, over and over again, to people. We make them true because we remember them in a certain way. And [maybe] they never happened that way at all.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“That night, during rehearsals for Power, cheers from a demonstration outside distracted the actors. Bud followed some of his fellow students out onto the sidewalk. There were placards and posters supporting labor, chants of “one for all, all for one,” and calls for the removal of Francisco Franco in Spain. Bud seemed delighted, the second-year student thought. All at once, lifting his fist in a show of power, Bud shouted, “Proletariat of the world, unite!”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Like Barbra Streisand, who just opened her mouth and sang without ever having a singing lesson, it was hard for Brando to view something that came so naturally to him as a great gift, let alone genius. Praised for his acting versatility, he recoiled: “You can say the same thing about a hula hoop.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando