Excerpt taken from
Peter Manso's book, Brando: The Biography. Here Manso mentions
about the relationship between Dean and Brando:
There was something even
more galling for Brando than Koster's [director of Desiree] ineptitude:
Across town, at Warners, Kazan was still working with James Dean on East
of Eden, and word was already out that Dean was terrific, Hollywood's
next big star. Marlon couldn't resist going to see for himself.
He arrived on the Eden set, posed for publicity pictures with Gadg,
Julie Harris, and Dean, but pretended that Dean didn't exist. Later
with the film's release all he had to say was, "Mr. Dean appears to be
wearing my last year's wardrobe and using my last year's talent."
"It was like Apollo driving
the sun chariot," said one of the extras at Warners. "He looks over
his shoulder and there's another sun coming up over the horizon.
Here Brando was trapped in a very bad picture and Jimmy's working with
his best director."
Marlon's competitiveness,
though, had been building for some time. In New York, three years
earlier, Stella had lectured him about paying Dean too much attention:
"You haven't anything in common. He's a little boy." Similiarly,
at a party at Barbara Baxley's apartment that was filled with Actors Studio
people, he'd bumped into Dean, and it was obvious how much the comparisons
between the two of them bothered him. "Everybody was imitating him
by then and he was very aware of any young actor who got good notices for
being 'real,' meaning that they were doing what he did," said Janet Ward,
a fellow members of the Studio. "Rod Steiger, Gazzara, anybody.
It threatened him. That evening he turned to me and said, 'See that
guy who just walked in? You know him?" I said, "Yes, it's Jimmy.'
He said, 'You want to make a bet that he takes off his coat and flings
it right on the floor there?"
"Jimmy was saying hello
to people. It was winter, and he had a coat on which he was still
unbuttoning. I said, 'Why do you say that?' 'Because I do it.
Watch him.' And Jimmy did it, which brought a big grin to Marlon's
face. I remember he put his hands up. 'See? I told you
so.' "
Marlon had played the recorder,
and Dean took up the instrument, too. In Hollywood, Dean also sought
out Marlon's bongo partner, Jack Costanzo, who recalled that during their
several sessions together Dean "asked me, in that broken, hardly understandable
way of his, 'How does Marlon play?' and when I told him, 'Great,' all he
said was, 'Oh.' " The motorcycles; the copycat Levi's, loafers, and
V-neck pullovers; and even Maila Nurmi-all were Brando carryovers.
"Jimmy was so adoring of
Marlon that he seemed shrunken and twisted in misery," said Kazan, and
even normally blase Sunset Strip types called it "a weird transference,"
an obsession that was "just impossible."
Brando refused to use Dean's
name in public, instead referring to him as "the kid." To Sondra
Lee he confided that Dean was undergoing "some kind of identity crisis."
When Jack Costanzo let Brando know that Dean was no good on the drums,
he was "tickled. Just sort of smiled and said, 'Oh, really?' "
"Dean...had an idee fixe
about me. Whatever I did, he did," Brando later commented, explaining
that he had listened in while the younger actor talked to his answering
service, trying to get through. "But I never spoke up. I never
called him back."
He also had "a very cute
way of imitating Jimmy," said the composer David Diamond. "He envied
his lower lip. He'd ask me, 'Do you think he's good-looking?' "
Ironically, this was the very question Marlon had asked Diamond about Monty
Clift. "Jimmy was terribly self-destructive, like cracking a bottle
and threatening to cut his wrists. There were several suicide attempts.
Marlon was aware of this. But [Jimmy] was in awe of Marlon.
I remember once saying to Jimmy, 'Go over, put your arms around him.
He's not going to bite you.' He turned red, like a little girl."
The morning after Marlon's
visit to Warners, Dean showed up on the Desiree set, still dressed
in his Eden outfit from the night before. He sat on the sidelines,
continuing to watch in awe, studying Brando, trying to find "the secret"
even as Marlon blew his lines with utter indifference. No words were
exchanged, and a few nights later, at a party for Sammy Davis Jr., they
met again; Marlon was in the midst of talking to Mel McCarter, Luther Adler's
old girlfriend, when Dean approached and, again, Marlon snubbed him.
"He had his elbow on the
mantelpiece," McCarter recalled, "looked around at Dean, then turned his
head to the wall. Dean was dying to talk to him, and stood there
for a few seconds, then kind of dropped his little head and walked off
into the den and started playing bongo drums."
An hour or so later he returned.
Brando would insist that Dean had been "throwing himself around, acting
the madman," but he took him aside and asked him if he didn't know that
he was "sick." Soon he had given him Mittelmann's name, suggesting
that when he returned to New York he seek out the psychoanalyst to get
help.