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The Legend. Brando's closest friends admit that he often needs a shave, and that regardless of the company he is in, he belches or scratches as the need arises. Although he now makes as much as $200,000 a picture, he is often without matching trousers and jacket; until very recently he preferred blue jeans for all social gatherings. The day he arrived in Hollywood, Marlon honored the occasion by dressing up in his only suit, but somehow failed to notice that the trousers had a hole in the knee and a slit in the seat, through which the tail of his shirt was showing. Shirts are a nuisance, anyway; when one gets dirty, he just rolls it up in a ball, stuffs it in a closet and buys another. At table, Marlon often drops his head to plate level and shovels it in, and if ketchup splatters on the tablecloth—let it. Once, so the story runs, he was found holding a piece of bread and dreamily buttering his sleeve.
The frequent condition of his living quarters—in Hollywood a five-room bungalow in Benedict Canyon, in New York City a vast studio in Carnegie Hall—was perhaps best described by a man who came to deliver a vacuum cleaner. "That boy doesn't need a vacuum cleaner," he said. "He needs a plow." The mess was at its worst in the days when Marlon had a pet raccoon, but even before that, it sometimes got pretty bad. Actress Shelley Winters reports that when Marlon and Comic Wally Cox shared a Manhattan apartment, they once undertook to paint the walls of the place. Says Shelley: "They painted one wall and then, for one solid year, the canvas, the buckets of paint and the brushes lay on the living-room floor. They just stepped around them."
Nothing Sacred. Be it ever so rough and tumble, Marlon's home is his castle. He seldom answers the phone before it rings 20 times, often lets invited guests batter wearily at the door for long periods before he casually lets them in.
Worst of all, in many a moviemaker's mind, is Brando's habit of teasing Hollywood's sacred cows, the gossip columnists. Actress Jessica Tandy once went to Marlon's dressing room with a powerful woman who, as everybody in the entertainment business knows, likes to think of herself as still quite youthful-looking. Said Marlon to Jessica in his silkiest tone: "Ah, this must be your mother." Columnist Hedda Hopper also went to interview him. "She talked for half an hour solid," says a Hollywood reporter, "and in all that time Marlon gave exactly one and a half grunts." He now calls Hedda "The One with the Hat," and Louella Parsons "The Fat One." The two influential lady writers naturally feel some resentment, and frequently express it in their columns.