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And Brando has personal as well as professional problems, or so the Slob stuff would indicate. But since his mother's death last year, he seems to have taken a firmer grip on his private life. There is less talk of a two-year trip around the world or "a nice long school in Paris," or a quick retirement to his Nebraska cattle farm, which is managed by his father. He still murmurs about an island paradise where he could concern himself exclusively with "eating and sleeping and the reproduction of the race," but he says less often that "I still don't know whether I want to be an actor."
Facing Up. In the opinion of many of his intimates, psychoanalysis has helped too. Like many a creative person, Brando seems to be by nature so sensitive to impressions—from within as well as from without, of his own emotions as well as of the world around him—that he often has a hard time handling them. He claims, for instance, that "if I go into a room where there are a hundred people, and one of them doesn't like me, I'll know it, and I have to get out of there." This is possibly a somewhat morbid and perhaps flamboyant exaggeration of his condition, but his friends say that he often does seem to flounder in a sea of impressions. It is to resist them, they say, that he puts up his arbitrary, antisocial front.
"It goes further than that," says one acquaintance. "Somewhere in childhood Marlon got the idea that he didn't really have to face the facts about himself if he didn't want to. Then too, somebody apparently gave him an idealized picture of reality, and when he found he couldn't measure up to it, part of Marlon turned renegade. It's the renegade, you'll notice, that Marlon has come to personify to the public. He needs to find something in life, something in himself, that is permanently true, and he needs to lay down his life before it. For such an intense personality, nothing less than that will do."
The analysis seems to have taken Marlon part way to the goal. He now seems to realize, his friends think, that he did not want freedom so much as he wanted irresponsibility. Now, they say, he is more ready to face life for what it is,—to live it with what he's got. If they are right, and if Brando can really "lay down his life" before his art, the U.S. stands to witness some spectacular histrionics before this prince of players says good night.
* Other famed Libertyvillians: Adlai Stevenson, Publisher Alicia Patterson (TIME, Sept. 13).