Orson Welles’ irrational hatred of Marlon Brando: “A huge sausage, a shoe made of flesh”
Hollywood history is littered with supreme shit-talkers, but few have ever been as locquacious in eviscerating their peers, colleagues, and contemporaries as Orson Welles, who could verbally annihilate someone and make it sound like pure poetry.
The Citizen Kane wunderkind saw himself as the smartest man in any room he walked into, and in certain respects, he was. Nobody achieves what Welles had achieved by his mid-20s without being fiercely intelligent and ferociously dedicated, but it was his savviness that let him down.
Sometimes, the easiest way to get ahead in a business as ruthless as cinema is to play the game. Either he didn’t know how, or he wasn’t interested, because the longer his career wore on and the further he slipped down the pecking order, it became blatantly clear that Welles’ worst enemy was himself.
By the time he sat down for an incendiary series of conversations with actor and filmmaker Henry Jaglom, it was clear that Welles had run out of fucks to give. He was already at a point in his professional life where making movies the way he wanted to make them was verging on impossible, and he went full scorched earth on anyone and everyone who irritated him.
Among the many well-known industry figures he shit all over at various points were Woody Allen, Elia Kazan, James Stewart, Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Richard Burton, and Bette Davis, but his most peculiar ire was reserved for Marlon Brando, who single-handedly reshaped acting in his own image.
Jaglom revealed that he “can never get over” what Welles had said about the On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire icon, with the auteur explaining exactly why he loathed him so much. “It’s that neck,” he declared. “Which is like a huge sausage, a shoe made of flesh.”
When it was suggested by Jaglom that “Brando isn’t very bright,” Welles couldn’t agree more, although he was kind enough to extend that belief and apply it to almost everyone: “Well, most great actors aren’t.” Would he have approved of the method man had he not been so unusually abhorred by the bit between his head and shoulders? Honestly, who knows with Welles.
He also – and entirely mistakenly – scoffed at Brando winning an Academy Award for Joshua Logan’s 1957 romance, Sayonara, which he called “a bad picture.” He was nominated for his performance as Ace Gruver, but it didn’t matter whether Welles was right or wrong because he couldn’t stand the movie either way.
“The picture was, on every level, an abomination,” he offered. “It looked like a musical that didn’t have any numbers in it.” There’s nothing wrong with someone, especially a person as famously outspoken as Welles, having an issue with a performer or the films they appear in, but his disdain for Brando was nothing if not odd, since it was based entirely around how much he despised looking at his neck.
If Brando took a role that required him to wear a turtleneck from beginning to end, then maybe Welles would have been on board, but since that didn’t happen, we’ll never know.
