Truman Capote’s first impression of Marlon Brando: “I hadn’t a clue to who he might be”
Cinema had never seen anything quite like Marlon Brando when he first captured the imagination of audiences everywhere in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, which was only the second film credit of his career.
He was roguish, rugged, and handsome, carrying himself with a confidence and self-assuredness that even veteran stars couldn’t convey. It also helped that he was a phenomenal actor, blowing everyone off the screen with a legendary performance that ultimately ended up changing the industry forever.
Brando might have been a relative newcomer to cinemagoing crowds, but theatre audiences were well aware of his gifts by then. He was rough around the edges, as all rookies tend to be, but the more he plied his trade, the more undeniable he became.
Years before bringing it to the screen, Brando had originated the role of Stanley Kowalski in the stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, and anybody who’d seen him then knew that big things lay in his future. One such audience member was Truman Capote, who ended up becoming famously infatuated with the future two-time Academy Award winner and all-around icon.
The author penned a famous profile on Brando when he was shooting the 1957 romantic drama Sayonara, but his first time drinking him in came a decade previously when he’d attended a rehearsal of Tennessee Williams’ play. Capote had no idea who this guy was when he turned up, but by the time he’d left, he wouldn’t have been able to forget.
“I hadn’t a clue to who he might be,” he admitted of his Brando ignorance per The Guardian, which was about to change in short order. “Arriving too early, I found the auditorium deserted and a brawny young man atop a table on the stage, solidly asleep. Because he was wearing a white t-shirt and denim trousers, because of his gymnasium physique – the weightlifter’s arms, the Charles Atlas chest (though an opened Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud was resting on it) – I took him for a stagehand.”
That case of mistaken identity was swiftly rectified, with Capote quickly becoming besotted by the way Brando’s visage gave off the impression of “a stranger’s head attached to the brawny body” for the way his face came across as if someone was “superimposing an almost angelic refinement and gentleness on hard-jawed good looks”.
Needless to say, Capote was enamoured, and he’d carry that admiration with Brando forward for the next decade and beyond. He may have gushed over him fawningly in his profile, but it’s apparent in his recollections that his first time laying eyes on the industry’s pioneering method man had already taken his breath away ten years previously.
To be fair, that was the early era Brando effect in microcosm, and while Capote wasn’t the first or last to feel that way, he was talented enough to put it into words better than most.
