And it wasn’t just the audience.
A photographer friend of Brecht’s — actually Brecht’s mistress — had been taking photographs. She was up in the lights, on a gangway near the ceiling. Her camera was old and the shutter clicked when she took a picture. And it kept clicking, over and over. And it might not have been the clicking that bothered him, but something did, and he refused to continue. He was supposed to continue his act, but instead he exploded. At a certain point in the performance he just went berserk. He started screaming and yelling at the woman with the camera, looking into the lights and shouting up to her, and it looked as if he was shouting up to god. But it wasn’t any god, and it wasn’t really the person with the camera. It was him. He was stupid and fat and worthless, and he knew he was being an idiot but he couldn’t help it.
The rehearsal was stopped.
Brecht, standing backstage, let him rant. He left him alone. “Ich muss ein 7UP haben,” Brecht said, and went out to the lobby for a soft drink. Joseph Losey, who had become the director after Orson Welles bowed out, found Laughton and tried to calm him down. They were standing in the wings. Laughton was shivering and Losey was holding him, by the shoulders. He was restraining him and at the same time trying to comfort him.
“Charles,” he said. “You’re just being a baby.”
“Yes,” Laughton said. “I am.”
There’s a famous line from the movie The Wild Ones. Marlon Brando, playing the part of a motorcycle rebel, has rolled into town, and when a townsperson asks him, “What’re you rebelling against?” he says, “Whaddya got?” Although Brando was almost thirty when he made the movie, his character embodied adolescent rebellion, a protest against powerlessness, and against an adult world that constantly said he wasn’t old enough or good enough. A child protests by saying no to authority because saying no is the only choice it has, and, like Marlon Brando, that’s what I was doing, standing in a shower stall with Alan.
I’d picked him up that morning, at the airport, and he’d invited me then to what he called a “bathroom party” in North Hollywood. I wasn’t busy that evening, so I went. I found the apartment, rang the bell, walked up the stairs and a few people were standing in the living room, but mainly people were in the bathroom, a large marble bathroom with a large Jacuzzi bathtub filled with cans of beer. There was also a shower stall near the door and chairs lined up against the wall, and some people were sitting on the edge of the tub. I didn’t see Alan, but I heard his voice coming from the shower. “Come on in,” he was saying, and I peeked over the top of the shower door and there he was, hair wet, drinking a beer with a group of people, all of them naked.
I took off my clothes in a room that, because it was being fumigated, was empty, and when I had everything off but my underwear, I stepped past the people sitting around the bathroom, and stepped inside the shower. It wasn’t a big shower stall, but it was big enough. Alan welcomed me with a beer and introduced me to Amanda and Eliza and Vijay, and since everyone was naked, I slipped off my underwear and flung it into the hallway. When I asked them why they were wet, one of the girls turned on the water, which was cold at first and then warmed up, and we took turns under its spray, orbiting around in the stall, and although we were literally next to each other, we could move around without ever quite touching. I say “quite” because there was a certain amount of unavoidable butt bumping butt, and sometimes genital brushing against thigh. But it was all very relaxed and innocent, and somehow, being naked made everything seem funny. When someone accidentally opened the shower door, we thought that was funny. I was laughing and the girls were laughing and Alan took a bar of soap from the rack and started soaping up Amanda’s back. She was short, and less voluptuous than Eliza, and she moved away her wet hair. Using the soap, Alan scrubbed her neck and her back and her side ribs, and when she lifted her arms he began soaping up her armpits and around to her chest, and then he handed the soap to me.
Vijay was smiling, and Eliza turned so that her back was facing me. Holding the sandalwood soap, I began massaging her tanned shoulders, rubbing suds across her back and upper arms, sliding it up and down her spine and down to her soft, slightly-less-tanned buttocks. I was reaching down, pressing my soapy arm against her wet skin, and she didn’t seem to mind, and I certainly didn’t mind, and I was surprised when Alan, at about that moment, told Eliza to look at me.
“Who does he look like?”
She cocked her head.
“I don’t look like anyone,” I said.
“Does he look like a movie star?”
“I’m not a movie star.”
“I’m asking her.”
“Which movie?” she said.
“Do your walk.”
I’d told him about the Steve Martin walk.
“The one where you just stand there.”
The problem was, I didn’t want to do the walk.
“Come on,” he said.
“Not now.”
The girls were looking at me, and I was looking at Eliza’s wet hair, and then Alan said, “Be yourself.”
Normally those are very calming words. Normally they precipitate ease and relaxation, but under the circumstances, what were they supposed to mean? He had decided who I was and was trying to tell me who I was, and. .
“Be myself?”
“Just do it.”
“Do what?” I said. I was about to say, “Whaddya got?”
I wanted to tell him to fuck off, but the thing about anger, it needs an object, and Alan, the object I wanted to engage my anger with, wasn’t playing along. He was standing there, squeezed between naked bodies, bemused and oblivious, and then he said, “You’re acting like a child.”
In The Wild Ones, the townspeople were scared of Marlon Brando, not because he was wild or seductive or tough, but because he was dissatisfied. He had an adolescent dissatisfaction, and the town fathers were afraid the dissatisfaction would spread. So they exercised authority. All rebellion springs from the unequal relationship of authority to non-authority — father/son, master/slave — whatever it is, the balance of power has to be unequal, and to Marlon Brando it was. He saw the inequality of power and he felt the need to protest, but because he was in a position of non-authority, he had to twist his protest, and transform his protest, and wiggle his protest into a place it could fit.
At a certain point Eliza pushed open the shower door and we all ran to the fumigated room. Someone grabbed a towel and we began drying each other, passing the towel between us, noticing as we did, the sizes of our penises and the different ways of trimming hair.
“Let’s all go to my house,” Alan said.
Alan wasn’t a father figure, and as far as I knew he wasn’t an authority on anything, but he wanted me to be something I didn’t want to be, and the only response I knew was to protest. Protest has now become passé. We’ve seen so many struggles amount to so little that we’ve become numb, convinced of the ineffectuality of protest, but sometimes all we have is protest.
Vijay and the girls were drying each other, more or less ignoring Alan’s invitation, and whether they would have been willing or not didn’t matter because, when he suggested again we go to his house, I told him I wasn’t interested.