Marlon Brando was the original angry young man, winning an Oscar for On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan’s movie about union corruption. But anger got the better of him at the 1954 Italian premiere of the film, when he refused to watch it after discovering that his voice had been dubbed, a new book reveals.
“Why didn’t somebody tell me I was going to see a dubbed version?” he spluttered in fury in the darkened cinema. His embarrassed agent, who had expected the original English-language version, recalled him “staggering up from his seat as if from a heart attack”, frantically whispering: “Get me out of here!”
Brando could not be calmed. “I’ve never seen myself dubbed,” he reportedly said. “I’m an actor, not a ventriloquist’s dummy, for Christ’s sake. Can you imagine what it’s like to hear somebody else’s voice come out of my mouth? You feel like a goddamn freak in a sideshow. Christ, why didn’t somebody prepare me? Didn’t you guys know?”
The incident is among the revelations in a memoir by Hank Kaufman and Gene Lerner, an American couple who, having arrived in Rome from New York in 1953, became agents, friends and confidants to some of the biggest movie stars, including Anita Ekberg, Ava Gardner and Simone Signoret.
Kaufman and Lerner died in 2012 and 2004 respectively. Now their role as unsung movers and shakers of the industry in the 1950s and 1960s is being recognised with the publication of their memoir, Hollywood on the Tiber.
They wrote it in the late 1970s, but it was published only in Italian in 1982. The stars featured in its pages may have objected to revelations that reflect both the highs and lows of celebrity, described by Lerner as “toxins”. It features everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Federico Fellini.
The memoir will be published next week in English for the first time by Sticking Place Books, which specialises in publications that have been neglected. Paul Cronin, its publisher, said: “When I first encountered this book, I thought, ‘This reads like La Dolce Vita meets Call My Agent!’”
He said that, for nearly two decades, Kaufman and Lerner were intimately involved, night and day, with their clients’ ambitions, delusions, hopes and loves, on-screen and off.
In their chapter on Brando’s premiere, they write that when they escorted him to the cinema in a black Cadillac, he was “unprepared for the hysteria” from a “screaming mob” that engulfed him as he emerged from the car. Once inside, he was overwhelmed with nerves on being seated next to a 19-year-old Italian actor, Sophia Loren.
“Brando had made art out of mumble. But in no film had he yet achieved the total inarticulacy which now overcame him, nor a gasping double-take as extraordinary as the one prompted by Loren’s frontal apparatus … Marlon’s efforts not to stare were as farcical as his initial double-take. He was unable to utter a word, and outside of an occasional smile at each other, the two sat in fidgeting silence. Whenever Sophia seemed to be looking elsewhere, Marlon turned with open mouth and bulging eyes to stare at Sophia.”
When Brando tried to leave the cinema over the dubbing, Lerner warned him: “Everybody will write about your leaving. They’ll say you hated it, disowned it, whatever. They’ll write reams and say nothing about the quality of the film.”
Brando was persuaded to visit a nearby bar and sneak back into the cinema five minutes before the end of the film, so nobody would be the wiser, the agents recalled: “As the lights went up in the cinema, there was Brando standing, leaning over the mezzanine railing to acknowledge the wild applause and shouts of bravo.”
In the memoir, the couple also recall finding Ava Gardner in a “hysterical” state because her lover, the Italian actor Walter Chiari, was “hooked” on cocaine. “He sniffs the stuff. He might be on something worse,” she cried, begging them to “do something”.
They also describe the industry’s sleazy side, noting Anita Ekberg’s response to hearing that a director wanted to meet her: “What is he, another of those kind who just wants to make passes at me or ogle my body?”
When she heard Sean Connery had married Diane Cilento, Ekberg was devastated, telling Lerner: “He told me we would get married … Men take advantage. When it comes to real love, I’m always duped.”
The agents remember Shelley Winters becoming “violently jealous” when she discovered her husband, Vittorio Gassman, was playing “hanky-panky” with another actor in his dressing room: “Shelley was overcome by a mirror fetish. She smashed several against Gassman’s dressing-room walls while screaming. Fortunately … the shards of flying glass caused no injury.”
The memoir has a foreword by Sandy Lieberson, who worked alongside Kaufman and Lerner in Rome and went on to produce Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, among other films. He writes: “The myth, the legend, but also the abyss and its squalour, one full of drug addiction, unrealised dreams and sexual favours. Hollywood on the Tiber is all these things together. It is heaven and hell.”
• The headline of this article was amended on 4 January 2025 to correct a misspelling of Marlon Brando’s surname.
