Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me Part 12

"We met in Tahiti."

"Where in Tahiti?"

She named a hotel in Papeete.

"We met there?"

"Indeed we did."

"Where did we meet there?"

"In your room."

"How do you remember it so well?" I asked.

"Because my room was two doors away from yours."

It turned out that one night in Tahiti I had made love to this fascinating lady, and then she had gone out of my life. Recognizing my blunder and trying to recover from it, I said, "Do you think for one minute I could ever have forgotten that night? It is embossed on my brain. I never expected to see you again. Of course I remember you; it was one of the great nights of my life!"

While I doubt that she ever truly believed me, the flirtation led to its predictable conclusion. She was a Brazilian archaeologist, a remarkable woman and a wonderful dancer; the way she set her foot down was like nothing else I've ever seen. She was beautiful and exotic, but she wanted a monogamous relations.h.i.+p, and when she realized my instincts led elsewhere, she sometimes expressed her displeasure in a volatile way. After we resumed our affair, I was in a swimming pool at a big Hollywood party with an old friend from New York, Jeff Brown, a quiet, staid fellow who I think was amazed by the baccha.n.a.lian atmosphere, and we were talking while in the pool when suddenly she came over and hit my head with the heel of her shoe. She was drunk and hit me so hard that I grabbed her and pushed her across the pool as far as I could. But my head still hurt, so I ducked underwater to make it feel better. When I came back to the surface, Jeff was looking at me. He had a broken nose. His face looked like a crushed strawberry-a huge, flattened, b.l.o.o.d.y, crushed strawberry. His mouth was wide open and he was looking at me in astonishment. "What the h.e.l.l's the matter with you?" he asked the woman, who said, "Oh, my G.o.d, who are you?"

She had recovered quickly after I pushed her, and just as I had ducked underwater, she had hauled off and tried to hit me again, but this time Jeff got it in the nose.

48.

IN SOME WAYS I think of my middle age as the f.u.c.k You Years. If I met a man who had a certain kind of overt masculinity, he became my enemy. I would find his weakness, then exploit it. I adopted his manner until I made a fool of him, which often took the form of sleeping with his wife. I used to be very vengeful. I agreed with something that George Santayana said: "To knock a thing down, especially if it is c.o.c.ked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood." I think of my middle age as the f.u.c.k You Years. If I met a man who had a certain kind of overt masculinity, he became my enemy. I would find his weakness, then exploit it. I adopted his manner until I made a fool of him, which often took the form of sleeping with his wife. I used to be very vengeful. I agreed with something that George Santayana said: "To knock a thing down, especially if it is c.o.c.ked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood."

I have a different att.i.tude now, but during those years I loved the thrill of taking certain risks: it was like rock climbing, scaling the vertical wall of a granite cliff without a safety rope, or jumping out of a plane and waiting until the last moment before pulling the ripcord, unsure that my parachute would open.

As I've observed, there was a lot of extracurricular f.u.c.king in Hollywood and Beverly Hills during the early sixties. At parties one of the popular pastimes was a variation of the kids' game of "It." The hostess turned off the lights and in pairs everybody went into hiding inside the house-and they were usually big houses. If the guests designated as "it" found you in the dark and could identify you by touch, they were no longer "it." One night I went off with the wife of a songwriter who had a little too much testosterone in his personality for my taste. While hiding with her in the darkness, I started to do what comes naturally, but she said, "No, not here, not here."

"Why not?" I asked.

"They might turn on the lights."

"So what?"

She answered, "But I'm married."

A few days later, she called and told me her husband had gone for a few days to their home in Palm Springs. We were upstairs in bed when we heard a car come up the driveway and then the garage door open and close. We knew it was him, so there wasn't anything for me to do except climb out the window. I lowered myself over the edge, grabbed some ivy hanging from the wall and tried to descend cat-burglar style to the ground, but I lost my grip and fell about seven feet into a huge bush that broke my fall and stabbed my legs with branches as sharp as spears.

For thirteen years I had an affair with a very attractive Beverly Hills woman. She is still alive, so I'll call her Lenore. Our kids grew up together, and I knew her and her husband very well. He was a physicist with a medical degree, as well as five or six others, and he owned a lot of patents that made him extremely wealthy. I used to park my car a few blocks from their house in the middle of the night and in my tennis shoes stroll leisurely down the street, vault over their back fence and open the back door, which she left unlatched for me. Her husband was usually asleep upstairs in his room, and I would walk up the back stairs, where she'd be waiting for me, sometimes in the shower. For some reason we conducted a lot of our s.e.x in the bathroom, where she was both athletic and imaginative. Then we'd either go to bed or I'd leave. Being upstairs with her husband so close by added excitement to the adventure. Before dawn I usually got up and hid under her bed in case he came in, and sometimes I would fall asleep, which was taking a chance because sometimes I snored. Lenore's children occasionally came in, and after a while they knew what was going on, but they were good soldiers about it. Since our kids used to play together, we had almost a familial relations.h.i.+p.

Lenore's husband, Arthur, was very intelligent but affected an aw-shucks persona. He pretended to be unsophisticated and said things like "Gos.h.!.+" "Gee whiz!" "Golly!" and "For heaven's sake!" On the other hand, he kept a loaded Sat.u.r.day night special in his room.

One summer night, I climbed over the fence and found the door unlatched as usual. After opening it, I turned to tighten the latch; I was supposed to lock the door after entering. While I was doing so, Arthur walked out of the kitchen and was standing two or three feet away from me in the dark when I turned around. I jumped about four feet, and he beat me by at least two feet. "Oh my gos.h.!.+" he said. "You scared me."

I was paralyzed and couldn't think of anything to say. My brain simply stopped working, though it functioned enough to remember Arthur's gun. A headline flashed through my mind: ACTOR KILLED-MIDNIGHT INTRUDER SHOT, MISTAKEN FOR BURGLAR ACTOR KILLED-MIDNIGHT INTRUDER SHOT, MISTAKEN FOR BURGLAR. It had happened to more than one playboy. After a few seconds I said the first thing that came out of my mouth: "Boy, am I glad to see you."

Then I tried to find the right face to go along with the words, whatever they meant, but there wasn't an expression I could come within a mile of, so more words came out of me like bubbles: "G.o.d, Arthur. I'm really glad to see you. I've got to talk to somebody somebody about this..." about this..."

These words flew out of my mouth as if they were coming from someone else, and I thought to myself, What are you talking about, you maniac?

Finally I said, "Arthur, can we talk?" I put my hand on his shoulder. "I've got a problem." I went on. "Can we talk?"

"Why, sure," Arthur said.

"Let's go out to the sunporch," I said. I knew the house well and that a walk to the sunporch would give me about forty-three feet and thirty seconds to come up with something to explain why I was in his house at 2:50 A.M. A.M., to say nothing about the door being unlatched.

When we got there, I slumped down in a chair, looked over at him and said gravely that one of my sons was missing from home. "Have you seen him?"

"My gosh, no."

"You haven't seen him at all today?"

"No."

Now I had a toenail grip on a theme, but only a toenail; if I made a slip, it was a straight drop about nine hundred feet down. But I gained a little more ground by saying, "You know, he's not home. I don't know where he is. He hasn't been home all day. I've been worried sick."

My son was home asleep, of course.

"Well, we sure haven't seen him around here," Arthur said sympathetically.

"I don't know whether to call the police or what," I said. "Maybe he's just out joyriding with some friends, or maybe he's in trouble, but I'm worried. The only thing I could think of was that he might be here-you know, the kids are always staying overnight with each other. I thought of telephoning, but I didn't want to wake everybody up."

Then I realized I had taken the wrong road; instead of telephoning, I had merely jumped over his fence, climbed up his driveway and opened his back door with the apparent intention of waking up the whole household. I wanted to escape from this cul-de-sac as fast as I could, but before I could say anything, Arthur said, "Well, maybe Lenore might know where he is."

"Lenore? She's probably dead asleep."

But Arthur said, "Well, gee, let me wake her up. I think she'd want to know about this..."

At that moment, Lenore came down the stairs in a s.e.xy peignoir, looking radiant, with her hair beautifully combed, ready to receive the paramour who had climbed over her fence. As she descended the stairs, she looked at Arthur and me sitting in the sunporch and burst out laughing, howling one of those laughs that go on and on and knock you to your knees. The sight of me looking up at her with my worried, second-hand Hertz-Rent-a-Face and Arthur trying to look compa.s.sionate, with his chin arched and his eyebrows pointed to the ceiling, made her explode, and she couldn't control herself. She grabbed a potted palm near the foot of the stairs, desperately trying to remain erect, choking on the sad news conveyed by my face, and still couldn't stop laughing.

My heart was pounding like a jackhammer and my blood pressure must have been 200 over 6. Why was she laughing? Was she hysterical? She couldn't possibly think the situation was amusing. There she was in her lovely nightgown, with her hair combed, at three A.M A.M. howling with laughter. How could she be behaving this way? Ignoring her laughter, I asked with a straight face if she had seen my son recently.

At this, the potted palm Lenore was clinging to fell over; she couldn't hang on to it. I was so frozen with terror that I didn't see what Arthur was doing as this was going on. I didn't dare take my eyes off the doork.n.o.b in the hall. That's where I was looking. He was on my right. She came from the left into the sunporch, and I was staring past her at the doork.n.o.b, thinking that I was going to be attacked by the same hysterics if I looked at her, so finally I said, "I don't think there's anything funny to laugh at."

Somehow, in her mind it was uproarious to see two men sitting in her sunporch in the middle of the night, especially one who was as guilty as a safecracker caught in the act, looking desperately for a reason to be in her house, and whose only excuse was, "Have you seen my son?" Eventually she stopped laughing, threw herself in a chair and said, "No, I haven't seen him." And with that Lenore, a very nimble-minded woman, launched into a performance that would have delighted Stella Adler. What temerity she demonstrated: if I had been a daredevil for jumping over her fence, imagine what she became, a collaborator and partner in bringing the escapade to a conclusion. Once she stopped laughing, she quickly grasped the picture. She could read it in our faces, and what she couldn't read, she imagined, and joined Arthur in expressing her support for me and for my fatherly concern.

Finally I said, "I'd rather not call the police. You know what I think I'll do? I'll just go home and wait. He'll come home. I'll just be patient instead of panicking. What do you think, Arthur?"

Arthur agreed that this was probably the best thing to do, so I got up and thanked them profusely while my chin quivered a little and Lenore nearly went into spasms while trying to keep from laughing.

"Where did you park your car?" Arthur asked.

"It's down around the corner," I said, and thought to myself that if I had to run into another patch of stupidity and make up another unbelievable story, I wasn't going to make it.

I said good night, and tried to reach the door as fast as I could while Arthur was saying, "Well, gosh now, you be sure to let us know..."

I walked out the door a free man, and maybe even did a little jig at the corner.

In hindsight I'm sure Arthur knew what was going on all along. Like Lenore and me, he was very good at playing a part. Eventually he killed himself, not because of Lenore or me, but because of a long illness that wasted him.

49.

AT HOME ONE NIGHT, before leaving to visit a woman in Beverly Hills whose husband was spending the night in the hospital for some tests, I ate a quart of ice cream. That wasn't unusual, but at the time I was getting ready to start a new movie and was on a strict diet, so after I ate it, I stuck my finger down my throat and threw up. (No, I am not a bulimic, but occasionally I do things like that.) The vomit was pink, but it didn't alarm me, and I drove down Benedict Canyon to my friend's house. After Sylvia and I did the usual wrestling around, we watched television until she got sleepy and went upstairs to bed. I finished watching the program, then got up to go home, but suddenly felt as if I were standing on the edge of a trembling precipice, inches from falling into the void. Through the fragile mists of overwhelming dizziness, I remembered the pink vomit and thought, Uh, oh, I must be bleeding internally.

I knew I needed help, so I crawled up the stairs on all fours to Sylvia's bedroom; it was a narrow spiral staircase that was almost vertical, and I can still see the fuzzy carpeting looking up at me a few millimeters from my nose. All the while I kept thinking, If I die here, her husband's going to know what she's been doing. Then the same voice in my head said, Finally, Marlon, somebody's going to make you pay for your sins.

I struggled up the spiral staircase one step at a time, then crawled down the hall to the side of Sylvia's bed and said, "You've got to get me to a doctor, I'm sick."

We both understood the situation: if I pa.s.sed out there, she'd have to call the paramedics and her husband would discover I had been in the house at three A.M A.M. If she took me to the hospital, people would see her with me. If I died, it would be even worse. Sylvia did something rather brave that I'll always be grateful for; without a beat, she said she was taking me to the hospital. Maybe she didn't have much choice, but she saved my life and it was courageous of her. She drove me to the UCLA Hospital, where emergency-room nurses sat me on a gurney and started asking me questions. A doctor came in, asked more questions, shook his head and said he didn't think anything was seriously wrong with me.

"Doctor," I said, "I'll tell you what's wrong with me. I'm bleeding internally. Stick a tube down my throat into my stomach, and you'll see that there's blood in there."

"Well, we're not certain of that."

"You'll never know until you try it," I answered.

They did what I suggested and pulled out a lot of black fluid from my stomach. I suspected I had split my esophagus doing my imitation of a bulimic, so by then I must have been bleeding internally for at least four hours.

"What happens if you can't stop the bleeding?" I asked.

"We'll take you upstairs and operate on you."

"How can you operate on me if I'm already going into shock?"

"Well, we don't know how much blood you've lost, so we're going to pump your stomach." They pumped the blood out, then pumped ice water down my esophagus, which stopped the bleeding. The next day they ran a tube with a camera lens down my throat and confirmed what I had thought: there was a tear in my esophagus. They put me on soft foods for ten days, and I was fine, but the experience left me with a herniated esophagus, which in later years I've tried to control with biofeedback and meditation.

I've gone on and off diets for years, usually before starting a new movie. When I have to lose weight, I can do it. It wasn't unusual to drop thirty-five or forty pounds before a picture. I ate less, exercised more and it came off. The hard part was putting myself in the right psychological mode, so that eating stopped serving as an avenue of pleasure. I'm not fat by nature. I got fat mostly because I loved brownies, ice cream and everything else that makes you fat. One reason for this, I suspect, is that when I was a kid, I'd come home from school to find my mother gone and the dishes in the sink. I'd feel low and open the icebox, and there would be an apple pie, along with some cheese, and the pie would say: "C'mon, Marlon, take me out. I'm freezing in here. Be a pal and take me out, and bring out Charlie Cheese, too." Then I'd feel less lonely.

Food has always been my friend. When I wanted to feel better or had a crisis in my life, I opened the icebox. Most of my life, I weighed about 170 pounds, though when I had my nervous breakdown in New York, I dropped to 157. After forty, my metabolism s.h.i.+fted gears, but I kept eating as much as ever while spending more and more time in a sedentary relations.h.i.+p with a good book.

There probably isn't a diet I haven't tried. During the seventies, one of them limited me to a quart of lemon juice and a few ounces of feta cheese daily. After spending the night at a woman's house in Santa Monica while on this diet, I woke up after she'd gone out to do some errands and had a terrible pain deep in my stomach. I drove home, swallowed some antacid pills and fell asleep even though I was almost doubled up with pain. When I woke up an hour or so later, I had a bad case of diarrhea and threw up. My vomit was black, so was my stool, and I felt dizzy. I didn't know what was wrong, but I had the presence of mind to know I should do something before I pa.s.sed out. I went to the bedroom to call for help and distinctly remember asking myself, after I fell face first on it, What is the telephone doing down here? Falling down must have provided my brain with enough blood to keep me going because I managed to tell the telephone operator that I was afraid I might pa.s.s out while we were speaking, gave her my name, address and telephone number in case I did, then asked her to call my psychiatrist and tell him I needed help. He drove over, and as he walked me to his car all I could think of was that he wasn't strong enough to pick me up if I lost consciousness. Finally, as we were driving to the hospital, I realized I must have a bad case of internal bleeding again; I hadn't eaten anything except lemon juice and feta cheese for three weeks, and the acidic citrus juice must have cut a hole in my stomach.

By the time the doctor got me to the hospital, I'd lost half my blood. My blood type is O-positive, and for some reason the nurses couldn't find any supplies of it; if I remember correctly, all the O-positive blood was frozen. They sat me up on a bedpan and took my blood pressure every two or three minutes. I suspected I was in shock and dying from a loss of blood. From the way the nurses acted, I also suspected they were worried that I could go any second. They were overly polite, talked a little too loud and moved a little too rapidly while a.s.suring me that everything was going to be all right. When Alice, my secretary, arrived at the hospital, I saw fear in her eyes. A doctor gave me several injections, and after what seemed like an hour or more, they came up with the blood needed for my transfusion. Once they did, I was okay. Later Alice said the doctors had told her I came within inches of dying. She also swears she saw me praying in the emergency room, but I've never believed her.

50.

NONE OF US EVER EVER fully understands the psychological forces that motivate us, nor can we-not yet, at least-understand all the biochemical reactions that occur in our brains and direct us to make one choice rather than another, to follow one path and spurn others. But I think one thing is certain: everything we do is a product of these biochemical reactions. As Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, wrote recently, "'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal ident.i.ty and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast a.s.sembly of nerve cells and their a.s.sociated molecules." fully understands the psychological forces that motivate us, nor can we-not yet, at least-understand all the biochemical reactions that occur in our brains and direct us to make one choice rather than another, to follow one path and spurn others. But I think one thing is certain: everything we do is a product of these biochemical reactions. As Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, wrote recently, "'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal ident.i.ty and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast a.s.sembly of nerve cells and their a.s.sociated molecules."

It is risky, even foolhardy, to ascribe adult behavior to a single event or even a series of events in childhood; there are more grays in the palette of human behavior than blacks and whites, and I know this. But as I grew older and pursued one exotic, dark-skinned woman after another, I couldn't help but wonder if I wasn't always trying to replace Ermi, my governess, whose soft, dusky skin has seldom been far from my mind since I was seven. She was the ideal embedded in the emotional concrete of my soul. Once I lost her, I suppose I spent most of the rest of my life trying to find her. Along with my mother, Ermi may also have had a lot to do with my refusal-or was it my inability?-to trust women after I grew up. If you've never had warmth, love or affection, it is hard to give it, or if you've had it and it has been stolen from you, if you think you've been rejected and abandoned, you fear being hurt again. My mother abandoned me for a bottle when I was little more than an infant; then Ermi deserted me. True, she was simply leaving to live her own life and to get married, but to my seven-year-old mind, after having lived with her so intimately, after devoting my young life to her, after being abandoned by the only other woman in my world, her disappearance was desertion, and my world collapsed.

After that, I always wanted several women in my life at the same time as an emotional insurance policy to protect myself from being hurt again. Because I didn't want to be hurt again, I found it difficult to love and to trust. So, like a vaudeville juggler spinning a half-dozen plates at once, I always tried to keep several romances going at the same time; that way, if one woman left me there would still be four or five others.

I enjoyed the women's company, but a someone named Harvey was always standing in the corner, an invisible rabbit called a relations.h.i.+p. All but a few women wanted me to promise that their love would be returned in equal measure, and that it would be forever and undying. Sometimes I told them what they wanted to hear, but I have always thought that the concepts of monogamy, fidelity and everlasting love were contrary to man's fundamental nature. Sure, adolescent, childish myths tell us what love ought to be, and so do the songs we sing; they all proclaim one way or another: I love you...you love me...we're going to love each other forever...I'm going to love you till I die and after I die I'm still going to love you, until you die and we're together again in heaven. The songs are part of our cultural mythology, promulgating values that collide with our fundamental nature, which is the product of billions of years of evolution.

I don't think I was constructed to be monogamous. I don't think it's the nature of any any man to be monogamous. Chimps, our closest relatives, are not monogamous; neither are gorillas or baboons. Human nature is no more monogamous than theirs. In every human culture men are propelled by genetically ordained impulses over which they have no control to distribute their seed into as many females as possible. s.e.x is the primal force of our and every other species. Our strongest urge of all is to replicate our genes and perpetuate our species. We are helpless against it, and are programmed to do as we do. There may be variations from culture to culture, but whether it is in Margaret Mead's Samoa or modern Manhattan, our genetic composition makes our s.e.xual behavior irresistible. man to be monogamous. Chimps, our closest relatives, are not monogamous; neither are gorillas or baboons. Human nature is no more monogamous than theirs. In every human culture men are propelled by genetically ordained impulses over which they have no control to distribute their seed into as many females as possible. s.e.x is the primal force of our and every other species. Our strongest urge of all is to replicate our genes and perpetuate our species. We are helpless against it, and are programmed to do as we do. There may be variations from culture to culture, but whether it is in Margaret Mead's Samoa or modern Manhattan, our genetic composition makes our s.e.xual behavior irresistible.

Although I let some women believe I loved them-and in some cases I may have meant it at the time-there was one woman I loved more than any other.

I was in my early forties when I met Weonna in Rome. She had a part in Candy Candy and was with a friend of mine. He and I had the same rivalry I'd had with Carlo Fiore; we both tried to seduce each other's girl. After he introduced me to Weonna in a hotel lobby, he went off and I put it to her succinctly. and was with a friend of mine. He and I had the same rivalry I'd had with Carlo Fiore; we both tried to seduce each other's girl. After he introduced me to Weonna in a hotel lobby, he went off and I put it to her succinctly.

"Why don't we go upstairs and f.u.c.k?" She answered, "Why not? Let's go!"

That was the beginning and the end of the seduction.

Weonna was born only about a hundred miles from my birthplace. She had written a little, done some acting, modeled for a while, made some money in real estate. She was an extraordinary piece of construction, with white skin, soft, natural blond hair, freckles, a lot of moles, green eyes, and a voice with the slightest hint of an Irish accent, a hand-me-down from her mother, who was from Ireland. She made me laugh harder than any woman I've ever known. She was quick to understand and laughed at me a lot, too. Like my mother and grandmother, she had a sense of the absurd, thought the outrageous and imposed no limits on her imagination. She was amusing, witty, intelligent, eccentric. But she was also troubled. She distrusted people, drank too much and occasionally used drugs-not hard drugs, but pills. It was spasmodic; she would use them awhile, then swear off them, be clean for a while, then start again, and I'd have to take her to a hospital because it was the only place where she could stop. Still, we had a lot of fun together, and even now I often laugh at what we laughed at then.

One night I took Weonna on a mission to steal a stack of pipe, and before the night was over, she nearly had a heart attack. Not far from where I lived in California, a large parcel of land owned by the Teamsters' Union had remained undeveloped for years while contractors erected houses all around it; and if I didn't feel like going to sleep yet, sometimes I'd drive over there in my Jeep and cruise around the property with my lights out for the fun of it. One day construction crews arrived, set up equipment on the property and started work on what looked like a big development. But after a while, everything stopped abruptly and the workers left, leaving behind stacks of building materials, including a pile of three-inch irrigation pipe. I was doing some work on my house and needed some pipe, so I took Weonna to the site at about two A.M. A.M., hooked up my Jeep's winch to several pieces of pipe and began reeling it in. Within a few minutes, a helicopter was overhead sweeping a bright spotlight back and forth across the construction site. I dropped my pipe wrench, and when the wavering cone of light settled on the Jeep, I waved frantically to it, as if to say, "Please come down here, I need help."

I had no idea what I was going to say to the cops, but it was the first thing I could think of. Then an amplified voice boomed out of the sky: "Stay where you are. Do not move. You are under police surveillance."

I kept waving and smiling like a stranded sailor who has been spotted by a pa.s.sing s.h.i.+p after spending half his life on a desert island. A minute or two later, a police car with flas.h.i.+ng lights skidded to a stop about fifty feet from us.

Among the problems I had to deal with was the fact that the cable from the winch on my Jeep was still attached to the stack of pipe. I whispered to Weonna, "Whatever I say, agree with me. Agree with me when I tell them what happened. We're going to have to tell a few lies."

"I'm not lying," she said. "You're "You're the one who got us into this, and I'm not going to be part of it." the one who got us into this, and I'm not going to be part of it."

I thought her disloyalty unbecoming, but I didn't get a chance to argue with her, for just as I was about to say something, the police car hit us with a spotlight and neither of us could see anything. I tried to put a look of happy relief on my face and hollered, "Thank G.o.d you found us! I thought we'd be here all night."

When they saw that a woman was with me it apparently eased the cops' sense of alarm, and one of them approached the Jeep. I thanked him profusely and said, "I took a wrong turn on Mulholland and ended up out here in the boondocks and got stuck in the sand. I tried to use the winch by tying up to that stack of pipe to see if I could bootstrap myself out, but the wheels kept spinning. Would you call a tow truck to get us out of here? I'd be very grateful."

All the while, I was hoping he wouldn't look at the ground, because if had he would have realized that no one could get stuck in a quarter inch of sand. He started walking back to the police car to call a tow truck, but before he'd taken four steps, I said, "Wait a minute, Officer. Before you call, maybe I should try it one more time."

I started the Jeep, pressed the throttle all the way to the floor until the engine roared like a thres.h.i.+ng machine at harvest time, then put it in gear and let out the clutch very slowly with one foot still firmly on the brake. The Jeep shook, shuddered, rocked and slowly started to move as I let out the clutch. After I'd driven a few feet, I got out and told the officer, "I think I made it. Boy, that was lucky. Thanks a lot, I really appreciate your help. I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't come."

He accepted my thanks and drove away. I followed him back to the road and we went in opposite directions on Mulholland Drive while Weonna's cold silence let me know what she thought of me. I was feeling really pleased with myself until in my mirror I saw the police car do a U-turn and start coming after us. Oh, s.h.i.+t, I thought, he's figured it out.

The car raced up behind us with its flas.h.i.+ng lights and I stopped. By now Weonna was bug-eyed, almost shaking. One of the policemen came over to my window with a flashlight and said, "You know, Mr. Brando, my wife would never forgive me for not getting your autograph."