A clash with the famous mumbler

Marlon Brando’s early Broadway appearances weren’t always, well, Brandoesque.

His Broadway debut was in “I Remember Mama” in 1944. Produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein, the sentimental play featured the young actor playing a teenager named Nels, growing up in a close-knit San Francisco family. Sample line for Nels, referring to a cat named Elizabeth: “It’s a very silly name for that cat. It’s a tom.” Hardly a sign of his future as the “wild one.”

Director Harold Clurman saw the play, at the recommendation of Brando’s teacher Stella Adler. Clurman was casting Maxwell Anderson’s “Truckline Cafe” (1946). Brando was up for the role -- not the lead -- of a returned soldier who kills his wife on learning of her infidelity.

Clurman initially doubted that Brando would suit the part. “He read poorly, his head sunk low on his chest as if he feared to divulge anything,” Clurman later wrote. “Yet there could be no question: He was peculiarly arresting. We decided to use him.”

Brando “mumbled for days,” Clurman recalled, and “couldn’t be heard beyond the fifth row.” One day, Clurman excused the other actors and told Brando to shout his lines. The director kept asking for more and more volume. Brando started getting angry. Suddenly Clurman ordered Brando to climb a rope that dangled from the grid while shouting his lines. Brando complied but “looked as if he were ready to hit me.” Other actors “came rushing onto the stage, alarmed at the terrifying sounds they had heard.”

Clurman then returned the scene to normal volume, and Brando “spoke up -- effortlessly,” Clurman wrote. He received “thundering ovations” when the play opened, although it lasted only 13 performances.

Later in 1946, he appeared in Shaw’s “Candida” as the romantic Marchbanks, another role hardly befitting current notions of Brando’s mystique. He was in another Broadway production, in September of 1946, a Ben Hecht pageant about Palestine called “A Flag Is Born.” One year later, it was time for “Stella!”