Marlon Brando was an endlessly fascinating man, and in fact, he is one of the most interesting men to ever grace the silver screen, starting out as the star of movies like A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, only to become a mumbling mess with a penchant for mooning his colleagues.
His career was full of ups and downs, from the disastrous Candy, in which he played an Indian guru (brownface and all), or the awful The Island of Dr Moreau, to The Godfather, widely declared one of the best films ever made, but for all of his mistakes, he had plenty of hits to make up for it, and his influence on practically every actor who has followed in his footsteps has been remarkable, his face an indelible image of a changing American cinema.
Off-screen, Brando could be moody, argumentative, lazy and reluctant to learn his lines, and he got up to all sorts of odd scrapes during his time. Whether he was trying to get a circumcision without anaesthetic, believing that he could curb all pain using just his mind, eating frogs, or gifting necklaces made out of human scalps, Brando was certainly a strange character.
Perhaps the pressures of fame got to his head a bit, or maybe he was just wired this crazy way; regardless, he didn’t half have a ton of stories to keep people entertained, and the one where he was mistaken for a plane hijacker is a pretty good one. Only an actor like Brando – or maybe Dennis Hopper – could have such a good plane-related story.
In Conversations with Brando by Lawrence Grobel, the actor revealed that he was on his way home, “dragging my poor ass to the plane in Los Angeles. It was National Airlines, the only connecting flight to Barranquilla for three days,” when a misunderstanding between him and the staff caused some significant issues.
“As I got on the plane, I said, ‘Are you sure this is the flight to Havana?’ The hostess was tired. She didn’t say anything, she just went over and said, ‘We’ve got a wisenheimer on here who wants to know if this is the flight to Havana,'” Brando said.
“The pilot said, ‘Get him off the flight.’ I couldn’t believe my ears. I said, ‘I’m awfully sorry.’ She said, ‘You get off this flight, or I’m going to have the FBI man here in a minute.’ I had a beard so she didn’t know who the fuck I was.” It seems pretty alarming that the FBI were called to mind so fast, simply because Brando asked a question about the flight, but at least security was tight.
Clearly, being a Hollywood star isn’t enough to stop you from being mistaken for a criminal – even if you’re the one and only Marlon Brando. Once he ran past the guy on the counter, as fast as “a sonofabitch,” Brando was informed that the whole thing was a big “misunderstanding.” Yet, he wasn’t going to acquiesce and get on the plane after he’d been accused of being a potential hijacker.
“Then, of course, it appeared in the papers and all that shit. But I got three extra days out of it that I never would have gotten. Oh, I was never so glad. That was just wonderful,” he concluded. Swings and roundabouts, I guess.
