Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Meal Ticket: My Lunch with Marlon Brando

Wayne Peter Liebman: My name is Wayne Liebman, I was born in L.A. where I still live, and this happened many years ago when I was an intern in surgery at UCLA Medical Center, which is now called the David Geffen School of Medicine. It was another time and being a surgical intern was like being a P.O.W. You slept very little, you had no time, you essentially lived at the hospital. So one afternoon I was hanging out at the nurse’s station on 7 East with the nurses and behind me a couple of them started tittering and saying, No, it’s him! It’s him! It’s Marlon Brando! And this made no sense to me because I knew all the patients on the ward and Marlon Brando wasn’t one of them. But I looked down the hall and there was a man shabbily dressed leaning against the wall outside the room of a patient who’d just gone down for a kidney transplant and it was most definitely Brando.

At this point in my life, I was very unhappy. I had begun transitioning away from medicine thinking it had been a very big error.

And I had started taking acting classes in my last year of medical school but being an intern had put a stop to that for a time which made me feel even more like a prisoner.

And so I just watched him and... And then he started slowly walking toward the nurse’s station. And I completely froze. I didn’t I didn’t know what to do. And very politely, in a subdued tone, said, Excuse me, but is there a place away from the cafeteria I can get something to eat? I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to formulate an answer to that question, but the clerk, who was a big strapping guy, very gentle, was completely unfazed and he looked Brando in the eye and said, No there isn’t, which was true, and Brando, disappointed, nodded and walked back to his spot. And this idea began forming in my head, which was very scary, but I said to myself, Wayne, do you want to meet Marlon Brando?

So I waited a minute and the conversation at the nurse’s station started up again and very casually I walked over to where Brando was, and I said, You know, I heard your question, and I was just going down to the cafeteria to get my lunch. Would you like me to bring you back something to eat? And his expression, which had been kind of closed, changed. He broke into this big smile, he got very warm and grateful, and he said, Oh, and then he read my name tag, Dr. Liebman, that would be wonderful, thank you. And I said, Great, I’ll be right back.

And I didn’t want to wait for the elevator so I ducked into a stairwell and ran down seven flight of stairs, into the cafeteria, which was very crowded, I was bumping into people and realized Brando was right to not want to come down there and I grabbed a tray and started piling things into it because I had no idea what he would want to eat. But I had these meal cards and whatever we could put on tray was free. You just gave the cashier the card when you were done. And I’m thinking to myself, Marlon Brando, Oh, my God, and I got sandwiches and fruit and jello and pie – this ridiculous pile of food, and I paid for it with the card and I ran to the stairwell, ran up seven flights of stairs, praying he would still be there, and I stopped on a landing at the seventh floor, completely out of breath, and I couldn’t go in because I didn’t want him to see me out of breath, so I waited – a minute, two minutes, three minutes, until I calmed down and I could talk normally, and all the time I’m thinking, please be there, just be there. And I casually opened the door and he was right where I left him. And I carried the tray over to where he was, and his eyes lit up when he saw the food and I thought, This pile of food looks so stupid, and I began to explain about the meal card, and said, Hey, take whatever you like. And suddenly he got really shy, and he said, Dr. Liebman, would you have time to have lunch with me? And I said, Yeah, sure.

So we walked into the waiting room which was empty and we sat down on a couple chairs with the tray on a chair between us and we began picking things off the tray and eating this huge lunch. And I wanted to say, Do you know what you mean to me, do you know when I saw STREETCAR, my mind exploded? Which I didn’t, because all he wanted to do was talk about was kidney transplants. It turned out he was a friend of the patient getting a new kidney and he wanted to know about rejection, and white blood cells, and antibodies and a lot of things I didn’t know anything about, or not very much, so I just told him answers that I had read about in medical school. And then he would think about what I said and he would reach across and finger my white coat and caress it with his fingers and said, Now, Dr. Liebman, can you tell me this, can you tell me that, and he was giving me this degree of respect that you reserve for an expert, which I completely didn’t deserve, but it didn’t seem to matter because I was his expert, even though to my mind I was only giving him crumbs. And we went on this way, back and forth this way for maybe twenty minutes, til I had told him everything I knew that had to do with kidney transplants.

And it was so strange. I wanted to tell him about my life and how much I wanted to act and that I didn’t want to be a doctor. And that would have been so wrong. And so I just kept on being a doctor I didn’t want to be and he kept being this shy, seductive kid asking these questions that he really wanted to figure out, until there was a natural end to it. And I got up to go and said it had been nice chatting and at that point he reached into his pocket and he got out his wallet and said, How much do I owe you? And the answer to that was Nothing, because I had used the meal card. So I said, I can’t take your money, because I really couldn’t, not because of who he was, but because it was wrong. But it came out wrong. I didn’t know how to say it. And I began to explain about the meal card and how it was all free, but the spell was broken, and I’ll never forget the instant where I saw in his eye, Ohhh, you know who I am. (Laughs)

How could anybody not know?

And I wanted to defend myself, and say, No, it’s not because I know who you are. I’m not gonna let you pay me, it’s because of who I am and I’m not gonna take money that doesn’t belong to me. But I realized it was useless. It was like the moment in the cartoon where the character’s running and he runs off the cliff but he doesn’t know it and so he keeps running on air and everything’s fine until he looks down and then he falls. And I got really embarrassed and felt kind of ashamed and so I excused myself and mumbled, I gotta go, and I very awkwardly just got out of there.

A couple years later I told the story to Peggy Feury, who was my then-acting teacher. And I mentioned I felt bad at the way the encounter had ended, that Brando thought ill of me or thought that I had been manipulative. And Peggy said, “No, don’t feel bad. How it ended wasn’t the point. Do you realize what a gift you gave him?” And I guess I didn’t until many years later, when it occurred to me she was right. When Brando got that look in his eye, it meant for him that he now had to go back to being Marlon Brando again, which he didn’t want. He would have preferred the scene we were playing, where I was the doctor, and he was the friend of the patient, to keep going. But now it was as if someone had said, “Cut,” and it wouldn’t work anymore.

Recently I was doing a reading of a play I had written, and Dustin Hoffman was in the cast, and during rehearsal we took a break for lunch and we were all sitting around telling stories and somebody said, Wayne, tell that one about when you met Brando. And Dustin said, You met Brando? Brando was God. So I told the story, and Dustin, who had never met Brando, said, That’s right, that rings true, that’s how he was. He never appreciated his own talent.

So I guess for two guys who really didn’t want to be what they were, it was a fair exchange. And that was my lunch with Marlon.