At the Park Savoy Hotel on West 58th Street, the pay phone in the first-floor hallway was jangling. When someone picked it up, they heard Bill Liebling ask if Marlon Brando still lived there. No, Liebling was told, Marlon had left the hotel some time ago, leaving no forwarding address. But the bohemians who still lived there remembered him fondly. There was talk that he’d gone “on the road”—not with a show, but with a carload of activists fighting for a political cause.
From the window of a speeding passenger train, Marlon stared out at the rapidly changing landscapes of Pennsylvania and western New York. Everywhere, it seemed, new housing was going up, guaranteed by federal programs for qualified returning veterans, complete with the latest appliances and the requisite picket fence. Now 23 years old, Marlon was fascinated by how the world was rebuilding itself—a task he was attempting for himself as well. After three unrewarding years in the theater, disillusioned and personally drained, he had needed something to believe in, something weightier and more meaningful than the superficiality of the theater. And so, for much of the spring and summer of 1947, he’d been crisscrossing the country with the American League for a Free Palestine, advocating for a Jewish state in the Middle East.
“I am now an active and integral part of a political organization,” he wrote home proudly. “My job is to travel about the country and lecture to sympathetic groups in order to solicit money and to organize groups that will support us.” A three-week training program had left him thoroughly familiar with and committed to the ALFP’s mission. After the horrors endured by Jews during the war, Marlon believed the only moral restitution was an independent Jewish state. The Western powers had “trampled” on the Jews, he said, and it was time for the British occupiers of Palestine to return to the Jews their ancient homeland. To his family he wrote, “You wouldn’t believe the injustices and cruelties that the British Colonial Office is capable of.” He assured them he was “not being rash” in his judgment, and sent home some literature to prove what he said was true.
Marlon’s attraction to the ALFP was not surprising. Both Stella and Luther Adler were on the organization’s board. The mission of the group was the mission of Marlon’s family, his emotional family, and so, quite naturally, it also became his.