WOW! This is big. How many of us know that the man who trailed a blaze for a great many Hollywood actors for keeping it brutally real, both on stage and in front of the camera, the incomparable Marlon Brando, once visited Karachi?

Not many, for sure. Well, he was here in 1965, a phase in his life when he was going through a bit of a lean patch in terms of box office success.

Marlon touched down in the city on March 21, 1965, from Beirut. Despite the fact that he was a ‘difficult’ person who was often accused of being ‘full of himself’ (why not?), he met pen-pushers at the Hotel Intercontinental, where he was staying… and was in his element.

His interview that got published on March 22 had a very interesting tone to it. It seemed that Marlon laced his answers with witticisms that perhaps got lost on the interviewer, and occasional serious assertions which gave away the fact that he was a politically and socially aware artist.

Marlon said he intended to make a film in Pakistan which would be based on a novel that he hadn’t read. Trust him. Directed by the critically acclaimed John Huston and co-starring Richard Burton, the movie would be shot in Peshawar and Lahore, he enthused. As for what character he would play in the film, Marlon’s reply was predictable:

“I will play the king.” When the woman interviewer asked who would play the part of the leading lady in the project, the two-time Oscar winning actor remarked: “She may be you.”

In Karachi Marlon visited the Quaid-i-Azam’s mausoleum and called it a ‘fascinating edifice’.

He found the city ‘stimulating’ and commented, “People in Karachi are of a different type. They talk and dress differently. Women wear burqas and cover their faces and men wear shirts out of their pants.”

It took him only a few hours to realise that “people in Pakistan enjoy voting rights, unlike in the southern part of the US where the blacks did not enjoy the same rights as people in other parts of the country”.

Responding to the question about how long he wanted to stay in Pakistan, Marlon said: “As I see things, it may last for six months.”

Of course, Marlon being Marlon, it didn’t take him that long to stay put in Pakistan. Perhaps he (famously) needed ‘some room to swing a cat’. Or someone else may have made him an ‘offer he couldn’t refuse’, and left Pakistan.

Ironically, a day earlier, March 20, another American artist was in Karachi: the pianist Ann Schein. In fact, Ann gave a wonderful exhibition of her art at the same hotel where the star of A Street Car Named Desire, On the Waterfront and The Last Tango in Paris stayed, playing compositions by classical European and American composers. But the news of Marlon’s presence eclipsed everything else that week, in the realm of art, that is.

In those days, American artists came to Pakistan more frequently than their diplomats, understandably so, which was why the Pak-American Cultural Centre (PACC) used to be a very active institute… not that it isn’t today.

On March 16, the PACC hosted a sculpture show of the then young Rabia Zuberi, who went on to become one of the country’s leading artists. There were 50 artworks on display, mostly in terracotta and plaster of Paris. Four of them were cement sculptures and two were done in stone, moulded in the traditional figurative style. The exhibition was very well received.

Published in Dawn, March 16th, 2015

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