Cox and Brando: As Unlikely as it Seems
In 1948, while living in New York and struggling to support his sister and invalid mother through sales of his homemade jewelry, then-23 year-old Wally Cox ventured onto the stage of the Village Vanguard for the first time to try his hand at stand-up.
His short, slight frame, thick spectacles, high, thin voice and careful enunciation screamed “nebbish” and made him a natural for comedy. The following year he appeared as a contestant on Arthur Godfrey’s nationally-broadcast radio talent show with a routine quite unlike anything anyone expected from a comedian in 1949. Instead of one-liners, he opened his routine with a monologue in the (very believable) persona of a street punk reminiscing about a slow-witted friend named Dufo who inevitably ended up seriously injured or under arrest after trying some stupid stunt or falling for a cruel prank. Cox’s street punk recounts each mishap with a smirk and the line, “What a crazy guy.” Then he turned the act on its head, yodeling (yes, yodeling) an off-rhythm rendition of “There’s a Tavern in the Town.” Although he came in second place that night, the act was so popular he recorded it and released it as a single. That same year he began taking small roles on TV, and in 1952 was offered the lead as the mild mannered junior-high science teacher Robinson Peepers in the live comedy series Mr. Peepers. Although Cox would come to hate the milquetoast role that typecast him for the rest of his career, over the show’s three year run it made him one of the most beloved and recognizable character actors in America. (As one sign of the show’s popularity, Ernie Kovacs offered a contemporary nod via his Percy Dovetonsils character, who was clearly inspired by Peepers.)
Now, around this same time Marlon Brando was establishing himself as one of America’s greatest and most powerful actors, thanks to his performances in the likes of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), The Wild One (1953) and On the Waterfront (1954).
It sounds irrelevant at first. On the surface the two men, as well as their careers, seem as different as milk and gin. They had nothing at all in common. Different as they were, what’s interesting about both men earning that kind of recognition at the same time requires going back some 20 years.
When he was very young, Cox’s divorced mother packed him and his sister up and moved from Detroit to Evanston, Illinois. There he became friends with a neighborhood kid named Marlon Brando. Brando was 8 months older than Cox and had recently moved to Evanston himself from Omaha. Both boys read a lot, were athletic, and at times, usually at Brando’s urging, more than a little wild (in one oft-told story, Brando tied Cox to a fence and left him there all night).
The friendship was short-lived, however, as Cox’s mother continued moving the family,, first to Chicago and then New York before returning once again to Detroit, where Cox graduated high school. He enlisted when America entered World War II, and after the war settled with his mother and sister back in New York. In the process of becoming a master craftsman and jewelry-maker while studying metalwork at NYU, he learned Brando was in town studying acting with Stella Adler. The two reconnected and became roommates. They lived together several years, and were still roommates when Brando took the role of Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar on Broadway. In a later interview, Cox’s sister said the seemingly incongruous pairing was based on the simple fact that Brando admired and envied Cox’s sense of humor, while Cox admired and envied Brando’s physicality and good looks.
Cox was eventually forced to move out of the apartment, having run out of all patience and tolerance for Brando’s pet raccoon Russell. The split didn’t seem to hurt the friendship much, as Brando encouraged the deceptively meek Cox to study with Adler himself. Both men would make their TV debuts in 1949—Cox on The Fireside Theater, Brando on Actors Studio—and given their personalities you have to imagine they found everything that followed absolutely hilarious.
Although their careers diverged wildly they remained strangely parallel. (In fact it always struck me that the persona Cox adopts during his “Dufo” monologue bore more than a passing resemblance to a young Brando long before anyone knew who Brando was.)
In 1953 Cox’s Mr. Peepers had become the gold standard in the public mind as the epitome of the mild mannered, mousy Everyman while Brando redefined rebel cool in The Wild One. While Brando reluctantly sang and danced in Guys and Dolls (1955), Cox recorded and released several singles, and while several books were already being written about Brando, Cox published four of his own, including a children’s book, a short memoir of his childhood, a satirical take on a Horatio Alger success story, and Mr. Peepers, what he called “a sort-of novel” consisting of adaptations of several episode scripts. Brando gave award-winning performances in films like The Young Lions, Mutiniy on the Bounty, and The Godfather. Cox, meantime, won several awards of his own (including two Emmys) for his work on sit-coms and a string of live-action Disney films. He was the voice of Underdog, and was a regular panelist on The Hollywood Squares.
Brando went on to play endlessly varied character types from longshoremen to Nazis to diplomats to cowboys, while despite Cox’s wide range of interests and talents, he found he was trapped for the most part playing variations on his Mr. Peepers role as an accountant, a librarian, a bird watcher, or a professor. But both actors remained much in demand, both remained in the public eye, and as different as their careers and personas were, their friendship remained strong. When asked about his friendship with Cox, Brando always made a point of telling interviewers that in person Cox had nothing at all in common with Robinson Peepers. He was a hiker, an electrician, a motorcycle nut, and a sharp-tongued cynic. Cox himself took things a step further, insisting he was “a terrible person” and referring to Peepers as “Mr. Goodboy.”
This dichotomy between Cox’s public and private personas did quietly sneak through in a few roles. As the lead in The adventures of Hiram Holiday (1956-1959), Cox played a quiet and studious newspaper copyeditor whose previously undiscovered talents lead him to a new career as an international superspy. Then there’s Underdog (1963-1966), the humble and lovable shoeshine boy who leads a secret double life as a superhero battling that villainous stinker Simon Bar Sinister. While playing a safe-cracker in the pilot episode of Mission: Impossible (1966) he surprised viewers with his obvious athleticism. Even in his ongoing appearance in the upper left-hand corner on Hollywood Squares he tossed Peepers out the window, ignoring the scripted responses and offering sharp, sardonic answers of his own when called upon.
A few films allowed him to display his versatile range as an actor, playing a sonar operator in the Cold War drama The Bedford Incident (1965), an obsessive and perverse toymaker/stalker pursued by Julie Newmar in the creepy dark comedy Up Your Teddy Bear (1970), and playing Adam to Marilyn Monroe’s Eve in the very last scene she ever filmed for the incompleted Something’s Got to Give (1962). But after rarities like that he was back to Peepersville, and in his penultimate role he played a, yes, mild-mannered newspaper archivist (albeit an ultimately heroic one) opposite Darren McGavin’s Carl Kolchak in The Night Strangler (1973).
Rumors of a drug overdose aside, Cox died of a heart attack in February of 1973 at age 49. His wife (his third) passed his ashes to Brando with the understanding Brando, as per Cox’s final wishes, would scatter them in the ocean. Instead, Brando took them home and kept them in a closet where he reportedly spoke to them every night. When asked why he kept the ashes, Brando replied, “He was my friend, and no one else’s.”
According to his son Miko, when Brando died in 2004, his ashes were mixed with Cox’s and those of another close friend, character actor Sam Gilman (who had appeared with Brando in six films), and all the ashes were scattered over Death Valley and Brando’s island near Tahiti.
So that chance meeting between two rambunctious neighborhood kids in the early ‘30s became a fortuitous one, resulting in one of those rare friendships that lasted a lifetime and beyond, and confused the hell out of most people.
by Jim Knipfel