Near-great at USC; the acting career and its curdling; driven back to native Tucson

texture · ~mid-1930s-1950s B.S.

• When: UNDATED span: USC "years later" after 1933; the acting rise and fall runs from young manhood ("promising young pre-Method actor") into his son's "early formative years" (Jim is born ~B.S. 1950 — see Dating notes)
• What: On the ruined knees he "never got to wave my hankie at anything beyond the near- and almost-great and would-have-been-great-if" at USC, and "later could never even hope to audition for those swim-trunk and Brylcreem beach movies that snake Avalon is making his mint on" (scene 049; see Dating notes for the Avalon wrinkle). The E.T.A. history compresses the next decades into one clause: "a former top U.S. jr. tennis player and then promising young pre-Method actor" who "had become a disrespected and largely unemployable actor, driven back to his native Tucson AZ and dividing his remaining energies between stints as a tennis pro at ranch-type resorts and then short-run productions at something called the Desert Beat Theater Project" — by then "a dipsomaniacal tragedian progressively crippled by obsessions with death by spider-bite and by stage fright and with a bitterness of ambiguous origin but consuming intensity toward the Method school of professional acting and its more promising exponents" (scene 020). The Brando grievance is his own monologue's opening theory: his wife — who "back in California before you were born... had a bit part in a Marlon Brando movie" and loved him from afar — belongs to the "new generation that moves against life’s grain"; Brando "ruined it looks like two whole generations’ relations with their own bodies," and the anti-Method sermon (which secretly concedes Brando's genius: "playing the equivalent of high-level quality tennis across sound stages all over both coasts") is where his body-doctrine and his professional bitterness fuse. The family slides down the Tucson ladder in his own accounting: "the Club’s staff quarters I got us removed from," "the house it was clearly my fault we couldn’t afford anymore," the trailer park with the communal garage.