BERLIN — The Iraqi immigrant's dream of meeting his Hollywood hero is a small-world story with a cruel-world ending.
Salah ben Ghaly, a former Baghdad theater director who now sells Middle Eastern fast food on a bustling corner here in the German capital, was the guinea pig for an experiment conducted by the cerebral weekly newspaper Die Zeit over the last six months. The project sought to prove sociologist Stanley Milgram's hypothesis about six degrees of separation--the idea that any person on Earth can be linked to any other by six or fewer acquaintances.
Ben Ghaly was asked to whom he would most like to be connected by a global chain of friends, co-workers or family. He chose actor Marlon Brando, describing the star of "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "The Godfather" as a fellow thespian who surely could become a soul mate.
"We all groaned when he said that because we know Brando is not the kind of person to do things for fun. But we told him he could pick anybody, so we had to give it a try," said Heike Faller, the journalist for Die Zeit who has written eight of the 13 progress reports that kept the prestigious Hamburg weekly's 450,000 readers on the trail to Ben Ghaly's idol.
In the course of the storytelling, the newspaper also recalled Brando's screen roles, described the lives of the intervening characters and even provided Ben Ghaly's secret recipe for falafel.
The 45-year-old Ben Ghaly, who fled war-ravaged Iraq in 1985 to seek his fortune in Germany--first in the theater but later more successfully selling falafel--said he chose Brando because the international star is strong, gritty and unabashed about showing his body and soul before the cameras.
The fast-food wizard helped with the first step by putting Die Zeit in touch with his former theater colleague, Asaad Hashimi, a 57-year-old computer expert who moved to Irvine with his German wife five years ago.
According to the newspaper, Hashimi combed through his contacts and eventually hit upon Ken Carlson of Los Feliz, a 27-year-old acquaintance from a fitness club in the office building where both work. Carlson's girlfriend, Michelle Bevan--a German-speaking travel agent--was able to bring them a step closer by putting them in touch with her old sorority sister, Christina Kutzer, the paper reported.
Kutzer is the daughter of movie producer Patrick Palmer, whose 1995 film "Don Juan de Marco" starred Brando.
