Every time Marlon Brando hired a new secretary, he would inform her that he was crazy and an S- addict. It may or may not have been a joke, depending on who was asked. The considered best actor in history lived a life of excesses in which he consumed food and alcohol with the same compulsiveness. He defined himself as having women constantly coming through the door and out the window".
Brando always did what he wanted. He was one of the first public figures to admit to having had S- relationships. He drove all the directors crazy about him. He had eleven (legitimate) children. He bought himself an island. He was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood precisely because he was free to do whatever he wanted without being accountable to anyone. But that privilege never satisfied an inner void that he had been carrying since he was four years old.
Marlon Brando never got over his mother's abandonment
"When my mother drank she gave off a sweetness to her breath that she can't find the vocabulary to describe," Brando recounted. As a child, he used to go with his sisters to the town bar to look for his mother. She was a modern woman for his day: she smoked, wore pants, and drove. But Brando would confess that the greatest sadness in her life comes from the fact that she "would rather drink than take care of us". When he was a child, he developed a talent for imitation (of cows and mules) because he managed to distract his mother from drinking.
When the mother left the family for some time, a nanny named Ermie took care of Marlon. They used to sleep together and N-. One night, when he was four years old, they had a San- experience: the boy sat on the woman and, as he would remember years later, "I felt that she was only mine." From that night, Brando would recognize in his memories 'Songs My Mother Taught Me' that he spent the rest of his life looking for Ermie.
Many of his partners and lovers were Latina or Oriental because Ermie was of Indonesian descent. When he got married, the nanny stopped working and Marlon felt abandoned by a woman for the second time. He was left alone with his father, an alcoholic who only touched him to hit him and who only spoke to him to tell him that he was not going to get anywhere in life. So he ran away from home without even finishing high school.
Brando didn't start acting out of vocation but on the rebound (his sister did long to be an actress), but as soon as he debuted he had such a natural talent that everyone congratulated him. It was the first time in his life that he felt valid. That's why he decided to make a career in acting. When Tennessee Williams was looking for his Stanley Kowalski from "A Streetcar Named Desire," the play's director Elia Kazan was so intent on getting Brando the part that he gave the actor $20 for a bus ticket to New York. Brando spent it on food and partying and hitchhiked to New York.
The best actor of all time
His ravenous, reckless, and visceral magnetism in the Broadway play made him a national star before making his film debut. Brando simply changed the way of interpreting: behind was the polished and imposed declamation, to make way for a hasty, crude, and even stammering naturalness. Brando was the first actor in history to appear in a movie speaking like a normal person, not an actor.
His lifestyle was also far from that of the Hollywood stars of the time. He binged on food (one of his favorites was drinking melted ice cream until he vomited), went to black bars in public, and had parties at his house where everyone had to go N-. He, as a host, walked around with a lily on his behind. Every time he hired a new secretary he would inform her: "you should know that I am crazy and also that I am addicted to S-."
He had relationships with Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner, and, according to rumors, also with James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Cary Grant. "Brando would F- anybody," recounted music producer Quincy Jones a couple of years ago. "He F- a post box, James Baldwin, Richard Pryor, Marvin Gaye." Richard Pryor's widow downplayed the matter: "It was the 70s, with enough cocaine you could F- a radiator and send flowers the next day." He would admit in 1976 to having slept with men, "now that no one cares anymore."
His S- compulsion, which led him to have relationships with several different people each day, was indiscriminate, but in his long-term relationships, Brando was with several women who suffered from mental health problems. Several of his partners attempted suicide. Among them, the actress of 'West Side Story' Rita Moreno after undergoing an abortion of the child she was expecting with Brando.
Marlon Brando didn't care about his career
After his mother died in 1954, Brando stopped caring. He no longer had anyone to impress, his mother's approval was the only thing that mattered to him and everyone else idolized him. Especially James Dean, a young actor who became obsessed with him and went around bragging about the cigarette burns all over his body that Brando had given him. It has never been made clear what kind of relationship they had, although several Dean biographies maintain that it was a sadomasochistic one.
At the peak of his power, he founded a production company and put his father in charge of him just to insult him, belittle him, and pay for the grudge that he continued to feel against him.
That 1954 he gave one of the most emblematic interpretations of his career, 'The Law of Silence', which gave him his first Oscar and became the stage where almost all the actors in the world would look. Brando despised the cinema. On one hand, he hated the frivolity of the industry and on the other hand, he hated seeing himself on screen. When he saw 'The Law of Silence' he felt "a complete failure" and left the room halfway. In addition, he considered the theater the most worthy artistic expression. But after that 1954 he never got on stage again.
In addition to Dean, Elvis Presley was also influenced by the Brando aesthetic (immortalized in iconography by the sultry biker look of 'Savage'), with his quiff, leather jackets, and scowl. But above all because of his attitude, which could be summed up in a phrase from 'Savage': "Nobody is going to tell me what I have to do." In the 1950s it was profoundly subversive: Marlon Brando was rock n roll before rock n roll was invented.
A family tragedy of Marlon Brando
In 1987 his daughter Cheyenne was dating a man named Dag Drollet. She told her brother Christian about her being mistreated by Dag, so the two men got into an altercation that ended with Christian shooting Dag to death. Christian Brando maintained it was an accident and reached a plea bargain, but the incident thrust Cheyenne into dark years of alcohol, drugs, and schizophrenia. In 1995 she committed suicide by hanging herself in her mother's house.
A nightmare on set
Being above good and evil, Brando settled down and stopped learning his scripts. He said it was because if they put up posters with the key ideas of the dialogue, he could express himself much more naturally, but his fights with the directors and co-stars gave him a reputation as an impossible actor that was only going to grow over the years.
In the middle of filming 'Apocalypse Now (1979) (which he arrived, of course, weeks later than planned) he rebelled against all his scenes, shaved his head to zero without notifying anyone, and demanded that they only focus on him in the shadows and from down to hide an overweight that made him self-conscious. His voracity with food led him to weigh 140 kilos. With them, he appeared in 'The Island of Doctor Moureau' (1996), another hellish shoot in which Brando decided that his character was going to carry a bucket on her head so that she could throw ice cubes inside between takes. He was hot.
That eccentricity culminated in the 1973 Oscars when Brando sent an Indian activist to reject the statuette in protest of the treatment of Native Americans in Hollywood. Then it was discovered that she was a Mexican actress. Brando spent his later years hanging out at his friend Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch and arguing with people online about political issues. His anonymous account was suspended in various forums for insulting anyone who contradicted him.
Marlon Brando's defiant and hostile attitude always stemmed from a deep grudge against the world. He considered that life had treated him badly and therefore he had the right to pay it back. His psychological pattern was that of a child with a complex. The trauma of the double abandonment of his two maternal figures pushed him to behave without respect for authority or the consequences of his actions. And he knew that there is nothing more powerful than placing himself above everything, but secretly he was not. "Journalists can hit you every day and you can't fight back," he wrote in his memoir. "I was very convincing in my nonchalant pose, but I was very sensitive and in a lot of pain."
