The report continued, intriguingly: “The ashes of Brando’s late friend Wally Cox, who died in 1973, were also poured onto the desert landscape as part of the same ceremony; how Cox’s ashes were in the possession of Brando’s family was unknown.”
It is hard to credit that neither the agency nor the papers knew that Cox, a comedian, had been Brando’s long-term lover. But such was the strength of the macho heterosexual myth surrounding the actor that he had to be protected even after his death.
What the media may be excused for not knowing is that Brando not only kept his friend’s ashes for more than 30 years but, when lonely, would sometimes dine à deux with the urn, holding conversations in which he would perfectly imitate Cox’s voice. He left instructions that after his own death their ashes should be mingled and scattered together.
The media may also be excused for not knowing that Cox was only one of many men with whom Brando had liaisons. Brando was bisexual and voracious. The roles he lived off-screen were even more provocative than those he created in films.
At his peak his list of lovers read like a Who’s Who of Hollywood and beyond, including Burt Lancaster, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Rita Hayworth, Leonard Bernstein, Noël Coward, Shelley Winters, Ava Gardner, Gloria Vanderbilt, Tyrone Power, Hedy Lamarr, Anna Magnani, Montgomery Clift (they once ran naked down Wall Street together for a dare), James Dean, Tallulah Bankhead, Ingrid Bergman, Edith Piaf and Doris Duke (at the time the world’s richest woman).
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Yet just as the film studio publicity machines covered up the proclivities of closet gays such as Rock Hudson — another Brando lover — so they hid the extent of Brando’s excesses.
The world knew of his predilection for “dark-skinned women”, particularly Tahitian and American Indian beauties. That he had a skinny, bespectacled male lover called Wally just didn’t fit the image. Yet he once admitted that he had never been happy with a woman, adding: “If Wally had been a woman, I would have married him and we would have lived happily ever after.”
Is this the reason for Brando’s self- destructive behaviour, the boorishness and the obesity that blighted the career of a man who was hailed 50 years ago as an electrifyingly handsome and talented new star?
Exuding a sense of brooding power and bottled-up anger, the iconoclastic Brando was arguably the greatest film star of all time. He changed the way stars, both male and female, acted and even the way young men dressed. His “uniform” of blue jeans and white T-shirts became standard issue, he reigned as the male sex symbol of the 1950s.
Yet he never found a movie role he really liked, not even his two Oscar-winning performances in On the Waterfront and The Godfather. He was even disdainful of his memorable role as Stanley Kowalski, which made him famous both on Broadway and on the screen in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
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During his twilight, he admitted, “I searched for, but never found, what I was looking for either on screen or off. Mine was a glamorous, turbulent life but completely unfulfilling.”
How do I know so much about Brando? I began meeting movie stars as a young boy when my mother was girl Friday to Sophie Tucker, the “last of the red hot mommas”. But I started hearing Brando’s dark secrets in my twenties when I was a neighbour and friend of Tennessee Williams, the playwright and one of Brando’s early seducers.
In the four decades since, I have been hearing further secrets from the actor’s former lovers, friends, rivals and colleagues; and I have built up a body of notes that would fill several books. This is sourced material and a rare insight behind the screen that separates the real life of an icon from the fantasy that the world is forced to feed upon.
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TO EXPLAIN where all this began I have to go back to the American Midwest in the 1920s. Marlon Brando might never have become a screen legend were it not for a willowy, ash-blonde beauty called Dorothy Pennebaker Myers. Nicknamed Dodie, the daughter of a gold prospector who died when she was two, she experienced a chaotic childhood before entering into an even more chaotic marriage to an insecticide salesman called Marlon Brando Sr in Omaha, Nebraska.
From the beginning of her marriage and even after the birth of her three children, Dodie disdained child-rearing and housekeeping. She did not believe in heavy discipline for her kids but preferred that they “discover their own true natures”.
For young Marlon, born in 1924, that often “meant running wild through the town, raising hell and causing trouble”, in the words of a former Omaha neighbor, Casey Culler: “The kid was a menace. The father was always on the road with one of his whores, the mother out drunk in some cheap motor court with someone’s husband.”
Once, to shame his parents about their excessive beer drinking, Marlon placed all the empty bottles prominently in front of their Omaha home to shock the prohibition-supporting church-going neighbours. Even so, he was very supportive of his mother throughout her alcoholic binges. After she broke her leg while driving drunk to a secret rendezvous with a lover, eight-year-old Marlon told his older sister Jocelyn, “Dad drives her to drink.”
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When sober, Dodie was usually involved in a production at the semi-professional Omaha Community Playhouse, where she was both a producer and often the lead actress. Henry Fonda always thanked Dodie for launching him into acting. He remembered lying around his home one summer in Omaha, having dropped out of university. A call came in from Dodie offering him a juvenile lead. Although the play didn’t run long, Hank stayed around.
Dodie fell in love with this shy young actor and seduced him. She promised to divorce Marlon Sr and marry Fonda right away. He turned her down, but they maintained their liaison for years to come.
Marlon’s sisters left for New York and he followed them, aged 19, to study acting while supporting himself through odd jobs such as lift operator. After discovering “too many lipstick collars” on her husband’s white shirts, Dodie headed east, too. She rented a 10-room apartment on Manhattan’s West Side and invited her children to move in with her. It quickly became an “open house” to many struggling actors of that day.
Bobby Lewis, a founder of the avant-garde Actors Studio, remembered: “People dropped in at all times of the day and night to the Brandos. Often they slept on her living room floor. And yes, fornicated there as well.”
Lewis heard a rumour that a drunken Dodie was picked up one night by two sailors and taken to a flophouse where she was repeatedly raped until Brando found out and went to rescue her.
“Through all the crap she put him through,” a close friend, Ann Hastings, said, “Marlon continued to worship his mother. He forgave her for everything. She worshipped him as well. She called him ‘that acting genius that popped out of my womb’.”
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Hastings also reported that one afternoon when she dropped in on the Brandos, “I saw the strangest sight. Marlon was sitting in the sparsely furnished living room. He had on one of Dodie’s street dresses and a pair of those Joan Crawford f***-me shoes, as ankle-strap high heels were called in those days. He was fully made up, lipstick and all. He didn’t seem at all embarrassed for me to see him dressed like that.”
Hastings went on to claim that Dodie was indulging in sexual intercourse with her own son. This could be dismissed as nonsense were it not for some supporting testimony from Lewis, who said that Dodie often slept in the same bed with her son.
He added: “One night while I was alone with Marlon and Dodie in their living room, listening to classical music, they seemed to have forgotten that I was there. Although she was wearing a housecoat, fully dressed, he snuggled into her breasts as part of a nursing ritual learnt long ago. In spite of her heavy drinking, Dodie always kept that special bond with her son. It was very Oedipal. A little too Oedipal for my tastes.”
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ALSO in those early times in New York there was Wally Cox, whom Brando had befriended in boyhood — when, with his horn-rimmed glasses and frail body, Wally was the type of little guy bigger boys “liked to beat the shit out of”, in the words of a former classmate.
“Sometimes Marlon would protectively put his arm around Wally on the school grounds as if to signal to the bullies that he’d beat them up if they so much as laid a hand on Wally,” recalled Eric Panken, another former classmate.
They were separated when Brando was sent away to military school but were reunited by chance years later in New York. Brando was trying in vain to persuade his sister Fran to get into a pushcart so he could race her through the traffic for fun. As if by magic, Cox suddenly appeared and got into the cart without protest. They disappeared into the traffic.
By the time Brando reappeared three days later he had become “bonded at the hip for life” with his long-lost boyhood friend. He made skinny Cox copy the tight jeans and T-shirt that were already part of the Brando image.
Lewis recalled seeing a lot of Marlon and Wally in those days: “Those two attended parties together and everybody just assumed they were a couple.” But Brando had also discovered his magnetism for women and brought them to Cox’s flat.
“It was a hell hole,” said Lewis. “There was a nasty little bedroom to the side, a kitchen where no dish was ever washed, and a living room with a battered sofa with the springs broken, and the most disgusting urine-stained mattress I’d ever seen in my life with nothing to cover it.
“Wally was obviously playing the role of the dutiful wife. But Marlon could never commit to anyone, much less a man. He loved his women too much.
As if to humiliate his friend, Marlon often brought his girlfriends over to Wally’s apartment to screw them. He’d take over the bedroom and make Wally sleep on that filthy mattress in the living room. Wally had to listen to the sounds of Marlon’s love-making all night. It was sadistic, really.”
Cox reacted to Brando’s new set of rules by becoming a bit of a womaniser himself and he married twice. “But if Marlon called, Wally dropped whatever he was doing and came running like a faithful puppy dog to his master,” said Lewis. “I think that Wally continued to love Marlon until he drew his last breath.”
THE other significant person to enter Brando’s life during his early years in New York was Marilyn Monroe. He mentioned fleetingly in his own memoirs that he “first met her briefly shortly after the war”, but in all of the many exhaustive reports on their lives, virtually no light has been shed on this historic first encounter between the future film god and goddess.
The only insider to offer a clue is Carlo Fiore, a Brooklyn Sicilian who became Brando’s close friend at drama school. Brando told him that he first met Marilyn at a bar in New York city in 1946. According to Fiore, he offered her $15 to come back to his rented room where he claimed they made love all night. In the morning Marilyn was gone.
Was Marilyn Monroe, for a brief period in 1946, hustling johns in New York City? It appears entirely possible. “With me, Marlon didn’t have to fantasise about encounters with broads,” Fiore said. “I could see it taking place right in front of my eyes. Often it was my broad he was scoring with. Long before he became famous he was ploughing such big names as Marlene Dietrich. Why not Marilyn? When he told me he’d screwed Marilyn in 1946, I found that completely believable. Still do.”
Lena Pepitone, Marilyn’s maid in later life, also revealed that the star had admitted to turning tricks for $15 “pocket money” in the 1940s. Marilyn herself said she had worked as a hooker on the back streets of Hollywood, but “I never took money. I only did it for food. Once I connected with a man, I’d negotiate for breakfast, lunch or dinner, depending on the time of day”.
Brando next met her some years later when both were rising stars. Details are sketchy, but Brando afterwards told both Fiore and Fred Zinnemann, the film director, the same story.
Brando said he was waiting in his car outside a Los Angeles apartment building when a beautiful woman came out and apparently mistook him for her date for the evening. She peered inside the car.
“You’re not Sammy,” she said, stepping back. “But you look familiar. You’re Marlon Brando!”
“And who might you be?” Brando asked. “Do I know you?”
“You don’t recognise me with my new hair colour,” she said. “I’m Norma Jean, but now I’m known as Marilyn Monroe. You don’t remember the time we got together in New York and you invited me back to your place?”
“That could fit a thousand encounters,” he said. “Get in the car. Perhaps you can do something to me to joggle my memory.”
She wiggled into the passenger’s seat and reached over to him as he drove off to his apartment. “I practically had three accidents before we got there,” Brando later told Zinnemann. “Since that night in New York someone had been teaching Marilyn new tricks. Maybe a lot of someones.”
The next morning, Marilyn lingered over breakfast and stayed with Marlon “for a matinee performance”. Brando kept Zinnemann up to date about his affair with Marilyn. He once told his director: “Marilyn’s studio is claiming her bust measurement is 37. However, Marilyn herself disputes that. She says her bust measurement is 38. As for me, I have a built-in tape measure in my brain. I’m never wrong about these things. I’d put her bust at 35 and I should know!”
The affair would stop and go, heating up in the mid-1950s, but never completely disappearing until her mysterious death in 1962.
“He was privy to her secrets and often gave her very good advice,” Fiore later said. “She never seemed to heed Marlon’s words but continued to call him for guidance she rarely followed.”
Perhaps the most surprising discovery about Brando’s early relationships comes from Paris. He and the teenage Brigitte Bardot spurned each other when introduced by her lover, Roger Vadim. “Brigitte was not at all dazzled by Marlon’s physique and he found her charming but no more than that,” said Vadim. Yet Brando found Coco Chanel, the ageing couturier, “the single most fascinating woman I’ve ever met”, and he seduced the tiny middle-aged singer Edith Piaf.
Not that the conquest of Piaf was easy, as Brando later told Jacques Viale, a young actor whom he also seduced. When she took him back to her apartment after lunch he made the mistake of assuming she had seduction on her mind, slipped off all his clothes and crawled into her bed.
“Who do you think I am, you bastard?” she shouted. “Some Pigalle whore? Get out of here!”
She chased him naked from the apartment and slammed the door — opening it to throw out his blue jeans but not his T-shirt or shoes. “I felt she definitely wanted to sample my noble tool,” he told Viale. “But she must have some mating ritual, the niceties with which I’m not familiar. I didn’t play it right.”
The next day, however, she sang La Vie En Rose down the telephone to him as an apology. And that night she dressed in rags and took him to Pigalle to sing incognito on the streets, as she had done before becoming famous. Brando held the cap to collect coins. They arrived home drunk at 6am and Brando put her chastely to bed.
The following night she invited him and seven nightclub dancers from the Lido to her apartment. Brando hoped for an orgy, he told Viale. But before dawn Piaf ushered the girls out of the door and invited Brando to share her bed and her small, frail body.
“She was still asleep when I left her bed in the late morning. She looked deathly pale. In fact, she didn’t even seem to be breathing.”
Friends say that women gradually became more important to Brando than men. “As he grew older, it appears that he led more or less a straight life . . . but with Marlon, you could never be sure,” said Lewis.
© Darwin Porter 2006
Adapted from Brando Unzipped by Darwin Porter to be published by Blood Moon on Thursday at £17.99. Copies can be ordered for £16.19 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585