The insatiable s**** life of Marlon Brando
New revelations uncover his voracity. "You must know that I am crazy", he explained to his secretaries when he hired them, "and also that I am addicted to s**x"
“Brando would throw anything. Anything! Even a mailbox. James Baldwin. Richard Pryor. To Marvin Gaye ”. Legendary producer and musician Quincy Jones redefined a couple of weeks ago in a Vulture interview the concept of "what's left of the convent ..." and aired Marlon Brando's s**x life with such self-confidence that the reader is not there was no choice but to look up and reread the previous paragraph: but what the hell was the question? It was one about musical genres, which led to cha-cha and from there to Brando's revelries.
Classic Hollywood romps have been sparking gossip, urban legends, and unauthorized biographies for decades that suggest those stars were doing nothing else. A mythical anecdote from the sixties tells that, during a party at his house where all the guests were naked, Brando walked with a lily on his butt. Brando's lovers include the usual suspects of the time: Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Ava Gardner, Rock Hudson, Grace Kelly, and James Dean.
Brando was vulgar, gorging himself on Chinese food, whole jars of peanut butter and cinnamon rolls. And his attitude towards sex was the same: insatiable, voracious and reckless.
The questions are: how could they find the time (and energy) to make movies? And how many hours a day did people as promiscuous as Warren Beatty sleep? The widow of the comedian Richard Pryor (Illinois, 1940- California, 2005), Jennifer Lee Pryor, wanted to shed light on these unknowns with the best phrase of the year even though she has ten months left: “It was the seventies, with enough cocaine you could fuck a radiator and send her flowers the next day. "
Marlon Brando (Nebraska, 1924 - California, 2004) never had any qualms about defining himself as "a sexual beast" who had "women coming in the door and out the window constantly." "You must know that I am crazy," he explained to his secretaries when he hired them, "and also that I am addicted to s**x."
He also readily confessed to having had homos**xu**l experiences. "I've never paid much attention to what people think of me," he explained to Gary Carey for his biography The Wild One. And he added: “But if anyone is convinced that Jack Nicholson and I are lovers, then keep thinking about it. I find it fun. "
And yet every revelation of her s**xu**l encounters with men (and one appears every two years) continues to be greeted with awe, perhaps because Brando has gone down in history as the most virile guy to ever set foot in Hollywood (he forged three distinct canons : that of the method actor, that of the indomesticable star and that of the male s**xu**l object) and in that story it does not fit that he slept with several men. Several black men.
Brando personified the eroticism of the working class from his second role, in A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1952). He stormed into an arrogant Hollywood whose stars had established themselves as the aristocracy America lacks. A collective illusion where Cary Grant walked with the certainty that all the men of the western world were going to try to imitate him. And Marlon Brando came, saw and beat by making love to Cary Grant metaphorically and (according to legend) literally.
Brando was vulgar, gorging himself on Chinese food, whole jars of peanut butter and cinnamon rolls. And his attitude toward sex was the same: insatiable, voracious, and reckless. A s**xu**l seizure arising from a first experience, at age 4, which even Sigmund Freud would have found too obvious. So much so that Brando himself pointed her out as the beginning of all his miseries. "When my mother drank," the actor recalled, "she gave off a sweetness to her breath that I can't find any vocabulary to describe."
He knew he was a victim of his own impulses, the excess of which made him a visceral interpreter, but a tortured man, and he tried to recreate that scene of possession: he needed to feel that each of the women he slept with were from. his property
Mrs. Brando abandoned her husband, also an alcoholic and abusive, and her three children. And she left them in charge of a babysitter. Ermie, the babysitter (of Danish and Indonesian descent), slept with little Marlon. Both n**d. "One night I sat next to her, observing her body and caressing her breasts," recalled Brando in the documentary Listen to me Marlon. "I lay on top of her, she was only mine, she belonged only to me," he added.
Brando believed that this unfinished s**xu**l awakening forever distanced him from the real world. "I spent the rest of my life looking for her," he confessed. When Ermie told him that she was going on a trip (actually, she was leaving her job to get married), Marlon felt abandoned by another woman. His possessive feelings towards Ermie, similar to those a boy feels towards his mother, created a traumatic frustration that the actor spent his life trying to satisfy.
"Brando described that experience with great innocence, but his sister suggested that the episode was inappropriate and that the family considered it an abuse by the babysitter," explains to ICON the author of Brando's smile, Susan L. Mizruchi. “This episode led Brando to this compulsive attitude towards sex: he wanted to practice it every day and the more the merrier. The babysitter was brunette, with an exotic appearance, and Brando was attracted to women of similar physique all his life, ”says Mizruchi.
The actor knew that he was a victim of his own impulses, the excess of which made him a visceral interpreter, but a tortured man, and he tried to recreate that scene of possession: he needed to feel that each of the women he slept with was his property. .
Truman Capote, in an article published in the New Yorker in 1957, quoted Brando's grandmother in an apparently harmless anecdote that, as always with Capote, was not at all: "As a teenager, Marlon always tried to pick up cross-eyed girls." . A pattern that, over the years, would gradually become corrupted. "He Not only did he have a favored physique, he also had a psychological preference," continues Mizruchi. "He was not attracted to stable people: in my research I found 22 women who had had relationships with him and who had either committed suicide or had tried," says the biographer.
"He looked at me with an intensity that made me feel weak," explained his first wife, Anna Kashfi, to whom the actor was unfaithful from the beginning. Brando was married three times, all of them due to pregnancies, and had 11 recognized children and an incalculable number of illegitimate ones. "He could never limit himself to a woman, he had a need and success and power allowed him to maintain relationships with whoever he wanted," says Mizruchi. And yes, that included Richard Pryor, Marvin Gaye, and James Baldwin.
“He had many interests in common with the black community. He took dance classes with Lena Horne and loved to play the bongos. This hobby attracted him to artists such as the musician Miles Davis or the writer James Baldwin ”, explains Mizruchi. And he adds: “It is unquestionable that at one point he slept with Baldwin: for Brando, friendship could evolve into sex with ease. I had a lot of love for him. He loved women. If we had to put a label on him, it would be heterosexual, but on the other hand, he was very sensual and he understood that sexual appetite and feelings had no limits ”.
"He was not attracted to stable people: in my research I found 22 women who had had relationships with him and who had either committed suicide or had tried," his biographer tells ICON
He was the first Hollywood star to play a homosexual man in Reflections of a Golden Eye (John Huston, 1967) alongside Elizabeth Taylor (whom Brando said never appealed to him because "his ass was too small", almost as inelegant as that other occasion when he described that "Sofia Loren had the breath of a dinosaur"), but the studio let the film die to avoid controversy.
“Marlon Brando was one of the few to defend the writer Tennessee Williams and denounce the cruelty with which the critical community despised him because he was homosexual. In an interview on The Today Show, he read various criticisms of Williams' work that included homophobic views to attack his work, ”recalls Mizruchi.
Fear and nervousness marked his relationship with James Dean, never confirmed, always fascinating. The biography James Dean: Tomorrow Never Comes collects statements from witnesses who claim that both had a sadomasochistic sexual relationship. The writer Stanley Haggart remembers how Dean proudly showed burns on his body, claiming that Brando had done them with cigarettes.
Susan L. Mizruchi suggests that both actors were probably having sex. Brando always denied it, even when in 1976 he acknowledged his affairs with men because "now homosexuality is fashionable and no longer scandalizes anyone."
"He could never limit himself to a woman, he had a need and success and power allowed him to maintain relationships with whoever he wanted," says Mizruchi. And yes, that included Richard Pryor, Marvin Gaye, and James Baldwin.
"James Dean was a lapdog behind Brando: he revered him, he was intimidated by him, just as the entire planet was intimidated by Brando," Mizruchi explains. “He had a strange relationship with his own fame, his power and his authority. He disliked people who idolized him too much and that's why I think he treated Dean with a certain contempt, who adored him, "says the actor's biographer.
What did happen was an ad**lt reunion between Marlon and Ermie, his babysitter. "When she was representing A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway, at the age of 23, she went to see him in the dressing room and asked for money," says Mizruchi. "Of course he gave it to her, but later he confessed that that reunion broke his heart: he was in love with her and she was a very important person for him, but she only wanted his money." For Ermie that relationship meant nothing, but it marked Brando for life.
It turned him into that sexual beast, insatiable, miserable, exuberant, with a desire so unbridled that, when he began to write his autobiography, The songs that my mother taught me (Anagrama, 1994), he had to call Ursula Andress to ask if any they had gone to bed once.
