From the November, 2005, serialization of Brando Unzipped, as featured in   Women's Weekly,   the largest magazine in Australia.   – All Rights reserved  There has never been an actor like Marlon Brando. Impassioned, iconoclastic, imaginative, impulsive, indomitable, and most of all, impossibly attractive. How well he knew it! In an astonishing new biography, Brando Unzipped, veteran Hollywood reporter Darwin Porter paints an extraordinarily detailed portrait of Brando, particularly about his early years, that is as blunt, uncompromising and X-rated as the man himself. “I don’t think I was constructed to be monogamous,” Brando once declared. “I don’t think it’s in the nature of any man to be monogamous. Sex is the primal force of our and every other species.” From a starving young wannabe who jumped off a train from Nebraska headlong into New York’s theatre scene, the sexually charged Brando became within a few scant years one of the greatest performers ever - “lightning on legs,” he was called by critics in 1947 as he strode onto the stage as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, and changed acting forever. For many, it is nearly impossible to remember the man decades before the tragedies of Brando’s personal life overshadowed his early accomplishments. After three tempestuous marriages and countless other relationships that produced 11 children (five from his wives; three from his former maid; one adopted; two from affairs), the fiercely private Brando was shocked and grief-stricken after his son Christian killed the fiancé of his troubled daughter, Cheyenne, in 1990. He blamed himself for Cheyenne’s lifelong unhappiness and never recovered from her suicide by hanging in 1995. It is nearly impossible to explain to those who have only seen Brando as The Godfather in 1972, or as a bloated behemoth in his last films, how Brando’s uninhibited carnality and skin-tight jeans shocked and astonished audiences in the late ’40s and early ’ 50s. He was the living, breathing embodiment of sexual desire in an era where movie censors forbade the word “virgin” on- screen.    No one who swooned for Brando in his early years would have dreamed that he would end his days as an obese recluse in his home in the Hollywood Hills, before dying at age 80 of congestive heart and lung failure on July 1, 2004. While in his final years, Brando replaced his voracious appetite for sex with food, in his heyday, he wielded what he happily called his “noble tool” with deliberate impunity. Women (and a fair share of men) literally fell at his feet. The list of his lovers was a who’s who of Hollywood and society: one-night stands and brief relationships with Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy (who claimed, “Marlon is one of the most interesting men I’ve ever met”), Ingrid Bergman, Gore Vidal, Leonard Bernstein, Ursula Andress, Edith Piaf, Joan Collins, Faye Dunaway, Bianca Jagger, Kim Stanley, Veronica Lake, Hedy Lamarr, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis (Her first words to him were, “I’ve done everything a woman can do in life, but meet Mr Marlon Brando”), Jean Peters, Gloria Vanderbilt, Doris Duke (then the richest woman in the world), John Gielgud, Burt Lancaster (originally intended to play Stanley in Streetcar), even (allegedly) Princess Margaret, and hundreds if not thousands of other bit players, the rich and famous, as well as complete strangers. Perhaps Brando’s “noble tool” provided some measure of oblivion; perhaps he was merely a sex addict. After all he did say, “All my life I’ve never been interested in someone else’s sex life - only my own.” “My noble tool has performed its duties through thick and thin without fail!” He was only half-joking, as ever hiding his true feelings behind bluster and a blunt façade. "I put on an act sometimes, and people think I'm insensitive,” he admitted. “Really, it's like a kind of armour because I'm too sensitive. If there are 200 people in a room and one of them doesn't like me, I've got to get out." The great tragedy of his life was that Brando did doubt himself, and he never seemed to have been able to come to terms with his raw, unparalleled gift for acting, often belittling himself and suffering long bouts of debilitating depression. He was, according to Darwin Porter, suicidal after his mother, Dorothy, died of acute alcoholism in 1954. His grief was so deep he didn’t bathe, or eat for weeks, veering between praising his mum and blaming her for what he considered to be the “mess” of his life. “It’s because of her that I have never been able to commit to another woman,” he bitterly claimed. “Marlon has a very, very dark side,” his best friend and confidant, actor Wally Cox, once said. “Sometimes he can go for months and repress that side of him. But sometimes it comes out.” Raised by a cruel bully of a father and an alcoholic passive/aggressive mother, who doted on him and shared his bed - whether sexually or not is a matter of conjecture - it’s hardly surprising that Brando was a mass of contradictions. He was nakedly (in every sense of the word) ambitious while intensely ambivalent about his profession; determined to fully reap the benefits of stardom while craving privacy; staggeringly promiscuous, yet willing to marry several of his girlfriends when they became pregnant; hostile to the press, yet deeply hurt by cutting reviews; profoundly egomaniacal yet generous and steadfast in his willingness to help the underdog in a wide variety of charities and causes; a loyal friend to his inner circle, yet stunningly disdainful if not cruel to those who fell out of favour. He was even loyal to his dreaded pet raccoon, Russell, who had an unfortunate tendency to leave a stinking mess wherever Brando dumped him. Brando was at ease in his own skin long before even partial nudity was fashionable, and he was often quite the exhibitionist. Early in his career, he was appearing in the Jean Cocteau play, The Eagle Has Two Heads, opposite the theatre’s Grande dame and great eccentric, the alcoholic and equally sexually ravenous Tallulah Bankhead. By the time the play was about to preview in Boston, Tallulah and Marlon knew the play was going to be a flop, calling it “The Turkey with Two Heads”. On opening night, Marlon showed his disdain for the production during one of Tallulah’s long, dramatic monologues. He turned his back to the audience, spread his legs, unbuttoned his fly, and proceeded to urinate against the stage scenery. The audience could clearly see what he was doing, but Tallulah couldn’t understand why they were laughing. When she found out what Marlon had done, she had him fired. After that, Brando was lucky his talent was so immense producers took a chance on him anyway. Still, you’d think he’d have learned his lesson - but he was too much the prankster to care. When his first film, The Men, was trounced by critics, Brando took the train back from Hollywood to New York, displaying his buttocks through the window at railway stops across America. “I made an ass of myself in The Men, so before America sees it, I wanted them to look up close and personal at the real thing.” Several years later, he took a girlfriend to a screening of The Wild One. Ever his own worst critic, he couldn’t bear to watch himself. Before running out, he shouted at the audience, “Look at Marlon Brando’s fat ass!” Brando was also an equal opportunity lover. Perhaps most surprising is the casualness of his bisexuality, switching easily as he did between male and female lovers with equal ardour. Streetcar co-star and lifelong friend Kim Hunter said, “Marlon told me some of his deepest, darkest secrets, including his fear of being forever a mama’s boy.” Marlon also told her that after a particularly intense affair with a man, he’d go crazily promiscuous: “screwing every girl who will go to bed with me - and very few of them say no.” His agent, Edith Van Cleve, explained Marlon’s penchant for going after men. “Instead of being hostile to actors with whom he was competing, Marlon tried to seduce them,” she said. “It was as if the act of seduction gave him the edge. Take poor Monty [Montgomery] Clift, for instance. Instead of being leery of Monty, Brando overpowered him sexually. At any rate, when I combed all of New York for Brando to tell him he was on again for the part of Stanley, he was screwing Burt Lancaster. If I had been a man, I too would have wanted to screw Burt Lancaster.”   “I have guilt about sleeping with men, and, almost to atone for it, I go in the opposite direction,” Brando claimed. “The more the merrier. That way, I manage to convince myself I’m a bona fide heterosexual, until the queer side of me comes out again.” As well as countless casual encounters, Brando had much more complicated relationships with Rita Moreno (whom many said was the one woman he should have married and didn’t); Tyrone Power (with whom he frolicked in a ménage a trios); Burt Lancaster’s lover Shelley Winters; playwright Tennessee Williams; and actor Montgomery Clift, his great rival. Privately, he called Clift “Princess Tiny Meat.” “Their friendship - dare I call it an affair? - was brief and intense,” his acting teacher Stella Adler said. “So intense that it was destined to burn out quickly. It was rivalry that tore them apart. They were both the two young geniuses of 1940s Broadway and later the two young geniuses of Hollywood.” Years later, Brando told Clift’s dearest friend, Elizabeth Taylor, “Your friend Monty and I were alike in only one regard. Both of us had desperate hopes and nursed unspeakable desires.” When Liz asked him to explain himself, Marlon said, “Both Monty and I have human hearts. But they beat in the wrong places.” Brando’s heart often seemed to beat in many places at once. Elia Kazan was blunt: “During the months he appeared under my direction as Stanley Kowalski, Marlon was a f**k machine. He became a phallic dream for both gay men and thousands of female theatre-goers. Later he would become the wet dream for millions of film fans around the world. He was, in essence, the male sex symbol of the ‘50s, with Marilyn Monroe wearing the crown for women.” Kazan ought to know. According to Darwin Porter, Brando had first met Marilyn Monroe at a bar in New York in 1946, when she was so strapped for cash that she was turning tricks in between modelling gigs. “I wouldn’t call her a rising starlet,” Brando said, when she came to “entertain” him several years later in Hollywood. “Seems to me she spends more time on her back.” Yet they became great friends, more than occasional lovers, and confidantes, sharing the same intense drive. “I know a lot of gals arrive in Hollywood dreaming of becoming a movie star,” Monroe told him. “But I have one up on them. I can dream harder than they can.”  They were also sexual kindred spirits, for Monroe was quite a lot more complicated and pragmatic than the vulnerable girly-girl of legend. “A girl should use sex like a weapon,” she told Brando with characteristic candour. “I think this is the only way a girl can get ahead in a town ruled by men.”  Over the years, she and Brando stayed in touch, often falling into bed when the urge struck. When he was filming Viva Zapata in Mexico, Monroe showed up to visit director Elia Kazan, with whom she was having an affair. When Kazan’s wife unexpectedly arrived, Monroe happily took to Brando’s bed, which made his own affairs with co-stars Rita Moreno and Mexican actress Movita (who later became his second wife) a tad complicated. Kazan later told Tennessee Williams that “the most outrageous event took place,” claiming that, on a lark, Brando and Monroe slipped away and got married under assumed names.  When she was sleeping with me,” Kazan claimed, “she called herself Mrs Brando, and told me that since I was married and she was married we were committing adultery. I told her I had no problem with that!” Brando obviously had no problem with adultery, either. He flatly denied having an affair with Streetcar co-star Vivien Leigh in his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, claiming that her husband, Sir Laurence Olivier, was such a "nice guy". In truth, however, he had already spent some time under the covers with the bisexual Olivier, who’d been captivated after Brando’s small but electrifying role onstage in Antigone.  Like Monroe, Vivien Leigh was sexually uninhibited. She quite surprised Brando when she introduced herself by saying, “Her Ladyship is f**king bored with formality.”  Then she went on: “As you’ll get to know me, and I hope you will, there is nothing respectable about me. In London, I pick up taxi drivers and f**k them. Don’t be surprised - I’ m just as whorish as Blanche DuBois.” Director Kazan referred to the couple as the pairing of “a gazelle with a wild boar.” The jungle did become a bit overcrowded during the filming of Streetcar, when Brando was invited to stay with the Olivier’s in their Hollywood home. He spent nights playing musical beds, even though Olivier was then having a well-known affair with the actor Danny Kaye. At one party, when Brando showed up on the arms of Leigh and Olivier, Kaye, whose hair had been dyed a bright red for a film role, saw them and flipped. He slapped Brando full in the face. Brando, who’d, had no idea about Kaye’s relationship with Olivier, merely said, “Like your hair colour.” Then he went back to the house and packed his bags, leaving a note for his hosts: “Dear Vivien and Larry,” it read. “Thank you for your hospitality. You were both wonderful to me. But it is time to move on now, and I’m heading back to New York to resume my life. My regret is never having gotten to know either of you. But, then, I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers.” One famous stranger he soon met was Cary Grant, with whom he had a brief relationship. “Spending some time with Cary Grant has convinced me of one thing,” Brando said. “Of all the possibilities for me in all the world, I don’t want to be a f**king movie star. Let me out of this cage!” Another was the young James Dean, who approached his idol after Brando gave a talk at the Actors Studio. “I’m confused about a lot of things,” the avowedly bisexual Dean told him. “Very confused. But not confused in my admiration for you.”  The two spent quite a lot of time together in the winter of 1951. “He was completely in charge of our lovemaking,” Dean reportedly said. “He told me what he wanted, and I went along for the ride.”  But Dean quickly became obsessed, showing up unannounced at Brando’s apartment, often spending the night outside in the cold, hoping to be let in. Brando sometimes took pity on Dean - and sometimes ignored him completely before telling a mutual friend, “You’d better get your boy to a psychiatrist right away. He’s an emergency case. One crazed sicko! If you only knew what he wants me to do to him.” Later, after he learned that James Dean had died, he commented:  “The trouble with Jimmy is that he wanted to be me. I don’t know why. Even I, myself, don’t want to be me.” Despite his sexual shenanigans, the young Brando threw himself into his work, particularly during the filming of On the Waterfront, where his calm yet impassioned reading of the line, “I could have been a contender” has become one of the most iconic in film history. Co-star Eva Marie Saint - one of the few leading ladies who had no interest in bedding him - has fond memories of their work together.   “He had a wonderful sense of humour,” she said. “It was cold and I wore red flannel long- johns. When it got bitter, I’d pull up my skirt and do a can-can for him. He always loved that. When it got really cold, he’d look at me and say, ‘I think it’s time for the can-can.’” Finally, Brando got a much-deserved Oscar for Best Actor in 1954 for his role in On the Waterfront.   “Thank you very much,” he said graciously after accepting the award. “It’s much heavier than I imagined. I had something to say and I can’t remember what I was going to say for the life of me. I don’t think that ever in my life have so many people been so directly responsible for my being so very, very glad. It’s a wonderful moment, and a rare one, and I am certainly indebted. Thank you.” Later that night, he left a star-studded party. “I’ve got a date with a blonde,” Brando said. “And there are still those people who spread the rumour that I don’t like blondes.” The blonde was Grace Kelly, that year’s Best Actress Oscar winner for The Country Girl, who couldn’t resist Brando’s charms, even though she’d been having an affair with her co-star, Bing Crosby.   “What happened in Grace’s suite around three o’clock that morning is still not known in exact detail, but Bing Crosby arrived for a showdown with Grace. Instead of that, he found a nude Marlon in her bed,” Darwin Porter relates. The affair was short-lived. Kelly went on to marry Prince Rainier, and Brando went on to make a string of films, many of them less than stellar. Although vowing never to wed, he nonetheless fell for the actress Anna Kashfi, an Indian-born actress whose real name was Joan O’Callaghan, marrying her in 1957 when she was pregnant with Christian.  "She was probably the most beautiful woman I've ever known, but she came close to being as negative a person as I have met in my life," Brando said.    “Marlon attracts women like faeces attract flies,” Kashfi retorted. Viva Zapata co-star Movita (born Marie Casenada) became his second wife in 1960. “I know my reputation for preferring jailbait, but I often throw a mercy f**k to older women,” Brando had said when he met her. “I think Movita is funny - she makes me laugh. She’s also beautiful in her own kind of way, smart and very sympathetic to my problems, when I lay my head on her breast at night.” That union barely lasted two years. While filming Mutiny on the Bounty in Tahiti, Brando fell in love with the young and lovely Tarita Teriipaia, married her in 1962, and bought a private Tahitian island, which became his retreat from the pressures of Hollywood and his own tormented, contradictory nature. Although Brando again astonished filmgoers when The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris became blockbuster hits in 1972 and 1973 respectively, his passion for acting gradually dissipated and his eccentricities became more pronounced. After he died, his ashes were mixed with those of his best friend, Wally Cox, then scattered to the winds of the California desert. “Now we’ ll be united for eternity,” Brando said. Even in death, he had not wanted to be by himself. Still, the glory that was Brando in his prime will live on forever. Adapted from BRANDO UNZIPPED by Darwin Porter © Blood Moon Productions 2005 Distributed in Australia by Bulldog Publishers and Eleanor Brasch