Marlon Brando

Copyright © 1994 by Marlon Brando All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. PLAYBILL ® covers printed by permission of PLAYBILL Incorporated. PLAYBILL ® is a registered trademark of PLAYBILL Incorporated, New York, N.Y.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brando, Marlon. Brando: songs my mother taught me / Marlon Brando with Robert Lindsey. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-307-78673-9 1. Brando, Marlon. 2. Actors—United States—Biography. I. Lindsey, Robert. II. Title. PN2287.B683A3 1994 791.43’028’092—dc20 [B] 94-15281 v3.1

To my sisters, Tiddy and Frannie; to G. L. Harrington, Clyde Warrior, and BobbyHutton; and to my children, who brought me up.

Contents
Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22

Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52

Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Chapter 58 Chapter 59 Chapter 60 About the Coauthor

INTRODUCTION, I received a telephone call from an old friend, the wife of a Hollywood actor and a gifted writer and actress. She asked me if she could give my private telephone number to one of her friends, but didn’t explain who it was or why. A few moments later, my telephone rang again and I heard a familiar voice say slowly: “This is Marlon Brando.” It really wasn’t necessary for him to identifyhimself. Like millions of people who had spent a sizable portion of their lives in a darkened motion picture theater, I recognized his voice. Like millions of other people during the past forty years, I had grown up with it.
IN 1988

He said he wanted me to write a book about a passage in his life during which he believed someone had terribly wronged someone he loved. A few days later I arrived at alocked gate beside Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills. The gate swung open, and I followed a winding road lined with pepper trees, uncertain where I was going. Then something almost ghostly happened: it seemed that a part of the forest of bamboo next to me began to move. A gap appeared in this leafy tangle as an electric gate, camouflaged with dense foliage, suddenly swung open. It might have beena wall of granite peeling open in an Arabian Nights fantasy. The gap in the forest widened, inviting me not only to Marlon Brando’s home at the top of a mountain, but into his life. After my first visit, I returned many times to the house on Mulholland Drive and he and I became close friends. We are an odd couple: I am a journalist with an ordinary past who has been married to the same woman forover thirty years and who, while reporting from Los Angeles as a correspondent for The New York Times, acquired a passionate disdain for the shallow and self-centered egotism and puerility that afflicts most movie actors I had encountered; he is an unconventional and reclusive actor who, after nearly fifty years of public life, despises the press, has had hundreds of women in his life and told methat he hadn’t “spent more than two minutes” with any one of them. Within twenty minutes of our first meeting, he had my shoes off, my belt loosened and my fingers wired to an instrument that measured my galvanic skin response, all the while explaining that it was a technique he sometimes used to get a personality profile of people by asking questions and observing the reaction of the meter. I...