The Contrarian: Marlon Brando’s Paradoxical Life

“If I hadn’t been an actor, I’ve often thought I’d have become a con man and wound up in jail.”

So writes the iconic Marlon Brando in his 1994 autobiography, Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, co-written by Robert Lindsey. The smoldering star of A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, The Godfather, and Last Tango in Paris, Brando redefined what it meant to be an actor and a star.

Yet the man behind the star is a much more slippery affair. Songs My Mother Taught Me reads in part as an apologia from a charming, brilliant, curious, deeply eccentric man who claims he used to be angry, used to be bad to women—without offering much proof of his professed transformation. 

Brando refused to write about his wives or his eleven children, and uses pseudonyms for the romantic partners he does discuss—meaning that we don’t hear about his alleged relationships with the likes of Richard Pryor, Shelley Winters, Christian Marquand, and Ursula Andress. Though he can’t resist admitting to a quick affair with his friend Marilyn Monroe—whom he believes was murdered. 

But then again, who knows what Brando really believed? As his longtime secretary told William J. Mann—author of the overly sympathetic but beautiful written biography The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando—Brando was a “master manipulator” who “did not tell the truth if a lie would suffice.” It’s an assessment Brando would have agreed with.  “I’m good at telling lies smoothly, giving an impression of things as they are not and making people think I’m sincere,” he writes. “A good con man can fool anybody, but the first person he fools is himself.”

Bud 

Marlon Brando Jr. was born April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska. His parents were larger than life: the vivacious, beautiful bohemian Dorothy and Marlon Sr., a handsome, womanizing traveling salesman and “card-carrying prick” whose “blood consisted of compounds of alcohol, testosterone, adrenaline and anger.”

Brando viscerally described a gut-wrenching, neglected childhood centered around his beloved mother’s torturous alcoholism. Brando and his two older sisters would spend hours searching for their mother, who disappeared frequently during benders, only to return home to give family life another go. “Sometimes alcohol sent her into a crying jag,” he writes. “But initially it usually made her happy, giddy and full of mirth, and she might sit down at the piano and sing to herself, and we often joined in.”

Called “Bud” by his family, the sensitive, curious Brando was already acting out in kindergarten due to his unstable family life.  “I was the bad boy of the class and had to sit under the teacher’s desk,” he recalls, “where my primary activity was staring up her dress.”

As the family moved around, ending up at a farm in Libertyville, Illinois, the increasingly angry, defiant Brando was left to his own devices. Obsessed with rhythm, he wanted to become a drummer, and became a self-proclaimed master of “pranks,” which he brags about with juvenile relish. After being fired as a teenage usher in a movie theater for refusing to wear a shirt under his hot jacket, he stuffed the air conditioning system with rotten broccoli and limburger cheese. 

Fed up with the sixteen-year-old Brando’s bad attitude, his father sent him to his alma mater: the Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota. But Brando could not be tamed. “I did my best to tear the school apart and not get caught at it,” he writes, in what could be a manifesto for his life. “I wanted to destroy the place. I hated authority and did everything I could to defeat it by resisting it, subverting it, tricking it and outmaneuvering it.”