Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [0]
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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 Bobby Hutton;
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 27
Chapter 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
IN 1988, 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 identify himself. 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.
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 a locked 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 been a 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 for over 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 me that 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 was more puzzled than