Free Hollywood Hellraisers by Robert Sellers Page B

night in Vegas.’
    A substantial box-office hit, Guys and Dolls remained the one and only musical Marlon ever made, believing as he did that his voice sounded ‘like the wail of a bagpipe through wet tissues’.
    In an interview Marlon once declared his intention of marrying within the year and was predictably inundated with offers from women in various states of desperation. One postcard arrived from a sixteen-year-old Eskimo girl who ended: ‘Me make best wife, know how to keep husband warm in very cold.’ Brando replied. ‘No good in California.’
    When he did finally marry, Marlon chose a suitably exotic creature, Anna Kashfi, who claimed to have been born in Calcutta of pure Indian parentage. She was just another of his numerous girlfriends until struck down with tuberculosis, whereupon Marlon, a sucker for the helpless, nursed her back to health and then claimed he was smitten, presenting Kashfi with the ring he’d taken from his dead mother’s finger and declaring, ‘I’m glad she’s dead! If she was alive, I never could have loved you. She wouldn’t have let me go.’
    Then it was off to Europe to film the war drama The Young Lions (1958), in which Brando played a Nazi. To help him get into the part director Edward Dmytryk hired an ex-Wehrmacht officer and every day he and Brando hurled German abuse at each other. During one meeting with Dmytryk Marlon announced he needed to take a leak. Instead of going to the bathroom Marlon removed some flowers from a vase, opened his flies and, ‘In front of me,’ Dmytryk later recalled, ‘he took a horse piss into the vase.’
    While filming in Paris Marlon was mobbed; fans tore off his coat and ripped his shirt. Fame was still very much a Kafkaesque nightmare and he grew increasingly paranoid that people used him just for money or status. He described himself as ‘a bomb waiting to go off’. Much of his anger was directed at the paparazzi. In Hollywood he knocked a camera out of a photo journalist’s hand, while in Rome half throttled a paparazzo who dared take a picture of him with a girlfriend. (By the seventies his antipathy for them hadn’t dimmed, as evidenced when he broke a photographer’s jaw. Undaunted, the paparazzo wore a football helmet next time he went snapping photos of Brando.)
    With The Young Lions in the can Brando’s marriage to Kashfi could go ahead. Marlon Sr was not amongst the invited. ‘I’ll bury him first,’ he told friends. If it were possible, relations between father and son were worse than ever. At a party given by Marlon for his father, Sr complained about the noise some of his son’s friends were making and told him to ask them to leave. When Marlon refused he was treated to a vicious slap across the face. Though seized with anger, Marlon did not retaliate. Many people have speculated that it was Marlon’s hatred for his father that fuelled his acting, and that it was Stella Adler who showed him how to focus that anger and channel it creatively. Marlon claimed that one of the few positive aspects of playing the motorcycle thug in The Wild One was that it released some of his inner violence. ‘Before The Wild One I thought about killing my father. After The Wild One , I decided that I shouldn’t actually kill him, but pull out his corneas.’
    Marlon and Anna Kashfi were married in October 1957. After a brief honeymoon the happy couple returned to Hollywood. Bizarrely, on that first night back Marlon clambered through the window of his sister Jocelyn’s house, crashing on the sofa and telling her, ‘Well, I did it. I got married. Now what do I do?’
    In May 1958 Kashfi gave Marlon a much-longed-for son, despite the trauma of being forced to change delivery rooms to avoid press photographers dressed as doctors who were roaming the ward. Tears welled up in Marlon’s eyes as he held the child, whom they named Christian. But parenthood couldn’t save the marriage, and the couple argued and fought constantly. Kashfi