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WILD THING
Darwin Porter reveals the extraordinary story that lay behind Marlon Brando's smouldering image in his new book ‘Brando Unzipped’
A couple of years ago many American newspapers printed a report from the Associated Press news agency that the family of the recently deceased Marlon Brando had scattered his ashes in Tahiti and in Death Valley, California.
The report continued, intriguingly: "The ashes of Brando's late friend Wally Cox, who died in 1973, were also poured onto the desert landscape as part of the same ceremony; how Cox's ashes were in the possession of Brando's family was unknown."

It is hard to credit that neither the agency nor the papers knew that Cox, a comedian, had been Brando's long-term lover. But such was the strength of the macho heterosexual myth surrounding the actor that he had to be protected even after his death. What the media may be excused for not knowing is that Brando not only kept his friend's ashes for more than 30 years but, when lonely, would sometimes dine a deux with the urn, holding conversations in which he would perfectly imitate Cox's voice. He left instructions that after his own death their ashes should be mingled and scattered together.

The media may also be excused for not knowing that Cox was only one of many men with whom Brando had liaisons. Brando was bisexual and voracious. The roles he lived off-screen were even more provocative than those he created in films.

At his peak his list of lovers read like a Who's Who of Hollywood and beyond, including Burt Lancaster, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Rita Hayworth, Leonard Bernstein, Noel Coward, Shelley Winters, Ava Gardner, Gloria Vanderbilt, Tyrone Power, Hedy Lamarr, Anna Magnani, Montgomery Clift (they once ran naked down Wall Street together for a dare), James Dean, Tallulah Bankhead, Ingrid Bergman, Edith Piaf and Doris Duke (at the time the world's richest woman).Yet just as the film studio publicity machines covered up the proclivities of closet gays such as Rock Hudson - another Brando lover - so they hid the extent of Brando's excesses.

The world knew of his predilection for "dark-skinned women", particularly Tahitian and American Indian beauties. That he had a skinny, bespectacled male lover called Wally just didn't fit the image. Yet he once admitted that he had never been happy with a woman, adding: "If Wally had been a woman, I would have married him and we would have lived happily ever after."

Is this the reason for Brando's self-destructive behaviour, the boorishness and the obesity that blighted the career of a man who was hailed 50 years ago as an electrifyingly handsome and talented new star?

Exuding a sense of brooding power and bottled-up anger, the iconoclastic Brando was arguably the greatest film star of all time. He changed the way stars, both male and female, acted and even the way young men dressed. His "uniform" of blue jeans and white T-shirts became standard issue, he reigned as the male sex symbol of the 1950s.

Yet he never found a movie role he really liked, not even his two Oscar winning performances in On the Waterfront and The Godfather. He was even disdainful of his memorable role as Stanley Kowalski, which made him famous both on Broadway and on the screen in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.

During his twilight, he admitted, "I searched for, but never found, what I was looking for either on screen or off. Mine was a glamorous, turbulent life but completely unfulfilling."

How do I know so much about Brando? I began meeting movie stars as a young boy when my mother was girl Friday to Sophie Tucker, the "Last of the red hot mommas". But I started hearing Brando's dark secrets in my twenties when I was a neighbour and friend of Tennessee Williams, the playwright and one of Brando's early seducers.

In the four decades since, I have been hearing further secrets from the actor's former lovers, friends, rivals and colleagues; and I have built up a body of notes that would fill several books. This is sourced material and a rare insight behind the screen that separates the real life of an icon from the fantasy that the world is forced to feed upon.

To explain where all this began I have to go back to the American Midwest in the 1920s. Marlon Brando might never have become a screen legend were it not for a willowy, ash-blonde beauty called Dorothy Pennebaker Myers. Nicknamed Dodie, the daughter of a gold prospector who died when she was two, she experienced a chaotic childhood before entering into an even more chaotic marriage to an insecticide salesman called Marlon Brando Sr in Omaha, Nebraska.

From the beginning of her marriage and even after the birth of her three children, Dodie disdained child-rearing and housekeeping. She did not believe in heavy discipline for her kids but preferred that they "discover their own true natures".

When sober, Dodie was usually involved in a production at the semi professional Omaha Community Playhouse, where she was both a producer and often the lead actress. Henry Fonda always thanked Dodie for launching him into acting. He remembered lying around his home one summer in Omaha, having dropped out of university. A call came in from Dodie offering him a juvenile lead. Although the play didn't run long, Hank stayed around.
Dodie fell in love with this shy young actor and seduced him. She promised to divorce Marlon Sr and marry Fonda right away. He turned her down, but they maintained their liaison for years to come.

Marlon's sisters left for New York and he followed them, aged 19, to study acting while supporting himself through odd jobs such as lift operator. After discovering "too many lipstick collars" on her husband's white shirts, Dodie headed east, too. She rented a 10-room apartment on Manhattan's West Side and invited her children to move in with her. It quickly became an "open house" to many struggling actors of that day.

Also in those early times in New York there was Wally Cox, whom Brando had befriended in boyhood - when, with his horn-rimmed glasses and frail body, Wally was the type of little guy bigger boys "liked to beat the ---- out of", in the words of a former classmate.

"Sometimes Marlon would protectively put his arm around Wally on the school grounds as if to signal to the bullies that he'd beat them up if they so much as laid a hand on Wally," recalled Eric Panken, another former classmate.
They were separated when Brando was sent away to military school but were reunited by chance years later in New York. Brando was trying in vain to persuade his sister Fran to get into a pushcart so he could race her through the traffic for fun. As if by magic, Cox suddenly appeared and got into the cart without protest. They disappeared into the traffic.

By the time Brando reappeared three days later he had become "bonded at the hip for life" with his long-lost boyhood friend. He made skinny Cox copy the tight jeans and T-shirt that were already part of the Brando image.

The other significant person to enter Brando's life during his early years in New York was Marilyn Monroe. He mentioned fleetingly in his own memoirs that he "first met her briefly shortly after the war", but in all of the many exhaustive reports on their lives, virtually no light has been shed on this historic first encounter between the future film god and goddess.

The only insider to offer a clue is Carlo Fiore, a Brooklyn Sicilian who became Brando's close friend at drama school. Brando told him that he first met Marilyn at a bar in New York city in 1946. According to Fiore, he offered her $15 to come back to his rented room where he claimed they made love all night. In the morning Marilyn was gone.

Brando next met her some years later when both were rising stars. Details are sketchy, but Brando afterwards told both Fiore and Fred Zinnemann, the film director, the same story.

Brando said he was waiting in his car outside a Los Angeles apartment building when a beautiful woman came out and apparently mistook him for her date for the evening. She peered inside the car.

"You're not Sammy," she said, stepping back. "But you look familiar. You're Marlon Brando!" "And who might you be?" Brando asked. "Do I know you?"
"You don't recognise me with my new hair colour," she said.

"I'm Norma Jean, but now I'm known as Marilyn Monroe. You don't remember the time we got together in New York and you invited me back to your place?"
"That could fit a thousand encounters," he said. "Get in the car. Perhaps you can do something to me to joggle my memory."

The affair would stop and go, heating up in the mid-1950s, but never completely disappearing until her mysterious death in 1952.
"He was privy to her secrets and often gave her very good advice," Fiore later said. "She never seemed to heed Marlon's words but continued to call him for guidance she rarely followed."

Perhaps the most surprising discovery about Brando's early relationships comes from Paris. He and the teenage Brigitte Bardot spurned each other when introduced by her lover, Roger Vadim. "Brigitte was not at all dazzled by Marlon's physique and he found her charming but no more than that," said Vadim. Yet Brando found Coco Chanel, the ageing couturier, "the single most fascinating woman I've ever met", and he also seduced the tiny middle-aged singer Edith Piaf.

Friends say that women gradually became more important to Brando than men. "As he grew older, it appears that he led more or less a straight life... but with Marlon, you could never be sure," said Bobby Lewis, a founder of the avantgarde Actors Studio.
(Courtesy The Sunday Times, UK)

Saga of the De La Salle brothers in Lanka
De La Salle Brothers in Ceylon Part 1 (1867-1919). By Bro. Michael Robert. Reviewed by Dr. Leonard Pinto

Though modest in appearance, the slim 139-page paperback on De La Salle Brothers in Ceylon from 1867 to 1919 is rich in substance. The book contains 13 chapters, 35 appendices, 2 maps and 34 photographs. The photos take the reader to the 19th and early 20th century Ceylon, while the text narrates the early history of the Brothers in Sri Lanka.

Appendices, though unusual for a history book, confirm the authenticity of the text. The author has painstakingly browsed through material deposited in the Archives of the Brothers, and produced them to ensure accuracy and transparency.

The mission of the Brothers was not to build churches, convert people or influence politicians. They came to Sri Lanka to provide quality education to children of the working class and the poor. To Catholic children, they provided Catholic education, and to all, they taught discipline, ethics, moral values and secular subjects. It was not an easy task for the Brothers to start schools here. They had to find their way in a foreign country, find funds and students, obey the superiors in Rome, comply with the directives of the local church authority, take criticism of lay persons, and continue to manage schools to produce good results. They followed the vision of their founder, St John Baptist De La Salle.

De La Salle, hailing from French aristocracy, educated in Sorborne and with a doctorate in theology, is credited for revolutionising education by introducing simultaneous method (not individual tutoring, but classroom teaching), native language as the medium of instruction (swabasha), free education (nidahas adyapanaya), technical subjects in curriculum (thakshana adyapanaya) and teacher training colleges (guru vidyala).

After the French Revolution, the Brothers moved to America and Asia. 1852 was the year that three French and three American Brothers landed in Asia. From Singapore and Penang, the Brothers ventured out to India and Burma (Myanmar), in their educational mission. They opened schools in Saigon (1866), Colombo (1867/68) and Hong-Kong in China (1875).

The book dedicates three chapters to St Benedict's Institute, which later became St Benedict's College. When Bro. Philip, the Superior General of De La Salle Brothers in Rome, had sent a negative reply to Mgr. Sillani's (Vicar Apostolic of Colombo) requesting for Brothers for St Benedict's, three French Brothers, Bro. Hidelphus, Bro. Daniel and Bro. Leo arrived in Colombo from India on their way to France. Sillani 'coaxed' them to take over St Benedict's. The Superior General in Rome ordered the three French Brothers to return to Paris, as they had taken charge of a school without his permission. The management of the school was given back to Fr. Vaderstraaten and the three returned to Paris.

The official date on which the Brothers assumed the management of St Benedict's Institute is May 1, 1868. Bro. Pastoris (French), Bro. Cyprian (Irish) and Bro. Frederick (Indian) arrived from Mangalore, first, to be followed by Bro. Peter (Indian) and Bro. Modeste (German). In October 1868 Bro. Pastoris left for France and thence to the USA, and died in California in 1874. Bro Modeste managed St Benedict's with German discipline and efficiency, as its first Director (Principal) with about 290 students.

The Brothers took over the management of St. Joseph's School Grandpass in 1905, and travelled daily from St Benedict's till the community was established there in 1925. The St Benedict's community register of 1920 indicates that St Mary's, Pettah, St Joseph's, Grandpass and De La Salle, Mutwal were under the Director of St Benedict's. De La Salle College was the stables of Mr. Armitage. The De La Salle Brothers started St Mary's, Negombo, the second Brothers house in Ceylon on January 7, 1870. They left Negombo in 1879. Again they took over the school in 1885. After another four years they left Negombo for good.

The politics of their arrival and departure are vividly described in a letter sent by one Mr. M. B. Fernando to the Director of St. Benedict's, which states that Koraley Manosingho, Manuel Pulley (Uppukade) and the two brothers, Jackirias and Bolis (sons of Piratti Alvino) were responsible for the departure of the Brothers from Negombo. By the end of 1903, there were 31 Brothers in Ceylon, ten at Mutwal and 21 at St Benedict's. In 1908 Bro. Cassian from St Benedict's was convalescing in Nuwara Eliya, when he conceived the idea of 'Nazareth Retreat,' a retreat and holiday house for the Brothers.

One of the appendices in the book provides sections of Bishop Bonjean's Pastoral Letter on Education published in 1892. Another appendix contains extracts from the M.A. thesis of Bro. Calixtus Fernando FRGS, FCP to the University of London titled ‘Education in the R.C. mission in Ceylon 1884-1905.’ Bro. Calixtus was the Director (Principal) of St Benedict's in the early 1970s, and became the president of a university college in India, from where he went to Mt. Kotakinabalu in Borneo, to undertake research on social anthropology of mountain tribes, and on his return died in Colombo in 1978.

The book contains many more interesting appendices. It is indeed an in-depth study, with an analysis of issues during this period in the last chapter.

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