IF BY PAGE five he’s a bad lay, then you have nothing to look forward to and who cares? In Anna Kashfi Brando’s Brando for Breakfast, we learn that Marlon Brando is “not well appointed,” is “selfish,” and was hardly ever home for dinner (much less breakfast, since he rarely woke up till after lunch); we get movie reviews, frank opinions on what a gauche genius poor Marlon is, and a flashily exposed solution to this man’s innermost mystery—that he’s really nothing but a poly-sexual and that he’ll stick it into any port in the storm, up to and including a duck. Anna wouldn’t mind, she explains, except that she feels his behavior is bound to taint their now twenty-one-year-old son, whom she always called Devi and Marlon always called Christian (after the boy’s godfather, Christian Marquand, the French director and very close friend of Marlon’s). Anna and Marlon were married for about a year and a half back in the fifties, but it has taken her all this time to give us The Book. She probably would have kept silent forever except that she took an overdose of drugs recently and was in the hospital for a month or so and when she was all better, she knew the world need no longer go on in ignorance. She decided to tell all.
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Anna and her coauthor, E. P. Stein, elaborately go into the story of Brando’s entire life and how his father thing and mother thing were the reason he turned out to be such a rat. The book includes details of how no screenplay, movie director, studio, or fellow actor involved with Brando was safe once he came into the room. It tells of all the naive young girls, all the illegitimate children, all the suicide attempts, wigs, sleeping pills, tearings up and down Mulholland Drive at midnight, and on and on unto the night of legal papers quoted at length. The last third of the book is almost entirely about judges and lawyers and what a liar Brando was but how everyone believed him because he was Brando and she was only this little starlet trying to raise her son and not take too many pills.
Describing his appearance on their first date, she and Stein write: “He balanced a steatopygous form on squat, sturdy legs and moved with a lissome stride that conveyed a forceful yet feminine grace.” (Roughly defined, steatopygia means fat ass.) Nevertheless, she lets him take her out to dinner, and when more than two months later she goes to bed with him out of “curiosity” and he is a dud, you’d think she’d call it a day and date someone better appointed.
But if she had, where would we be today? All her thoughtful insights would have been lost. Such as:
“In short, Marlon Brando is modern gothic: grotesque, contradictory, impossible.”
“Marlon’s sexual tutti-frutti comprise several shadier flavors.”
“Marlon reserves his favors for Orientals, Latins, blacks, Polynesians, and Indians, both east and west. When I accused him of choosing ‘inferior’ women as partners to satisfy his need for superiority feelings, he was incensed.”
“Marlon flaunted his dominance of women by humiliating them whenever they dared display an independent mien.”
And last but not least:
“A naive young girl probing her way through the world meets the suave seducer.”
Well, not naive exactly—more like a B-movie adventuress.
Anna Kashfi was born in Calcutta in 1934 of “an unregistered alliance” between her mother and father. When she was eighteen, she went to London to study, and though she was supposedly a naive young girl probing her way through the London School of Economics, she ran off to Paris with an Italian jet pilot. Unfortunately, in Paris she ran into her father, who was supposed to be home in India with Mom. Dad cut her off without a penny. Anna was forced into “modeling,” a pursuit she explains by saying she couldn’t type. Luckily, Spencer Tracy agreed to cast her in a movie with him. When the cast and crew moved from their location in Chamonix to the Paramount soundstage, she was whisked off to Hollywood. A week later, she was sitting in the Paramount commissary in her red sari and minding her own business when from across the room (where he was nuzzling Eva Marie Saint), the sly seducer clapped eyes on her. She did not, she says, even know who he was the first time he called and they went out, but it wasn’t long before someone told her, and perhaps who he was outweighed her objections to how awful he was, all squat and steatopygous.
When I was sixteen, I took up with a band of vicious Hollywood starlets who were all older than I (real old, like twenty-two or -three). They spent their days working on tans at the Beverly Hills Health Club and devising diabolic revenge for schmucks who crossed them in any way at all. They spent their nights drinking martinis and wearing Jax dresses with necklines so low that their bulging breasts were all anyone could think about. They drove Thunderbirds, dated celebrities, and always knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was a prince for them, a handsome, rich, clever, hip prince who was famous, had famous friends, and drove a Cadillac convertible down the Sunset Strip in the afternoons listening to jazz on the radio. A man with a large appointment who was never selfishly premature.
And a man who came home to dinner and stayed home, not like the man who was always running around with Rita Moreno—who left her wig in the bedroom, as Anna tells us. Marlon would have been perfect except that he had other ideas. But from afar—among those vicious starlets—Marlon was the ultimate score.
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Not a single one of those girls found a prince—including Anna Kashfi. In her mixture of rectal conjecture and quotes from Pauline Kael cut in half so that they say the opposite of what was meant, Anna seems to speak for all of them—one long wail of howling outrage. A tirade against the audacity of the way things turned out compared with how they should have been. Marlon Brando has “toes (at least) of common clay,” she screams, and he did it to this duck in Paris besides! The world is no longer to be kept in ignorance of all Anna has suffered.
Perhaps there’s something marvelous and brave about Anna and my vicious starlet friends, out for blood and evening up the score so long after everyone has gone home. But we do worry when we realize that Anna, though she’s out of the frying pan Brando-wise, might be someplace hotter with this E. P. Stein person cowriting her book. Anna seems to have a fatal fascination for sticking with the hopeless. But this time, instead of winding up in divorce, it ends up, after pages and pages and pages (I mean, who wants to hear Anna and E. P. Stein’s critical essay on Bedtime Story?), a book.
I was almost gasping with relief upon coming across one small holdout during a time when Anna and Marlon were recently estranged: “Newspapers played up the theme of ‘Brando’s two loves’—France Nuyen and Barbara Luna. Miss Nuyen displayed her usual tantrums for the press, while Barbara Luna withdrew with grace. Asked her feeling for Marlon, she replied, ‘I’m not in love with him.’”
Oh, Barbara Luna, tell us everything. What was he really like?
Esquire
October 1979