The Psychology of Marlon Brando (2017 Rerun)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, deserving listeners.

Speaker 2 (00:01):
Today's episode is about the psychology of Marlon Brando. Up
until recently, I didn't really think much about Marlon Brando.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
I didn't know much about him.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
I remembered him from The Godfather and Apocalypse Now and
Superman as Superman's father, and I remember hearing that he
was really difficult to work with, and I remember hearing
that he was sort of insane and sort of crazy.
But I had no idea how fascinating his life was,

(00:32):
and I had no idea how fascinating his psychology was. Well,
that's what I want to talk about today. I want
to see if we can understand Brando and why he
was the way that he was, and to help me
talk about that, I asked Carrie Burbank to join me
on this episode. I was listening to the TBTL podcast,
the Too Beautiful to Live podcast, and I heard that

(00:54):
Carrie Burbank was really into Marlon Brando. So I messenger
message message messaged you on Facebook and I asked you
to I asked Carry to come on the podcast so
she could offer her insights into his life and his personality.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Welcome to the podcast, Carrie.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
Is there anything you want to introduce about yourself before
we get gone, other than.

Speaker 3 (01:17):
I have no official, legitimate credentials to warrant being on
the show. I'm not going to stop me from giving
my very passionate opinions about Marlon Brando.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
So today we're going to talk about his work as
an actor. We're going to talk about his childhood, and
I'll propose here and there a tentative analysis of his
personality and why he was the way that he was
because he had some interesting behaviors in his life.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
So first, let's talk about.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Marlon Brando as an actor, because for those of you
that don't know his influence on American society and film,
I think you really should know because I didn't know
this until I.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Did it deep dive on him. Carrie. Yes, let me
ask you a specific question.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Do you think many people think he's one of the
best actors that ever lived?

Speaker 1 (02:08):
Do you think he's one of the best actors that
ever lived?

Speaker 3 (02:10):
I do.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Why do you think that? Well?

Speaker 3 (02:12):
I will say I wasn't actually very aware of Marlon
Brando myself up until about three years ago. I was
home alone. Luke was my husband, was traveling and I
was in the mood to watch a movie, so I
went on demand and nothing really appealed to me. So
I went to I think the old the classic movie
Collections or something, and happened to see street car named

(02:33):
Desire and thought, well, I've never seen this movie. I've
heard it talked about a lot. I should just check
it out. And I was absolutely blown away, Like I
was mesmerized by this in black and white and you know,
terrible lighting and all this stuff. It was just the
most captivating performance I've ever seen in my life. And
so then I became very curious about who this guy was.

(02:56):
And the more I found out about him, the more fascinating,
the more intriguing he became, not just as an actor,
but who he is as a human being, which of
course translates into his acting. But in my opinion, I've
never seen anyone that's you know, grabbed my attention and
kept I mean, he could read a grocery list and
I would just be sitting there dumbfounded and you know, captivated.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yeah, what was it about his performance? Mesmerizing?

Speaker 1 (03:21):
What did you like about him?

Speaker 2 (03:23):
Because I could say because I recently did a deep dive.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yeah, watched a lot of.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
These movies myself and have a few things to say
to you, But what was it about his performance it
really got them?

Speaker 3 (03:33):
Well, I'm going to state the obvious here and say, first,
he's he's quite easy on the eyes, So there was
just I wasn't aware of how good looking into a
guy he was when he was younger. And I don't
even know if I can fully articulate what it is,
other than to say perhaps it's just because he he
is so authentic, and I don't think there's a single

(03:55):
you know, bat of his eye that's not being utterly
in earth, excuse me, utterly authentic to the character that
he's playing. And it's so I once heard someone say,
the more authentic you are, the more captivating you are.
The more vulnerable you are, the more captivating you are,
And I feel like he does that to a degree
that most actors aren't even capable of reaching.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Yeah, yeah, I agree, mesmerizing, easy on the eyes, authentic.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
I mean, he was such a fox when he was young.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
He really was, because.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
I remember him from The Godfather from an older guy,
and he wasn't bad looking, but man, when he was
in his twenties in Streetcar was maybe when he was
thirty ish or late twenties or something.

Speaker 3 (04:39):
I think he was in his early twenties. Then. Yeah,
and boy, you're not kidding. I've even watched there's an
audition tape of him auditioning for Rebel Without a Cause,
which he did not get that part, but there's maybe
a three four minute audition tape that you can google
online and watch. And even just that, like him standing
there slating for the ca came turning his head to

(05:01):
the right, turning his head to left, spinning all the
way around. You can kind of see in his eyes
he finds this whole thing a little bit ridiculous. But
he's very young and this is his first audition of
this nature, so he's going along with it. But just
the story that's happening in his eyes and his little
smirk as he looks at the camera, like I could
just watch that over and over again and he's not

(05:22):
even doing anything, you know.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, people said, I didn't realize this, but James Dean
and Elvis, who are two of the biggest sex icons,
you know, just these these foundational men in American pop
culture sure modeled themselves after Marlon Brando.

Speaker 3 (05:42):
They did James Dean very much, so like almost studied
him as a person, not only as an actor, but
kind of started mimicking his the way he dressed and
sort of different mannerisms of his.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
Right, which is just so interesting because to me, Marlon
Brando's this crazy kook who was in The Godfather. I
had no idea that he was like the original Elvis. Yeah,
and we'll get into even more how intertwined these people's
lives were. One thing I just want to get out
of the way because a lot of people refer to

(06:16):
him as like the mumbler, you know, and say, well, yeah,
I was asking around as I was preparing for this episode.
I was like, did what do you think about Roylen Brando?
And like, well, isn't he the one that mumbled a lot?
What do you think about that? Does this mumbling get
to you?

Speaker 3 (06:30):
No? I mean he definitely. I think that reputation is
pretty legitimate because he even makes jokes about the fact
that he mumbles or used to it, So I think
that I understand where that comes from. But in terms
of watching his performances in the films that I've seen
and even interviews that I've watched, I don't think I

(06:52):
would have noticed it if he hadn't been labeled with
the mumbler or kind of notorious for being this actor
that mumbles. I almost think it's kind of a gestive
thing where you hear that and then you pick up
on it. In my opinion, right, because I just think
it's he has a unique way of speaking. But I
wouldn't really describe it as mumbling.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yeah, I mean, I think there are times briefly where
he's mumbling, but I think it's more of a product
of what.

Speaker 1 (07:18):
Acting was when he came.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
Up Exactly, you were supposed to dictate, and you were
a Thespian and you spoke in a certain way that
was understandable to people in the back row without any amplification.
Whereas he's in that zone where he's he's intimate and
authentic and he talks like real people talk, and it
doesn't always come out very dictatorial, you know, if that's

(07:43):
a word, probably not, But you know, like in Julius Caesar,
he doesn't mumble at all.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
No, he's very Shakespearean.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
So I agree, I think that it's a reputation that
he got and then hit the nail.

Speaker 3 (08:00):
One hundreds You hit it on the head because I
think it was in the time that he was sort
of being discovered. Acting was this whole other thing. And
so when he came in and was understated and seft
spoken and could also tap into his sort of feminine
side while also being this sometimes edgy, dangerous character, I

(08:20):
think people didn't really know what to think about that
because it was so different, right, and just instead of
getting labeled maybe understated, it was more of this guy
he mumbles, you know yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
And that's another thing that upon reading people review him
back then, was that he was in touch with his
feminine side, which today I wouldn't see that looking back
at these performances. But given the tradition of men and
movies up until that point, sure it was, you know,
very it had feminine qualities to it. Okay, So more

(08:55):
about his career. He was cited by many actors as
a major INFLA, including, as we said, James Dean, Elvis Presley.

Speaker 1 (09:03):
Elvis Presley was a terrible actor.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
So I don't know what you know he I don't
know how he was following it in Malon.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
Brandos, what's that?

Speaker 2 (09:10):
But Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Robert de Niro, Al Pacino,
Johnny Depp, even Ryan Gosling, and many many more. I
saw interviews with these guys saying they all look back
to Marlon Brando as the actor to emulate. He also
gave acting lessons to some famous people. Do you know

(09:31):
who Just a little bit trivia.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
Here, I do not know Michael Jackson. They actually became friends.

Speaker 3 (09:37):
I knew they were good friends. I didn't know he
gave him acting lessons.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
Yeah, Sean Penn, John Voight, and Whoopi Goldberg.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah, he won a bunch of awards throughout his life.
He was nominated for the Oscars. You know how many times?

Speaker 3 (09:54):
I know he won twice, but I don't know how
many times he was nominated.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
He won twice, He was nominated eight times. He won
four on the Waterfront and fifty four and The Godfather
in seventy two. Do you know the Godfather Oscar story?

Speaker 3 (10:08):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (10:08):
What do you remember about that story?

Speaker 3 (10:10):
Well, when you won the Oscar for the Godfather? He
I mean we may be skipping ahead a little bit
here to touch on this, but he's notoriously not interested
in the business of show business and things like award
ceremonies and so he wasn't particularly interested in going there
to accept this award, but he was very active in
a lot of political issues and specifically Native American rights,

(10:34):
and he felt like if he had five minutes to
be able to speak to eighty five thousand people at once,
he wanted to take advantage of that for something that
he felt was more important. So he sent a Native
American girl, Sasheen Little Feather up to read this speech
that he had prepared about the particular issues at the time,
and they wouldn't let her read it, so she was

(10:56):
just able to kind of I don't know, I think
he gave her like thirty seconds to just say, I cannot,
you know, accept this war on behalf of Marlon Brando.
He would like to decline this generous award. And then
she said because of the treatment of Native Americans in
Hollywood and in film right now, which kind of was
met with mixed responses of some applause and some booing,
and it was a very awkward moment, and I think

(11:17):
at the time the Academy and some of the people
in that room did not really appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah, from my impression, there was a huge backlash in
the media and from the American public, although there were
some people who were sympathetic to it and maybe even
applauded it from what I can tell, because I think
Marlon Brando eventually had like was forced to sort of
apologize to the American people, which is interesting because today

(11:43):
every other speech is a political oh yeah speech of course,
and speaking up for the oppressed. And I just it's
just a sign of the times that in nineteen seventy
three that.

Speaker 1 (11:54):
People would boo a.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
You know, Native American woman and saying that he's going
to decline this because of the treatment of our people.

Speaker 1 (12:07):
Yeah, you know. Today, you know she would get a
standing ovation.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
Yeah, she'd be one in a crowd of many people
giving a similar speech.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
You know.

Speaker 3 (12:17):
I think this is perhaps we'll get to this more
in depth later, but I think this is one example
of how he was so far ahead of his time
in so many ways. And like I've watched these old
interviews with him on the Dick Cabot Show, I think
in nineteen seventy three. They're really, to me very interesting,
and they're on YouTube, and he's talking of course about

(12:40):
some Native American rights on that as well, but just
a lot of the way he thinks a lot of
the way he approached life and himself and trying to
understand what we're here for and looking out for the
more vulnerable people in society, whomever that may be. In
so many ways, I think he was very far ahead
of his time, and his thinking was so progressive at

(13:02):
the time. But I was recently watching some of these things.
I think these apply one hundred percent to exactly what's
going on in a lot of cases right.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
Now, you knowally, Yeah, and I have some ideas as
to what about his childhood would lead him to have
a personality trait that questions the authority and the society
in which he lived. In other awards that he got,
he had some Golden Raspberry Award nominations. Those are the
anti Oscars, right, He won once for The Island of

(13:32):
Doctor Moreau in nineteen ninety six.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
Have you seen this movie?

Speaker 3 (13:37):
I have not. I think because I have such a
good impression of Marlon Brando, and because I have such
a soft spot for him, I almost don't want to
watch this film. Yeah, but I'm sure I'll have to
at some point.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
It's notoriously bad.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Whenever you want to talk about like a bad movie
or like a disastrous production of a movie. People point
toward the island of doctor Moreau. I want to say Monro,
but it's Moreau. He got the Worst Supporting Actor Award,
that he got an Emmy, which I didn't know in
nineteen which I wouldn't even think he was on TV.

(14:10):
But he was on TV nineteen ninety nineteen seventy nine
for the I think it's our sequel to Roots called
Roots the Next Generations, and he plays a white supremacist,
so he got he politically wanted to play. He wanted
to be involved in a lot of projects that helps
people understand racism and oppression. But since he's white, he

(14:33):
would often get these roles as like the ignorant white man,
like in Siren Saidinada or Sirenara. Have you seen that
movie where he's in Japan. He plays a racist white
American GI who I think eventually falls in love with
the job I didn't watch the whole thing, but falls
in love with the Japanese woman, but at first is

(14:54):
very bigoted against that. And incidentally, have you seen South
Pacific Musical. There's a similar storyline in that, and I
realized that South specific came out the year the movie
came out after Sarinara or Saarinada. And I was in
South Pacific in high school, and I as an Asian

(15:14):
Japanese American myself. I played a white gi who falls
in love with an Asian woman and the Asian woman's.

Speaker 1 (15:23):
Played by a white girl.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
And I had to sing this song about racism and
about you know, falling in love with people of color
and how you've got to be carefully taught.

Speaker 1 (15:35):
You know, to not like those people.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
But anyway, how did it go over?

Speaker 2 (15:40):
You know, I'm a terrible actor, but I like to sing,
so that's why I got the part. In fact, I
think I think every guy who tried out for a
part in South Pacific got a part, you know what
I mean?

Speaker 1 (15:51):
Those yeah, because they're so limited in terms of the
met so I automatically got a part. I AMDB.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
He is on one list of the top one hundred
greatest actors of all time.

Speaker 1 (16:03):
He's number He's number two. Who do you think is
number one, Laurence Olivier?

Speaker 2 (16:09):
Nope, good guest though, Jack Nicholson, Ah, he's number one,
number one, Are you kidding? There's a number of lists
on IMDb, but he's number one. In sixty one, he
got the Golden Apple Award for the least cooperative actor.
In nineteen ninety nine, Time magazine named him one of
the most one hundred most important people of the century,
And upon reading this, I was like, why have I

(16:30):
not known more about Marlon Brando? I mean, what's wrong
with me? Okay, So let's get into his life here.
Born in nineteen twenty four, Omaha, Nebraska. My white side
of my family is from Nebraska, so I feel sort
of a kid and he kind of reminds me of
my grandfather.

Speaker 3 (16:47):
At I have my grandfather's from Nebraska right near Omaha,
this little town called Broken Bow.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
Oh really, Yeah, most of my family's from Kansas, which
is you know, just what south of Nebraska.

Speaker 1 (16:59):
Have you driven through Nebraska?

Speaker 3 (17:01):
No? And I want to, I really want to.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
It is one of the most boring states to drive through.
It's just kind of like these slight roly hills and
then you'll see a tree, and then more slightly roly
hills you see another tree.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
I mean, beautiful, but just interesting.

Speaker 3 (17:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
Anyway, he his ancestry. Ancestry is German, Dutch, English, Irish,
so kind of typical Misshmash of Western European American. He
was raised as a Christian scientist. Did you know any
details about his Christian scientists?

Speaker 3 (17:31):
It's not really discussed a whole lot anything I have
read or writed, But.

Speaker 1 (17:36):
It seems like you know in name they were a Christians.

Speaker 3 (17:40):
I think that's more the case. He was raised more
as son of two alcoholics. I think that was the
bigger religion in the house.

Speaker 2 (17:47):
The religion of Jack Daniels is Yes, he had two
older sisters. So what do you know about his childhood?
I'll fill in whatever else you don't get to. But
from what you've said so far, my guess is you
know everything. So what do you know about his childhood?

Speaker 3 (18:03):
What I know about his childhood is he so? Yes?
Both of his parents were pretty heavy alcoholics. His father
was traveling salesman who spent a lot of time also
cheating on his mother, and he was kind of an
abusive alcoholic. He would abuse his mom when he would
get upset with her, and she was an alcoholic. But

(18:26):
Marlon really loved his mom a lot, and she actually
was an actor in the local theater. But he would
often as a young kid, have to go to the
bars and find her and drag her home, and he
would do this thing to keep her alert, where he
would imitate the barnyard animals, or he would imitate neighbors
or friends of theirs to make her laugh and to

(18:47):
keep her attention and to keep her awake. And I
guess it's sort of a rumored that that's where his
very first acting kind of began. And his father was
very withholding. He never really gave Marlon any approval, never
made him feel loved. In fact, the opposite. He kind
of made him feel worthless and unwanted and he would

(19:10):
never amount to anything. And so he had a lot
of a lot of issues with regard to his father.
But he did when up until about age seven, I
believe they had a governess in their house who cared
for the kids, and he got very attached to her.
He was very, very attached to her, and she left

(19:31):
one day saying she was taking a vacation, but she
never came back, and that was like for him. He's
talked about that that was like the biggest betrayal of
his life and kind of what created the foundation to
not really trust people and having trusting relationships and kind
of going through life feeling very unsafe and unloved, unprotected.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
Right, Yeah, good, you truly know everything about this man's life. Yeah, Carrie,
you described his childhood very well. The only thing I
would add that I read was, I don't know if
you mentioned this was his father and mother to some extent,

(20:16):
were both promiscuous and cheated quite a bit, and the
mother was seemingly suicidal, yes, and possibly depressed. So so yeah,
I want to talk a little bit more in detail
about his what you're calling governess or nanny. Her name

(20:38):
was Ermie apparently, and yeah, as you said, he was
very attached to her, and from the age of two
to seven, this woman took care of him. And she
was half white, half Asian like myself, and they were
again very close, and reportedly they slept in bed together

(20:58):
at night every night naked, Yeah, which I don't know
what to make of. On one level, it's like, well,
if you're two and it's hot in Nebraska and you're
sleeping in bed, you sleep naked, No, no big deal.
I mean, if it was if Marlon was a little girl,

(21:20):
you probably wouldn't think much of it. But you know,
it's like, why do we have to sexualize everything. I mean,
in the olden days, we didn't even have clothes, So yeah,
you know, it's like, what's the big deal, But then
you think seven years old and da da da. So
it's unclear because Marlon, to my knowledge, never commented on
his feelings about that.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
No, I didn't even remember it.

Speaker 3 (21:45):
I don't know. The only thing I've heard him say
about that was just describing it very fondly, but almost
more like you know, motherly. Not anything strange about it,
just I mean, he was seven, the oldest, and maybe
it was really hot. I don't know, but I think
it was more of a that skin to skin contact
probably really stuck out in his mind of the nurturing.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, now, at the very least we can say that
it provided with him a sensual experience. Yes, that was
related to instrument, but also I mean physical you know,
warmth with someone that was not his mother, that was
with a person of color, which influenced likely his mate

(22:32):
choices moving forward in life. But yeah, you described it.
When he was seven, she told him that she was
going away but she would be back soon, and he
waited and waited and waited and waited, and then he
realized suddenly that she was never coming back. And he
wrote about this and talked about it and said that

(22:53):
it was a big betrayal to him, and he said,
quote from that day forward, I became a stranged from
the world. So, yeah, this is this relationship with Ermie
was likely his only secure attachment. He had two alcoholic
parents who were either distant or abandoning of him emotionally

(23:18):
or abusive. And then there's this woman who is taking
care of him all the time and he has a
really strong attachment with her, but she just disappears and
lies to him and betrays him. And this is a
huge attachment injury, which he's already been attachment injured by
his parents just not being there for him, and so

(23:41):
he just has this huge crushing blow to how he
feels about himself, how he feels about other people as
trust and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
Carrie, Do you have kids, Carrie? Yeah, talking about that.

Speaker 3 (23:54):
Luke has a daughter, So I have a stepdaughter, but
she's twenty three.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
Okay, are you gonna have kids?

Speaker 3 (24:00):
We're trying.

Speaker 1 (24:01):
Would you have a nanny? Do you think if you
had if you had some kids.

Speaker 3 (24:05):
Or well, it's a tough question. I can see the
value not a full time nanny, but but somebody that
maybe comes and helps out, just so you can maintain
some sense of self or identity. But I think we're
fortunate enough that my mom is going to be retired
very soon, I think this year, and she's just dying,

(24:26):
dying to have some grandkids. So I think it would
probably be more of a thing where maybe she could
help out a little bit.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
Yeah, but it's a really common thing today to have nanny's.

Speaker 1 (24:36):
That's why I'm asking.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
Yeah, I don't want a nanny, shame anybody, but but
it's something that I feel like people don't think about
in terms of the reality of child development and attachment
because a lot of nanny jobs are temporary, and a
lot of nanny's will just disappear, you know, they'll just
be like they'll tell a little Johnny, Okay, so today's

(24:58):
my last day, and I'm really sad, And then nanny
might be legitimately sad. But then nanny's like, I'm moving
on in life.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
I'm a young woman.

Speaker 2 (25:06):
I'm going to college or I'm moving back, you know,
to my home country or whatever. And the child is
left there. The child doesn't know the child is like,
you're another mommy to me, but everyone else in society knows, no,
that's a temporary nanny, but the kid doesn't know that.
And especially when you have a kid who's being neglected
and abused by their biological parents, they become even more

(25:29):
dependent on that person. And then you add the fact
that Marlon Brando had a nanny for five years, the
same person, and you sleep with her all.

Speaker 3 (25:38):
Night during the most formative years.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Right and then, and she didn't even say goodbye, like
I'm sorry, we can write or blah blah blah. She
just lied to him and just ditched him. I mean,
imagine that feeling of like she didn't even care enough
to say goodbye, you know, that she just dropped me
like I was, you know, dead weight, And how horrible

(26:05):
that would make you feel deep down.

Speaker 3 (26:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:08):
The way I like to describe this to people as like,
think of the worst, most terrible breakup you've ever been through,
where you might have even kind of stalked them a
little bit, you know, and you were just broken up
about that. Times at times a million. That's what this
is like. Because as an adult, we have our faculties,

(26:28):
we have foundational attachments, we can turn to we have
our sense of self. When you're suven, you don't have
those things, and especially having been abused and just thinking
about what that did to his psychology and to his
neurons literally is just very interesting to think about as
we move forward into his life as an explanation of

(26:49):
why he did some of the things that he did.
So as a child, he was defiant. Apparently he locked
teachers into rooms, he set fires, he broke a property,
he was expelled, Apparently he was starved for love and
affection apparently, So, so what can we say about his

(27:11):
psychology as a result of his early childhood life. What
are some sort of summary things we can say about
what his brain is like at the age of ten, he.

Speaker 3 (27:22):
Describes the book that he wrote and I think and
even in the documentary Listened to Me Marlon, which is excellent.
I recommend it for anybody who might be interested. But
as incredibly insecure, like going through life just feeling bad
about himself and embarrassed. And he didn't complete I know

(27:43):
you said age ten, but like he didn't end up
completing school, so he felt insecure, that he was dumb
and that he you know, just wasn't like everybody else,
and topping, you know, adding on to that the trust
issues and the anger he felt towards his father, which
translated to anger toward any type of authority, any type

(28:04):
of someone trying to control him or tell him what
he should do or shouldn't do. Really, I think that
created a really deep, I don't know what you would
call it, but complex, something that that ran very very
all throughout his life. I think not only until he
was practically in his seventies that he kind of was
able to get a harness on some of those anger
issues in that reactivity. And I don't think he ever

(28:27):
stopped having the defiance toward authority or toward being controlled,
So that would be kind of my assessment.

Speaker 1 (28:35):
Yeah, good, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
When I read about this about his early life and
learned about that, everything made sense to me in terms
of his later life. I think we have this thing
in our society where we think, well, a successful, famous,
loved person, they must have a good self esteem, right,
and they present themselves in interviews like they're confident, and
they're in movies and they're you know, they're paid a lot,

(28:59):
and so they must have high self esteem. No, he
had extremely low self esteem. And the more I get
to know famous people, the more I realize that there's
I've been indoctrinated into that belief that famous people are
are well put together. But of course they're just like
all of us who wake up in the morning and

(29:22):
put both low self esteems on with you know what,
one leg at a time, and it's it's just like
anyone else. And again, because of Marlin's just terrible. I
can't think of a worse scenario for him growing up.
I mean, his parents divorced. I think reportedly he had

(29:45):
to threaten his father with a gun to stop abusing
his mom. And it's it just sounds.

Speaker 3 (29:51):
Awful when you add on to the fact that I
think by nature he was a very very sensitive kid,
and then you add on all the things that transpire.
But he had that almost in his DNA of being
this very sensitive soul, right And I would almost dare
to think that famous people, by and large, as compared

(30:11):
to the normal population of non famous people, are driven
more by insecurities and not feeling enough and not feeling
like so they have that's kind of what drives them
to achieve these exceptional things and receive attention and validation
because they may not have that sense themselves.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
Right, They're constantly chasing a validation that normals have just waking.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
Up in the morning, yeah something, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
So the things we can say about his psychology emerging
from childhood is neglected, emotionally abandoned, emotionally abused, you know,
put down, physically abused. He witnesses extreme abuse and violence
from his father. He was parentified is the language we
use in my industry, of being elevated in hierarchy above

(31:07):
his mom to take care of her, and he seemingly
channeled his pain into bad behavior and anti authority behavior.
And he had an anger problem, which is natural, and
he was beginning to realize that he could get attention
and love by performing for his mother. Okay, so teenage years,

(31:30):
he goes to military school. He has more bad behavior,
but he goes into acting class and really is for
the first time, finds something that he enjoys and that
he gets rewarded for. He drops out. He tries to
enlist in the military because it's during World War Two
at this point, but that don't let him in because

(31:51):
he has an old football injury. So at the age
of twenty, he goes to New York City to become
an actor like his sister, and he he hooks up
with his mother figure, Stella Adler, who was his acting teacher.
She was a famous method acting teacher. What do you
do you know anything about her?

Speaker 1 (32:09):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
I don't know a ton about Stella, but yes, you're correct.
She she kind of became a surrogate mother figure for him,
and she was basically the first person in his life
to ever say he was good at something and encourage
him to do this thing and let him know he
had a talent, he had a gift. And that was, like,
I mean, going eighteen years before you really ever hear

(32:31):
somebody say you're good at anything. So I think for
him that, obviously, I'm guessing made him more curious about
acting and continuing to do it. But at the same time,
kind of being welcomed into her actual family and feeling
like somebody. I think that it held two appeals for
him in that sense.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
Right, Yeah, A mother figure, someone giving himself esteem, like
you said, for the first time in his life, feeling
good about himself, feeling rewarded for his hard work, and
he just pours himself into acting, and he becomes a
stage actor and starts to rise in the ranks pretty

(33:11):
quickly as a young man. And he is, you know,
starts to get good critic reviews and this kind of thing.
And he's in a stage production of street call a
street car named Desire, which was later made into the
film with the same people I believe.

Speaker 3 (33:30):
Actually it was Jessica Tandy played the other one the
role in the theater production, and Vivian Lee played her
in the film version.

Speaker 1 (33:39):
Okay, so you truly know everything, So question me, Kirk.
So this is now we enter.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
The nineteen fifties, which he's in his late twenties at
this point, and he's a he starts to act in
movies and he's a huge sensation right off.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
Out of the gates.

Speaker 2 (34:01):
Street Car named Desire, Vivis Apatta, Julius Caesar, the Wild
One on the Waterfront, Guys and Dolls. I've watched all
these movies in the past couple of weeks, and I
loved him and Julius Caesar.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
Man just just loved him.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
I mean he that movie as a whole was boring
except for him, right like everyone else was like and
then every time, like Marlon Brando, just with that furrowed
brow that he always has in that movie, you know,
and power with that Mark Anthony speech on the Roman steps.

(34:36):
You know, he's just like, I mean, it's just amazing.
And he took that role because he wanted to prove
that he could act act, you know, because he was
getting a lot of flak for being a hack who
the girls were liking or something.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, for kind of playing that mad boy dangerous. And
he was also getting associated with because he played the
character Stanley Kowalski in The street Car named Desire, and
it's obviously as he's kind of a bad guy, and
he was having people associate that character with him as
as though he had that personality, and that really genuinely

(35:13):
kind of upset him. It bothered him that people thought
perceived him as being any in any way similar to
Stanley Kowalski. And he says he hated that character as
a character as a person.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
Yeah, Yeah, the character was physically abusive, you know, rash, brutish,
really mean to his controlling. Yeah, Stella And I'm so
glad that I watched this movie in prep for this,
because I finally know the origin of Stella.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
I know me too.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
When I saw it, I was like, Okay, all the
Simpsons episodes.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
And On the Waterfront, which.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
I could have been a contender, you know, I finally
finally understood that scene.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
Isn't it funny though, how when you grow up hearing
these lines from famous movies like that, like On the
Waterfront or even in The Godfather, and then when you
watch them yourselves, how much more understated they actually are
in the film than this impression that people do of it,
or that's kind of grown into this thing that's much
bigger than it is. He says that, in my opinion,

(36:22):
in a very almost just like defeated way. But when
you hear people say it, they're like, I.

Speaker 2 (36:26):
Could about But it's more like he says, I could
have I could have been some I could have been
a contender.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
I could have been I could have been somebody.

Speaker 2 (36:33):
Charlie and he's talking to his brother, and it's just
really sad scene because his brother is I mean spoiler
alert sixty years later he is. His brother's basically telling him,
if you don't do what I'm about to tell you,
I have to kill you, because the mob.

Speaker 1 (36:48):
Is telling me I have to kill you.

Speaker 2 (36:49):
And you know, and the face that Marlon browds just
like really Charlie and anyway, yeah, and then and the
stell moment he it's this truly you know, pathetic meaning
like sad moment in the movie where he's he abused

(37:11):
his wife and he's yelling up to his wife saying, Stella,
come down here, I'm sorry. I was, I'm a jerk,
I'm a terrible person, and she's not. And he's like, Della,
And this the the passion in that voice when you
watch it, you know it's it's it's you.

Speaker 3 (37:29):
Just wrecked as a man.

Speaker 1 (37:30):
Ye right, It's not to me.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
I always thought it referred to some melodramatic you know,
someone screaming at something for for no reason or I
don't know anyway.

Speaker 4 (37:40):
So.

Speaker 2 (37:43):
Why do you think at this point, I think I
already asked you this, But why do you think he
was such? Do you have anything more to say about
why you think he was such a big star? Because
you know, there are a lot of actors.

Speaker 1 (37:54):
During this time that you could point to that were great.

Speaker 2 (37:58):
Why was it that he was such a so he
was basically and I didn't even know this, that he
was basically Elvis. Before Elvis, you know, he was the
screaming fans were screaming at Marlin before they were screaming
at Elvis.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
Why do you think you were such a huge star?

Speaker 4 (38:13):
Well, I think, for one, I don't know how to
articulate this exactly, but you know, when you've met people
in your life, or maybe you've even done this yourself,
at times where when you really don't care about something,
like you genuinely don't care, it will somehow find its

(38:36):
way into your orbit and you can really take it
or leave it. But it's like it happens when I'm
with relationships, when maybe you've had a crush on somebody,
or you still have feelings for an ex and then
the second that you stop having feelings genuinely for them,
then all of a sudden they're super attracted to you.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
That's a weird, convoluted way of explaining the way I'm
the dynamic I'm trying to explain, But I think I
have to believe that part of it was that he
gave absolutely know f's whatsoever about show business, about being popular,
about being famous, about even doing movies. Really like he
it's so so truthfully and so convicted about you know,

(39:15):
how he felt about that business. He was incorruptible and
if it all went away, you know, the next day,
I don't think he would have cared. And there's something
that's very intriguing about that type of a person or
that type of an attitude, and I don't really think
it's something that you can teach someone. I don't think
it's well, you can't even try to do that.

Speaker 1 (39:35):
You're diametrically not doing that because you're trying.

Speaker 3 (39:38):
To exactly and that's like death to getting the thing
that you want, is desperately wanting it. So whatever that
thing is, however you quantify that like, I think that
was possibly a part of the draw to him, and
that's because he was so different, so very very different
than anyone else, especially in that business at that time.
But I don't know. For me, it's just I'll come

(39:58):
back to what I sort of said, and in the
beginning was the authenticity thing of For me, I'm more
fascinated with Marlon Brando as a person, as a human
being than as an actor, but both are quite fascinating
to me. The person Marlon Brando is just as authentic
as the actor Marlon Brando there's no separating the two.

(40:19):
And I've never encountered or witnessed anyone else in my
life seems to embody that one hundred percent of the time,
no matter what circumstances they're in, no matter what's being
said to them or expected of them, it's like this.
I don't even know how to explain it. It's like
this ultimate This is gonna sound lame, ultimate truth. That's

(40:41):
not it. It's more like he knew who he was,
flaws and all, you know, the good the bad. He
never betrayed who he was for money, for fame, to
make someone else feel less awkward in a moment like
I don't know if you've seen some of those interviews
where he clearly is almost physically uncomfortable being asked about
his film. Especially as he got later in life, he

(41:02):
had less and less patience for being interviewed about those
kinds of things.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
Yellwood sort of mess with them or turn the tables
and asked or asking them questions.

Speaker 3 (41:12):
Yes, And I don't think he was doing it to
be a jerk. I think it was pop some of
it probably for his own entertainment, But he was a
very curious person, and I think He just he didn't
see the importance of discussing those things when there were
so many other things in life to learn about or

(41:32):
to discuss. And sometimes that's why he would talk to
one of the interviewers, and I think it was genuinely
because he wanted to know something about them, right, you know,
who'd even say, just because I was in this film,
doesn't make you any different than I, and like, you
have just as many interesting things in your life, you know,
to talk about, which is very not something people did

(41:53):
back in those days at all.

Speaker 2 (41:55):
Right, Yeah, and still don't really Yeah, you said it
really well and that I thought a very similar thing,
except well thought out. I sort of saw him as
the fifties version of Kurt Cobain.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
You know.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
Nirvana famously hated being famous, right, and as soon as
their album became big, they instantly declared that grunge was dead.
And I remember when they would say stuff like that,
you know, like, yeah, grunge is dead, and I was like, hey,
I just discovered grunge and why are you saying it's dead.

(42:31):
And it was because to them, fame meant it was over,
you know, like fame if soccer moms are listening to me,
then it's dead.

Speaker 1 (42:40):
It's now. Yeah, it's it's over, you know.

Speaker 2 (42:43):
And and Kurt Cobain, you know, famously would you know,
just seemed to you know.

Speaker 1 (42:50):
Thumb, what are they I'm not good?

Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, thumb your nose at fame and MTV, and you know,
he'd wear dresses to things, and he pretty quick cut
his hair, and he was really known for that shaggy,
you know, locks of hair, and he like pretty quickly
cut his hair. And I remember thinking, like, man, he's
really going against the whole grunge image by cutting his hair.
And so I thought Marilyn Brando gave off a very

(43:15):
similar kind of vibe about just like, you know, just
being himself and wasn't going to play the game at
the same time though he was. He even said he
was very insecure and really wanted validation, and so in
Kurt Cobain, I think was the same way. I think
Kirk Cobain hated fame but also was chasing that dragon

(43:39):
to get validation that he wasn't that he never got
from his family growing up.

Speaker 3 (43:45):
Does that make sense, It totally makes sense. I was
just thinking because in my sort of reading and watching
things about Marlon brando and interviews and such. I know
this is going to sound a little bit contradictory, but
I don't actually think he sought validation. I don't actually
think that was one of his driving factors.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
From Alwoods.

Speaker 3 (44:09):
Yes, outside of his mom and his dad, he would
write letters from New York, begging them to write him
a letter and asking how they were and saying, I'm
sure I'd love to see you soon, and you know,
could you just send me a letter. I'm feeling awfully lonely,
And they wouldn't, you know. And so I think if
there was any validation that he was seeking, it was
from his parents. But he wanted nothing to do with

(44:30):
the I sound like I'm like the world's biggest Marlin
and Brando expert. I'm really not. But this is just
from what I have observed and watched and read. But
he wanted nothing to do with the business of show business,
and he because it was phony and he knew they
were selling him as a commodity and he didn't want

(44:50):
to be sold as a commodity. But then there was
the point in his career where it kind of you know,
after he's used to making a certain amount of money,
it's like the more money he made, the more his
lifestyle became more expensive, and he had more children with
various women, the more he kind of needed to do
at least like one picture of a year. And I

(45:12):
think the more his hatred for acting grew, the more
that he kind of became reliant on it financially. And
it's just it's sad because when you watch him in
some of these interviews and you can see him physically
becoming uncomfortable. He would happily answer questions that had nothing
to do with films. If somebody just asked him something

(45:32):
as a person, or to speak on a topic that
he felt passionate about, he would react in a completely
different way, and he was fully engaged. And if it
was about so did you think such and such film
was going to be as big of a hit, he'd
just be looking around the floor and all over the room,
and then he might comment to somebody off camera, and
you know, he just did not enjoy And in fact,

(45:55):
there were times that he said he was even frightened
when he would be going. I think the first time
he to the Oscars, the crowd was kind of mobbing him,
and I forget who it was getting out of a car,
and he was genuinely scared by that and almost kind
of mad at the crowd, a little bit of like,
you can't just invade my personal space because right this

(46:15):
after person.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
My suspicion of that was his physical abuse. Well, I'll
provide my suspicion of that after the break.

Speaker 1 (46:23):
So let's take a break.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
Okay, we're back, Yeah, Carrie Burbank, expert of Marlon Brando.
At least between you and me, you mentioned something I
didn't know that at the Oscars, the crowd was moving
in on him, which people do to stars, and he
was very uncomfortable with that and a little hostile against that.

(46:48):
And my suspicion of that is, which I'll get into
more later, maybe is he suffered from PTSD and what
we call complex PTSD because it was ongoing over time,
involving someone that's supposed to love him. His father was
very scary to him and traumatic. And if you've never

(47:09):
been through stuff like that, it's hard to imagine because
it's like, well, can't you just be like, well, dad's
being dad, But no, it's when you're even up until
teenage years, if someone in your family is scary physically
in that way with their anger and aggression. It can

(47:30):
literally rewire your brain so that whenever there is a threat,
it triggers this response of a post traumatic stress response,
and you can become quite deregulated and can become very
upset and hostile to get people away from you. And
so there were signs of it. I can't remember the

(47:52):
exact quote, maybe I'll find it in my notes here
in a second, but he talked about he didn't like
being suddenly touched, which is a sign of PTSD. There
wasn't a lot of other signs of PTSD. I wish
I could talk to them and really kind of go
through it, but it would make total sense that esp.

Speaker 3 (48:05):
I do know that he notoriously did not like loud noises, right.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
Yeah, loud noises another symptom of PTSD. Now, I don't
have enough to go on to really definitively say, but
it would make total sense to me that he suffered
in that way. Also, just one more thing to add
to what you were saying Carrie earlier, in terms of
his you know, being a huge star. As a child

(48:32):
of an alcoholic family, you become keenly aware of the
state of your parents, because when your parents are in
a stable mood, they don't drink as much, and when
they're unstable, they tend to drink more, and when they
drink more. So not only do you need to know

(48:52):
the emotional state of your parents to know if they're
going to drink more, but you also need to know
how drunk they are, because you know a but a
five drink mom is different from a ten drink moomb,
which is different from a fifteen drink moomb. And your
entire life as a five year old is dictated by
how drunk your parents are. If your parents aren't alcoholic

(49:12):
and they're stable from day to day, you don't need
to pay attention to your parents' state because they're always
the same.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
But in this instance, when you're a.

Speaker 2 (49:20):
Child, you're forced to develop the skill that you shouldn't
be forced to develop, which is to become super aware
of other people's states. And he seemingly had that. He
seemingly was very good at reading people.

Speaker 3 (49:35):
Is that at all similar to what I've heard called hypervigilance.

Speaker 2 (49:40):
Hypervigilance often you could apply it to this, Yeah, but
it more often refers to being very observant. Hyper observant
of what's going on around you to avoid threats. Essentially,
you know, like that person cross the room seems a

(50:00):
little upset, and I'm going to keep my eye on
that person because that might be a threat to me,
so I'll keep it up. Whereas other people, if they're
not suffering from a trauma reaction, might notice that person upset,
but it doesn't kind of trigger a response. This is
just general human alcoholic family stuff.

Speaker 3 (50:21):
You know.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
You ask any.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
Child of an alcoholic and they will say, oh, yeah,
I was always keenly observant of where my parent was
with regards to their drinking and use. And so what
this does is it's further neglect because the child resents
this for like, why am I having to take care
of my parents and they're not taking care of me.
They're not noticing me. And you also don't develop a

(50:45):
keen sense of who you are because you're spending too
much time on other people. But you developed this really
great skill that you can use, and one of the
ways you can use it is to gauge how other
people respond to you in a way to manage so
how they respond to you so you can get their approval.

(51:07):
You know, how you walk, how you talk, how you
present yourself. You know that your acting style, all those
things might have been influenced by this, you know, great
skill at reading other people's states.

Speaker 3 (51:20):
That is a thing that has been discussed a lot
about him is that he he'd pretty much size people
up in a matter of seconds. And I'm sure that
plays into the charisma, right, because it's like, you know
how to connect with people, you know how to get
what you want from them, or in his case, I
think he was more trying to figure out who he
was dealing with.

Speaker 2 (51:38):
Right, you know, because when he was a kid, if
he didn't know who he was dealing with, his life
would completely fall apart. But as an adult he could
use that skill and he was, shall we say, hyper
vigilant about who are you? Can I trust you? Are
you a good person? Are you a bad person? Are
you against me? Are you for me? And so that

(52:00):
affected also, I think his rise to fame in some
ways and his ability to figure out how to act
in a lot of ways. Okay, so just kind of
quickly going through his thirties, which I find to be
a very interesting time in his life. Nineteen fifty four
nineteen sixty four. Between those years, his mother diesen fifty

(52:24):
in nineteen fifty four, and to some this sort of
marks the end of his golden years, you know, which
was the early fifties, with all those big movies you
were talking about earlier, because it was the way. You know,
for some people, it's like, oh, your mom died, that's
really sad. But to him, not only did his mom
die and was that sad, but so died the possibility

(52:45):
of ever having the nurturing relationship that he ever wanted
from her, and that can be ten times one hundred
times worse than the grief of losing your mom, do
you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
So he had he made several he made a number
of big.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
Movies because he was a big star during this time,
but none of them were as well liked as his
earlier work, which I don't really understand because I've watched
some of these movies and I still think that he's great,
you know, in him, and I still think the movies
are fine. But for some reason, it maybe it was
because people were getting tired of him or something.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
I don't know, what do.

Speaker 3 (53:18):
You think it's I don't know, I've.

Speaker 1 (53:22):
Watched they weren't terrible.

Speaker 3 (53:23):
No. Some of the commentary that I've heard on some
of his whether it was a bad sort of patch
that he had, of a number of years of sort
of failed films, or why one in particular was a flop.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me in
this day and age, because I think just the movies
have changed so much, and like you said, you could

(53:44):
look at one versus another and not see a whole
lot of difference. But I think sometimes in those days
it was whether it was like a fight between the
studios or this such and such thing happening, or him
getting a reputation for this.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:56):
I mean, it's hard to know because we weren't there
at the epicenter of that culture. But I think it
was because he was His fame grew bigger than his
acting career in some ways, and I think people wanted
to see him kind of fall.

Speaker 3 (54:14):
That can be true. I also know that he was
starting to become a little bit of a handful on
sets and running up budgets, running over budget at times,
not wanting to be cooperative about a certain element of
the script or story. But it was always because he
was trying to fight for something that he believed made
this story better. And I have to say, in many instances,

(54:34):
I've heard from people who worked with them and they
said and he was usually right. So it wasn't just
for the sake of being, you know, a diva or
I think it came from good intentions, but then I'm
sure at some point it butted up against that. Oh
they're trying to tell me what I have to do,
and no one's going to tell me what I have
to do.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
You know, right, Because when I gave in to authority
as a child, it meant extremely bad things for me
in terms of my dad controlling every aspect of my
family and me. And so therefore I have to be
hyper vigilant about fighting against that authority because it's a threat.

Speaker 1 (55:13):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (55:14):
So in his thirties, first wife and Kishfi.

Speaker 1 (55:19):
They got pregnant and so they got married.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
She was half Indian, half British, So here we get
into this woman of color attraction, which is you know,
fine by me. They had one son, she was drinking
a lot, they fought a lot, they got divorced. During
this time, he was a notorious womanizer. Do you know
all the people he reportedly womanized?

Speaker 3 (55:43):
Well, I know that they're in the hundreds, if not thousands,
but I know some of them. But he in the
biography that he wrote that I've recently just read, he's
actually quite respectful and that he doesn't name the women.
Who'll tell maybe a story about when I was with
this person or this story.

Speaker 2 (56:02):
He's like it rhymes with Fairlyn from He did talk
about a little just like a short love affair that
the two of them had, and a couple of other
people he named, but most of them were kind of
remained anonymous.

Speaker 1 (56:16):
God, I wish he.

Speaker 2 (56:16):
Would have said it, but just for my own curiosity,
but yeah, he like rumor had it or maybe even
the women talked about it, Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, which
is kind of a funny picture in my.

Speaker 1 (56:31):
Head, Grace, Kelly Jackie, Oh.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
Apparently you know, I don't know this is just all
internet stuff, but I would believe it because you know,
some of them have been confirmed he was bisexual, which
I had no idea about. He reportedly do you know
of the men that he's really no?

Speaker 3 (56:52):
And I was really curious when I read the autobiography, Well,
he had a biographer write it with him, but to
words and it's called songs. My mother taught me if
anyone's interested. I was curious to see if he would
touch on that in the book, because he goes into
a lot of personal detail and it doesn't seem like
he's attempting to hide anything. And I had heard from

(57:14):
other sources that he would sometimes have love affairs with men,
including women as well as men, but he never made
any reference to that in his book, So I don't
know if it's true. I kind of feel like that
many people probably wouldn't say it if there wasn't some
element of truth to it.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
But I guess I know, yeah, And I don't know
the sources, but from my memory of what I read,
it sounded credible that he had been together with James Dean,
with Carrie Grant, Rock Hudson, and Lawrence Olivier. It would
make more sense with rock Hudson. Was Laurence Olivier gay?

Speaker 3 (57:53):
I don't know. I don't believe so, but I don't.

Speaker 2 (57:55):
Know, but anyway or bisexual, I don't know. But if
half of it is true he had sex with he's
probably the you know, he's like the the Kevin Bacon
of sex, you know, like everyone's within six degrees of
of having sex with Marlon Brando. I mean he, you know,

(58:18):
just seemed to attract and be attracted to a lot
of different people.

Speaker 3 (58:23):
I think that speaks a little bit to his what
I see in his personality of this eye contact that
he would make so deeply with anyone that he was
working with or being interviewed by or talking to, and
this connection that I feel is almost visible, if that
makes sense, like watching it on screen. Visible that's not

(58:45):
the right word, but like palpable. Maybe that's a better
way of describing it. Of wanting to like see through
you into your soul and know who you are and
in a real way, not outside fluff, not the what
you want me to think or not what you know,
but really get right to the heart of a person
and being able to admire whatever that is, whether it's

(59:06):
a male or female. I could see that potentially being
part of his personality. Or I saw this interview with
Larry King that he did some like in the nineties,
and even the way he's looking at Larry King, it's
like those memes go around like I want, you know,
my band to look at me the way that such
and such looks at this. It's like even the way
Marlon Branda was looking at Larry King, and I think

(59:27):
he kissed him on the lips at the end of
the interview. Exuse, I think, God, but I just did
a really what about the glasses classes off? Yeah, just
did a really horrible job of explaining that. But I
think what I meant was him being able to see

(59:47):
the beauty in each person, perhaps regardless of gender.

Speaker 2 (59:51):
Yeah, and you know, people's sexualities are complicated, and maybe
he was quote unquote born that way. But I think
another hypothesis is that he was so anti authority and
questioned authority so thoroughly that he looked at society's rules

(01:00:13):
about sexuality and said, I'm not going to follow that rule.
I'm going to follow I'm going to explore, you know,
I'm going to see, you know, why can't I have
sex with men?

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
Society says I'm not supposed to.

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
But I know authority is bullshit, you know, and so
I'm gonna I'm gonna try this out. Is is another Again,
sexuality is odd and.

Speaker 3 (01:00:36):
Right, is more complicated than that. But it's possible because
he he when he would talk about you know, forming
your opinions about things. Don't listen to what someone else
tells you, don't just take what you've read in a
newspaper as fact, like figure it out for yourself, form
your own opinion, you know kind of. I mean that's
obviously what he did throughout his life. He was a

(01:00:56):
self taught man, and he was incredibly intell, incredibly articulate.

Speaker 2 (01:01:01):
Yeah, he learned French to talk to Tahitians, I believe.
And there's an interview on YouTube that I saw where
he is fully being interviewed in French.

Speaker 3 (01:01:12):
I have never seen that.

Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
Wow, And he's on French TV being a he I
don't speak French.

Speaker 1 (01:01:18):
I took three years of it in high.

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
School, which would you would think would sound like hello,
I don't even know those things. I could say that Spanish.
But the he he famously could speak like seven languages,
many of them pretty well, and was very into philosophy.
And there's a lot of interviews that I saw on

(01:01:40):
YouTube of him speaking very intelligently.

Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
He's so eloquent just any topic you can get him on,
and he has such interesting thoughts and theories and perspective
on them.

Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
Well, you mentioned Larry King, and maybe some people out
there would be waiting for us to talk about the
famous interview in which he talks about Jewish people.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
Do you remember this interview?

Speaker 3 (01:02:04):
You know, I have not watched that one. Yeah, probably
because again it might taint my, it's opinion of him.

Speaker 1 (01:02:11):
So it's pretty bad.

Speaker 3 (01:02:13):
I mean he's pretty old at this point, right.

Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
Yeah, he uses you know, he's so Larry King is
Jewish himself, right right. And in the end, Larry King
i think even said, you know, because it was a
big controversy, I think Larry King said, look, you're all
taking this out of context. You know, Marlon Brando was
more than just this quote that you're pulling out.

Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
But it's pretty bad, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
It's just it's it's it's What's interesting is that when
it came to black people, when it came to Native Americans,
when it came to Asians and Tahitians, he was he
was pretty progressive, you know. Was he perfect in today's eyes?
I would say, you know, not likely, but you know,
in terms of his time and being a white guy,
he was definitely at the cutting edge. But when it

(01:02:58):
came to Jewish people, for whatever reason, he started talking
about how Jewish people are are in charge of Hollywood
and how they won't allow negative portrayals of Jewish people
in movies where and he goes on to say, like,
you've had negative portrayals and use a lot of colorful language,
but you know they, you know, the Jewish Hollywood allows

(01:03:21):
for negative portrayals of white people, of black people, of Asians,
but they won't allow for negative portrayals of Jewish people. Now,
I have no idea where he was getting us from
or but it sounds very quintessential anti Semitic.

Speaker 3 (01:03:35):
That's really interesting to me, only because I have seen
interviews with him in the seventies where he actually it
sounds like he was almost given the exact same type
of speech, but he also included Jewish people in that
when he was talking about minorities Native Americans, black people,

(01:03:56):
and he cites you know, Jewish people, and I've heard
a think of at least one or two where he
was more in defense of them as a group that
has been marginalized at times. And so that's surprising for
me to hear that.

Speaker 2 (01:04:11):
Right, So he's I think he just talked a lot
about a lot of things. And there's a couple quotes. Oh,
it's in the Playboy magazine. Actually that was back when
people actually did read Playboy for the art.

Speaker 1 (01:04:26):
It was actually, like.

Speaker 2 (01:04:27):
You know, kind of a well known place to read
in depth interviews with people. But he so, I'll just
read the quote. Okay, you've seen every single race besmirched,
but you've never saw but you never saw an image
of the Kike because the Jews were ever so watchful
for that, and rightly so they never allowed.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
It to be shown on screen.

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):
The Jews have done so much for the world that
I suppose you get extra disappointed because they didn't pay
attention to that. So I think that's what I was
saying earlier. He also said on Larry King in nineteen
ninety six, he said, Hollywood is run by Jews, it
is owned by Jews, and they should have a greater
sensitivity about the issue of people who are suffering because

(01:05:15):
they've exploited. We have seen the we have seen the
N word and the grease ball. We've seen the Chink,
We've seen the slit eyed, dangerous jap, we have seen
the wiley Filipino. We've seen everything, but we never saw
the Kike because they knew perfectly well that that is
where you draw the wagons around, so you know, again

(01:05:41):
in terms of the delivery, not so great. And maybe
there's a sensitive notion behind all that, but obviously when
you read it, it just comes across as.

Speaker 3 (01:05:57):
It definitely to me that smacks of kind of him
turning into the old cranky, slightly losing it man stage
because and I probably some of that stems from his
whole life being this person who says whatever he thinks,
does whatever he wants, and for the most part, people

(01:06:17):
are in favor of it. And maybe at a certain
point you just get so used to doing that, but
you're not necessarily being as careful with what it is
you're saying, because, like I was saying, referencing an interview
that it was in the early seventies on the Dick
Havevitt Show, he basically says a similar type of thing.
I don't think he addresses the issue with the how
the Jewish people are portrayed in films specifically, but he

(01:06:39):
does with all the other races you just described, and
it's in a much gentler kinder comes across as much
more sympathetic that he's trying to say, it's not fair
that these people are portrayed this way, and we just
accept it as okay or funny or it's like they're
a caricature of what we think of this race or
this group of people, and it's not okay. So it's

(01:07:02):
really surprising to read that. But I feel like part
of it is a similar message that he spoke about
twenty some years prior in a much more articulate way.
And the part about the Jewish people, that's a little
surprising to me. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:14):
I mean, I'm not going to defend it, and I'm
not going to say that it wasn't misguided what he's saying.
It's hard to know because when he actually listen to
the quote, it's not exactly clear what he's saying precisely,
but it definitely rings of a little insensitivity at least. Yeah,
So I and I remember hearing about those quotes and

(01:07:35):
being like, oh, Marlon Brando, you know, like the Mel
Gibson thing, Like, isn't mel Gibson like against Jews? You know,
you just get these these snippets from media. But upon
learning the full breadth that I could about Marlon Brando's life,
it's like, oh, in context with all of his civil
rights work, he stood behind MLK when he gave the

(01:07:59):
I Have a Dream's speech, he did the March on Washington.
He was heavily involved. You know, he sent a Native
American to accept his you know, to take the ort
to refuse the oscar. You know, he took a number
of movies. He did a movie about anti apartheide, he
did Roots, He did all these things. In the context

(01:08:21):
of everything, and he said this, this what he said
about Jewish people. It's like, it doesn't necessarily justify what
he said, but in the context of everything, it's like, well,
he was headed in the right direction.

Speaker 1 (01:08:35):
In a lot of ways.

Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
Yeah, and maybe he got misguided in a couple of ways,
or he had a particular thing against Jews.

Speaker 3 (01:08:43):
But I think, I mean Stella Adler was Jewish, and
so he actually had quite a few people in his
life throughout his life that were some of the closest
friends and people to him. And I think when I
saw him on Larry King Live, I don't know why
I were doing such a deep dive on the Jewish thing,
but I'm really going for it. But Larry King thought
he was Jewish, and he was like, well half He's

(01:09:04):
like not really, but like I identify because kind of
growing up in New York around so many Jewish people,
I think he felt he said, culturally, I identify with them.
But what you had just said about that quote from
the late nineties coming out a little bit, I would
say insensitive or probably not the best thing you could
have said or the best way of phrasing that. But

(01:09:25):
it's funny because it's almost true to Marlon Brando's line
of thinking in that you shouldn't make an assessment about
someone based on something you've read in a magazine or
a paper or scene in the press, but do some reading,
do some you know, learning research, and then decide, like,
don't base it on what someone else has told you.

(01:09:46):
So it's almost true to that point of if you
take a look at the whole breadth of his work,
his life, where he spent his money and his time,
and where he put his priorities, I think it's pretty
counter to one sensitive statement about a certain group of people.

Speaker 1 (01:10:02):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:10:02):
Again, we're not going to apologize for anti Semitism, but again,
to label him as this bigoted, terrible human being is
denies the humongous amount of work that he did that
was very positive. Right, So I want to just touch
on a couple things really quick. He had a second

(01:10:24):
wife in nineteen sixty to nineteen sixty two. Again she
got pregnant. They got married Mexican American actress Movita Castneta.
Two children. He had several affairs during that. Then during
this time, he had a girlfriend, Rita Moreno.

Speaker 1 (01:10:41):
Do you know about this? What do you know about this?

Speaker 3 (01:10:43):
I just know that their love affair went on for many,
many years, and it was kind of tumultuous. Yeah, and
I think they would have sort of these big breakups,
these big dramatic things, and then they'd get back together.
And yeah, that went on for many years.

Speaker 2 (01:10:56):
Yeah, it went on for eight years from nineteen fifty
four to nineteen sixty two. During the time he was
married twice. For those of you who don't know the
name Rita Moreno, she's from West Side Story. She's the
main Puerto Rican girl. She's the main girl other than
the main girl medic you know anyway, And she's actually

(01:11:20):
Puerto Rican herself. And she wrote a whole memoir about
her life, and she wrote about her time with Marlon Brando,
and she said that having sex with him was quote
unquote earth shattering, which is actually a trait. I haven't
talked about borderline yet. For those who listen to the podcast,
they know all I do is ever talk about borderline.
But I want to talk about borderline personality a little bit.

(01:11:42):
And I always whenever I talk about it, I'm talking
about not the personality disorder, but I'm talking about the
personality trait, which is much more of a broad you know,
you can think of it the personality disorder as a
subset of the personality type. You know, he uses the
word betrayed. You know, it wasn't that he was hurt
by his nanny when she left. It wasn't that he

(01:12:03):
was sad or grieving. He felt betrayed. And when your
loved ones betray you humiliate you, wrong you, and that
is your narrative because she did just abandon him, and
it is usually associated with abandonment and rejection. You grow
up with a sense of you're very easily triggered to

(01:12:26):
feel abandoned and betrayed by other people. And when you
go through that, you become very needy of affection and
love because you're walking around in this constant state. And
I don't use constant lightly. In a constant state of
feeling betrayed and hurt and alone, and one of the

(01:12:47):
things that people will often turn to is sexuality as
a way of trying to fill that void.

Speaker 3 (01:12:54):
Yeah, well, my understanding of kind of touching on what
you're talking about when people have some sort of experiences
in there upbringing them perhaps cause them to develop, whether
it is traits of borderline or kind of what we're
talking about with Marlon Brando here, It's like, all you
internally are desiring is love, trust, safety, affection and all

(01:13:18):
of these things, but then you end up acting out
in a way that prevents anyone from actually truly being
close with you. So in his way, it was having
multiple women all the time, so that I believe I
heard him say this once where if any one of
them were to leave him for some reason, while he
had four or five others, so he was never truly
going to be alone. But he was also never truly

(01:13:39):
what he would describe as like a healthy, loving relationship.
He wasn't ever capable of being loved because he would
never be true to any of these women and was
sort of constantly self sabotaging in that way of keeping
everyone at arm's length, even though you really want the
opposite of that, right.

Speaker 2 (01:13:58):
Because of continual betrayal and then re enacting these chaotic relationships,
he and others will develop a very huge distrust of
themselves and of other people, to the point where any
sign of difficulty will be interpreted as well, that's it,

(01:14:19):
or well that means they don't love me, or that's.

Speaker 1 (01:14:22):
The end of that.

Speaker 2 (01:14:23):
And you know, when you're in a even in ten
year long relationship, but particularly in the first couple of years,
you have to withstand a lot of signs, you know,
especially you know, think about the first five dates. It's like, oh,
he didn't open the door for me, jerk, he probably
is a you know, terrible massage. You know, like you
hear these stories, people will just like they'll read into

(01:14:44):
a lot, you know. Or I texted him, but he
hasn't texted me back in a couple hours.

Speaker 1 (01:14:50):
What does that mean?

Speaker 2 (01:14:50):
You know, you have to be able to now not
saying there's a right or wrong answer those questions. Maybe
he should have texted you back in two hours, but
is that There's a lot of tiny little threats to
does this person really love me? And you need to
be able to withstand those and when you are like

(01:15:11):
Marlon Brando and have this betrayal, borderline insensitivity, lack of
self issue, you will tend to overreact to the because
you'll feel extremely hurt and will feel justified in reacting
against And so my suspicion is that even though he

(01:15:34):
was deep down desperate for love and affection and stability,
most of the women around him and maybe men, felt
very much rejected by him, not the other way around, right,
which is common to people who you know. And it's
sort of like the perfect storm because if he did have,
you know, borderline traits, he was also extremely good looking

(01:15:56):
and extremely famous and grew up in at the fifty
six when there's a lot of free love going on,
and so it was like the epicenter of attraction and
at the same time like the prime rejector or something.

Speaker 3 (01:16:11):
Yeah, you know, I'm just curious in your experience as
a therapist, if you've ever worked with somebody with this
type of borderline trades or these kinds of reactions where
you're constantly scanning the horizon for threats and overthinking, and
you know, what does that mean about me? How do you?
How do you work with people like that? How do

(01:16:32):
you get them to sort of minimize those instances or
to not get as I don't know if the word
is scared or upset or reactive about when those little
things happen.

Speaker 2 (01:16:44):
Good question, complicated answer in a nutshell. The prime thing
is what we call corrective emotional experience, where eyes a
therapist provide a stable attachment that they will try to
reject or they'll try to involve me in tests to
see whether or not I'm worthy of trust, and I

(01:17:04):
will do everything in my power to prove to this
person that I am trustworthy and that I do care
and that I am stable, And through that experience into
their soul, they internalize, okay, there's one example of one
person who I can depend on, who won't let me

(01:17:25):
mess with them, who has boundaries, but is close and
warm and true, and through that emotional experience they can
begin to believe in the human race again and in themselves.
It also involves me reflecting back to them in a
way that you would to a three year old, because
they weren't given this in terms of like reflecting emotions

(01:17:45):
and valuing them and letting them be narcissistic a little
bit because that's normal. But other techniques have to do
with awareness and emotional regulation and surrender and avoiding the
kinds of behaviors that lead to further abuse. There's also

(01:18:06):
trauma recovery work. It's complicated. But anyway, does that make sense?
Is that surprising to you at all? Or is that
kind of no?

Speaker 3 (01:18:13):
I was just curious as how you as to how
you begin to approach that, because it is so prolific.
If it could be one hundred instances of those in
a day of over analyzing, overinterpreting, taking things to mean
something about you that have nothing to do with you,
that I just find that the process of kind of

(01:18:33):
undoing that wiring to be interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:18:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18:37):
The common response is, well, just tell people to knock
it off, you know, is tell people to stop doing that.
But if it was that simple, they would have stopped
it themselves.

Speaker 1 (01:18:45):
Exactly. It has to do with.

Speaker 2 (01:18:46):
Something deeper than that that has to be experienced, you know.
And I specialize in borderline personality and have worked with
many people, and for therapists out there listening, they know
this is that orderline clients are very difficult.

Speaker 1 (01:19:01):
To work with.

Speaker 2 (01:19:02):
They're very challenging, they can become very aggressive and like
Marlon Brando. They know how to read people. So imagine
Marlon Brando coming into my office, right, okay, and how
he would you know, take no shit from me and
would try to figure out what I was doing, and
would call me out on stuff and would try to
you know, mess me up a little bit, you know,

(01:19:24):
and might at some point be like you're a phony.

Speaker 1 (01:19:27):
This is ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (01:19:28):
And I, as a therapist, would know what I was
dealing with and would not react against him and would
let him say things like that. You know, so you're upset,
you know, I get that and try to remain stable
in that. But I'm still a human being and can
still be hurt and can still feel bad about myself.
And so because these people are very good at, you know,

(01:19:51):
reading people, and when they get up, when they feel
when their trauma is triggered and they feel upset, they
attack and then and they know how to attack.

Speaker 3 (01:20:00):
Right exactly where to hit you, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:20:01):
Exactly where to hit you.

Speaker 2 (01:20:02):
Even a therapist who you know presumably has done this,
you know, for a long time, like myself, they can
absolutely get under my skin because I'm just not very
good to protect. Yeah, but I'm also just not very
good at protecting myself. I think I'm just not. I
don't know, but anyway, Yeah, they've made me look into
the depths of my flaws and it's not pretty, and

(01:20:25):
I don't it doesn't feel good, and but I have
to remain stable for them, you know, and I'll get
my help with my own therapist or something. But over time,
the ideas is that they internalize our relationship and begin
to heal from that severe trauma regarding their own parents

(01:20:46):
growing up.

Speaker 3 (01:20:47):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:20:47):
But it takes a long time, and most therapists avoid
it because it's you know, gives you a lot of stress. Okay,
So back to Rita Moreno from West Side Story. You
know what did she call their sex shadow shadding? She
actually goes into quite.

Speaker 1 (01:21:06):
Did did do you need to do?

Speaker 3 (01:21:07):
Another impression of.

Speaker 2 (01:21:11):
I don't know why people sing when they're in bed.
But don't judge me, you know, this is a judgment
free podcast. She said that Marlon Brando was very needy.
She said that he needed women to love him, which
is consistent with borderline. She said he was frequently betrayed
by her no no, sorry. She said he frequently betrayed

(01:21:34):
her emotionally, which is ironically, what happens with people with
borderline is their very fear is what they, you know,
make other people go through. She said she dated Elvis,
but she only did so to make Brando jealous, and
she got pregnant and he forced her to get an abortion,
and he was insensitive about it apparently. And when he

(01:21:57):
fell in love with his third wife, which I'll get
into in a second, she was terribly hurt and she
found his sleeping pills in his house and she tried
to kill herself by swallowing them. Brando's assistant found her
and saved her life by taking her to the hospital.
She woke up in the hospital and she never rekindled
her off and on relationship.

Speaker 1 (01:22:17):
With Marlon Brando. I just think that's fascinating.

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
That's the I mean, she wasn't just in West Side Story.
She was in a whole bunch of things. Yeah, And
I just find that to be just so much. To
make a movie about Rita Moreno and Marlon Brando, you know,
I just think that would be the most interesting movie
of all time. So third wife, Terita Terry Epaya, I
don't know how to pronounce that longest relationship ten years.

Speaker 1 (01:22:42):
They were together.

Speaker 2 (01:22:43):
I think they got pregnant and just like all the
other women, and he married her. She was from Tahiti.
She was a lot younger than him, eighteen years younger.
This is when he was filming Mutiny on the Bounty,
which was near Tahiti, apparently Tedi's the South Pacific, and
he fell in love with Tarita, and he fell in

(01:23:04):
love with Tahiti. He it was for the first time
in his life. He felt like he found peace. Have
you heard his accounts of this, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:23:14):
He he describes it as because the people in Tahiti
had no sense of who he was as a movie star.
They don't really have a concept of anything like that
in their culture at the time, and for someone to
even be slightly arrogant, they would just get so ridiculed
and made fun of that they would stop putting on

(01:23:35):
whatever air. So it was just the kind of a
society where people just did not It was very you know, equal,
And he just said that he could see joy in
their eyes. They were very joyous people who obviously lived,
you know, very simply, and they appreciated the simple things.
And he said, like the sunsets and the beauty of

(01:23:56):
the island was just like nothing he'd ever seen before.
And so yeah, he had this he's full contentment that
he'd never felt before, and I think enjoyed that people
just treated him like anyone else for the first time
in most of his adult life. And he ended up
buying an island out there, small island, and spending a
lot of his later years in life out there and

(01:24:16):
doing things to help the Tahitian people.

Speaker 2 (01:24:18):
Yeah, and it also, you know, is possible in addition
to all that, which I didn't know all that, that
his nanny was half Indonesian, which she might have looked
a little Tahitian to him, and so that might have
been an additional residence that he felt upon, you know,

(01:24:41):
going there.

Speaker 1 (01:24:42):
People. I hear this.

Speaker 2 (01:24:44):
I know I have friends of mine who grew up
in difficult, addict alcoholic homes and upon going to like
Hawaii or Fiji or something, I've heard similar accounts from
them of just this serenity that they find out there
on the beach and surfing, and and they stay there

(01:25:07):
and they love the people, you know, the like you say,
the kind of simple as a funny word, but you know,
just like non complicated, you know, way of living hang
loose kind of a thing, and it seems that Marlon
Brando really fell for that and really valued that, and

(01:25:28):
in a way, it's like the first happy element to
his story. You know, of this Up until this point,
it's like you can't really point to anything and say like, yay, Marlin,
but this I can. It's pretty clear that he finally
found something.

Speaker 1 (01:25:46):
We're just like, oh, I can I think that breath.

Speaker 3 (01:25:48):
I think that was the starting point of him because
he was a man that was constantly searching, constantly. I mean,
he said he spent hundreds, if not millions of dollars
in like psychotherapy, and he was constantly searching for not
only answers about why are we here, what is life about?
But himself. Why did I end up this way? How

(01:26:09):
did my childhood affect me? Why do I respond this way?
And these types of circumstances. Always curious, always searching, always learning.
And I think he eventually got to this point where
he was able to forgive his father and undo a
little bit of the rage. He started meditating and kind
of started drifting away from some of the habits in

(01:26:30):
his younger years in terms of behavior and issues that
were sort of stuck in him, and I think the
beginning of that was sort of finding Tahiti and then
kind of going from there. In terms of how his
life I think got a little more peaceful as he
got older.

Speaker 2 (01:26:47):
There's a thing about and I want to mention that
we haven't talked about yet, which is he Okay, he
hated his father. We've established that his father was a
terrible human being, physically abusive, alcoholic, traveled a lot, abandon
his family, cheated on his wife.

Speaker 3 (01:27:05):
He also lost all of Marlin's money when he was older.

Speaker 1 (01:27:07):
That's what I want to get to.

Speaker 2 (01:27:08):
Oh, no, no, is he and maybe you know more
details about this, and Marlon, I think this was still
in the fifties or something ish or maybe early sixties,
Marlin's business and money affairs were getting kind of big,
and so he handed over all of his affairs to

(01:27:30):
his father, which is when I heard that, I was like,
what you know, Like but makes total sense. And then
his father proceeded to lose all of his money. But
it makes total sense because again, he's a human being,
Marlon Brando and is well to the day he died,
probably just so desperate for approval and closeness with his parents.

(01:27:57):
And he was willing, even though his dad made fun
of him for being an actor, called said only women
and homosexuals are actors. You know, that's not a real
man's job.

Speaker 1 (01:28:08):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:28:08):
It was always putting him down and just so such
a just just sound. I just I just hate this guy,
you know, and then he hands his entire business.

Speaker 1 (01:28:17):
There's even an interview have you seen it with the
two of them.

Speaker 3 (01:28:20):
Yeah, when he was They're in Marlin's house.

Speaker 2 (01:28:23):
I don't know where they are, but yeah, Marlin's a
little younger and it's him and his dad, and they
even have like a little fight on camera.

Speaker 3 (01:28:29):
It's like a little shtick of play play fighting. But
you can if you watch, you can see there's so
much subtext in Marlin's face. Right when the interviewer asks
his dad, did he have the normal upbringing as a child,
and you can tell Marlin's really yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:28:42):
Kind of looking at him, and then his father's like, yeah,
it was a normal love ring anyone could have, and
Marlin's like.

Speaker 3 (01:28:48):
Oh boy, well he said something to the effect of
I think he may have had a little more trouble
with his parents than most kids. And that's when Marlin's
eyes are like.

Speaker 2 (01:28:55):
They kind of, oh, yeah, he was, like saying like
he was kind of a will child, you know, as
a dad. I wonder why I was a wilful child,
you know what I mean? But yeah, just so interesting,
you know, like it just explains so much about his
behavior and how intensive a human being he was, and
you know, his relationship. I don't know, Just like you,

(01:29:17):
I'm more fascinated with his personal life than his working life,
which is also, you know, fascinating.

Speaker 1 (01:29:25):
So I want to get into some last points here.
But before we do that, let's take a little break.

Speaker 2 (01:29:34):
All right, We're back with Carrie Burbank, expert on Marlon
Brando or you know someone that knows a lot more
than I do, and I want to talk about it.
We can't talk about Marlon Brando without talking about how
he gained a lot of weight throughout his career. What
are your thoughts about that?

Speaker 3 (01:29:51):
It makes me just one more reason that I sort
of really feel for this guy in terms of kind
of the way his life went. I think instead of alcohol,
he turned to food. He had basically a food addiction,
and it was somewhat problematic in his earlier days, but
I think he could pretty much keep it under control.
He would occasionally show up for a film a little

(01:30:13):
larger than he was supposed to or I think I
heard on Mutiny on the Bounty he went through fifty
three pairs of pants because he kept splitting the back
of them.

Speaker 2 (01:30:24):
It's funny because if you watch the movie, he's actually
not that big, but to the time, he was huge
and he was in charge of this, or he was
being very difficult as a This is when his difficulties
as an.

Speaker 1 (01:30:39):
Actor really started to blossom.

Speaker 2 (01:30:41):
And he was so insecure about his weight that he
wouldn't come out of his trailer. I don't know if
it was this movie or it was another one, but
or he would demand certain angles be only shot of
him because he was so insecure about his weight. So
he wasn't like a happy, plump dude. Every pound made

(01:31:04):
him feel extremely ashamed of himself. And yeah, I agree
that he likely channeled You know, when you grow up
with alcoholism, you associate alcohol with just terribleness. You just
look at alcohol and you're just like, alcohol is a terrible,
terrible thing for weak people, so you avoid that. But

(01:31:24):
you have the internalized and maybe even the biological disposition
towards addiction, and so you'll you're more vulnerable to other
kinds of addictions like work or food or you know,
some other substance.

Speaker 1 (01:31:40):
And that seemingly was his vice was.

Speaker 2 (01:31:43):
Food, And it's common when you have a frequent you know,
imagine on a daily basis, you know, everyone out there,
if you're not borderline, because I know we have some
borderline not clients, but listeners. Imagine the one the days
in which you felt the worst about yourself because you
were rejected. You know, you got fired, you got dumped,

(01:32:06):
you got divorced, someone said you look terrible. You're in
a date, and someone says, I don't think things are
really working out.

Speaker 1 (01:32:15):
You're not really my type.

Speaker 2 (01:32:16):
Just that sinking feeling of shame and rejection or betrayal,
or the day someone said that they cheated on you,
or the day you found out someone cheated on you.

Speaker 1 (01:32:28):
I mean, the these just.

Speaker 2 (01:32:30):
You know, it's a terrible, ugly, shameful, horrible feeling. People
that have borderline personality feel this way every day. Every
day you feel that way, well, if you're in that
state every day, it's going to be hard to stay
on a diet. Because I'll tell you for my life,
for me to stay on my diet, everything's got to

(01:32:51):
be going perfect in my life. I mean, I have
to be fully rested. I got to be like top
self esteem. I've got to get energy. People got to
be treating me right. My internet connection has got to
be pretty good, you know. Anything that gets out of
whack and I'm gonna be like it's a cheat day,

(01:33:11):
you know, because it just it's a little treat I
can give myself to make myself feel good. And Marlon
Brando rarely felt good and turned to food in all
likelihood as a way to just give.

Speaker 1 (01:33:26):
Him a little bit of happiness.

Speaker 2 (01:33:28):
And when you add that up over decades and decades,
you just see a slow progression of gaining weight.

Speaker 3 (01:33:34):
Yeah. Yeah, it's sad because I think that's You're exactly right.
And I think I read or saw somewhere this employee
of his, probably kind of like an assistant at his house,
said that this is near the you know, the end
when he was really, really pretty big, he would actually
make this. This employee of his padlock his refrigerator shut

(01:33:59):
and did not have a key to it. But they
said it would come over the next morning and it
would still be locked, but then there'd be a bunch
of empty ice cream containers and big mac wrappers because
he would have like paid someone to go get it,
or he would have had someone at the McDonald's deliver
them to his house. It was like a common thing.
And so even when he was trying to stop himself,
he couldn't stop himself. And that's what I think is heartbreaking.

Speaker 1 (01:34:21):
Yeah, that's true addiction.

Speaker 2 (01:34:23):
Yeah, it's one thing to sneak a little bit of
like one cookie. It's another thing to go to the
lengths of having someone padlock your fridge and then you
call Jimmy down at McDonald's and say, could you drive
over a bunch of food for me? You know, that's
rock bottom right there in terms of you know, and so.

(01:34:47):
And I always thought he was proud of his gaining weight,
you know, like before I looked into it. But the
more I looked into it, it was like clear that
even when he was just slightly.

Speaker 3 (01:34:57):
You're not kidding. I. Yes, there's this one brief little
interview he's doing with this really attractive lady and he's
you can tell he's a little bit smitten with her
because he's just really staring at her face. She's quite beautiful.

Speaker 1 (01:35:09):
Is this when he's eating a steak at a restaurant.

Speaker 3 (01:35:11):
I don't think he's eating at the moment, but they
they believe they had a luncheon and so it might
be the same one. But she is. I forget exactly
what she says to him, but he gets a little
bit flustered and he's grinning and then he oh, because
she gives her she pays him a very wonderful compliment,
and it's kind of over the top. So he's getting
a little embarrassed, and then he kind of chuckles to

(01:35:32):
himself and he says, have you seen me nude? And
everyone starts laughing, and he says, getting so fat? And
like at that point he was not fat in the slightest,
so he was clearly concerned about it, even when it was,
you know, a very minor thing.

Speaker 2 (01:35:49):
Standards are different back then, and ye also might have
just had a particularly sensitive time to I mean, I'm
a huge Beatles fan, as the listeners know, and John Lennon,
in the beginning of the Beatles' career was known as
the fat one.

Speaker 3 (01:36:03):
What, yeah, I've never heard that before.

Speaker 1 (01:36:05):
Oh, totally.

Speaker 2 (01:36:06):
John Lennon was known as the fat Beetle. But if
you look at the Beatles.

Speaker 1 (01:36:10):
Nineteen sixty three, nineteen sixty four, it's like he is
not fat. He's just not rail thin.

Speaker 3 (01:36:16):
Like hey, guys, it's kind of like the Three Stooges
where Curly was the fat one. You look at him now,
you're like, he's like thirty pounds of her weigh Like
it's not he's averaged by today's standards.

Speaker 1 (01:36:26):
Yeah, oh boy.

Speaker 2 (01:36:28):
So another thing about gaining weight that I just want
to throw in there that some people might be, you know,
thinking about, which is when you're sexually abused. And one
could look at his history and again we I can't
talk to him.

Speaker 1 (01:36:45):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:36:45):
There could be signs of what we might frame a
sexual abuse in terms of sensuality between him and his nanny.

Speaker 1 (01:36:55):
We don't know, you know, I don't want to.

Speaker 2 (01:36:58):
Shame, you know, affection physical between children and their caregivers.

Speaker 1 (01:37:04):
But it might have been akin to sexual abuse. Maybe
he saw his father sexually abusing his mom. I mean,
who knows.

Speaker 2 (01:37:14):
But one of the ways that people will manifest that
trauma is through eating disorders or eating problems, and weight
gain not only as a way of trying to fill
that void and try to cope with the trauma reaction,
but also as a way of trying to push people

(01:37:34):
away from you. The bigger you get, the farther people.

Speaker 1 (01:37:37):
Move away from you physically, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:37:39):
And people know that it's a problem in our society
that we shun people that have extra fat celles. But
it's a way of getting people to get away from you.
Don't touch me, don't look at me. I'm now overweight.
This is not a common syndrome, but I just wanted
to throw it out there as a possibility. Yeah, So

(01:38:01):
just some other details that I wrote down in my
notes here. In his later years, he became kind of
lazy as an actor. He would he refused to learn
the script, and he wanted he wrote his lines in
places that you couldn't see so on the film, so
he would write. He would have people hold up que cards,

(01:38:21):
or he would write the lines like on the set
so he could. And there's this scene in The Godfather
when he's talking to al Pacino and he's giving al
Pacino advice about keep your keep your friends close, but
keep your enemies closer.

Speaker 1 (01:38:37):
It's all that whole.

Speaker 2 (01:38:38):
Scene and you see al Pacina, or you see Marlon
Brando looking off screen whenever he talks in that that's
because he's reading a freaking Q card. It's crazy and
he still is amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:38:50):
I know that actor.

Speaker 3 (01:38:51):
That's what blew my mind was. I knew he started
doing that in his later years because he just he
did care about The Godfather, but most of the films
he didn't care about. He was just doing it for
the money. But when I saw that, because I didn't
know it when I first saw The Godfather, that he
was reading the lines, and that blew my mind because
I thought it was such an amazing acting performance, which

(01:39:12):
it was, but to know he's just he's just reading
the lines. He's still acting. But it's like, man, oh man,
imagine if he had really spent a lot of time
with this or you know, really dove into this character
in the same way as he did, you know, in
the early days of his acting, but he was still phenomenal.
It's still just.

Speaker 2 (01:39:30):
Yeah, it's just amazing to think about a guy who
could pull that off.

Speaker 1 (01:39:35):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:39:36):
So, as you were mentioning he started really demanding bigger paychecks.
And it's hypothesized or maybe even known that that's because
he'd been married and divorced three times and had ten kids. Well,
so I found all these different accounts of how many
kids he had, and like one, so these are all

(01:39:59):
quotes at least nine children, another quote, at least eleven children.
Another quote I read sixteen known children, another quote, seventeen
or more children. One of his one of his possible
kids might be Courtney Love's mom.

Speaker 1 (01:40:18):
Did you know that? So Courtney Love might be Marlon
Brando's granddaughter.

Speaker 2 (01:40:21):
So yeah, he had to pay a lot of money,
apparently for alimony and child support, and so he started
demanding these big paychecks. He was supposed to be in
Godfather too, in these sort of flash forwards, but because
he was demanding like millions and millions of dollars, the
studio refused to pay him. He famously in Superman Night
seventy eight, Christopher Reeve, the star Superman, was only paid

(01:40:45):
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which is a lot,
but Marlon Brando got paid almost four million.

Speaker 3 (01:40:50):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:40:50):
And Brando is a small part in that movie.

Speaker 2 (01:40:54):
He's he's in the first ten minutes and then he
kind of chimes in now than kind of like Obi Wan,
you know, and Brando successfully sued the makers of Superman
for fifty million dollars because he felt cheated out of
his share of the box office profits. So he became

(01:41:14):
very concerned about earning a lot of money in his
later years, when in the beginning of his career he
didn't seem to really care about that. Also, we should
mention Apocalypse Now, what do you know about I'm thoroughly
confused about what was going on. I mean, I'll tell
you what I do know. He was in the you know,
this is around the same time as Superman. He was difficult,

(01:41:37):
He refused to learn the script, he argued about the ending,
he gained a lot of weight. Coppola had to shoot
a body double, you know, from far away shots because
apparently Marlon Brando was too big to be believable as.

Speaker 1 (01:41:51):
A colonel in the army and or Marines or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:41:56):
And but this movie and his role is so shrouded
in insanity. You know, on one level, I'm like, was
everyone insane and was he insane?

Speaker 1 (01:42:10):
Or is it just apocryphal? Or what do you know
about Apocalypse Now?

Speaker 3 (01:42:15):
So I have never seen the film, I have seen
half of it. I really need to watch the whole thing.
That's the kind of odd thing about me I'm realizing
as I'm talking to is for as much as I
appear to know certain things about Marlon Branda, I've really
only seen maybe three or four of his films. And
I don't know if that's because, like we've talked about,

(01:42:36):
I'm more interested in who he is as a person
versus as an actor, and maybe because he had such
a disdain for acting. It's almost like to just pay
attention to his films as you know, doing the opposite
of what he would have wanted. But well, now that
I'm consciously thinking, Apocalypse.

Speaker 1 (01:42:51):
Now is not a great movie. I mean, some people
love it.

Speaker 2 (01:42:55):
Yeah, and there's some great scenes for sure, but it's
a it's suffers from its production problems, especially the ending.
I think at the time it was just like mind blowing, sure,
because it was like whoa, what's happening, and like it's
anti war and it's like dark and this new look
at Vietnam and American colonialism and stuff. But it doesn't

(01:43:18):
really hold up, so you're not missing much, is the point.

Speaker 3 (01:43:22):
I still will probably watch it, just too because I
have heard, you know, like some of the stories that
you had just described there and knowing that it's funny
because Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola had a He actually fought
for Marlon Brando to be and the Godfather. The studios
did not want him because of the reputation he had
built up for causing so many issues and you know,

(01:43:44):
pushing films over budget and behind, and it was like
an immediate no way, and so it's kind of a
long story, but eventually he he had Marlon Brando to do
a screen test at his house, and when Coppola showed
the execs or whomever it was the screen test, they
didn't even know it was Marlon Branda because he had
stuffed his cheeks with Kleenex and he'd put shoe polish

(01:44:06):
in his hair, and he changed, you know, his physicality,
and so obviously they eventually ended up hiring him, but
he didn't really hardly get paid anything for that film.
That was part of the agreement, and they worked really
well together and so working together again on Apocalypse now.
I think Coopola, it appears, has mixed feelings, but I

(01:44:26):
think he still has a positive overall take on Brando,
at least from what I've heard and witnessed, but that
that's not everything. So it seems as though it had
to do with Marlon hadn't read the book and he
hadn't read the script when he showed up, and so
they spent about a week just talking, a week of

(01:44:48):
was supposed to be film time talking, so crew, everyone
is there, the money meter is already running. And my
take on it is in the end, I believe that
because of the the decisions that Marlon Brando felt were
important to the film and as well as Francis Ford Coppola,
it kind of ended up being somewhere in the middle
of where it was supposed to be. And I think

(01:45:09):
where Marlon wanted it to be. A part of that
was because, like you said, they couldn't shoot him because
he gained so much weight. And I think that Francis
Ford Coppola said that he would just kind of feed
Marlin these little seeds of an idea about a scene
and then just film him and he would just improvise
for twenty thirty minutes or so, and that was kind

(01:45:33):
of a big part of where, you know, his role
in the film was not necessarily always scripted, But it
seems to have gotten. I feel like most people I
know regard that as a one of like the great films.

Speaker 2 (01:45:47):
But yeah, yeah, totally. I am not a huge fan.
Maybe if I grew up in that time and saw
it or something.

Speaker 3 (01:45:56):
That's what's hard is, I think we have such a
different sense now films, and not only the content but
the way that they're made are so so different and
so much more fast paced now that when you go
back and you watch an old movie, sometimes you're thinking,
why why did everyone say this is such a great movie.
It seems very slow, it seems very schlocky or you know,

(01:46:18):
but that's.

Speaker 2 (01:46:19):
Just where believe in The Godfather. When I saw it
growing up, I loved it, and so I still love it.
But I younger people will say I saw The Godfather,
I couldn't get through a fell sleep And I was like,
how dare you feel sleep during The Godfather? I mean,
that's that's terrible, sacrilegious. But then I was like, huh,
compared to today's movies, it is.

Speaker 1 (01:46:38):
Probably you know, a little slow. Yeah, but yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 (01:46:43):
So anyway, there's a lot of weird stories about Apocalypse Now.
They made an entire documentary Heart of Darkness, I think
it's called here's my little analysis of this time in
his life. And it's hard for me to know, obviously,
but I think what happened was just as as a guest.

Speaker 1 (01:47:02):
Was he was.

Speaker 2 (01:47:04):
He was well known for being difficult on set. He
was well known for being one of the best actors
of all time. He was well known for his womanizing
and his maybe his manizing and his antics. And it
was at a time, you know, we're talking sixties seventies
when improv was big, and like being real was big,

(01:47:27):
and like experience and humanistic psychology and primal screaming and
anti establishment.

Speaker 1 (01:47:33):
You know, it was a lot of chaos. And he's
supposed to be like the best, most interesting, most dynamic,
you know, and then he's asked to be in this
the second France you know Copola movie where Godfather.

Speaker 2 (01:47:48):
Was like this sensation. I mean, we still talk about today,
and it came out in nineteen seventy two, and there's
just all this pressure on him to like be something
transcendent in this in the in this second movie with Coppola,
and it's about Vietnam and it's this you know, this,
it's supposed to be this delving into psychology, and it's

(01:48:09):
not just supposed to be a movie about you know,
the story. It's supposed to be like a delving into
human the human darkness of our minds, you know. And
he's supposed to and the whole movie is about finding
Colonel Kurtz and then once you find him finally up
the river, it's supposed to be this fantastic you know.

(01:48:30):
It just was too much pressure, and I think he
kind of overthought it, I think, and I think he
got too wrapped up in like, I want to do this.
I want to get paid, I want to be I
want to you know, give a good performance.

Speaker 1 (01:48:47):
But this script is kind of bad. There's a lot
of pressure.

Speaker 2 (01:48:51):
You know, someone needed to step in and say, Marlin,
here's the script. I need you to act this part
because it fits within the large story of this movie.
Now again, maybe some people will say, no, Barlin's you know,
his performance is perfect and everything went correct the way
that it did.

Speaker 1 (01:49:10):
But to me, it wasn't that way.

Speaker 2 (01:49:13):
Of course, we get the classic improv line, the horror, the.

Speaker 1 (01:49:18):
Horror, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:49:19):
Yeah, but I particularly didn't like his scenes in Apocalypse.

Speaker 3 (01:49:24):
Now we now that makes me really want to watch it.

Speaker 2 (01:49:26):
Yeah, oh dude, you have to Yeah, he's yeah, and
the and the documentary. Okay, So let's kind of race
through the end of here late career in his you know,
late fifties until he died at the age of eighty,
So nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties, several terrible movies, including the
infamous The Island of Doctor Murreau, but some good ones.

(01:49:47):
A Dry White Season, which I think is about apartheid,
The Freshman with Matthew Brodrick.

Speaker 1 (01:49:54):
You probably I.

Speaker 3 (01:49:54):
Haven't seen that, but I want to.

Speaker 1 (01:49:56):
He plays Vito Corleone.

Speaker 3 (01:50:00):
Oh right, Yeah, it's like a satire.

Speaker 1 (01:50:02):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:50:03):
The score, which I really liked with with Edward Norton
and Robert de Niro, which is final movie in two
thousand and one. I really like that movie. That's a great,
just standard heist movie. Edward Norton is at his most
Edward Nortony, you know, during this time in his late career.
He had three nominations and one win for the Golden

(01:50:25):
Raspberry Award.

Speaker 1 (01:50:27):
He had one Oscar.

Speaker 2 (01:50:28):
Nomination, I think for The Dry White Season. Still difficult
to work with. The score was directed by Frank oz
from from Muppets and famously Marlon Brando was very terrible
to frank Oz and called him miss Piggy, which is,

(01:50:49):
you know, not nice to say, and like refuse to
take direction from him and whenever, and toward the end
of when he was acting the movie, refused to have
frank Oz even in the room and so he would
make Robert de Niro give him direction. Interesting, like, imagine
you're trying to direct a movie and one of the
stars is saying, you can't be on the set even

(01:51:10):
though you're direct. His fourth partner during this time, Maria
Christina Ruiz, who was his housekeeper. But he had three
children with her, So there's that, Okay. So I really
want to get into something at the end of the
episode here that I just think is just a fascinating story.
It's nineteen ninety.

Speaker 1 (01:51:32):
His daughter Cheyenne. What do you know about this story?

Speaker 3 (01:51:36):
What I know is his daughter Cheyenne, who was I
believe his second child with his third wife, the Tahiti Cheyenne.
She was beautiful to me. She's the child that I've
seen pictures of. It looks the most like Marlon Brando.
She's just this gorgeous girl.

Speaker 2 (01:51:52):
Well everyone knows that half Asians, which she was are
the most beautiful people.

Speaker 3 (01:51:56):
Is that what they say?

Speaker 1 (01:51:57):
Yeah, that's what I say.

Speaker 3 (01:52:00):
She kind of sounds like she had a troubled bit
of a troubled life. I think she suffered with some
depression and a little bit of just some kind of difficulties.

Speaker 2 (01:52:09):
Right, just to chime in on that. In general, Marlon Brando,
although intellectually loved his children, was not there for his
kids growing up. And he felt very shameful of that
and very bad about that. But at the same time
did it. You know, he fathered many children that he
wasn't there for, very similar to the way he was

(01:52:31):
treated by his parents.

Speaker 1 (01:52:32):
Sure, which is what we all do.

Speaker 2 (01:52:34):
We tend to recreate the problems that we had when
we were growing up.

Speaker 3 (01:52:38):
So, okay, so she's she's kind of a troubled child,
and he actually did spend I believe he spent the
most time with the two children, because they were together
for ten years.

Speaker 2 (01:52:48):
And she was So if you would appointed at Marlin
and say who was you know, really, who are your real.

Speaker 1 (01:52:54):
Kids, it would be which one's really count it would
be Cheyenne and Cheyenne's brother.

Speaker 3 (01:53:01):
Probably. He was really close with her, and I think
he tried to get her help and save her from
herself in a way, but she eventually did end up well.
There was one instance that happened prior to that, which
her boyfriend they got pregnant. I believe she was in
her early twenties, and Marlon just wanted to see what

(01:53:22):
kind of guy this person was, so he sent her
older half brother, Christian, to just kind of, you know,
give him the old once over and check him out,
see if it was a guy that they wanted her
to be with.

Speaker 2 (01:53:33):
Right, So I want to I want to dig on
down this because I think this is a critical part
in the story. Yeah, because that's the way it's described.
It's like give him the ol once over or whatever
it is. But to me, it's like if I'm a
if I'm a dad and I'm a little upset that
my angel has been impregnated by this random dude that
I don't have a relationship with, I'm going to be like,

(01:53:56):
who the hell is this guy? How dare he to me?
I think there's more to that story.

Speaker 3 (01:54:02):
I mean, there probably is, And I actually want to
say I think that the family knew this. I believe
his name was dev I want to say his name
was dev the.

Speaker 1 (01:54:12):
Guy who dag dro that's a Heasian guy.

Speaker 3 (01:54:16):
I want to say that he was friends with Shann's
brother or somehow maybe Christian knew him. Somebody knew him.
He had been around, and I think Marlon was just
wanting to get a take a read on what kind
of a guy he was. That was my understanding, but
I could certainly be wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:54:31):
But Christian, who is desperate for his father's approval because
everyone was, particularly his kids, particularly because he didn't give
them enough attention growing up, Christian's like, Okay, I'm going
to do right by my dad. But he brings a gun. Yeah,
So that's the part where I'm like, if Marlon was

(01:54:51):
just like, you know, hey, just go question him, see
if he's on the up and up, and then Christian's like, okay,
I'm going to bring a gun. Either Christian's an idiot,
or Marlon was like, look, I need you to really
confront this guy and scare him and like really make
sure he's on the up and up. Or I want
you to go to this kid and tell him he's

(01:55:11):
got to get out of my daughter's life. Because that's
the part where I'm thinking, maybe that's what happened again,
I have no evidence of this.

Speaker 3 (01:55:17):
Yeah, it's hard to say.

Speaker 1 (01:55:19):
But anyway, so Christian.

Speaker 3 (01:55:21):
At any rate, apparently there was some kind of a
I think it's reported as they kind of got into
a little bit of a wrestling match and the gun
went off accidentally and shot Dag and he died. So
Christian actually got sentenced. I believe it was like ten
years in prison for.

Speaker 2 (01:55:38):
That, right, just like you said, Christian shoots Dag shoots
him in the face, by the way, and as you say,
the account is there's a wrestling match, but we just
really don't know. Marlon was there and tried to give
CPR TOG. I don't know if it's pronounced dag, it's
spelled like dag. Didn't work, obviously. Marlon then called the police.

(01:56:01):
And there's a famous trial in the early before oj
Big trial. Robert Shapiro was Christian's lawyer. Oh, just like
oh Je's lawyer. Have you seen the video of Marlin
giving testimony.

Speaker 3 (01:56:16):
I have, because some people said that he was acting
when he was up there. Is that kind of what
you're wondering or.

Speaker 1 (01:56:21):
Just and just what he was saying?

Speaker 3 (01:56:23):
Oh yeah, I mean I think he broke down when
he was up there, and he he sort of blamed
himself in a way because he said Christian had a
pretty pretty bad upbringing, you know, just between the marriage
falling apart, the mom drinking a lot, him not being around.
He was kidnapped at one point, like there was a
lot of issues with their custody battles with him. I

(01:56:45):
think he had kind of a tough life.

Speaker 1 (01:56:47):
Christian was kidnapped.

Speaker 3 (01:56:49):
I believe he was kidnapped by the mother and held
somewhere to get some ransom money or to somehow get
some kind of something that she wanted in the custody battle,
but it was not to be traced back to her,
but it was so I think the kid, you know,
he had not the greatest upbringing, and I think Marlon
felt bad about that. So he was not to say

(01:57:11):
that it would justify, you know, him shooting someone, but
that perhaps his lack of being there for him or
being a good father or providing more guidance or whatever.
He might not have brought a gun to this, you know,
meeting with this guy, or he may not have acted
in the same way.

Speaker 2 (01:57:28):
The whole thing wouldn't have happened if Marlin had said
Christian go to, you know, question this kid, so and
how traumatic that must have been for everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:57:39):
So, yeah, he broke down on the stand and it
was moving. But yeah, I think you know, some of
the reporters were like, oh, he was just acting to
try to get his son right off, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:57:52):
But which again, if you know nothing about Marlon Brando's life,
it's like, yeah, maybe he you know, because he's a scumbags,
dificult to work with, and he's some kind of psychopath
who hates Jewish people, then, you know, but again, knowing
the full breadth of his life, I think it was
absolutely genuine.

Speaker 3 (01:58:12):
Yeah, and especially in his later years, he really made
a point to spend a lot of time with his
kids in the last you know, ten or so years
of his life and to kind of make up for
some of that right lost time.

Speaker 1 (01:58:25):
And presumably he was asking Christian to go to Cheyenne's
boyfriend to question him because he loved Cheyenne so much
and was trying to protect her, and maybe he was
even trying to like bond his you know, Christian with
the family and you know, just trying to be a family,
you know, And.

Speaker 3 (01:58:43):
It all well, and that's not even the worst of it.

Speaker 1 (01:58:46):
Right, then what happened?

Speaker 3 (01:58:48):
Did I cut you off where you wanted to see.

Speaker 1 (01:58:49):
Something, go for it? But you were right?

Speaker 2 (01:58:51):
So Christian is convicted ten years in prison, which is
awful for Marlon Brando, and then what happened And then a.

Speaker 3 (01:58:57):
Very short time later, Cheyenne's committing suicide and so it
was kind of a double blow for him in terms
of essentially losing two children.

Speaker 1 (01:59:09):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:59:09):
So Cheyenne having witnessed her boyfriend, the father of her children,
maybe the love of her life, get killed by her
half brother at the sort of orders of her own father,
and she's depressed. She has a young child, so she's

(01:59:30):
you know, depressed, and she hangs herself in Tahiti. And
now Brando's like, just I mean, just the tragedies that
are happening to him in his life, it's just terrible. Yeah,
And then a decade later he died. That's quite a
bummer of an ending there for us. That's the end

(01:59:52):
of my notes, of which there were you know, fifteen pages,
which I'm sure everyone could tell it was long.

Speaker 1 (02:00:00):
But what's the final word on Marlon Brando? And remember
you're an expert, Carrie bourbon, right.

Speaker 3 (02:00:07):
I yeah, I have a laminated print out that I
made myself in clip art's saying I'm the number one
Marlon Brando expert in Watkom County. I feel like it's
hard to sum his his life up and in the
person that he was up succinctly, because there's just so
so many things that happened to him, so many things

(02:00:28):
he did, so many contradictory elements of his personality. And
that's why I think I'm so fascinated with the guy,
because it's just it seems like you could keep learning
more and more and more about him and keep finding
more and more layers and more interesting and you know stories,
And because that's the other thing too, I feel like
we did kind of go down a dark path for
some of that. But he was also known as someone

(02:00:50):
that was a big laugher, practical joker. Loved to you know,
goof around and have fun and you know, especially on
sets like prank people and if he could get a
laugh out of somebody. I think that was like his
favorite moment, you know, of especially he talked about making
his mom laugh. He used to do some crazy things,

(02:01:10):
like he used to have a raccoon in his apartment
in New York when he was like twenty years old
as a pet, and one time it got out and
crawled across the ledge into the neighbor's bathroom, and I
think he like crawled across the ledge after it, or
he he talks about hanging from like eleven stories to
just amuse people at a party, and he's like, I
would never do that. Now, It's crazy these things I

(02:01:30):
did as a kid. But he just had such a
wild and interesting and rich life. But at the same time,
I'm intrigued by just the way his mind worked and
the way he thought about things and explored and never stopped,
never stopped being curious, like all the way up to
the end. He would He was famous for calling certain

(02:01:50):
people that he just maybe saw in a film or
in an interview and found interesting for some reason, call
him at three o'clock in the morning and talk to
them for three hours on the phone. And a lot
of times the first reaction was like, this isn't Marlon Brando? Yeah, right,
but then call back.

Speaker 2 (02:02:06):
I just think he was sort of like prints in
that way, you know, like everyone was like a prince.

Speaker 3 (02:02:09):
Story, right, Yes, that I mean he's obviously an eccentric guy.
Some of his friends who knew him from way back
in the day, when he would often just do these
whether it was kind of these crazy stunts, or maybe
they would be at a party and he would say
or do something that's completely socially inappropriate but would crack
everybody up or make someone feel very uncomfortable. They would

(02:02:32):
wonder if he was doing these things just to play
some sort of joke on everyone, or if he was
just genuinely like that, like he just genuinely couldn't help
himself from doing those things. And it wasn't with any
sort of pretense or with the objective of getting a rise.
It was just this is how his brain worked, and

(02:02:52):
this is what he wanted to do, so this is
what he was going to do. And most of them
came to the conclusion that no, that was that was
just the way he was wired. He just did whatever
he did or said whatever he said, almost to kind
of amuse himself for because that felt like the thing
to do in that moment. And the last thing that
I will say about him that I really admire is

(02:03:13):
when we've seen him in some of these interviews where
he's not willing to really go there in terms of
talking about a film he's made and talk about it
for the nineteen hundredth time, The way that he could
sit there after being asked a question and just either
say that's not really something I want to talk about,
and then it just hangs there and there's awkward silence,

(02:03:36):
and you can see the host not knowing what to do.
And I know, for myself, and perhaps this is true
of most people, like you would feel the need to
say something or you would try to make it. You
sort of know what your role is there. You've come
out of the show to promote this thing or to
talk about this thing, and the comfort in your own
skin that it must take to sit there and beyond

(02:03:58):
national television and be, you know, and interviewed by some
of the most famous people, and to not succumb to
the pressure of what you know they want you to say,
and to talk about what you know they want you
to talk about, but instead just stick true to yourself
and what feels okay to you. Like that takes some balls.
I don't like. That's another thing. I don't think I've

(02:04:20):
ever seen anyone in my real life exhibit that kind
of absolute what to me reads as comfort in your
own skin that you don't feel the need to validate
this person. You don't need to you don't feel the
need to make this moment less awkward or you know
what I'm saying. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (02:04:38):
Do you ever think WWMD.

Speaker 3 (02:04:42):
When you're you know what's really funny is like, right
before I got here, my husband texted me and said,
you know, have fun, you know, doing this podcast, and
if you get nervous, just remember ww MD. I'm not joking.
I can show you the text I said. I responded with, well,

(02:05:03):
he would probably want to talk about Native American causes, but.

Speaker 2 (02:05:08):
Yeah, that's what Marlon would do. Yeah, he would derail
and advocate.

Speaker 3 (02:05:13):
Yes, but I do wish. I do long for some
point in my life to be able to harness a
little bit of whatever that is, you know, to just
be kind of unflappable in yourself as a person and
not feel the need to succumb to what other people
expect of you or want from you. But you're not
comfortable giving.

Speaker 1 (02:05:31):
Yeah, I respect that. I like that.

Speaker 2 (02:05:36):
It makes me wonder what does it say about me
in terms of the people that I love in my life?
I mean, I have a new love for Marlon Brenner,
but it's new. But it's like I love Paul McCartney
and John Lennon. So it's like, why, you know, what
is it about me?

Speaker 1 (02:05:51):
You know what.

Speaker 2 (02:05:52):
Personality trait am I trying to absorb from them?

Speaker 1 (02:05:57):
It's interesting to think about.

Speaker 3 (02:05:58):
Do you think that's what it is?

Speaker 1 (02:05:59):
Do you?

Speaker 3 (02:06:00):
I think it's yeah, that's what it is for you.
That's what it feels like.

Speaker 1 (02:06:03):
Yeah, I think that. I talk about this with my students.

Speaker 2 (02:06:06):
You know, the age group of people who idolize famous
people the most are teenagers, right, And the reason why
that is is because teens are the most insecure people
on the planet and they're desperately looking for someone to
aspire to to give them the internal sense or hope
or something of having self esteem and having a direction

(02:06:30):
and having people accept you and you know, appreciate you
and so and as we get older, we get less,
we get less of a sense of idolizing, you know,
those sorts of people, and but we'd never give it up, right, Yeah,
And it makes total sense. You know, I think Marlon
Brando's the way that you're seeing him is absolutely someone

(02:06:53):
we could all look up to as someone that was authentic,
who was real, who said what he wanted to say,
and sometimes made mistakes and didn't do what everyone wanted
him to do and rejected like he was supposed to be.
He was supposed to play Genghis Khan in that movie
that John Wayne played again, and I'm so glad that

(02:07:14):
John Wayne was the one who played Keenghis Khan with this,
you know, the eye makeup to make a locasi. He
didn't take that role because he wanted to take a
social conscious role. I think Burne was the movie and
he wanted to make movies that had a political statement,
you know. And I feel like we could all follow
in his footsteps, which is not what I thought I

(02:07:35):
was going to come to when I thought I was
going to find insane. It's a big jerk, yeah, a
big racist, insane dude who gained weight, you know. I
thought that's what I was going to find. But I
think there's a lot to admire about him.

Speaker 3 (02:07:48):
And I agree with you, And I've asked myself at times,
like why do you you know, I don't think I
have an obsession with Marlon Brando, and I, like I said,
I haven't even seen probably one quarter of his films,
but it's him as a person that like, I'm reading,
you know, this book, I'm watching the documentary Listen to
Me Marlin, anything I can find online, I'm watching, and

(02:08:09):
it's I can watch them. I seriously watched Listen to
Me Marlin at least like once a month, usually when
my husband's out of town.

Speaker 1 (02:08:19):
Koozy Candle.

Speaker 3 (02:08:23):
Exactly. But I think this is gonna seem a little
bit disconnected, but I will bring it back around. So
I've done a little bit of acting in my life,
kind of starting as a little kid, just taking my
parents VHS cameras and making home movies and talk shows
and skits and things just for the fun of it.
And in some of my adult life I've dabbled a

(02:08:43):
little bit here and there and had an agent at
one time. And don't worry, I haven't done anything important.
But I really enjoyed the process of taking classes and
learning about acting and going through a lot of these exercises.
But I never really liked the whole going on auditions
and oh I got to book that tou lelip Becauseino commerci. Oh,
Like you know, I always just felt like embarrassed about
that stuff and didn't really want to get the parts

(02:09:05):
in those types of things, so I eventually just sort
of quit that, but I continued with this one acting
workshop that I do probably every three months because really
it's it kind of reminds me a little bit of
when Marlon Brando talks about being at the New School
for Social Research where he met Stella. To me, it's
like we explore in that workshop what it is to
be human, and so you're really opening up and you're

(02:09:28):
the exercises that we do. It's unlike anything I've ever
experienced before, and I feel like it makes me a
more full human being and a more sometimes getting rid
of certain fears or getting them out of the way
and building confidence in certain directions, but exploring like playing
characters that are completely different than me and going through
emotions I've never personally experienced, but you find them because

(02:09:50):
you're tapping into your own humanity that we all share.
And the point is, I think that I don't really
enjoy the acting acting part for the sake of getting
a role or achieving some sort of status with it.
I just enjoy the process of learning what it is
to be human and exploring those emotions and applying them
to different circumstances. But I think the other thing why

(02:10:13):
I'm probably more interested in Marlon Brando than your average
person is just his curiosity about why people do what
they do and what motivates our behavior and trying to
endlessly understand yourself and what your purpose is. And I
don't know about you. I'm sure you do this as
being the career that you're in. But I'm always analyzing

(02:10:33):
other people and wondering what motivates them, and you know,
talking over dinner with my husband about, you know, someone
we know or someone we observe that day, and like
trying to understand, you know, what created what caused them
to be this type of person or to have this
type of reaction or those things are really fascinating to me.
And I think that's potentially why I am so such

(02:10:55):
a big fan of Marlon Brando. Not to say I
have any in any way, shape or form that I'm
on the same level as him in that thinking, but
I think there's a that's shared endless curiosity and fascination
with people and why they do what they do and why.
Listening to him and some of his theories on things
and his perspective and how that's changed over time is

(02:11:17):
really just up my alley.

Speaker 2 (02:11:19):
It's so interesting because I'm not an actor. As I
said in my shirt acting career in.

Speaker 3 (02:11:24):
High school, I was terearing your musical theater.

Speaker 2 (02:11:27):
Yeah, I'm a singer, but I'm a terrible actor. I'm
not that great of a singer, but I'm a much
better singer than I am an actor.

Speaker 3 (02:11:35):
What's your jam?

Speaker 1 (02:11:36):
What do you mean?

Speaker 3 (02:11:37):
Like?

Speaker 1 (02:11:37):
What song? Or I mean I'm a songwriter.

Speaker 3 (02:11:39):
Like if you're in the car going somewhere by yourself
and you're feeling the need to well.

Speaker 2 (02:11:43):
I love the Beatles, and I love the Strokes, and
I love the NAC I love a lot of bands
with the in the beginning, Yeah, this.

Speaker 3 (02:11:49):
Is a safe bet to go with. Yeah, band the
on the beginning.

Speaker 1 (02:11:52):
Uh, the Cardigan's Elvis got still.

Speaker 3 (02:11:55):
Cardigan's at least in that love Fool song.

Speaker 1 (02:11:57):
That's the worst of all the songs.

Speaker 3 (02:12:00):
Think it is the only song of theirs I know.

Speaker 1 (02:12:01):
Their first three albums are pop gold.

Speaker 2 (02:12:05):
It's so that's the production and the melodies and every
song's different, and they're one of my favorite bands.

Speaker 3 (02:12:11):
Do you remember the first Beatles song?

Speaker 2 (02:12:13):
You ever heard No, But I pretty much only knew
of their early stuff, you know, I didn't know about
their psychedelic weird stuff. And once I got older and
started getting into that, I started really getting into that
and liked it more. But yeah, as you describe, you know,

(02:12:33):
the identification you have with Marlon Brando in terms of
your process of the craft or experience of acting, it
reminds me of what we call improv or drama therapy.
And it's just what you're talking about. It's essentially taking
acting classes but with no aspiration of actually acting. And

(02:12:54):
as a family therapist, we incorporate some of these kinds
of interventions where people will do different exercises of emotion
and experience and role play and interactions and spontaneity and
you know, yes, ending and stuff and how when you
really get into it, how it just unleashes certain things

(02:13:15):
about you and you learn things and you feel it
and it's real.

Speaker 3 (02:13:19):
You feel yourself like expanding, and yeah, it's it's one
of those things that if I would have heard somebody
talk about this ten years ago, I'd probably be like, yeah,
that's not for me. But having done it and actually
experienced it and felt how much. It kind of re
energizes me and remotivates me and takes me to a
different level, whether it's in my thinking or in my

(02:13:40):
willingness to walk through some fear and do it anyway,
or you know, all those kinds of things would sound
a little bit amorphous, but I think they're all connected
in that. It's not to summarize that. Do you have
any words of wisdom?

Speaker 2 (02:13:54):
Well, I could see how Marlon Brando is like the
epitome of what you're talking about, and how many actors
might look up to him in that way because he
was so raw and so good and so real and
so willing to take a fall and so and.

Speaker 3 (02:14:13):
I think willing to be seen. That's that's the thing.
It's like we're all walking around kind of with some
amount of protection all the time, and maybe we lower
it a little bit around certain people. But to truly
be seen, like be nakedly seen, is like a very
scary thing. And then to be you know, up on
a screen or in some sort of arena where people
their job is to judge you, to be like was

(02:14:34):
that good or was that bad? Did I like it
or did I not? And then put it in the newspaper,
and that's like a hundred times more terrifying than just
the doing of it.

Speaker 2 (02:14:43):
You know.

Speaker 3 (02:14:43):
It's like now you're going to be judged for it too,
and with art and anything than the creative realm. It's
like it's one thing to have the guts to make it,
but then there's the whole possibility that, you know, people
may hate it and they may say terrible things about you.
They may love it, but you know, it's it's a
scary career path to choose or to you know.

Speaker 1 (02:15:05):
The little I know about it, I know enough to
know that it's an emotional rollercoaster.

Speaker 2 (02:15:11):
All the auditions and the rejection big yeah. And then
it's like, oh, half the people hated it, you know,
and just and how Marlon Brando seemed to be above
all that, you know, he just seemed to be like
fu well again in the same way that Kurt Cobain
is so beloved by young guitarists, because it's like, you know,

(02:15:36):
Kurt Cobain just gave a big finger to the entire thing, you.

Speaker 1 (02:15:39):
Know, and there's there's.

Speaker 2 (02:15:43):
Something useful to the soul to try to bring that
into your life.

Speaker 3 (02:15:49):
You know, Yeah, I agree, and I think the one
thing that people don't necessarily always consider as it relates
to actors. Brando spoke about I think in an interview
if somebody said, you know, do you ever miss the theater?
Would you ever want to go back to theater acting?
And he was like, no, no way. He was like,
you have to for the three nights every night and

(02:16:11):
sometimes twice on Sunday, Like you have to if you're
playing that kind of a role, like a Stanley Kowalski,
you have to take yourself to this awful place of
just emotionally destroying yourself and the energy that it takes
and the you know how exhausting that is. It's not
fun to go to that place, you know, every day
for however long a show is running. And that's the

(02:16:33):
thing I don't think I've thought about a ton when
I'm watching. I guess it would be mostly stage actors
because you just saying, well, this is their job. They
know how to do it, they've been trained.

Speaker 2 (02:16:43):
But it's not that hard. They just get up there
and act right. Yeah, and it's but it is a
big deal because the emotional.

Speaker 3 (02:16:48):
The emotions are real. You're putting yourself in a place
where you are you're experiencing that and you know, if
you're if you're good, I guess you're you are you're
actually having that physical sensation in your body, you know.
And what can I say? Yeah, Marlin's very much of
one of a kind, that's for sure.

Speaker 1 (02:17:06):
Totally. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:17:07):
I can't think of anyone who, after learning about him,
is comes close to his humongousness of career and personality
and stories and fascination and magnetism.

Speaker 1 (02:17:22):
I mean, I just just after.

Speaker 2 (02:17:24):
Doing a deep dive on him, I can't think of
anyone else that comes close to him, really, and learning
about him has been interesting psychologically, it's been interesting in
terms of film, but it's also been interesting in terms
of history of America in some ways because he is
intertwined in all that. And so yeah, I've just this

(02:17:44):
has been a really fascinating thing to do. And Carrie,
thanks for coming on the podcast to talk about this.

Speaker 1 (02:17:51):
It's been almost three hours.

Speaker 3 (02:17:53):
Are you serious?

Speaker 2 (02:17:55):
Which is awesome I think for the listeners because they
like these deep episodes and you've just been a really
awesome expert from Watkin County.

Speaker 1 (02:18:08):
I'm Marlon Brando.

Speaker 3 (02:18:09):
Well, thank you for having me. This has been really
fun to talk about a person that I really am into.
So thank you for having me. And here's to hopefully
not too arduous an editing process that you have ahead
of you to get this down to something.

Speaker 2 (02:18:24):
There's only a couple there's only a couple of moments
where I said something stupid. Nothing that you said a lot.
That's all stand especially all that fart joke stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:18:34):
Yeah, that's some of my best materials.

Speaker 2 (02:18:36):
That that whole you know, gross bit will stay in good.

Speaker 3 (02:18:41):
Well.

Speaker 2 (02:18:42):
That is it for that episode of Psychology and Seattle.
Thanks for joining us out there. Please take care of
yourself and go out there and learn more about Marlon.
Watch YouTube. There's a ton of interviews, just super interesting
historical personality bits on YouTube and watch all that. Please
take care yourself because you deserve it.

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