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Picky Marlon Brando thought 'Elizabeth Taylor's a** was too small and Sophia Loren's breath was worse than a dinosaur.' Marilyn and Jackie fit the bill - so did Rock. But his first love, at age four, was his housekeeper, new book reveals.
On the tenth anniversary of Marlon Brando's death at age 80, a new book reveals that his huge sexual appetite began when he was four years old - with his housekeeper Ermi
'At night, we slept together,' he said. 'She was nude, and so was I. I sat there looking at her body and fondling her breasts'
'I have had homosexual experiences,' Brando admitted
Pipsqueak Wally Cox, famous for his TV character Mr. Peepers, was his unlikely soul mate. When Marlon died their ashes were mixed together and scattered in Death Valley
Brando's weight fluctuated when he realized it was having an impact on his sex life. 'There probably isn’t a diet I haven’t tried’
With a lifelong obsessive sexual appetite that matched his enormous weight gain in later years, iconic actor Marlon Brando bedded the biggest stars in Hollywood – male and female – with no regrets.
In the fifties and sixties, Brando was the quintessential American sex symbol bedding Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Jackie Kennedy and hundreds more in the swinging sixties and at Hollywood key parties. But he was also selective and turned down Elizabeth Taylor because ‘her a** was too small’ and Sophia Loren because her breath was ‘worse than that of a dinosaur’.
By his own confession, he also slept with men. ‘I too, have had homosexual experiences’, he confessed in 1976. On that list of alleged lovers are Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Laurence Olivier – to name a few.
Brando’s overwhelming sexual appetite and obsession that motivated him to have four to five lovers at one time was awakened by his housekeeper, Ermi, when he was only four years old.
‘During the day, we played constantly. At night, we slept together. She was nude, and so was I...She was a deep sleeper and I can visualize her now lying in our bed…I sat there looking at her body and fondling her breasts, and arranged myself on her and crawled over her.
'She was all mine; she belonged to me and me alone. Had she known of my blinding worship of her, we would have married…’, Marlon Brando, writing in his own autobiography about his first lover, his housekeeper, Ermi, when he was four.
When she left the Brando household to marry, Brando never recovered from the loss and writes his lifelong sexual addiction was caused by feeling abandoned by Ermi. ‘From that day forward I became estranged from the world. I spent most of the rest of my life trying to find her’.
‘He was an epic womanizer and his need for sex with women was an addiction,’ author Susan Mizruchi writes in a new biography, Brando’s Smile, being published on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the actor’s death on July 1.
‘It took up endless amounts of his time. Yet there was a deliberation behind everything he did, including his romances. His love letters describe how he wanted to pleasure women, ignite a woman’s passion’.
‘He wanted to be loved and needed women, but then he broke their hearts because he couldn’t be loyal’.
His grandmother was a Christian Science healer by touch. ‘Several of Brando’s lovers spoke of his incredible sense of touch – how he would stroke their skin or hair’.
Mizruchi was granted total access to all of Brando’s personal archives, letters, tape recordings, script notes, and she writes that the actor has been widely misunderstood.
In his collection, there were reams of notes about all the women he slept with, none on the men.
‘His persona was a harsh, thuggish macho figure but in reality he was a gentle, soft-spoken, sensitive and compassionate man with an insatiable curiosity’.
‘I can report that Brando’s hunger for knowledge was as insatiable as his more legendary appetites for women and food’.
The gossip about his many affairs contributed to the actor being stereotyped as an intellectual lightweight.
Collecting books from the time he was a young actor in New York, he amassed a library of some 4000 books rivaling that of an academic, all of which he catalogued under a system he created.
He was given books by the many women he had affairs with, poetry, handmade books with details of their dates, pleas for more. His collection included books of politics, poetry, self-help, psychology, nature, grammar and vocabulary books. He was interested in everything.
Brando entered the world feet first, a breech delivery, in Omaha, Nebraska on 3 April 1924. His great grandfather, a renowned doctor as well as an alcoholic and con man, his mother, Dodie, an alcoholic who had a thriving career in the theatre as well as being a talented sculptor. Marlon, Sr,was a traveling salesman for a limestone products company. He shared his wife’s growing dependency on alcohol but he handled it better.
During the Prohibition era, from 1920 to 1933, they dosed the children with cod liver oil while brewing beer in laundry tubs in the basement and gin in the bathtub.
Marlon Sr. insisted that Marlon Brando, Jr, nicknamed ‘Bud’, learn proper table manners, and beat him for bad behavior while he, himself, was a drunk and slept with prostitutes while on the road.
Bud was often sent out to local bars to fetch his drunken mother, who also had her own extramarital affairs. Her unpredictable behavior while on a drinking jag required housekeepers to keep some order in the house with three children, two older sisters Jocelyn and Franny and the youngest child, Marlon.
When Marlon was four, Ermi, an eighteen year old governess of Danish and Indonesian extraction, lived with the children for three years until Marlon was seven.
‘She bathed and slept with the young boy, both of them nude’. She stayed with the family when they moved from Omaha to Evanston, Illinois when Brando was six years old.
This relationship inspired the actor’s lifelong preference for brunettes and women of Asian, East Indian, Hispanic, black or Jewish descent.
Brando was a dismal student and the only child in his class to fail kindergarten. He was mildly dyslexic but grew out of it.
The Brando children began going to the movies weekly in Evanston and his early fondness for the opposite sex showed up in love notes. On the back of one girl’s sixth-grade class photograph, he wrote: ‘Yours till the ocaen [sic] wears rubber pants to keep its bottom dry. Lot’s of luck Buddy Brando’.
It was also at the Lincoln School in Evanston where he met classmate Wally Cox who later became a comedian and actor in Los Angeles, famous for his character, Mr. Peepers in the television show of the same name. They remained close friends for life, both from unstable families with alcoholic mothers.
‘One of their favorite activities was taking long hikes in the woods, where they examined plants, trees, and insects and often carried their treasures home’.
Years later in Los Angeles, they wandered together through the woods around Brando’s home on Mulholland Drive. Brando saved all the walking sticks the pair collected on their walks.
Brando kept Cox’s ashes after his death in 1973. ‘I’m not sure I will ever forgive Wally for dying’, he stated. ‘More than a friend; he was my brother, closer to me than any human being in my life except my sisters. He taught me how to speak and to see in words the melodies of life’.
When Brando died in 2004, some of their ashes were mixed together and scattered in Death Valley.
Marlon Sr. focused on his son’s inadequacies, his lousy grades in school, expressed contempt for acting and never exhibited any pride in his son’s accomplishments. Brando had disdain for his father’s salesman profession.
It was a standoff except for a passion for chess that they shared.
Brando Sr. believed acting was ‘self-indulgent, a Bohemian activity that was reserved for women, homosexuals, and outcasts’. He was jealous of his son’s unexpected success in comparison to his own mediocre life and loss of patriarchal authority.
On the tenth anniversary of Marlon Brando's death at age 80, a new book reveals that his huge sexual appetite began when he was four years old - with his housekeeper Ermi
'At night, we slept together,' he said. 'She was nude, and so was I. I sat there looking at her body and fondling her breasts'
'I have had homosexual experiences,' Brando admitted
Pipsqueak Wally Cox, famous for his TV character Mr. Peepers, was his unlikely soul mate. When Marlon died their ashes were mixed together and scattered in Death Valley
Brando's weight fluctuated when he realized it was having an impact on his sex life. 'There probably isn’t a diet I haven’t tried’
With a lifelong obsessive sexual appetite that matched his enormous weight gain in later years, iconic actor Marlon Brando bedded the biggest stars in Hollywood – male and female – with no regrets.
In the fifties and sixties, Brando was the quintessential American sex symbol bedding Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Jackie Kennedy and hundreds more in the swinging sixties and at Hollywood key parties. But he was also selective and turned down Elizabeth Taylor because ‘her a** was too small’ and Sophia Loren because her breath was ‘worse than that of a dinosaur’.
By his own confession, he also slept with men. ‘I too, have had homosexual experiences’, he confessed in 1976. On that list of alleged lovers are Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Laurence Olivier – to name a few.
Brando’s overwhelming sexual appetite and obsession that motivated him to have four to five lovers at one time was awakened by his housekeeper, Ermi, when he was only four years old.
‘During the day, we played constantly. At night, we slept together. She was nude, and so was I...She was a deep sleeper and I can visualize her now lying in our bed…I sat there looking at her body and fondling her breasts, and arranged myself on her and crawled over her.
'She was all mine; she belonged to me and me alone. Had she known of my blinding worship of her, we would have married…’, Marlon Brando, writing in his own autobiography about his first lover, his housekeeper, Ermi, when he was four.
When she left the Brando household to marry, Brando never recovered from the loss and writes his lifelong sexual addiction was caused by feeling abandoned by Ermi. ‘From that day forward I became estranged from the world. I spent most of the rest of my life trying to find her’.
‘He was an epic womanizer and his need for sex with women was an addiction,’ author Susan Mizruchi writes in a new biography, Brando’s Smile, being published on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the actor’s death on July 1.
‘It took up endless amounts of his time. Yet there was a deliberation behind everything he did, including his romances. His love letters describe how he wanted to pleasure women, ignite a woman’s passion’.
‘He wanted to be loved and needed women, but then he broke their hearts because he couldn’t be loyal’.
His grandmother was a Christian Science healer by touch. ‘Several of Brando’s lovers spoke of his incredible sense of touch – how he would stroke their skin or hair’.
Mizruchi was granted total access to all of Brando’s personal archives, letters, tape recordings, script notes, and she writes that the actor has been widely misunderstood.
In his collection, there were reams of notes about all the women he slept with, none on the men.
‘His persona was a harsh, thuggish macho figure but in reality he was a gentle, soft-spoken, sensitive and compassionate man with an insatiable curiosity’.
‘I can report that Brando’s hunger for knowledge was as insatiable as his more legendary appetites for women and food’.
The gossip about his many affairs contributed to the actor being stereotyped as an intellectual lightweight.
Collecting books from the time he was a young actor in New York, he amassed a library of some 4000 books rivaling that of an academic, all of which he catalogued under a system he created.
He was given books by the many women he had affairs with, poetry, handmade books with details of their dates, pleas for more. His collection included books of politics, poetry, self-help, psychology, nature, grammar and vocabulary books. He was interested in everything.
Brando entered the world feet first, a breech delivery, in Omaha, Nebraska on 3 April 1924. His great grandfather, a renowned doctor as well as an alcoholic and con man, his mother, Dodie, an alcoholic who had a thriving career in the theatre as well as being a talented sculptor. Marlon, Sr,was a traveling salesman for a limestone products company. He shared his wife’s growing dependency on alcohol but he handled it better.
During the Prohibition era, from 1920 to 1933, they dosed the children with cod liver oil while brewing beer in laundry tubs in the basement and gin in the bathtub.
Marlon Sr. insisted that Marlon Brando, Jr, nicknamed ‘Bud’, learn proper table manners, and beat him for bad behavior while he, himself, was a drunk and slept with prostitutes while on the road.
Bud was often sent out to local bars to fetch his drunken mother, who also had her own extramarital affairs. Her unpredictable behavior while on a drinking jag required housekeepers to keep some order in the house with three children, two older sisters Jocelyn and Franny and the youngest child, Marlon.
When Marlon was four, Ermi, an eighteen year old governess of Danish and Indonesian extraction, lived with the children for three years until Marlon was seven.
‘She bathed and slept with the young boy, both of them nude’. She stayed with the family when they moved from Omaha to Evanston, Illinois when Brando was six years old.
This relationship inspired the actor’s lifelong preference for brunettes and women of Asian, East Indian, Hispanic, black or Jewish descent.
Brando was a dismal student and the only child in his class to fail kindergarten. He was mildly dyslexic but grew out of it.
The Brando children began going to the movies weekly in Evanston and his early fondness for the opposite sex showed up in love notes. On the back of one girl’s sixth-grade class photograph, he wrote: ‘Yours till the ocaen [sic] wears rubber pants to keep its bottom dry. Lot’s of luck Buddy Brando’.
It was also at the Lincoln School in Evanston where he met classmate Wally Cox who later became a comedian and actor in Los Angeles, famous for his character, Mr. Peepers in the television show of the same name. They remained close friends for life, both from unstable families with alcoholic mothers.
‘One of their favorite activities was taking long hikes in the woods, where they examined plants, trees, and insects and often carried their treasures home’.
Years later in Los Angeles, they wandered together through the woods around Brando’s home on Mulholland Drive. Brando saved all the walking sticks the pair collected on their walks.
Brando kept Cox’s ashes after his death in 1973. ‘I’m not sure I will ever forgive Wally for dying’, he stated. ‘More than a friend; he was my brother, closer to me than any human being in my life except my sisters. He taught me how to speak and to see in words the melodies of life’.
When Brando died in 2004, some of their ashes were mixed together and scattered in Death Valley.
Marlon Sr. focused on his son’s inadequacies, his lousy grades in school, expressed contempt for acting and never exhibited any pride in his son’s accomplishments. Brando had disdain for his father’s salesman profession.
It was a standoff except for a passion for chess that they shared.
Brando Sr. believed acting was ‘self-indulgent, a Bohemian activity that was reserved for women, homosexuals, and outcasts’. He was jealous of his son’s unexpected success in comparison to his own mediocre life and loss of patriarchal authority.
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