Robert Sellers - Hollywood Hellraisers: The Wild Lives and Fast Times of Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson

My old man used to hit harder than that.

N ear the end of his life Marlon Brando was asked: If you could live your life over again, what would you do differently? Scarcely skipping a beat he replied, I wouldnt get married and Id kill my father. Life is never that simple, but the great Brando might have avoided a lot of grief if hed done just that.

Marlon grew up terrified of his own father, Marlon Brando Sr, a man of unpredictable mood swings and often fierce rages. He was a travelling salesman and threw his money around in whorehouses and speakeasys, fucking or drinking anything he could lay his hands on. Rumours of his wayward lifestyle filtered back to the simple house in Omaha, Nebraska, that Marlon shared with his two elder sisters and his mother Dorothy, known by all as Dodie, a fragile, creative spirit who acted in local theatre and dared to dream of Broadway success. Ashamed of her husbands infidelity, Dodie could hit the bottle hard too, and on nights they both got loaded the lounge became a battleground where the children feared to trespass.

Born on 3 April 1924, the young Marlon, nicknamed Bud, had a hectic wildness in him that needed controlling, being taken to kindergarten on a leash, in case he ran away. He once even dropped the neighbours dog down a well. At night he crawled into bed with his eighteen-year-old half-Danish, half-Indonesian nanny Ermi and theyd sleep naked together. The five-year-old sometimes playfully touched Ermis ample creamy brown breasts and writhed around on top of her as if she were a bouncy castle. She belonged to me and me alone. Not for long, though, and when Ermi left after two years to get married Marlon was devastated. My mother had long ago deserted me for her bottle, now Ermi was gone too. From that day forward I became estranged from this world. Marlon was a very serious and lets say strange little chap.

If he turned to his parents for comfort, they were incapable of giving it to him. His father, when he wasnt being a bully, giving orders and issuing ultimatums, fostering in his son a lifelong aversion to authority, was an emotional cripple. There were no father-and-son bondings, no shared tender moments, no hugs or Well done, son, just constant lashing out. Dodie instilled in the young Marlon a love of nature and the arts, but too often was legless or borderline conscious, her son reduced to play-acting for her in an attempt to grab some attention and love. When he was older Marlon often brought Dodie home after shed spent the night drunk in jail, events that traumatised the young boy. I admire Marlons talent, Anthony Quinn once said. But I dont envy the pain that created it.

On many a Sunday afternoon Marlon and his sister Frances would run away from home. For kicks he enjoyed setting off fire alarms then hiding to watch the emergency services roar down the street. When his pet chicken died and Dodie buried it in the garden, Marlon repeatedly dug the poor thing up until it resembled some monstrosity from the nightmare cupboard of Tim Burton.

When the family uprooted and moved to rural Illinois, Dodie was forced to leave her theatrical and bohemian friends behind, her artistic dreams crushed. But Marlon loved the new place; it was a veritable zoo with a horse, a cow, a Great Dane, several rabbits and twenty-eight cats. To this menagerie Marlon would occasionally add a wounded snake or broken bird hed found somewhere. He was a champion of the defenceless, once even turning up at home with an elderly bag lady who had fainted outside in the street, fussing over her while the doctor was called. He became naturally drawn to troubled children, perhaps because they reflected something in himself. One such boy, frail with glasses and bullied at school, was Wally Cox, and the two boys became inseparable, even after Marlon tied poor Wally to a tree in a wood and left him there all night. Their friendship lasted until Coxs premature death in the early seventies and, rather spookily, beyond. Brando kept Coxs ashes in his house and confessed to talking to them most nights.

Aware that her marriage was more compost heap than bed of roses, Dodie was hitting the bottle even harder. Hubby still enjoyed his wayward trouser dropping, and when Dodie spotted lipstick stains on his underpants the rows got worse. Marlon had heard his parents argue and fight before but, now a strapping twelve-year-old, was at last confident physically to confront the man hed grown to despise, a taskmaster whod raised his family by the strict rules of the Bible but who was nothing but a fraud and hypocrite. The gloves were off, and their frequent clashes were so volcanic that the neighbours could hear them warring. One night Marlon burst into the bedroom while his father was beating Dodie and threatened to kill him if he didnt stop.

Its no surprise that Marlon scarcely discussed his childhood when pressed by friends or reporters. The memories were just too painful. His mother had been the only brightness that shone out from the muck and gloom, and he had had to watch her spiral into drunken promiscuity and darkness, fighting her horrendous private demons. Often shed disappear on wild binges and Marlon spent tortured nights in bed waiting for her to come home, or hed search out the streets, the saloons and seedy hotels, often finding her passed out in her own vomit. One time he brought her home naked in a cab from some miserable hell-hole and fought off his father as he rained his fists down on his wretched wifes head.

Is it any wonder, with such a home life, that school seemed a total inconsequence to Marlon, who gladly treated it as such, flunking lessons and misbehaving, like the time he burned the word SHIT on the blackboard with corrosive chemicals. Only for sports and drama did he show any kind of aptitude. When it was discovered hed failed all his subjects and was being held back a year, his father exploded. Marlon didnt care and got himself expelled when he orchestrated one prank too many, placing cheese into the air-conditioning unit and stinking out his classroom.

Marlon Sr was at a loss about what could be done with his son. The boy needed discipline, that was for sure, and as a product of military school himself, he decided that the army could beat it into him more productively than he ever could. So in 1942 Marlon found himself at Shattuck Military Academy in Minnesota, up before dawn, inspections, drills, hikes, marching about, and lights out at 21.30. If anything his rebellious nature found a greater outlet to express itself, and there were pranks galore: stealing every piece of cutlery from the canteen so his fellow cadets couldnt eat, emptying a chamber pot out of the dormitory window as someone was passing and shimmying up a tower to disable and then bury the school bell, which chimed every quarter hour and drove him to distraction.

As for women, he fucked conveyor-belt fashion local lasses from waitresses to farm girls. According to one fellow cadet, Marlon was an equal-opportunity fucker; he happily screwed ugly, pretty, fat or thin girls. They just had to be fuckable.