![Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2018/02/09/TELEMMGLPICT000153729536_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqy6f01PZPGQOHIv9Qt0OBT5cD9JMxNKWUi14Nsv74sns.jpeg?imwidth=680)
'He'd sleep with a mailbox': a guide to Marlon Brando's lovers, both real and alleged
![Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2018/02/09/TELEMMGLPICT000153729536_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqy6f01PZPGQOHIv9Qt0OBT5cD9JMxNKWUi14Nsv74sns.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Marlon Brando had an insatiable lust for many things in his life. There was his passion for politics, as evidenced by his choice to have Sacheen Littlefeather collect his Best Actor Oscar in 1973, highlighting Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans in the process. There was also his lust for food, never clearer than the time he rowed into the middle of a lagoon to eat a five-gallon tub of ice cream in peace. Or so legend tells it.
But little compares to his insatiable appetite for sex; Brando, to put it mildly, cut a swathe through Hollywood like a yak in heat. Or, as Quincy Jones eloquently put it this week in an interview that broke the internet, “He’d f--- anything. Anything! He’d f--- a mailbox.”
In his later years Brando may have substituted a litany of human orifices for various butters and cheeses, but he left behind a sexual legacy that would make even Charlie Sheen blush.
Here are just some of the many, many high-profile lovers Brando reportedly accumulated in his lifetime.
Jackie Kennedy
Buried in C David Heymann’s 2009 book alleging that Jackie Kennedy had an affair with her brother-in-law Robert shortly after her husband’s assassination are claims that she also had a brief fling with Brando. While researching for the book, Heymann discovered excerpts from Brando’s own 1994 autobiography, which he claimed were excised at the request of a friend of Jackie Kennedy, who was then working in publishing.
![Jacqueline Kennedy in 1962](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2018/02/09/TELEMMGLPICT000002002443_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNrzB8hrvgfJ5sESwMmBGZOCHfpH_fyW0CNqPxWGmNfw.jpeg?imwidth=350)
According to Brando, the pair shared two nights together in 1964, one year since John F Kennedy’s assassination, after Jackie pursued him at a dinner he was invited to attend.
Heymann writes: “In Brando’s words, ‘From all I’d read and heard about her, Jacqueline Kennedy seemed coquettish and sensual but not particularly sexual. If anything, I pictured her as more voyeur than player. But that wasn’t the case.
“She kept waiting for me to try to get her into bed. When I failed to make a move, she took matters into her own hands and popped the magic question. ‘Would you like to spend the night?’ And I said, ‘I thought you’d never ask.’”
Brando later commented on Kennedy’s “boyish hips” and “muscular frame”, before adding that the pair slept together once more in Manhattan and never saw each other again.
Richard Pryor
In a series of anecdotes that’ll make you never look at radiators and mailboxes the same way again, Brando’s fling with the legendary comedian Richard Pryor went viral this week, with Jones claiming that the affair was a classic example of Brando’s rampant sex life. Jones, who said in a GQ interview last week that he considered Brando a brother to him, also spilled the beans on Brando’s flings with writer James Baldwin and singer Marvin Gaye.
![Richard Pryor](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/tv/2016/02/10/richard-pryor_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqKe7amNOesseFcwurppOLBNzEPv69yTJpwckr2Jo5OlE.jpg?imwidth=350)
Pryor spoke about his bisexuality in his early stand-up, and was reportedly open about it with his wife Jennifer. She added to this litany of priceless quotes by confirming to TMZ that she knew about his sexual encounters with Brando.
“It was the Seventies!” she explained. “Drugs were still good, especially quaaludes. If you did enough cocaine, you’d f--- a radiator and send it flowers in the morning.”
But in a strange twist that makes the Pryor family seem like cast members from Dynasty, Pryor’s daughter Rain claimed in a Facebook post that her father didn’t sleep with Brando at all and that both Jones and Jennifer Pryor were liars.
![Marlon Brando with Mutiny on the Bounty native Tahitian actress Tarita](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2018/02/09/TELEMMGLPICT000153727476_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq88X1hBv9qMYEveWd8YrsSYbXWix8bUtvZx1SXQ_M4Mo.jpeg?imwidth=350)
“[Quincy] was once a brilliant music producer who is losing his mind, and decided to garner publicity for himself with a sensationalised interview,” she wrote. “Then on top of it all, my dad’s so called widow validated it, because she needs to keep legitimising herself and tarnish our dad even after he’s dead. She hated [Quincy] and Daddy.”
James Baldwin
The legendary writer and social commentator James Baldwin was a close friend of Brando’s for over three decades, their friendship founded on their mutual Civil Rights activism. They met while struggling creatives in Forties New York, where they were roommates for a period. And, according to Quincy Jones in the aforementioned Vulture interview, they were lovers.
Brando and Baldwin appear together in a 30-minute roundtable discussion from 1963 that is currently viewable on YouTube, discussing racism in America alongside a star-studded line-up that includes Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and a presumably pre-Republican Charlton Heston.
![Brando with James Baldwin in 1963](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2018/02/09/TELEMMGLPICT000153727848_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqVHzyo7OuTI5InyeNX_T1jAlDx5d2psMPAxqkfjsHOko.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Speaking to James Grissom for his 1990 Tennessee Williams biography Follies of God, Brando said: “If you wish to ask me what I cared about most now, if you ask me to state what was important or lasting, it would have to be that I walked and sat and dreamed next to a man named James Baldwin.
“James, or Jimmy, knew how to analyse, place, describe, repair, and destroy things – all in the right way and for the right reasons. Baldwin, as I liked to call him, taught me to think in a piercing way about things far more important than scripts or contracts or poems. He taught me to look into and understand people and their motives and their identities. And I didn’t always like what I saw, but it led me toward something that might be called freedom.”
Jackie Collins
In an anecdote that will make you cry either “It was a different time!” or “Brando’s a child predator”, the late bonkbuster novelist Jackie Collins revealed in 2010 that she had a fling with the star when she was 15 and he was 29. If the story came to light when Brando was alive, he could have been investigated for statutory rape.
![Jackie Collins with her sister Joan, in 2015](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/fashion/2015/12/23/jackie-joan-collins_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqy6f01PZPGQOHIv9Qt0OBTzEjXkNONwUmBkEkAvmT-8o.jpg?imwidth=350)
Speaking to the US tabloid The Globe, Collins recalled that their affair began after Brando glimpsed her at a Hollywood party in 1953. She said: “He sent someone over to me to say, ‘Marlon thinks you’re great-looking and have a great body and would like to meet you’. We had a very brief but fabulous affair. He was at the height of his fame and gorgeous.”
She also offered a defence of Brando’s actions by saying in the same interview that “When I was 14 I had the figure of a 19-year-old, and I liked boys. I lived in a basement flat so I was out of the window every night.”
She elaborated on the fling to Access Hollywood in 2015, telling the show’s hosts that Brando remained the sexiest man she ever met, and that he was “the best”. She also promised to go into further detail about their relationship in her memoir, Reform School or Hollywood, which she was writing at the time of her death. It sadly remains unpublished.
Rita Moreno
In a prime example of Brando’s ability to be both completely awful and completely irresistible, Rita Moreno has described being treated horribly, being forced to abort a child and driven to near-suicide during their eight-year relationship, but insisted that she still has fond memories of their time together.
Writing in her 2013 memoir, Moreno recalled meeting Brando on the set of their film Désirée. “My body temperature skyrocketed as though I had been dropped into a very hot bath, and I went into a full-body blush,” she writes. “It was the sort of rush that inspires poetry and songs.”
![Rita Moreno in West Side Story](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2018/02/09/TELEMMGLPICT000022507955_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqeoMPseA8rXxS7fV2a1a45cdnjcKJ_TbzNErQoCzw3uk.jpeg?imwidth=350)
She added: “To say that he was a great lover — sensual, generous, delightfully inventive — would be gravely understating what he did not only to my body, but for my soul. Every aspect of being with Marlon was thrilling, because he was more engaged in the world than anyone else I’d ever known.”
But as their relationship continued, Moreno wrote that she could no longer handle Brando’s “insatiable sexual needs”, along with his affairs and jealousy. The pair began making each other jealous as a result, with Moreno flaunting her flings with Dennis Hopper and Elvis Presley to get back at Brando for his own infidelities.
Things grew worse when Moreno fell pregnant, leading Brando to arrange a hasty abortion that she writes she was forced into. Devastated, she took an overdose of sleeping pills in an attempt to end her life. Rescued by doctors, she then realised that she needed to leave him.
Despite their destructive relationship, the pair reunited in the years preceding Brando’s death and became good friends. Moreno told People Magazine last year that while she ended up finding the “love of her life” in her late husband Leonard Gordon, she considers Brando “the lust of her life.”
Shelley Winters
Almost as sexually rambunctious as Brando in her heyday, Shelley Winters had flings with the likes of Errol Flynn, Sean Connery, Laurence Olivier, William Holden and Burt Lancaster. As revealed in her 1980 memoir, Winters also had a prolonged “friends with benefits” arrangement with Brando which began when they were both struggling young actors.
Shacked up in a run-down apartment in New York, Winters claimed that Brando wooed her with the immortal line: “The only way to keep warm in this apartment is to get into bed. My body generates a great deal of heat.”
![Shelley Winters](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2018/02/09/TELEMMGLPICT000004391384_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqeawYjNG9i94uIDjxO1F-ghRtmf4zRhRxlqgY4trh20o.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Writing of his sex appeal, Winters added that when Brando was on stage, “all you could do was feel, the sexual arousal was so complete. The only other time I experienced it was when I saw Elvis Presley perform live in Las Vegas.”
Winters also recalled an incident in which a stark-naked Brando ran through the hallway of her apartment building to throw into an incinerator various framed photographs of Burt Lancaster, her married lover at the time.
Speaking on daytime television in 1980, Winters said that Brando had no problem with her spilling the beans on their affair in her book, but did tell her: “Look, it’s okay to put me in your book, but on a scale of 10, I want to be 10!”
Marilyn Monroe
There have been slight discrepancies when it comes to Brando’s alleged fling with Marilyn Monroe, with some sources claiming they had a decade-long affair, others insisting they had little more than a good friendship, and others still claiming he rejected her because she was a blonde.
Brando, who escorted Monroe to the premiere of The Rose Tattoo in 1955, reportedly said during his life that the pair did sleep together, but that they were closer as friends and lovers. Speaking in audio tapes that form the 2015 documentary Listen to Me Marlon, Brando said that he last spoke to Monroe two days before her death, and that they had been planning on working on a film together.
![Marilyn and Marlon](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2018/02/09/brandomarilyn_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqEDjTm7JpzhSGR1_8ApEWQA1vLvhkMtVb21dMmpQBfEs.jpg?imwidth=350)
A fling, however, was disputed by Brando’s friend George Englund, who wrote the biography Marlon Brando: The Naked Truth. He claimed that while the pair flirted with each other during their first meeting, their chemistry went no further. “We were in New York,” he recalled. “I said to him he could probably call any woman anywhere in the world and if he asked her to come over to the hotel, there was a high probability she would.
“Marilyn was staying at the Plaza Hotel across the street. He had never met her before but he phoned her, gave her a few chat lines, and she said she'd come. And they sat and talked about what it was like to be surrounded by people who wanted to say they’d slept with a movie star, not people who wanted to know the human being you were. They had a rapport that evening, a shared experience, but she wasn’t his type.”
James Dean
James Dean’s sex life has conjured infinite stories over the years, from the gloriously brilliant (like his threesome with Eartha Kitt and Paul Newman) to the vaguely depressing. Dean’s fling with Brando is one of the latter, with a recent book claiming the pair were involved in a sadomasochistic affair in which Brando manipulated Dean’s affections for his own personal pleasure.
![James Dean](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2017/09/19/TELEMMGLPICT000141066207_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqjTsw8QAHGpHbGKiy8yUeBCIviKYZY-RLmmlIQPJcn7g.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Whether the arrangement was consensual remains a mystery, but Darwin Porter’s book James Dean: Tomorrow Never Comes claims that after meeting in an acting class, Dean became obsessed with Brando, with the latter exploiting Dean’s infatuation by forcing him into S&M sex in which Brando repeatedly burnt him with cigarettes.
Composer Alec Wilder, a friend of Dean’s, is quoted in the book as saying: “They were definitely a couple. Of course, the words ‘sexual fidelity’ would be unknown in each of their vocabularies. Jimmy and I used to sit and talk for hours in my room at the Algonquin Hotel. He kept me abreast of the affair.
“I really believe that Jimmy fell in love with Brando that year. As for Brando, I don’t think he ever loved Jimmy. I met Brando only three times and each time he was with Jimmy. In my opinion, Brando was in love with Brando.”
Cary Grant, Montgomery Clift and various other A-list actors
Brando confirmed his bisexuality in a 1976 interview, and as a result has been linked with almost every A-list male actor from his generation. The list ranges from the most famously closeted actors of the era, including Montgomery Clift, Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson, to stars that have been generally known to be straight, among them Cary Grant.
In Darwin Porter’s 2005 book Brando Unzipped, a precursor to the James Dean expose referenced above, the author writes of Brando’s affairs with Grant, Clift and Dean among many, many others.
![Cary Grant](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2016/11/28/GrantMain_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq0RN0SxybFMDF0P5HxNqFpYzViFm3--h28sFYsOPtsW0.jpg?imwidth=350)
“[Brando’s] affair with Montgomery Clift was a long and enduring relationship,” Porter writes, adding: “Marlon had a bit of a fling with Cary Grant, spending a weekend with him in San Francisco. Cary was also pursuing the actor Stewart Granger, who became another of Marlon’s conquests.
“Marlon admired John Gielgud but they didn’t have a relationship, rather, Brando performed sexual favours for Gielgud and told friends, ‘I owed it to him because he really helped me with lines in [their 1953 film] Julius Caesar.’”
But as Porter has long been responsible for celebrity exposes that hinge on speculation about homosexual affairs, it’s best taking some of this with a grain of salt, particularly as there is scant evidence outside of his book.
Heidi Fleiss
By the mid-Nineties, Brando’s weight had long got the better of him, but that reportedly didn’t prevent his rampant love-making. That’s according to notorious Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, at least, who told the Sunday Times in 2008 that she had a week-long fling with him shortly before she was jailed for tax evasion in 1997.
![Heidi Fleiss](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/films/2018/02/09/TELEMMGLPICT000153765160_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqeCgSvhXI4qKiTyls6EsqMfpGg6fnmbQh9zJzsoT_z-0.jpeg?imwidth=350)
“Marlon was without doubt the sexiest, fattest man I ever slept with,” she recalled. “We had the most exhausting but satisfying eight hours of my life. He was old then but Marlon knew exactly how to please a woman and despite his size had incredible stamina. He just kept going.”
She did, however, confess that Brando had one predilection that she found slightly unusual. “The only thing slightly off-putting was he had this strange habit of munching on grapes the whole time we had sex,” she claimed. “He kept them in a big bowl next to his bed.”
It appears that by the end Brando had somehow managed to combine his two greatest loves: sex and food, intertwined in a carnal snack-a-thon straight out of Caligula. He lived his best life.