Icon no 5: Marlon Brando

(Actor, film maker, activist: 3/4/1924-1/7/2004)

Oct 23, 2023

Warning: this post contains references to trauma and abuse

Brando in The Godfather as Don Vito Corleone

It’s around noon on a Sunday outside Libertyville, Illinois. We are in a pickup truck. The figure in the driving seat, after a night of anguish and then a call from the police, is heading into town. At the police station, the driver of the pickup is shown through to the cells, where a second figure is sleeping on a bench, wrapped in a blanket. Why do they keep doing this? Underneath the blanket, they are naked, having been found like this in a drunken state sometime during the night. Together, the two figures make their way to the truck and head back home. This scene, above all in the biographies of Marlon Brando, says most about the challenges he faced. At the age of 16, he was too young to drive a pickup truck. And too young to be dealing with his mother in a state like this. It wasn’t the first time. But as was often the case, there was no one else to do it. So, he did it. “You don’t feel anything”¹ he would later say. You just do it.

Marlon Brando was an actor who changed the way actors think about their craft.¹ He has been described as an acting “genius” who “raised the bar for what could be achieved on the screen”¹– particularly with regards to realism. He made over 50 feature films, including A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront (Oscar, best actor), The Godfather (Oscar, best actor) and Apocalypse Now. He was idealised by fellow actors; Humphrey Bogart once saying,

“wrap up all the Oscars, including mine, and hand them over to Brando”.

Brando used his fame to confront his country and the film industry about important social injustices of his time, including racial equality for Blacks, native Americans and Mexicans.

Theory of narcissism predicts that those driven to achieve admiration and greatness are often driven in order to manage the effects of specific types of trauma: emotional neglect (or a dismissing of their emotional vulnerability and need) and repeated condemnation or shaming. On the map of narcissism, emotional neglect and judgment appear as roles that continue to feature as problematic later in life. What do we find in the childhood of this iconic actor?

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The map of narcissism²*

Trauma: when vulnerability is unsafe

Even before Dodie Brando’s reputation – as a drunk and as promiscuous – spread, the Brandos were misfits in the community. When Marlon senior was away, as he often was as a travelling salesman, Dodie, Marlon’s mother, would take to her whisky. And things would fall apart. Dodie more than once took an overdose of pills and had her stomach pumped. Young Marlon was faced with the terror of his mother dying alongside feeling he had the responsibility for saving her.

When Marlon was 10, riding his bike, he came across a woman, staggering along by a lake. With her arm around his shoulder, he brought her home and was met on the front steps by his parents. Dodie and Marlon senior looked on embarrassed as their son with a very drunk stranger said, “I think we should take care of her – she is sick”¹. Here, their son, living in a house where alcohol as a problem could not be spoken about – perhaps trying to say something, trying to do something, about his mother. It was Dodie whose sickness he was desperate to take care of.

Marlon as a child with the older sister Jocelyn, who would later suggest acting school

Most theories of narcissism focus on the needs of the infant and child and the early relationship with parents in which their needs, for a while, seem to be met perfectly. Hunger, cold, fear and other needs for comfort are met quickly. To need – to depend – to belong to another person - is safe and manageable. But there is an illusion: for a while it seems as if needs are provided in a way controlled by the spontaneous needs of the infant. When they are upset, the comfort comes. The actual parent – who is good enough but not quite as connected to the infant’s needs as they seem – is, for the moment, ‘invisible’³. They seem to be part of the child. One of the infant’s earliest learning experiences will be to move from this perfect dependence to tolerating something less perfect –someone separate, but still worth depending on.

After this transition, the human child continues to need a reliable other person throughout their childhood. This person is there first to protect and feed, and secondly to notice and make sense of emotions, and thoughts, so that every day feelings can be managed, and so that traumatic experiences do not become traumatising. For the 16-year-old Marlon in the pickup, this person whose role was to help him manage a traumatic experience, was asleep, naked and perhaps herself, traumatised.

What happens to the emotionally neglected child in this situation? According to narcissism theory, finding dependence unbearable – perhaps humiliating – the child opts to give up needing the caregiver. The child is still physically present, but emotionally, they go it alone. Although they have an undeveloped ability to manage their own emotions and thoughts, there is a shutting down of human emotional connection as a strategy for learning how to do this. In attachment terms, this is called a ‘dismissive’ attachment style. This strategy may serve them in the short term but will perhaps cause problems later.

For Marlon this difficult situation was taken to further levels. Like many children in such a situation, he became, at a young age, the parent figure to a parent who frequently collapsed or put themselves at risk. There was despair. But there was also surely fear – with only himself and his sister to turn to for comfort. So, Marlon was starved of safety but also comfort and the empathy that he would need in order to develop normal emotional resilience. And resilience, of course, is there for potentially traumatic situations later in life. He would need it.

Trauma: physical abuse and condemnation

Marlon Brando was only ever called ‘Bud’ at home. Marlon was the name of his father, a travelling salesman. Marlon described his father as a “frightening, silent, brooding, angry, hard drinking…bully”. Marlon bore the brunt of his father’s anger – “cruel, demeaning words, mostly, and arduous tasks around the house. But sometimes there was physical violence as well”. One of Marlon’s jobs was to milk the family’s cow. This was a platform for humiliation, and he would be beaten if he got it wrong. If the cow put its dung-covered hoof in the bucket of milk, Maron would sieve it and serve it to the family rather than admit fault.¹On one occasion when Bud was a teenager, Marlon senior waited for him to get dressed up to go on a date before ordering him to milk the cow in his only set of smart clothes.

“I don’t remember forgiveness”, Marlon’s younger sister Frannie remembered. Instead, there was “blame, shame and punishment that often had no relationship to the crime”¹

There were frequent arguments between the parents and on one occasion, hearing his father hitting his mother, 14-year-old Marlon had burst into the bedroom and threatened to kill his father. He meant it and his father could see so.

Trauma: vulnerability exploited

This neglectful and abusive situation, dismissive of emotional needs of the child is implicated in the map of narcissism. But this was not the only childhood trauma indicated in the biographies of Marlon Brando. When Marlon was three years old, the family took in a 17-year-old maid from Denmark. According to biographer William Mann this became, over four-five years, a sexually exploitative relationship. Marlon later said that when he was eight, the housemaid got married and left - without saying goodbye. He also described becoming a ‘delinquent’ child from around this same time that she left. Brando repeatedly referenced the years before his seventh birthday as setting him up to have problems in life.

At 17 Marlon had been labelled as ‘good for nothing’ at his local Libertyville High School. Marlon’s developing physical ability to stand up to his father at home was perhaps also becoming a problem for Marlon Senior. Marlon was sent to Shattuck Military Academy – something his father thought would ‘straighten him out’. Marlon didn’t fit in well. But the head of English and drama, known as ‘Duke’ saw potential in him.

Duke, a 44-year-old bachelor, was described as an eccentric who tested the boundaries between teacher and students – inviting some to his apartment on site. He was the first teacher in Brando’s life to champion the boy and notice acting talent. In response Dodie, having wanted to act herself in the past, started to coach Marlon – warning him that acting was hard work. An idea for the boy’s future was tentatively forming.

It is clear to biographer Mann, that something “traumatising” happened between Duke and Marlon at the start of 1943¹. In any case three dramatic events offer clues: Firstly, Duke abruptly turned-on Marlon and rejected him after a period in which they had grown close. Marlon, in turn appeared very angry with Duke -calling the teacher an “asshole” Infront of others. Secondly, Marlon was expelled on charges that to most pupils, did not make any sense, (pupils held a protest and the decision was later reversed but Maron refused to return). Thirdly, Duke was, after Brando’s expulsion, exposed as having sex with cadets and he was fired. Years later, Marlon was asked why Duke had never come forward and taken credit for being the first to champion his talent. Duke had never made contact with Marlon again after he left the Academy despite his becoming the “best actor in the world”. Marlon replied explaining that Duke had died before he had become successful. But this was a lie.

The implications for Marlon are tragic. Four caregivers of immense importance to him – his mother, his father, the housemaid, and his first mentor and champion – had betrayed him. Just a few months after being expelled from the cadet school, Marlon arrived at the Dramatic Workshop; an acting school in New York, at the recommendation of his older sister – herself a budding actor.

Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire

Brando’s trauma and Brando’s talent

William Mann, in his biography of Brando, is clear that throughout his life, he struggled with a mental health problem. Mann says that Brando had post-traumatic stress – or what would now be called complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) because the traumas are multiple and relational. Post-traumatic stress disorder is marked by anxiety and heightened fear response, avoidance of reminders of the trauma and intrusive memories and nightmares that trigger intense feelings. Traumatic events must have occurred or experienced in order to have this diagnosis. Marlon’s dissociative experiences, relationship problems and bouts of depression, avoidance and escape, could all fit with this diagnosis. There were periods of anxiety and depression, and he would “fall to the floor, frozen in fear, until he gradually started breathing again”¹

However, as is often the case in narcissism, Mann focusses on the parts of Brando that look like illness – separating them from other unusual experiences and behaviours that are a bit different: compulsive sex addiction, violence and rage, a drive to be admired and successful, a tendency to be shaming of others and high levels of dishonesty¹. These are all the same man. But we find it difficult to put the problems that look like illness or ‘victimhood’ together with the problems that look like power or like ‘perpetrator’.

I think it was more complex than complex-PTSD. But a large part of Brando’s complex difficulties can be summed up as narcissism – something that I think is a kind of post traumatic syndrome, but rarely looks like one. If we use the map of narcissism to understand Brando, then the victimhood and the perpetrator features are connected. Brando, having suffered repeated unsafe experiences of vulnerability along with traumatic experiences of judgment and shame, found performance, power and invulnerability in relationships, as his escape strategies.

Brando’s “pearl”

The map of narcissism suggests then, that part of the great talent of some actors and leaders, is brought about by trauma in this way. After Brando had become a world-renowned actor, someone once asked him about this idea. Marlon responded, intelligently, impatiently and tellingly:

“What you’re saying, is that unless you irritate an oyster with a sand grain, he will not make the necessary compensations for the purposes of that sand grain and will [therefore] never create a pearl. Who gives a damn about the pearl.”¹

What is Marlon saying? It sounds to me as if he is saying that the world wants the oyster (himself) to comply with the effects of the sand grain (trauma) and create a pearl (talent, performance which others enjoy), but on the other hand, he is the poor victim who has to put up with it. The sand grain appears, in Marlon’s case, to be parental neglect, and physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Brando is making this link himself between trauma and talent. Now extremely famous, he pours contempt on this talent. No one is talking about what brought it about. And no one knows what it cost. And so Brando hated all the compliments and how “phony” it all was.

To perform, to be great - to be this “pearl” - gave Brando distance from vulnerability and from humiliation. At the same time though, it left his trauma and his vulnerability unseen. This is the catch 22 of narcissism - the power of original trauma is being alone with it. The problem with narcissism is that you remain alone with it. Only the shining pearl or powerful behaviour can be seen.

In part B of this post, I will look at the compulsive and damaging strategies and patterns in Brando’s adult relationships. How can we understand the sometimes shocking patterns in the personal relationships of our icons?

Narcissism, Trauma and Celebrity

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