Private Tapes Uncovered After Marlon Brando’s Death Expose His Deepest Thoughts

The contents of the tapes were revealed to the world in the 2015 documentary Listen to Me Marlon. Curiously, the director of that project, Stevan Riley, had known little about Brando when he was first asked to make it in 2012.

In October 2015 Riley wrote for The Telegraph, “It was serendipitous that at the exact time I was doing my research, the estate was unpacking and logging Brando’s personal possessions that had been boxed in storage since his death in 2004.”

Riley continued, “What I heard on one tape provided my first clue about some buried trauma in Brando’s past. I eavesdropped on a private conversation he was having with himself. ‘Marlon, listen to my voice,’ he said.

But even before the documentary was made, many people knew that Brando had had a difficult childhood. In those days, he went by the nickname “Bud,” and times were hard.

In his 1994 autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me, Brando wrote about the fraught relationship between his mother and father. That conflict colored his childhood in a quiet, sinister way.

Then there was Brando’s school life. He wrote in Songs My Mother Taught Me that he was “a bad student, chronic truant, and all-around incorrigible.” While he wasn't a bad kid, he developed an unsavory reputation.

Some of the events in Brando’s adult life were well-documented, too — often for all the wrong reasons — including one particularly unpleasant story that made headlines in May 1990. Brando’s adult son Christian took a gun and shot his sister Cheyenne’s boyfriend Dag Drollet, killing him.

And there was more. Christian claimed to the police that he and Drollet had fought, and the gun had gone off accidentally. But Drollet was found slumped on the sofa.

In any case, Brando acted quickly, possibly in an attempt to protect his children from the fallout. He sent Cheyenne away to France, where she soon checked into a mental hospital.

Tragically, Cheyenne took her own life just a few years after the horrible incident. At the age of 25, she was found dead at her mother’s house in 1995.

Each family member had their inner demons; the relationship between Brando, Christian, and Christian’s mother had been rough from the beginning. That's because Christian was born in 1958 to Brando and a woman who went by the name of Anna Kashfi.

In fact, Brando only found out about his bride’s true identity just days before they were married. From there, things got worse. When Christian was born, Brando allegedly named him after one of his male lovers.

After Christian’s arrest for murder, Brando made it clear to the world that he considered himself to have failed in the parenting department. It was a shocking sentiment to hear in such a public setting.

So it’s fair to say there were already a number of revelations about Brando’s personal life out in the open. But what about the secrets that he’d hidden away from the world? Riley set out to uncover them via the tapes.

The director knew he needed some help to make sense of the sprawling audio diary. In October of 2015, Riley and some other key players in making Listen to Me Marlon gave an interview to The Guardian newspaper about the movie.

Rebecca said, “I didn’t know the tapes existed. I’d see [my father] talk into the dictaphone sometimes, but he would stop as soon as he saw me and say, ‘Hi, darling, how are you?’”

Brando’s daughter went on to say, “Making these tapes, I think, was a way to self-analyze. My dad loved to talk to people, and he would call people in the middle of the night and talk about anything and everything, about life, nature, business, and inventions.”

And some of the actor's ideas blew away the documentary crew. John Battsek, the producer of Listen to Me Marlon, said of Brando’s parenting skills, “He says it himself: he wasn’t a good enough father...”

But Rebecca said of her father, “He could be moody and distant, but for the most part he was fun and funny. He had such a presence, even his silence was just impactful...”

Rebecca added, “I didn’t know my grandparents, and he rarely talked to me about them. But, towards the end, he expressed how your parents are only going to do as good as they can with the tools they have.

Miko Brando agreed with his sister. He said, “He never spoke bad about his parents to us or put them down. And he’d always say to me, ‘Miko, you learn by your mistakes.’”

Unsurprisingly, Battsek said there had been intense interest in the movie. He said, “This is the only film I’ve made where every week I would get a call saying that one of the 30 most famous actors in the world would like to see the film, how can that be arranged?”

According to the Brando children, the movie managed to do their father justice. Rebecca told The Guardian, “The first time I saw it, I had to walk out of the theater."

Both in the tapes and in the movie, Brando spoke about everything from his family to his acting ability. The icon pointed out that these two topics were essentially connected.

In fact, Brando’s father might have been the reason the actor honed his survival skills so well. At one point, Brando discussed the sort of parenting he’d been subjected to.

One incident on the tapes in particular indicates what life was like for the young actor. Brando remembered, “One time my old man was punching my mother. And I went up the stairs and I went in the room...”

And Brando might have drawn on the troubles with his father later to spur him forward as an actor. He said, “If I had a scene to play and I have to be angry..."

One revelation that came out in the tapes was that Brando generally disliked the industry of moviemaking. He believed that Hollywood was far too focused on making money, not art.

That’s right, and one director in particular was singled out for criticism by Brando. This was Francis Ford Coppola, one of his most famous collaborators who directed him during the troubled production of Apocalypse Now.

What’s more, it surfaced that Brando didn’t even like his own performances on many occasions. For instance, he talks very negatively on the tapes about his role in On the Waterfront, for which he won an Academy Award.

The documentary also delved into Brando’s activism. Throughout his career, the actor had voiced his support for Martin Luther King and had stood up for the rights of Native Americans.

In one of his tapes, the actor said, “This is life and death. This is really life. We’re talking about human relations. We’re talking about human rights, racial issues, and that’s why I care.”

Interestingly, Brando was absolutely fascinated with the island culture of Tahiti; indeed his third wife, Cheyenne’s mother, was Tahitian. To him, it seemed to be a sort of paradise.

Brando went on, “They had unmanaged faces. No manicured expressions. A kindness. That’s where I want to go. That’s where I want to be.” He added, “If you took some kid and you put him up in Tahiti, he’s a completely different kid.”

Naturally, the sad case of Christian Brando is mentioned in the film, too. At one point, Brando recollected the day he’d first met his son and the feelings it had brought up about his own father.

But of course, things did not work out how Brando had hoped. Later on in the film, his diary revealed a tragic quote: “Christian was burdened with emotional disorders and psychological disarray, the kind of trouble that I had in life."

However, there was an indication that Brando might have forgiven his father, to some extent. At one point he says, “When my father died, I imagined he was slump-shouldered, walking to the edge of eternity. He looked back and said, ‘I did the best I could.’”

Come July 2015, Riley told the website The Frame about why he thought Brando had made so many in-depth recordings about his life. He said, “It was self-meditation and self-medication as well.”

In any case, the challenges Brando went through were hard to overcome. Perhaps that’s what he meant in another quote from the tapes, “Acting is just making stuff up, but that’s okay. Life is a rehearsal. Life is an improvisation.”