WWW – Like everything thing else about him, Marlon Brando’s romantic life was large – and so complicated even he had trouble keeping track of his lovers and their offspring.
In the 1950s, when his smoldering sex appeal lit up the big screen, it seemed he could have any woman he wanted.
Marilyn Monroe is said to have told him after their lovemaking, “I don’t know if I do it right.”
His 12-year on-and-off relationship with actress Rita Moreno was so traumatic for her that when it ended for good in 1961, Moreno overdosed on sleeping pills.
Among his many conquests were actresses Pier Angeli, Shelley Winters, Nancy Qwan and Katy Jurado.
During his affair with Moreno, Brando was married for two years to his first wife, Welsh actress Anna Kashfi. That ended in 1959, but produced his troubled son, Christian Devi Brando.
Within a year, he was married again after striking up an affair with Mexican actress Movita Castenada on the set of “Viva Zapata!”
A veteran of romances with Clark Gable and Errol Flynn, Castenada initially turned down Brando’s marriage proposal – even throwing his ring back at him when he knocked on her door and threatening to call the police.
Nevertheless, they had a secret wedding on June 4, 1960, and by October she gave birth to son Miko, who later became a security guard for Michael Jackson. At the time, Brando was 36 and Castenada was 43.
A couple of years later Brando fell for Tarita Teriipia, the 19-year-old Polynesian beauty who played Miamiti in 1962’s “Mutiny on the Bounty,” which starred Brando.
Brando reportedly needed six months to seduce her – because, it’s said, she thought he was a bad man.
“While he had several other girls servicing him in what was basically a turnstile arrangement, he would never ‘go to bed’ with her,” Brando’s friend Nick Rutgers told Peter Manso, author of the definitive “Brando: A Biography.”
Teriipia finally agreed to marry him in 1962 and eventually gave birth to Rebecca, Simon and Cheyenne.
Even Brando’s daughter accused him of lecherous behavior. Manso, who interviewed Cheyenne extensively, said she alleged that her father “abused her physically and sexually.”
“Do I believe it?” Manso said. “I sit on the fence.”
Brando’s love life was so complicated that in 1967, he fathered actor Stephen Blackehart, whose spokesman said he didn’t know who the mother is.
Through the 1970s, Brando romanced a half dozen women, including Yachio Tsubaki, the daughter of a Zen master.
In 1988 he began a 14-year affair with his Guatemalan maid, Maria Cristina Ruiz, who bore him three children – Ninna, Miles and Timothy.
Although Brando bought Ruiz a $450,000 home and a Mercedes, she filed a $100 million palimony lawsuit against him in 2002. The suit was settled.
Brando also adopted Petra Barrett Brando, born in 1970, the daughter of his former assistant, Caroline Barrett, and novelist James Clavell.
While most profiles credit him with nine children, biographer Manso believes Brando may have left as many as 15 children. Manso also claims Brando paid for numerous abortions.
As if he didn’t have enough women in his life, Brando was quoted in the Gary Carey biography “Marlon Brando, the Only Contender,” as saying: “Like a large number of men, I too have had homosexual experiences and am not ashamed.”