The book by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, is based on conversations with sources and veteran gossip journalists who had known James before his tragic death in a 1955 car crash at 24-years-old. It reveals that Marlon had so much control over his young lover that he even made James watch him have sex with strangers just to mess with his head and his heart.
James was apparently so in love with the Streetcar Named Desire star that he would allow himself to be burned with cigarettes, just for Marlon’s pleasure. Upon seeing the scars on James chest, a friend said “I was practically ready to call the police on the brutal son-of-a-b*tch until Jimmy told me that he’d asked Marlon to do that to him. For the first time in my life I came to realize what a masochist Jimmy was — or was becoming.”
According to a another pal, “James talked frequently about Marlon and how frustrated he was in the relationship. I got the impression that Jimmy was engaged in a cat-and-mouse affair with Marlon, with Marlon being the cat, of course. Marlon seemed to be toying with Jimmy for his own amusement. I think Brando was sadistically using Jimmy, who followed him around like a lovesick puppy with his tongue wagging.”
In his memoir “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” Marlon denied that any such relationship ever happened and that James was “never a friend of mine.” Not only that, he said that young star “had an ‘ideé fixe about me” but nothing more.
HollywoodLifers, are you shocked by these claims about two of Hollywood’s most legendary actors?