The Fall of the House of Brando

MARLON BRANDO'S LIFE WAS FULL OF TRAGEDY, ACRIMONY, SQUANDERED TALENT AND SCANDAL. HIS DEATH AND ITS AFTERMATH HAVE BEEN NO DIFFERENT. FOR AMERICA'S GREATEST ACTOR PEACE WAS UNATTAINABLE, EVEN AT THE END

Let us begin with Marton Bando at home in bed approximately 24 hours before his death last year on July 1, 6:30 p.m., at the UCLA Medical Center. George Englund, a close friend and associate of the actor for five decades, had been summoned for what would be his last visit. Brando lay on his side with his back to the door. His robe was hiked up, exposing his vast behind. A Filipino woman named Angela Bortaza, the actor's housekeeper turned mistress (according to Brando's friends), knelt on the floor beside him, her hands in white surgical gloves. She was flipping wads of soiled tissues one after another into the nearby waste can. In the background the oxygen tank hissed. A gray stubble, a two-week growth, covered Brando's face. His eyes were vacant, lost at the end of a dark tunnel.

Englund and Brando began talking for what would be almost two hours, reminiscing about their shared past, their likes in popular music and women, as well as Brando's pain, a difficult subject the actor tried to Joke about by referring to his "flaming asshole."

He was "weak and in and out of awareness," Englund recalls, trying to describe the exchange. "My words weren't to stimulate conversation. They were a lullaby for my friend."

When Englund rose to leave around five p.m., Borlaza reassured him that Brando's health was on the upturn.

"I think things are improving," she said, walking him out to his car. "He has a better set of doctors now."

She added that although she wasn't a nurse, her younger sister Vie was, and Vie was on call to give Brando his meds whenever he needed them.

Late the next day, when the news from the hospital came, Englund was not surprised, but he was perplexed. How could Borlaza have thought Brando was improving? Who were these new doctors? Englund reminded himself that four months earlier, the last time he'd seen Brando, the actor had looked old and worn, but since then he had become a corpse. Why hadn't anyone alerted friends and family to what was happening?

In the first days after Brando's death, celebrations of his career were everywhere. Francis Ford Coppola made a simple, dignified statement, saying that since Brando would have hated the idea of people talking about his death, his only comment would be that he was sad. Al Pacino mused. "What will we do without Marlon in this world?" a sentiment echoed by Robert Duvall and James Caan. Last Tango in Paris director Bernardo Bertolucci declared that "in the very act of dying Marlon has become immortal."

But the news had a dark side, too. Gossip columnists and tabloids focused on the tragedies of Brando's life: the squandering of his talent, his son Christian's conviction for the murder of Dag Drollet (the boyfriend of Brando's daughter Cheyenne), Christian's imprisonment and Cheyenne's suicide. Speculation grew that the two-time oscar winner might have taken his own life. When UCLA issued a press release citing the cause of death as pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic lung disease, the next hot item was that Brando had died destitute--his estate owed $28 million in back taxes and debts, and Tetiaroa, the famous Brando hideaway near Tahiti, was going to be sold as the site of a future five-star hotel.

For veteran Brando watchers it was business as usual. Brando had lived--personally and professionally--what could charitably be called a messy life. Behind the headlines and brief snippets on Entertainment Tonight was a story as complex and sad as the man himself. In the aftermath of his death, brother turned against brother, loyal staffers became litigants and relations turned acrimonious between new friends and old. As the story unfolded, it seemed that everyone, old-timers and newcomers alike, was destined to pay a price for being part of Brando s world.

With the filing of the actor's will for probate on July 9, eight days after his death, more details began to emerge. Brando was far from destitute. According to the 15-page document, the estate was valued at $21.6 million, represented mainly by Brando's Mulholland Drive residence, worth $10 million, and his Tahitian atoll, valued at $8.6 million. Nine children were listed as equal beneficiaries, ranging from the actor's oldest son, Christian, 47, to the three children, ages 16, 13 and 11, he had sired with his ex-maid Maria Christina Ruiz. Excluded were Brando's adopted daughter, Petra Brando-Corval, and Tuki Brando, the son of Brando's late daughter, Cheyenne, and her lover Drollet. Small monthly stipends were granted to longtime assistant Alice Marchak and cook Blanche Hall. To guarantee the terms of the will and the living trust that went with it, a no-contest clause cut off any heir who challenged the stated distribution of assets.

It was a straightforward document with one important exception--one that Brando's friends couldn't have expected, yet given Brando's erratic behavior it was hardly surprising. On June 18, only 13 days before his death, Brando had signed a two-page codicil that changed the executors of his estate, substituting relative newcomers for the tried-and-true old guard. The new executors were film industry executive Mike Medavoy, an accountant named Larry Dressier and Avra Douglas, a woman in her mid-30s who had been a teenage friend of Brando's daughter Rebecca and her half-sister Cheyenne. The outgoing executors were Brando's assistant Marchak and JoAn Corrales, his longtime business manager.

The women had been designated executors two years earlier when the will was originally drawn up on August 28, 2002. Why had there been a change? Marchak (continued on page 145)Brando(continued from page 102) was believed to be a trusted figure in Brando's life; she came to work for him in the 1950s, having been brought over from the Paramount Studios secretarial pool. Over the years she had cared for his suicidal girlfriends, become Christian's legal guardian, overseen Brando's Pennebaker Inc. film production company, protected his privacy and just generally taken care of whatever had to be taken care of. She worked for Brando full-time until the mid-1980s, after which she remained involved in all aspects of his life.

Corrales too had a long history with Brando. They met 43 years earlier when Corrales was a friend to Brando's former wife Anna Kashfi. Like Marchak, she had served as surrogate mother to troubled Christian, first when he ran away from home at the age of 15, then after his release from prison in 1996, when he moved to Kalama, Washington and she served as his sponsor with the local parole board. In 1999 Brando asked her to become his business manager, and from her farm in rural Washington she straightened out the actor's books, got him tax refunds and gathered millions in uncollected residuals and fees when Brando became ill and couldn't work.

Now Marchak and Corrales had been replaced, much to their surprise and anger. Dressier, it turned out, was Medavoy's brother-in-law and had been to Brando's house only once, according to Corrales. Douglas, the youngest executor, had fallen out of favor with Brando at the end of 2002 when she and her husband, actor and filmmaker Joseph Brutsman, were editing an acting video, Lying for a Living, that Brando had begun working on in 2001 with British director Tony Kaye.

Medavoy, chairman of Phoenix Pictures, was the most high profile of the executors. He had started out in the Universal mail room and had been an agent, a production executive at United Artists, a co-founder of Orion Pictures and chairman at TriStar. Everywhere in the world, he boasted, "I can turn on the television and see a film being broadcast that I had some hand in getting made." Medavoy had been involved in the making of such quality films as Amadeus, Platoon, The Silence of the Lambs and Legends of the Fall. His annual Golden Globes party was one of the hottest tickets in town, and if this weren't enough to guarantee his social and professional standing he also had numerous connections to such industry and community organizations as the Sundance Institute, the Israel Film Festival, the Anti-Defamation League, his alma mater UCLA and even the Los Angeles Board of Parks and Recreations.

Medavoy met Brando at a 1996 political fund-raiser Medavoy had organized. Brando needed to rehabilitate himself after accusing Jewish Hollywood moguls of insensitivity to blacks and other minorities on Larry King Live, after which he made a tearful apology to directors of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Medavoy then called to invite him to his fundraiser--which, "as luck would have it, was a fund-raiser for Israel," says Caroline Barrett, Brando's assistant at the time, who went with him. Ordinarily Brando would have sneered at the event, but he forced himself to go so he "could be seen to be 'on the right side,'" according to Barrett.

The relationship of the two men as it evolved afterward was casual. "Marlon would be reading Variety," explains Barrett, "and he'd call Medavoy to talk about grosses. Marlon figured he was going to use Medavoy to capitalize on his contacts."

For Marchak, Corrales and Philip Rhodes (Brando's oldest crony and longtime makeup man), the codicil and the changes it represented were alarming, and the more they thought about them, the angrier they became. In the mid-1980s Marchak had to strong-arm Brando into making his first will; Corrales had to lean on him to do the revised version in August 2002. Now the old guard found it hard to believe that Brando, ill and half out of it, had made such major changes at the last minute, removing those who had been with him the longest. They saw a pattern. Corrales, accountant Linda Pedula, lawyer Leon Bennett, housekeeper Alicia Mule, assistant Richard Thomas and personal assistant Barrett had all stopped working for Brando in the six months leading up to his death, while Toni Petrone's secretarial duties had been cut by half. Most claim to have been eased out by housemaid Borlaza, who had gradually taken a pivotal role in managing the ailing actor's daily life.

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If paranoia, anger, laziness and the need to manipulate were the source of the tragedy that was Marlon Brando, then the die was cast early in his childhood, when he decided he was not loved. His father, Marlon Sr., was tough, gruff and big--a man's man. His mother, Dorothy, or Dodie, was his father's opposite--poetic, a lover of nature and an accomplished actress who would channel her thwarted ambitions through her son. Both parents were alcoholics. In outsize Freudian terms, Dodie was the dominant figure in Brando's life: His inability to trust women and his tendencies to destroy the things he loved and turn on the people who cared about him most all had their roots in the paradox of his mother as both nurturer and lost drunk.

A Streetcar Named Desire eventually propelled Brando to stardom in 1947. With it came not only the perks of money and women but the habit of surrounding himself with friends who were emotional orphans (and whom he could draw into his web).

His talent, of course, was staggering, and he rewrote the rules of motion-picture acting. On the Waterfront brought him his first Oscar, in 1955, but at that point he no longer cared. By the start of the 1960s, after marrying pregnant Anna Kashfi and walking out on her six months later, he was nearly out of control and blaming others. For his directorial debut, One-Eyed Jacks, he shot more than a million feet of film, six times the norm. During Mutiny on the Bounty, his feuds with co-star Richard Harris and director Carol Reed held up production and nearly bankrupted MGM.

By the early 1970s it seemed he was finished, all but unemployable until The Godfather, which won him his second Academy Award for best actor. The next year he received another Oscar nomination and great critical acclaim for his tortured performance in Last Tango in Paris.

Despite his success, Brando practically exiled himself to Tahiti, where instead of making movies he focused on his atoll, using his own hands to drive the huge Caterpillar tractor he'd brought in to bulldoze the island's airstrip and piloting his private LST landing craft. Solar power, a lobster farm and even a preserve for chimpanzees all fascinated him. Between 1972 and 1978, at a time when he could have banked millions after the success of The Godfather and Last Tango, he took only one film project, The Missouri Breaks with director Arthur Penn.

In March 1983 he tried to get organized by hiring a new assistant, Tom Papke, a middle-aged techie with a background in film and electronics. Brando talked about security, pointing to an outbuilding of his house on Mulholland Drive; its walls were made of one-foot-thick steel-reinforced concrete, with no windows and heavy plate-steel doors. It was nicknamed the Bunker. He explained that he had arranged for a helicopter service to be on call at a moment's notice. In the event of a disaster, an earthquake or a riot, the helicopter was to pick up his assistant Pat Quinn, sister Jocelyn, son Christian, friends Philip and Marie Rhodes and anyone else Brando chose to add to the list and deliver them to Mulholland so they could be safe in the Bunker.

Brando also had a penchant for pushing real estate boundaries. He had more than doubled the size of his Mulholland house, with a separate building that became the secretaries' office, then another building, then the conversion of a carport into a den (where Drollet was shot), and then an addition to the kitchen. With the exception of the last, each had been put up without a permit. The office had even been built on land belonging to the county of Los Angeles. Brando had been warned but was not deterred: Nobody was going to file a complaint against a star, so he'd just say, "Fuck 'em."

The fortifications he requested at 12900 Mulholland Drive had proceeded in stages and included a several-thousand-pound steel gate at the foot of the driveway, as well as 300 bamboo trees planted along the property's perimeter and laced with concertina wire that had been sprayed green, Vietnam camo--style. A Richard Nixon--worthy taping system was hooked up to all the telephone extensions, to record calls and eavesdrop on conversations anywhere inside the house.

"These phone calls of his," says Rhodes. "He'd always say, 'How's sex with your wife? You get anything on the side?' He had all these people talking about their sex lives, and it was all recorded."

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Christian's imprisonment in 1990 and Cheyenne's suicide on Easter Day 1995 accelerated Brando's emotional tailspin, and with the deterioration of his health beginning in 2000, his usual erratic behavior seemed to escalate, possibly because he feared he was dying. Rather than settle a 2002 lawsuit with Ruiz, the ex-maid who had sued him for palimony and child support, he dug in his heels and went to court. There was also a lawsuit filed over Brando's claim that Barrett, his former assistant, owed him money he had given her; it became another exercise in "defending my rights" and "holding the line." Along with the inflexibility, he was wildly spending money in manic-depressive swings. The Lying for a Living video soaked up $500,000; another $400,000 went to designing and patenting a new, improved type of conga drum that he was so high on he rewarded the designer with a $50,000 tip. Payroll records indicate that from 1995 through 2002 Avra Douglas and her husband were paid $275,291, in part for their part-time editing and the work Douglas did as Brando's on-location assistant for movies including The Score. That 2001 film proved to be Brando's last.

In the following years his earnings had dipped to less than $1 million a year, mainly from residuals. Meanwhile there was a $1.5 million mortgage on the Mulholland house, plus the creditors in Tahiti and daily expenses.

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To the old guard the problems really began when Borlaza took over for Ruiz as Brando's housekeeper in 1994. At the height of Borlaza's influence, she and her sister, husband and son were being paid around $150,000 a year in addition to their housing expenses and "God knows how much on the credit card," says Corrales. Vie, Borlaza's sister, received a $1,000 bonus as a new employee even though she'd been working for Brando for more than a year.

Corrales had started commuting from Washington after Brando's pulmonary fibrosis diagnosis in April 2001. On November 14, 2003, during one of Corrales's trips from Kalama, Borlaza accosted her, demanding she put her husband, Nicolas Magaling, on salary. The year before, Corrales had agreed to put both Vie and Borlaza's 16-year-old son, Dean, on the books, but she now refused. Corrales feared an INS investigation, and listing Magaling as a cook when he wasn't working for Brando would be illegal and too risky.

After the turndown Borlaza went to Brando, who dictated a letter to the INS verifying that Magaling was employed as his cook. Though frustrated, Corrales was not surprised. Borlaza's maneuverings had been obvious for the past year, ever since, according to Brando's friends, she started sharing the actor's bed. In August 2003 Corrales had felt compelled to communicate with David Seeley, Brando's lawyer. "I think we will have some real issues in the future over her power and Marlon's lack of control, whether he thinks he does or not," she told him.

Lack of control was one way to look at it. Borlaza's new ranch-style bungalow in the San Fernando Valley, which Brando was paying for, was less than a 40-minute drive away, but Borlaza moved her two children and sister into the Mulholland house, along with a dog and a cat. The office had been turned into a sleeping area for Borlaza's kids and their animals, and her son Dean was driving Brando's Lexus, which he'd managed to get into a $3,000 fender bender. The monthly food bills were running from $3,500 to $4,000.

"Marlon bought her the house, I think, probably for the husband to live in," says Brando pal Rhodes, "because by then Marlon was having an affair with Angela, as he always had affairs with his help."

Corrales wrote to Seeley in November 2003: "The house is a pigpen--windows dirty, no toilet paper half the time. One of the crew and I went around the house picking up dead rats." Brando, she said, "stays in his room, oblivious to life in the outside world other than his television."

Brando was not getting any exercise. Corrales noticed that all his pills were being kept in the kitchen except for a large bottle of something called Norco on his bedside table. The drug, she soon found out, was a habit-forming narcotic analgesic. Symptoms of overdosing on Norco may include bleeding, slow breathing, weakness, confusion and even coma. The drug is contraindicated for anyone with kidney or liver disease. Corrales determined from checking credit card receipts that Brando was obtaining the narcotic from two different pharmacies, sometimes filling two prescriptions on the same day.

During this time, Brando's battle with pulmonary fibrosis left him bedridden, except to go to the bathroom. He stayed on oxygen full-time, and he slept mostly during daylight hours. Outside his window workmen Corrales had brought from Kalama were busy building a new deck and wheelchair ramp everyone knew he'd never use. One afternoon Brando told Corrales he wanted a garden planted in the spring. He wanted sunflowers.

In his more rational moments Brando could be touching, open and unguarded. In September 2003 he sent Corrales flowers. The card, which referred to his considerable weight loss of the previous year, read, "From a short ex--fat person who holds you in great esteem. Every flower is a copy of your soul." Corrales faxed him back, "It took some time for my tears to dry."

Corrales also worried that Brando felt trapped by Borlaza. He had called Corrales long-distance in November 2002, instructing her, "Please, JoAn, I want you to write this down: 'Emotional involvement with Angela getting out of hand. Marlon wants out. Angela has too much power.'"

Brando told Corrales on one of her visits, "JoAn, look around and tell me what you see."

"I see books, music, family pictures, things that have made up your life for as long as I've known you," she said.

"Then why did I wind up with someone who knows only one subject--salary?" he said with a sigh. "Angela has more moves than a shit-house rat."

In mid-December 2003 Corrales, plagued by bronchitis, cut her L.A. visit short. By now she knew Brando was over the edge and in all probability doomed. She wasn't the only one. Bruce Davis, one of the Kalama workmen, wrote Corrales a note saying of Brando, "He was doing a lot of groaning and heavy breathing and was not coherent. I didn't think I would see him again, but Angela said he was fine and that there was nothing wrong with him."

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That Christmas Tarita Teriipaia, Brando's Tahitian common-law wife and Cheyenne's mother, decided to fly in from French Polynesia. Brando had met Teriipaia while filming Mutiny on the Bounty in the early 1960s. Borlaza called Corrales to warn her that Teriipaia would probably be spending lots of money on her usual shopping and on some fairly heavy dental work, too.

The visit did not go well. On January 14 Brando called Corrales, his tone now almost businesslike. "There's a big mess down here," he said. "The girls are going crazy." No one involved in that event will say what happened during the visit, but Corrales found herself in the middle of Brando's marital mayhem. She called David Seeley for instructions. Brando's lawyer advised her to lie low and let the storm pass.

Corrales heard from Brando again on January 19, when he left what Corrales called "an insane message" on her voice mail that she was to make every available effort to show he was not a California resident. She was to buy a generator for his electricity; he would use only bottled water, not the city supply; he would lease out the Mulholland house, possibly to Medavoy; all services to Mulholland were to be stopped; and he would no longer use credit cards in the state.

The idea itself wasn't new; he had already talked about saving on California income tax. But this was pure Howard Hughes. More worried than ever before, Corrales wrote Seeley later that day, "In reviewing the message, I have to believe Marlon is not diinking rationally."

On January 28 Borlaza told Linda Pedula, Brando's accountant, to pay certain bills. This was a first. Corrales wrote in her log, "Angela trying to place herself in situation where she controls funds, the banking, has control of the books."

Corrales wanted to discuss this with Brando and left messages. After several days, he left her a voice mail. "I don't know what to say, but everything has turned brown here," he said. His voice was slurred, and from past experience Corrales knew that "brown," as Brando used it, meant "shit." She called him back. Nothing.

On February 10 she again faxed Seeley. She brought up Brando's euphoria, depression, despair and sexual and financial promiscuity. She accused Seeley, whom she called "the starstruck attorney," of refusing to intervene on Brando's behalf with Borlaza. The lawyer made no reply.

Finally, on February 25, Corrales acknowledged the obvious: She'd run into a wall. She sat down and wrote Brando a 10-page letter recapitulating their long, involved history, hoping against hope that it would reach him. She sent copies to Seeley and Medavoy, too. Borlaza, she maintained, had taken over his life.

"My mother used to say that when a frog is in the middle of a mud puddle, he doesn't know there is dry land all around him. That is where you are and have been for a long time," Corrales wrote. "I wanted so much for you as my friend, and I am so sad at the wedges that have been placed between us for material and financial gain. You should be ashamed of yourself. I don't think you or Angela have any idea of the repercussions of what you have done."

Brando did not respond. Instead Corrales received a directive from Larry Dressler, the new accountant, on March 18, instructing her to return all records belonging to the actor. Two weeks later she was informed that she was no longer to use Brando's credit card. Corrales had been fired.

The change in status was shocking. Only a year before, Brando had called Corrales into his room and talked about his lost daughter. He had looked up at her from his bed with tears in his eyes. "It'll be all right, won't it?" he asked in a trembling, little boy's voice. "See, I can say her name now."

He pointed to Cheyenne's picture, a small framed snapshot of her at 12 or 13 on the beach at Tetiaroa. Corrales realized he'd moved the picture from across the room to his bedside table so he could see it at eye level while lying down. He broke completely and sobbed. After a moment he dried his face with some tissue and motioned her to stay.

"There was a time I couldn't," he said, pausing and trying to smile, "say her name. But promise me you'll always take care of my son. You've been so good to Christian always."

Brando had sent Christian a note, an extraordinary tough-tender letter that said, in effect, "Sober up or you're going to die. I love you, my son, please know that." He signed off with the handwritten apology, "Excuse the typing, can't write so well. All my love, Pop."

The handwriting was indeed impossible--a series of squiggly, spidery, spastic letters that were all but indecipherable. There were a dozen reasons Brando blamed himself for what had happened, and all of them were legitimate.

He then told Corrales what to do after he died, giving her directives about his death that he would repeat before their break at the end of February:

(1) Seal the bedroom with a padlock. No one is to enter. "They will steal the buttons off my shirt," Brando said.

(2) Regarding Miko, Brando's second-oldest son: "He wants to be my first-born. It will never happen; we have nothing in common. Christian is my firstborn. Make sure he knows how much I loved him."

(3) "After a couple of weeks, take Christian into my room. I have something for him. It will be in the top left-hand drawer in the bathroom."

(4) "Have everyone leave the premises except for someone to feed the dogs. Have the gardeners take care of the yard."

(5) "What happens to my house?" Brando asked. Corrales said it would be sold. Brando said, "Please treat her gently. I have been here almost 50 years."

(6) "Do not let anyone see me after I die. I want everyone to remember me as I was the last time they saw me or talked to me. Promise me. Promise me."

(7) "Do not allow any kind of services, especially not any memorials."

(8) "I wish I could be sitting under a coconut palm in a very special place on the island when I die. If not...send my ashes to Tarita."

What had happened in the following months? At first Corrales focused on Borlaza. Corrales claims to have documents showing two Social Security numbers and at least three names for her: Angela Borlaza, Angela Magaling and Evelyn Magaling. But Brando was the one at fault, really. He was dying, and his life was unraveling. His last days were as tortured as his earlier ones, and no one could help.

•

Philip Rhodes, ordinarily a most mild-mannered man, began to complain when his old friend's body was put on display at a local Sherman Oaks funeral home days after his death.

"It was appalling," Rhodes says. "That was the last thing Marlon would have wanted, to be put on display like that."

"Like that" meant an open casket stuffed with the 300-pound Brando, who was wrapped in a caftan topped off with his favorite vermilion scarf, his face smeared with rouge and whatever else undertakers use to prettify the dead. On principle Rhodes refused to go to the viewing. Brando's secretary, Toni Petrone, attended and reported to the others that members of the family were there, as well as Brando's ex-mistress Yachiyo Tsubaki, a wealthy heiress who had flown in from Tokyo with her brother. Brando's former agent Jay Kanter was there, along with Teriipaia. New executors Medavoy and Dressler were present too, as was Borlaza, who brought her children, sisters and friends and planted herself at the head of the casket as if she were Brando's grieving widow.

Rhodes says he called Brando's sister Jocelyn and mentioned he'd heard that Borlaza's sister Vie had been giving Brando painkillers, supposedly by injection. Whether Vie was fully licensed as a registered nurse he wasn't sure.

"I told her I was afraid something had been done to Marlon. She said, 'Oh no, I've been talking a lot to Angela, and her sister is an accredited nurse.' I wasn't happy with that," says Rhodes. "Marlon was a very, very tough guy, and it seemed as though he went too quickly. I'd known he was taking a painkiller that affected his liver, and about a week before he died they found a tremendous growth. Why hadn't it been found earlier? If they had operated, maybe he'd be alive today."

Brando's body was cremated, precluding an autopsy. Shortly thereafter his estate was hit with a flood of lawsuits. Brando had never been careful with money and was often duplicitous with friends. Claims filed against his estate, and those about to be filed, were significant: $460,000 from Air Moorea for unpaid business costs; $408,079.85 from the Creative Artists Agency for unpaid commissions and interest; a claim for a building lot on Tetiaroa that Brando had promised his L.A.-based architect, Bernard Judge; and another claim from ex-mistress Tsubaki for the return of two paintings she had made. Petrone filed for reimbursement for an art deco ring she had lost down the drain at the Mulholland house while washing vegetables.

Pending claims were bigger, specifically those of Kanter and Marchak, who each demanded the return of waterside bungalows in Bora Bora that Brando had given them as presents but failed to deed over. Marchak's lawyers also wanted the cash value of the Newport Beach residence Brando had contributed to as part of a retirement package in 1984; he then "borrowed" the house to secure a loan and eventually sold the property without giving her the proceeds as promised. Her claim, based on the loss of both properties, totaled $1,065,000.

So many lawsuits were filed by Brando's former friends and associates that even veteran Brando watchers were amazed. Was Brando such a bad friend that he left behind a sea of ill will? Were his old friends not really friends at all but gold diggers looking to cash in on the actor's wealth and fame? Probably no suit was more surprising than the one filed by Corrales. She made a claim for $500,000 in unpaid commissions for work she had agented while serving as Brando's business manager. Then, surprisingly, the woman who had spent 43 years tending to Brando's needs, watching over his son and crying with him at his bedside, also asked for an additional $3 million for what her lawyer would tell the media was sexual harassment. Corrales's affection during Brando's life had turned to disappointment at being removed as an executor of the estate. In the end that disappointment transformed into rage and litigation. "In the end one's love and devotion and hard work were replaced by abandonment and broken promises, however much you cared for the man," she complained bitterly. "If he were alive today, I would prefer to sue him in person."

In a further complication, lawyers for Ruiz, mother of Brando's three youngest children, had gotten a favorable court ruling allowing her to file for additional monies without violating the will's no-contest clause. The court decision meant other heirs could do the same.

For the old guard there was one big question: How competent was Brando when he signed the codicil that changed his executors? For months he had been isolated--Marchak, for example, had called twice in the two days preceding Brando's death, and Borlaza had put her off. Like almost everyone who inquired, Marchak got the line "Mr. Brando, he sleeping" or "Mr. Brando, he in the bathroom." How could anyone prove incompetence when no one had been to his home, when most of the longtime staffers had been fired?

Brando's new inner circle wasn't talking, at least not for the purposes of this article. Medavoy, Dressler, Douglas and Borlaza endured the old guard's animosity in stony silence.

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In early July Brando's sister Jocelyn addressed the question of a memorial by telling Foxnews.com columnist Roger Friedman that there would be "no service of any kind."

In fact, three or four ceremonies were held. Brando's son Miko, 44, appeared to have planned one while elder brother Christian, long Miko's rival, was absent. Miko had long been chummy with Borlaza, so his new status seemed to fit. Toward the end of September a crowd of nearly 200 gathered at the Medavoys' colonial-style mansion, better known for its Golden Globes parties than for memorials.

The night of the ceremony the guest list was star-studded: Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, Jack Nicholson, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Robert De Niro and Barbra Streisand. Even Michael Jackson was there. Former agent Kanter told the media it was "really quite small, and a lot of Brando's family were there." There was family--sister Jocelyn and several nieces and nephews--but the actor's staffers and friends who had been with him for decades were nowhere to be seen. Englund and Marchak boycotted the event. (Marchak was offended when told she couldn't bring anyone with her.) Corrales, Barrett, Rhodes and his wife, Marie (who had worked as Brando's stand-in), had not been invited, nor had friends and staffers Pat Quinn, Tom Papke and Alex du Prel.

Aside from Nicholson and Penn, and to a lesser extent Depp, few of the celebrity cast had actually had much contact with Brando. No less surprising, Borlaza was one of the evening's featured speakers. Speaking slowly with a pronounced accent, she told of how, 10 years before, "Maarrlon" had welcomed her as a friend, not an employee. "My darkness, it make no difference," she said. He hired her, sent her to language school, trained her on the computer--so what else could she have done, she asked, but be there when he needed her? "There are people who say they knew Marlon for 40 years. It not matter; you can know Marlon in an instant."

She continued, giving credit to her sister for all the good work she'd done, and at the end she called Brando a great man. A big round of applause followed, which was the cue for Miko to rise. He too spoke on the theme of greatness.

"My father," he said, "was a very simple man. People don't realize that. He was a great father, too. He had 11 children. I have all these stepsiblings, and we all get along."

That was not really true. The Brando kids had never gotten along. But Miko was actually saying something else: that he was now the family spokesman. Older brother Christian, who had come down from Washington, sat on the sideline, brooding next to Nicholson and nursing a bottle of Jack Daniel's.

"The whole thing sucked. Miko was doing his bullshit, walking around like the fucking Godfather," Christian said later. "He's a complete asshole. I went up to him afterward and said, 'When you gonna find out whose dick you really came out of?'"

This was not a fresh insult. Christian and others have long believed Miko wasn't Brando's son at all. Brando met Miko's mother, Movita Castenada, just before filming Viva Zapata! in 1951. The old guard basically maintains that Castenada had used the infant Miko to trap Brando into marrying her. The marriage, annulled in 1968, took place in Mexico in 1960, and even that was suspect because at the time Castenada appeared to be married to Irish boxer Jack Doyle. According to Marchak, Brando's psychiatrist urged him not to confront Miko with the truth of his birth until he was a teenager. Yet Miko was included in Brando's will, and the two had an ongoing relationship.

"Marlon felt sorry for the kids," says Rhodes, "and he bought a house for them all to live in. Later he told Miko, 'You must get it out of your mind; you are not my son.' He never adopted him, either, I don't think."

Adds Marchak, "Marlon didn't like Miko. He didn't trust him, because when he was a child he'd come up to the house and, as Marlon saw it, spy for his mother. He wasn't a likable child. He was sneaky, and Marlon always warned me about him. 'Miko always sees dollar signs. That's his thing.'"

In his 20s Miko was known to drive around L.A. with a vanity license plate that read Producr. He would show up at film premieres, where he could mix with the stars and pose for photos, and in 1978, while working as a production assistant on the Korean set of Inchon, he would tell journalists his father would be arriving and he'd be happy to arrange interviews. In the 1980s Quincy Jones, a friend of Brando's, got Miko a job working as a security guard for Michael Jackson. Miko quickly made himself the intermediary between the pop singer and Brando, who, oddly enough, wound up giving Jackson acting lessons.

Despite this job, Miko felt free to tap his father's assets. In December 2002 Miko charged a $115,000 Porsche turbo to his father and instructed the leasing company to send the contract to Borlaza, who forwarded it to Corrales for payment. When Corrales killed it outright, Miko threw a fit. He also asked for $4,807.17 to cover a three-day car trip to Carmel and San Francisco with his kids, and Corrales recalls receiving another demand for $950 he claimed to have spent on groceries for the family's Thanksgiving meal.

Miko's new role as family spokesman was codified at the time of the September memorial when the Los Angeles Times ran the story "Behind the Scenes of Brando's Life: His son tells of a doting, eccentric father...," the first of several Brando articles by Times staffer Robert Welkos.

"The last time my father left his house to go anywhere, to spend any kind of time, it was with Michael Jackson at Neverland Ranch," Miko was quoted at his most nostalgic. "He loved it. My father had a 24-hour chef, 24-hour security, 24-hour help, a 24-hour kitchen, 24-hour maid service. Just carte blanche."

On the question of Tetiaroa's fate, Miko grew more businesslike. "I think there's talk about developing half of it," he said, "because at the end, my father wanted to take it over and develop it as a resort. He never got around to it, so you know, if it comes up that's an option we have. But we're keeping our business options open."

Brando's old friends say the actor had never wanted to develop or sell the atoll. But buried in the article was a more revelatory announcement: The estate was obtaining trademarks on Brando's name and likeness.

"The last thing I'm going to do is something that cheapens Marlon's image," Medavoy said in a follow-up article dated October 15. "You want some sort of blanket protection against anyone doing something that basically goes out and steals his image and puts it on a napkin. This way you can protect against it."

"If Marlon were alive and well, he'd kill them," Rhodes says, chuckling that he'd been misrepresented in the Times article.

It is possible that Brando may have had a deathbed conversion brought on by concern over his kids' shaky financial future. The branding of dead celebrities is big box office. Given the enthusiasm of Brando fans the world over, marketing Brando could generate $10 million to $15 million a year. Among the ideas being contemplated: Brando sunglasses and a Brando line of clothing.

For the Brando kids--who so far had raised no objection to the branding of their famous fadier's name, whether for bottle openers, key chains, credit cards or temporary tattoos--the arrangement was worth a potential $1.25 million annually for each of them.

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As if the estate squabble weren't enough, the existing members of Brando's family continue to struggle with the legacy of being a Brando. Documents seized from the home of Michael Jackson's personal assistant show that Miko had received $20,000, reportedly as part of a plot to kidnap the 12-year-old boy accusing Jackson of sexual molestation. Prosecutor Ron Zonen said Miko was not considered part of the conspiracy after all but would likely be called to testify at Jackson's trial.

Christian had even bigger problems. Attorneys in the Robert Blake trial in L.A. presented evidence implicating Christian in the killing of Blake's wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley. Christian reputedly acknowledged having an affair with the woman, followed by a bitter falling-out, but denied making a death threat. Christian was eventually cleared, but the Blake experience, coupled with the loss of his father, sent him into a tailspin. He was thinking heavily and had complicated matters by suddenly marrying Deborah Presley, 48, in Las Vegas. Presley claimed to be an illegitimate daughter of Elvis Presley, but a Memphis judge ruled in 1988 that her claim had no merit.

Medavoy offered Christian a construction job on the set of his new film, a remake of All the King's Men, starring Sean Penn, but Christian declined, apprehensive that he would have to deal with "too many people" and wouldn't be able to take the pressure. The estate then loaned him money, reportedly several thousand dollars a month over several months, money Christian and his new wife went through in a flash. In February 2005 Christian found himself hauled into court for spousal abuse, and his wife, who remained with Christian, went back to Medavoy to ask the estate to pay for her husband's rehab.

"Grow up," the producer reportedly told her. "You're not Jesus Christ. He's got to take care of himself. I'm doing exactly what Marlon would do--nothing!"

Medavoy later modified this a bit, claiming he would help only after Christian made the first move to help himself, but Brando's old friends were nevertheless appalled. For all their problems and inability to communicate, Brando had never abandoned his son, whether he was hocking his home to pay for Christian's legal defense or telling Corrales and banker Diane McCallum to look after him. "There are two things Christian must always have--a roof over his head and health insurance," Brando once said. "He can't take care of himself."

Now the estate was telling Christian to do just that, even as the lawyers were jetting back and forth to Tahiti and the accountants were billing at their customary $300 an hour. When Christian, a welder by profession, first came down from Washington after his father's death, he went to the Mulholland Drive house to retrieve his tools. An armed guard refused him entry, and he was on the street, without a real home.

Meanwhile, fresh controversies erupted. In early 2005 Tarita Teriipaia published her memoirs in France. In them she says Brando was to blame for the death of their daughter, Cheyenne. The book quotes Cheyenne on what she had told me when I wrote Brando: The Biography, published in 1994. Cheyenne said her father massaged her from the age of seven onward, "as if he wanted me to pretend we were making love."

Things were a mess. Dressier surveyed the situation and told The New York Times that he and the other executors were finding the aftermath of Brando's death uphill-going.

"He didn't live with order in his life," said Dressler of Brando, with the most magnificent if unintended irony. "He liked to leave things where they lay."

By late February 2005 the executors had moved forward with the sale of the estate's two principal assets, the Mulholland house and Tetiaroa. For Mulholland, the JN Trust--presumably neighbor Jack Nicholson--was offering $5 million even though the property had been valued at probate at twice that amount. For Tetiaroa, Tahiti Beachcomber SA, proprietor of several luxury resorts in French Polynesia, was offering $2 million even though Brando had rejected $5 million plus $1 million yearly in hotel royalties from the same outfit in March 2003. Neither property was being put on the open market, so it was hard to determine the apparent advantages of these bird-in-the-hand offers. Members of the old guard consulted lawyers. And on behalf of Teriipaia, Bernard Judge, Brando's master planner for the island, tried to reach out to environmentalists "to save" the pristine atoll from development.

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As the controversy about Brando's life and choices persists, those close to him have returned to their daily routines, struggling with their ambivalence as to who exactly the great actor was. Tom Papke, the young tech whiz who saw the older man as a friend, recalls one specific moment with Brando that bordered on magic. It happened in the 1990s after Christian's imprisonment and before Cheyenne's suicide. Papke was standing outside the house, watching lightning crack over the valley below Mulholland Drive. Before he knew it Brando was standing next to him, barefoot and dressed only in a kimono, with the wind blowing through his hair.

"I love the wind! When I die, I'm going to be part of it!" he shouted above the storm.

Christian's imprisonment and Cheyenne's suicide accelerated Brando's emotional tailspin.

Brando was the one at fault, really. He was dying, and his life was unraveling. His last days were as tortured as his earlier ones, and no one could help.