Famous narcissists - Marlon Brando
A look at the lives of well know people who show signs of being narcissistic (lack of empathy, a grandiose self-image, selfishness etc) can teach us a lot. We can see the pattern of damaging behaviour that narcissism produces and we can start to understand how and why it develops.
The iconic actor Marlon Brando was an arrogant, self-absorbed womaniser with a voracious appetite for food and sex. Although he could be charming and generous, he was also often extremely cruel, irrational, and paranoid. His legendary philandering produced 9 official children and probably others.
Most of the women in his life came off the worse for the association. Like his great friend Jack Nicholson, he was usually involved with more than one woman at a time. He controlled his women. In most of his relationships he was psychologically brutal. After enduring 12 years of his constant betrayal for example, Rita Moreno was so dispirited she attempted suicide and other ex-lovers remembered him with bitterness or hatred.
From childhood, Brando resented all authority and was a rebel and a clown, which got him the attention he craved. Before he was famous for instance, he regularly shoplifted and thought it amusing to throw horse manure at people from his window. He always enjoyed playing cruel practical jokes and thrived on drama and strife, sucking people into a chaotic emotional vortex of his own making.
All Brando’s children suffered because of his self-centredness. His daughter Cheyenne, whose drug addicted brother Christian, shot and killed her boyfriend in 1990, claimed that her father had sexually abused her as a child. Addicted to drugs herself, Cheyenne hung herself in 1995.
So how did Brando come to be such a destructive force?
He was the youngest child and only son of a boozing, philandering, abusive father and an alcoholic mother. Brando senior had inherited a violent temper and bullying ways from his own father and his family were terrified of him. Marlon’s father frequented brothels, had constant affairs, and was affectionate one minute and violent the next. Her life with such a husband drove Brando’s mother to alcoholism. She idolized her only son, told him he was a genius, but neglected him and put her own needs ahead of his. Marlon had to care for his incompetent, drunken mother and often missed school to search bars for her.
Brando hated his father, adored, pitied and felt protective of his mother, and resented both his parents for ignoring him. After being expelled from high school for constant misbehaviour, his parents sent him to a military academy. During his 2 years there, he wrote to his parents every week, telling them he loved them. Neither of them ever replied.
Feeling unloved as a child produced a rage that made him troublesome and wilful all his life and also probably produced the grandiose, false self-image of the narcissist.
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