Drama, drugs, and decadence colour the story of Cardiff-born Anna Kashfi. For a long time dismissed as simply the first wife of Marlon Brando, this is being reversed by author Sarah Broughton, who talks to Mab Jones about her book Brando’s Bride.
What attracted you to Anna and her story?
I was just really intrigued by her journey, how that happened. I couldn’t figure it out, because she had no contacts in Hollywood – these days, everything is always about who you know – so I was really interested in following that. I mean, her parents lived by Gabalfa roundabout, and Anna had once worked in a butcher’s shop.
I was also really interested because there was a parallel with my own life. My mother was in India at the same time, and was an actress at the same time that Anna was an actress. And, as I unravelled Anna’s story, my mum started looking into our family background, and we discovered that we, also, were Anglo-Indian. I was discovering things about Anna whilst getting emails from my mother saying “You’ll never guess! Your great-grandad worked on the railways in India.” So there were all these links, I felt – these strange parallels between the two stories, the two journeys.
That’s fascinating.
Yes. The other thing I was really intrigued by is that there are loads of Marlon Brando biographies. When I was first writing I counted 53; there have been several more since then. Almost every single one of them repeats the same information about Anna – they all state that she lied about her background. Even in her obituary [she died in 2015], it said she was ‘ethnically ambiguous’ and was always very mysterious about her origins.
To be honest, I’d never heard of Anna. Was she a big star?
Anna made her first four films, which turned out to be her only films, by the age of 23. In her first film she’s playing opposite Spencer Tracy, in her second film she’s opposite Rock Hudson, in her third she’s with Jack Lemmon, and in her final film she plays Nat King Cole’s wife. So she had a very stellar career, and who knows what might have happened if she hadn’t been derailed.
By the marriage to Brando, I presume…
Well – she arrived in New York at the age of 21, flew to LA and within two weeks she met Brando. They started an on-off relationship and two years later, she married him. By the following September, they had separated. It’s a bit like a star that’s rising and rising, then crashes and burns.
The infamy part comes from the fact that she was so castigated. If you look at the Brando biographies, even now, they are venomous about her, saying she was a gold-digger, that she seduced Brando. They are very derogatory, and I wanted to restore that in some way.
What happened after?
Anna was still just 23. When she divorced Brando, she got the largest settlement of her day – that there had ever been – so I think she spent some time spending that…
So, she had a good time?
She had a good time… except it was also a descent into alcoholism and prescription drug addiction, which I talk about in the chapter entitled Dirty Drugs. It made her behaviour more erratic, which didn’t help with the fact that she spent another 14 years in and out of court with Brando, contesting custody of their child. It culminated in her having her son kidnapped. He was eventually found in Mexico, and of course, unsurprisingly, she lost custody of him.
That’s very dramatic. What are your hopes for the book?
I hope that people will read it and form a different opinion of her. One of my chapters involves three of Anna’s contemporaries, young actresses, who all had horrible early deaths. It kind of shows how the world was for those young starlets, and how tricky to navigate. Anna got through these things and the other three didn’t. She was a survivor.
Brando’s Bride by Sarah Broughton, published by Parthian Books. Price: £10. Info: parthianbooks.com