Kalama [WA] woman breaks silence over lifelong relationship with Brando family (Interesting)

JoAn Corrales walks into Kalama’s Heritage Square Antiques wearing Marlon Brando’s hat. A memento of her 50-year friendship with the late movie star, the leather newsboy’s cap crowns the thick, gray hair that falls in waves to her waist. When she smiles, the years drop from her face, and it’s not hard to imagine the 72-year-old Corrales as a young model rubbing elbows with Hollywood’s elite in the 1950s.

Beneath her fringe of bangs, though, her blue eyes are sad.

It’s been four-and-a-half years since Brando’s death at age 80, and a little more than a year since his son, Christian Brando, died of pneumonia at age 49. Corrales mourns for Christian, who lived with her as a teenager, later moved to her rural farm on the outskirts of Kalama in 1996 and is now buried in the town cemetery. She misses Marlon Brando’s monthly stays at the farm’s guest house.

She’s lonely without her complicated, reclusive friend Marlon’s daily phone calls, during which the two-time Academy Award winner often would assign her outlandish errands, such as asking her to buy him a 400-pound pig that could pull a cart for his children and sleep on the couch at night.

“Marlon would be the first person to tell you he was nuts,” Corrales said with a laugh. “You were expected to not laugh at him. And you never knew when he was kidding or serious. ... You just didn’t know if he was putting you on to see how far you’d go.”

For the first time, Corrales is ready to open up about her friendship with the Brandos and their connection to a small Southwest Washington town of 2,400 people.

Corrales, also Marlon’s business manager, said she wants to focus on “the good stuff, the funny stuff, the real Marlon, the Marlon nobody knows.”

I knew that if I didn’t do it that people would come up here and write their own article, and it wasn’t going to be the truth,” she said, adding that she’s had many requests for interviews by major media outlets. “Everyone knows that Marlon’s been up here. They know who I am.”

Meeting Marlon

Born in Oklahoma in 1936, Corrales grew up poor in the mountains of Myrtle Creek, Ore. Her father, a writer, was killed in a dynamite blasting accident in the woods, and her mother, a well-educated artist, struggled to cope with the loss. The family had no electricity, no phone and no money.

Corrales left as soon as she could, eventually finding her way to Southern California. Years later, Marlon Brando would want to hear the stories of her hard-scrabble youth again and again.

Corrales’ stunning looks and social graces attracted the attention of movie producers. But Corrales, a model, was too shy to be an actress. However, she made connections in high places that brought her to Hollywood awards ceremonies and parties.

In the late 1950s, Paramount Pictures producer Howard Joslin introduced Corrales to Anna Kashfi, Marlon Brando’s wife. Corrales became friends with the couple, who divorced in 1959 after a two-year marriage that resulted in a son, Christian Brando. Corrales, who by then was married with two daughters, bore a son soon afterward, Harry, who grew up with Christian.

When Christian was 13, he ran away from home during a custody battle between his parents and moved in with Corrales’ family, then living in Vancouver, Wash.

Marlon Brando, who lived in Los Angeles, would visit Christian every month and stay with him in the loft above the rec room, where the father and son would build ham radios together. Neighbors didn’t realize the man in a coat and stocking cap they saw installing a radio antenna on the roof was the famous actor, Corrales said. By then, Brando had already become a major Hollywood star and won an Oscar for his performance in “On the Waterfront.”

Harry and Christian were always up to something, whether it was ordering $2,000 worth of room service on a family trip to Las Vegas or growing a 6-foot marijuana plant in Corrales’ back yard. (Corrales didn’t know what it was. When a friend identified the strange plant for her, Corrales cut it down, and the crestfallen teen boys couldn’t say a word.)

Christian, she said, “loved being with us. ... We were a family.”

In 1996, following Christian’s well-publicized problems with the law and five-year prison sentence, he sought out Corrales, who now lived in Kalama. Christian bought a house but preferred to stay with Corrales on her farm. His father joined them for monthly visits.

One of Corrales’ fondest memories of the Brandos on her farm was the time Christian was playing guitar on his bungalow porch. Hearing the music, his father stood on the guest house balcony and began playing along on the harmonica.

“I always thought that was very, very special,” Corrales said. “People didn’t see that side of him (Marlon) or anything like that.”

Sometimes Marlon and Christian would eat dinner at Red Lobster in Kelso or the Oak Tree in Woodland, and often people would recognize them.

But in Kalama, the townsfolk left the famous duo alone. Christian, who worked as a welder, became a familiar sight in his flannel shirts and work boots.

“Everybody treated him like he was nobody, and that’s what he wanted to be treated like,” Corrales said.

By the time the press got wind Christian lived in Kalama, he had been living there two years. Reporters asked a lot of questions, but no one would play ball. When the press dropped by the police station to ask whether Christian was serving his parole in Kalama, the officers looked at each other and said, “The name sounds familiar ...” but played dumb.

“Those are the kinds of things that made them fall in love with Kalama,” Corrales said of the Brandos.

His ‘home’ in Kalama

Wednesday, Corrales sipped a mocha in the Victorian coffee shop tucked in a corner of Heritage Square Antiques, the former general store she painstakingly renovated in 1993 and recently gave to her daughter, Kerrie Svatos. The shop at 176 First St. in downtown Kalama is filled with vintage crockery, furniture, jewelry, baby clothes, linens and artwork. One room houses the Ruby Moon Day Spa.

Marlon Brando couldn’t get over the fact that a woman was a carpenter, she said. He used to marvel at the before-and-after photos of the restored circa-1896 building, which was going to be torn down for a parking lot before Corrales bought it in 1991.

Brando loved hanging out at Heritage Square at night. Corrales would sneak him inside, and Brando would sit in the mezzanine balcony in the dark for hours, watching people outside passing under the streetlights.

Most of Marlon Brando’s time in Kalama was spent at the 5-acre farm Corrales bought in 1983, though. The farm is off-limits to the press because she’s got a deal in the works to sell photos of the guest house, which is exactly as Brando left it on his last visit, she said. (She also would not allow photos of herself to be taken for this story.)

Corrales’ farm had several buildings, including the original 1886 house, a carriage house she converted into a guest house for Marlon Brando, the bungalow Christian lived in, a shop, barn, chicken pen and the main house built in 1924. Corrales also set up his business office on the property.

She wanted a casual country-style guest house, but Brando had other ideas.

“He goes, ‘We can’t have this. ... I want the downstairs to flow. I want it to be elegant, because who knows, I might invite the president of France over,’” Corrales recounted. “He was dead serious.”

She redecorated the bottom floor in French gold leaf with beautiful handmade carpets.

“And then he stayed upstairs. He never came downstairs,” she said. “He never wanted to go home. He always missed the plane.”

Before his death, Brando was making plans to move permanently to Kalama, partly for tax reasons, partly to give his children a place to grow up outdoors, Corrales said.

Brando’s suite was decorated in a country theme in his favorite shades of orange and blue. French doors opened to a 12-by-24-foot deck overlooking a field where Brando would watch deer and other wildlife. He’d also sit on the deck and listen to the chorus of frogs in the swimming pool.

Friends to the end

Near the end of his life, when he was bedridden at his Beverly Hills home with pulmonary fibrosis, he would call Corrales in Kalama.

“Would you do me a really big favor, honey?” he’d ask. “Will you take the phone and let me hear the frogs?”

Corrales would hold the phone over the balcony, tears streaming down her face.

“What you did was try to give him any and all things that you could possibly think of that would make him happy,” she said.

For instance, knowing of Brando’s fondness for corn, Corrales and Longview resident Bruce Davis, a dear friend of Brando’s, once bought 20 stalks of ready-for-harvest corn with the roots attached from a Woodland farmer and drove 14 hours to L.A. They brought the corn to Brando’s bedside at his house on Mulholland Drive. He touched the ears and the silks and began to cry, she said.

He picked six ears off the stalks, and Corrales warned him not to harvest more than he could eat that night.

“He goes, ‘I’m gonna eat ‘em all.’ And he did,” she said.

Brando also loved Corrales’ lemon pies, Yankee pot roasts, homemade bread, pickles and dried fruit.

“I couldn’t keep food here,” she said. “He loved food, he loved to eat.”

Sometimes Brando would hang out with Robert Savory and his partner, Don Poupard, who own the Rivertown Antique Market in downtown Kalama. One Christmas, Corrales asked how their visit with Brando went.

Savory replied, “It was OK except he ate all the fudge,” Corrales said.

Eventually the binges caught up to the former sex symbol. By the 1990s, he weighed more than 300 pounds. He got stuck in the farm’s guesthouse shower stall once, prompting a remodel of the whole bathroom. But Brando didn’t mention his weight gain because he didn’t care, Corrales said. He’d go in public in a stocking cap, unshaven, disheveled, his corduroy pants unbuttoned. He’d ride her lawnmower around her farm in shorts with no shirt.

“He just didn’t give a damn. ... He never impressed anybody. He could just embarrass you to death,” Corrales said.

The Brando smouldering on-screen in movies such as “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “On the Waterfront” wasn’t the man Corrales knew. Brando hated being an actor but did it because it was easy work, she said.

“You had to pry him out of bed to have him go make a movie. ... For Marlon, a movie was just a job,” she said.

He didn’t attend his movie premieres and never watched his own movies until a couple of months before he died, Corrales said.

Once she asked what he would have been if he hadn’t become an actor. A massage therapist, he replied. Brando, who holds several patents, also could have been a scientist or an inventor, she said.

Fond of experiments, Brando once had a long phone conversation with Longview veterinarian Dr. Rick Mitchell about whether he could train his two large, aggressive dogs to be friends with his new kitten. Brando wanted to put the kitten in a cage in the middle of the room so the dogs could get used to it. He didn’t understand why Mitchell thought it was a bad idea.

Last week, Mitchell, who has since retired, said it was tough to stay objective and firm while talking to the screen legend.

“I’m telling The Godfather not to put the cat in the cage. Am I gonna die?” Mitchell recalled thinking.

Brando loved scheming, problem solving and cooking up ideas for Corrales’ farm. For years he talked about digging holes with a track hoe on her treeless property and using a helicopter to drop big trees in the holes. He also wanted her to install solar panels on all the farm buildings, which she didn’t do because they were ugly and expensive, she said. He wanted to grow a grape vineyard so they could make their own wine.

“I let him have his dreams,” she said.

Brando once had Corrales buy dozens of exotic, rare chickens that laid green and blue eggs. (She put her foot down when it came to getting that 400-pound pig he wanted, though.)

On one of her frequent trips to Brando’s Los Angeles home, she brought a dozen eggs with her, made breakfast and read Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” to his young children.

“He thought that was the most beautiful thing that happened to him in his entire life,” she said of the green eggs breakfast. “The unexpected kindness was worth millions of dollars to him.”

But despite his appreciation for simple things, Brando was a complex, moody, vulnerable man with an unpredictable nature. (Brando, who was married and divorced three times, adopted three children and fathered several others, the last of whom was born in 1994 to his longtime housekeeper Maria Christina Ruiz.)

“Marlon had a side of him — he could be treacherous, he could be generous, he could be adoring, he could turn around and be absolutely horrible. You never knew,” Corrales said. “If you’re going to work for him, you had to learn to read him. You had to know when to keep your distance, when to be close to him, or when he needed to be nurtured or fixed a great meal.”

Still grieving her losses

Her closeness with the Brandos came at a price.

“Every day I get some sort of a call from a lawyer,” she said Wednesday, her voice bitter.

Corrales, who’d advised Marlon on his business affairs for years, was appointed his full-time business manager in 1999. She also was named the co-executor trustee of his will, along with his longtime friend Alic Marchak.

Two weeks before Brando died in 2004, Corrales and Marchak were abruptly replaced as executors by three other people with Hollywood connections. His caretaker, Angela Borlaza, filed a lawsuit claiming Brando’s signature on the document was forged. A handful of other lawsuits were filed by other parties alleging conspiracy and fraud in the handling of Marlon and Christian Brando’s assets.

Corrales, bound by a confidentiality agreement, can’t talk about any of that.

And anyway, none of it would bring back the man she devoted so much of her life to or the boy she knew from babyhood. She’s depressed and lonely, she says.

Corrales pulls a mini-cassette player out of her hobo bag and presses play. Out floats Marlon Brando’s unmistakable voice. It’s one of his rambling messages she saved on her answering machine. He tells Corrales how much he appreciates her, how smart she is. He breaks into song: “You’re wonderful, you’re marvelous that you should care for me....”

A tear rolls down Corrales cheek. She has many such recordings. So many memories.

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