Marlon Brando
During the Fifties I often did assignments with the American journalist Margaret Gardner, who wrote articles for the top film magazines Modern Screen, Movieland and Motion Picture. These magazines featured stories about the private lives of the stars and were very important for the cinema world in America.
One day we heard that Marlon Brando, “America’s intellectual pin-up boy” and one of Hollywood’s greatest stars at the time, was hiding out with a girl in a tiny seaside town, Bandol. It was the off-season and we did not have much difficulty in finding out from the patron of a small bistro in Bandol that he had seen a stranger who was staying with a local fisherman, “Popaul” Berenger, in a small back street, the Rue de la République. Two pretty young girls giggled and gave us even more information: they knew that the handsome stranger was American and that he was the “fiancé” of a local girl named Josanne Mariani, the stepdaughter of Monsieur Berenger.
I waited around discreetly and had just got my Leica ready when suddenly a Vespa scooter came speeding around the corner in a cloud of dust. It was Brando with a girl clinging closely to him. They stopped and quickly went inside a house. I decided to go to see Brando and ask him to pose for some pictures. Brando greeted me politely, but he was very reserved and reluctant to pose, saying: “I’ve already refused some friends from the press and don’t want to be unfair to them.” I went off but decided to wait around, as I was still very keen to get some pictures of this story, which was something out of the ordinary. Brando was, after all, a great Hollywood actor, the star of Streetcar named Desire and The Wild One, the heart-throb of the Fifties, once called the “Valentino of the bop generation” who had excited millions of cinemagoers. In his guise as the outspoken beatnik, he had made an old T-shirt a symbol of virility, and according to Elia Kazan, director of The Wild One, he was the greatest actor in the world. So it seemed incredible that Brando, reputed to be one of the strangest men in Hollywood, was just living in a fisherman’s house and romantically courting an attractive but unassuming teenage girl. I later found out that Josanne had once been a model for the painter Moise Kisling in Bandol, and through Kisling she had met an American family who had invited her to New York to teach their children French. Josanne had met Brando at a party and they fell in love. Brando even told his friends that he might marry Josanne.
In the afternoon of that day I was sitting outside a café when Marlon Brando, with Josanne linked to him, came quietly promenading along the seafront. Brando saw me, but as he did not make any evasive action, I went over to him. He said that Josanne had reminded him that some photographs of them together had already been taken, and that I could take some pictures if I liked.
I just had time to send my exclusive photographs away before Josanne’s mother announced the engagement of her daughter with Brando. Then a crowd of photographers and journalists poured into Bandol, but Brando had left for Rome. There he officially confirmed the engagement, but like many of Brando’s romances, this love affair ended, and Brando did not marry Josanne.