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To young Marlon, better known in those days as Bud, life was an unbroken series of contests: Who could eat fastest, hold his breath longest, open his mouth widest, tell the biggest lie, do the least homework? One day he and some other boys invented the best game of all: Who can sink farthest in the quicksand along the river bank without hollering for help? (Luckily, nobody won.) Bud and sister Frances (now Mrs. Richard Loving, a painter, living in Mundelein, Ill.) ran away from home regularly every Sunday afternoon. On Saturdays Bud rummaged devotedly through the neighbors' rubbish, came home bearing old corsets, broken umbrellas, German helmets, lopsided baby coaches, "just in case."
After they moved to Libertyville,* near Chicago, the Brandos had a horse, a cow, a great Dane, a goose, a pair of bantams, several rabbits and 28 cats. Bud was the only one who could milk the cow. To this menagerie he would occasionally add a wounded snake or broken bird he had found somewhere. Once, when Bud's favorite chicken died, Mrs. Brando buried it in the garden. Bud dug it up and brought it back into the house. Mrs. Brando buried the chicken again. Bud dug it up. This went on for some time.
At the age of eight, Marlon brought home a live woman. "I found her lying near the lake, Mother," he said. "She's sick, and doesn't have any place to stay." (Mother put her up for the night in the local hotel.) Later he brought home a whole series of charity cases: his girl friends. Sighed his grandmother: "Marlon always fell for the cross-eyed girls."
Out the Window. Free as a bird at home, Marlon never took kindly to the cage of formal education. When his father sent him to Shattuck Military Academy—"the military asylum," he still calls it—Marlon tried hard to be a good soldier. The first two years went pretty well. He got parts in two school plays, but in both cases (he played a corpse on the gallows at midnight and an explorer in an Egyptian tomb) it was too dark to tell whether he was really any good. Then, all at once he was expelled. One of the reasons: late one night he emptied a chamberpot out the dormitory window, saw too late that there was somebody passing below.
Marlon thought for awhile that he would like to enter the ministry. Talked out of that, he spent the summer of 1943 as a tile fitter in a drain factory (he was turned down for the draft because of a trick knee). In the fall he went to New York to live with sister Frances, then studying painting at New York's Art Students League. After four days as an elevator operator at Best's department store (he quit because it embarrassed him to call out things like "lingerie''). Marlon went to study dramatics with Stella Adler at Manhattan's New School. Before the first week was over, Teacher Adler told friends that this "puppy thing"—he was only 19—would be, within a year, "the best young actor in the American theater."