Breaking up the Marlon Brando way exposed with intimate letter

‘I’m sorry I could not have tried harder to be less self indulgent,’ wrote Marlon Brando to the woman with whom he was breaking up.

Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 film A Streetcar Named Desire. Picture: AP

Anyone who has ever ended an affair knows there is a procedure to be followed, once described by George Costanza, a character in the Seinfeld sitcom, as the “it’s not you, it’s me routine”.

It appears this is true, even for a young Marlon Brando.

In a letter that is up for auction in Boston, the actor performs the routine with some embellishments, albeit several spelling mistakes, while breaking up with a French woman.

He writes: “In order that you won’t think me a complete boor, I am writing you this letter to explain that because of an erratic, flighty, fly-by-night, temperament I wish not to humiliate and degrade your sentiments by seeing you only at my mood’s conveinence. Please accept this letter with an open heart as it is written with fourthright sincerity.”

It was written to Solange Podell, a dancer and actor in Paris, in the late 1940s. Brando was a rising matinee idol, celebrated for his brooding charisma that shone through on Broadway even while playing the brutish Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.

He had been cast in the play after hitchhiking to Cape Cod to visit playwright Tennessee Williams. He arrived “a day or two late for the reading”, as he recalled in his memoir.

When he eventually got there he found Williams’s lavatory was overflowing; Brando repaired it before reading for the part. Williams wrote to his agent, describing this and saying that on top of “his gifts as an actor he has great physical appeal and sensuality, at least as much as Burt Lancaster”.

So it proved: the play was a tremendous hit.

Podell, who had left France for Hollywood, had broken an acting contract to visit New York where she was advised to meet a young actor backstage “who was both handsome and talented”.

She recalled in 2014: “He told me, ‘Why don’t you come each night so that I will be with someone to have supper after the performance?’ ”

Podell was living with her mother in a hotel on Broadway. She said Brando would visit her and her mother would prepare dinner for them all on a camping stove.

“One day he asked me, ‘Why do you live in a hotel?’ ” She said Brando, who was making $550 a week, “gave me $900 so that I could move into an apartment with my mother”.

On Sundays he would pick her up with his friend Wally Cox and they would ride on his motorbike into the New Jersey countryside. “We would sit under a tree,” she said. “He would take apples from his bag and we would eat them.”

Then she got the letter.

Brando’s break-up letter to Podell, complete with spelling mistakes, is up for sale.

“I’m sorry I could not have tried harder to be less self indulgent and therewith, a little more compatable,” he wrote. “My intuitions were flawlessly scroupulous, but my emotions, unfortunately, unstable. I will remember you with fondness, regard, and appreciation. When we meet in France (perhaps in October) I trust my behavior will be a trifle more adult.”

Then there is a postscript. “Please give my kind acknowledgements to your mother, if she’ll accept them.”

Bobby Livingston, of RR Auction, said the letter might fetch up to $15,000. He said it showed a Brando who was self-aware and “has that vulnerability to him – it’s not a kiss-off letter”.

Podell turned to photography and settled in Monaco, where she worked with Grace Kelly, who became Princess of Monaco. She died in 2020.

Brando did not mention her in his 1994 memoir, Songs My Mother Taught Me, in which he disguises the names of most of his lovers. He recalled that as his star rose on Broadway, every night “there would be seven or eight girls waiting in my dressing room”. He wrote: “It was wonderful. To be able to get just about any woman I wanted into bed was intoxicating.”

He seemed to have forgotten his sweet relationship with Podell – the dinners on the camping stove – that he broke off as he rose to stardom.

The Times