A few years ago I wrote an article for The Crime Library about Christian Brando, the oldest child of actor Marlon Brando. Christian’s trial for the murder of his sister’s lover was the warm-up for the OJ Simpson case that followed not too much later.
Christian ended up serving 5 years for manslaughter in the death of Dag Drollett, who was the father of Cheyenne Brando’s baby. Cheyenne was Christian’s younger half-sister.
Trouble seemed to follow Christian, who probably lived a little too fast for his own good. That wasn’t all his fault, though. His parents, Anna Kashfi and Marlon Brando were not exactly the best role models and Christian was left to raise himself most of his life.
Most recently Christian was in the news because he was linked to Bonnie Lee Blakely, the woman whom Robert Blake was accused of killing. Blake, of course, was acquitted. For a time there was a question as to whether or not Christian was the father of Bonnie’s baby.
But this is a true crime website, not a Hollywood gossip site. Why am I writing about Christian Brando, you ask?
Because he died over the weekend and tonight I was eating dinner tonight when the phone rang and a woman sniffled into the phone asking if I was the guy who wrote the Crime Library story on Christian Brando. That’s not really unusual for me. I get phone calls all the time from people who have questions about stuff I write.
When I told her I was the guy, she asked if I was going to update the story with his death (I’m not), because she wanted me to know that Christian, his mother, and her boyfriend saved her life one day a long time ago.
It turns out that during one of those times that Christian was being shuffled back-and-forth between Anna Kashfi, a washed-up Hollywood never-really-was, and Marlon Brando, a…well, a Marlon Brando, he was sitting up in the bedroom of the rundown apartment Anna was sharing with her boyfriend looking out the window when my caller, who was obviously much younger, was accosted by a couple of knife-wielding thugs.
No one else was around and it looked like something awful was going to happen to her, when from his window Christian yelled and scared off the goons. His mother called 911 and because the girl’s mother was working two jobs at the time, Christian and Anna cared for her all that night.
She said no one was ever interested in hearing her story because it didn’t fit with the tabloid version of Christian Brando, and I believe her. All of the research I did for that Crime Library story indicates that Christian was a good, tormented soul who didn’t deserve a lot of the stuff that happened to him. He didn’t go looking for trouble, but it seemed to find him without much difficulty.
I’m just putting this up because there will be stories written about Christian Brando in the next few days and I think it’s important that people know that he was so much more than just the son of Marlon Brando who killed his half-sister’s boyfriend.