‘The lust of my life’

Yes, Marlon Brando was one of the acting greats. He was also, as reports have continued to confirm well after his death in 2004, an accomplished romantic with a voracious sexual appetite.

With three wives (including Anna Kashfi, Movita Castaneda and Tarita Teriipaia), and a long list of flings and affairs that included Marilyn Monroe, Reiko Sato, Dorothy Kilgallen, Pier Angeli, Shelley Winters, Nancy Kwan and Katy Jurado, Brando also admitted in a 1976 interview to having had “homosexual experiences,” with a list that reportedly included James Dean and Rock Hudson.

One of his most noted affairs, however, was with West Side Story legend and EGOT-winner Rita Moreno, who now stars on Netflix’s One Day at a Time. The pair dated on and off for eight years and throughout his three marriages, wrapping up their romance in 1961. The split was so traumatic that it led Moreno to overdose on sleeping pills for “an escapefrom-pain death” as she described it in her 2013 memoir. On Thursday, 86-year-old Moreno recalled those heady days on Wendy Williams, revealing, “(Brando) slayed me good ’cause he was the king of everything. Eeeeeeverything. He was the king of movies. … He was really one of the most sexual men on Earth. It was one of those very tempestuous love affairs. It lasted eight years, on and off, on and off, on and off.”

Moreno said she had wanted to marry the actor, but he refused and she continued to date him regardless. “One time when I found some lingerie that was not mine, I just went home devastated, weeping and crying — and something wonderful happened the next day,” she said.

That wonderful thing happened to be none other than Elvis Presley, who “liked what he saw” and asked to meet her. When Brando found out she’d been on a date with the singer, he “threw chairs,” Moreno said, “It was wonderful!”

In her memoir, Moreno said, “I couldn’t stay away. In fact, I was becoming addicted to the challenge of winning him over and over again... I knew no one could possibly make Marlon Brando more jealous.”

And while he might have appeared at just the right time to win a date, Moreno told Williams her time with “sweet fellow” Presley was “amateur night.”

In fact, comparing Presley and Brando as lovers, she said, is “like comparing a two-year-old and the king!” And while Leonard Gordon, her husband of 45 years (who died in 2010), was “the love of my life,” it was Brando who was “the lust of my life.”