TWISTED SECRETS
JAMES CAAN TOOK TO GRAVE Detested Godfather Brando & dated Hollywood Madam
TOUGH guy movie star James Caan took shocking secrets to the grave, including his hate for his Godfather co-star Marlon Brando, trysts with Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss and why he became a cocaine junkie.
A four-time loser at marriage, the 82-year-old father of five — including Hawaii Five-0 actor Scott Caan — died at his Beverly Hills home July 7.
He rode a rocket to stardom in 1972’s The Godfather when he played Marlon Brando’s oldest son, Sonny Corleone, and publicly claimed he loved the movie legend.
But secretly, he despised him because “Marlon drove
Jimmy nuts,” a source says. “He thought Brando was crazy and working with him drove Caan to distraction!”
Caan says he would tell Brando jokes at lunch and the aging screen legend wouldn’t get the punch line until “two hours later, in the middle of a scene, I’d look at him” and Brando would be laughing.
“I’d say, ‘What the f**k’s the matter with you?’ and he said, ‘That’s funny.’ Two hours … He was like a child like that.” Prankster Caan also started a “mooning contest” on the set after he stuck his bare butt out a car window at Brando.
He also wasn’t fazed by superstar John Wayne when at 26 he got a part in The Duke’s western El Dorado.
Catching Wayne cheating at chess, Jimmy threw a punch at the legend before co-star Robert Mitchum broke it up. The former Michigan State football player had huge hits in the ’70s, including Cinderella Liberty, Funny
Lady and Rollerball. He became a martial arts expert and rodeo calf roper, but went off the rails with hookers and cocaine after his beloved sister
Barbara died at 38 in 1981.
“My sister had died of cancer and I was just angry, raging at the world,” he recalled. “Getting high and partying seemed like the best option.”
He was grilled by cops about
Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss, who claimed Caan was bedding her on the Texas set of 1993’s Flesh and Bone.
He later claimed they were just friends and insisted he never PAID for her hookers, saying: “I just gave them all the cocaine they wanted.”
In the mid-’90s, he finally got clean at Marina del Rey’s Exodus Recovery Center because “I got fed up with being a jerk.”