But it was more than that, she added. "The same things amused them; there was always much laughter when they were together. And they had similar attitudes toward fame and publicity. They were among the first generation of actors who fled from the press and hid from the public. And they were both intellectuals and extremely intelligent and had lofty conversations on unusual subjects. They were birds of a feather."
Joan "Toni" Petrone, a longtime friend of Brando's who worked as his assistant for 12 years until 2003, said Cox and Brando each had a "mischievous sense of humor."
"They liked to play jokes on people and also liked to explore the mental processes of personalities," she said. "They would do imitations of people." Cox was known for breaking into a yodel, she added. "Marlon liked him because he was fun and he would make him laugh."
One of Cox's favorite antics was swinging like Tarzan from the rafters of his Studio City home.
"He put brass rings all across the living room, across the garden room and into his workshop," Patricia Cox Shapiro recalled.
Often, the men gathered at each other's home, sometimes in the company of the late actor Sam Gilman, who appeared in a number of Brando's films, including "The Missouri Breaks."
There was always much game-playing when the three men got together, said Gilman's widow, Lisabeth Hush. "The game was, Sam was to be the critic, Wally was either the good boy or bad boy, and Marlon was always the bad boy."
To those who knew him closely, like Cox and Hush, Brando could be both a marvelous friend and a moody tyrant, gracious to a fault yet jealous and exasperating. Brando could also be temperamental and didn't hesitate to take it out on everyone else.
"He could cause a freeze in your living room if he came in a bad mood," Hush said recently. "He could make you feel uncomfortable in your own skin. Everybody was miserable because of his misery."
Hush recalled that Cox would fume -- privately -- whenever Brando turned his aggression on someone.
"Marlon would go do his numbers on people and Wally would be furious, but he couldn't take Marlon on," she said. "It was a strange, tough relationship among tough and weak people."
Would-be breakup artist
The actor could be very possessive of his friendships and had earned a reputation for trying to bust up relationships.
"He, of course, was after my wife right away," said Rhodes, the actor's makeup artist. "That was part of his background. He disliked his father very much, and Marlon tried to break up his father and mother for many years. He did the same thing with other people. He'd go after somebody's wife to break them up. That was just one of his hang-ups."
Gilman's widow said Brando also tried to interfere in her relationship with Sam.
"He was really mad when Sam took up with me," she recalled. "He was furious. He'd call up at 2 in the morning and want Sam to crawl around the coffee shops with him. But Sam wouldn't do it. Marlon also wanted to know about our sex life, and Sam just hung up on him."
Cox, who had married three times, also struggled with Brando's demanding nature, two of his former wives said.
Milagros Tirado "Millie" Beck, Cox's second wife, said Brando was often "generous in spirit," but he also could turn "totally vicious, mean, almost bitchy."
The first time she met Brando, she recalled, he arrived with an entourage at Cox's home in rural Connecticut: "He comes in and he doesn't say a word. He was kind of sulky and very rude and I sensed, absolutely, that he was like a brother being jealous of an intruder."
Cox's third wife, Shapiro, said much the same.
"He didn't want Wally to marry me," Shapiro said. "He was very possessive of Wally."
Shapiro recalled showing Brando a gold wedding ring Cox had given her in 1968.
"Wally carved a beautiful ring that I still have," she said. "It was made of gold. It had beautiful flowers. Marlon came over and said, 'Wouldn't you like diamonds set in the flowers?' I said, 'No, this is Wally's.' [Marlon] loved to test everybody to see what you were made of."
Beck recalled how Brando once became jealous after fans flocked around Cox, ignoring Brando.
Brando and a large group of friends, including Cox and actors James Coburn and Lee Marvin, had been riding motorcycles together one day in the mid-1960s when they made a pit stop in Bakersfield. A tour bus pulled up and several elderly riders got out and instantly recognized Mr. Peepers.
"They came screaming over to Wally. Then I noticed that Marlon was now posing -- doing his famous kind of Julius Caesar pose," Beck said. "They didn't recognize him. Marlon pouted the rest of the day."
Beck said Brando and her husband would often wrestle like kids. It would start with arm wrestling and progress to full-on wrestling. Her husband may have looked slight and weak, but "Wally would beat [Marlon] every time, pin him down," she recalled.
