From the sudden death of his mother to an uphill battle with addiction, Josh Brolin’s 56 years of life have been filled with heartache, turmoil and oftentimes surreal moments.
In his newly released memoir, “From Under the Truck,” the “Goonies” actor opens up about his rocky upbringing, the ins and outs of his alcoholism, fatherhood and various out-of-this-world experiences, including the time he says he witnessed John Travolta heal Marlon Brando in stepmother Barbra Streisand’s living room during a dinner party.
“I had been invited to a dinner with John Travolta; Kelly, his gorgeous and uber-pleasant wife; Marlon Brando; a redhead Marlon had met on the internet; my pops and his wife, Barbra (a singer),” Brolin wrote. “I was twenty-seven years old and the whole reason I got into acting was because of the early films I had watched starring Marlon and the late James Dean (who, incidentally, died from an automobile accident on the outskirts of my hometown of Paso Robles and ended up in the same morgue that my mother would just months before the fortieth anniversary of his death).”
“Wow. I was going to meet the Marlon Brando,” he recalled thinking at the time.
“When [Marlon] stepped from the car and stood up, he reached down and pulled up his pant leg. Under it was blood running down his leg,” he continued. “He explained that he had stopped to help some people pull their cars from a landslide on the Pacific Coast highway, and when he tried to pull a cat out of some mud, it got traction and the bumper hit his leg.”
Brolin said it was at that point he heard Travolta, a longtime and well-known Scientologist, say, “I just got to the next level!”
“Marlon sauntered up to John and John to Marlon and they gave each other an ebullient hug,” he wrote. “John excitedly told Marlon how he had just completed a [Scientology] course on healing and that he could help him. John grabbed Marlon softly by the hand and led him inside, toward Barbra’s living room.”
“By the time I walked in, Marlon was prostrate on a chaise lounge and John told him to close his eyes,” he continued. “I stood there quietly and left mine open. John put his hand on Marlon’s leg, then his other hand on Marlon’s chest. Time passed, quietly. Nobody spoke. I was the person farthest away from them. I watched. Marlon Brando and Danny Zuko. This is insane.”
“How is that?” Brolin recalled Travolta asking Brando.
“Wow,” Brando responded.
“I know, it’s really something,” said Travolta.
“Marlon stood up, looking less blanched than before,” Brolin wrote. “I had just witnessed John Travolta fix Marlon f—ing Brando.”
Throughout his book, Brolin shares various stories of his upbringing, the challenges he faced after losing his mother, Jane – who died in a car crash in 1995 – and how Streisand’s “old-fashioned” approach to motherhood eventually helped him move forward with seeking sobriety.
“The reality is [Jane and Streisand] would’ve hated each other,” Brolin wrote. “I’m convinced of that. Tough people almost always hate other tough people unless one has let their guard down. But I’ve always liked tough women.”
Streisand and Brolin’s father, James Brolin, married in 1998, when Josh was 30 years old. In the book, he recalled a moment in which Streisand gently called him out while he was deep in his alcoholism.
“I walked into their house one day: ‘I’ll have a glass of wine,’ I said. She looked at me and cocked her head, so I repeated myself. ‘I’ll have a glass of red wine, please.’ She took a slow breath then hit me with: ‘Aren’t you an alcoholic?’” Brolin wrote.
“It was a pretty ballsy thing to say,” he continued. “I knew her for a while already, she was my dad’s wife now, and he was really in love with her, and from what I could tell, so was she with him. ‘Aren’t you supposed to not be drinking?’ Man, there it is again. She always had a way of washing her tongue with a bulls— cleanser before she talked with me. My own mom was like that, so it didn’t paralyze me, but my own mom was dead, so this was going to have to do.”
“‘It’s fine. It’s just a glass of wine,’ I tried to justify. ‘I [don’t] think you’re supposed to drink anything, right?’” Brolin wrote.
“It’s a puzzle, the psychology of winning, no matter the consequences. I wanted what I wanted and that was my only concern. I’d been to jail more than a few times by then. I had put my kids in jeopardy. I had lost relationships and friendships. I knew that having a drink wouldn’t make anything better, but was very likely to make any situation ultimately worse,” he continued.
The Marvel star said his relationship with Streisand “started great, soured, then grew in value.”
“My mom was dead and nobody was going to replace my own mother, no matter how poisonous my own mother might have been,” he wrote. “[Barbra] signed a card for me once: Love, Mom. You see, there it is. Mom. You’re not my mom. You’re my stepmother. Who wants to be a stepmother though? Nobody. It connotes evil intentions: drastic compensations for cosmetic insecurities, misery loves company, me me me syndrome. She wasn’t that. She wanted a family. She was being kind.”
“That stunning Jewish mother,” he continued. “I’d heard about them. I’d read about them. I’d had some friends with those. They’re almost always comically on the offense.”
“She never saw that guy I was,” he added. “She was never [privy] to those things that landed me in jail or in fights or figuring out why I was waking up on the sidewalks with my T-shirt wrapped around my otherwise naked waist. That’s what I understood a mom to be for the longest time. This was different. This was just plain old-fashioned mothering. I had to get used to it.”
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Brolin – who is dad to four: Trevor Mansur, 36, and Eden, 29, who he shares with ex-wife Alice Adair, and daughters Westlyn Reign, 6, and Chapel Grace, 3, with wife Kathryn Boyd – found sobriety at 45 years old.
In September, during an appearance on the SiriusXM podcast “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” with co-hosts Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson, Brolin opened up about how his 99-year-old grandmother was ultimately the one who pushed him toward recovery in 2013.
Recalling his last night of drinking, Brolin said he “woke up on the sidewalk” near a Del-Taco.
“I didn’t know where my car was, and it wasn’t that rare,” said the “Dune” actor, who was supposed to go see his grandmother on her deathbed. “That was just, you know, the 400th time that it happened.”
“I was supposed to have picked up my brother and taken them because I was the kind of, I was the one in the family that put everything together and structured everything and controlled everything,” he added. “Anyway, I woke up on the sidewalk, went inside. My brother called me. ‘Where are you?’ Picked him up, walked into that hospital eventually.”
Once he got to his grandmother’s room, he said everything changed from that moment on.
“Everybody knew when I walked into the room, [she] picked her head up and looked at me and smiled and that was it,” he said. “I was done. I said, ‘If this woman could get through 99 years on life’s terms, how dare me?’”
“I said, ‘How dare me,’ and I’d gotten away with, I was 45 years old, and I’d gotten away with a lot, been in jail nine times, done a little bit of whatever,” he continued. “So I thought, I wonder if I could do that half of life like that and then do this half of life like this. Then I get to live two lives and not just one.”
