A 1970 Harley-Davidson FLH Electra-Glide owned since new by screen icon Marlon Brando has sold for $256,000 at Julien's Hollywood Legends auction in Hollywood. Brando won two academy awards for best actor (from eight nominations) and despite many famous film roles (A Streetcar named Desire, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Guys and Dolls, On the Waterfront, Julius Caesar, Apocalypse Now and Mutiny on the Bounty, it was his role as Johnny Strabler in the 1953 Columbia movie The Wild One for which he is best remembered and which helped catalyze the outlaw biker culture.
Brando was a motorcycle enthusiast throughout his life, and riding in New York before he became famous and even after he became famous, he enjoyed going on long rides.
The following Brando quote further establishes his two-wheeled bonafides: "It still pleases me to be awake during the dark, early hours before morning when everyone else is still asleep. I've been that way since I first moved to New York. I do my best thinking and writing then. During those early years in New York, I often got on my motorcycle in the middle of the night and went for a ride-anyplace. There wasn't much crime in the city then, and if you owned a motorcycle, you left it outside your apartment and in the morning it was still there. It was wonderful on summer nights to cruise around the city at one, two, or three a.m. wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a girl on the seat behind me. If I didn't start out with one, I'd find one."
The black Harley-Davidson FLH Electra-Glide motorcycle purchased by Brando on April 8, 1970, and was sold showing 13,859 miles.
The $256,000 sale price puts Brando's Harley comfortably inside the top 50 motorcycles ever sold at auction.