Christian Brando Tells of Remorse and Hopes : Hearing: Courthouse is a painfully familiar locale for actor’s son on eve of sentencing for manslaughter.

When Marlon Brando’s son walks into the Santa Monica courthouse today, the surroundings will be painfully familiar, he says. “I’ve been coming through those doors since I was a kid.”

It was there that his parents repeatedly fought over him--legally, physically and very publicly--throughout more than a decade. And it was the fallout from those battles, his lawyers contend, that has led Christian Brando and his actor father back to the courthouse to answer for a killing that is the product of those traumatic years.

“I’m nervous, I’m scared to death. But I’m not trying to get out of anything--I already said ‘guilty,’ ” a remorseful and self-effacing Brando said in an interview with The Times on the eve of today’s sentencing hearing.

He pleaded guilty last month to voluntary manslaughter in the May 17 shooting death of his half sister’s Tahitian lover, Dag Drollet, and faces up to 16 years in prison. The prosecution has asked for the maximum sentence while Brando’s lawyers and a probation officer have asked for leniency.

“I did plead to a manslaughter,” he said. “It’s a tragedy and I do feel bad. If I could give my life to have him come back, I’d do it, but there’s nothing I can do. I have to live with this for the rest of my life, I wake up with it and go to sleep with it.

“But are people going to spit on me all the time? Can’t I (just) go to jail? Is that OK?” he said, annoyed by the unrelenting attention that has surrounded him.

During the two-hour interview, the 32-year-old welder spoke of his “weird and spaced-out” family, the tragic events of the shooting, his struggle with substance abuse and his hopes for the future. He even expressed doubts about his half sister’s allegations that Drollet had beaten her.

The picture of Christian Brando that emerges is a curious mix of sadness and bravado that led a defense investigator to call him “a stray puppy with machismo.”

His has been a Hollywood life with the glitter dusted off, a life gone wrong at crucial junctures, a life he is now trying to hold together as he prepares himself for years behind bars.

“He is a tempestuous kid from a tempestuous family, frustrated and angry about his life,” said his psychiatrist, Dr. Saul Faerstein. “But there is not a particle of antisocial attitudes and behavior which threatens society.”

Brando’s lawyer refused to allow him to answer questions about prosecution allegations of previous violent incidents, saying only: “We do not acknowledge them.”

Faerstein said that Brando, once an inquisitive and alert child, has been damaged emotionally and intellectually by his upbringing and chronic substance abuse. Despite the material advantages conferred by the Brando name, the psychiatrist said, neither parent provided “a stable, protective, safe, emotional environment for Christian to grow up in. . . . “

In recent weeks, while awaiting the beginning of his sentencing hearing, the 10th-grade dropout has been juggling several welding jobs and reporting to County Jail for random drug tests, although he acknowledged that after he is sentenced “it won’t matter anymore.”

Brando said his daily routine consists of “eat, sleep, go to work and that’s it.” He said he values good friends more than ever because some presumed pals tried to exploit his crime by selling their stories.

Once he serves whatever sentence is imposed, Brando said, he wants to resume a life of anonymity that will include fishing trips, Dodger games and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Brando said he cannot forget his chaotic youthful years--the court fights, the abductions by one or the other parent, the nannies and maids who reared him.

“I grew up with an extremely violent mother (actress Anna Kashfi). She drank and we had a lot of problems,” Brando said, adding that he has not spoken with her for about three years. The Brandos were divorced before their only child learned to walk.

Marlon Brando was granted permanent custody of Christian when he was 13, about the time that he boy started drinking and taking large doses of various drugs, including LSD. “But I didn’t do needles and stuff,” he said.

“My whole family, except for my father, is alcoholic,” he said. “I’ve been doing pretty good, although I miss coming home and having a few beers.”

He said he has been sober now for nine months and attends AA meetings several times a week in West Hollywood, near the modest apartment he shares with his girlfriend.

Asked whether his relationship with his father has changed because of the shooting, Christian said: “No. He’s been helping me through this, supporting me as a friend. . . . He was there for me. . . . ‘And who am I? I’m nobody.”

The elder Brando put up his hilltop estate, where the shooting occured, as collateral for his son’s bail and is paying for his defense.

The Brando children--there were several more by the time Christian went to live with his father--were expected to earn their keep. “We worked summers at dad’s hotel (in Tahiti) and we’d have to pay our own plane tickets. If we didn’t clean up the yard, we didn’t get dinner.

“My family’s so weird and spaced out. We’d have new additions all the time. Like I’d sit down at the table with all these strange people and say, ‘Who are you?’ ”

Marlon Brando has nine children by four women.

For three years, Christian worked in Alaska, piloting a barge for a fish processor during the summers. In winter, he said, he returned to a cabin near Mt. St. Helens in Washington and “froze,” living on unemployment checks and odd jobs.

After returning home to Los Angeles, he became a tree-trimmer, a vocation ended by a serious fall. Then, about eight years ago, he found welding, a trade he learned at a Downey technical school that makes him beam. Structural steel welding. Pipes. Commercial buildings and chemical plants. Gates. Furniture.

Welding is satisfying, he said, because “I get to be the boss. I’m in control of the situation.”

Brando, dressed in jeans and work boots, said being the son of a celebrity is a hindrance. He said he avoids invoking the Brando name or image.

His single acting venture came when he was recruited for a part in a movie in Italy. Not knowing that it was an attempt to exploit the Brando name, he said, “I went.” The film, he said, was “pretty awful.”

But it was last May 17 that Brando’s life bottomed out when his half sister confided that her lover, the father of her unborn child, had been beating her. She was crying, and Brando had already downed a six-pack of malt liquor and was starting in on hard liquor.

“She went off on this bizarre tangent,” Brando said, “she kinda like got me going. I didn’t stop to think.” Knowing what he now knows of Cheyenne Brando’s fragile mental state, he questions whether she was ever beaten by Drollet. “I feel like a complete chump” for believing her, he said.

At his father’s estate on Mulholland Drive, Brando burst in on Drollet, pointed a gun at him and shouted, “Lookit, don’t do that anymore!” Brando said that as he turned to leave, his arm still outstretched, Drollet tried to grab the gun and it went off.

“I did not go into that room to kill Dag Drollet,” said Brando, adding that he had met the 26-year-old man for the first time only hours earlier. “I just wanted to scare him.

“I just sat there and watched the life go out of this guy.”