Brando’s long-awaited memoir, Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, written with Robert Lindsey (468 pages. Random House. $25), is just out; the other Brando, by Peter Manso (1,172 pages. Hyperion. $29.95), is coming Sept. 23. Manso’s mammoth tome is probably the record for an actor. But of course Brando is more than an actor, as he has been telling us for his entire career. He is-well, what exactly is he? Manse attempts to answer that question with an exhaustive, incisive biography that took seven years and entailed hundreds of interviews. Brando’s book has much less information; there’s almost nothing about his wives and children. But it is a fascinating apologia for the life of a great archetypal figure, and it puts us in intimate touch with his mind. (Brando did not cooperate with Manso, deciding to write his own book for a reported $3.5 million-which Manse says is really more than $5 million, plus a $750,000 bonus upon signing the contract.)
Both books start with the family: Brando’s in Proustian fashion as he evokes the sights, sounds and smells of his Nebraska childhood. He recalls the sweetness of his mother’s breath, the sweetness of the gin that the alcoholic Dorothy Brando swigged from an Empirin bottle. His mother, says Brando, preferred getting drunk to caring for him and his sisters, Frannie and Jocelyn. His father, Marlon Sr., was also a drunk, a bully and a philanderer. But Dorothy (Dodie) knew “every song that was ever written,” and Brando says he still remembers thousands of songs his mother taught him.
The other key woman in Brando’s early life was his young nanny, Ermi. Manse quotes a family friend who’s convinced that Ermi sexually abused little Bud Brando. But in Marlon’s account he is the initiator, slipping into Ermi’s bed when he was 3 or 4, fondling her nude body and crawling all over her. When Ermi left to get married Bud felt doubly deserted, by his mother for the bottle and now by Ermi. “That’s why in life I would always find women who were going to desert me.”
Manso paints a portrait of a young Bud Brando whose anguished home life made him a troubled kid at school, a probable mild dyslexic who mumbled in class and defied authority with such tricks as doing his French assignment on toilet paper. At 16 he was dispatched to Shattuck military school in Minnesota, where he stole the clapper from the school bell and set fires by igniting hair tonic. Manso reports that Marlon, in addition to cutting a swath through the local girls, experimented with men, including group sex with other cadets. Brando is silent on these matters.
Bud’s only real success was in Shattuck’s dramatic club. So in 1943, when Shattuck had had enough of his antics and expelled him, he headed for New York, where he joined Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research. Manso beautifully evokes the excitement of those New York days. Here Brando was born as an actor, midwifed by the brilliant and glamorous actress and teacher Stella Adler. “He’s the most keenly aware, the most empathetical human being alive,” said Adler. But again Brando was kicked out of a school, this time by Piscator, who found him “intractable, ungovernable.”
Brando landed on Broadway, appearing in “Truckline Cafe,” which closed quickly but stunned the audience with the savage. sensual young genius who came through. said Karl Malden, “like a bolt of lightning.” That was just a warm-up for his appearance as Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire” -one of those events that change a culture. “He’d created not only a standard of acting, but a style,” said director Bobby Lewis. “Everybody after that wanted to act like Marion Brando.” Immediately the first signs of Brando’s alienation from his own success appeared. Manso quotes an interview in which he said: “The theater to me is just a job. just like slicing baloney.” And in his book Brando insists that he was miscast as Stanley: “I was sensitive by nature and he was coarse.”
But it was exactly the tension between coarseness and sensitivity that made his Stanley such an explosive performance. Brando established a new American style of spontaneous emotional combustion and visceral truth. Manso tells how when he went to Hollywood to film “Streetcar” with Vivien Leigh, he said to her, “Why are you so f–ing polite?” That was not Brando’s way, onstage or off.
Brando’s self-disgust at his fame drove him to a succession of psychiatrists, but the more successful he grew, the more he professed his hatred for acting. “Acting, not prostitution, is the oldest profession,” writes Brando. “Even apes act.” Amazingly, Brando devotes one perfunctory paragraph to his performance as Marc Antony in Joseph Mankiewicz’s film of ‘Julius Caesar," saying, “for me to walk onto a movie set and play Marc Antony without more experience was asinine.” But Manso gives a vivid narrative of Brando’s stunning performance in that film, in which lie first taped his lines in the classically Shakespearean manner. “You sound exactly like June Allyson!” said Mankiewicz. “I want you to scare the shit out of me.” And he did, his speech over Caesar’s body making Mankiewicz say, “It was the greatest moment I have ever felt as a director.”
Brando’s book is a soliloquy; Manso’s is a dramatic narrative. He seems to be supplying some spicy tidbits just to keep the tabloid franchise: he tells about a young woman who told him she was going to kidnap him and cannibalize him. This disturbed woman was sexually irresistible to Brando. There are several revelations of this sort, but nothing about his family disasters: his failed marriages to actresses Anna Kashfi and Movita Castenada. and his relationship to the Tahitian Tarita Teriipaia, mother of his daughter Cheyenne; the custody fights with Kashfi over his son Christian, who killed his half sister Chevenne’s boyfriend; Cheyenne’s schizophrenia and her suicide attempts.
Brando wants to preserve privacy, but his refusal to give his side of such crucial and widely reported parts of his story makes him seem evasive and self-serving. The great actor might have given us a Sophoclean insight into the continuum of crackup from his parents to himself to his children. Brando does give lengthy accounts of his involvement with many causes-his aid to Israel in the ’40s, the civil-rights struggles of the ’60s, the American Indian Movement. It’s sad to see him write now that these efforts had no effect. Would his hero, Martin Luther King, say that? Manso goes into Branddo’s activism in even more detail, fitting it into the ideological context of its time.
Manso’s last look at Brando is in a Los Angeles courtroom, testifying at Christian’S sentencing hearing (he received 10 years for manslaughter and weapon possession). The actor’s testimony is rambling and disjointed, an inadvertent parody of his acting style. Brando ends his own book with a kind of manifesto in which he evokes Watson, Crick and the human genome mapping project, and asserts his belief that “the roots of evil are genetic. . . . genetic alteration, however fraught with danger, is the only possible solution.” This vision of a Brando New World is scary, though perhaps prophetic. Manso ends his book with a vision of Brando as a modern Lear; Brando says he can finally be the child he never was. But the truest vision of Brando is neither as old man nor child, but as artist. That will he Brando’s legacy whether be likes it or not the stunning actor who embodied a poetry of anxiety that touched the deepest dynamics of his time and place.
