Customer Reviews

Brando: The Biography

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It is a tribute to something--stamina, perseverance, curiosity, perhaps just to pure stubbornness--that I have struggled through to the end of this dreadful book. This is an 1,100 page compendium of minutiae, tedium, and dirt--all rather inartfully designed to assassinate the life and character of Marlon Brando. Not particularly well-written, generally void of perception and insight, it has very little beyond salaciousness to recommend it. In fact, it is such an abomination that I have, for the first time, broken a personal rule and filed a book review on-line.

Full disclosure: I am a great fan of Mr. Brando--as artist, actor, activist, and man. Still, when I picked up this book, I never expected nor required a whitewash of his life. Brando, like many larger-than-life figures, was a complex amalgam of contradictions. He was certainly no angel--even though the unspeakable dysfunction of his early home life would have given anyone reason to develop the anger, confusion, and despair that marked his later life. Yet, in reading this book, neither did I expect to encounter a ceaseless, unrelenting campaign to lay waste to a man's entire life and art.

In Manso's hands, Brando simply cannot win for losing. He is recognized as the greatest actor of all time, but constantly denigrated for "acting" and playing control games in his personal life. He is damned for walking through sub-par acting roles to finance alimony, child support, and court-custody battles, yet doubly damned for "trouble-making" and insisting on intellectual honesty and authenticity in scripts and film projects. He is taken to task for wasting his talent by not acting enough, or leaving sets for home on weekends (no matter where in the world they were located), yet denounced for being an inattentive father who spent too much time away from home. By all accounts Anna Kashfi, his first wife, was a dangerous and unbalanced lunatic. Yet when Brando takes legal steps to gain custody of his son Christian and to cut Kashfi out from their lives, he is derided as callous, manipulative, and harsh. Manso consistently takes the side of lifelong coattail riders like Walter Seltzer and Philip Rhodes, who, with his wife, functioned as parasites of Brando for decades, subsisting on the crumbs he arranged to fall from his table of power and fame. Yet, once Brando turns on Rhodes for committing the unpardonable sin of disloyalty and revealing personal secrets to the tabloids, Manso implicitly deplores Brando's cruelty and temper, and quotes over-liberally from Rhodes throughout the book any way he can to disparage his subject. Manso criticizes Brando for contributing millions to the liberal movements that were close to his heart, such as the American Indian Movement and civil rights, and mocks him as "Mr. Liberal" for embarking on numberless aquaculture projects on his private island to feed the hungry of the Third World, and for being "used" by Indian groups. Yet when the actor finally distances himself from AIM, Manso casts him as fickle, unreliable, unserious. He even charges Brando with cowardice because he has the good sense to hit the deck while being shot at by federal agents during the siege of an AIM-affiliated group. This despite the fact that Brando repeatedly put himself in a position of actual physical harm during the struggles of the Sixties and Seventies, and even faced possible prison time for aiding the Indian cause.

Manso is so intent on tearing his subject down that at times he even lets this spill over into Brando's acting. After the unprecedented artistic and commercial success of Brando's first six or so movies, Manso dismisses all of his work before and after his comeback in "The Godfather" and "Last Tango"--including performances that many critics agree have much to recommend them: "The Young Lions," "One-Eyed Jacks," "The Fugitive Kind," "Reflections in a Golden Eye," "Burn!" "The Missouri Breaks," "Apocalypse Now," and "A Dry White Season." Yet perhaps the most egregious mistreatment of Brando takes place in the book's final 100 pages or so. Throughout the biography, Manso consistently ascribes the worst of motives to Brando while exonerating anyone who crosses swords with him. He never misses an opportunity to deride his subject, with some good reason, as an inattentive and inadequate parent. Yet when Brando does perform nobly to stand by Christian, his son accused of murder--putting up his Mulholland Drive home as bail, hiring private investigators, and legal talent the likes of William Kunstler and Bob Shapiro--Manso predictably finds fault with Brando for being manipulative, callous, and using his power to shield his son.

On another note, for all of the book's incredible detail, we learn precious little about many interesting people who shared Brando's life. Tony Curtis was a one-time Hollywood roommate, Rita Moreno, Tallulah Bankhead, and Marilyn Monroe were on-again, off-again lovers and confidantes, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Dick Cavett, and Michael Jackson were friends, Martin Sheen, Rod Steiger, Richard Harris, and George C. Scott acted opposite him, Bob Dylan considered Brando a soul-mate--yet we learn next to nothing about these relationships and countless others.

In sum, this book is the definition of unfair--one that does not begin to treat its admittedly complex subject with a modicum of even-handedness. Readers looking for more meaningful information on Brando's acting career and philosophy should consult his autobiography, Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me. For an exceedingly more insightful treatment of his personal life, see George Englund's biography. As for Manso's book, all I can say is, on one of the most influential persons of our time, we deserve better. Brando deserved better.

Manso's biography of Marlon Brando is a mixed bag. It is distinguished and praiseworthy for its incredible detail. Manso conducted an enormous number of interviews for this work, and he is able to provide valuable detail on Brando's acting career, personal life, politics, and relationships--detail that is not available elsewhere. This is the strongest attribute of the work. A problem, though, is that it is difficult to know how much of the detail to actually believe. Manso is manifestly hostile toward his subject, giving every other person in his life the benefit of the doubt instead of Brando. Manso also has a rather distasteful eye for the salacious--the more tabloid-like the better. Thus the reader does not know quite what to believe. A good example is Manso's treatment of Brando's alleged bisexuality. He is able to give names, dates, places, addresses, favorite colors, shoe sizes, and any other detail when discussing any of Brando's hundreds of heterosexual partners, but is not able to supply a single name when speaking about allegations and rumors of homosexual conduct. In a way, Manso's prejudiced stance toward his subject, and his own propensity to wallow in the gutter, marred what would otherwise have been a more valuable work.

I remembered reading Manso's book when it first came out. I was fascinated by the extent of the research and depth of information. However, one thing became evident. It seemed that, as Manso what putting together and actually writing the book from the hundreds of interviews he had done, his tone began to change. The more he began to write about Brando, the more he began to dislike him. By the end of the book, you feel that his feelings are so tainted, he should just end the book way before he did. It colors his interpretations as well. He states that The Freshman was a critical flop, but I vividly remember that Siskel & Ebert--easily the most influential film critics of the nineties--gave the film a positive review and two thumbs up. But you can't discount the breadth of his research and all the information gathered within.

I finally managed to read Manso's long, laborious biography of Marlon Brando. Overall, it's a disappointing piece of work. It seems like Manso made up his mind on Brando very quickly during his exhaustive 7 year stretch to research and write this book. And it isn't pretty. Reading this massive tome, the reader comes away feeling that Brando was little more than a very talented yet egocentric, sexist, misguided, confused, cruel jerk.

Brando, like many cult personalities, sharply divides people. Usually, you either love him or hate him. Legions of actors like Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Johnny Depp, etc, worship Brando and put him on an Olympian pedestal with no equal. Obviously, they love the man. Yet other people like certain movie critics, Hollywood producers, some former friends and acquaintances, etc., sharply loathe Brando and found him troublesome, vindictive, mean and incredibly ungrateful for his talent and for the money he was paid for his film work. Manso falls in this latter category.

It's hard to judge a guy like Brando. At the tender age of 23, Brando starred in the stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire and completely revolutionized acting. At age 30 he won an Oscar for Best Actor for On the Waterfront and was promptly proclaimed as the greatest, most electrifying actor in films. I think thereafter he quickly became bored and disdainful of films and Hollywood in general. He had the world at his feet...nothing much else to do or prove. He then fueled his main interests: food, sex, social activism and intellectual interests. To Brando, acting was merely the best way to pursue these other things.

I agree with another reviewer, for a more insightful treatment of Brando, read George Englund's biography, The Way It's Never Been Done Before : My Friendship with Marlon Brando. Englund does a much better job capturing the real Brando. Englund doesn't portray Brando as a saint or sugarcoat the man's eccentricities. He shows Brando's shortcomings and loutish behavior. However, Englund also shows a real affection and admiration for Brando.

Brando would say that few of us are all good or bad. We're "polka-dot" people. Manso, unfortunately, saw little good in Brando and decided to dish the dirt in a very demeaning way. I'm giving it 2 stars instead of 1 because I'm amazed that despite his contempt for his subject, Manso still managed to write this thing!

To me, this book is definitive. I cannot imagine another writer tracking down and skillfully interviewing more of those who knew Brando (a task which would now be impossible in any case)... or doing a better job of relating the events of Brando's life to the process by which Brando created one masterly role after another. Plus Manso has hours of taped interviews with Brando himself. My impression (and I do know Manso), is that his pride in his journalistic accuracy over-rode any feelings he had about Brando personally. In fact, he is writing about a man whose achievement is so far-reaching that it dwarfs any individual's particular reactions or analysis...and whose personal life is so flamboyant and erratic that his actions seem to stand for themselves, and anyone's attempt to analyze Brando seems superfluous. Manso scrupulously avoids cheap commentary, but he does an excellent job of connecting the dots between Brando's childhood and adolescense and what he did with them as an actor, as well as the story of how each role and his preparation for it fit... or did not fit... into his changing personality.

I go to this book when I am thinking about a particular movie or play...and never fail to find myself enlightened further about what I have seen... and browsing with fascination beyond my original intentions.

Finally, this book supplies the material for a contemporary tragedy, which I believe Brando enacted in his life, and particularly in the sequence of events in which Brando's son Christian murdered the lover of Brando's beloved daughter, the daughter committed suicide...and Christian, too...whom Brando loved dearly and tried to protect but who lived a troubled, violent and addicted life...died not long after his father did. Brando's molestation of this very same daughter in childhood is hard stuff for fans to take, but Manso had evidence from more than one source, and knew he would take abuse for revealing it.

The story was incomplete, and Brando and Christian still alive, at the time of this book. There has been another scandal, apparently, in regard to Brando's death and will, which Manso has tried to write about... all in keeping with the saga of a man gifted with enormous personal power who could not put it together in his own offstage life. I wonder that the publishing world does not demand one more Brando book from Manso to complete this tragic story.

Understandably, to attempt to write factually about Brando is to invite enemies: first among them, Brando himself, who produced a valentine book in response. Writers who followed stole freely from this work without acknowledgment...and got cheered for their books! And in show business, not only every production is open to opinion but every act and every rumor. The place to start with Brando is obviously his work. Nothing said or written about this larger-than-life but hollow man can be 100% taken literally. But if you want a book, this is the one that must come first.

There are countless reasons why this is out of print, but now that Brando is dead it might be republished, who knows.
You can find this doorstop of a book at used bookshops for a couple dollars; it was about $30 originally. Nothing but dirt, page after page (and there are more than 1000), no insight or intelligence. I paid $2 and I feel cheated. Some examples of the absolutely worthless details Manso serves up: Brando used to feed one of his dogs by removing the top and bottom lids of the dog food can, then blowing the contents into the dog's mouth. In one of his many tries at losing weight, Brando rigged up a device so he could hang upside down from his ceiling, but was suffocated by his own fat rolls as they oozed downward. You get the idea. Who cares, except people who never understood or appreciated Brando in the first place? A disgraceful heap of trash and contempt fit only for those with subscriptions to the National Enquirer. If you want to know Brando, watch his films. That's where it's at.

It was a beautiful portrayal of Brando. A rollercoaster ride of emotions. I laughed cried and was touched; moved. here is an artist unlike any now or then that literally personified the art of acting. It is sad what happened to this beautiful art over the years, but you can look back at this passionate life, and feel happy.

You can tell Peter Manso dug deep into Marlon's past to get so much information on him...EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING you have EVER wanted to know about Brando is in this book...unlike Brando's own biography, Peter doesn't leave anything out...after reading this you'll feel as though you were next to Brando every step of his life. He talks about Brando's childhood, his days before stardom in New York, his parents, siblings, lovers (most are female, a few are male) wives, and children...he holds nothing back. Another thing that is great is every single play and movie Brando ever acted in, he tells in GREAT detail of how Brando behaved on set, how he got along w/ the co-stars, how he prepared for the film, who he was sleeping with at the time, what he felt about the movie, and even gave exact quotes from the movie reviewers and papers in reference to that movie. Peter also lets us know everything about Brando's children including his son, Christian's trial (for the murder of his 1/2 sister Cheyenne's boyfriend) and also Cheyenne's mental deterioration after the murder *the book was written before she commited suicide* Much time is spent on telling us about Brando's experience w/ helping the Civil Rights Movement, as well as helping the Native Americans, and his experiences and time spent on his beloved island in Tahiti. He also gives direct quotes from Brando, as well as Brando's family members and friends, as well as court transcripts and interviews...as you read this of course you must realize some of it may be stretching the truth a little or a lot, but Peter lets you know by giving different people's versions of the same story. VERY INFORMATIVE book, this is a MUST for any movie fan, after all many movie stars are mentioned throughout this book, because Brando was associated w/ them one way or another: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sophia Loren, Rita Morena, Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and many more. I recommend this one. A+

i had heard so much about this book over the years. all great. this is a gift to a special friend and i'm very pleased with what arrived.

This is a VERY detailed account of Brando. I can't say that i even believed alot of the details in here, manso seems to make a LOT of conclusions about Brando without and supporting evidense.

But some of the details he gives are just downright boring after a while. I became very bored and skipped ahead in the book 50 pages....and it felt like i missed nothing at all: Brando studies to be an actor....Brando has sex with her her and her.

Also he seems to go into a lot of detail about the people in Brando's life. I was always thinking "so what about this person....i bought a book about Brando".

All and all, it had a lot of good "facts". I cant say i believe a good portion of it, but interesting stuff. Definatly could of been about 100-200 pages shorter though.