Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley [Hardcover]

Jon Krampner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2006

Elizabeth Taylor and Joanne Woodward were inspired by her work. Arthur Penn called her the American equivalent of Eleanora Duse. She was the greatest stage actress of a generation that included Julie Harris, Geraldine Page, and Colleen Dewhurst. Between 1949 and 1964, Kim Stanley created starring roles in twelve Broadway productions, including Cheri, the nightclub singer in Bus Stop. Then, after fifteen years of stardom, Stanley walked away from the theater, never to return. What happened? Female Brando answers that question with a meticulously researched, empathetic biography that traces Stanley’s childhood, her early training, her stardom—and her tragic descent into alcoholism and loneliness. Much more than a mere cautionary tale, Female Brando is a clear-headed examination of Kim Stanley’s brilliance that places her in the pantheon of great American artists.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A legend of stage, small and big screens, actress Kim Stanley (1925-2001) is vividly brought to life in this biography. Krampner (The Man in the Shadows) unravels many of the false stories surrounding Stanley's fabled life and career (several of which were perpetrated by Stanley herself) as he gets inside the head of the talented but troubled and difficult icon. As famous for her stage roles (Millie Owens in Picnic or Cherie the failed singer in Bus Stop) and film work (The Right Stuff and Frances) as for her affairs and heavy drinking, Stanley, an Actors Studio member and Method disciple, was often compared to fellow Methodist Marlon Brando and had an equally tumultuous off-screen life. Krampner lays out the facts but stops short of passing judgment on the mother of three who was married four times before turning 40, concluding, "Kim's story is either the tragic tale of someone who failed to tame her demons or the exasperating story of someone who indulged them and expected others to pay the freight." This well-researched account of a scandalous icon will find a welcome audience among the actress's fans; refreshingly not the stuff of tabloids. 45 b&w photos.
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About the Author

Jon Krampner, the author of The Man in the Shadows: Fred Coe and the Golden Age of Television, has written about entertainment history for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: Back Stage Books (June 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0823088472
• ISBN-13: 978-0823088478
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #614,712 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Kim Stanley, the Complicated Best There Was, June 22, 2006

By 

maggie "2dogwoman" (Pine Mountain Club, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley (Hardcover)

About time someone had the fortitude to dig deep for information about Kim Stanley, one of the greatest actresses of the 20th century.

In The Goddess, though the author does not agree, I found her, at the age of 32, quite believable playing a 16-year-old. Her immense talent made her voice young, the flicking of her hair young, the set of her shoulders young. Like Brando, whose weight disappeared when he smiled, the lines under Kim Stanley's eyes disappeared, or seemed to, when she played 16.

Kim Stanley could act with her back turned to the audience, and there was no mistaking what her character was thinking.

Jon Krampner has gifted theater- and movie-lovers with the fullest, and only, history of this fascinating, tortured actress.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Worth reading but lacking in some important respects, October 23, 2006

By 

Alan (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley (Hardcover)

Jon Krampner deserves praise for taking on the tough project of writing a biography of Kim Stanley. It's good that he did it while there are still plenty of people around who knew and worked with Stanley, and he has interviewed many of them. The notes in the back are laudably comprehensive in identifying sources for almost every statement in the book.

I want to be able to rave about this book but I found it only partly successful. There is a lot of good information here and it's almost always absorbing. There are, however, some big gaps in its coverage of Stanley's personal life and aspects of her career. The gaps in recounting her personal life, at least, are somewhat understandable given that all four of her husbands are dead, she seems to have left behind few letters and, as Krampner documents, she not only made up stories about herself, especially about her early life, she told different stories at different times. And as her life went on, she became something of a recluse.

Krampner gives an account of her early years and her family background that seems as thorough as anyone could have managed, which can't have been easy. But when it comes to her later life, there are some really puzzling elisions.

For example, on page 231 we're told, pretty much out of the blue, that Stanley has just married a man named Joseph Siegel. Prior to this, there have been only two brief mentions of Siegel, including one that does tell us they would marry. But there's virtually nothing about their courtship and nothing at all about how they met. If nothing is known, that should have been stated.

Another example: On page 256, when Stanley is in the midst of her first major breakdown, Horton Foote is quoted about having been asked to go to New York to help her. He says that he suggested Vivian Nathan should be called to help her. There have been three previous mentions of Nathan in the book, all fairly brief. The last previous one was on page 81. If she was so important to Stanley that Foote said, "She's the one who can help Kim," why have 175 pages passed since she was last mentioned?

There are several other similarly frustrating lapses.

Trivial but puzzling is when a man named Ken Pressman is quoted about an incident that occurred when, at the age of 14, he saw Stanley in "Bus Stop": another cast member fainted onstage, the performance stopped, and then continued with the actress's understudy. Pressman says, "Of all the performances I saw Kim do, that was not my favorite, or even close. Because my feeling was that her concentration was blown." This is the book's only mention of Pressman. We never find out who he is, what other performances of Stanley's he saw, or why he might be considered an authority on acting or Stanley. It's not even an interesting story. Is it surprising that Stanley's concentration might have been thrown in that situation?

Krampner's theatre knowledge is a bit lacking, resulting in some factual errors as well as statements that are correct but don't include relevant information. For instance, writing of the house in which Stanley was born, he mentions that another actress, Jan Clayton, was born there, telling us that she played the mother in the "Lassie" TV series. True enough, but in a book about an actress who often proclaimed her dedication to the theatre, it would have been appropriate to mention that Clayton created the role of Julie Jordan in "Carousel" and starred as Magnolia in the 1946 revival of "Show Boat."

Similarly, when Krampner writes a couple of pages later that Stanley was the most important dramatic actress to come out of Albuquerque, better known for "TV sitcom stars" such as Vivian Vance and Neil Patrick Harris, it might have been appropriate to acknowledge Vance's and Harris's many theatre credits. I wonder if Krampner knew of them. (It's easy to find out about them on the Internet.) On the next page he writes of a significant event in Stanley's life: when she saw the tour of "The Philadelphia Story," with Katharine Hepburn, Joseph Cotten, and Van Johnson -- except it would have been Van Heflin, not Van Johnson. These things may seem trivial, but with a number of other examples of gaps in Krampner's theatre knowledge occurring elsewhere, it does make you question the thoroughness of his research and wonder whether he's getting other things wrong that you're not picking up on.

Particularly disappointing is that we read relatively little about Stanley's working methods and rehearsal process, or learn with much specificity what went on during rehearsals for the plays in which she appeared. We do get a fair amount about "Three Sisters," especially about the disastrous London engagement, but much of that comes from Foster Hirsch's book "A Method to Their Madness." With many people still around who were in plays with her, I think that we could have learned more about these productions and how she worked in rehearsals.

An especially frustrating moment comes when a man named Randy Bennett, who was Stanley's downstairs neighbor when she lived in Los Angeles from 1983 to 1993, is quoted saying that Stanley used to tell him "stories about her early days on Broadway." Why does it seem that none of those stories is in the book?

I'm grateful to Krampner for having written this book, most of which is absorbing and informative as far as it goes. He's clearly done a lot of research and worked hard, and some of the book's problems surely have to do with Stanley's own vagaries. I do recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about Stanley.

Still, I wish that it had been polished a bit more and that Krampner had covered some major aspects of Stanley's life in more detail.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unflinching Portrait of an Enigmatic and Self-Destructive Stage Acting Legend, July 2, 2006

By 

Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley (Hardcover)

It is quite telling that the title of this piercing biography compares the subject to her most comparable male counterpart and thereby validates the sexism that must have played a factor in her mostly forgotten status now. Method actress Kim Stanley was among the most acclaimed among her peers on Broadway and live TV in the 1950's. At the same time, there is precious little of her greatness recorded for posterity. If one takes a look at her movie debut, the title role of 1958's "The Goddess", there is a strange conundrum - a brilliant, visceral performance and a serious case of miscasting. Bearing a striking resemblance to Gena Rowlands, she seems physically ill-suited to play a doppelganger for Marilyn Monroe in spite of an innate ability to inhabit her roles seamlessly. Biographer Jon Krampner captures Stanley's conflicting sense of image with urgency and delves deep into the inner turmoil that plagued the actress despite her enormous talent.

Stanley was revered by her peers and especially Actors' Studio artistic director Lee Strasberg and originated key roles in two William Inge classics, envious tomboy Millie in "Picnic" and abused saloon singer Cherie in "Bus Stop". But similar to Brando, she became a case study in self-induced excess - alcoholism, a persistent weight problem, four failed marriages, a sometimes insolent sense of perfectionism and emotional instability - all combined to make her later work quite sporadic if never less than watchable. Krampner shows how Stanley made decisions that would deliberately curtail her career - an initial studio rejection to play Alma in "From Here to Eternity" made her wary of movies, a thrashing by London critics for an Actors' Studio production of Chekhov's "The Three Sisters" swore her off the stage permanently. Despite a late career, 1980's renaissance (thanks primarily to Jessica Lange's efforts) in "Frances", "The Right Stuff" and a PBS production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", she disappeared living in exile in New Mexico until her 2001 death. Krampner has written a most intriguing book about a most enigmatic figure.