The Way It's Never Been Done Before: My Friendship with Marlon Brando [Hardcover]

George Englund (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 26, 2004

Marlon Brando was the brightest, boldest, and most iconoclastic acting talent of our time. But while his courage and imagination as an artist brought applause and attention from around the world, Brando shunned nearly everything that goes with celebrity status. He was one of the most reclusive personalities in modern times and a legend beyond compare. He was also an equal opportunity provocateur -- a dazzling baffler -- be it on stage, on screen, or in his private life. Always true to his nature, he never failed to surprise. He did things his way -- The Way It's Never Been Done Before.

No one shared as much of Brando's private fields as his lifelong friend and business confidant, George Englund. For more than five decades, Brando and Englund were each other's most trusted ally and closest compadre. Even at their first meeting, at a Hollywood party in 1956 -- the kind of occasion where Brando was most on guard against any who would attempt to get close to him -- he and Englund forged close ties. From that initial meeting right up to the eve of the superstar's death in the summer of 2004, Brando and Englund were in nearly constant contact. They traveled together, worked together, and played together. They consoled and cajoled each other through their marriages and divorces, the births and tragic deaths of their children, good and bad business deals, and the onset of aging, concluding with Brando's death at the age of eighty.

"I remembered what Mark Twain wrote," Englund says, "'that everybody is a moon with a dark side he doesn't show anyone else.' I felt this was an appropriate hour for a book that looked at the other side of Marlon, that told of the man and friend and father he was. There has not been such a book in Marlon's lifetime, even including his autobiography, and I felt that after our long years of friendship, perhaps I should attempt to write it. I knew the difficulty I would encounter; to write about Marlon is to work with delicate glass, for he was, without question, the most complicated personality I ever met or knew about.

"I once thought what a grand time he and I would have writing the book about our friendship together. That possibility has passed away, for Marlon is gone now -- I must make the attempt to write of us alone. I summon to the task the sacredness, which, when we were at our best, Marlon and I laid upon our friendship."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Englund, producer and director of Brando's film The Ugly American, was friends with the superstar for 48 years. While he explains how he and Brando bonded over their relationships with their fathers—Brando hated his, Englund didn't have one—readers don't get a complete picture of the actor. After decades of camaraderie, Englund, now 78, finally recognizes Brando's slide from artistic icon to biased old man. Alas, a chronologically confusing narrative, perfunctory condemnation of Brando's parents and agonizing enumeration of trivial details rules out any multilayered insight. Englund prefers to detail Brando's hobby of humiliating women. He also enjoys casting himself as the actor's co-conspirator, whether Brando is farting in elevators or hijacking rickshaws in Hong Kong. When not reveling in immature hijinks, Englund chats about films (though his experience of directing Brando gets scant attention). He rarely ponders his friend's acting style, but excels at observing the Brando family's dynamics, intelligently discussing the pathology of despair and destruction that arose after Brando's son, Christian, shot his sister Cheyenne's boyfriend, and Cheyenne committed suicide. Unfortunately, this perceptive detour is short-lived; Englund soon returns to mind-numbing transcripts of financial negotiations involving Brando's autobiography (which was never realized). This disappointing book puts the spotlight on Englund's ego, not on Brando's place in film history. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Producer-director Englund provides a relatively comprehensive summary of the late actor's life and work in this manly look at a manly actor that fairly drips testosterone and endeavors to probe beneath the surface, behind the scenes, and deep into the mind and passions of its subject. In this it succeeds fairly well, although the breathless urgency of Englund's celebration of all things Brando may wear on some readers. Others will just appreciate the strengths that make it a useful acquisition for collections concerned with movie stars. Brando was a powerful performer before he became a joke for talk-show monologues, and his old friend Englund (they met at a Hollywood party in 1956) is uniquely qualified to interpret the artistic side of his pal. For that purpose, the text's high manliness quotient helps insofar as it truthfully suggests Brando's approach to his best-known and most-appreciated roles. Okay, maybe it doesn't apply to his approach to Sky Masterson, but really, what could? Valuable for its contribution to film history, Englund's book is a sincere appreciation of Brando the artist and larger-than-life personality. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: HarperEntertainment (October 26, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060786302
• ISBN-13: 978-0060786304
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,161,246 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:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brando, Warts and All.., March 4, 2005

By 

John Hechtlinger (Fort Lee, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Way It's Never Been Done Before: My Friendship with Marlon Brando (Hardcover)

This is a sad and poignant memoir and a fine companion piece to Brando's autobiography. I wondered while reading it why Mr. Englund wasn't mentioned by name in the autobiography, but that is made clear toward the end of Mr. Englund's work. A few comments regarding the handful of negative reviews on this site. Brando's legacy as a great actor is not diminished in any way by some of the brutal revelations regarding his personal life. Perhaps a few sordid details could have been left out but I never got the sense that they were thrown in out of a sense of animus directed at Brando. In fact what comes through repeatedly is the author's deep affection for his subject, a mutual bond that was forged through their shared misfortune at having self-absorbed and destructive fathers. To their credit they achieved great material and artistic success in spite of the psychological burdens they both stuggled with throughout their lives.
Now, as for the book itself. There is one chapter dealing with Mr. Englund's relation to his father that is absolutely riveting. Not only did I find it so but Brando himself was absorbed in this story, seeing as it touched on the same issues at the core of his own personality. There are also numerous other anecdotes that shed light on the main question: who is Marlon Brando, what is he really like when the veil of his movie star personna is lifted. In many respects it's a sad picture. It's the classic case of the mistreated child who grows up to perpetuate the wrongs that were once unfairly inflicted on him. As for his acting, he was able to overcome all obstacles and develop his great talent, though there's no doubt that the fuel that fired him was drawn from the well of his bitter early years.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Plain Spoken Friends, November 23, 2004

By 

MadameX "scribe3" (Louisville, KY United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Way It's Never Been Done Before: My Friendship with Marlon Brando (Hardcover)

After reading this book, I had to respect the author for surviving the friendship of Marlon Brando. With Brando's keen perception and ability to read people, he stripped friends and acquaintances of their defenses in record time. There is one part describing Marlon's encounter with a cop that is worth the price of the book by itself. The book is both amusing and sad but even the sad parts have a humorous side. I think Mr. Englund tells us more than we need to know about Brando's final days. This part is indeed plain spoken and it's a tribute to the author's writing skills that it was not offensive. For some reason, no matter what we read about Brando, it seems we admire him more. I think it has something to do with the fact he was real and human. And he comes across as both in this book written by his friend.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars It HAS been done before, November 28, 2006

By 

Snorre Smari Mathiesen "Buster" (Norway) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Way It's Never Been Done Before: My Friendship with Marlon Brando (Hardcover)

While their supposed friendship lasted for nearly fifty years, from 1956 to Brando's death in 2004 (with a noticeable break in the 1990's), I can't help feeling that all author George Englund wanted all these years was to earn information about Marlon so he one day would be able to write a book like this one. He claims that they were very close, and one would think he has a reason for saying so, inasmuch as the two talked about quite personal experiences and memories. But tell me: am I unfair to put to question whether a true, close friend would ever publish an intimate account on their relationship after the other's death, despite being well aware that the latter despised to be written about and analyzed in public?

George Englund's book THE WAY IT'S NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE: MY FRIENDSHIP WITH MARLON BRANDO opens with some reflections from the author, written a few months before the actor's death. "Marlon is an old man. I both laugh and weep as I write the sentence. Marlon Brando old? It can't be true. It is, though; he is eigthy. But it isn't the number of years that's significant, Brando could still be youthful. It's how the years have treated him and how he has treated them." The book eventually covers the first meeting between George and Marlon, the opening of their film-company Pennebaker and the filming of a movie Englund directed which Brando starred in, the lesser known THE UGLY AMERICAN from 1963. Perhaps surprisingly to some, none of this information reveals anything significant about Brando as a man or actor; George nearly fell asleep during at the opening of Pennebaker Productions. Marlon ate too much while filming UGLY AMERICAN. He was wild about women. Thing is, it's "been done" numerous times before. Fortunately for Englund, this is what many people prefer to read about. He describes Brando's relationships with women in a tasteless way, giving the impression that he did not care a whoop about any of his sweethearts except if the setting was in bed. It is no secret that Brando could be a troublesome man at times. My point is just that we need not another account to remind us of that. We have all the tabloids and Peter Manso-book to do that job for us. Instead Englund could, as a "friend," provide us with some new insights into Brando's good qualities, which have been widely ignored ever since he became a star.

But that is not what he does. I don't know if Englund intended a book of this sort, but I find it not only downright disguisting but also completely unnecessary of him to present long excerpts of telephone conversations with Marlon which he'd taped through the years; I also wonder whatever I am to do with descriptions of a nurse cleaning the actor's rear end at a late point in his life, when he was in need of constant care.

But Englund has not reached his peak yet. What really leaves me convinced that the author is, frankly, just another footnote in Brando's life who, unsuccessful as he was, found it necessary to befriend a star in order to get some status, was when the topic of the Drollet-murder was brought up. (In 1990 Brando's son murdered his sister's boyfriend while heavily intoxicated.) Englund admits that he did not attend court during the trials and never got to watch any footage of it anywhere, but when he read in the newspapers that Marlon began to cry in court, he nevertheless knew Brando was lying: "he acted. But this wasn't the greatest actor of his time seizing everyone's imagination, this was a former champion, overweight, out of shape, sloppy with his technique."

Not quite as sloppy as yourself, George. You say that you intended this book as a gift for Marlon. Sweet of you. I still wonder, though; how comes it that you actually admits in your book that to write a book about Marlon was the biggest sin a friend could do to him? Do you consider yourself an exception? Or do you in the end realize what you really are? Brando said, several times, "My friends don't write books about me." In a well-published interview with Laurence Grobel, he stated, "["Friends who write books about me] weren't friends from the beginning." Englund furthermore insists that Marlon's true motive for writing his memoirs was not, as he claimed, his children's insecurities of him, but the money which such a book would gain him. All right: what was your motive behind this thing, George?

The ethical aspects apart, THE WAY IT'S NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE is also a very flawed book on a technical basis. Although pretty well written literally, Englund moves from one time to another back and forward which I found to be very confusing at times. For example, he mentions one incident when he visited Marlon's house while the actor watched ON THE WATERFRONT on TV; it took me a while to figure out that this was at the end of his life.

A little final footnote: in the superb TCM-documentary on Brando in 2007, Englund was one to be interviewed. At one point, he recalls a story to which his wife corrects him, telling his story is not a truthful version. "Who cares about that?" he laughs, "this is Hollywood." In the end, THE WAY IT'S NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE presents Marlon Brando as little more than a self-absorbed, womanizing, irresponsible money-hunter, but while he may have possessed some of these qualities to various degrees, the man who sent an Indian woman to refuse his Oscar due to the unjust treatment of Indians in America so very obviously consisted of much, much more. It is Englund himself who ends up in a bad light. Ironically perhaps but quite deservedly so.