‘I stepped on one lily pad, then another’

By his own admission, Marlon Brando lived a charmed life – so why was he so nasty? By Roger Lewis

MTHE CONTENDER by William J Mann 719pp, Harper, £22, ebook £12.99

arlon Brando, born in 1924, was, William J Mann assures us, the product of a

“physically and emotionally abusive” father and an “emotionally distant and neglectful” mother. How Freudian. This is one of those psychologically claustrophobic biographies where each and every instance of adult behaviour, the obstinacies and vituperation, is immediately traced back to childhood trauma, which axiomatically include bad parenting, hopeless schooling (undiagnosed dyslexia – of course) and an injured knee.

It is true that Brando was always immensely pampered and spoilt. He managed to command attention wherever he went, and was never censured or chastised. He was raised in Nebraska, then Illinois, where his father, Marlon Snr, was a travelling salesman for the Calcium Carbonate Corporation, and had enough of an income to employ maids. Later, Brando’s parents acquired a farm, with chickens and cows. Brando resented having to share the chores with his two sisters. The family brewed and distilled their own booze, and Brando’s mother, Dodie, became an alcoholic, remaining in bed for days on end. The house was messy, “dishes cluttered the sink, the trash was beginning to smell.”

From this picture, Mann deduces that Brando would always prefer a sloppy bohemian set-up, recoiling from ordered domesticity. He was never going to be interested in “fragile blueeyed blondes liable to shatter if he gripped them too hard” – ie women like his mother. Instead, what he sought were dusky sorts, “olive-skinned, fetching, extremely artistic.” Well, there were a lot of those.

Secondly, if his relationship with his father was animated by hatred rather than affection – and Brando did go out of his way to call him “a card-carrying prick” and once referred to him as “the golem that stomped across the geography of my psyche” – why, if he was such a ghoul, did Marlon Snr keep sending his son a generous regular allowance for years, before his career got going?

And when it did get going, and the millions flowed in, instead of cutting loose, Brando employed the old man as his manager, whose specific task was to shelter his income from tax by investing in cattle and gold mines. Though these operations “collapsed under the weight of conspiracy, mismanagement and fraud,” Brando bore his father no ill-will. If anything, he was wryly amused.

Brando’s life and career are better viewed not psychoanalytically but in the light of a comment he once made, that “I just stepped on one lily pad and then another. I lived a charmed life,” generally doing as he pleased. Acting, for example, came as easily to him as it did to Shirley Temple (“He never needed to work at it,” agrees Mann), and this may be why, although grandiose claims are always made for his talent (“There is near-universal agreement that he was the greatest”), I am never quite convinced. Brando was lazy. His apparent realism was seldom realistic, his lumbering, scratching, growling naturalism owed nothing to nature.

Even Mann has to concede that Brando was only “truly engaged and invigorated by the process of creating a character” a handful of times: Stanley Kowalski, proud and vain, waddling like King Kong in A Streetcar Named Desire; Terry Malloy, the punch-drunk antihero and “contender” in On the Waterfront; and the deadly Vito Corleone in The Godfather.

For the rest, there was a lot of artifice and stylisation. Brando was as mannered as a figure in the Bunraku Puppet Theatre, and he was in fact much drawn to oriental and exotic subjectmatter (The Teahouse of the August Moon, Sayonara, even A Countess from Hong Kong). His house in Mulholland Drive had a teak Japanese interior. He married a Polynesian. After making Mutiny on the Bounty in 1962, Brando bought an atoll in the South Seas, because he adored the “hordes of teenaged Tahitian girls” who could reliably be found there.

Brando’s confident physical appeal, “the whole sexy motorcycle bad-boy image,” was God-given – no gym or surgical enhancements were involved. Women flung themselves at him, so he flung them away. “If women stayed around too long, they became irritants,” we are told. The actress Rita Moreno, who tried to be his “little geisha,” was so affected by Brando’s “manipulation and deceit” that she attempted suicide. Anna Kashfi, his Indian-born first wife, who was not the Hindu princess Brando had believed but a former assistant to a Cardiff butcher, was driven to hysterical outbursts –

Most of his acting was as mannered as the Bunraku Puppet Theatre

battering on the door, coming at her husband with a knife.

Brando was always boasting about his sexual adventures – “I screwed her dog-fashion while she was on the telephone.” He was a hedonist, even growing fat for pleasure. Eating was a deliberate “act of rebellion”, writes Mann, and “food was always a friend”. Possibly his only friend. At the Shattuck Military Academy in Minnesota, and at drama school in New York, Brando was too much of a bully to know what actual companionship entailed. He was one of those practical jokers who made people think he’d jumped out of the window – he’d be hiding on a cement parapet; he’d phone people up in disguised voices; he’d leave drawing pins on chairs; he’d remove hinges from doors. Crossed, criticised or disagreed with, he punched walls and staircase bannisters, “sending pieces of wood flying in all directions”. At his wedding reception, Kashfi said, “he entertained us by extinguishing cigarettes on the back of his hand.”

If he thought he could do no wrong, it didn’t help Brando’s conception of humility when his drama tutor, Stella Adler, told everyone, “Wait till you meet this kid. This is a genius.” Brando’s reaction was to dismiss all actors as pretentious nobodies, “as phoneys, narcissistic…” He affected to despise Hollywood – “everybody pretending to like each other and praising each other, yet full of resentment deep down.” When he won the Oscar for The Godfather, he sent an Apache actress to collect the statuette in his stead, outraging John Wayne.

Brando had a reputation for behaving badly with directors; inevitably, Mann thinks this was because they were “male authority figures who were trying to manage him” – shades of his father, yet again? When, in 1961, Brando directed a film of his own, One-Eyed Jacks, into which he “poured his life blood”, he walked away from the incoherent result, leaving it to the studio to edit it.

Though he’d said “after you’ve got enough, money doesn’t matter,” all that came to matter to Brando was big bucks. Random House paid $5 million for an autobiography, which turned out to be a boring tirade against racism and injustice – and his “rambling banter” on talk shows, to publicise it, was also a big yawn. As Jor-El of Krypton, in Superman, he was paid $3 million for two minutes of screen time.

“I led a wasted life,” Brando concluded. Instead of playing

Lear, he became him. “Misery has come to my house,” he howled.

His son Christian, who died aged 49, and had been since childhood “a basket-case of emotional disorders,” shot dead the father of his half-sister’s baby. That sister, Cheyenne, hanged herself in 1995, aged 25. Brando himself, morbidly obese, died in 2004 from diabetes, pulmonary fibrosis and liver cancer.

Why are movie biographies often so dire? This zigzag opus is hard to follow. Some films are dealt with in obsessive detail, others go unmentioned – there is hardly anything on Apocalypse Now. Mann’s chronology is confused to such an extent that I wondered whether a compositor had randomly shuffled the manuscript pages in a fit. I did laugh, however, to learn that Brando once rigged up a remotecontrol fart machine, which went off whenever Robert De Niro sat on a settee.

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If criticised, he would punch walls and bannisters, sending bits of wood flying