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Show Business: Marlon Brando takes the money and runs...
Contemplating his own life in Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me (Random House; 568 pages; $25), Marlon Brando, aided by journalist Robert Lindsey, strikes a pose of injured innocence: he is a sweet-spirited, mischievous man- child who accidentally fell first into acting, then into fame and finally into self-contempt, and at 70 remains "an enigma to myself in a world that still bewilders me." That observation pretty well sums up the level of self- awareness (and self-revelation) he achieves in his book...
Contemplating the same life from the outside, Peter Manso, author of Brando (Hyperion; 1,140 pages; $29.95), plays the indefatigable investigative reporter. He spent seven years interviewing something like 1,000 people, and he has, it would seem, never met a woman Brando failed to bed or a man he failed finally to betray. His sense of propriety is typified by his willingness to trail Brando's daughter Cheyenne as she leaves her psychiatric clinic, corner her on a park bench and record without qualification her accusations about her father's role in the murder of her lover...
Neither author is capable of approaching their common subject in a way that is morally, culturally or aesthetically enlightening. Manso doesn't even try to evaluate Brando's work or place it in context, relying on old newspaper clippings instead. Like everyone, Brando is a poor judge of his own accomplishments -- he thinks he gave his best performance in Burn! Without a perceptive discussion of Brando the artist, the two books are left only with Brando the celebrity. But that celebrity has long since detached itself from the qualities that made Brando worthy of fame in the first place...
...friends, and oh, his foes, he gave a lovely light! In works like A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, Brando mobilized a raw and unprecedented behavioral truthfulness; heedlessly, he challenged the blandness and piety of the times. If you were young with pretensions to hipness, he seemed to speak your thoughts. And he drove the old Eisenhower crowd nuts. But what we read then as rebelliousness was really confusion. Brando had a stern, cold father and a dream-disheveled mother -- both alcoholics, both sexually promiscuous -- and he encompassed both their natures without resolving the conflict. Elia Kazan...