For everything we know about Brando as a man as well as an actor and artist, he remains a fascination. What are we to make of someone whose life, both personal and professional, hit such dazzling highs and such abysmal lows? Stefan Kanfer answers this question, in the process giving us the final word on one of the most astonishing talents of the twentieth century.

Born in Nebraska in 1924, Marlon grew up unaffected by the Depression but scarred by a brutal father and fatally alcoholic mother. After a turbulent childhood, Brando made his great escape to 1940s New York and fell in love with a city bristling with postwar optimism and vibrancy. Soon New York fell in love with him, too--his stunning Broadway debut as Stanley Kowalski made him an instant star at age twenty-three.

Brando then decamped for Hollywood, and Kanfer illuminates his performances in early movies like The Men, Julius Caesar, and On the Waterfront. Starting in the late fifties and continuing throughout the sixties, though, Brando transformed from bright young star into something more complicated. By looking at such films as The Young Lions, One-Eyed Jacks--the one and only movie he ever directed--and Mutiny on the Bounty, Kanfer gives us a real understanding of Brando's breathtaking talent and sexual power while also giving us a sense of the vulnerable man behind the towering image. Through assessments of his performances in critically panned movies like Reflections in a Golden Eye, Candy, and The Appaloosa, an intricately woven portrait emerges--showing not only Brando's genius, but also his self-destructiveness, womanizing, constant dissembling, and evolving ambivalence toward his fame and his craft.

With the role of Don Corleone, Brando pulled himself out of his slump for his career's third and perhaps most interesting act; Kanfer turns his critical eye on The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Last Tango in Paris, the last arguably Brando's most intimate and disturbing appearance onscreen. After these, it was once again a downhill slalom for Brando, both professionally (the movies he made in the last fifteen years of his life were hardly worthy of him) and personally, as he lived out his finale in the shadow of horrific family tragedies.

With the surest of hands, Kanfer gives us the first truly comprehensive examination, not only of a life and a career, but of how the two came together to create the icon we know as Brando.

From the Hardcover edition.

1924-1942

In Disgrace with Fortune

It was typical of Marlon to enter the world upside down. The breech birth took place shortly after 11 p.m., April 3, 1924, in the Omaha Maternity Hospital.

His earliest home was right out of the imaginings of Hollywood at a time when the film industry, dominated by Jewish immigrants, was beginning to reinvent its host country. If status was denied to these rough, uneducated Eastern Europeans, observed historian Neal Gabler, the movies offered an ingenious option. The first moguls "would fabricate their empire in the image of America. They would create its values and myths, its traditions and archetypes. It would be an America where fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent." This is the superficially idyllic America into which Marlon was born.

Yet even in the peaceful Midwest, ideal turf of the Dream Factory, there were dark spots no one could ignore. In the year of Marlon's birth, for example, two adolescents, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, kidnapped and murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks in a Chicago suburb. That was in May. Detectives closed in shortly afterward, the culprits were arraigned in June, and by August they were on trial for their lives. The defense, headed by star lawyer Clarence Darrow, enlisted mind doctors, "alienists," in the parlance of the day, to establish irresponsibility by reason of insanity. Sigmund Freud was asked to aid the cause, but he was in fragile health and declined the invitation. After being called "cowardly perverts," "atheists," and "mad dogs," Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life imprisonment. But the debate about capital punishment continued unchecked, touching the plains and cities of Nebraska. At virtually the same time, Chicago crime raged on, fueled by Prohibition. The outlawing of alcohol had become official in 1920; since then the racketeers and illegal importers had grown, peddling booze to the country's flourishing speakeasies. Turf wars began: Al Capone's brother Frank was gunned down by police when he led some two hundred armed men into Cicero, Illinois, in support of ?Mafia-?backed politicians. And North Side gang leader Dion O'Banion was shot and killed by three men who had entered his flower shop after hours. The murder began a ?five-?year war with the Capone gang that was to culminate in the notorious St. Valentine's Day massacre.

Closer to home, Omaha wrestled with its own Prohibition troubles and with a more intractable problem. Since the end of the Great War, the city's African American population had more than doubled. With the influx came resentments and racial taunts. The Omaha Bee was particularly inflammatory. The paper's favorite topic concerned rumored assaults and rapes of white women by black men. The accused were hauled before judges and juries. When they failed to convict, another newspaper, the Mediator, warned of vigilantism in Omaha if the "respectable colored population could not purge those from the Negro community who were assaulting white girls." A few months later a volatile combination of labor unrest and racial suspicion erupted. Before it ended, a black man was lynched, two other blacks died of wounds suffered during a street fight, the county courthouse lay in ruins, and the city came under federal military control.

All these provoked conversation at the Brando dinner table through the 1920s and early 1930s, marking an odd contrast to the rustic atmosphere at 1026 South Street. Outwardly all was lyrical. Three children--two pretty sisters and their robust younger brother--played in the large front yard; the backdrop was a capacious wood-shingled...

 

 

"Miraculous. . . . A landmark in Brando studies."

 

"[A] vivid chronicle. . . . The Marlon Brando story is a fascinating and tragic one, and Kanfer gives it the size and understanding necessary to provide an enthralling read."

 

"Stefan Kanfer strikes an original note by portraying him, albeit with great sensitivity and tact, as a man permanently teetering on the brink of madness--clearly part of his mesmeric screen presence."

 

Stefan Kanfer's books include The Eighth Sin, A Summer World, The Last Empire, Serious Business, Groucho, Ball of Fire, and Stardust Lost. He was a writer and editor at Time for more than twenty years and was its first bylined film critic, a post he held between 1967 and 1972. He is also the primary interviewer in the Academy Award--nominated documentary The Line King and editor of an anthology of Groucho Marx's comedy, The Essential Groucho. He is a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library and recipient of numerous writing awards. He lives in New York and on Cape Cod.

From the Hardcover...