BRANDO Songs My Mother Taught Me. By Marlon Brando with Robert Lindsey. Illustrated. 468 pp. New York: Random House. $25.
THREE times in his memoir, Marlon Brando recalls women whose breath was incomparably sweet: his beloved alcoholic mother, who becomes the tragic heroine of his story; his governess, Ermi, with whom he slept naked in a moonlit bed and whose abandonment of him when he was 7 (she left to marry another man) led to a lifetime of womanizing; and a Jersey cow named Violet.
Little Bud Brando's chores included milking Violet when the family lived on a farm near Libertyville, Ill. "I'd open the gate, climb on Violet and ride into the pasture," he says. "I'd put my arms around her, kiss her and feel her return my affection."
Who knows whether literary technique or mere carelessness caused him to link his mother, his nanny and a cow? The connection through a remembered smell must be second nature for the most sensory of actors, the man who turned a sweaty T-shirt and the word "Stella!" into a howl of lust-filled frustration, who transformed a raspy voice and padded jowls into the archetypal image of a Mafia don. The sweet-breath connection also captures the cockeyed, impressionistic, disarmingly blunt charm of "Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me."
Brando was never going to write a straightforward, fact-filled autobiography. For the past 15 years, his rare interviews have been rambling, incoherent, tendentious. A reader's best hope was that his memoir would turn out like this: so weird that it's wonderful. Reading "Brando" is like opening a door on the side of his head and peering into his brain. It's a mess in there, but it's a fascinating mess.
Continue reading the main storyHis book is vulgar and funny, with sexual exploits out of an updated French farce. It can turn pedantic, with canned history lessons to back up the tale of his involvement with the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement. And the story of his private life is full of craters so giant only Superman's father could fill them. He refuses to discuss his children, and therefore ignores the shattering, now familiar tragedy that happened four years ago, when Brando's oldest son, Christian, shot his half sister's fiance to death in his father's home.
Yet in the end, the book is also touching and emotionally honest in its own twisted way. Brando hides behind a defensive mask, warning that events may be "distorted by the blurred prism" of his memory. He goes on to reveal the tortured emotions that were turned on himself and blasted outward at others. (Exposing oneself while hiding inside a character is, after all, the essence of his style of acting.) Brando's life has obviously been one of brilliance equaled by self-destruction. Now he is 70, and "Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me" suggests there isn't much self-delusion left.
The subtitle refers to the thousand songs Dorothy Brando's son still remembers. Brando is obsessed with his loveless childhood. His mother was "a delicate, funny woman" who "preferred getting drunk to caring for us." She would vanish for days at a time. Sometimes she was brought home by the police; sometimes Brando and his two older sisters searched through bars for her.
Brando's hated father, Marlon Sr., was also an alcoholic, as well as a philanderer, a bar brawler and a tyrant. "His blood consisted of compounds of alcohol, testosterone, adrenaline and anger," Brando writes. "He enjoyed telling me I couldn't do anything right." Among the family photographs included in the book is one of Marlon Sr. as an older man wearing a fedora and a thin moustache. He looks quite a lot like Don Corleone.
If another biographer were to press this hard on the idea of Brando's alcoholic parents (as Richard Schickel did in his 1991 study, "Brando: A Life in Our Times"), it would sound like simplistic armchair psychology. As the relentless theme of his memoir, Brando's childhood becomes a visceral hurt, an unhealed deep wound.
Yet Brando is hard on himself and refuses to play the martyr. As an adult, he tells us, he gave Marlon Sr. a job running his production company, a job that was botched completely. One day, Brando the movie star and employer launched into a three-hour verbal assault on his father. "I made him feel useless, helpless, hopeless and weak," he recalls matter-of-factly. After that, "I had him under control and never let him go."
He is equally direct about his emotional cruelty to women and his need to control them. His attitude on the page must echo the seductive manner that worked even better in person. He portrays his love life as complicated, funny, freewheeling and even tragic, but never sordid.
As a boy, he stole his first kiss from an adored, narcoleptic elementary school classmate. Carol fell asleep; Bud kissed her. "I never mentioned my thievery," he writes. As an adult he would seduce almost any woman in sight. (He disguises the names of most of his lovers.) One of his great loves was a woman who vengefully slept with Brando's grown son in the midst of their own long, turbulent affair.
He even seduced a crazed fan who made her way to his apartment when he was a hot young actor in New York in the mid-1950's. She was suffering from the delusion that Brando was Christ. She washed his feet as if she were Mary Madgalene. He took her to bed, discovered she was a virgin, then "felt remorse" and got her psychiatric help. It's a chilling story and he knows it. (Like many anecdotes from Brando's gossip-soaked life, this one isn't entirely new. He gave a shorter version to Lawrence Grobel in a 1978 interview, though at the time he claimed not to remember whether he had slept with the woman.) After Ermi left, Brando says, "I always wanted several women in my life at the same time as an emotional insurance policy."
He traces his decision to become an actor to his neglected childhood, too. (He mentions many fruitless years with psychiatrists; we could have guessed.) Curiously, he doesn't tell us that his mother was an amateur actress. He simply says that acting was the only thing -- other than sports and a screwdriver he once made in shop class -- that anyone ever praised him for. He is blase about a talent that others consider to be at the level of genius.
STELLA ADLER, his revered Stanislavskian teacher, taught him to act by experiencing emotions, and he says, "Virtually all acting in motion pictures today stems from her." He's wrong, of course; it stems from Brando. The De Niro-Pacino style we now take for granted, all raw nerves and subtle glances at the camera, was unimaginable before he left his brief, star-making Broadway career for Hollywood. His ghostwriter, Robert Lindsey, writes that Brando talked about his films reluctantly, and his lack of interest shows.
Still, Brando's profound ambivalence about acting is illuminating. He has contempt for Hollywood, he insists that acting is not an art, he admits that creating a complex character is too personally painful. All these attitudes help explain the bizarre rise and fall, then rise and fall again, of his career. After brilliant performances on stage and film in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and in the movie "On the Waterfront," the unloved child had all the adoration, money and women he could want; by 1954, acting had served its purpose. His artistic decline was reversed in 1972 with "The Godfather" and "Last Tango in Paris." Adored once more, he went into a second artistic slump from which he shows no signs of recovering.
"Last Tango in Paris" pushed him to decide that there's no need to tear your guts out on screen as long as the big bucks are still rolling in. In popular memory, that film is all about sex, the dialogue reduced to Brando's line "Go get the butter." But the film includes a wrenching autobiographical monologue Brando improvised with Bernardo Bertolucci, the director. Brando's character talks about his mother's alcoholism; the family dog, Dutchy; his abusive father, who made him go to a school dance with cow manure on his shoes. Though some details, like the dance, were invented, the dialogue obviously dredged up painful memories. Brando writes, " 'Last Tango in Paris' required a lot of emotional arm wrestling with myself, and when it was finished, I decided that I wasn't ever again going to destroy myself emotionally to make a movie." So much for Stella Adler.
"Last Tango" truly was the end for Brando the actor. His mystique still great and his commitment nil, now he freely admits to taking small parts for vast amounts of money. He pans his most recent film, "Christopher Columbus: The Discovery," but says, "The pay wasn't bad . . . $5 million for five days' work." Dissatisfied with the script, he writes, "There was nothing left for me to do except walk through my part." You'd almost have to be a genius to create a performance as staggeringly flat as Brando's portrayal of the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada.
After "Last Tango in Paris," Brando the sex symbol was finished, too. His always-fluctuating weight blimped out of control, and he resorted to dangerous remedies. He once tore his esophagus after eating a quart of ice cream, then sticking a finger down his throat to purge himself. "I am not a bulimic, but occasionally I do things like that," he writes.
"I've made stupid movies because I wanted the money. I'm writing this book for money," he says. Brando doesn't say that he agreed to write the book days after Christian Brando was sentenced to 10 years in prison. His fee, reportedly $5 million, could pay a lot of lawyers.
Brando's refusal to acknowledge his son's murder trial is the glaring, disingenuous gap in the book, of course. He testified at the sentencing hearing. "I think perhaps I failed as a father," he said on the stand. He angrily insisted his son was being judged unfairly: "This is the Marlon Brando case." Having said so much and more, his complete silence now seems unnecessary.
"Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me" has been racing with Peter Manso's "Brando: The Biography," which is scheduled to be published in a few weeks. Mr. Manso's book promises all the lurid details Brando has left out. A published excerpt has already said that Brando wanted his Tahitian lover, Tarita, to have an abortion. She refused, and their son, Teihotu, now 31, was born. He also says Brando likes to dribble food out of his mouth and make flatulence jokes.
Yet the autobiography is so shrewdly put together that no one can accuse Brando of ignoring the sensational aspects of his past, however glancing his responses. (Mr. Lindsey, a former New York Times correspondent and more recently co-author of Ronald Reagan's autobiography, presumably deserves credit for the book's coherence.) Brando's veiled reference to rumors of his bisexuality is deflected off Montgomery Clift. "I do not know for a fact that Monty was a homosexual," he says with baffling naivete. "Some people told me he was, but I have heard so many lies told about myself that I no longer believe what people say about others."
"I think I'd have made a good con man; I'm good at telling lies smoothly," Brando admits. That line could be seen as an invitation to view this book as the ultimate con. More likely it is the alibi of someone who has told some truths that cut too painfully. After his almost factual, emotionally brutal monologue in "Last Tango in Paris," Brando's character says defensively, "Think I was telling you the truth?" He wags his eyebrows mischievously. "Maybe. Maybe."
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