Book Review:

Published on Sunday 28 December 2008 20:19

'SOMEBODY: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando' By Stefan Kanfer Faber, 352pp, £20 Review by MICHIKO KAKUTANI

JOHN HUSTON said he was "like a furnace door opening" – so powerful was the heat he gave off. Eva Marie Saint said he had the ability "to see through you" and make you feel "like glass". Jack Nicholson said he had a gift that "was enormous and flawless, like Picasso".

Marlon Brando, of course. No matter how much he lost his way afterwards, how poor his career choices, how great his self-indulgence, no actor changed the way in which other Hollywood stars acted. He reminded audiences of his galvanic power in The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, but he also made many bad movies, and he would fall prey to catty tabloid reporters and gossip mongers who wanted to dwell on his weight, his emotional outbursts, his multiple marriages and troubled children instead of his achievements on the screen.

Stefan Kanfer's new biography of Brando, Somebody, is an antidote of sorts to the unsavoury and voyeuristic 1994 biography written by Peter Manso, who focused on the actor's personal difficulties – his eccentricities, his many affairs and his often capricious behaviour – in voluminous detail. With Kanfer, it's the work that counts.

To prepare for the role of a paralysed war veteran in The Men, for example, Brando checked into a Los Angeles hospital and, "learned how to live in a wheelchair, wear heavy leg braces, rely only on his arms for movement," and he picked up from the patients there "a tough, ironic humour drained of lament and self pity". To prepare for the title role in Viva Zapata! he travelled down to Sonora, Mexico to observe peasant life for himself, talking with people who still remembered meeting that revolutionary.

And to prepare for the role of Vito Corleone in The Godfather, he "got himself invited to the home of a well-placed Mafioso in New Jersey", where at a dinner for some 40 people, he took mental notes on the "exaggerated politesse" they showed to a stranger, the "manner in which powerful dons spoke in quiet voices".

Kanfer describes the tensions on Guys and Dolls that developed between Brando and Frank Sinatra, who played Nathan Detroit in that musical instead of the romantic lead, Sky Masterson, which he reportedly wanted and which went to Brando instead. Sinatra also seems to have resented the younger actor for nabbing the role of Terry Malloy in Waterfront away from him.

Unlike Richard Schickel and Patricia Bosworth, who each wrote slim, illuminating books about Brando, Kanfer doesn't serve up any particularly new or original takes on the actor. His biography remains indebted to those earlier works, and even more heavily reliant on Brando's quirky but vivid 1994 memoir, Songs My Mother Taught Me.

In "Songs" Brando recalled how his emotional insecurity as a child gave him a reservoir of intense emotions to draw upon as an actor. "It also gave me a capacity to mimic," he wrote, "because when you are a child who is unwanted or unwelcome, and the essence of what you are seems to be unacceptable, you look for an identity that will be acceptable. Usually this identity is found in faces you are talking to. You make a habit of studying people, finding out the way they talk, the answers that they give and their points of view; then, in a form of self-defence, you reflect what's on their faces and how they act because most people like to see reflections of themselves."

If "you want something from an audience," he said on another occasion, "you give blood to their fantasies. It's the ultimate hustle".