Summary

Stefan Kanfer, acclaimed biographer of Lucille Ball and Groucho Marx, now gives us the definitive life of Marlon Brando, seamlessly intertwining the man and the work to give us a stunning and illuminating appraisal. Beginning with Brando's turbulent childhood, Kanfer follows him to New York where he made his star-making Broadway debut as Stanley Kowalski inA Streetcar Named Desireat age twenty-three. Brando then decamped for Hollywood, and Kanfer looks at each of Brando's films over the yearsfromThe Menin 1950 toThe Scorein 2001offering deft and insightful analysis of his sometimes brilliant, sometimes baffling performances. And, finally, Kanfer brings into focus Brando's self-destructiveness, ambivalence toward his craft, and the tragedies that shadowed his last years.

Author Biography

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 edition.

Introduction	p. ix
In Disgrace with Fortune (1924-1942)	p. 3
This Puppy Thing (1943-1946)	p. 30
Make Them Wonder (1947-1950)	p. 59
The Illusion Is Complete (1950-1953)	p. 86
That Streetcar Man Has a New Desire! (1954-1955)	p. 114
A Mess Pretty Much (1956-1959)	p. 142
Stockholders, Man the Lifeboats! (1960-1963)	p. 169
The Snake in Eden (1963-1967)	p. 192
Eleven Turkeys in a Row (1967-1970)	p. 219
How Did God Go About His Work? (1971-1972)	p. 239
An Intense and Hopeless Despair (1973-1990)	p. 264
Messenger of Misery (1990-2004)	p. 286
The King Who Would Be Man	p. 312
Appendix	p. 325
Acknowledgments	p. 327
Bibliography	p. 329
Index	p. 333
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpts

1

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. TheOmaha Beewas 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, theMediator, 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 house redolent of fresh-cut hay, wild flowers, and smoke from a wood-burning stove. In the next decade Andy Hardy movies would take place in just such an environment.

But there was a

Excerpted from Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando by Stefan Kanfer
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