By continuing to use this site you consent to the use of cookies on your device as described in our cookie

policy unless you have disabled them. You can change your cookie settings at any time but parts of our
site will not function correctly without them.
Close

ft.com > life&arts > books >

Non-Fiction
Subscribe Sign in
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

Home
UK
World
Companies
Markets
Global Economy
Lex
Comment
Management
Personal Finance
Life & Arts
Arts
Magazine
Food & Drink
House & Home
Lunch with the FT
Style
Books
Pursuits
Travel
Columns
How To Spend It
Tools
July 25, 2014 5:03 pm

Brandos Smile, by Susan L Mizruchi

Review by Antonia Quirke

Share
Author alerts

Print

Clip

Comments

The restless intellect behind the magnetic screen presence of

Marlon Brando

Getty

A life-long horror of convention and commitment: Marlon Brando, pictured in the 1950s

M
arlon Brando, 1924-2004. Actor, expert make-up artist, bisexual sex addict, kook. Only
son of two drunks, with a bohemian mother so volatile he learnt young to perfect
impressions of not just animals and people but machines and inanimate objects in order
to soothe her his cash register was, by all accounts, irresistible. Sympathetic Boston
English professor Susan Mizruchi is keen to add intellectual to the list in this new
biography. Brando has been a victim of sexism, she writes. Because he was so
charming and physically appealing, his equally energetic mind has tended to be
negated.
In fact, the actor did poorly at school and was expelled from military academy. But in his
early twenties he fell in with a radical drama teacher, Stella Adler, in New York he did
not, as many assume, study the Method at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg who
believed that actors were essentially a breed of undercover agent, trained to notice
everything. By the early 1950s, first on stage and then in movies such as A Streetcar
Named Desire and The Wild One, the thrill that came off him had audiences clutching at
their faces, blushing like plums, not just because of his outrageous sex appeal but the
unusual way in which he gave working men classical gestures, size and stature. Elia
Kazans first impression was that the actor was subtly humorous, catlike, lazy, not easy
to frighten or rush. Kazan, who went on to direct Brando in the monumental On the

Waterfront in 1954, learnt never to superimpose any will on him, just to wait quietly as
Brando worked out a part, confident a miracle would come (Brando won the Oscar for
best actor).

More
ON THIS TOPIC

Marlon Brandos private island becomes a resort

IN NON-FICTION

The Crossing, by Samar Yazbek

The Raj at War, by Yasmin Khan

Black Horse Ride, by Ivan Fallon

The Public Wealth of Nations, by Dag Detter and Stefan Flster

Sign up now

FirstFT is our new essential daily email briefing of the best stories from across the web

A night owl who rarely got up before the afternoon and who collected raccoons and pigs,
Brando was doggedly resistant to convention all his life, and is frequently described as
unquestionably odd and very strange. Ever nervous about his academic knowledge,
he was a classic autodidact with a whole archipelago of studies and subjects, from Jung
to black holes, maps, wildlife, Judaism, the Native American, Shakespeare.
For the first time among his biographers, Mizruchi had access to Brandos library of
more than 4,000 books complete with his personal annotations. His bad spelling is
spectacular (entrieging) and his jottings in the margins endearingly keen and wry.
RIDICULOUS, GREAT GOD! And GET next to anything that might inspire him to
further reading. In his copy of The Brothers Karamazov he underlines every unfamiliar
word.
The received wisdom is that Brando rarely put any effort into his roles post-1960,
retreating between bloated paychecks to his Tahitian atoll, his great belly an emblem of
self-destructiveness, terrible visual proof of the burden of his prodigy. But delightfully
and this is the central revelation of the book the stack of note-encrusted scripts
Mizruchi examines (Mutiny on the Bounty, 1962, Last Tango in Paris,

1972, Apocalypse Now, 1979, and many others) prove how continually interested in the
process of acting Brando was. Always a careful reader and reviser, he liked to pare his
speeches back, and then back again, rephrasing, deepening. His ear was impeccable. So,
where Mario Puzos script had the Don say to the Undertaker at the start of The
Godfather (1972): Why are you afraid to give your first allegiance to me? Brando
amends to: Bonasera, Bonasera, what have I ever done to make you treat me so
disrespectfully? There is no doubt which is the better line.
Why must we require great intellect in him? Cant we leave him as he was: a beautiful
maelstrom of dissembling?
Mizruchi makes a great deal of this sort of thing as she should and her research is
burningly proud and serious. And yet, though Brando doubtless had a talent for coining
memorable epithets and was extremely widely read, in truth his powers of concentration
were finite. Incontrovertibly smart, yes, capable of clever gestures and ever-instinctive
and whimsical, but his life-long horror of convention and commitment to women, to
anything meant he would binge on a project and then suddenly lift off, sated, like a
blood-slowed mosquito. There is little mention here of his troubling use of dialogue
assistance: cue cards, lines written on the back of shirts or propped ludicrously against
walls. Doubtless Mizruchi feels that to go into this would destabilise her argument that
he cared deeply about his work though she could have very easily argued that this
much-mocked trait of Brandos was not necessarily laziness or arrogance but a further
expression of his wilful defiance, a flat rejection of any existing order.
Of all actors it is easy to believe something near-mystical of Brando. Even in
photographs of him as a small child in Omaha, smiling in dressing-up-box cowboy
chaps, his tousled hair still tipped a toddlers blonde, the face is experienced, moving.
Those strange folds over the corners of his eyes as if some force is pressing down on him
as though something powerful has touched him. And the eyes themselves, that so
mysteriously seem for all the world to be brown even when youve just watched the
1955 musical Guys and Dolls (again) in Technicolor but that were, in fact, a seapouring grey.
Possibly a little too often in these pages he is presented as the possessor of an extra
sense, able to read others with a shamanic intensity. And yet you only have to flick
through Richard Burtons diaries to learn how Brandos first wife Anna Kashfi firmly
convinced Marlon that she was Indian when it turned out to Marlons fury and
immediate divorce that she was Cardiff Welsh.

So, in many ways, this book presents a gorgeous dream of Brando the telekinetic
scholar, bent sweat-damp over his studies (theres even a photograph here of him doing
this). Still, I wonder at the urge to reframe him at all. Why must we require great
intellect in him? Cant we leave him as he was: a beautiful maelstrom of dissembling?
And yet this always interesting, addictive book (I didnt move for two days) does
repeatedly demonstrate how brilliantly Brando dreamt himself up. Right at the end, for
example, just when you least expect it, after 357 pages rather primly uninterested in his
zillion flings, bad marriages and affairs from a teenager he was seriously into serial sex
and was happy to admit to encounters with men suddenly a precious page on his
relationship with an anonymous Pakistani woman, 19 to his 39 (around the time
of Mutiny on the Bounty). The girl noted that he liked coffee with a cinnamon stick,
steak medium rare, with salad and Miles Daviss Sketches of Spain. So far, so hipster.
But also, that he was teetotal, never swore, rarely laughed and yet once dressed up as a
Western Union man with packages to make her smile.
Reading this, the actor suddenly sprang into full life for me, and never more than when
the girl adds that she always suspected that all this was, for him, a form of role-playing
of the highest order, that he was as mesmerised with this super-sincere version of
himself as she was. But, after a few months, he made his excuses, suddenly cruel and
withdrawn, like the ghost he really was, ever-concealing some great interior emptiness,
moving on to some other lover, some other film, some other self-designated role.
Brandos Smile: His Life, Thought and Work, by Susan L Mizruchi, WW Norton,
RRP18.99/$27.99, 512 pages
Antonia Quirke is an FT film critic
Photograph: Getty Images
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015. You may share using our article tools.
Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

Share

Author alerts
Print
Clip
Comments

info
Content recommended for you
Related articles

Deutsche and Goldman ignite an oil war in Kurdistan

Women and money: the struggle to juggle

Highlights from this weeks Investors Chronicle

Apple Pay: What it is and how it works

Capitalism: Morality and the money motive

Barnes & Noble: storybook ending

More exhibitions, including Jackson Pollock and Sonia Delaunay

The List: lost and found movie props

The art of nation-building in Albania

How to dress for a eurodrama

COMMENTS (1)

Sign in

+ Follow
Submit Comment
By submitting this comment I confirm that I have read and agreed to the FT Terms and Conditions. Please also see ourcommenting guidelines.

Newest | Oldest | Most recommended

LazzJul 26, 2014
"a sea-pouring grey"
Lovely
ReportShare
RecommendReply
MOST POPULAR IN LIFE & ARTS

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Magazine: The future of machine intelligence

H&H: At home with mayoral candidate Tessa Jowell
Magazine: Israels cyber spy agency
L&A: Endurance-lit long-running stories
Books: Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee

MOST RECENT FROM LIFE & ARTS

Ant-Man film review

Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee
Why do we run marathons?
Sheikha Moza
The poet-preachers of Tamil Nadu
TOOLS & SERVICES
Multimedia

Video
Blogs

Podcasts
Interactive graphics

Tools

Portfolio
Topics
FT Lexicon
FT clippings
Currency converter
MBA rankings
Today's newspaper
FT press cuttings
FT ePaper
Economic calendar
Services

Subscriptions
Corporate subscriptions
Education subscriptions
Syndication
Conferences
Annual reports
Executive job search
Non-Executive Directors' Club
Businesses for sale
Contracts & tenders
Analyst research
PropertySales.com
RSS feeds
Quick links

FT Live
How to spend it
Social Media hub
FT Property Listings
The Banker
The Banker Database
fDi Intelligence
fDi Markets
Professional Wealth Management
This is Africa
Investors Chronicle
MandateWire
FTChinese.com
Pensions Expert
New York Institute of Finance

ExecSense
ASEAN Confidential
China Confidential
LATAM Confidential
Updates

Alerts Hub
Daily briefings
FT on Facebook
FT on Twitter
FT on your mobile
Company announcements
Share prices on your phone

Help

Contact us

About us

Advertise with the FT

Terms & conditions

Privacy policy

Copyright

Cookie policy
THE FINANCIAL TIMES LTD 2015 FT and 'Financial Times' are trademarks of The Financial Times Ltd.