Patricia Bosworth is an acclaimed biographer whose classic work on the life of Montgomery Clift was praised by Newsweek as "the best film star biography in years." Her firsthand knowledge of the entertainment industry infuses her writing with an intimacy and vividness The Washington Post Book World calls "extraordinary." In Marlon Brando, she evokes the magnetic sexuality, passion, and vulnerability of the icon and the man.

Following its subject from the moody Oklahoma teenager to the Method-trained star to the eccentric recluse of his later years, Marlon Brando offers a penetrating look at the actor's evolving persona: the volcanic Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, the sensitive rebel in The Wild Ones, the iconic Don Corleone in The Godfather. Bosworth probes Brando's alcoholic parents' influence on his acting, his decades of psychoanalysis, and his tumultuous personal relationships. Here, from rebellious unknown to reluctant idol to falling star, is the complex charismatic genius who changed the face of acting.

Chapter 1

Marlon Brando, nicknamed Bud, was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska. At the time much of the state was recovering from a grasshopper plague that had turned the sky green. Enormous humming clouds ate all the crops and left the fields and gardens brown and bare.

Brando was the only son of Dorothy ("Dodie") Pennebaker, a radiant, unconventional blonde of Irish heritage, and Marlon Brando, Sr., a salesman for Western Limestone products, who'd inherited a violent temper and martinet ways from his father, Eugene Brandeaux, of French Alsatian extraction. Senior changed his name to Brando shortly before he married Dodie on June 22, 1918. They had had a passionate courtship, starting in high school, and had written many love letters to each other when Senior was serving in the Army during World War I. Brando saved some of the letters but maintained that they did not move him.

Brando lived with his parents and his two older sisters, Jocelyn and Frances, in a comfortable wood-frame house at 3135 Mason. They were frequently visited by "Nana," their twice-married, independent-minded grandmother, who was known for her outspoken views on immigration and women's rights and as a master speed reader. Nana was also a devout Christian Scientist and a lay healer; in later years she would say she could speak with the dead. Often Nana spent hours with her daughter Dodie and her grandchildren, discussing history, religion, art, politics. "She inspired us," Jocelyn remembers, and Brando and his sisters needed inspiration.

Their father, Marlon Senior, was a moody, unpredictable man given to fierce rages, and they were terrified of him, although he was rarely with his family. He spent most of his time traveling all over Missouri and Iowa as a salesman. He was often seen in Chicago brothels and speakeasies; he had frequent affairs. When he returned home, he and Dodie would drink heavily and fight. It was Prohibition, so they brewed their beer in the kitchen.

In 1926, when Brando was two, he and his family moved with Nana to a bigger house at 1026 Third Street, and Dodie began filling the living room with bohemians and oddballs, as well as friends from the community theater, such as the Fonda family and the parents of Dorothy McGuire, the actress.

The atmosphere was relaxed and casual. Dodie often received people in bed, her quilt littered with magazines and crossword puzzles. Brando has told friends that his earliest memory was lying in bed with his mother, sharing a bowl of milk and crackers.

Although Dodie truly loved her children, she was seldom home. Housework bored her, and she was hopelessly stagestruck. Just before Brando was born, she'd joined the fledgling Omaha Community Playhouse, and she escaped there whenever she could, even attending rehearsals of shows she had no part in. She sat in on auditions and gave the young Henry Fonda his first job. Over the next four years she played many roles, from Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie to Julie in Ferenc Molnár's Liliom. The local critic said of that performance: "Mrs. Brando is profoundly moving (especially in the death scene). Her reserve has the effect of numbing in sorrow," and another wrote, "Amazingly realistic."

With his mother away from the house so much, Brando began relying on the loving attention of his nurse, Ermeline, who was "Danish, but a touch of Indonesian blood gave her skin a slightly dark, smoky patina," as he writes in his autobiography. At night they would sleep together in the nude, and Brando, then age five, would wake up and look down at her body and fondle her breasts, and then he would crawl all over her. "She was all mine; she belonged to me and to me alone."

When he was seven, Ermi left him to get married, and Brando felt abandoned. He began to stutter. He was a fat-bellied little boy, serious and determined, with a penetrating stare and boundless energy. Jocelyn had to take him to kindergarten on a leash; otherwise he would have run away.

In 1930 Senior got a better job in Illinois as the general manager for the Calcium Carbonate Company, so the family moved to Evanston. Dodie agreed to the move, but she resented it; she had to leave the playhouse at the height of her success. Her drinking increased. She would say, "I'm the greatest actress not on the American stage." Senior was always away. Sometimes she would wander around their new house on Sheridan Square, crying. Then she would sit down at the piano and begin singing. Her children would sing with her.

"My mother knew every song that was ever written," Brando writes in his autobiography. He memorized as many of them as he could. Today he can still remember the lyrics of all those songs: Greek songs, Japanese songs, Irish songs, German songs, American songs-all the songs his mother ever taught him.

By the time he was eight, Bud Brando was the "star" of the neighborhood, mimicking people, climbing in and out of windows (something he would do for much of his life), swinging at the end of a rope while letting loose with a Johnny Weissmuller yell so piercing it could be heard for blocks. He was "a free spirit," a friend remembers, "a real individualist. Even as a little kid you knew he was going to do anything he set out to do. And he was a prankster. Like he'd pull the fire alarm and then race off and hide when the fire engines zoomed down the street."

At Lincoln School he was very popular. He and another sixth grader, Wally Cox-frail, bespectacled, and skinny-became inseparable. "Marlon thought Wally was a genius. Maybe he was," said Pat Cox, Wally's third wife. "He certainly was tremendously knowledgeable, an omnivorous reader. Even at the age of ten he knew about botany, the names of different butterflies and birds, and every wildflower in the world. He and Marlon would hike all over the place, talking a mile a minute." They loved to have contests: Who can eat faster? Who can hold his breath longer?

Wally's mother was a mystery writer. She also was an alcoholic, so Wally and his sister were often left to be cared for by near strangers whenever Mrs. Cox went off on a binge. Later she abandoned them for a lesbian lover. Soon Wally was dropping by the Brando house; he would stay for supper and then the night. "Wally became like a member of the family," Jocelyn says, and when he was tormented by classmates, Brando would protect him as he protected sick animals and bums. He once brought a bag lady home from off the street. She was in rags and seemed quite ill. Brando had a tantrum until Senior agreed to take the bag lady to a nearby hotel where she could recuperate in a clean bed.

By 1936 Senior's philandering had become so extreme that Dodie was beside herself. One night when he came home with lipstick smeared on his underpants, she started screaming and crying, and he took her into their bedroom and began beating her. Brando, age twelve, rushed into the bedroom and threatened to kill his father if he didn't stop. It was a scene that Brando later described to his friends over and over, and he would refer to his father's unpredictable nature: affectionate and sensitive one minute and livid with anger the next.

He was repelled by what he felt was his father's hypocrisy. Although Senior was raising his kids by the "Good Book," he was a relentless womanizer, and by forcing the family to move from Omaha, he'd ruined Dodie's life by depriving her of her career on the stage; he had no compassion for her huge despair.

Throughout his adolescence rage propelled Brando: rage against his father and fantasies of revenge. Decades later, in the 1980s, with the help of his therapist he would realize how his family had been an incubator of psychological violence, and that society had no way of controlling it or of stopping it because it was a private family matter, conducted behind closed doors.

For a while Dodie and the children went to California to live with her half sister, Betty Lindemeyer, and Nana. Brando and his sisters attended Lathrop Junior High School. A couple of times Henry Fonda visited and drove Dodie to Hollywood; he had never forgotten how she had given him his start. But she was drinking a lot and sometimes disappeared for days at a time.

Two years later, in 1938, the Brandos reconciled, and Senior bought an old farmhouse in Libertyville, Illinois, thirty-five miles outside Chicago. There was a barn and stables and acres of land. Brando loved the animals "because an animal's love is unconditional." He especially loved his dog, Dutchy, a Great Dane, and a cow named Violet. "I'd ride Violet out into the field and I'd put my arms around her and kiss her. Cows have very sweet breath because of the hay they eat."

But life was no better for Brando on the farm. Dodie hated housework and hated being so isolated in the country, and the place was often a mess. Brando was doing poorly in school. He'd stay in his room, listening to Gene Krupa records. He loved playing the drums, and he carried his drumsticks everywhere, beating out a frantic tat-tat on coffee tables and desktops. He drummed so much he'd forget to milk the cows or do his homework, and then his father would get after him, and they'd start yelling at each other on the porch. Dodie would say, "Can't you have a civilized discussion? Why can't you speak normally?" and she'd shoo them out into the backyard, where they'd continue to shout. Often Brando would simply run off.

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© 2001 Viking Press, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

Tags: Biographies & Memoirs

About the Author

Patricia Bosworth's books include her critically acclaimed biographies of Diane Arbus and Montgomery Clift and a memoir, Anything Your Little Heart Desires. She is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and writes regularly for The New York Times. More