Brando Unzipped [Hardcover]

I had read the serialised version of the book and thought that it was going to be a well written, racy, and meticulously researched biography of Marlon Brando. I was bitterly disappointed.

The structure of the book is very poor. The book seems to meander through Brando's early life at a very slow pace. The author fails to use endnotes and footnotes to help make the book more readable and instead chooses to be easily distracted by the interesting lives of Brando's acquaintances. For example Liz Renee a burlesque dancer with a fascinating life story of her own supposedly had a brief affair with Brando. Personally I believe her life story should have been in the footnotes and just the part about her affair with Brando belonged in the main text. Instead we were given a summary of her exploits, interesting as they were, when you consider how many people Brando knew you can imagine how distracting this is and how tedious it becomes when every other character receives this treatment. Concentrating heavily on Brando's early life and career the book seems to stop in the early to mid 1960s. After this point it descends in to boxes with a picture and a few paragraphs about later events in Brando's life. I expected there to be quite a lot of information about Brando's children especially Christian there wasn't. Even the death of Dag Drollet was reduced to just a brief outline of events that took place. It would have been better if the book only concentrated on his life up to the late 1950s because after this the book seems to be unfinished. Considering the author's determination to put all sorts of mini biographies of Brando's acquaintances in the main text it seemed to really jar that after the 1960's the detail becomes so scant. I was even left wondering who Brando's children were exactly and to whom? What became of his children, wives and lovers?

The content of the book varies greatly in detail and I was frequently unsure where the information was coming from. I was unhappy with the fact that there where not explicit references. I gather that the author got a lot of information from interviews but even then I was not always sure who the contributor was. Even written sources such as other biographies were not referenced within the text. The revelations made in the book are not for the faint hearted and are frequently cringe worthy and the lack of referencing only made me suspect their validity. Whole conversaions were remembered at times in the book which just didn't ring true to me, I imagine this was the result of using interviewees recollections but it simply didn't seem right. Although I would not doubt that many of the revelations were possibly true it made the book read like a fictionalised biography. By the time I had finished reading the book I felt as though I had waded through an uncorrected proof that was going to be subject to a major overhaul.

One good point about the book was that it did include lots of photographs that were useful for identifying people that were mentioned in the text. However the pictures themselves were only small and printed within the text itself so they were not really of great quality.

In short I found the book to be tedious and repetitive. It was long winded at the beginning and seemed to be extremely brief at the end. Ultimately I wondered how the author had made such a wild life such a chore to read about!

I was very much looking forward to this book as i'm a big Brando fan and haven't read any of his biographies before. However this has got to be the worst book i've ever read - no exaggeration. Page after page consists of pure tabloid slander, its fairly obvious you are viewing the work of a hollywood celebrity reporter. Brando gets his kit off almost every page (and theres a lot of pages). Some of the scenes are so ridiculous that you know they can't be true, e.g. Brando in his youth hiring 2 bongo players to accompany him to a hotel room so he could do a tribal dance for Tennesse Williams and two older movie producers (dressed only in a thong) - at the end of the song the bongo players leave and Brando gets naked with everyone.

Disclaimer: I only read 200 pages but couldn't stomach anymore.

Well, as biographies go this was a real OMG! on virtually every page. It's salacious and compulsive reading which leaves the reader in no doubt that the great Marlon Brando was indeed a very bad boy. That said, many actors of the day were very badly behaved - they did not have the instant exposure of the internet and the press couldn't have printed most of their antics without the censors combusting, so they were able to get up to all sorts without too much intrusion. For all of it's tabloid newspaper style, most of the entries seem plausible although some do seem a bit far fetched. All I can say is I hope he had a picture in his attic to cover those bad boy years! That said, the book does give an insight into the complexities of Brando and read alongside other books about him such as Songs my Mother Taught Me, Somebody - The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando and Conversations with Marlon Brando it is possible to gain a very good all round picture of who he was and what made him tick. Great fun and worth a read. Brando..... simply the best.