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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Long winded and tedious, 6 Jan 2008
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!
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Streaker Named Desire, 22 Feb 2006
Reads like a women's weekly on drugs. Titillating & salacious insights into not only Brando's very personal life, but those around him too. Descriptions of enormous sex drives vie for attention with descriptions of enormous egos. Brando seemed to have a penchant for showing off, stripping off, showing off by stripping off, and aggressively used his physical presence for sexual, professional & even on occasion it seems direct monetary gain. An absolute rebel with predatory instincts, he would have creamed the James Dean character in Rebel Without a Cause - as it was, he did that anyway, but off camera. Not the best written book, but revelations come thick and fast, and keep you turning the pages - A case of content over style.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
YUMMY. (From "Book Marks" and "Books to Watch Out For."), 14 Feb 2006
YUMMY! That sums up veteran entertainment reporter and biographer (of Howard Hughes and Humphrey Bogart) Porter's titillatingly tabloidish account of Marlon Brando's eccentric, sex-centric years. The author barely pauses to take a deep breath as he dishes - drawing on 50 years of conversations with dozens of Brando's intimates - about the late, great actor's personal life. As befits "unzipped," much of the book focuses on the bisexual Brando's many sexual partners, from his World War II romance with playwright Clifford Odets, through his affairs with Stewart Granger, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson just a few among the many men he's said to have bedded, all the while squiring the great actresses of the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, and marrying and divorcing a couple of times. But there's way more to the biography than sex: Porter writes with an insider's astuteness about the actor's movie career, critical passages that provide welcome depth. But it's no exaggeration to report that practically every page discloses a fascinating homosexual tidbit - about Liberace successfully seducing Dean, for example, but failing to seduce Brando. This is an irresistibly flamboyant romp of a read.
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