by Peter Manso
Marlon Brando seems to be the only human on the planet who has no respect for his own genius. The mystery of that towering gift and his lifelong struggle to shed the burden of it is a topic that could fill volumes. At the moment, it fills two: Brando (Hyperion, $29.95), a hard-hitting unauthorized biography by Peter Manso; and Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me (Random House, $25), written by the actor with journalist Robert Lindsey.
Both books excel in depicting Brando's childhood, the fraction of his life that most clearly illuminates why his talent has never brought him happiness. "Bud" was the third child of two jazz-age alcoholics: Dodie Pennebaker, an acclaimed amateur actress, and Marlon Brando Sr., a cold, prosperous sales executive who told his son, "You won't amount to a tinker's damn." Young Brando grew up wild, unstable, plainly hateful of authority.
Accounts diverge when Brando reaches early manhood, discovers acting and rises to the station of World's Greatest Actor. As Manso tells it, Brando squandered his promise with compulsive sex and eating. To hear Brando tell it, acting was just a good way to make money, have sex and eat.
Manso makes a strong case that Brando's childhood destroyed not only his career but the sanity of his children—as evidenced by the 1990 murder of his daughter Cheyenne's fiancé, Dag Drollet. (Convicted of the crime, Brando's son Christian is now serving a 10-year prison term, and Cheyenne has been hospitalized for psychiatric problems.) For Brando—who refuses to violate the privacy of his wives or his children by including them in his opus—any good that came of his life is a sheer miracle. "If I hadn't been an actor, I've often thought that I'd have become a con man and wound up in jail. Or I might have gone crazy."
Manso's exhaustively researched, 1055-page book shows just how close the actor came. Manso's book is humorless; Marlon's book is, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. Manso brings the weight of hard facts to his argument. Brando brings little more than his magnetic presence. Between them they unlock the riddle of this complex giant, but neither quite cracks it alone.
by Mario Morgan
Once upon a time a white, middle-aged American (a former Mrs. Kansas, no less) was invited by a tribe of Native Australians to a ceremony honoring her work with urban Aborigine youth. But instead of the plaque she expected, Mario Morgan was rewarded with a four-month odyssey through the Australian Outback with a tribe of nomads she calls Real People.
Mutant Message Down Under is based on that experience. (The book was originally self-published as nonfiction, but Morgan's credibility has been challenged by critics. HarperCollins, which paid a reported $1.7 million for the rights to republish the work—now a best-seller—calls it fiction.)
For a mutant (someone who "has lost or closed off ancient remembering and universal truths"), Morgan quickly adjusts to her no-frills world. She makes remarkably little ado about trudging across the desert barefoot, sleeping on a dingo hide and dining on spiders, worms and weeds. Her purpose is to bring the Aboriginal message of Divine Oneness to the rest of us mutants before it's too late. As Morgan learns, "the importance of healing physical health must be coupled with the real healing of humans, the healing of their wounded, bleeding, diseased and injured eternal beingness."
Huh?
It would be refreshing if there were a book about personal and planetary transformation by someone who could actually write. Alas, Mutant, dripping with New Age psychospeak, isn't it. Whether the book is classified as fiction or nonfiction hardly matters. It works as neither. (HarperCollins, $18)
by Stephen King
Ordinarily, Stephen King novels are to substance what Cheez Doodles are to nutrition. But this book manages to touch on abortion, spouse abuse, health care and aging before King trots out his monsters.
This time he introduces enigmatic, spiritual creatures—entities, he calls them—who look like shmoos or Close Encounters types and have the power to decide who is going to die and when.
The entities manifest themselves in Derry, Maine, but only to babies, animals and septuagenarian retiree Ralph Roberts and his friend Lois. King even keeps the entities a secret from his readers for most of the novel's 700 pages. Meanwhile, Roberts has to deal with his wife's death, a young friend whose husband beats her, the physical failure of his elderly friends and a chronic case of insomnia.
With the creatures such a tangential part of the story, King is forced to spend more time with his characters, and he makes the most of it. Old Stephen knows, however, on which side his career is buttered: the dark side. So the surreal doings gradually creep in. King never really resolves the event that motivates this novel: a visit to Derry by a pro-choice activist that brings out the entities. Despite the dissatisfying conclusion, though, King keeps up readers' curiosity. While you're disbelieving what's going on, you're anxious to know what will happen next. (Viking, $27.95)
by Ellen Stern and Emily Gwathmey
Inability to program a VCR, like claiming computer illiteracy, has become a badge of honor among those lagging behind in our frenetic electronic age. Out of such technophobia comes this loving look at the early days of the telephone in America, when phone exchanges began with romantic names like Trafalgar and Butterfield and turn-of-the-century decorators urged clients to hide their phones in the closet.
In addition to a breathless history of telecommunications—from 1876, when 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell filed patent No. 174,465, to 1982, when the government broke up AT&T—this volume is loaded with lively phone facts. The book is also cluttered with shots from old movies like Bells Are Ringing and lots of quaint telephone artwork from the early 1900s, all intended to evoke, as we hurtle toward videophones and computerized grocery shopping, a more innocent era. "The instrument that once brought people together has spawned an industry that now keeps them apart," argues Stern, a former magazine writer, and Gwathmey, an author, and certainly their vision of a society awkwardly discovering itself through telephones is sweet and wistful. But unless you are one of those folks who desperately misses rotary dialing, you may find their nostalgia a bit forced. (Harcourt Brace, $27.95)
by Joseph Heller
In this sequel to Heller's classic, Catch-22, the lives of ordinary people are controlled by mad generals, a vacant Quayle-ish President and venal death merchants such as Catch-22's Milo Minderbinder (teamed here with Dr. Strangelove). But those lives are good, full and loving.
And ending.
Closing Time is about the death of the world and of decent individuals. Heller treats the former with his trademark black humor but, except for occasional quips, the humor falls flat. Today's world has such excesses and grotesqueries that Heller might as easily be reporting as inventing.
What compels are the ordinary people. Lew Rabinowitz, terminally ill, witnessed the firebombing of Dresden and has long known that "I made no difference. It all would have taken place without me and come out just the same." Even John Yossarian, the hero of both books, stuck at the intersection of the evil and the ordinary, opts for the latter.
To understand the novel, it's no more necessary to be familiar with Catch-22 than with The Divine Comedy or the Ring Cycle. All add resonance to Heller's tale but aren't crucial to grasping that without love, we live in a hell on earth that's about to end—and we live in it even with love. (Simon & Schuster. $24)
- Contributors:
- F.X. Feeney,
- Barbara Graham,
- Ralph Novak,
- Alex Tresniowski,
- Elaine Kahn.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
