|
Literary Review
Cooling stars
WEIDENFELD AND NICOLSON has been publishing a series of short "eminent lives", by eminent authors: Edmund White on Proust, Garry Wills on St. Augustine, Peter Gay on Mozart, Jonathan Spence on Mao and Karen Armstrong on the Buddha. The first question has to be, therefore, why Marlon Brando? A good actor, when he can be bothered, a couple of times even a great one, but has his work really earned him a ranking with the Buddha and Proust? Patricia Bosworth, a journalist for Vanity Fair, has done a perfectly competent job, but if you're punching above your weight in terms of subject, the treatment needs to be more than competent.
Marlon Brando repeats what every movie-star biography (and there have been 12 on Brando already) tells us. A great deal comes from interviews with the star and his own autobiography, and there has been no attempt to check the truth of his anecdotes. Brando says that when he was 12 he stopped his father beating his mother. Did he? Other stories he tells indicate otherwise. For example, he remembers going into Chicago "to hunt for his mother, whom he usually found slumped in some bar passed out in her own vomit". I don't know Chicago bars very well, but most don't usually leave their customers lying in vomit, if only to please the Board of Health.
The most dramatic moment in Brando's career came when he was offered "On the Water-front" after Elia Kazan, its director, had named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Kazan compared his betrayal of his friends to the actions of the longshoreman in the movie. But Terry testifies against the Mafia; Kazan was testifying to Joseph McCarthy. Kazan's weasel words pass without comment and Brando takes the role, because "Gadg (Kazan) is good for me (as an actor)", to silence on the implications from Bosworth. Instead, we are told that Brando "revolutionised the craft of acting", but not how he did so. Brando may have dealt with the subject better than Bosworth ever could. He once said: "A movie star is nothing important. Freud, Gandhi, Marx — these people are important. Movie acting is just dully boring, childish work ..."
Strange that he should bring up Gandhi, because Christopher Sandford, in his doorstop of a book Steve McQueen, has a place for him, too. He begins: "If lacking in surface drama, 1930 was still a turning-point, with two or three events of real long-term significance. In Germany the first Nazis took public office; on the sub-continent Gandhi began his civil disobedience campaign, with all the dislocation that entailed: and in the American rust-belt Steve McQueen was born." Sandford is dazzled by McQueen. He has done a remarkable research job. He has the facts, and shows them to us; McQueen was, by everyone's testimony, a foul-mouthed, mean-spirited, alcoholic, drug-addicted, tight-fisted wife-beater. He was a loner who needed "a loyal entourage ... who came when he whistled"; a maverick who measured his success by the money he earned. He was an outsider who worked the system, and a "ferociously loyal" friend who "fell out at one time or another with almost all his cronies".
McQueen, it is true, had it tougher than most; his mother was a teenage alcoholic prostitute, his father entirely absent. He was alternately brought up by his mother, when she wasn't being beaten up by his "step-fathers", and his great-uncle, who gave him a home, but not much more. He went the standard route for such lost children, of reform school and the Marines. Then, miraculously, he found a way forward through acting. That he pulled himself out of the morass of degradation that sucked his mother down is admirable. His single-minded pursuit of success was formidable. He sent reams of notes, buckets of flowers, to the wives of studio executives; he romanced, possibly slept with, Hedda Hopper, several decades his senior. When he got to the top, it still wasn't enough. He turned down a script for his own production company because it was too good: "I'm in the business of being a star, not making them." McQueen's theory was "Me first, everyone else last". He even telegraphed his wife: "MY LOVE IS WITH YOU DARLING NEXT TO ME YOU ARE THE MOST TALENTED PERSON IN THE WORLD."
Nothing shatters Sandford's faith. McQueen beats his wives, but "always regretted it", and these assaults are simply "gaffes". He picks fights, threatens a studio executive with a chainsaw, writes off car after car, and tells the accountants they are "****heads" when they query the bill; but for Sandford, "the inner brat was endearing". Where he can't excuse, he fudges; he claims after another incident that Steve was only now "reaching adulthood", at 40. Things that are too destructive are left out entirely — there is no mention of the gay porn movies McQueen made before his break-through. The author's loyalty is all McQueen could have asked for: "Around 1967-8 McQueen had virtually saved the American movie industry." Of course he did. In those two years, the industry managed to produce only "The Graduate", "Cool Hand Luke", "In Cold Blood", "Bonnie and Clyde", "2001: A Space Odyssey", "The Lion in Winter", "Rosemary's Baby", "Funny Girl" and "The Odd Couple". McQueen, by contrast, made "The Thomas Crown Affair" and "Bullitt". Now, these are goodish movies, if not the masterpieces that we are led to believe. And McQueen, while not a great actor, was certainly a "star"; more importantly, he epitomised a type of cool. Cool, however, is evanescent. (Try to think of Sinatra saying "Ring-a-ding-ding" without flinching.) Sandford cannot accept any proportionate evaluation of his hero. His assessment of McQueen's style is sound: "His basic vision comprised a few key ideas which consistently recurred", but by adding "Nobody thought more clearly or more deeply about his films than he did", he makes one wonder.
The style is no more rewarding, and it is not always clear that even the author is paying attention. Try "the two women were friendly, but not that civil", or "there was no end to their finite but expanding relationship". When McQueen's body was taken for cremation, "It was what (he) had wanted. He'd always hated fires." And, my own favourite, "Steve McQueen was dead. It was a strange enough ending for a life."
Marlon Brando, Patricia Bosworth, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, p.216, £12.99. 0 297 84284 6.
McQueen, The Biography, Christopher Sandford, HarperCollins, p.497, £16.99. 0 00 257195 1.
©The Times Literary Supplement
Every week The Times Literary Supplement provides intelligent, thoughtful criticism of literature, culture and the visual and performing arts.
Take out a subscription to the TLS and you will not only receive your copy of the paper delivered direct every week, but you will gain free, exclusive access to our online archive. The archive contains the TLS in full from October 1994 updated to six months before the current issue. The archive is fully searchable. This means that you can use it to find reviews, comment, poetry and listings, using the criteria of your choice. It is certain to be an invaluable search tool and is available online only to subscribers.
Simply call our credit card hotline on +44 (0) 1858 438 805 or write to TLS Subscriptions, Tower House, Sovereign Park, Market Harborough, Leicestershire, LE 16 9EF, U.K. http://www.the-tls.co.uk
JUDITH FLANDERS
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
