Brando Unzipped

Brando Unzipped*

Bad Boy Megastar Sexual Outlaw

by Darwin Porter

• Hardcover: 550 pages
• Publisher: Blood Moon Productions, Ltd.; Third edition (January 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0974811823
• ISBN-13: 978-0974811826

Unlike many biographies that track the subject’s life in a linear line from birth to death, BRANDO Unzipped: A Revisionist and Very Private Look at America's Greatest Actor, opens with Marlon Brando’s arrival in New York City. He was just nineteen. He wore a red fedora hat and declared, “I want to knock New York on its ass.”

Brando meant that figuratively and literally. It’s the literal part Darwin Porter highlights in this exposé of one of the world’s best-known actors. Porter tracks Brando’s life and career using the simple expedient of Marlon’s appearances on stage and film. Porter discusses in depth the actors, directors, and hangers-on who swirled around Brando in each of his performances. Through notable directors such as Elia Kazan, Joseph Mankiewcz, and Stanley Kubrick, came fame, and a cavalcade of actors and actresses seeking out what Marlon called, “my noble tool.” The names are as varied as colors in a sunlit prism. Hedy Lamarr, Burt Lancaster, Clifford Odets, Rita Moreno, Cary Grant, Wally Cox, and James Dean, stand out against a backdrop of anonymous sex with men, women, and under age boys and girls.

Shortly after sodomizing a string of fifteen-year-old Mexican boys while shooting the movie Viva Zapata, Brando said, “They have the smoothest skin—sometimes their asses are even smoother than a woman’s creamy breasts.”

According to Darwin Porter, Brando did not discriminate. When presented with an opportunity, he took it. While Marlon lived as a guest in their home, both Vivien Leigh and her husband Lawrence Olivier sampled Brando’s noble tool on alternating nights. What a guy!

Brando’s pre-New York days are detailed in flash back interviews with those who knew him. Many comments were not flattering.

On reading, BRANDO Unzipped, I came away with the feeling that the man was not very nice. If Darwin Porter’s account of Brando’s life is to be believed, Marlon loved four people: his mother Dodie, with whom he had an incestuous relationship that ended in his late teens, Wally Cox, James Dean, and above all, himself. The rest were merely stand-ins. This brings me to the point where I question Mr. Porter’s accuracy. While he verifies his accounts with second voices, many others slip in without corroboration.

Unlike fiction, biographies don’t often lend themselves to flights of eloquence and Porter’s book is no exception. The style is unadorned, sometimes even tiring.

By the time I finished Brando Unzipped I was exhausted. Marlon Brando was either a test case for a wide variety of sexual addictions, or he was the luckiest bi-sexual man to have ever breathed air.

For Brando fans this is a must read book despite its flair for tabloid sensationalism. As for his career, Marlon Brando left a body of work that only the envious decry.

*Reviewed earlier on other sites.