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.

By That Sin Fell The Angels

By That Sin Fell The Angles

by Jamie Fessenden

           Paperback: 210 pages

            Publisher: Itineris Press (August 29, 2012)

            Language: English

            ISBN-10: 1613726996

              ISBN-13: 978-1613726990

This was an unusual book for me. Not because the topics of gay teens coming (or not coming), to terms with their sexuality, or self-loathing, or religious self-righteous bigotry, or mass hysteria and false labeling of gays as sexual predators, or teen suicide. All of these have been explored and dissected elsewhere in non-fiction and fiction. What struck me from the beginning was the sense of balance, the yin-yang, Jamie Fessenden strikes in By That Sin Fell The Angels.

The setting is a small New England town. The kind represented in movies where the lens is softly focused and where everyone knows everyone—smiles all around you.

The story begins with Daniel, the only son of Isaac, a Christian fundamentalist preacher, committing suicide in a way that is startling, and dramatic.

Schooled from boyhood in the Bible by his father, Daniel is devoutly Christian, and gay. From this dynamic flow two powerful, and seemingly irreconcilable forces. Forces that Daniel could not resist, so he ended them by killing himself in the very sanctuary of his church.

The chief theme in this story is Isaac the preacher coming to terms with his God, and his understanding of that God. Yet there’s lots going on in By That Sin Fell The Angels, however, Jamie Fessenden focuses not on the infectious bigotry pastor Isaac himself spreads among his flock, nor the triumph of the town’s acceptance of a gay teacher, but rather pastor Isaac’s wrenching journey of a soul in distress toward understanding that we are all fearfully and wonderfully created.  From Daniel’s suicide, to the outing of his school teacher, as well as Jonah, another boy in the school, and of Eric, a boy who is very much out and about as a gay teen, Jamie Fessenden weaves a coat of many colors. 

Mr. Fessenden has written a book of deep understanding. As I read this, I got the sense that he has on some level experienced some of what he has expressed so well. 

Homo Domesticus

Homo Domesticus

Notes From A Same Sex Marriage

By David Valdes Greenwood

Paperback: 224 pages

Publisher: Da Capo Press (May 13, 2008)

Language: English

Formats: Hardback, soft cover, E-book

ISBN-10: 0738211141

ASIN: B005X4DNY8

The year is 1995. The place is Boston Massachusetts. The event is a wedding. David and Jason are getting married. Seventeen years have passed since that event, but the issue is still as explosive as it was back then. David Greenwood begins his story at his wedding ceremony. Like many such events it had its unplanned moments. In David’s case he discovers that, just as the guests are arriving, he’s left his tuxedo pants at home. A madcap race to get his pants on and back to the church reads like something out of a silent era Keystone Kops film. There are many funny anecdotes throughout the two hundred and twenty-four pages of Homo Domesticus, but the overarching themes of love, relationships, the pitfalls of living with a man who is totally your emotional opposite, and the real cost of second guessing another person’s needs and wants, dominates Greenwood’s smooth narrative. Relationships that last many years and then settle into the routine to which all relationships fall victim, either expand and survive, or collapse under the weight of ennui. This urge to grow in a static environment, so often experienced by we humans, strikes David and Jason almost at the same moment. For those who like angst with their humor this part of the story will be appealing.  After many years together, Jason and David decide to split. This is not an uncomplicated thing, because they’ve bought a house.  Their social, financial, and personal lives are so intertwined that it becomes inevitable that they would be forced back to living together, although not on the same terms as before; terms, that is the key word. David and Jason come to terms with not only with each other, but also with themselves as individuals living as a couple. But never fear, as trite as it may sound, true love does, in Greenwood’s case, conquer all. A happy ending to Homo Domesticus is capped with David and Jason adopting a baby. Her name is Lily. Chapter 14 is devoted to Lily. Greenwood begins this chapter thus: ‘People enjoy scaring parents-to-be with tales of the life-altering madness, which awaits them. These dire predictions have a solid basis in fact… On the other hand, everyone who described the instantaneous love we’d feel for Lily was also correct….’

Greenwood ends the book with these words about Lily.  ‘Everything I love best in the world is in that bed,’ I thought to myself, though I didn’t say it out loud. I didn’t need to; Jason just shot me one of his I-know-you’re-being-sentimental looks, and rolled his eyes…. I scooped my daughter up, gave my husband a kiss, and started another day with my family.’

 It is my opinion that anyone who writes like David Valdes Greenwood, deserves to be read.

At the time Homo Domseticus was published, David Valdes Greenwood was a contributor for the Boston Globe and a teacher at Tufts University. Perhaps he still is, I don’t know, but what I do know is this, anyone who reads Homo Domesticus will experience wry humor and professional writing that is engaging on just about every human level.

Wanting much more of Greenwood’s prose, I was truly unhappy when I read the last page.  

Joseph And The Old Man by Christopher Davis

JOSEPH AND THE OLD MAN*

    Hardcover / Soft Cover 195 pages

    Publisher: St Martins Press 1st edition (May 1986)

    Language: English

    ISBN-10: 0312444893

    ISBN-13: 978-0312444891

    E-BOOK: NO

I read JOSEPH AND THE OLD MAN in 1986 while on vacation in the South of France. At the time I was forty-six and still relatively young, and so I read the story through young eyes. I just reread the book for my blog and not surprisingly that at sixty-eight, I found the story resonating through older eyes. May-December loves. They are what many older men who find themselves alone want, and what many younger men, for a variety of reasons, often seek. This book falls into the category of what is termed literary fiction. Its emphasis is on meaning, rather than entertainment.

The protagonists in JOSEPH AND THE OLD MAN are Oswald Stevenson, as the Old Man, a college professor and prize-winning novelist, and Joseph Ross one of his students. There is a line on page 62 where Joseph and the Old Man, having first met, are walking together. ‘Mr. Stevenson spoke quietly and carefully and Joe brashly spoke with the fervor of a young man who knows he is right.’ Ah yes, when I was young, I remember well the surety of feeling that what I knew and understood was completely true, and that perhaps, just perhaps, some other people may know it too.

This story takes place on Fire Island, just off the coast from Long Island, New York. The time frame is the late ‘60s to the mid-70s; an era of my own life where memories are still fresh.  A line caught my eye. Joseph says to the Old Man that Europe will never be united. In less than twenty years from the publication of Joseph And The Old Man, Europe had begun its union. Funny how our present outlook can make our confident sense of what the future holds, utterly unreliable.

The story reads like a play. Christopher Davis not only tells us what is happening, he does it in a way that makes the reader a part of each scene. Davis takes us into his mind’s eye. The reader sees not what Davis wants us to see, but rather what Davis sees himself. I was there on the beach with Joseph and the Old Man as they walked together and discussed what made Alexander the Great, so great. I joined them as they swam with strong confidence through the ocean waves just off Fire Island. All relationships come to an end, either by way of betrayal, death, the withering of passion and interest in the other person, or just plain carelessness. In Joseph And The Old Man it is death’s scythe that cuts two people from one another. I was part of the ritual gathering of friends who filled Joseph and the Old Man’s beach house on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I was there too, when those same friends gathered to grieve and to say goodbye.

Joseph And The Old Man brims with the emotions of longing, respect, admiration, understanding, patience, yet as is appropriate, chief among these is the love of two men for one another. While there is sadness in this story, there is an overarching celebration of the strength in living, rather than in dying, that in the end remains unconquered. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to be included in a world of abiding friendship and gentle caring.

* Joseph And The Old Man is no longer in print, but good clean copies are available from online booksellers. I got my copy for just over $7, which included shipping.