This is right for so many reasons.

I've been reading Brando biographies again, which is nothing sort of usual around these parts. This week it's Patricia Bosworth's Marlon Brando.  I've found a lot of speculation on screen legends in general (and Brando in particular) gets caught up in wading through the pile-up of hard-to-verify anecdotes that gather up over the crawling decades, trying to separate man/woman from myth. 

I don't think that should ever be a factor with Brando. If anything, my excessive reading on this hot mess dandy has taught me that I don't really believe there IS a separation to be found. Yes, I'm pretty sure Brando actually was that unbelievable. 

Any Brando biography worth its salt will deliver on this front, serving up an outstanding anecdote or two which all defy explanation, rationalization, and beg to be proven wrong. But you can't. Brando was a Bad News Bear of the first degree.

I like this one: violence, bitchiness and the triumph of Brando (despite himself). Brando had been cast as Stanley for Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway. The role was originally written for a much older man, but Tennessee fell head first for Brando's vicious portrayal and practically gift-wrapped the role for him (he was known to admonish director Elia Kazan to just "Let Marlon be."). Rehearsals began in the New Amsterdam Roof Theater and newcomer Brando was a bit of a loose cannon.... 

…Brando’s instincts took him all sorts of places in rehearsals, as in the famous birthday party scene in which he stormed from the table, then slammed his hand down on the plate, smashing it to smithereens. As he delivered his line, My place is cleared, you want me to clear your places?” he swept the rest of the plates from the table with a great crash. The first time he played the scene full out, he had to keep picking shards of china from his bloodied fingers, but he spoke his lines anyway. He was totally into his character.

On opening night in New Haven the show was a technical shambles. The complex lighting didn't work. Music cues were off. But when Brando entered as Blanche DuBois' brutal executioner, in his jeans and t-shirt clutching his bloody package of meat, the audience gasped.

[…]

 [After the show] playwright Thornton Wilder, author of The Skin of Our Teeth…primly gave his critique of Streetcar: it was negative. He maintained that the play was based on a totally false premise. No southern belle as genteel as Stella would marry a brute like Stanley, let alone succumb to his sexual violence.

Tennessee Williams listened politely for as long as he could, but when Wilder was out of earshot, he murmured, "That man has never had a good lay!"

Ha.  Outstanding.