When Do I Start?: A Memoir

Malden's memoir captures the qualities of his best performances: it's intelligent, gritty, unexpectedly joyful and utterly convincing. The well-known character actor--he won an Oscar for A Streetcar Named Desire and later became the much imitated hard-nosed detective Mike Stone on TV's The Streets of San Francisco--was born Mladen Sekulovich in 1913 in the Serbian community of Gary, Indiana. He worked in the steel mills before making the unusual leap to the Goodman Theater in Chicago and, from there, to the New York stage. In the first half of his book, Malden's early struggle to make it as an actor is interposed with his wry memories of the internecine struggles within the famous Group Theatre, among such luminaries as Harold Clurman and future film directors Martin Ritt and Elia Kazan. A brilliant but mercurial Marlon Brando figures prominently in Malden's often uproarious stories of the making of Streetcar (both the play and the film), On the Waterfront and One-Eyed Jacks. Just as entertaining, and as unsentimental, is his advice to a young, stagey Michael Douglas when the two were grinding out episodes of Streets: ""When you do shit,"" Malden told him, ""do it fast."" Malden, writing here with his screenwriter daughter Carla, comes off as a riveting dinner-table raconteur, one who pauses often to acknowledge his astonishingly patient wife of 58 years. He is, in short, a model of wit and self-deprecating charm in these plain-spoken, extremely entertaining recollections. (Nov.)