Marlon Brando Book Competes With . . . Marlon Brando Book

Here are the contendahs . . .

In this corner, weighing 2 pounds, 3 ounces and running 468 pages, it’s “Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me,” the long-awaited autobiography of the enigmatic Marlon Brando.

In that corner, weighing 3 pounds, 5 ounces and spanning 1,172 pages, it’s “Brando: The Biography,” an unauthorized account by Peter Manso, who has been digging for seven years.

Although the 70-year-old Brando’s best work may be long behind him, the two new books arrive this month--the autobiography goes on sale today--amid long-standing curiosity about the reclusive actor who forever etched Stanley Kowalski, Don Corleone and the madman Kurtz in the popular imagination.

Whether that curiosity, or the books themselves, will be compelling enough to turn both high-profile publishing ventures into commercial successes is impossible to predict.

Meanwhile, Random House is the one with its neck stuck way out. The publishing house reportedly paid Brando $5 million, one of the book industry’s biggest advances, to part his thick curtains and tell his story.

The actor agreed to do so, he explained in a recent statement, “so that my children can separate the truth from the myths that others have created about me.”

Then again, the bucks exerted their own irresistible charm. He explains in the autobiography that “I’m writing this book for money because (publisher) Harry Evans of Random House offered it to me. . . . In his own way, Harry is a hooker just like me, looking for a way to make money any way he can.”

Lots of money. Random House would need to sell a half-million hardcover copies or more to recoup its $5-million outlay. Fat chance, many industry sources predict, particularly in a fall publishing season that will be jammed with celebrity titles.

Indeed, the belief that Brando is a misguided gamble in this age of Harrison Ford and Jerry Seinfeld may explain why Random House is boasting in specifics--that it has sold foreign rights to the book in 11 countries for a total of about $2 million and picked up another $750,000 (and counting) from publications planning to run excerpts. Translation: The publisher, which has announced a first printing of 500,000 copies, is showing that it already has begun to see a yield on its investment.

Brando, in his own Brando way, plans to help the cause. Instead of sitting for a promotional schmooze alongside Larry King or Jay Leno, Brando is fulfilling a contractual commitment to do one broadcast interview by questioning himself on camera. That is, an hourlong docu-promo apparently will show him as Don Corleone, Truman Capote and even as a female gossip columnist from Texas (paging Liz Smith!) interviewing his undisguised self.

Random House says cable and broadcast networks are vying for the chance to show this unusual venture, which also will be screened at a splash of a book party the publisher is planning for New York next month. Although only a fool would promise that Brando will attend the soiree, snippets from his spoof probably will be picked up by TV stations around the world. More guaranteed publicity.

“This is what happens when you have a high-profile figure who holds a certain fascination for the public,” said Nora Rawlinson, editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly. “It’s a tough game for publishers. The amount of money they have to pay him is still a lot less than he would earn from movies, so it becomes a question of whether you can earn the money back. But I think it’s a safe bet. And because the unauthorized book will presumably have a lot of juicy information, I think people will want that too.”

Random House clearly had to be first out of the gate. It has too much invested to even dream of giving Manso’s unauthorized account a head start in the marketplace. At the same time, the two-week delay before the Manso book goes on sale--around Sept. 21--may benefit the second title among comparison shoppers.

Brando writes nothing about his children or former wives, and he identifies by name only a few lovers who have since died (such as Marilyn Monroe).

After Broadway performances of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” he would select a different one of the women waiting in his dressing room. He loved to bed “any woman, anybody’s wife.”

Elsewhere, he races through recollections of “The Godfather,” the controversial “Last Tango in Paris” and his more recent films in a few dozen pages at the end of the book.

One suspects that the publisher Hyperion will address movie fans’ hunger for more by claiming that Manso’s twice-as-long book has just what they’re looking for, including extensive film and stage lore. Mirabella, Vanity Fair and Premiere (in the October issue on sale next week) all have mined the book for excerpts, as Manso, a combative personality who views Brando as a living tragedy, waits to have his say on NBC’s “Today” and other broadcasts. First printing: an ambitious (but comparatively modest) 80,000 copies.

Reviews may be slow to accumulate because the publishers withheld finished texts from wide circulation for competitive and marketing reasons. In what may be the first printed assessment, Newsweek critic Jack Kroll this week calls Manso’s book “detailed and comprehensive” and Brando’s “compelling but incomplete.”