Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  Nevertheless, there were compensations. The vahines, as well as some Polynesian youths, were compliant to the point of passivity. A wink, a nod, and they were in bed with the flirter. Hetero-or homosexual, it didn’t matter; there were no obligations beyond the moment of pleasure. This was more like it. Marlon relaxed in an atmosphere of total indulgence, auditioning local women for the role of Fletcher Christian’s South Sea inamorata. He settled on a lush, empty-headed nineteen-year-old hotel worker named Tarita. This was the beginning of many disasters for the film. Early on, Tarita had trouble remembering her lines, and her scenes were repeated day after day until she got them right, at a cost to MGM of at least $50,000 per diem. Naturally she bedded down with Marlon, but so did other locals. In this, he was no different from other members of the cast and crew, who slept around more or less at will. Many, including Marlon, contracted gonorrhea and an expensive California physician had to be flown in with serum and antibiotics. Pregnancies forced some young extras to leave; they were replaced by even less talented ladies. A fortysomething technician fell for a voluptuous lass and, alongside her parents, announced their engagement—even though he had been married for more than ten years. Friends eventually persuaded him to give up the fantasy, but it was a hard sell.

  Complications continued: While preliminaries got under way, the weather turned foul. Seventeen inches of rain fell one day, and storms were ceaseless. Then there was the problem of the script. Ambler’s plot and dialogue were found wanting in character development, and new men were brought in for repair work. First Borden Chase, best known for Westerns, doctored the dialogue and plot; then Charles Lederer, who had earned his first screen credit in 1931, came in to fix the fixes. And then there was the problem of Marlon himself. He adored Tahiti and did everything he could to delay a return to California. On the very first day of shooting he told the director, “I’m sorry to see this day come; it means one day sooner that we’ll be going back to the States.”

  Consciously and unconsciously he made life difficult for his fellow performers, insisting on retakes for nearly every scene. Richard Harris, a hard drinker but a dead-serious actor, was thrown by Brando’s improvisatory technique. So was Trevor Howard. As the martinet Captain Bligh he had many scenes with the star, and abhorred Marlon’s unpredictability. “You never know where you are,” he fumed. “Brando could drive a saint to hell in a dogsled.” Squabbles, rewrites, and inclement weather forced more postponements. Having indulged Marlon well past the point of fiscal sanity, MGM finally put on the brakes. Because it was impossible to fire the star, the director took the fall. As a crowd of paparazzi and columnists descended, studio flacks blandly asserted that Sir Carol Reed had decided to move on to other assignments, and that MGM was delighted to welcome Lewis Milestone as the H.M.S. Bounty’s new skipper.

  Milestone was sixty-five, a durable Academy Award winner whose wide-ranging credits included All Quiet on the Western Front, Of Mice and Men, and Ocean’s Eleven. He was a born survivor, convinced that he could right the foundering ship. Recalling the pacifist spirit of All Quiet, Marlon was deeply respectful when they conferred about the picture. Milestone rolled up his sleeves and prepared to take over. He would soon regret his decision. The Bounty script was divided into thirds: the mutiny; the life on the island; and the fallout and fatal internecine strife among mutineers. These sections were written by different men at different times and the parts rarely meshed. Marlon continued to be troubled by the personality of Fletcher Christian. Before him loomed the image of Gable strutting in the 1935 film. Clark “was marvelous in a lot of movies,” Marlon maintained, but in Mutiny “he was just another fellow in a funny hat.” To put some distance between the Fletchers, he proceeded to make his mutineer a high-minded, overprivileged fop. That put the wardrobe department in a delicate situation: Marlon’s weight fluctuated by the week. At times his belly bulged over his pants (he went through fifty-two pairs), and he insisted on looking taller than his natural height by wearing awkward lifts in his shoes.

  All along, Marlon’s private life echoed the film production’s chaos. After reading about Brando’s current affairs in a tabloid article, Rita Moreno made a highly publicized suicide attempt. The overdose of sleeping pills could not have been more ill timed; it occurred in 1961 during one of his short visits home. She was later to describe her state of mind at the time: “There is falling in love and falling in love. You don’t want the kind of love where you feel you are falling off a cliff but sometimes you can’t tell the difference.” Embarrassed and frightened, Marlon refused to comment on the incident then or later. (The ex-lovers would meet again in 1968, this time on the set of a film, where their all-is-forgiven-and-forgotten declarations soon proved to be a lie.)

  Rather than face the paparazzi, Brando backtracked to Tahiti. From his South Seas redoubt he phoned Anna Kashfi to tell her he had married Movita, that they had a son named Miko, and that he would like the boys to meet as brothers. Furthermore, he wanted Anna and their son to join him in Tahiti, where racial prejudice was unknown. She wanted nothing to do with the move. “I know why he wants me to move to Tahiti,” she commented. “He wants me to be stuck on an island somewhere, and he can come and go as he pleases. It’s time he was man enough to assume the responsibility of being a father.” And so saying, she opened new court proceedings that accused Marlon of being wholly unfit to raise their child in any way, at any time.

  All too soon, these and other factors turned Bounty into a bookkeeper’s nightmare. Production costs for costumes, sets, and plank-and-beam reconstruction of the H.M.S. Bounty went into unplanned millions. Scuttlebutt on the picture was distressing; it was said that Marlon couldn’t remember his lines and had to have them pinned to the actor opposite him so that he could read the little idiot cards as he went though his scenes. Rumors turned so negative that Marlon felt compelled to speak to journalists. He told a reporter for United Press International that he had little to do with the rising costs of the picture. There had been thirty different versions of the script, but never a final one. He hauled out the various treatments and put them on display. “How can an actor play a character if he doesn’t know what will happen to him?” he demanded; those improvisations weren’t prompted by frivolity but born of necessity.

  No excuses were enough to satisfy MGM or its backers. An investment newsletter warned them, “Stockholders, man the lifeboats! The Bounty has sprung a leak!” By the fall of 1961 the stock had dipped ten points. Studio production chief Sol Siegel grumbled to associates about suing Marlon. In his mind the actor had deliberately delayed production so that he could get overtime pay. Siegel added a new grievance: Marlon had tried to subvert Bounty by suggesting, with tone and gesture, that Fletcher Christian was gay. Here Siegel was unfair. Going against type, Marlon had attempted to create an exemplar of the upper-class Briton of the period—haughty rather than nasty, effete rather than homosexual. Had he decided to queer the proceedings, however, history would have provided him with ample backing. Sub rosa, the nineteenth-century British naval tradition was often referred to with three nouns: “rum, sodomy and the lash.”

  The studio’s dissatisfaction became a matter of public discussion. Early in 1962, the new President, John F. Kennedy, turned to his White House guest, Billy Wilder. “When in the world are they going to finish Mutiny on the Bounty?” he inquired. The director had no answer at the time; a few months later he could easily have supplied one—MGM called him in to help with the picture’s finale. None of the writers had supplied a satisfactory ending; Marlon himself had taken a crack at it. Evidently affected by Plato’s cave in The Republic, Brando suggested a finale with Fletcher sitting at the mouth of an underground retreat. The officer would be shown musing about the dark side of British imperialism. As the chief mutineer mused, shadows of rape, pillage, and murder would move on the stone walls as the British sailors ruined the natives of Pitcairn’s Island.

  The scene was summarily rejected. Wilder’s accepted version had Fletcher Christ
ian exhorting his compatriots to sail back to England and go on trial, pleading for clemency by revealing the harsh conditions of the British navy. The men refuse, attacking him and angrily setting fire to the ship. Mortally wounded, he gives his final speech against a background of flames in paradise. By now Milestone had thrown in the towel. Disgusted with Brando, he refused to direct one more frame. Since the finale was to be shot in Culver City, veteran director George Seaton volunteered to take over for the last few days. Marlon argued for a death scene in which he would lie on a bed of ice to give him the authentic chill of death. Permission was granted. Afterward Seaton was all the more grateful that he had insisted on a clause in his contract. Like Billy Wilder’s and Carol Reed’s, his work on Bounty would go uncredited.

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  During the waning days of production, Milestone granted an interview to Bill Davidson, then researching a piece about the making of Bounty. The article ran in The Saturday Evening Post of June 16, 1962, ballyhooed in ads, and augmented by a cover showing Marlon as a beefy Fletcher Christian. If the photograph was unflattering, the prose was devastating. The headline read six million dollars down the drain: the mutiny of marlon brando. Inside were quotes from the director. Marlon’s reckless self-indulgence was responsible for “months of extra work” and millions in unnecessary expenses. Milestone seemed to gather rage as he went on: “The movie industry has come to a sorry state when a thing like this can happen.” Its executives “deserve what they get when they give a ham actor, a petulant child, complete control over an expensive picture.”

  Davidson went outside the crew of the Bounty to consult Robert Wise, editor of Citizen Kane and Oscar-winning director of the lavish but highly disciplined musical West Side Story. Wise cited another troubled production, the still-incomplete Cleopatra. Originally budgeted at $2 million, it had cost Twentieth Century–Fox a reported $40 million with no end in sight. The first director, Rouben Mamoulian, had been forced out with almost nothing to show for his time. The reason: Peter Finch, who had been signed for only six months, had left to fulfill a prior commitment. The new Caesar was Richard Burton, the Welsh baritone with “the best pipes in Hollywood,” according to his press agent, and a penchant for heavy drinking. The female lead, Elizabeth Taylor, was then considered the most beautiful woman in the world—“violet eyes to die for,” claimed her press agent. Like Marlon for The Fugitive Kind, she had been guaranteed $1 million up front, with extras to compensate for production delays. That sum had already ballooned to $6 million, with more money en route. There were all sorts of reasons for the skyrocketing costs. Taylor had taken ill, and was shipped off to a hospital, where she was reported to be near death, only to make an astonishing recovery, bounce back into her golden costume, and go on with the show. Once healthy, however, she proved even more expensive than when she was bedridden. To the distress of Taylor’s husband and Burton’s wife, the two stars engaged in a steamy tabloid affair that would ultimately lead to two divorces, a Liz-and-Dick marriage, a Liz-and-Dick divorce, followed by a Liz-and-Dick remarriage. The Burton-Taylor story became a much larger epic than the one being filmed. Bounty had merely crippled MGM; Fox was nearing bankruptcy. In an unsigned Time cover, John McPhee asked the same question of Burton that had been asked of Brando the previous year. “Does he want to be the richest actor in the world, the most famous actor in the world, or the best actor in the world—and in what order? Or just a household word?”

  The complications surrounding Brando and the Bounty, and the off-and onscreen excesses of Cleopatra, said Wise, “might well mark the end of the star system as it exists in Hollywood today.” The superstar monopoly—“the monster that we created ourselves out of fear of television—has now become such an expensive luxury and so loaded with trouble that it’s just not worth it.”

  Testimony from two important directors would have been damning enough, but the Post decided to weigh in with its own unsigned editorial. Both Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor, said the editors, should be exiled to Tahiti. After that, Bounty and Cleopatra “could be merged and sent back thirty years from now when we might be more sympathetic to these examples of National Vulgar. The only hitch we can see is that Tahiti, once burnt by Brando and the Bounty, might be unwilling to accept such important émigrés. In that case, we recommend sparsely inhabited but nearby Bora-Bora, an island whose very name onomatopoeically suggests our reaction to both stars.”

  Marlon’s response was volcanic. Not since Truman Capote’s New Yorker profile had he been so shaken and outraged. On that occasion he had allowed friends to talk him out of seeking justice in a courtroom. Not this time. “My son will soon be starting school,” he told his attorneys. “I don’t want him to have to answer questions about what a kook his father is.” They initiated a $5 million lawsuit against the Post, accusing the Curtis Publishing Company of libel. The action forced Marlon to make other moves as well. He bypassed Sol Siegel and went straight to the top, confronting MGM president Joseph Vogel at his New York headquarters. There he turned on the Brando charm, appealing for a statement that would free him from the charges of sabotage and self-indulgence. He thought his plea effective; in fact the case had been made before he entered the room. Vogel was well aware of the lawsuit and wanted no part of it. But he needed to keep Marlon happy and cooperative until Bounty opened. It would not do to have both director and star knocking the picture. Therefore he issued an official statement: Contrary to uninformed reportage, Marlon Brando “performed throughout the entire production in a professional manner and to the fullest limit of his capabilities.” The result was “the finest portrayal of his brilliant career.”

  Vogel had performed an effective bit of jujitsu. To boost his image as a cooperative team player, Marlon was now obliged to attend the openings of the film on both coasts. He showed up at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles with Movita on his arm; Rosenberg accompanied Tarita, who had returned from Tahiti with Brando, and who was then in the early stages of pregnancy. Audience reaction to the film was mild but not hostile. Things were much worse at Loew’s State in New York. When the houselights went up, someone caught sight of the star and booed. More catcalls ensued. Unlike Tennessee Williams, Marlon did not boo back; he simply retreated through a side door. The reviews were no kinder than the Manhattan ticket holders. Mutiny on the Bounty, said Time, “wanders through the hoarse platitudes of witless optimism until at last it is swamped with sentimental bilge.” The Saturday Review cited the film as an instance of Hollywood’s death wish: “Bounty and Cleopatra are the auguries by which the entire industry will chart its future course.” Though it obviously pained him to say so, Bosley Crowther informed New York Times readers, “Brando puts tinsel and cold-cream into Christian’s oddly foppish frame, setting him up as more a dandy than a formidable ship’s officer.” The British press lay in wait, then pounced: “Marlon Brando,” said the Telegraph, “sounds as if his part had been dubbed by a subaltern at Sandhurst.” Several journalists made fun of the way Christian addressed “Cept’n Blah.”

  Undeniably, Marlon had brought this on himself. Only decades later could the actor’s work be judged on its merits rather than on his extracurricular extravagances. There are aspects of his Fletcher Christian to be disparaged, but there is also much to be admired. His disdainful, upper-class attitude is lively and intelligent, and his character grows subtly from a perfumed coxcomb out of a Rowlandson caricature to a complicated figure capable of moral outrage when he sees the skull beneath the skin of career officer Captain Bligh. Like all men of elevated background, Christian is a believer in class distinctions. The idea of mutiny changes from anathema to possibility and, finally, inevitability in the face of cruelty and oppression. His life is wrecked in the process. Yet all along the chief officer retains something none of the others have: a sense of humor. At the beginning of the film he loftily dismisses the Bounty’s mission—to bring back samples of the breadfruit tree. These, it is pointed out, could turn out to be cheaper than bread itself, thus feeding the
English factory workers at a fraction of the current cost. Christian summarizes the situation: The Bounty has set sail going “halfway ’round the world on a grocer’s errand.” When the crew begins to grow restive and one of the more odious sailors rats on a shipmate, Christian inquires, “Is there anything else you wished to discuss—early Renaissance sketching, perhaps?” In that line Marlon brought contempt, hauteur, and a twinkle far beyond anything in the Gable rendition. As Mutiny on the Bounty winds down, Fletcher Christian sounds his own epitaph: “I did what honor dictated, and that belief sustains me.” The self-conscious line hangs in the air for a moment; then he adds, “Except for a slight desire to be dead, which I’m sure will pass.” Christian’s ironies are threaded through the picture; those who wrote that Marlon had no grasp of comedy failed to comprehend what he was attempting to do in Bounty, and what a bravura and emotionally consistent performance he gave. Arthur Penn would be one of Brando’s directors in a few years; he and film critic Richard Schickel spoke up for Marlon’s full-length portrait. Schickel called it a “delicious performance, wonderfully comic, and socially acute.” To Penn, Brando’s Fletcher Christian “was a terrific work of art.” They applauded in an empty house.

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  An old New Yorker cartoon pictures a human executive trying to persuade his elephant client. “It’s a fabulous deal,” he explains. “You’ll make peanuts.” In 1962, the executive was played by Jay Kanter, the pachyderm by Marlon Brando.