Somebody

by Stefan Kanfer

  A Dry White Season was based on André Brink’s 1979 antiapartheid novel. The thirty-one-year-old black director, Euzhan Palcy, was anxious to have Brando in the small, vital role of Ian McKenzie, an eccentric, righteous barrister. But when they met, she felt compelled to warn Marlon that his customary fee was beyond the scope of this low-budget independent movie. In a rare, quixotic gesture, the man who was in the Marlon Brando business suddenly offered his services gratis. His Screen Actors Guild minimum of $4,000 would be donated to the antiapartheid cause.

  Released in 1989, Palcy’s tragedy of South African racism was treated with great respect. In the National Review John Simon could not avoid carping, but went out of his way to praise “the presence of Brando, aptly pronounced [Orson] Wellesian in both flamboyance and girth, and, despite a somewhat hokey British accent and the signature slow pacing, easily the best thing in the film.” Variety singled out a line in the script, “Justice and law could be described as distant cousins—not on speaking terms,” and pointed out, “Those words are spoken by Ian McKenzie (Marlon Brando), rising with a world-weary magnificence to the role of a prominent human rights attorney whose idealism has been battered into resignation. Sarcasm is his only tactic, the moral high ground his only refuge as McKenzie proves Captain Stolz (Jürgen Prochnow) a murderer, but loses his case before a judge who makes no effort to hide his disgraceful bias.” The role won Marlon another Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Supporting Actor. As expected, he stayed away from the Oscar ceremonies. Rather than recognizing a job well done, he said, the statuettes were “part of the sickness in America, that you have to think in terms of who wins, who loses, who’s good, who’s bad, who’s best, who’s worst…I don’t like to think that way. Everybody has their own value in different ways, and I don’t like to think who’s the best at this. I mean, what’s the point of it?”

  The protests went on as voluble as ever, but there was no more talk of a final film. Marlon considered The Freshman, a whimsical Godfather send-up costarring a green Matthew Broderick. For reassurance he asked the director, Andrew Bergman, to come to Tahiti. “It was just surreal,” Bergman was to tell a reporter from Interview. “For four days we never discussed the movie. We discussed the Holocaust, music, everything but.” Ultimately Brando said, “Well, you know, I’ve been thinking about it. I can only do it if I think of it as some version of the Don.” Bergman had an inspiration: “You’ll be the guy the Don was based on. You’ll be the real guy.” Replied Marlon, “That works for me.” And the deal was done.

  The first day of shooting was complete bedlam. Part of the movie was shot on location, and when reporters heard that Marlon Brando was working in Greenwich Village they flooded Little Italy to cover the story. Marlon looked ready to explode. Glancing around anxiously, said Bergman, “I asked, ‘How are you going to get out of here without being photographed?’ And he went into the trunk of his car—which was no easy task—and this guy drove him out.” Bergman was awed by offscreen Brando as well as the onscreen one: “He loved De Niro when De Niro was fat in Raging Bull. He said, ‘Just the way he moved…’ And he kind of leaned over and picked up a chair with his arm, like a fat man would. He became the fat version of Jake La Motta in that instant. In the seventeenth century he would have been burned as a witch.” Filming should have been a pleasure from then on, but, as always, Marlon lived by the motto Why have it simple when you can have it complicated? He had taken up with his young maid Maria Ruiz, and in May 1989 she gave birth to their daughter, Ninna Priscilla. As if there were not enough parental responsibilities on his roster, aside from the continuing problems with Christian, there was more trouble brewing. One night in Tahiti Cheyenne borrowed Teihotu’s car, flooring the gas pedal. Whether she was driving under the influence of drugs, as police suspected, or merely reckless, she ran off the road. The accident was horrific. Marlon arranged to have his daughter flown to Los Angeles, where she underwent operations for massive injuries to her face and head. He left the Freshman set, now in Toronto, and returned shaken and abstracted. Bergman covered for him. Laurence Olivier had recently died after long battles with both cancer and a muscle disorder, and the writer/director told reporters that Brando now had no rivals, and that “he contributes continually to the movie, and he will make you laugh.” That Marlon did, but at considerable cost. Disoriented and miserable, he denigrated The Freshman just before it opened in 1990. “I’m retiring…. I wish I hadn’t finished with a stinker.” Recalled Bergman, “He didn’t realize he was hurting everybody in the movie. I think he’d had a really good time and it went against everything he’d taught himself to believe. Somehow he had to foul his nest. He was an unhappy person and a tortured soul. He paid for that gift many times over.” Bergman reminded Marlon of what was at stake and got through to him. Contritely, the star went public with a revised view of The Freshman: “There is no substitute for laughter in this frightened and endlessly twisting world.” They were empty words. For Marlon’s personal world was about to become more frightening, and more twisted, than any filmmaker could possibly have imagined. This time neither laughter nor money would set things right.

  1990–2004

  Messenger of Misery

  1

  The torment was reduced to eight words: “The messenger of misery has visited my house.” Marlon first used that phrase on the night of May 16, 1990, in a frenzied telephone message to the activist lawyer William Kunstler, whom he had known since the days of the civil rights marches. It was to be repeated when Los Angeles reporters gathered at his front door the next morning. A man had been shot to death in the Brando house only hours before. The victim was twenty-eight-year-old Dag Drollet, scion of a prominent Tahitian family. The killer was thirty-two-year-old Christian Brando.

  Cheyenne and Dag had been staying with Marlon. That night she and her half brother ate at the Musso & Frank Grill, and as Christian downed glass after glass of malt liquor, she related a tale of woe. Her boyfriend had beaten her in Tahiti. The other day he attacked her right here in the Brando house. She was afraid to be in the same bedroom with him. When Cheyenne and Christian returned from the grill, she went to bed alone. Fortified by alcohol, Christian went to his own room, then prowled the halls looking for Dag. He found him in the den, watching television. Christian aimed a .45-caliber pistol at the houseguest and demanded, “Are you slapping around my sister?” According to the shooter’s account, he was about to leave, arm outstretched in a threatening manner, when the gun accidentally went off. A single slug hit Dag in the head. The confrontation had taken place in seconds, and when it was done the shooter bent over the body in shock. “I just sat there and watched the life go out of this guy.” Marlon heard the report of the gun, dashed to the den, and tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He was too late.

  Christian wanted to flee the crime scene; Marlon spoke forcefully but calmly, talking the young man down from his drunken hysteria, convincing him to stay, speak to the police, tell them that it was misfortune, not murder. The advice was sound; there was nowhere for Christian to run. He would surely have been captured within twenty-four hours, looking all the worse for having fled. By the time the police arrived, he had worked out a plausible account. As blood samples were taken, he told patrolman Steve Cunningham, “I shot him, man. But not on purpose. We were both in a fit of rage. Please believe me, man. I wouldn’t do it in my father’s house.” Los Angeles police detective Steve Osti was next to interview Christian. The perpetrator, still manic, with a blood alcohol content almost twice the legal limit for a drunken-driving charge, ran off at the mouth. “I did it because he hurt my sister. He was laying on the couch. He was fighting with my sister. I said, ‘You leave my sister alone.’ We were both in a rage. The fucking gun went off.” That testimony would have been damning enough, but Christian added, “Man, death is too good for the guy.”

  Perhaps the saddest part of all was that Dag was a physically imposing but gentle man. Cheyenne had invented the tale of abuse. Her entire life had
been a shuttle between illusion and fact, drugs and sobriety. She adored her father for his glamour and generosity; she despised him because she had no identity except as the daughter of Marlon Brando. Pursuing a modeling career, she boasted, “I am the most beautiful girl in Polynesia, the most intelligent and also the richest because of my father” she had no self-confidence at all. She said she was strong enough to go it alone; eight months pregnant, she lived in fear that Dag was about to leave her. Aware of his daughter’s ever-precarious state of mind, Marlon had finally persuaded Cheyenne and Dag to leave Tahiti, stay at his house, take it easy, let somebody else do the cooking and make the bed until the baby arrived. In Christian Brando: A Hollywood Family Tragedy, Mark Gribben reports that by the time Dag accepted the offer, he was rapidly losing patience with his girlfriend’s bipolar moods. The words of his father haunted him: “Stop this life with Cheyenne because she’s not balanced. You will have great difficulties—perhaps suicide, perhaps she can kill you or you can die, both of you, because of her.” The Brandos and the Drollets had been acquainted for years, and Marlon tried to reach them by phone to break the news as gently as possible. The tabloid television show Hard Copy got there first. Jacques Drollet blurted, “Oh, my God! He was a good boy, but that’s all over now.” As the details of the killing came in, Dag’s father had more to say. The young man “never beat Cheyenne. Perhaps on one or two occasions when Cheyenne was in a rage, she was scratching him, hitting him, throwing things at Dag, perhaps he gave her one or two slaps, but he never beat her and nothing at all since she was pregnant, never.”

  After Cheyenne testified in a hostile manner to the police (“It’s murder, in case you don’t know it”) she was given sedatives around the clock. Meantime, with each hour things worsened for Christian. A police search of his room turned up a large cache of firearms. Possession of illegal automatic weapons was added to the charge of murder in the second degree. Medical evidence revealed that Dag had been shot in the back of his head, not the forehead, as Christian had said. The den in which the violence had taken place showed no signs of a struggle; Dag had died with a bag of pipe tobacco in one hand and a TV remote in the other. An outraged judge set bail at $10 million. Even with all the money Marlon had earned recently, that sum was beyond his means. As the bad news accumulated, Marlon made two moves. On the advice of Kunstler, he hired Robert Shapiro, a high-profile defense lawyer who had represented the porn star Linda Lovelace on an obscenity charge, film producer Robert Evans on a drug charge, and the flamboyant attorney F. Lee Bailey on a drunk driving charge. Marlon also arranged to have Cheyenne taken back to Tahiti, where she was hospitalized upon arrival. Several weeks later the baby was born and immediately placed in postnatal detox. Bereft and angry, the child’s mother got hold of a bottle of sleeping pills and downed them. She was discovered before the narcotic could take full effect. Intensive therapy began, and for a while Cheyenne responded, quieting down and accepting her maternal responsibilities.

  After a preliminary hearing Christian’s bail was reduced to $2 million. But there were all sorts of other financial obligations, for legal fees and medical bills. Marlon knew he would have to go back to work, and that part of his work would involve exposure to the press. He took a deep breath and faced reporters after the bail hearing. “I have a hide this thick,” he told them, stretching his thumb and forefinger as far as they would go. “But when it comes to my son and my children, you’re talking to someone with a different impulse.” He was still rotund, although his face had harrowed with the pressure of events, and there was a bone-weariness to his conversation, some of it quite odd. He told the journalists that the room where Dag had been shot was now a candle-lit shrine to the deceased. Someone asked if anything could have been done to prevent the tragedy. Marlon replied with his own question: “Where is a feather dropped by a seagull on the heads of two thousand persons going to land? There are too many unknowns.”

  Robert Shapiro earned his costly fee. He discovered that Christian had not been read his Miranda rights. The tape-recorded statements of the accused were ruled inadmissible. Shapiro also saw to it Cheyenne would not be extradited from Tahiti, persuading the court that cross-examination would further injure an already fragile psyche. With Cheyenne testifying in person, asserted prosecutor Steven Barshop, “this is a murder—at least a tryable murder.” Without her presence, he complained, “we cannot legally prove malice and without being able to prove malice, this case is a provable manslaughter.” With the charge reduced, Shapiro pressed for a shorter sentence, citing a probation officer who spoke of Christian’s drug-induced brain damage and his lack of self-esteem. The prosecutors insisted on the maximum of sixteen years for the crime. The defense countered by calling Marlon to the stand. While Shapiro led him through the peaks and valleys of Brando’s marriage to Christian’s mother, Anna Kashfi, who was not in the courtroom, Marlon mentioned her temper, instability, and attractiveness. “She was probably the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known, but she came close to being as negative a person as I have met in my life.” Still, he shouldered much of the blame: “I led a wasted life. I chased a lot of women. Perhaps I failed as a father. The tendency is always to blame the other person. There were things I could have done differently.” Then he used the same words he had placed in his own father’s mouth when he dreamed about Marlon senior shortly after the old man’s death: “I did the best I could.”

  He sobbed during some parts of his testimony, and raged at other moments: “This is the Marlon Brando case. If Christian were black, Mexican, or poor, he wouldn’t be in this courtroom. Everyone wants a piece of the pie.” At the end he lowered his voice, and tears welled in his eyes again. Overtaken by contrition, he returned the withering stares of Dag Drollet’s family. Speaking in idiomatic French he addressed them: “Je ne peux pas continuer voir la haine dans vos yeux. Je suis désolé avec mon coeur entier.” (I cannot keep looking at the hate in your eyes. I mourn with my whole heart.) The next day Christian also apologized to the Drollets and told the judge, Robert Thomas, he was prepared for the consequences of his deed. Thomas struck a bargain between the prosecution’s insistence on the full sentence and Shapiro’s plea for lenience. To the Drollets’ distress, on March 1, 1991, Christian pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and received a ten-year prison term at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo. With time off for good behavior, plus the nine months he had already served, he would be eligible for release in as little as four years. In a strange way, he had entered the track to salvation. It was Cheyenne who was the irretrievably lost child. The messenger of misery was not finished with the Brando household.

  2

  On June 2, 1991, Miko’s wife, Jiselle Honore Brando, thirty-four, was driving on a freeway south of downtown Los Angeles when a drunken driver smashed his vehicle into hers. Death was instantaneous. Miko had been acting as bodyguard for Michael Jackson in the heyday of the singer’s career, and for a brief interlude the grieving widower received more press attention than his father. Such a condition could not last, and very soon Marlon’s name surfaced in the entertainment pages again.

  To pay his outstanding debts he would play the part of Tomás de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, in Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. Columbus was not looked upon kindly by the American Indian Movement and Marlon objected to making the mariner a hero instead of an exploiter of Native Americans. He was unprepared for the backlash. As Indian spokesmen argued for an Indigenous People’s Day to replace Columbus Day, the Order of the Sons of Italy, a group unfriendly to the Godfather films, offered evidence in favor of their hero. Columbus had no slaves of his own, nor did he bring any from Africa to the Western Hemisphere. He did not consider the Indians he met to be inferior; in his journals he expresses admiration for members of the Taíno tribe, whom he considers handsome, generous, and intelligent. Moreover, the New World was not the disease-free Eden described by twentieth-century Indians. Tests on exhumed bones indicated that native populations suffered
from venereal infection, tuberculosis, arthritis, and dental trouble. The average life expectancy was about forty.

  Marlon stopped struggling and did his film work without any further ado. There would be no awards for Columbus. Variety was one of the few publications to have a kind word: “Brando makes a grand Grand Inquisitor…. Drawing upon an actual intersection of historical fact and dramatic symbolism, pic also highlights Spain’s expulsion of the Jews, a boatload of whom sail into exile the very same day that the Niña, Pinta and Santa María leave port. Brando’s slyly insincere blessing to both expeditions is a telling moment.” Opposing this minority view, The Washington Post amused itself at the actor’s expense: “When Marlon Brando makes his entrance in the bloated epic Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, we know how Ahab must have felt when he first laid eyes on Moby Dick.” Swathed in clerical robes that “wardrobe doubtless made from the mainsail, Brando plays the Spanish Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, but he would have been better cast as the Niña. Brando is that wooden.” The New York Times made the same points more benignly: “This Torquemada could have dropped in from a lost Jerry Lewis movie. He doesn’t look quite real. Though he is strangely familiar, it’s not easy to recognize him. Then you have it: the nearly round, evilly smiling face is that of the man in the moon.”

  Movie offers dried up. So did the cash flow. Marlon had been approached many times to write his autobiography; he had always refused. It was not (or not only) a matter of playing hard to get. He disliked the idea of extreme self-revelation; Last Tango was as far as he was willing to go. But debts continued to accumulate for child support, lawyers’ bills, divorce settlements, upkeep of the island, and taxes, and the need for money became so acute it swept all other considerations aside. He had already been the subject of numerous books and articles. There was Carlo Fiore’s Bud, the Brando I Knew; Anna Kashfi’s Brando for Breakfast; Charles Higham’s Brando: The Unauthorized Biography; Bob Thomas’s Brando: Portrait of the Rebel as an Artist, and many others. Marlon resented them all. The speculations kept coming anyway; everyone seemed to have a theory about the real Marlon. One of the brightest of the speculators was Molly Haskell. Her post-Godfather consideration of Brando’s art and attitude in The Village Voice remained the most acute of all.