In three hours I did what in thirty-three years I had never been able to, yet the whole time I was scared. I was frightened of what he would do to me. I had always been overwhelmed and intimidated by him, but the more I talked, the more strength and conviction I gained of my rightness and justification. It was like Joe Louis with Max Schmeling in their second fight: I hit him everyplace. He was naked and I was all over him like a cheap suit. Then, when I’d finished saying what I wanted to get off my chest, I dismissed him.
Afterward, I called everybody in the family and told them what I had done and they congratulated me. “Well, it’s about time,” my sisters said. But inside I felt tremendous aftershocks from what I had done. I thought the sky was going to fall on me because of what I had said.
A few days later I got a call from a psychiatrist who said that my father was seeing him and that he needed my cooperation because his patient was in a serious depression and “on the edge of a precipice.”
“Well, Doctor,” I said, “I appreciate your calling. When my father has gone over the edge of that depression and smashed himself on the rocks below—when he’s hit bottom—please call me and I’ll see if I can arrange something.…”
After that, I always kept my father on a tight leash so that he could never come near me and never get too far away. I had him under control and never let him go.
In the spring of 1965 I visited the Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona and met an old medicine woman. She was charming, with intelligent dark eyes, and I asked her if she could tell anything about me simply by looking at me. Through an interpreter, she said yes, she could, and she dipped her hand into a box of flowers beside her and sprinkled yellow cornflowers over my head and shoulders, letting them fall around me. She said alcohol had played a very important part in my life, and that I was about to be struck by lightning. As she said it, I felt a strange sensation streak through my nervous system.
“Both your parents are dead,” she went on.
“No,” I said, “one of them is dead—my mother—but not my father.”
Within minutes, I was informed that there was a telephone call for me at the tribal office. It was one of my sisters calling, to tell me my father had just died. We both laughed, and I said, “And not a moment too soon.”
I got in my car and drove all the way home. It took almost twelve hours. I was with a woman named Honey, who was from Holland, and when we got home and were in bed I told her about my father and how I felt about him. Then, as I began to drift off to sleep, I had a vision of him walking down a sidewalk away from me, then turning around to look at me, a slump-shouldered Willy Loman with a faint smile on his face. When he got to the edge of eternity, he stopped and looked back again, turned halfway toward me and, with his eyes downcast, said: I did the best I could, kid. He turned away again, and I knew he was looking for my mother.
Then, like her, he became a bird and started rising in the sky, soaring higher and higher until he found her beside a cliff, where she had been waiting for him.
My father was so secretive about money that we never found out how much he had when he died. He left his second wife their home and about $3,000 from an insurance policy, but he had hidden the rest—who knows how much—in bank accounts under false names. It’s probably there to this day. Curiously, years before, he had done something accidentally that almost made him a success. After he died, the price of gold shot up and for the first time it became profitable to refine the tailings from the old gold mines on which he’d lost so much of my money. But by then we had long since disposed of them.
If my father were alive today, I don’t know what I would do. After he died, I used to think, “God, just give him to me alive for eight seconds; that’s all I want, just eight seconds because I want to break his jaw.” I wanted to smash his face and watch him spit out his teeth. I wanted to kick his balls into his throat. I wanted to rip his ears off and eat them in front of him. I wanted to separate his larynx from his body and shove it into his stomach. But with time I began to realize that as long as I felt this way I would never be free until I eradicated these feelings in myself. With time, I also may have seen a little of him in me. Maybe it was in my genes all the time. He was a very angry man, as I was for most of my life. His mother had deserted him when he was four years old, and he must have experienced some of the same feelings I had. As children, my sisters and I never had much emotional security, and perhaps he didn’t either. Physically and emotionally, each generation is linked, like the strands in an endless rope, to the generations before it and those that follow it, and families’ emotional disorders can be transmitted from one to the next as surely as a genetic disorder. Like us, he had been left as a child to fend for himself emotionally as best he could. As I’ve said before, I don’t believe any of us is born evil. We are all products of our childhoods and genetic and environmental forces over which we have little control.
My sisters have tried to help me understand my father more. As Fran reminded me in a letter, our father’s father “was a mean-spirited, rigid, terrifying martinet of a person who had made life so unbearable for our grandmother that she ran off when Poppa was just four years old. Left him abandoned.… Left to a miserable, loveless and terrified childhood with a self-righteous, loveless disciplinarian instead of a father. That was our father’s wound and terror from which he never recovered. He grew up to be six feet tall … and inside his strong masculine presence was a very complicated, troubled and isolated person … at odds with himself and often with the world.”
Ultimately I realized that I would have to forgive my father if I was ever going to be able to get on with my life.
39
THE HAPPIEST MOMENTS of my life have been in Tahiti. If I’ve ever come close to finding genuine peace, it was on my island among the Tahitians. When I first went there, I foolishly thought I’d use my money to help them; instead, I learned I had nothing to give them and that they had everything to give me.
Tahiti has exerted a force over me since I was a teenager. It began in the library at Shattuck, when I used to thumb through the National Geographic, and it continued after I went to New York and searched libraries for any book that mentioned Tahiti and combed the film archives at the Museum of Modern Art looking for images of Polynesia. In the early 1960s MGM asked me to play Fletcher Christian in a remake of Mutiny on the Bounty and said it would be filmed in Tahiti. Previously David Lean had asked me to play T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia; I had gone to Paris to meet with him and Sam Spiegel, and they had announced I was going to be in the picture. But when Mutiny on the Bounty came up and David said he expected to take six months filming Lawrence of Arabia, most of it in the desert, I decided I’d rather go to Tahiti. Lean was a very good director, but he took so long to make a movie that I would have dried up in the desert like a puddle of water.
From the moment I saw it, reality surpassed even my fantasies about Tahiti, and I had some of the best times of my life making Mutiny on the Bounty. The filming was done largely on a replica of H.M.S. Bounty anchored offshore, and every day as soon as the director said, “Cut” for the last time, I ripped off my British naval officer’s uniform and dove off the ship into the bay to swim with the Tahitian extras working on the movie. Often we only did two or three shots a day, which left me hours to enjoy their company, and I grew to love them for their love of life.
While we were filming, reports began circulating that it was months behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget because of me. Initially I didn’t realize this, but MGM was blaming me for budget overruns that it was responsible for, just as Twentieth Century-Fox had used Elizabeth Taylor as a scapegoat for its miscalculations and production excesses on Cleopatra. When I arrived in Tahiti, MGM still didn’t have a usable script, the H.M.S. Bounty wasn’t finished, and the ordinary preproduction preparations were several weeks behind schedule. Once filming started, the studio realized it had underestimated the cost of shooting a picture on location in French Polynesia
, and then it fired the director, Carol Reed, causing further delays and extra expense. Dishonestly, MGM portrayed me as the source of the delays. It wasn’t true, but reporters in the entertainment press, who didn’t like me for refusing to give interviews, and who seldom did any independent digging on their own unless it involved titillation, accepted what MGM’s press agents said; it fit their preconceived notion of an eccentric, cantankerous Brando, and quickly the distortions were carved in granite. For the first and only time in my life, I asked a press agent to present my side of the story, but then discovered too late that he was an MGM plant. Though he was supposedly working for me, he was on the MGM payroll and had been instructed secretly to keep placing the blame on me. I didn’t learn about this until many years later. At the time, I was still of a mind to ignore what people wrote or thought about me, so I hadn’t paid much attention to what was going on until the stories of my alleged profligacy had been woven into the tapestry containing all the other myths about me.
The first director on the picture, Carol Reed, was a talented Englishman whom I admired. When MGM replaced him with Lewis Milestone, we were told that Carol had had an argument with the studio and quit. Later I learned that he’d been sacked because he wanted to make Captain Bligh a hero. In reality, Bligh was a hero, but Charles Laughton hadn’t played him that way. Since Laughton was the definitive Bligh, the studio didn’t want to revise history in the new version, which wasn’t a remake of the original but a kind of sequel that picked up where the other one left off. I had seen the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty and was impressed with the performance of Charles Laughton but not with that of Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian. He hadn’t even bothered to speak with an English accent; nor had Franchot Tone, the costar. They made no concessions whatsoever to the fact that they were portraying British seamen, and it seemed absurd. As always, Clark Gable played Clark Gable.
If I had been Trevor Howard, I would never have accepted the responsibility of playing Bligh in the remake because there was only one Bligh, right or wrong, historically correct or not. Laughton’s characterization renders anybody else’s useless. Carol Reed wanted to be historically accurate and to depict the mutineers as pathetic as they were in life. But the studio didn’t want it that way, and I’ve never met a studio that had the integrity to stick to the truth if it was able to make more money by distorting it, and so Reed was dumped.
During a break in the filming, I climbed one of the tallest mountains on the island of Tahiti along with a Tahitian friend. At the top, he pointed to the north and said, “Can you see that island out there?”
I couldn’t see anything.
“Don’t you see that little island out there? It’s called Teti’aroa.” Finally, I discerned a slender pencil of land lying on the horizon about thirty miles away, and before long, it was exerting as mystical a pull on me as Tahiti itself. I asked other Tahitian friends about it and was told it was owned by an elderly American woman named Madame Duran, who was blind. It had been given to her father, a doctor named Williams, by the last king of Tahiti, Pomerae V, and Williams had lived there for years, established a coconut plantation and was buried there. After he died, Madame Duran took it over, and she too had lived there for many years.
After the movie was finished, I continued to think about Teti’aroa and reread my books on Tahiti to see if it was mentioned. Somerset Maugham had written about it, and I discovered that a leper had spent most of his life there. A friend, Nick Rutgers, told me he had once visited the island, knew Madame Duran, offered to take me there and introduce me to her, so I returned to Tahiti. Since there wasn’t an airstrip on the island, I had to hire a fisherman to take us to Teti’aroa. As we approached the island, I realized that the thin sliver of land I’d seen from afar was larger than I thought and more gorgeous than anything I had anticipated.
Teti’aroa was actually several islands: a coral atoll a few feet above sea level encompassing about 1,500 acres on over a dozen islands. By far the largest encircled a wide, crescent-shaped, breathtaking lagoon. A dozen varieties of birds watched as we waded ashore; ahead of us, thick stands of coconut trees stood in the sand like brigades of sentries adorned with feathery crowns; everywhere broad sandy beaches stretched in front of us. The lagoon was about five miles across at its broadest point and infused with more shades of blue than I thought possible: turquoise, deep blue, light blue, indigo blue, cobalt blue, royal blue, robin’s egg blue, aquamarine. As I admired this astonishing palette, several flawless, white, flat-bottomed clouds rolled past me at about two thousand feet, as if they were on parade and I were on a reviewing stand. A shadow fell across the island briefly, then moved on, and the sun shone again like satin on the riotous colors of the lagoon. It was magical.
Madame Duran, who lived alone on the island except for a friend and helper named Annie, gave me a gracious welcome. We talked for seven hours without stopping. As isolated as she was, she knew that I was an actor. She rarely left the island, but she had a radio that was her only link to the world, and once she had heard me give an interview. She seemed lonely, but she was full of energy, curiosity, vitality and wisdom. She had been blind for almost twenty-five years, but could distinguish light from dark. She lived comfortably, she said, in a small house built of coral and cement, and got around by using a technique she had invented; she had strung wire from tree to tree and used it to guide herself around the island, holding on with a rag wrapped around her hand. When she came to a tree, she felt her way around to the other side, then grabbed the next wire and walked on.
Madame Duran was anxious to hear any news about America and told me stories about the island—about her father, shipwrecks and old Tahitian friends—and to this day I regret I didn’t write them down. For company she had Annie, an old woman who was part Chinese, and at least forty dogs and cats, most of whom lounged in the shade around us as we talked. Her biggest nemesis was the dogcatchers from Tahiti. Whenever they tried to set foot on the island, she went after them with her umbrella.
It was a pleasant visit, and a few months later I returned to the island and brought her an apple pie. She had taken a shine to me and I to her, and I asked her to tell me more about the history and magic of Tahiti. Once again we talked for hours. I sensed that she might be growing concerned about her health because she was getting older, and I asked if she had ever thought about selling the island. “No,” she answered, “I don’t think so.” But two or three years later I got a note from her in which she said she was thinking about selling Teti’aroa because she had hurt herself in a fall and might have to move back to the city where she had grown up, Vallejo, California, for medical care. When I asked how much she wanted for the island, she said $200,000. After we struck a deal, I called the governor of Tahiti, a Frenchman, and told him I planned to buy the island if it was acceptable to the Tahitian and French governments. After meeting with his cabinet, he assured me enthusiastically that I was welcome in the community, but that it would take a while to process the papers and he would let me know when they were ready. Puzzled by the delay, I asked, “Can you think of any reason why I would not be granted a permit to buy the island?”
“Oh, no,” he said, “we’re delighted to have you among us. We’re proud to have you.”
A year later, the paperwork still had not been completed and the governor left office. On his last day at work I received a telegram declaring: YOUR PERMIT TO BUY THE ISLAND OF TETI’AROA HAS BEEN REFUSED.
I thought that was the end of it, but the next time I was in Tahiti, I went to Teti’aroa to see how Madame Duran was getting along. The first thing she said was that she was disappointed that I’d changed my mind about buying the island, but now she had another offer, from an American businessman I knew; it had been approved by the government and she was going to accept it.
I was shocked, and said: “Madame Duran, I wanted to buy the island and still do, but I was denied permission to do so.”
“How could permission have been refused?”
> “I don’t know.”
She said, “The politicians here are as crooked as pigs’ tails. You just keep trying.”
Shortly thereafter I was in Paris and decided to look up the man who had been appointed the next governor of Tahiti, a suave, charming Corsican. After a couple of hours of trying to assure him that I would be a good neighbor, he said the government wouldn’t stand in my way if I wanted to buy the island and Madame Duran still wanted to sell it to me. I contacted her, but she told me she was about to sign a contract to sell Teti’aroa to the businessman for $300,000. I told her what I’d been told in Paris, but said I couldn’t afford that much.
“Well,” she said, “I asked you to pay two hundred thousand and you agreed to it, so that will be my price.”
I said, “I can’t do that. It’s unfair. If you can get three hundred thousand for it, please take it.”
“No,” she insisted. “It’s yours if you want it. The only thing I ask of you is that you not cut down any of the Tow trees.”
Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Page 22