I made not only that promise, but also another to preserve the island in its natural state as much as possible. I have kept those promises. No one, incidentally, ever asked me for a bribe. I wouldn’t have paid one if they had, though I suppose bribery begins with a smile that you don’t mean, and I used as much charm as I could to persuade the government.
I urged Madame Duran to keep her house and live there for as long as she lived, but she said, “No, it’s yours now. I’m going back to Vallejo.”
Shortly after she returned to California, Madame Duran died.
40
ONCE I BECAME the lawful owner of Teti’aroa in 1966, I arranged to be taken there by a government boat from Papeete and to make the final landing in smaller craft filled with some of the things I expected to need on the island. Setting sail for Teti’aroa was as exhilarating a moment as I’ve ever had. There were about ten of us in two boats, Tahitian friends and me. When the government boat left us outside the reef, the surf was too high to attempt a landing through the channel I’d used on previous trips; however, one of the Tahitians said he knew of a pass on the opposite side of the main island, so we went around and the first boat made it to shore quickly. I was in the second boat, a big rowboat crammed with a lawn mower, a keg of beer, an electric generator, rakes, shovels and other tools, all packed in boxes that the five of us were using as seats. As we glided toward the reef following the route of the first boat, I felt the current begin to pull us toward the island, and in front of us saw row after row of eight- and ten-foot-high waves. They rose up and seemed to pause in a moment of uncertainty, then suddenly collapse on the reef with explosive force. Later I learned that when a big Tahitian wave hits a coral atoll like Teti’aroa, the pocket of air beneath the curl of the wave is densely compacted by the weight of the water, and when the wave breaks on the reef, the compressed air that is released erupts with ferocious energy, sending a huge tower of water into the air. We watched this spectacular show from outside the reef as we waited for the right moment to make our landing. A Tahitian at the front of the boat kept a watch on the waves, then said in Tahitian, “Let’s go!” The five of us began paddling as hard as we could, and I’d never had more fun in my life. But suddenly I noticed we weren’t going anywhere; then I realized that we were going backward. We were paddling as hard as possible, but we were going into reverse. I looked around and saw a wave that must have been thirty feet high coming from behind us with my name written on it. It said Welcome to Tahiti, Marlon. I looked fleetingly at the coral reef in front of us and couldn’t believe what I saw; suddenly the reef had become a vast, dry meadow of stone tinted a pretty shade of pink. Like a gargantuan pump, the wave behind us had sucked almost all the water from the reef and assembled it into a giant fist that was about to smash us. It hit like Joe Louis, and when the pocket of compressed air detonated, we were launched toward heaven. We bounced two or three times in the sky on the top of the wave, then began rocketing toward the hard, pink reef at what seemed like eighty miles an hour at a ninety-degree angle. The Tahitians jumped out of the boat, but I didn’t move fast enough. It crashed into the reef bow first and cracked in half, with me clinging to one half like a rodeo rider trying to stay on a crazed bronco. As the boat slammed into the reef, I heard another wave coming from behind and looked around: it seemed even bigger than the first one. I could either ride it out in my broken half of the boat or try to escape to the reef. I jumped onto the reef. If the wave smashed into the boat with me still in it, I figured, it might turn upside down. As soon as I jumped, the second wave exploded and dragged me several hundred yards across the coral, which was as sharp as razor wire, slashing my body from head to foot. Had I known what I learned later, I would have grabbed a piece of coral, held on to it and let the wave pass over me, then come up for air before grabbing another piece. But I didn’t know that then, and I was a mess when I limped to shore. I could walk but was bloodied all over, and the Tahitians warned me that I was in for a bad infection from the coral.
There were no antibiotics on the island, so it meant I had to return to Papeete to see a doctor. We radioed for help, but it took four days for the government boat to return. This time it carried a special craft with a shallow draft that Tahitians call a reef jumper. They wait for a wave to pass, then attempt to skim across the reef before the next one.
From the island I watched the government boat arrive and lower the reef jumper into the ocean. A tall, distinguished-looking man with gray hair got in, followed by eight younger Tahitians. He must be their leader, I thought; he was a proud, patrician-looking figure. While the younger men waited for his orders with their long oars extended, he stood up and surveyed the reef like an ancient mariner, waiting for a pause in the waves and the right moment, reminding me of the legendary heroes of ancient Polynesia. You could see that he’d obviously had a lot of experience. He waited about twenty minutes, surveying the waves, gauging the speed of the wind, studying the patterns of the swells and breakers. The waves looked as big and powerful as they had four days earlier, but the gray-haired man seemed supremely self-possessed and confident. Finally he looked around and gave the signal. The eight men started stroking and pulling on their oars and the boat rocketed toward shore as if propelled by a two-hundred-horsepower motor. I was very impressed; it was beautiful to watch. But then a wave came up behind them and knocked the boat thirty feet into the air. Everybody went flying, half of them outside the reef, half inside, and their oars went everywhere. The boat turned over on its side, then rolled bottom up like a soggy doughnut. Suddenly I felt I had to rethink all those legends about Tahitians’ knowledge of the sea.
Subsequently I learned that Polynesians who live on high islands seldom know much about low-island living and vice versa. The men I’d come ashore with the first time and those that came to help us the second time weren’t used to landing on an atoll like Teti’aroa, which is only eight feet above sea level. A few feet offshore, it plunges straight down at seventy degrees to a depth of about three thousand feet. When a huge wave comes along, the reef pulls the footing out from under it, and then the wave crashes down and flings any boat in the wrong place into the coral like a battering ram. The reef around Teti’aroa can rip out the bottom of a boat with the efficiency of a carbide saw, as the wreckage of at least ten vessels strewn along it attests. Once, several years after I bought Teti’aroa, a family from California, sailing home from Australia, smashed their sailboat on the reef and swam ashore to one of the islands. Exhausted, with no food and suffering badly from shock and exposure, they were there for a week, thinking of themselves as shipwrecked survivors like the Swiss Family Robinson, until they saw a passing boat and the fisherman told them that they were only a couple of miles from the hotel I had built on the island.
On my next trip to the island a few months later, I left Papeete aboard a three-masted, square-rigged sailing ship, the Carthaginian, which dropped anchor off the reef, and we rode to shore in a small boat across a placid sea. We passed through the surf without any difficulty, and I jumped out of the boat and swam over the reef. There were so many fish everywhere, beautiful fish of all colors and hues, that I could have closed my eyes and hit one with a spear anywhere I threw it. On the beach I walked to the end of one of the islands. Extending from it was a long, narrow sandspit stretching five hundred yards into the sea, and at one end, near the water’s edge, was a small palm tree only a few feet high. It was dark by then, and I decided to lie down under the tree. Coconuts were scattered near its base, and I noticed that they were triangular-shaped. I picked one up and realized that by working it into the sand, I could make a wonderful pillow. I lay back with my head on the coconut, my feet in the water, and looked up into the sky while a sensuous breeze blew across me. The temperature of the water was almost exactly the same as the air around me. Then, for a moment, I remembered the great, worn face of Mr. Underbrink scowling at me from behind the principal’s desk at Libertyville High School as he lectured me about how I would never amou
nt to anything.
If you’re so smart, Mr. Underbrink, I thought, why don’t you have an island?
I slept under the coconut tree until dawn but before dozing off, I looked up into the stars and thought, Here I am on a tiny speck of land in the middle of a massive ocean on a planet in the middle of an inconceivably large area we call space, and I am sleeping on the skeletons of dead animals (which is what coral reefs are made of). After that night, I have never considered myself as the owner of the island, only that I have paid for the privilege of visiting it. I think of all the Tahitians who have been there before me, lain on that same beach and looked at the same stars five hundred or a thousand years ago, and I feel the spirits of those people whenever I go to Teti’aroa.
41
A DOZEN OR SO buildings built from native coral, cement and plaster were on Teti’aroa when I bought it, and most were badly in need of repair. I’ve always loved projects and began restoring the buildings while keeping my promise to change the island as little as possible. One of the first things we did was to rebuild the leper’s house, plant flowers around it and dedicate it to his memory. Later I began what became a twenty-year endeavor to make the island financially self-supporting. We started work on a modest hotel built in the Tahitian style, a school, homes for the Tahitians who worked on the island and, after our cook pulled a can of DDT off a shelf and mistakenly used it instead of flour to bread some fried fish, a rudimentary airstrip. Until then a mishap on the island could have been fatal. With no doctors or nurses, medical help was thirty miles away, and the only way to get it was to hail a passing fishing boat or wait for a chartered boat from Papeete.
Even before the incident with the DDT, I was reminded of the precariousness of life on Teti’aroa while I was diving in the pass between two of the islands. I’m a pretty good swimmer, and I decided to see if I could free-dive—without using an air tank—all the way to the bottom, forty feet down. On the way I passed several reef sharks six or seven feet long, enough shark to make me worry, but I didn’t seem to bother them, so I kept going. Holding my breath, I touched bottom, but there, waiting for me, was a solitary shark that was a lot bigger than the others. It turned its head, gave me a look and then began swimming in my direction. I didn’t like the way he looked, and he obviously didn’t like the way I looked. Unfortunately I was in his backyard. He started swimming faster, moving his body back and forth to gain purchase in the water, and when he was a few feet away I thought I could see him sizing up my calf for his lunch. I’d read somewhere that in situations like this divers are supposed to look the shark squarely in the face and smack it on the nose. Instead, I started clawing my way to the surface like a scalded cat. Whether the shark followed or not, I don’t know; I don’t even remember getting to the surface.
This incident reinforced my sense of isolation. If the shark had taken a bite out of me, I probably couldn’t have gotten off the island for treatment until it was too late. I wasn’t on Teti’aroa when the cook mistook DDT for flour, but those who ate the fish became very sick. Fortunately two people missed the meal and were able to look after the victims until a boat came by and took them to Papeete. Still, I decided we needed an airstrip.
In the mid-seventies, after I’d owned the island a few years, the hotel was operating in a bare-bones fashion and the airstrip was in, an elderly Tahitian called Grandpère went fishing and returned with a fat red fish about three feet long. He said it was a red snapper, but to me it resembled a picture I’d seen of a red poison fish that appeared occasionally off the lagoon. I told Grandpère so, but he assured me that this wasn’t a poison fish. “It looks like one,” he said, “but it isn’t.”
“Okay,” I said, figuring that if you have gray hair in Tahiti you must know what fish are safe to eat.
At two o’clock the next morning, I woke up with no sensation in my lips; they were completely numb. My feet were tingling, the palms of my hands were itching, and I had a headache as big as a Buick. I knew it was the fish, though I hadn’t eaten very much of it. I had read stories about fish poisoning in the South Seas and didn’t want to die that way: depending on the toxicity of the species, some kill you within hours and some take three or four days to send you screaming into the arms of death. I had heard stories of people ripping the flesh off their bodies because they itched so much. I got up and went around the island and learned that everybody who had eaten the fish was sick. Being captain of the ship, I had to give what medicine we had to them, and then radioed Papeete to send a charter plane to take them off the island.
Sickest of all were Grandpère and four of his friends. They had eaten the poison fish with fafaru, a Tahitian version of Limburger cheese to the ninth power: scraps of fish (usually intestines and innards) are left out in the sun to rot in a coconut shell filled with seawater until the mess stinks and worms flock to it. Then the shell is emptied and fresh seawater is mixed with the bacteria left by the rotting process to create a bacterial soup that is then used to marinate fresh fish. After four or five hours the fafaru is ready to eat and it smells like the foot of a dead alligator left out in the sun for two months. It is putrid beyond description, the only thing I’ve ever seen buzzards refuse to eat. In fact, I’ve heard that buzzards have fainted from the odor.
Not all Tahitians eat fafaru, but some, like Grandpère, adore it. At meals they usually sit downwind of everyone else at the table, but you can still smell people who have eaten fafaru a mile away. Unfortunately, Grandpère and his friends had put pieces of the poison fish in their fafaru the night before, and they were in terrible shape. The plane took them to Papeete, where their stomachs were pumped and they spent two or three weeks in the hospital enjoying a vacation.
Although we established an air link between Papeete and the island, it was never first-class service, or anything approaching it. It was usually provided by an ambitious pilot on Papeete who decided he was going to establish an airline with one and a half planes, though because of breakdowns it was more often like half a plane. Before takeoff, one of the passengers had to get out and crank the propeller.
Once, after spending a few weeks on the island, I had to go to Los Angeles for a movie and the pilot arrived from Papeete in what for him must have been a sleek, fancy, upscale airplane, a two-engine crackerbox that Wiley Post would have discarded. There were five of us leaving Teti’aroa that morning, but a few minutes after we took off one of the propellers stopped turning. “Mayday, Mayday,” the pilot said into his radio, “my starboard motor has quit.…” Then he turned around and told us casually, “Don’t worry, this thing can fly on one engine.”
I knew enough about flying to know that when one motor conks out, the pilot has to use a hard right or left rudder to compensate for the loss of power on one side and keep the plane from flying in circles. The pilot did what he was supposed to do quickly, and since we were only about five minutes out of Teti’aroa, he turned around and headed back to the island. But now the other motor started choking and missing.
“All right, everybody,” I said, “we’re going to have a contest. Everybody put your palms up. We’re going to have a sweat contest. The person who sweats least …”
As we descended over the reef and the pilot took aim on the landing strip, the second motor kept kicking in and out, then the motor that had failed originally suddenly came to life. But when it kicked in, it started pulling us toward a grove of coconut trees at the edge of the airstrip; then the pilot applied the opposite rudder, and we veered away in the other direction. The motor quit again. With the second engine still fluttering in and out, once more we veered toward the coconut trees. The trees, I recalled, had once stood up to a 110-mile-an-hour hurricane, and I wondered what would happen when an airplane ran into them. While I was pondering this, the warning bell indicating that the plane was in a stall went off. As I listened to its bleating and the sound of the engines alternately dying and coming to life, I had the thought, What a funny way to go it would be, to die on this gorgeous island.
After the pilot had slammed the plane down on the runway, I sat in my seat and thought, Well, Marlon, I guess not today.
After I got out of the plane, I kissed the pilot on both cheeks as French custom dictated, looked up at the coconut trees and remembered that I had to be in Los Angeles the following day. I went back to my room, threw myself on my bed, looked out through the shell curtains at the lagoon and said to myself, To hell with it. Though they sent another plane to pick us up later in the day, I stayed on Teti’aroa for another two weeks. I simply didn’t feel like going back to Los Angeles yet.
42
SO MANY THINGS happened during the sixties and seventies that now a lot of those years are a blur. I was still trying to give my life some meaning and enlisted in almost any campaign I thought would help end poverty, racial discrimination and social injustice. But that wasn’t all I did in those years; there was a lot of partying, getting drunk, having fun, jumping into swimming pools, smoking grass, lying on beaches and watching the sun go down. During the sixties in Hollywood, everybody was sleeping with everybody. It was part of the game to screw the other guy’s wife or girlfriend and vice versa, and I did my share of it. As always, making movies was a means to an end: earning enough money to feed myself and my family, make my alimony payments, pay for my projects on Teti’aroa and help people in need. I did as much playing as I did worrying about the state of the world, but I still felt that films ought to address issues like hypocrisy, injustice and the corruptness of government policies. Sometimes I would decide to stop making movies altogether and I told my secretary to send back all scripts unread because I didn’t want to make any more money. California is a community-property state, which meant that my wife of record was entitled to half of everything I made, and sometimes I refused to work.
Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Page 23