I still couldn’t help being concerned for people who were less fortunate than me, who were up against it or were treated wrongly by others. Above all, I detested those who abused authority, whether they were parents or presidents, and trampled on other people. Injustice, prejudice, poverty, unfairness and racial discrimination offended me, whether it involved groups not fortunate enough to be favored by our political system or individuals like Caryl Chessman, whose execution I opposed because I thought he had been unjustly condemned to die.
The movie about the United Nations that I had intended to make when we organized Pennebaker in 1955 evolved six years later into The Ugly American, which was based on the book by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. I played a U.S. ambassador, Harrison Carter McWhite, a vain and seemingly well-intentioned man who was sent to a fictional country in Southeast Asia and brought with him all the misconceptions and self-interest of the American ruling class. I regarded him as a metaphor of the ways the United States condescendingly and selfishly treated poorer nations in the so-called Third World. In hindsight I now realize that the movie was also a metaphor for all the policies that led to Vietnam and the loss of 58,000 American lives, largely because of myths about the “Communist conspiracy” and the “domino theory” that sprang out of the heads of the Dulles brothers.
As I’ve already mentioned, when I first heard about the UN’s technical-assistance program and America’s foreign aid, I had thought of them as wonderful examples of the haves helping the have-nots with compassion and charity. But when I visited Third World countries for UNICEF, I had realized that the policies of the industrialized nations were not only selfish, self-serving and misguided, but also weren’t working. In the name of all that was decent, the United States and companies like the United Fruit Company claimed the right to run the world; throughout Latin America and Asia the United States bankrolled any government, no matter how corrupt, that agreed to oppose communism and to favor American interests. But the populations of these countries were being alienated by us. The leaders of the so-called free world created dictatorships and propped up tyrants whose only indigenous support was among the wealthy elite, resisting ordinary citizens’ democratic dreams. Tolerating murder and corruption, the United States rationalized that it was better for a nation like the Philippines to have a tyrannical dictator like Ferdinand Marcos, who opposed communism, than a leader who would be responsive to peasants’ wanting a share of the prosperity that was concentrated in the hands of only 2 percent of the population. The CIA destabilized elected governments and intervened in other countries’ internal affairs. Our government created dictators who robbed, cheated and murdered their people with impunity, but as long as they were against communism, it let them get away with anything, including murder. Further, if we sent any aid to these countries, there were strings attached. It wasn’t because we wanted to fight starvation, ignorance, disease and poverty; it was because of self-interest, greed and the myths about communism.
When The Ugly American opened in Bangkok, Kukrit Pramoj, a former government minister of Thailand who in the movie played the prime minister of our fictional country, threw a party and invited Thailand’s entire diplomatic corps, I flew over for it and, as one of the guests of honor, was seated in a prominent position where everybody could see me. The principal entertainment was a formal Thai opera, which consisted of dancers in bare feet moving very slowly. It seemed to take them years to move their eyes from one side to the other and centuries to move their hands or feet. Before long, I couldn’t stay awake, and someone beside me had to keep poking me to keep me conscious. It would have been a terrible insult to fall asleep, because I was the guest of honor. Between acts, the music stopped and I had to get up and walk over to the players and, with appropriate gestures and greetings in Thai, tell them through a translator how wonderful they were. It was hard to make a sensible commentary about the wonders of the Thai opera, but I was told that in the next act the Monkey King would attack and there would be a fierce battle. At last, I thought, some action and excitement are coming up. It is difficult to credit, but this part of the opera was even slower than the others; the high point was some finger-wagging and eye movements that each took about a minute to complete. Fighting the two stevedores who were pulling my eyelids down, I overcompensated and must have looked like a zombie with my eyes frozen open.
I don’t know how I made it through the performance. Afterward I met all the diplomats and dignitaries at the event; there were handshakes all around and much conversation in French, Thai, English and broken English. I was nearly dead asleep, but for some reason I enjoyed it all very much. Back at my hotel, I collapsed on the floor because the air conditioning was coolest there. My feet itched terribly but I didn’t know why. Before I finally fell asleep, I remember thinking that if only the hog gnawing on my heels would stop chewing on me for half a minute everything would be wonderful.
Strange as it may seem, it was nights like these that made being in the movies worthwhile. They gave me a chance to meet people like Justice William O. Douglas, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dag Hammarskjöld, Sukarno, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Robert and John Kennedy.
When JFK ran for president, I believed he was a new kind of politician whom I could admire, so I supported him, even though I have rarely voted in my life. He was not only charming but bright, and he had a sense of history and curiosity and an apparent sincerity about wanting to right some of the wrongs in our country.
At a fund-raising dinner I attended, Kennedy began working the room, table-hopping and shaking hands with everyone. “You must be pretty bored by all this,” I said when he got to me.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, a little startled and perhaps offended, “I’m not bored at all. I’m interested in what people have to say, what their opinions are and—”
“C’mon,” I said. “You mean you’re thrilled to death to sit here and make cracker-crumb conversation with a lot of purple-haired ladies?”
“I like those ladies,” Kennedy said.
“Oh, c’mon.”
Kennedy looked at me with undisguised hostility and suspicion until I smiled at him and said, “You really can’t be all that serious.”
He smiled back, and it was a lovely smile, when he realized that I was not being critical, that I was simply saying, in effect, that just once I’d like to hear a politician tell the truth.
After dinner a Secret Service agent came over and told me the president wanted to see me.
This will be interesting, I thought, and followed the man upstairs to Kennedy’s hotel room. He hadn’t eaten at the fundraiser because he was so busy shaking hands, so he was going to have dinner now and invited me to join him. But before that we proceeded to get drunk.
Kennedy was unbridled, spirited and full of zest and curiosity about the women I knew in Hollywood. Then he changed the subject, looked at me suspiciously and said, “We know what you’ve been doing with the American Indians,” wagging a finger at me.
“Well,” I said, “I know what you’ve not been doing with the American Indians.”
Changing the subject again, he said, “You’re getting too fat for the part.”
“What part? “I asked.
“That’s not important. It’s the fat that’s important.…”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “Have you looked in the mirror lately? Your jowls won’t even fit in the frame of the television screen. When they have to go in for a close-up, they lose half your face. You look like the moon on television. I can hardly see your face, it’s so fat.”
Kennedy said he weighed a lot less than I did, and I said, “No, you don’t.” So we headed for the bathroom, both of us weaving, and I got on the scale. I can’t remember what my weight was, but when he got on it I put my toe on the corner and made him about twenty-five pounds heavier, so that he weighed more than I did. “Let’s go, Fatso, you lost,” I said.
A few years later, while the Vietnam War was beginning to blossom into
the tragedy it became, I went back to Asia for a UNICEF emergency-food program in the northeastern Indian state of Bihar, which had been struck by a devastating famine. The suffering moved me to make a forty-five-minute movie about it, which I filmed with a sixteen-millimeter camera. I traveled with UNICEF workers from village to village by Jeep over such rutted, muddy roads that it took longer to drive seventy-five miles on some of them than to fly between Los Angeles and New York. Most of the villages were laid out in a figure eight: on one side lived the Brahmans and the Indians of other upper castes; on the other side lived the untouchables. Usually the wells on the untouchables’ side of town were dried up, and no one had the money to drill a new one, yet they were forbidden to take any water from the wells used by people of higher castes because according to their beliefs they were unclean and would pollute them. Even if an untouchable received water in an earthen jug from a Brahman well, it was believed that he would pollute the Brahman.
My mind became bent trying to follow the logic of all this and the ways in which the untouchables were treated. They had to sweep the streets and to gather up human dung with their hands. To the Hindus they were not only untouchable, but unhearable. In times gone by they couldn’t play musical instruments in some villages because they would pollute the ears of any Brahmans who heard the music; they couldn’t walk on some roads because they would be seen and thus pollute the vision of the Brahmans; they had to carry a bell when they walked to announce their presence so that Brahmans could avoid unintentional contact. In one village I saw an untouchable standing outside a store trying to be heard. The merchant came out on his porch and asked, “What do you want?” The untouchable answered, “I want some rice.” The shopkeeper told him how much it cost, then backed off; the untouchable placed some rupees on a post outside the shop then backed away, the merchant came out, took the money, put the rice on the post, then disappeared, and the untouchable came forward slowly and took the rice. He had accepted his position in the hierarchy. Meanwhile the shopkeeper had to perform a religious ritual to purify himself because he had been polluted by the untouchable’s money.
The Bihari children I filmed were emaciated and covered with smallpox lesions and scabs; many were dying. Usually there was no hospital for many miles; if there was one, it was understaffed and had little medicine or food. The hospital beds were gray with flies and the children were laid out on them according to caste; even there the untouchables were outcasts. In almost all the villages, children suffered from malnutrition and diarrhea. Mothers had no milk because they had had no food and little water. One little girl came up to a relief worker who was offering her food and she reached out with the folds of her sari to collect it, but the garment was so threadbare there wasn’t a square inch of cloth strong enough to hold the food.
In many villages cows had chewed the thatch off the roofs because they had nothing to eat, and people were so thin it seemed incredible that they could walk. If you touched the cheek of a child, a hollow spot remained in her flesh after you removed your hand; the skin had no resiliency and was like that of a cadaver.
In one village I was photographing a group of Indians when a woman came out of the crowd and offered her baby to the camera as if it possessed a magic that could save her child. As I photographed dying children, it seemed surreal that not far away people were killing each other in Vietnam. How I would have liked to take a tiny portion of the money being spent on bombs for that country to hire teams of hydrologists who could go from village to village digging new wells.
India’s caste system is the most insidious social system man has ever devised, though in principle it is no different from caste systems in all societies. Similar hierarchies exist in all anthropoidal systems, among humans, baboons, chimpanzees and gorillas. In India the system is simply more complex and stratified, with some nineteen thousand subcastes in Hindu society. People born into inferior castes are presumed to have done evil in a previous life; at the top of the hierarchy, the Brahmans claim to be descendants of the holiest priestly class. Yet even some Brahmans won’t marry other Brahmans because they are not in the same subcaste. Because of Gandhi, it has been illegal since 1949 to treat untouchables as inferior, but laws can’t change how people think. Even with all his force and power, Gandhi barely made a dent. This appalling system, with variations, is common in all societies, including ours, as a result of the fundamental human drive to organize into groups and identify others as inferior. It is ironic that when the British, whose class system is as rigid, if not as complex, as the Indians’, ruled the country, they treated the Brahmans as if they were a lowly caste.
In the United States we’ve always had our own untouchables—American Indians, blacks, homosexuals. Who knows who will be next?
On my last day of filming, after photographing a child who had died right in front of me, I put my camera down and cried. I couldn’t take any more. I knew that I had to get the scenes I had filmed to the American people and thought if I did so, the whole country would be appalled and do whatever it took to ameliorate this misery. When I got home, I showed the film to Jack Valenti, who became president of the Motion Picture Association of America after serving as a presidential aide; he told me he had shown it to President Johnson, but that was the last I heard of it. I showed it to as many prominent people in Hollywood as I could, but nobody offered to help arrange to show it in movie theaters as a documentary, even though among those who saw the film there wasn’t anybody with a dry eye later, except for the wife of one producer, who said, “You know, Marlon, we ought to take care of our own first”—one of our famous phrases. After striking out in Hollywood, I thought the picture might reach an even wider audience on television, so I showed it to an executive at CBS News, who said, “It’s an effective film, but we can’t use it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
He said, “Because our news department produces all its own stuff; we don’t requisition or use outside documentaries.”
“Why not? I was there. What I’m showing you is the truth.”
“Well, we have policies we have to follow, and we can’t make exceptions.”
NBC told me the same thing, so I never got the film on television and that was the end of it.
43
ONE FACT ABOUT MY LIFE I constantly find amazing: I was born only sixty-two years after one human being could still buy another human being in America. I remember first being amazed by this discovery when I was an adolescent, and wondered how it could be. I read the history of black people, began to empathize with them and tried as best I could to imagine what it would be like to be black—which, of course, is impossible, though it took me many years to learn that. I began thinking of African Americans as a heroic people because of their enormous resiliency acquired over almost four hundred years; despite slavery and torturous treatment by whites, they had never allowed their spirit to be broken. Through every adversity and hardship, they preserved something, even if it was only their music or religion. They were yanked out of their homes in Africa, forced to endure a long trek to a seaport in chains, then imprisoned at sea before being delivered somewhere to be sold. They survived not only these hardships but the uncertainty and shock of not knowing where they were headed or what would happen to them when they got there; then they were thrust into what must have been a terrifying world of a different language, customs and culture. Families were split up and sold to slave owners who forced them to work like animals on whatever diet their masters deigned to allow them. They had to live this way from generation to generation, beaten down and made to feel like animals. The ones who survived had to be very strong, which is why I’ve always thought of American blacks as being different from African ones; their ancestors had to endure so much that only the strongest could survive.
When Lincoln gave blacks their so-called freedom, it was transformed with the speed of summer lightning into the sharecropper system. Then came the KKK, the lynchings, the theft of their constitutional rights and all the modern k
inds of slavery. Blacks were free, but discrimination was so complete and insidious that all it did was change the form of slavery. White people were in the majority, and blacks have been conditioned from birth into thinking of themselves as inferior. They sense it every day; they are denied hope, yet have survived adversities while enriching our culture enormously. Much American humor comes from blacks; so does our music. Blacks taught the world how to dance, from the jitterbug to rock ’n’ roll, and I believe they were largely responsible for helping liberate Americans from the puritan attitudes toward sexuality that weighed down our culture for most of this century and the one before it. Along with their music, sex was among the few things granted slaves, because when they procreated it meant a new chattel. Their dancing and music were expropriated by whites, but through it they taught us, and others in much of the rest of the world, to be aware of our sexuality and be less inhibited by the impulses that are a natural part of all of us.
When the civil rights movement took shape in the late fifties and early sixties, I did whatever I could to support it and went down South with Paul Newman, Virgil Frye, Tony Franciosa and other friends to join the freedom marches and be with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At the March on Washington, I stood a few steps behind Dr. King when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, and it still reverberates in my mind. He was a man I deeply admired. I’ve always thought that while a part of him regretted having to become so deeply involved in the cause of racial equality, another part of him drove him to it, though I’m convinced he knew he would have to sacrifice himself.
Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me Page 24