Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me

by Marlon Brando

  There were constant rumors that the governor had ordered the National Guard to retake the novitiate, which would certainly have meant bloodshed. But like all Indians I’ve ever met, those in the novitiate under attack joked no matter what the circumstances were, even when they were being fired on. We talked a great deal, and it was during such moments that I realized how much I related to their philosophy of life and how closely it paralleled my own. In terms of religion or philosophy, I suppose I am closer to what American Indians believe than to any conventional faith. Its essence is a sense of harmony and oneness, a belief that everything on earth—the environment, nature, people, trees, the land, the wind, animals—is interrelated, and that every manifestation of life has a purpose and place. Indians also believe that nothing is inherently bad; we are all in the same cycle of life, and there really is no death, only transformation. They follow what in many ways is a pure form of democracy: major decisions are made collectively by a consensus reached at councils, and chiefs are elected on merit; just because a young brave is the son of a chief, he doesn’t succeed his father unless he has earned it.

  The shooting continued sporadically day and night while the Dog Soldiers ran into the building to reload, then back into the snow to return the fire of the rednecks, whooping and yelling. It didn’t seem real until a rifle bullet smashed into a chimney a few feet from my head on the afternoon of a sunny day. The temperature was up to about thirty-five degrees and I was tired of being penned inside, so I went up to the roof to enjoy a little sun. A second or two later, a brick exploded an arm’s length from me. For an instant, I wondered what that was; then I heard the rifle shot, remembered that bullets travel faster than sound, and ran for cover. It was only another bullet, like millions before it, fired indiscriminately in the hope of killing an unimportant Indian.

  The next day I was asked to represent the Indians in negotiations with the Alexian Brothers, the religious order that held title to the novitiate, in an attempt to end the standoff. I heard through the grapevine—I don’t remember how—that the apostolic delegate, the Catholic Church’s representative in Washington, had sent a message to the pope urging him to apply pressure on the Alexian Brothers to reach a settlement because the Church couldn’t allow blood to be spilled in a dispute over real estate. I didn’t let on during the negotiations that I knew this, but I told the officers of the Alexian order, who came from their headquarters in Chicago, that the Church had much to account for because of its virtual enslavement of Indians in its early California missions, that the Menominee Indians had originally owned the property which had been taken from them, and that the Church therefore had received stolen property. Our first meeting ended without an agreement, but was followed by others. Finally the Alexian Brothers offered a compromise: they would give the tribe the deed to the property, but the police wouldn’t accept their request for amnesty in the takeover, which meant that some Indians would have to go to jail.

  With the light of the afternoon sun fading fast, I joined the Indians in the main room of the novitiate to consider the offer. As always, I was impressed by their inherent sense of democracy and respect for the individual. In Indian fashion, they went around the room so that everyone could express his opinion about accepting the offer or fighting on. It was soon apparent that there was a deep division. One group said that they had won the battle and should give up and take their medicine, but some of the younger men wanted to shoot it out with the National Guard. One said, “Let’s die as warriors. Our children will be proud of us and remember we were warriors.”

  They went around the room until one of them said, “Brando?”

  I answered with something like this: “Many of you either have a patch on your shoulder or a tattoo on your arms. It does not say, ‘Deed and Death,’ it says, ‘Deed or Death.’ You’ve gotten the deed; they made the accommodation. You won what you wanted and have all performed honorably. What you also have is an opportunity to continue fighting for your cause if you live. If you want to die, go outside and start shooting; the Guardsmen will take you at your word, and you’ll be dead in a few minutes. But death is an easy way out. What you’ll leave behind is a lot of trouble for your children. Who’s going to earn money to pay for your family’s needs? Besides, you haven’t got enough ammunition to last very long. You can die, but you won’t add anything to what’s already been accomplished. This is a very small piece of land, and there’s a lot of other work ahead. It will take a lifetime of dedication to right the wrongs you’ve suffered for hundreds of years, so I say, ‘Take the deed and do the time.’ ” There were a few murmurs, but nobody responded, and then it was somebody else’s turn to speak.

  In the end they decided not to fight, and some of them told me afterward that my saying, “It says, ‘Deed or Death,’ not ‘Deed and Death,’ ” had swayed them. They were arrested and we were all escorted into Gresham by National Guard troops. On the way I tried to talk to one of the guardsmen, but he looked at me as if I were a piece of rotten meat. I’d never seen such hatred in a man’s face. I didn’t have a ride to Milwaukee, where I wanted to catch a plane, so Father Groppi offered to take me. He also gave me a meal and a bed for the night, for which I was grateful because I hadn’t slept or eaten much for several days. The next morning after breakfast, the priest said he was going to pray and asked if I wanted to join him. Sitting in a pew, I suddenly felt a great rush of emotion. I asked him if he would pray for me and give thanks that the standoff had ended without another massacre. As he did, I started crying. Tears flooded my face. I was overcome with feeling. I have no idea why.

  It was all over except for one thing: in the end the Indians went to jail but never got the deed. Once again they had made a treaty with the white man, who had then violated it. The incident at Gresham was one more metaphor for the centuries-old relationship between the white man and the Indian.

  Several months later two FBI agents were killed under circumstances that have always been in dispute, at a place called Jumping Bull on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The FBI called it an ambush; AIM said that the agents had provoked a clash. I don’t know the truth. Two nights later seven or eight AIM members, some of whom I knew, showed up at my home in Los Angeles about one A.M. and said they were going underground because they were afraid of being hunted down and killed by the FBI in revenge for the deaths of the agents. After everybody was fed and rested, I let them take a motor home I used when I was on location and gave them radios so that they could talk back and forth on the road. Several months later I saw a television report that a motor home and a station wagon had been stopped by the police in Oregon. The FBI had the vehicles under surveillance and had asked the local police not to intercept them, but apparently a state trooper didn’t get the word and tried to stop the Indians, so there was a shoot-out. Five in the station wagon, including Dennis Banks’s pregnant wife, Kamook, were arrested, but he and another Indian evaded arrest, he told me later, by jumping out of the moving motor home. As it continued driverless along the highway, the police chased it, ran it into a ditch and opened fire on it while Dennis and his cohort disappeared into the darkness.

  Dennis spent a month on my island in Tahiti before returning to California and serving a short jail term for a minor offense unconnected to the deaths of the FBI agents. Later I flew with him to a reservation in Minnesota in a plane flown by a young Indian who said he’d been a marine pilot in Vietnam and wanted to return to his roots. At the reservation we were invited to join a ceremony in the sweat lodge with several men from the tribe. Everyone took off his clothes and sat in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, while a medicine man poured water on a pile of hot stones, making the lodge as hot as a sauna. Then he began singing while we went around the circle and everyone expressed with frankness what was in his heart: worries and disappointments, bad experiences, resentments, hatreds—extraordinary revelations spoken by total strangers. When it was my turn, I said that I was grateful to the American Indians because they had taught me a great deal, and
that I was inspired by their stoicism in the face of endless disappointment and shame. Only much later did somebody tell me that the pilot who took us to the reservation and shared our experiences in the sweat lodge was an FBI spy.

  There was one more postscript to Dennis’s trip in my motor home. The passengers in the station wagon included Anna Mae Aquash, a staunch member of AIM whom the FBI suspected of being involved in the deaths of its two agents. About a year after she was arrested and released, a badly decomposed body was found in a gully on a ranch in South Dakota. A Bureau of Indian Affairs pathologist did an autopsy on the corpse and said that it was an unidentified Indian woman who had died from exposure. The FBI cut off her hands, put them in a plastic bag and sent them to Washington for fingerprint identification—a barbaric act because they must have known that Indians believe that unless a body is whole, it cannot begin the next stage of its spiritual evolution. When the fingerprint check determined that the body was that of Anna Mae Aquash, her family became suspicious of the original pathology report and exhumed her for another autopsy. A second pathologist found a small-caliber bullet in her head, along with a lot of damage to her brain; she had been murdered, execution style.

  When I heard about this, I called the original pathologist, told him who I was, and asked him how it was possible for him to have opened Anna Mae’s skull, excised her brain and not noticed the bullet or the damaged brain tissue. “There seems to be a discrepancy between your findings and those of the other forensic expert,” I said, “and I was wondering how you account for it. How could you not have seen a hole in the back of her skull?” The man replied that he had seen the second report and had no argument with it, but became indignant with me. “I don’t have to answer these questions,” he said. I replied, “Indeed you don’t, but I’m going on television and people are going to ask me about what happened, so I called because I want to get the story correct.” But the pathologist merely repeated exactly what he had said before.

  I never got an answer to my questions. Anna Mae was assassinated, but to this day no one has ever been tried for her murder; to the federal government, she was just another dead Indian.

  The American Indian Movement did much to inspire Native Americans and raise their cultural pride, though it never won many tangible victories in the struggle to redress centuries of wrongs. However, I don’t think the story is over. Although Indians who ask for equity are still branded as rabble-rousers and dangerous militants, things are changing; maybe I’m overly optimistic, but history seems to be on the side of native peoples. In Canada the government has begun giving back tracts of land to its indigenous peoples; Australia is doing the same; even in the United States there have been small victories—court rulings that uphold some Indian fishing rights—and in Hawaii the return of some resources to native people. American Indians say that they realize that the descendants of the European settlers who took their land aren’t going to get back on the ships that brought them here and return to Dublin, Minsk, Naples or wherever they came from; all they want is the return of some of the stolen native lands to shelter themselves and their children and to provide them with a future. They say that at least we should give them a small cut of the pie that we’ve stolen.

  I believe it is inevitable that the Indians will succeed. A society cannot continue to claim that it favors expanding women’s or gay rights, or spend its wealth helping a country like Israel reclaim its historical lands, and yet do nothing for its own native peoples.

  55

  I DON’T FAULT THOSE who think otherwise, but I’ve never thought much of giving prizes to actors; I consider it inappropriate. The Academy Awards and the hoopla surrounding them elevate acting to a level that I don’t think it deserves. As I’ve mentioned, many people in Hollywood who I care about take the Academy Awards extremely seriously, and with a worldwide audience of a billion people, it’s obvious that a lot of people elsewhere do, too. But that’s the problem: they take it too seriously. When the world has so many serious problems, it’s troubling that such an inconsequential event has taken on such importance. I know people who start planning what they’re going to wear to the ceremonies six months in advance, and if there’s any chance they’ll be nominated, they begin memorizing their acceptance speech. If they win, they pretend their words are spontaneous, but they’ve lain awake for months mumbling to the ceiling what they will say.

  The ceremony has its roots in Hollywood’s obsession with self-promotion; people in the business have a passion for paying tribute to one another. I suspect it stems from the fact that so many of them are Jewish. It is a part of their faith to recognize and reward good works and be honored for them. This reassures them that they are worthy people, especially after having grown up in a culture where there is a great deal of guilt and pressure to excel. Jews who are recognized for good works even get a better seat in the synagogue, meaning that they are closer to God. Even the name of the organization, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is an exaggeration. I laugh at people who call moviemaking an art and actors “artists.” Rembrandt, Beethoven, Shakespeare and Rodin were artists; actors are worker ants in a business and they toil for money. That’s why it’s always been called “the movie business.”

  When I was nominated for The Godfather, it seemed absurd to go to the Awards ceremonies. Celebrating an industry that had systematically misrepresented and maligned American Indians for six decades, while at that moment two hundred Indians were under siege at Wounded Knee, was ludicrous. Still, if I did win an Oscar, I realized it could provide the first opportunity in history for an American Indian to speak to sixty million people—a little payback for years of defamation by Hollywood. So I asked a friend, Sacheen Little Feather, to attend the ceremony in my place and wrote a statement for her to deliver in my name denouncing the treatment of American Indians and racism in general. But Howard Koch, the producer of the show, intercepted her and, in his wisdom, refused to let her read my speech. Instead, under great pressure she had to adlib a few words on behalf of the American Indian, and it made me proud of her.

  I don’t know what happened to that Oscar. The Motion Picture Academy may have sent it to me, but if it did I don’t know where it is now.

  Mario Puzo sent me a copy of The Godfather shortly after it was published, along with a note saying that if a movie was ever made from the book, he thought I should play Don Corleone, the head of the New York Mafia family he had written about. I read the note but wasn’t interested. Alice Marchak remembers my throwing it away and saying, “I’m not a Mafia godfather.” I had never played an Italian before, and I didn’t think I could do it successfully. By then I had learned that one of the biggest mistakes an actor can make is to try to play a role for which he is miscast. You have to take a few risks now and then, but some parts you shouldn’t play no matter how much they pay you, just as some roles are best left alone because they’ve already been done unforgettably by someone else. Only a foolish actor, for example, would try to succeed Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan, Robert Donat as Mr. Chips or Charles Laughton as the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  But Alice took the book home, read it and said she thought I should take the part if it was offered me. She didn’t change my mind, though I did call Mario without having read the book and thanked him for his note. Mario, who had sold the film rights to Paramount, began writing a screenplay based on the book and called me from time to time and encouraged me to reconsider, without telling me that he was lobbying on my behalf at Paramount, where, he later informed me, executives were dead set against my playing the role. The principal resistance came from Charles Bluhdorn, head of Paramount’s parent company, Gulf + Western, and Robert Evans, the chief of production. Bluhdorn believed some of the stories he’d read about my supposed excesses on Mutiny on the Bounty, and since Paramount had lost a lot of money recently, he didn’t want to risk losing more on the The Godfather. To Evans I looked too young to play Don Corleone, who aged in the story from his late forties to his earl
y seventies. I was then forty-seven.

  When Mario sent me the finished screenplay, I read both it and his book and liked them. By then Francis Coppola had signed on as director and was beginning to rewrite portions of Mario’s script. He also said that he wanted me to play the part, and suggested that I audition for it to convince the executives at Paramount. I told him I had my own doubts, but said I’d let him know.

  I went home and did some rehearsing to satisfy my curiosity about whether I could play an Italian. I put on some makeup, stuffed Kleenex in my cheeks, and worked out the characterization first in front of a mirror, then on a television monitor. After working on it, I decided I could create a characterization that would support the story. The people at Paramount saw the footage and liked it, and that’s how I became the Godfather.

  A month or two before we were scheduled to start shooting, someone at Paramount—I think it was Evans—said that I looked too heavy to play the part, so I went on a diet. But I lost too much weight and had to put twenty pounds back on before the picture could start.