Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me

by Marlon Brando

  In Tahiti there are more laughing faces per acre than in any place I’ve ever been, whereas we’ve put a man on the moon but produce frustrated, angry people.

  I can hear some readers say, “Why do you want to run America down, Marlon? You’ve had it pretty good!”

  Well, America has been good to me, but it wasn’t a gift; rather, I’ve earned it by the sweat of my brow and my capacity to invent and sustain myself. If I hadn’t been in the right circumstances and had a lot of luck, I don’t know what I would have become. I might have been a con man and gone to jail, or if I’d been lucky enough to get a job without a high-school education, I might have spent my life on an assembly line, had three children, and then at fifty or fifty-five been cast off like yesterday’s garbage, the way a lot of Americans have been recently. This doesn’t happen in Tahiti because it is a classless society, and this is probably the main reason I’ve gone there whenever I could during the past thirty years. In Tahiti I can always be myself. There’s no fawning or kowtowing to people who consider themselves famous or more important than others. Tahitians have a quality I’ve never observed in any other large group: they have no envy. Of course, there are pretentious Tahitians who want to appear knowledgeable about the world and put on airs, but I’ve run into very few of them. What I admire about the people of Tahiti is that they are able to live in the moment, to enjoy what is going on now. There are no celebrities, movie stars, rich men or poor men; they laugh, dance, drink and make love, and they know how to relax. When we were making Mutiny on the Bounty, a Tahitian girl in the cast missed her boyfriend and decided to go home. The producer said, “You can’t quit; you signed a contract. If you do, we’ll sue you.” The girl said, “Well, I’ve got a dog and a couple of goats, and you can have them.”

  The producer said, “Then we’ll have you arrested,” and she said, “All right.” Then she left and they had to rewrite the movie. Hollywood meant nothing to her.

  When I wake up in Tahiti, my pulse is sometimes as low as 48; in America, it’s nearer 60. Living in our so-called civilized society makes the difference. There are no homeless people in Tahiti because somebody will always take you in. If there’s a shortage of anything, it’s of children; they love kids. It’s not perfect. There’s crime, fighting, disorder and family conflicts, but by and large it is a society where people are internally quiet and outwardly full of laughter, gaiety and optimism, and they live each day as it comes. Unfortunately, life is changing there as outside forces try to improve, as well as exploit, what they regard as a primitive culture. In all of Polynesia, there are only about 200,000 people, and they are constantly under assault, from patronizing and condescending religious missionaries to fast-buck promoters who consider them simple and primitive. They are neither primitive nor simple, but sophisticated in their own way of experiencing life to the fullest. Outsiders who call them backward do so out of racial snobbery and a prejudice rooted in the foolish notion that equates technological advancement with civilization. Westerners seldom acknowledge the extraordinary feats of early Polynesian seafarers who, without compass, radar or navigational satellites, but only by dead reckoning and a knowledge of the winds, traversed thousands of miles of uncharted waters in open ships. Along with the Micronesians, the Polynesians settled the Pacific, and their descendants enjoy life more than any people I know. Tahitian women are the toughest I’ve ever met. They are independent and have no inhibitions, about sex or anything else. After falling in love and having children, they usually stay with the same man, but not always; sometimes two or three women move in with the same man. They feel jealousy, have fights and feuds like everyone else, and when a Tahitian woman takes against a man, she’s likely to tell everything about him to everyone. No secrets are left untold.

  Most of all, Tahitians love parties. Once, when Charles de Gaulle was scheduled to visit Tahiti while I was there, the word was passed from village to village. Most people ignored his arrival until someone said there would be a party when he came. Then they flocked aboard buses, brought their drums and skirts and celebrated the joy of life, not De Gaulle; they didn’t give a damn about him and didn’t even know who he was. But when he sailed into the harbor, people stood in the water up to their necks, there were thousands of them, with food, flowers, tears and singing. It was then that I fell in love with the Tahitian soul.

  I still have many dreams for my island. My greatest hope is to return it to what Polynesia used to be. Considering the many incursions from the outside world that it has had to endure to sustain itself, it’s remarkable how resilient Polynesian culture has been. It has been invaded repeatedly by alien cultures: the Spanish, English and French; missionaries, whalers, tourists, hucksters, human sharks; and now television, perhaps the most insidious influence of all. The pressures are enormous, and the Polynesians must face the reality that they are living in a technological age and that it will be impossible to go backward. Now there are television, satellite dishes, jet airplanes, insurance policies, bank accounts, cutthroat real estate promoters and assorted other highwaymen who want to exploit Tahitians down to their last buck.

  If I have my way, Teti’aroa will remain forever a place that reminds Tahitians of who they are and what they were centuries ago—and what, I’m convinced, they still are today despite the missionaries and fast-buck artists, a place where they can recreate and procreate and find enjoyment without being exploited by outsiders. I would like the island to become a marine park with technological systems that can help provide its inhabitants with more food. Because the population is growing rapidly, they will have to find ways to increase the yield of their land and lagoons. If I can do this, it will give me more pleasure and satisfaction than any acting I have ever done.

  60

  I CAN DRAW no conclusions about my life because it is a continually evolving and unfolding process. I don’t know what is next. I am more surprised at how I turned out than I am about anything else. I don’t ever remember trying to be successful. It just happened. I was only trying to survive. Much like a newly fertilized egg, I look now at some of the things I have done in life with astonishment. Fifty years ago, at a party at my home, I climbed out the window of my apartment in New York and clung to a balustrade eleven stories above Seventy-second Street as a joke. I can’t imagine myself ever having done that. I have difficulty reconciling the boy I was then with the man I am now.

  I suppose the story of my life is a search for love, but more than that, I have been looking for a way to repair myself from the damages I suffered early on and to define my obligations, if I had any, to myself and my species. Who am I? What should I do with my life? Though I haven’t found answers, it’s been a painful odyssey, dappled with moments of joy and laughter. In one of my letters from Shattuck, I told my parents, “In a play written by Sophocles … the Antigone, there are lines that say: ‘Let be the future: mind the present need and leave the rest to whom the rest concerns … present tasks claim our care: the ordering of the future rests where it should rest.’ These words written two thousand years ago are just as applicable today as they were then. It seems incomprehensible that through the fifteen thousand years since our species came into being, we have not evolved.”

  At fifteen, I was already aware that we have learned little from our experiences, and that our proclivity is to leave the correction of wrongs and injustice to a future we are not accountable for. Yet I spent most of the next fifty-five years trying to do the opposite. Frustrated in my attempts to take care of my mother, I suppose that instead I tried to help Indians, blacks and Jews. I thought love, good intentions and positive action could alter injustice, prejudice, aggression and genocide. I was convinced that if I presented the facts—for example, show people a film that I made about starvation in India—they would be aroused and help me to alleviate that suffering. I felt a responsibility to create a better world, propelled by the certainty that compassion and love could solve its problems. I am no longer persuaded that any significant change through a co
urse of behavior will make any difference of lasting importance. Late in life I learned something that sustains me: my suffering for other people doesn’t help them. I still do what I can to be helpful, but I don’t have to suffer for it. Previously I had empathized with people who were less fortunate. My sense of empathy remains undiminished, but I apply it in a different manner. Through meditation and self-examination I feel that I am coming closer to discovering what it means to be human, and that the things I feel are the same that everybody else feels. We are all capable of hatred and of love.

  Curiosity about why people believe as they do is one of the most consistent features of my life. Still, I don’t think any of us ever knows with certainty why we do some things or how our behavior is a product of our genes or our environment or a blend of each; it is impossible to answer the question with precision. I have not achieved the wisdom of why I am alive, and I take large comfort in the knowledge that I never will. The mist of misperception defeats all of us.

  Still, I no longer feel that I have a mission to save the world. It can’t be done, I’ve learned. I didn’t realize it then, but I think my attitude started to change when I made that film about the famine in India. On my way home, I stopped in Calcutta to visit Satyajit Ray, the Indian movie director, and we went out to lunch. When we left the restaurant, a sea of children in tattered clothing, broken, blinded, twisted and sick, engulfed us to ask for baksheesh. I was aware as we drifted through this swarm of broken kids that Satyajit was completely unconcerned, even unaware, and gently swept them aside absentmindedly. It was as though he were brushing his way gently through a wheat field. I asked him how he was able to do it, and he replied, “If you live in India, you see this every day of your life. If I sold everything I had to help these children, it wouldn’t amount to a billionth of one rupee for any one of them, and they would all be back tomorrow. There is nothing I can do to solve this problem; some problems are unsolvable.”

  All my life, I had been a do-gooder, but I finally learned that what Satyajit said about the children of Calcutta was true: there are some problems that I can’t do anything about.

  I’ve also changed some of my views about the nature of human behavior. When I was young, I embraced the Judeo-Christian concept of good and evil, and its corollary, that all of us were responsible for our deeds because of the choices we made. I don’t believe this anymore. Philosophers like Plato, Socrates, Kant and Spinoza have argued for millennia over the nature of free will, and of good and evil. Epicurus said that God was either uncaring and chose to ignore evil, or he was unable to prevent it and therefore not omnipotent. But Saint Augustine, trying to resolve the paradox that Christians face about how a supposedly benevolent God could allow evil to exist, rationalized it by arguing that evil was not a product of God but was the absence of good, and that what at first appeared to be evil might turn out to be good in the context of eternity. This is how events like the Holocaust and the slaughter of the Native Americans are explained. But I believe that the roots of the behavior we call “evil” are genetic. I’ve never found any system—religious, social, philosophical, ethical, political or economic—that was able to suppress man’s innate animus and predilection to gather into groups dedicated to exterminating other groups for their beliefs, profit, hatred or frolic. More people have been killed in the name of religion and the defense of dogma than any other single cause. Genetically determined behavior affected by environmental features seems to be the final arbiter of human behavior. I believe our genetic impulses are so strong that we cannot overcome them. No matter how well equipped we are to cerebrate, our minds are in direct service to our emotions, and yet we cling to the outmoded myths of goodness and evil in the Bible and the Talmud. Neither money, religious zeal, political revolution or even knowledge can alter the basic nature of the human animal. Nothing has ever made people good. I may have given away millions of dollars, but I realize now that most of it didn’t do any good for the people I intended it for.

  For over fifty years, the Cold War dominated our lives like storm clouds, and communism was blamed for most of the evils of the world. Now that the Cold War is over, the world is fragmenting and ethnic warfare has erupted everywhere, including the streets of the United States, where poverty, murder, violence and injustice are endemic. Our preoccupation with communism camouflaged a rottenness within the political and economic system of which we were so proud. There has been an illusion throughout history that when man made “progress,” advancing technology would help him to communicate better so that the barriers of conflict and misunderstanding between us would crumble. But now that we have satellite dishes, global coverage by CNN, interactive TV, instant telecommunications, the most sophisticated equipment and the forensic wisdom of the Rand Corporation, our situation is worse than ever.

  Whatever grains of optimism survive in me about the evolution of mankind are centered in the belief that genetic alteration, however fraught with danger, is the only possible solution to what Hannah Arendt referred to as the banality of evil. I don’t think anything in the range of human existence since Neanderthal man—not fire or the invention of weapons or the wheel—equals in importance Francis Crick and James Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA. It will have an incalculable effect on society, religion and our concept of ourselves. Within a few years, scientists will finish mapping the human genome based on Crick and Watson’s discovery, and with it will come an opportunity to alter the nature of man. Already scientists are beginning to unravel the sources of the neural disorders that produce anger and frustration, the will to kill and the hostility that produces war. They have already linked some genetic defects to certain kinds of aggressive and violent behavior; they are starting to make extraordinary advances in biogenetics and neurogenetics, opening doors that will lead to a clearer understanding not only of how genes affect our behavior, but how to alter that behavior. In the science of behavioral genetics, we’re on the cusp of enormous change. The time is approaching when the genes of a chimpanzee can be altered to give him the gift of speech. Genetic engineering of human behavior will advance on a parallel track. If the human race has a genetic fault that causes errant behavior or self-destruction, it will simply be removed.

  A fantasy, you say? I think it is inevitable—and necessarily so if our species is ever to stop killing its own kind.

  Of course there will be an uproar in the churches when scientists have the power to engineer human beings. It will be argued that the design of human beings is God’s province alone. There may even be enough resistance to advancing the science of behavioral genetics to halt temporarily what is doable, but whenever something is possible, sooner or later it will be done. The world has always been in a state of revolution between the old and the new, and new discoveries are unstoppable. The twenty-first century will produce a far bigger revolution in the biological sciences than the twentieth century did in the physical sciences. It has taken me seventy years to refrain from doing certain things that were destructive to me and to other people, and to resolve emotional conflicts that produced errant social behavior. With genetic implants I probably would not have been burdened with the emotional disorders that caused me to spend most of my life in emotional disarray. In the future, specialists will recognize the kind of trouble I had as a child and be able to do something about it.

  If I had been loved and cared for differently, I would have been a different person. I went through most of my life afraid of being rejected and ended up rejecting most of those who offered me love because I was unable to trust them. When the press made up lies about me, I used to try to maintain an image of indifference, but privately I sustained great injury. Now it truly doesn’t matter to me what anyone says about me. I have achieved honest indifference to the opinions of others except for those I love and hold in high regard.

  Clifford Odets once told me, “I never heard what Beethoven was saying until I was forty.” You gain a great deal simply by living long enough. In some ways I haven’t cha
nged. I was always sensitive, always curious about myself and others, always had a good instinct for people, always loved a good book and any kind of joke, which I think I learned from my parents, because they were both good laughers. But in other ways I am a vastly different person from what I was like as a child. For most of my life I had to appear strong when I wasn’t, and what I wanted most was control. If I was wronged or felt diminished, I wanted vengeance.

  I don’t anymore. I am still contemptuous of authority and of the kind of conformity that induces mediocrity, but I no longer feel a need to lash out at it. In my twenties I always wanted to be the best, but now I truly don’t care. I’ve quit comparing myself with other people. I don’t worry if somebody is more talented than I am or if people invent vicious stories about me; I understand that they’re people not unlike myself who are just trying to pay the rent and who close their eyes to the vulgarity of their deeds. I realize they are doing it for their own reasons. Moreover, in telling the story of my life in this book, I must acknowledge that I am guilty of some of the sins for which I used to despise others.

  I believe it is fortunate that my parents died when they did; otherwise, I would have probably wrecked what was left of their lives before I found a better way to live. Now I am happier than I’ve ever been. My sisters and I rode out the storm together with the help of one another. Both grew into wise, independent women who beat alcoholism and created new lives for themselves. Frannie died this year, leaving a void in my life that can never be filled. But before she died, she found happiness, too; in her late forties she went back to college and became a successful teacher. Tiddy, after one career as an actress and another in business, became a wonderful therapist and applied her extraordinary insight to helping others.