No one disputes that the film shoot was suspended while actor and director brainstormed on a houseboat. Coppola’s collaborative intent was expressed in a letter to Brando from the summer of 1976. The letter described the director’s anguish over the unfinished script and the hope that he and the actor would be able to turn it around. Coppola’s admiration for Brando’s intuitions was clear, as was his conviction that the two of them together would find a way through this complicated and controversial material. If anyone in the business could produce an authentic portrait of the Vietnam War, Coppola suggested, he and Brando could. Coppola’s tone here, and the high expectations of what Brando had to offer his film, contrasted sharply with Coppola’s June 1979 public critique of an unprepared and overweight actor who figured prominently in the director’s difficulties with the production.22 Perhaps Brando’s work on the film after he arrived in the Philippines in the fall of 1976 didn’t meet Coppola’s expectations. But Michael Herr, the novelist who received partial credit for the screenplay, recalled, “The actor wrote a stream of brilliant lines for his character,” the “part was twice as long in the rough-cut as it was in the released movie.” Coppola himself described how he and Brando reconceived the script to increase the suspenseful anticipation of the mythic Kurtz.23 As Coppola’s biographer notes, “This long coda in Kurtz’s domain houses the core of the film’s meaning, and Kurtz’s speeches alight unerringly on the reasons for the American predicament in Vietnam.”24
Brando was in a position to clarify and enhance this meaning when he arrived on location. His personal files for Apocalypse Now include dozens of articles and books, which he annotated, and letters from experts about specific incidents. On the war, Brando was particularly captivated by Soldier, the 1973 memoir of Anthony B. Herbert, inspector general of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, one of the highest-rated combat units in Vietnam.25 A son of Lithuanian immigrants who had devoted his life to the military, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert writes about being shocked by the routine negligence and malfeasance actively concealed by commanders. Herbert filed formal charges, accusing superiors of war crimes after his appeals for investigation were denied. The charges were dismissed and the forty-one-year-old career officer felt forced to leave the US Army.
Brando’s copy of the book is full of highlighting that reflects his absorption in Soldier. He marked some passages for their authentic dialogue (“Vietnam was the ‘unreal world,’ they said, ‘Brown Disneyland’. . . Six Flags Over Nothing”; “It was Cover Your Ass time”; “If Carthage had been as dependent on the coconut, there would have been no need for the Roman plow”).26 He marked others for their clear statements of themes (“The generals were has-beens or never-beens of World War II”; “He was applying, whether intentionally or not, the Westmoreland Precept: see no evil, hear no evil, and you will avoid being contaminated by evil”).27 And he read for characterization (“A philosophy of war is a personal matter, to be dealt with by each individual. It has to be that way or you go bananas”; “commendations and medals just didn’t mean very much anymore”).28 Brando also raised questions and highlighted contradictions, eager for information beyond Herbert (writing “get” over a reference to Seymour Hersh on the Peers Commission Report in the New York Times).29 In a similar skeptical vein, he revised Lieutenant Colonel Herbert’s observation—when you “make your war a war of numbers, you have no trouble sleeping. Most generals and presidents sleep well.” Brando added: “and lieutenant colonels.”30
On set for Apocalypse Now in the Philippines. Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images.
Both Brando and Coppola were taken by Herbert’s book, which came up in tapes of their houseboat conversations, and Herbert’s influence on Apocalypse Now superseded Brando’s part. For example, Brando writes “Possible” across a passage about a deranged chaplain with rosary beads who requests that soldiers be pulled from combat for Mass.31 The celebrated Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore sequence depicts a priest giving communion to a group of soldiers in the midst of battle, while the manic Kilgore (Robert Duvall) discusses surfboards. Captain Willard’s (Martin Sheen) voice-over following his stint with Kilgore’s unit could be straight from Soldier: “No wonder Kurtz put a weed up Command’s ass, the war was being run by a bunch of Four Star Clowns who were gonna end up giving the whole circus away.”32 The most obvious echo of Herbert’s book is Kurtz, the stellar officer, groomed for the highest ranks, driven to rebel against the chain of command.33 But Herbert retained his sanity, while Kurtz becomes a magical figure in the jungle. For his portrait of the individual who transcends the bounds of civilization, Brando drew on a larger and more treasured section of his library.34
Religion, spirituality, and myth were among the most heavily represented subjects in Brando’s library. He annotated Lao Tzu’s The Way of Life (1962) cover to cover and had a copy of the 1964 bestseller Markings, by Dag Hammarskjold. In the film, Kurtz’s bookshelf features volumes—James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Bible—that Brando owned sometimes in multiples, on subjects (T. S. Eliot, James Frazer, the Bible) that so absorbed him he read and annotated many secondary works about them.35 He had books on angels, voodoo, magic, Zen, and the occult, books by and about Krishnamurti. He had Bibles and scriptures from most of the major religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, American Indian and Christian Science; books of psalms and Bible interpretation; books on anthropology and myth (by Joseph Campbell, Arnold Toynbee, Kurt Seligmann, and Lord Raglan, among others), including Bronislaw Malinowski’s 1948 study, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Brando’s collection featured titles such as Unveiling the Mystery of Creation, How the Great Religions Began, Man and His Gods, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, which Brando might well have lent to his alter ego, the colonel, or discussed at length with him. But Brando, the ultimate agnostic or seeker (he even owned The Seeker’s Handbook), was never dogmatic, whereas Kurtz, as Brando told Coppola in their recorded conversations, was “a true believer, in Eric Hoffer’s sense.”36
Brando’s conception for Apocalypse Now was “to return to the original plot of Conrad’s novel, in which a man named Marlow describes his journey up the Congo in search of Walter Kurtz, a once-idealistic young man who has been transformed by his experiences into a mysterious, remote figure involved in what Conrad called ‘unspeakable rites.’ . . . What makes Conrad’s story so powerful is that people talk about Kurtz for pages and pages, and readers wonder about him. They never see him, but he is part of the atmosphere. It’s an odyssey, and he’s the Heart of Darkness. . . . I offered to rewrite the script based on the original structure of the book, and Francis agreed. . . . Besides restructuring the plot, I wrote Kurtz’s speeches, including a monologue at his death. . . . It was probably the closest I’ve ever come to getting lost in a part, and one of the best scenes I’ve ever played.”37 The oft-repeated command that Kurtz be “terminated with extreme prejudice” is a notorious CIA line with which Brando was familiar.38 Brando also shaved his head to suit Conrad’s description of Kurtz as “impressively bald. The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball.”39 Much of this footage was omitted from the 1979 film, but sections were added onto Apocalypse Now Redux (2001), which critics and Coppola himself considered the definitive cut.
Brando’s appearances in Apocalypse Now amount to about twenty minutes. But Kurtz infuses the whole movie with a sense of doom, as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Kurtz’s spell is cast when Captain Willard first hears his voice, and it deepens as he gets bits of information, drifting up the Nung River toward Cambodia, where Kurtz and his devotees conduct their guerrilla operations. Willard says, “The more I read and began to understand the more I admired him . . . a tough motherfucker . . . staged operation Arc Angle . . . rated a major success. . . . He just thought it up and did it. What balls.”40 Audiences share Willard’s obsession with Kurtz, skimming
voyeuristically over his shoulder: Kurtz’s application for transfer, photographs of Kurtz at an awards ceremony (borrowed from Brando as Major Pendleton in Reflections in a Golden Eye). Kurtz is the diabolical catalyst of the journey; his subversive activities initiate it, his sacrificial death completes it. “I made an entrance into the movie with just my bald head,” Brando recalled, “without my face, and then I went back out into the shadow, because that was in a sense what had happened to the man’s mind, that he was in the darkness . . . he went back and forth into this netherworld that he had created . . . he no longer had any moral reference for anything.”41 If the mad Colonel Kurtz is dispatched, the higher command trusts, his mad reading of Vietnam will also disappear. Yet he is not the only officer who has lost his mind in Vietnam.
Captain Willard is introduced in drunken despair; writhing on the floor of his hotel room, he smashes a mirror, smearing blood over himself. The mission to eliminate Kurtz comes as a salvation for Willard, though it proves fatal to nearly the entire patrol-boat crew. Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore’s benightedness is his asset. Kurtz, in contrast, is a seer: He dies with his eyes open, whispering, “The horror, the horror.” A type of Christ, he is dangerous not because he is symptomatic of Vietnam but because he understands it. Kurtz knows the impossibility of victory in a war waged to protect American interests, the ineffectiveness of a revolving-door army with sophisticated weaponry against guerrilla forces motivated by belief who are able, Kurtz says, “to utilize their primordial instincts to kill, without feeling, without passion, without judgment.” Brando was reading Hannah Arendt’s Crises of the Republic (1972) around the time of Apocalypse Now, and its chapter on the Pentagon Papers (an honest appraisal of the Vietnam War, 1945–1967, commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara) is especially relevant to Kurtz. Brando marked, for instance, the assertions that “technical superiority can ‘be much more of a liability than an asset’ in guerrilla wars,” and that after 1965 the prospect of victory receded and the US “objective became ‘to convince the enemy that he could not win,’” thus avoiding a “humiliating defeat” for the American military. Brando appropriates McNamara’s thinking for Kurtz. One can easily imagine him highlighting in full, as Brando did, Arendt’s chilling epigraph from Robert S. McNamara: “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring a thousand non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”42
Another book by Arendt may have informed Brando’s thinking on Kurtz even more—Eichmann in Jerusalem (1975). Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann helped Brando to extemporize in a way that takes us close to the “heart of darkness.” Here is a sample of Kurtz’s ravings, completely improvised by Brando, that were not included in the film:
I, I, I, I had immense plans, threshold of great things. . . . To look into the abyss without drawing away is everything, the highest the highest honor. To approach the horizon of endurable anguish and to pass it . . . the unthinkable you must experience the unthinkable. Masses, masses, any any people who go anywhere do anything, as long as the ring of faith is in their nose, yes put the rings in their nose and call it God, country and mother then you can run a slim rope through the rings and herd them all, ten million, a hundred million two hundred million or more. The human animal has no limits, he can . . . fling himself into outer space and find a new orbit, determined by far greater forces, like that of Jupiter or the Sun. . . . The will to submission is stronger than the will to power, Eichmann, six million Jews. . . . Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, no vice. This war will never be won by the priests of misery at the Rand Corporation and not in the situation rooms in Washington. . . . This is a time for giants and they send us pygmies armed with chalk, computers, tape recorders, tennis rackets. . . . We are the murderers, we are the monsters that we fear in others. Here we go round the prickly pear, here we go round the prickly pear.43
Among the many passages Brando starred in Eichmann in Jerusalem was a reflection on why there were not more displays of conscience, of resistance by the Nazis who were slaughtering innocents in the field. Some officers insisted that they had “inwardly opposed” the extermination they dutifully carried out, that, as one officer put it, the crimes committed by his “official soul” were decried by his “private soul.”44 Brando’s speeches for Kurtz suggest a different explanation: that perhaps he didn’t have a soul. Despite his violence, confirmed by the surrounding corpses, Kurtz is methodical and polite. When he learns Willard is from Ohio, he muses gently about the gardenia plantation he once saw there that made you think “heaven” had fallen “on the earth.”45 Later, reading aloud from T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” Time magazine on Vietnam, or Frazer on sacrifice from The Golden Bough, Brando makes clear that Kurtz’s horror is grounded in principles of civilization.
Reviews of Apocalypse Now were mixed. Frank Rich, writing in Time, was among the most negative, characterizing the film as “an incongruous, extravagant monument to artistic self-defeat”; Vincent Canby in the New York Times called it a “stunning work . . . as technically complex and masterful as any war film I can remember,” while highlighting its flaws. Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times agreed about the flaws but concluded: “As a noble use of the medium and as a tireless expression of national anguish, it towers over everything that has been attempted by an American filmmaker in a very long time.” And Dale Pollock in Variety warned that this “brilliant and bizarre film . . . complex, demanding, highly intelligent,” was entering “a marketplace that does not always embrace those qualities.” His predictions proved correct. Many contemporaries were irritated by Apocalypse Now and by Coppola’s overt parallels in interviews between his subject and his experiences making it (“this isn’t a film about Vietnam, the film is Vietnam”). Still, it is now widely acknowledged as a major film about Vietnam, a stature assisted by the release of Apocalypse Now Redux. This was anticipated by Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Years and years from now, when Coppola’s budget and his problems have long been forgotten, Apocalypse will still stand, I think, as a grand and grave and insanely inspired gesture of filmmaking.”46
Apocalypse Now was the most idealistic of Brando’s films from the 1970s. His next role as an amoral CEO was the most cynical. An oil baron, without use for anyone who stands in the way of profit, Adam Steiffel of The Formula (1980) worries more about the dead frogs in his chlorinated pool than the humans he has killed. Though a detective played by George C. Scott exposes him, Steiffel triumphs in the end, his “oil shortage business” promising exponential growth in the years ahead. Here too, Brando, in a brief but deft performance, helped to convey prophetic truths. Somewhat camouflaged behind prosthetic teeth, nostril expanders, and thick glasses, Brando earned some positive reviews from Roger Ebert—Brando “appears in three fascinating scenes and leaves us wishing for more”—and Janet Maslin—Brando “plays a captain of industry, and does it with a rakish sense of humor,” offering “very memorable” moments with Scott.47 Like his other projects of the seventies, The Formula featured leading actors (Scott, and John Gielgud, with whom Brando had appeared before), had production problems, and paid Brando royally for his limited time—$2.7 million for two weeks. Even though commercially profitable, the film made little impression and reinforced Brando’s cynicism about contemporary filmmaking, helping to spur his decision to take a sabbatical of sorts. This was his choice. Scripts continued to come in throughout this period (he turned down a role in Rambo III, for instance, because the United States and the Soviet Union were near an accord on missile reduction), but he was determined to pursue his own ends, and the significant income from his recent films made it possible.48
During the nine years between The Formula and A Dry White Season, Brando kept his hand in prospective movies and pursued the usual good works (which included continued time on his Indian projects), read, wrote (a novel, Fan-Tan, and a script, Jericho, for a movi
e that got to the production stage but no further), and planned (eco-projects for his island in Tahiti; garden and house renovation for his Mulholland Drive home).
HIATUS AND RENEWAL
Brando had never lacked for things to do when he wasn’t filming. He read even more than usual, devoted time and energy to Tetiaroa and to his children. In 1980, Brando’s Tahitian children, Teihotu and Cheyenne, were seventeen and ten, respectively. His “other daughters,” Miamiti (b. 1977) and Raiatua (b. 1982), conceived by his Tahitian wife Tarita with other men, and the daughter of his assistant Caroline Barrett, Petra (b. 1972), whom Brando also treated as his own (he put Petra through college and law school), were often on Tetiaroa and occasionally visited Mulholland Drive. Brando set up a school on the island, with French-speaking tutors who taught them English in addition to a variety of subjects, including sociology. His library had books, workbooks, and textbooks belonging to the island’s children. Brando was also concerned with the educations of his children in Los Angeles, marking the high school graduation of his son Miko with a Rolex watch inscribed, “To my beautiful son, from his very lucky Dad, June 1978,” and supporting the college education of Miko’s sister Rebecca at the University of Arizona in the late 1980s.
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