Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  Now that we have a fuller record of what Brando said, read, and did, it’s possible to grasp the consistency of his commitments to learning, self-development, and political causes. There was a reason why he thought of becoming a minister after he achieved fame in Streetcar.1 Brando was a lifelong seeker in pursuit of greater purpose. He was concerned about the world, including its environment, plant and animal life, the interdependencies of ecosystems, and its human cultures. A fan of scientific innovation, he was among the first in Hollywood to own a personal computer.2 His ambitions transcended acting, with his desire to know more, and to do something about the injustices and suffering he saw everywhere.

  BORN TRAVELER

  “I was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and I grew up in America, but I consider myself a citizen of the planet,” Brando said in 1978. Patriotism, he continued, postpones acceptance of the inevitable; the earth is “getting smaller all the time . . . pollution doesn’t recognize borders. Weather changes that have been brought about by the manipulations of man don’t recognize frontiers. Economics certainly doesn’t recognize frontiers. Everything is overlapping, whether we like it or not—we are our neighbor’s keeper.”3 “Even as a boy, Bud had a great desire to travel, to see far-away places,” his mother recalled. “He’d often start on mysterious journeys all by himself.”4 Reading National Geographic magazines as a teenager, he was especially drawn to Polynesia. The multicultural world of Manhattan in the 1940s whetted his appetite for human variety, and Broadway success provided the means for travel. As soon as he was able, at the close of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1949, Brando went to Europe, spending three months there, mostly in Paris. He studied French (his copy of Berlitz’s Deuxième Livre, a “natural method” of French conversation, was annotated copiously) and explored, only lured home by the need to earn a living.5 But the pattern was set: He would be a traveler for life, whether journeying to Egypt and Istanbul for pleasure (February 1967), Australia for work (The Island of Dr. Moreau), Southeast Asia for UNICEF, or his Taihitian island Tetiaroa for rest.6 “I always wanted to go to Tahiti,” Brando told a journalist in French in 1997. “And also Japan . . . and to France and to England and especially Ireland . . . my ancestral home. Films have allowed me to travel everywhere in the world.”7

  In 1956, Brando toured the Far East as a prelude to filming in Japan of The Teahouse of the August Moon, accompanied by George Englund, Stewart Stern, and the photographer Herman Leonard. Traveling through the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Indonesia, Brando and Englund were doing research for the Pennebaker Productions film on the UN, which Stern, a scriptwriter, had been hired to develop. By Jakarta, Brando had grown tired of the full entourage. Leaving a note for Englund and Stern, he chartered a plane and flew to Bali with Leonard. “From now on,” Brando told the photographer, “you’re Mr. Jones and I’m Mr. Smith, capiche?” Leonard recalled that the scheme was almost foiled at the outset in Denpasar, when two hundred American tourists suddenly poured through the hotel lobby to register. “Marlon took one look, grabbed me by the collar and leaped over the counter and out the back. With the help of the hotel manager, we escaped in the back of a laundry truck.” They ended up at the palace of Prince Tjorkorda Agung Sukawati in Ubud. The “palace” was a series of raised wooden cottages without electricity or running water, but Leonard and Brando felt that they had “found paradise.” The prince treated them to daily dances and magic shows, and they were liberated from the modern world: no T-shirts, taxis, or telephones, just rice paddies and bamboo. Leonard’s only regret was that the hundreds of photographs he took during this idyllic sojourn were lost. When Brando went on to Japan, Leonard returned to New York, sending all his negatives, as requested, to the Pennebaker files in Hollywood. He never saw them again. All that time “with Marlon in all those exotic places surely must have produced some great classic images,” the photographer reflected sadly in December 2004, five months after Brando’s death. For the much-photographed actor, it was probably a relief that the record of that respite from fame survived only in memory.8

  Brando in Bangkok with Buddha statue. © Herman Leonard Photography, LLC, www.hermanleonard.com.

  Brando seemed to have his own cache of images to draw on when he chose. Looking at the sky during a conversation on Tetiaroa, Brando noted, “That star next to the moon is always there,” which reminded him of a time “in Marrakech on a sparkling, crystalline desert night and I saw the same star. I’d been talking to this girl a long time—it was four in the morning, and the muezzin came out in his minaret and started chanting. . . . It made me feel like I was in Baghdad in the twelfth century.”9 Sometimes, as in Bali or Marrakech, it was possible to reach a setting so pure that it felt like a different era. Brando might well have been a time traveler if he could have been.

  The most obvious prospect for travel was on-location filming. All terms being equal—subject, screenplay, director, pay—Brando’s willingness to accept a project was guided by how keen he was to visit its production site, as in his famous choice of Polynesian islands (Mutiny on the Bounty) over Middle Eastern desert (Lawrence of Arabia). On his first trip abroad for a film, during the spring of 1951, Brando had traveled to the Morelos region of Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, met people who had known Zapata (who died in 1919), and picked up some Spanish. What he did most of all was watch the men—the way they walked, sat, ate, rode horses, and treated women, children, and animals. He also fell in love—with Mexican-American actress Movita Castaneda—and he arranged for her to have a part as an extra in the upcoming film. This too would become standard practice. For Brando, getting to know a region and culture would involve language study (he had dozens of conversation and grammar books from countries he visited), learning local customs and traditions, while sampling the cuisine and sleeping with the women.

  In his early years as a traveler, Brando was content simply to savor the atmosphere of Paris, Anenecuilco (Zapata’s hometown), Bali. He preferred anonymity, following the recommendations of friends for people to look up, locals who might have an extra bed or their own to offer. He already knew that going anywhere as a celebrity distorted relationships. This is one reason why foreign travel was appealing to Brando: It offered a better prospect for freely observing people in their home habitats. The human zoo was as fascinating to him as the animal kind. Zoologist Desmond Morris, whom Brando sought out in the 1990s after reading his work, noted that they shared “insatiable curiosity” and were both “serious observers of the minutiae of human actions.” He was so impressed by the actor that he devoted a chapter to their meeting in Watching: Encounters with Humans and Other Animals (2006), which closed with an account of how they were besieged by paparazzi after a London dinner.10 Morris witnessed how difficult it was for Brando to fulfill his predilection for exploring and looking.11

  Brando also had an extreme sense of fairness, and he could be fierce if he felt wronged. Lovers, friends, and professional acquaintances recalled his sensitivity to slights, his fear of being cheated or exploited. He externalized this worry as well in his regard for the unfortunate: kids vulnerable to bullies, people he encountered who were poor or neglected, and minorities in the United States and abroad. Brando distrusted power, and he tended to suspect people who had it. Almost as soon as he was famous, he joined efforts to improve things for victims of poverty or prejudice. A telegram he wrote in 1960 shows that he was ever alert to slurs and prepared to use his celebrity to call attention to them. Addressed to the news editor at KNXT, the local Hollywood station, about their coverage of the Olympic Games, the telegram noted that the commentators at the ski-jumping event “consistently referred to the Japanese as Japs. This is a term that is considered by the Japanese as unsavory and derogatory. I am sure that this was an oversight but felt obliged to send this.”12

  Being an actor and a citizen of the planet seems to have merged in Brando. Harold Clurman, while directing the very young performer, was one of the first to see the inseparability of these callings. Cl
urman thought Brando’s genius as an actor was rooted in personal suffering. At the same time, Clurman felt Brando couldn’t live up to his own standards of virtue, so he continually sought purification.13 While Clurman’s characterization may strain credibility in light of all the women Brando seduced, those close to him confirmed his idealism. He used his celebrity to spotlight conditions that would otherwise be ignored. He believed in the principle he marked in a passage from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: “The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful for the sake of something else.”14 His success and renown obligated him to serve as a public conscience, both at home and abroad.

  AMERICAN INDIANS

  There was no cause to which Brando was more dedicated than that of the nation’s original inhabitants. He felt implicated in events of the previous century that had turned the surviving natives into interlopers in the modern era. Brando’s sense of responsibility toward American Indians had roots in the history of his family and the state of Nebraska, where his maternal great-grandfather, Myles Gahan, settled after emigrating from Ireland. Brando grew up hearing about the injustices done to American Indians from his grandmother and mother, and in the late 1940s in Paris, he was already talking about the Indian massacres and his desire to make a film one day that would bring to light the history and their present circumstances.15 While doing research in 1951 for his role as the part-Indian Emiliano Zapata, he learned more about the larger situation of the Indians in Mexico. The earliest record of his intent to make a film about the American Indians is a March 4, 1958, response to a Mrs. B. R. Hill, who had apparently sent him a script for an Indian movie. I have yet to “read extensively about Indians or their culture, but I have had more than a slight brush with them,” Brando wrote, and “I think that the modern Indian has enormous problems in our society and that an accurate account of the rape and decimation of those people has never been recorded on film. I am anxious to read your script.” Thus began his search for the right story.16

  He hoped to contribute to the recuperation of a history that, along with the native inhabitants themselves, had been expunged. “When I was going to school in the thirties,” Brando noted, “most textbooks dismissed the Indians in two or three paragraphs that described them as a race of faceless, ferocious, heathen savages.”17 Knowing the impact of films, and of his own public persona, he saw that educating himself on the subject might be a prelude to educating Americans more generally. Brando had about seven hundred books, many of which he annotated, on American Indians, a collection rivaling those of authorities in the field. Marking “get” in note citations, consulting authors directly for advice on what to read, and collecting catalogs from publishers specializing in Indian subjects were his means to an extraordinary scholarly record. (An Oklahoma University Press catalog on Indian books annotated by Brando, with his personal materials from The Godfather set, suggests that he was perpetually searching for books.)18 To get a sense of how he read, it’s almost possible to look over his shoulder as he became engaged with the cause.

  Brando marked passages about Indians relevant to both Zapata and One-Eyed Jacks, for instance, in his Cowboy Encyclopedia (1951).19 We know too that he was reading about the Indians of Mexico during the early 1950s in Miguel Covarrubias’s Mexico South. One of the first books on the American Indian that Brando recalled reading in the early sixties was They Came Here First (1949), by Flathead Indian anthropologist D’Arcy McNickle; Brando annotated it heavily and arranged to meet the author.20 Yet fascination did not prevent skepticism: questions such as, “What’s his source?” and “How often?” beside McNickle’s claim that Indian “women often gave as good as they received” in response to harsh treatment from their men.21 Typically, too, Brando’s curiosity overran the book’s content. Thus he writes at the start of a chapter on language: “Ask D’Arcy McNickle about Ind. understanding of treaties”; next to a priest’s report on the generosity of the Hurons: “get complete report.” By an account (from Montaigne) of Indian cruelties, he writes, “Public Executions. Check concurrent European Barbarities.”22

  Brando’s marginal comments in the McNickle book display empathy tempered by realism. Brando emphasized the Indians’ victimization, but he recognized that they were warring among themselves before the whites arrived.23 He also discerned their shrewdness; far from being “noble savages,” they exploited divisions among the colonizers. Former Indian enemies were capable of uniting to defeat adversaries, as during Pontiac’s six-month campaign against the British, about which Brando took note.24 None of this mitigated the host of official statutes ignored, treaties betrayed, or the ultimate attempts at eradication.25 But Brando avoided reversing the demonization: “The cavalrymen and settlers who slaughtered the Indians weren’t inherently evil” but rather products of a culture that demonized Indians, which doesn’t “excuse our country’s refusal to settle a debt that is long overdue.” How ironic it was, he went on, that, “With the exception of the United States, virtually every colonial power that stole land from its indigenous peoples has at least started to give some of it back,” many urged to do so by the US government.26

  Over and above the ongoing treacheries, what mattered most to Brando was the richness of the Indian way of life: the intricate Apache baskets created “out of the poverty of the desert” and the cultural harmony expressed in their songs.27 There was some idealization here, obviously, given the prevalence of war songs, but he could be more realistic, crediting Indian leaders with the prescience to distinguish self-inflicted problems, and highlighting passages confirming their skills as ironists.28 The most insidious means of destruction, he seemed to think, was the overt assault on Indian languages and ritual practices.29 But he also saw their history as part of a universal story of oppression, writing in the margin of a book on the Indians of the Southwest: “Hellow tahiti.”30

  Sample of Brando’s annotations on his copy of McNickle book. Annotations reproduced by permission of Brando Enterprises, LP.

  Had Brando’s concern for the American Indians been limited to his library, it would have represented a unique scholarly side of a leading actor’s life. But Brando translated his newfound knowledge into action almost immediately, visiting D’Arcy McNickle in New Mexico to find out what he could do to help. For Brando, the effort to redress these national crimes, masquerading for years as the cost of progress, was a century overdue. While he knew the value of his fame, he was willing to serve as a foot soldier. What pleased him most about being among Indians was their apparent indifference to Hollywood success. From the beginning he noted approvingly, “They didn’t give a damn about my movies.”31

  After McNickle directed Brando to the National Indian Youth Council, founded in 1961, he became a regular at council meetings, befriending Clyde Warrior of the Ponca tribe; Hank Adams, a Rosebud Sioux; and Vine Deloria, a Sioux political scientist who, like McNickle, had written extensively about Indians. One of Brando’s initial acts of civil disobedience was at an Indian “fish-in” that challenged restrictions on tribal fishing rights at the Puyallup River in Washington. Though officials insisted on releasing Brando two hours after his arrest (keeping Indian offenders longer), he participated the next day in a march in nearby Olympia, Washington, which was followed by a meeting with Governor Albert D. Rosellini. Brando’s involvement in the event drew national publicity, helping to lay the groundwork for subsequent campaigns. Fishing entitlements had long been an important Indian civil rights issue, and their successful defense in the 1960s was critical to raising awareness of violated treaties. Brando kept track of the issue, annotating heavily his copy of the Congressional Record from the August 5, 1964, Senate hearing on Indian Fishing Rights overseen by Senators Frank Church, Henry Jackson, and Alan Simpson, all of whom he came to know through his advocacy.32

  At “fish-in” with Robert Satiacum, March 2, 1964. © Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection; Museum of History and Industry/Corbis.


  Fish-ins and other initiatives that ordinarily would have been overlooked were blanketed with television cameras when the actor was in attendance. Throughout the 1960s, he appeared in news reports and did interviews on talk shows, all in an effort to publicize how the US government regularly ignored more than four hundred treaties with Indian tribes dating back to the eighteenth century.33

  Brando often pointed to the lack of distinction between Democrats and Republicans when it came to Indian policy. Indeed, a 1960 ruling by the liberal Warren Court (Federal Power Commission v. Tuscarora Indian Nation) had authorized a Democrat, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963 to disregard a treaty with Indians to pursue the Allegheny River Project under the power of eminent domain. When Brando met President Kennedy at a Beverly Hills fundraiser on June 7, 1963, he was already identified as an activist willing to break the law to make a point. “We know what you’ve been doing with the American Indians,” Kennedy told Brando, who replied, “I know what you’ve not been doing with the American Indians.” This encounter—in which both Brando and Kennedy were drunk and traded gibes over who had gained the most weight recently—anticipated in its surrealism a later Brando meeting with another powerful figure, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Brando admired Douglas, who had famously introduced a stay of execution for the Rosenbergs and was a great defender of the environment. Arriving in the judge’s chamber with a briefcase full of notes on the Indians, Brando found himself completely inarticulate. He later confessed that he was rendered mute by the spectacle of this man whom he held in such high esteem, sitting there listening so attentively.34

  Brando’s associations evolved with the changing shape of the Indian movement; by the end of the 1960s, he was working with the Survival of American Indians Association (SAIA), the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), and the newly created American Indian Movement (AIM), headed by Russell Means and Dennis Banks, friends as well as political comrades to whom he gave substantial financial and legal support. Brando named his daughter Cheyenne for the Indians who had been living in Grand Island, Nebraska, prior to the arrival of his great-grandparents. During the 1970s, Brando continued to make television appearances to talk about Indian issues in the United States (The Dick Cavett Show) and abroad (the British Iain Johnstone Show), to participate with Indian activists on various rights measures, and to develop ideas for television and film.