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

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  Brando’s decision to send Sacheen Littlefeather to the 1973 Academy Awards ceremony to decline his award for The Godfather was the most sensational of his efforts to bring attention to the grievances of Indians. But this was not the last award that he turned down. Later, when the NAACP chose him for the 1975 Spingarn Medal in humanitarianism, he professed embarrassment in light of the far greater sacrifices made by legions of anonymous civil rights workers. In a telegram to the organization, he added, “The question of being honored formally for having contributed in some small measure to the relief of the anguish and humiliation that black people are made to suffer in this country produces a conflict within me and renders me unable to accept such an honor.”35

  For Brando, the Academy Award incident was one of many efforts to publicize Indian affairs; for instance, he gave forty acres of land in Liberty Canyon near Los Angeles to a group representing the Survival of American Indians Association on December 30, 1974.36 He never stopped resenting that the press preferred him to infinitely more knowledgeable Indian spokespeople such as Clyde Warrior, Hank Adams, and Vine Deloria, or lawyers such as Mark Lane, William Kunstler, and Larry Leventhal, who all had years of experience on the issue. “I don’t know how many times I’ve said, ‘Listen, there are perfectly eloquent gentlemen standing to my left . . . they know far better than I do why they’re here, don’t ask me.’”37

  Donating forty acres in Liberty Canyon to Indians, 1974. © Bettmann/Corbis.

  Brando took the greatest personal risks on behalf of AIM, adding to an FBI file dating from the late 1940s.38 In a meeting with Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii on December 21, 1976, Brando described his concerns about the surveillance of Indian rights activities, noting his long discussions with Senator Frank Church, whom he had known “for many years,” about how the United States “very nearly missed having a police state under the control of the FBI.”39 Church had published in 1975 and 1976 the famous Church Committee Reports from his Senate hearings on the operation and abuses of US intelligence agencies. The largest of the reports was a 1,000-page-volume on the FBI, which focused significantly on the FBI’s counterintelligence campaign against domestic dissidents during the antiwar movement and the era of civil rights.40 Brando’s own FBI file featured lengthy documentation of his meetings with AIM members, and the tapping of his phone during the 1970s probably was related to his AIM activism.41 The American Indian Movement was created in Minneapolis, during the summer of 1968, by a group of two hundred Indian activists determined to redress a century of wrongs against the Indian nations and the miseries of the present—high unemployment, slum housing, prevailing racism—through civil disobedience and even occasionally armed protest, though they only used guns in self-defense. The purposes of AIM were consistent with other political movements of the 1960s that were dedicated to radical social change, from student and Vietnam War protests to feminism and black power. While AIM members did not advocate violence—it would have been self-destructive for them to do so—their revolutionary fervor attracted the attention of the FBI and the CIA, which maintained constant surveillance over its members, subjecting them to arrest and extended court trials.

  In 1974, Means and Banks were put on trial for the 1973 occupation of the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. On February 27, 1973, about 250 Sioux Indians and members of AIM had taken over Wounded Knee, calling for the ouster of corrupt tribal leaders and the reopening of treaty negotiations with the US government. Wounded Knee was chosen for what turned into a seventy-one-day siege because of its historical significance as the site in December 1890 of one of the worst massacres of the American Indian wars. The 1973 protest at Wounded Knee had been largely ignored until Brando drew attention to it in the speech that Sacheen Littlefeather delivered on his behalf at the Academy Awards ceremony. Following the speech, a deluge of reporters descended on Wounded Knee. In the ultimate standoff with police, two people were killed, twelve hundred were arrested, and Means and Banks were charged with murder. They were eventually acquitted, and, as was often the case, the incident and their trial helped to publicize their cause but had no tangible legal consequences.

  Still, Brando believed in the inspirational impact of these events, which is why in June 1975 he again aided AIM members wanted by the FBI for questioning about the murder of two of their agents. Fearing that the fugitives, including Dennis Banks’s pregnant wife, would be killed without a hearing, Brando provided cash and transportation—his motor home. Visited by FBI agents on the set of The Missouri Breaks that July, Brando was cooperative, even gracious.42 He had been more imperiled in Gresham, Wisconsin, earlier that year when caught in gunfire during a Menominee Indian takeover of a Catholic monastery run by the Alexian Brothers on what the Indians considered to be tribal land. Brando ended up serving as an intermediary in their standoff with the National Guard, helping to negotiate a deal that would give the Indians a deed for the property in exchange for their peaceful surrender. “In the end, the Indians went to jail but never got the deed,” Brando observed. Five months later, the Menominee tribe was forced, “due to lack of funds and support,” to relinquish all ownership of the monastery and its lands.43 This was typical in American Indian campaigns of the era, though Brando continued to hope that political channels would eventually serve to redress many wrongs.

  At the same time, he pursued the prospect of a significant contribution in his area of expertise.44 That Brando kept the prospect alive through the 1980s is confirmed by his response to actor Sean Penn’s inquiry about a film based on Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. In a letter of August 24, 1986, Brando cites his twenty-five-year dedication to the cause and marvels at the general ignorance of the plain truth that, “from the time of our ‘founding fathers,’ national policy toward the Indians was never anything less than genocidal,” that whites simply took “the land away from these aboriginal people.” He admires Erdrich’s book, he tells Penn, but anticipates difficulties translating it to the screen, paraphrasing H. L. Mencken (“No one ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American public”). He has himself, he noted, been “striving mightily in the past eight years” with “a story about the Sand Creek Massacre.” On November 29, 1864, a peaceful village of Cheyenne Indians was invaded by a cavalry regiment of 700 Colorado Volunteers, resulting in the death of about 400 Indians, mostly women and children, many of whom were mutilated. It was to be a part of a television series tentatively entitled “Vision Road,” which seems to have run aground for the usual reasons: funding problems, artistic conflicts, studio disinterest. But there is abundant evidence—Brando’s handwritten notes, tapes of his ideas for characters and plot, marginalia in books on the subject—of his long-term commitment to it. Brando especially appreciated the hypocrisy of John Chivington, a preacher–colonel who had led the massacre and had notoriously requested a “fighting” commission over a “praying” one.45

  Brando spent a great deal of time conceptualizing a movie, and from his notes and marginalia we can glean some basic features of what he had in mind. He appears to have been thinking continually about possible directors and screenwriters—he writes in the margin of a Dee Brown book that maybe he “should write the movie.” Abby Mann, Vine Deloria, and Leslie Silko were also considered.46 His direction of One-Eyed Jacks, in which he was drawn to everything from script changes to the historical accuracy of an extra’s costume, is recalled in his approach to the Indian film.47 He highlighted details about soldiers—culling drawings of military uniforms, songs, habits (no bathing at southwestern outposts), language (some immigrant soldiers barely spoke English)—as well as about Indians—clothing of particular tribes, the complex varieties of Indian languages (hundreds in Mexico alone).48 He identified incidents for movie scenes: Americans hanging President Washington in effigy after hearing he planned to pay Indians for their lands; a grasshopper plague in Colorado Territory viewed as an evil omen by settlers and Cheyenne Indians alike.49 Reading The Camp Grant Massacre, a novel
about the 1871 murders, by US cavalry in Arizona, of Apache Indians who had surrendered, Brando coined phrases from events the book described, writing in the margin: “Bury my leg with me” and “Bad year for smiles” (one character had explained, “It has been a bad year thus far . . . I have not been able to smile”).50

  The prospective film reflected the catholicity of Brando’s intellect. There would be a technological component portraying the Indians’ 1885 destruction of the overland telegraph line—which cut off the Pacific coast from communication for months—as well as their struggle against the great white weapon of the railroad, the “demonic . . . Iron Horse.”51 There would be scenes of railroad agents appeasing Indians in the United States, set against scenes of deception abroad—peddling Indian lands to unsuspecting immigrants in Europe.52 One theme would be ubiquitous: the complicity of all nations in the plunder and oppression of indigenous peoples. Though mindful of differences (Canadians and Brazilians behaved best, Americans and Spaniards worst), he planned to confront the painful truth that every colonizer, in the New World and elsewhere, had been ruthless.53 Some book passages inspired lists of global touchstones. In one book, he scrawled, “Shaka Kahn, Tartars, Boers . . . Arabs in Central Africa”; in another, “German, Japanese, Russians in E. Europe.”54 Three assumptions guided Brando’s reading for his Indian picture: The history of the Indians in the Americas was a global issue that had been repeated throughout history; insight depended on grappling with divergent opinions; and knowledge could not be definitive.55

  Nor did Indian history ever cease. Thus, his developing account of the Indians’ past was informed by their present. Brando saw Indians in the 1960s as immigrants in their own country—forever marked by the fact that they had battled ferociously in the nineteenth century the government they had adopted reluctantly in the twentieth.56 He was equally alert to the strategic parallels between black and Indian politics, drawn to the paradoxes of their premodern encounters.57 Some tribes had been slaveholders in the pre-emancipation era, while emancipated blacks had served as “Buffalo Soldiers” (the name was believed to have originated from the Indians who compared their hair to that of buffaloes), filling Western cavalry regiments.58 Each group, he noted, despised the other for selling out: the Sioux called the black cavalry “Black White Men,” and Indians built on the disparaging black sobriquet of Uncle Tom in condemning those Indians they felt submitted to whites as “Uncle Tomahawks.”59 Brando underscored the detail that 25,000 Indians had served in the US Army from World War II through Vietnam along with the grim comment that the Indian “had been feasted, feted, and bemedaled. . . . Then he was forgotten.”60

  In all his film preparations, Brando emphasized the deliberateness of American policy and the dignity of Indians in resisting it. The object, he wrote in the margin of McNickle’s Indians and Other Americans, was “to quickly reduce the Indian to hopelessness so his muffled cries of outrage would not be heard nor reach the conscience of U.S. people.”61 He used the back cover of the same book to outline for the film the Indian struggle against that policy. His protagonist would be a fighter, against “white boys . . . always in jail always resisting never capitulating, cynical.” He would “dream of his forefather as himself.” Reparations would be thematized, and comparisons would be made to the Philippines and other countries where indigenous populations were partly repaid in cash for land, resources, and even cultural attributes lost in the colonization process. “Cross check legal obligations of S. Africa and U.S. to indigenous people in separate enclaves within their territories and Panama and Cuba—Okinawa Guam Marshal Isl,” he wrote to himself on the back cover of Francis Paul Prucha’s American Indian Policy in the Formative Years (1962). And finally, the film would pay homage to Indian survival. “The Indian has sung his death chant. He will die before becoming White.”62 What could be a stronger testimony to the power of a civilization?

  Brando was still writing “Notes on a Possible Indian Story” in the 1990s, an enduring fascination evident as well in the film he made about the American Indian, The Brave (1997), with Johnny Depp.63 Brando may have cared too much, preventing bringing the movie to fruition. He had spent so many years informing himself about Indian history, doing political work, and trying to counter the indifference of the majority of Americans, that in the end he could not settle on a portrait that satisfied him. For that matter, he even remained unsettled as to whether he would play an Indian or a white man. Next to an image of a great Indian warrior in one book, he wrote, “Maybe Yours Truly,” but he seemed equally attracted to the prospect of augmenting his gallery of sinners from the late period with a white villain.64

  It is also probable that he gave up because he distrusted himself and the industry that had made him so successful. He could not bear another disappointment like One-Eyed Jacks—the endless ambition and work, the frustrations, and the inevitable sense of imperfection. Nor could he bear the complex maneuvering and ultimate limits of the alternative—collaborating with a director and producers—for this picture. Ultimately, the most important factor in the foiling of Brando’s magnum opus on the American Indians was probably that he was overextended. Personal calendars from 1966 through the end of 1975 are filled with references to the film. His calendar features regular meetings about it, which often included Brando’s agent Jay Kanter, producers Jack Beck and John Foreman, writer Abby Mann, Hank Adams (trusted friend from the National Indian Youth Council), and, occasionally, his lawyer, Norman Carey. Among the directors considered were Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Bob Rafelson. But Brando is equally involved during the same decade with ecological plans for his new Tahitian island, Tetiaroa, and films to promote them, as well as his commitment to the civil rights movement.

  He also vacations and travels routinely. It is a rare month that he doesn’t spend on at least two continents, traveling among North America, Europe, and Polynesia. There are the usual romances, particularly with former actress Jill Banner, whom he met while making Candy (the only white woman Brando said he loved), who accompanies him on a visit to his childhood home in Omaha, Nebraska. Finally, there are films he’s in—the script consultations with directors John Huston, Michael Winner, Francis Ford Coppola, and Bernardo Bertolucci—and the ones he assists—talking with James Baldwin, who was writing a screenplay of Blues for Mr. Charlie.65 If calendars tell truths, they’re simple ones: Brando was just too busy during the years he was most engaged with the Indian film to put the necessary time into it.

  CIVIL RIGHTS

  Brando’s race politics, like his concern for the Indians, had family origins: his mother’s example as an early proponent of civil rights and the principles of equality she instilled in him. From a relatively young age, he was sensitized to what seemed a patent national wrong. It astounded him that a mere sixty-two years before he was born, it had been possible for one human being to buy another.66 And he remembered as a boy seeing photographs of lynched blacks surrounded by smiling crowds in the daily newspaper. “When I was a kid, it was very common to read about a black man being dragged through the streets of a town, in the South but also in the North, until he was near dead,” Brando told Michael Jackson, recounting also that he was castigated by a teacher in Evanston, Illinois, for befriending a black boy.67

  Brando admired the resilience of blacks in the movement, the pride they displayed in battling the most vicious oppression. His work against racism developed naturally out of friendships and interests dating back to his earliest days in Manhattan. Through dance lessons at Katherine Dunham’s Studio; at clubs in Harlem and on Broadway, where he cultivated passions for jazz and drumming; in dramatic workshops at the New School—all racially mixed worlds despite the prevailing segregation—Brando got to know people (Harry Belafonte, Quincy Jones, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee) who would figure prominently in the civil rights movement.

  Almost immediately upon meeting, Brando and his friend James Baldwin began a process of mutual education. Baldwin was pivotal to Brando’s enl
ightenment. What made the friendship satisfying were all the things they had in common despite antithetical backgrounds: love for humor and language and an independence of thought that made them resist orthodoxies that foiled bonds like theirs. Perhaps their key affinity was abiding awareness of how it felt to be worthless. As the neighborhood truant from the wrong side of the tracks, his mother the town drunk, Brando had been a social outcast.68 Brando underscored these passages in his copy of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time: “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being”; “this is the crime of which I accuse my country, and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed, and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.”69Self-scrutiny was essential to confronting injustice. “The questions which one asks oneself”—which Baldwin wrote in Nobody Knows My Name and which Brando highlighted—“become one’s key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.”70