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

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  Speaking at civil rights event, with Martin Luther King Jr. looking on at left. © Bettmann/Corbis.

  Baldwin admired the way his friend threw himself into civil rights work, noting in the autobiographical account of his own “Baptism,” that Brando had always been “in the forefront.”71 Because the movement, in comparison with the Indian rights movement, was more centralized in its organization and tactics, the stakes for Brando were not as high as they were with the Indians. The fluidity of the different Indian organizations, and their comparative neglect in an era of widespread activism, encouraged a hands-on approach among supporters. As Brando told Michael Jackson, “There are twenty-five million Blacks and they have the power, the organization, the money. . . . There are only a million, a million and a half Indians, they have no money . . . no support, no organization.”

  When the movement for black civil rights was reinvigorated during the 1950s under the leadership of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1954, Brando was one of the first white celebrities to join the cause. The group’s ethic of nonviolent protest, and events such as the Montgomery (Alabama) Bus Boycott of 1955, inspired sympathizers nationwide, aware that racism was hardly confined to the South.72 Brando was incensed by the mistreatment of black performers in Hollywood—Diahann Carroll and Sammy Davis Jr., for instance, were restricted to shabby motels on Sunset Strip, while appearing at palatial venues where they couldn’t even order drinks.73 By 1960, Brando’s calendar was filled with civil right activities, especially during the summer of 1963: June 11, he flies to Sacramento to welcome a group of Freedom Walkers; June 25, he strategizes with CORE official Dorothy Gray; July 12, he spends the evening with ACLU and CORE representatives Nate Monaster and Tom Neusom; July 14, he helps Eartha Kitt and others set up a scholarship fund for Medgar Evers’s children; July 27, he is picketing against discriminatory housing practices in Torrance, California.74

  On the historic day of August 28, 1963, Brando is in Washington, standing near the podium as Martin Luther King delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, later participating in a televised Civil Rights Roundtable.75 Appearing with some of the most prominent activists in the country, his perspective on American racism was exceptional in its globalism. He was the only one to mention the international politics of race, reflecting on parallels between the situations of blacks in Haiti and in the United States, and between American racism and the German genocide against Jews.76

  With Baldwin at the Lincoln Memorial (holding cattle prod). AP Photo/Los Angeles Times/Larry Davis.

  Brando later got to know members of the Black Panthers, such as Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver, and spent hours on different occasions listening to their analyses of the race situation at home and abroad and strategies for self-empowerment. These interactions added to Brando’s already extensive FBI file and were one reason why he was refused a chance to screen his film on children’s starvation in India for President Lyndon Johnson. Brando’s civil rights activities also led to boycotts of his films in the South, beginning with Bedtime Story (1964).77 Brando was undeterred. To quell potential violence, he walked through Harlem with Mayor John Lindsay in April 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King. Though he later dismissed the incident as unwitting participation in Lindsay’s courting of black votes, Brando’s presence in Harlem at that moment of crisis and grief inspired blacks and whites alike. Still, he was alert to the limits of his efforts and their susceptibility to exploitation. And he was aware of the ambivalence felt by many black leaders toward white activists. One of the few times that he experienced such resentment himself was with the Black Panthers after Bobby Hutton was killed; he noticed James Farmer, a founder of CORE, regarding him with what he felt to be absolute hatred.78 Bobby Hutton was a seventeen-year-old member of the Black Panthers who had been shot by police in Oakland, California, during the turmoil that erupted in the aftermath of King’s death. A secretary for the group, Hutton had been a Panther for two years, having joined to help protect blacks from police brutality. On the night of April 7, 1968, he and other Panthers, including the well-known Eldridge Cleaver, were involved in a gun battle with police. After one Panther was killed, Cleaver and Hutton decided to surrender. According to Cleaver, Hutton came out stripped to his underwear to show he was unarmed, while police insisted that he was clad in an overcoat and behaving suspiciously. The police fired more than a dozen bullets into Hutton’s body. His funeral was held six days after the death of King.

  That the Panthers, notorious for repudiating white liberals, accepted Brando’s offer to speak at Hutton’s funeral was extraordinary. Their decision was undoubtedly motivated in part by the added publicity Brando’s appearance brought to the event, but it also reflected their belief in the sincerity of his sympathies. Brando gained credibility through humility. “That could have been my son lying there,” he proclaimed, “and I’m going to do as much as I can, I’m going to start right now, to inform White people of what they don’t know. The Reverend said, the White man can’t cool it because he’s never dug it. And I’m here to try to dig it. Because I myself as a White man have got a long way to go and a lot to learn. I haven’t been in your place. I haven’t suffered the way you’ve suffered. I’m just beginning to learn the nature of that experience. And somehow that has to be translated to the white community, now!”79

  These were no idle words, as Brando demonstrated when he appeared on The Joey Bishop Show on April 25, 1968, and spoke his mind about the problem of racism in America and its responsibility for rage among black youth in particular. Making reference to the Bobby Hutton case, Brando, who was well versed in the legalities of public speech, avoided statements that might be construed as defamatory. He referred generally to “the police” as responsible for Hutton’s death, rather than to specific officers or a specific department. Still, on June 20, 1968, Brando was sued for defamation by the Oakland police officers involved in the standoff with Hutton and other Panthers. The case churned through the courts, subject to complicated wrangling from both sides. Brando was first acquitted, but then the ruling was reversed on behalf of the individual plaintiffs in the case, though Brando was not required to pay damages, since it was ruled the officers had not suffered financially from his comments. Brando eventually appealed to the Supreme Court of the State of California, seeking first to “secure uniformity of decision,” and then “to settle important questions of law,” specifically a central legal question highlighted by the case—whether talk shows were protected under free speech. On February 8, 1971, Brando’s request for a hearing by the California Supreme Court was officially denied, and the case was closed.80

  Brando remained active in civil rights issues throughout the 1970s and ’80s. In April 1979, he made a rare appearance at a mass rally in LA’s Dodger Stadium to aid Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH for black high school youth.81 In August 1983, he went on television with Coretta Scott King to honor the twentieth anniversary of her husband’s “March on Washington.” Brando’s performances in Alex Haley’s Roots (1979) and the South African film A Dry White Season (1989) were efforts to further equality and understanding. Part of Brando’s understanding of civil rights issues came from his self-education. James Baldwin’s and Toni Morrison’s works tutored him on racism. He wrote Morrison in 1991: “It seems somehow improper to close this letter without mentioning the enduring and stabbing beauty of your book Beloved. I will remain deeply affected by its poetry, subtlety, strength, and undying conviction that the courage to love in the face of abject horrors offers perhaps the only alternative to madness and mayhem.” (His admiration was apparently returned, for Morrison responded, “I would like to end this reply with some suitable language about my regard for your work, but I can’t quite handle it.”)82 Brando drew widely on a range of disciplines and genres, popular as well as academic, in attempting to understand the depressing persistence of racial hatred.

  Though it was small compared to his collection on Indi
ans, and the books had far fewer annotations, the works on black history and thought reflected similar selectivity. Brando owned a dozen reports from the United States Commission on Civil Rights; classics such as C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow and Stanley Elkins’s Slavery; and multiple issues of W. E. B. Du Bois’s journal, Freedomways Quarterly. There were studies of black living conditions under Southern peonage and in Northern ghettos. There were autobiographies by Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale and a manifesto, Moral Crisis: The Case for Civil Rights (1964), by John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. There were stories of strategy sessions (Howard Zinn on SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and of famous protests (William McCord on the Freedom Party during one “Long Hot Summer” in Mississippi). Typical of Brando was the collection’s globalism, with books about racial struggles in Africa and England as well as in Russia. These included Bloke Modisane’s South African autobiography, Blame Me on History (1963) with an inscription from the author on how much the actor’s films had meant to him.83

  Brando’s practical approach to racism was evident in his marginalia. From Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice (1958), he took the witty definition of being “down on something you’re not up on,” and also a useful distinction—individuals whose race hatred was a product of custom were ignorant rather than prejudiced. In Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967), he marked discussions of black antiquity, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s misunderstanding of the anticolonial Negritude movement.84 His views on why civil rights legislation finally passed were just as realistic. There had been no radical transformation of the culture; what had changed were America’s trading partners in countries rich with resources. He asserted that all over Africa, indigenous rulers were assuming control. He saw that American enlightenment was “purely economic. After the U.S. was confronted with the fact that it would have to go to black Africa with all the colonial countries gone, and they would have to deal with the black man for business,” Brando explained. “If the colonial countries had still been in Africa, there wouldn’t be any Civil Rights Act today. . . . How could we possibly get raw materials from black Africa when we were burning black people with gasoline in the South?”85 Brando’s understanding of the economic motivations for the passage of civil rights legislation echoed arguments in works by Du Bois and Fanon as well as in speeches of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. For a white man of his time and place, however, Brando’s views were unusual.

  Brando’s realism left room for hope, even with the seeming intractability of racism. He had seen too great a change firsthand: worrying about antimiscegenation laws prior to marrying his first wife, Anna Kashfi, who was half-Indian (he married his second wife, Hispanic Movita Castaneda, in Mexico), and hearing racial slurs directed at his children, all of mixed race. But he had witnessed the decline of such sentiments and anticipated greater openness as the inevitable shrinking of the globe brought peoples together. Still, he marveled at the ubiquity of racism, which he had found almost everywhere he visited. “For a long time I was angry at this country. But then I looked around and saw what the French did in Algeria, what the Dutch did in Indonesia,” Brando ruminated. “In Japan they have a class called the Etta, a people which the Japanese can’t intermarry with.” He had expected a relatively gentle Tahitian society to be an exception, but people were no different there.86 These problems were basic to human beings over time; no system—political, religious, or otherwise—had ever provided permanent solutions to them. “I’m not a Marxist,” he noted, though many of his opinions might have been construed as such. “There have been wonderful monarchies and horrible monarchies . . . wonderful democratic periods and bad.”87

  HUMANITARIAN ABROAD: UNICEF AND TETIAROA

  Brando reflected on how he had once thought about becoming a minister: “I thought it might give me more of a purpose in life. I flirted with the idea for a while, but in the end it never developed sufficient force to make me want to do it. Or maybe it was because I became interested in the United Nations, which for a while I saw as perhaps our last hope for peace, social justice and a more equitable sharing of the earth’s resources.”88 This observation, buried in Brando’s autobiography, seems dismissible: another expression of misplaced idealism of the kind found in interviews he did over the years. As the handsome actor whom audiences couldn’t get enough of expounded on his concerns beyond films, the obliging journalist recorded every detail.89 But the fantasy of making a vocation of helping others, the dedication to the UN and to environmental issues, including the more rational distribution of global bounty, were for him interdependent. His interest in the ecology of his Tahitian island, where he planned to develop alternative energy sources, foodstuffs, and designs for housing, grew out of an awareness of worldwide suffering that he had also sought to address actively over decades.

  From the mid-1950s, he promoted the UN’s technical assistance program, which provided people in third world countries with skills and tools to offset poverty and develop local industries. He spent the most time on the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and became “a roving ambassador for the agency, preaching a different kind of religion”—that all children deserved to have their basic needs met.90 He traveled to publicize UNICEF initiatives, made television and radio spots, and encouraged other celebrities to participate. He planned a film about the UN, which partly funded his trips during the 1950s to various countries in Southeast Asia.

  Despite his growing ambivalence about the underlying purposes of Western assistance, Brando continued to work during the 1960s for UN programs, particularly UNICEF. He visited eleven countries on its behalf, including Greece, Lebanon, Australia, and India, and sponsored fundraising galas in Paris and New York. In March 1967, Brando went to Bihar, India, to help with emergency food relief, making the rounds of villages in a jeep with UNICEF workers.91 He was so appalled by what he witnessed—thousands of emaciated children, their bodies covered with smallpox sores—that he recorded the suffering on film with a handheld 10mm camera. He was struck by how carefully caste boundaries were maintained at the hospital, with Untouchables separated from other dying children to prevent their ritual pollution. “Some of the trucks had been unloaded by Untouchable labor,” Brando recalled, and a “Hindu, who was absolutely starving himself, and as big as a broomstick, and whose children were scabrous and on the edge of death, would not allow his children to have that food.”93 He described scenes of mothers offering up their babies, hoping that his camera held magic properties that could relieve their hunger, and he remembered the faces as corpselike, so taut that “if you touched the cheek of a child, a hollow spot remained in her flesh.”94 On his last day of filming, after a child died in front of him, Brando sat down and cried. Upon his return, he screened the film for UNICEF officials and media representatives in New York and for various people in Hollywood. In October 1967, he showed the film at a UNICEF event in Helsinki, Finland, to a group that included renowned Turkish journalist Altemur Kiliç, and the president of Finland. This was one instance where a resolution of the misery Brando had seen was in the offing. The Johnson administration had been working on Emergency Food Assistance to India legislation, which passed in 1967, to shore up relations with a wavering ally (India had criticized US policies in Vietnam). In order to receive the food and stave off famine, however, India had to modernize its agricultural practices.94

  Praying with children in Thailand. Larry Burrows/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

  Brando continued to show the film to remind people that some disasters were preventable. He supported the UN World Food Programme’s efforts to develop foodstuffs that might offer long-term solutions to hunger. The experience informed his interest in innovative plant and animal proteins (modern versions of breadfruit, the object of the famous Bounty voyage), such as tilapia, a hardy, mass-producible fish farmed increasingly in the second half of the twentieth century. He familiarized himself with efforts in Africa, I
srael, Japan, and Vietnam to manufacture mashed varieties of this nutritious staple. He was an advocate for alternative energy sources and investigated solar power and different materials and styles for sturdier homebuilding. His ambition was to create on Tetiaroa, his Tahitian island, an experimental site to test sustainable ideas—from new energy sources and forms of nutrition to construction methods. He brought in scientists to study the island’s bird sanctuary, reef, and lagoon. Wind- and solar-power specialists assessed its development capacities, and archaeologists from the University of Hawaii excavated the island’s marae (ceremonial structures).95

  Screening his film on hunger at UNICEF headquarters, ca. 1967. © UNICEF.

  During filming of Mutiny on the Bounty in 1961, Brando had discovered Tetiaroa, a coral reef atoll comprising a dozen islets with a land area of 1,500 acres and a lagoon five miles across. King Pomare V had bequeathed it to an American dentist, Dr. Johnston Walter Williams, in 1904. In 1967, Brando bought it from Williams’s daughter, Marjorie Doran, who had lived there for decades, her sole companions a Chinese woman and forty cats and dogs. When Brando visited the island in 1963, he and Mrs. Doran, who was blind, talked for hours. However isolated she was, she knew who he was, having heard him interviewed on her shortwave radio. She found him charming and he found the beauty of the island overwhelming. “The lagoon was . . . infused with more shades of blue than I thought possible: turquoise, deep blue, light blue, indigo blue, cobalt blue, royal blue, robin’s egg blue, aquamarine.” He visited again, bringing an apple pie, and told her that if she ever decided to sell Tetiaroa, she should let him know. He kept his promise to her when he purchased the island—that he would do everything possible to preserve its natural condition. When he died in 2004, the island had been barely affected by development.96