Tetiaroa. Courtesy of Te mana o te moana.
In 1972, Brando commissioned a field study, directed by Dr. Yosihiko H. Sinoto of the Bishop Museum in Hawaii. Conducted over three months (December 1972, January and July of 1973), Archaeology of Teti’aroa Atoll and Society Islands was part of the larger program of research Brando had in mind.97 He was anxious to kindle interest among Tahitian youth in their national antiquities. He also hoped to establish ties to universities in Tahiti, France, and the United States, convinced that the island should benefit Tahitians and that experts in various fields were best positioned to help him protect it while enhancing its resources. To that end, students from the University of Hawaii and the École Normale in Papeete participated in the field study, which focused on Tetiaroa’s twenty-one marae. According to the final report, the island was settled sometime during the sixteenth century. The configuration of the largest and most elaborate ceremonial site, which had a platform suitable for council meetings or dancing, suggested that Tetiaroa played an important role in the nation’s political and social system, an assumption further supported by the island’s proximity to the Tahitian mainland. King Pomare I, who unified and ruled Tahiti in the late eighteenth century, was believed to have made frequent use of the island, possibly living there. It seemed eerily appropriate that the first European in Tetiaroa was thought to have been William Bligh, who arrived there in 1789 searching for the Bounty mutineers.
Brando was not shy about going straight to the source when seeking information, a way of exploiting his celebrity dating back to when he invited Margaret Mead over for dinner to discuss her book. After reading The Whole Earth Catalog, he decided that its author, Stewart Brand, would be worth talking to about the ecology and resources of Tetiaroa. Brand brought along an associate, Jay Baldwin, an energy specialist who had worked with Buckminster Fuller, when they met on Mulholland Drive in 1974. Their conversation covered subjects from windmill architecture to Eskimo attitudes toward trash. Brando learned from them that Eskimos had no word for “garbage,” since they made use of everything, and Brand and Baldwin learned from him that coconut lumber was as strong as steel.98
Brando and Brand conceived of a television series that would introduce environmentally sound techniques for construction and repair, while encouraging self-reliance and holistic values. Brando considered it as a replacement for a thwarted documentary, Future: Tense, about “the worldwide crisis of unbridled growth,” which was to be filmed partly on Tetiaroa. He had planned to serve as “a partner and narrator” on that film, but in the spring of 1973, Don Widener, the documentary’s producer, wrote to say that the networks would not sponsor Future: Tense unless they were granted full control.99
Brando considered Tetiaroa an ideal TV-series location for demonstrating the potential of aquaculture, wind and solar energy, and eco-friendly architecture. Brando had learned about aquaculture from the Lummi Indians under the direction of marine biologist Wally Heath, who was a consultant on Tetiaroa. Aquaculture represented a point of overlap between Brando’s commitments to the Indians and his plans for sustainability on Tetiaroa. On June 12, 1973, he flew from Tahiti to appear on The Dick Cavett Show, with a group that included Heath and a representative from the Lummi tribe, who described their aquaculture system and showed a film about it. But Brando insisted that all productive measures on Tetiaroa be accomplished through “simple applications of soft technology,” to “improve the lives [of people] without wrecking the environment.”100 He respected Tahitian perspectives on work and pleasure, recognizing the advantages of a slower approach.
The challenge was reconciling the island’s commercial potential with the goal of preservation. Brando knew that a successful eco-hotel on Tetiaroa would support research and green development, which was costly. Among the plans he approved with a developer just before he died was for air-conditioning the hotel through deep-ocean water technology. He was equally committed to conservation aimed at protecting local species, while reducing invasive ones (which explains why he was reading Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe around this time).101
Brando received criticism from those frustrated by his reluctance to implement their plans, or complaining about the island’s primitive state. For the most part, however, he managed to use it for what he wanted—as a retreat and as a haven for friends and family. It was a natural utopia where he could revel in the stars, look at animals and plants, read, think, and also dream—for instance, about a possible gorilla preserve on the island, since he loved watching primates.102
What he did manage to do during his twenty-eight years as the proprietor of Tetiaroa was to protect it from plunder—by fishermen, who cleaned out the part of the lagoon that he was forced by his purchase agreement to keep public; and by nature, the cyclone of 1983 that destroyed most of the buildings. He also founded Tetiaroa University in 1981, for his growing children and for researchers from France and the United States. The university never became functional, but researchers were able to obtain recognition for the island as an official bird sanctuary and marine-turtle nesting site. Although he never returned to Tahiti after his daughter Cheyenne’s suicide in 1995, he kept his word to Madame Doran, preserving the natural beauty of Tetiaroa. The island was passed on to Brando’s heirs, who formalized his dreams with the creation of the Tetiaroa Society. Its goal is a real-world laboratory where theory and practice meet to test technological innovations in a working system. It is especially fitting that development plans for Tetiaroa follow the model set out by the United Nations at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development.
Brando never abandoned hope that the wisdom afforded by science would exert increasing influence in years to come. His faith in such prospects was at the forefront of a television ad he made near the end of his life, in February 2000, for Telecom Italia. Brando took an active role in making the ad, shot at Anza Borrego Springs near San Diego, revising his lines from initial to final script and from final script to performance. Wearing a black fedora and coat, alone on a mountain range, he omitted the name of the company advertised and focused on the technological transformations it harnessed. Comparison of the original script to Brando’s revised version reveals his gift for language and understanding of science. He opens with an admission of mortality: “Well . . . I probably won’t live to see the full impact of the wave of change that technology is bringing towards us.” Marlon Brando is old, the ad announces, forced to contemplate, like all of us, the world he has known moving on without him. He retains high hopes, nevertheless: “What I’d really like to see is a time when there aren’t any boundaries between art, science, religion, philosophy,” anticipating the prospective wonders: “the authority of this world become irrelevant as massive quantities of information become available to all of us on this earth” or the word “impossible vanish from our dictionaries, or from our ways of thinking.” Technology also sanctions the optimistic close. “The way things are changing; I might just hang around. . . . Wouldn’t that be swell?” Yet the ad makes a paradoxical distinction between the immortality of the film star assured long ago by cinematic technology and the mortality of the man. And Brando’s 2004 death confirmed that the technological future he imagined had yet to arrive.103
EPILOGUE
LYING FOR A LIVING
Perhaps because of his ambivalence toward acting, Brando always had plenty to say about it. He could be dismissive: Actors were not artists, films were a business. He’d kept at it because it was a good living, and the hours were unbeatable. These were not the claims of a gnarled cynic; from youth to old age, he maintained that he was an actor because he hadn’t found anything better to do, and because he lacked, as he said in Time in 1954, “the moral strength to turn down the money.” Such remarks, however, seemed disingenuous beside others in the same magazine a year earlier, when he compared European and American filmmaking to the latter’s detriment, observing: “The Europeans are businessmen too, but they can handle art because their
culture permits it. They’re not in such a hurry—people take their time. They examine little things. A director will show you a guy going out his door, down a long hall, down the stairs. . . . Here, everything has to move fast or people won’t like the movie, so it won’t make any money. . . . Why, what happened when you got a picture done with true sensitivity like The Quiet One [a 1948 documentary about an emotionally disturbed black child]. That film died.”1 His complaints about the profit motive on Broadway and in Hollywood, and about the aesthetic obliviousness of American audiences, sound like jeremiads denouncing the violation of what he revered.
Observations about acting made throughout his career amount to a set of basic principles. First, the idea that acting was instinct. Everybody acts—from the toddler who quickly learns how to behave to get his mother’s attention to husbands and wives engaged in the daily rituals of marriage. Every human activity requires acting of a different sort; none could survive without this inborn skill. Second, the recognition that there was nothing wrong with artifice or “lying.” We act because we must. Third, adept professionals inevitably conceptualized these procedures, holding up a mirror to reveal the dramatic nature of social activity. Fourth, the least important part of any performance is the words. If the acting is effective, the audience should be able to understand most of what is happening from face and gesture alone. (Brando had a habit of watching television without the sound to better apprehend silent expression.)2 Fifth, an audience’s ability to identify with the character mattered more than the quality of the acting or dialogue. This was why Brando told anyone who would listen that he gave stronger performances in Burn! and Last Tango in Paris than in On the Waterfront. Terry Malloy was an everyman whose regret for what might have been was deeply affecting, while the plot and characters of the later two films inhibited empathy.
Many of these ideas were as old as Hamlet’s advice to the players. Brando had memorized a lot of Shakespeare, and he considered the Bard’s language and dramatic invention unequaled: “One is tempted to believe that he has come from another galaxy. His distance from other writers . . . has to be measured in light years.”3 Brando frequently drew on Shakespeare’s insights, and he clearly knew Stanislavski’s work, but he seems not to have benefited from much else in the field of dramatic theory. Given the size and range of Brando’s library, his mere hundred books on theater and film, very few of them annotated, may be surprising.4 Perhaps he did care more about the language of dolphins, the subject of a 1989 Omni essay, which had Post-its on every page and was part of a large science collection, or about the history of religion because he owned and heavily annotated so many books on it.5 He did mark up Ingmar Bergman’s memoir, The Magic Lantern (1988), which he may have been reading as a model for his own autobiography, but he seems to have read mainly for discovery, information, and consolation.6 His range as an actor was the result of his many varied interests. When it came to acting, he found inspiration everywhere but in acting books.
People who worked with Brando often marveled at his powers of concentration. He could immerse himself in scenes, ignoring cameras and lights as well as directors, like no one else. While he never “became” a character, extending his role beyond the set, he felt that an actor had to commit to his fiction. He assented readily when the host on The Tex and Jinx Show commented: “If you aren’t convinced of what you’re doing, you won’t convince anyone else.” In that radio interview of December 12, 1955, which included Marilyn Monroe, Brando also rejected the label “method actor”; it wasn’t the first time nor would it be the last. Asked to define “the method,” Brando answered: “That’s what 50 million actors would like to know too. It’s an age-old argument and you could spend twelve hours in Walgreen’s Drugstore arguing about it. Stanislavski wrote several long tomes on the subject.” Pressed about his own technique, he characterized it as “instinctive.”
Brando never studied with Lee Strasberg, who in America had made his name synonymous with method acting. Brando furthermore disliked the rigidity and elitism associated with a specific school and prophet. While his mentor Stella Adler was hardly self-effacing, she presented her techniques as part of a tradition to which she paid homage through interpretations of great performances (from the Yiddish Theatre and elsewhere) and redactions of Stanislavski and other theorists. Brando always acknowledged his debt to Adler, but he departed from her teachings by refusing to idealize acting as she did and by downplaying distinctions between those with talent and those without.
His view of acting was essentially democratic: It was a basic human impulse motivated by social necessity. This was a key emphasis in the 1965 interviews he did to promote his movie Morituri (made into a 1966 documentary, Meet Marlon Brando, by Albert and David Maysles). Questioned about his professional development, Brando said, “We’re all actors . . . the way that you conduct yourself in this interview is not the way that you conduct yourself at a bar with some of your friends . . . one is able to adjust oneself to a situation.” Reporter: “Would you say that your handling of your roles is a reflection of yourself as a person?” Brando: “I think everything we do in life is a reflection of ourselves.” In response to a French reporter who wondered whether he thought the status and prestige of actors obligated them to take stands on social issues, Brando said he considered this the responsibility of every citizen.7
Brando also saw acting as an evolutionary adaptation. “We couldn’t survive a second if we weren’t able to act,” he said on The Dick Cavett Show in 1973. “Acting is a survival mechanism; it’s a social unguent, a lubricant and we act to save our lives actually every day. People lie constantly every day, by not saying something that they think or saying something that they don’t think or showing something that they don’t feel.” He gives the example of the underling whose ambition to move up in an agency requires that he celebrate the boss’s every harebrained scheme. Such mundane situations call for acting of a very skillful kind. The role is played “day after day after day, in order to survive in your job.” And even if the lines change, the motivation doesn’t. What makes this acting is the deliberate intention and goal, requiring specific contrivances. To Cavett’s retort that these daily dramas have nothing to do with Brando’s performances, Brando insists that he could never play Cavett’s role. Then he launches into a review of Cavett as talk-show host. The host’s mind is in overdrive as he sizes up each remark, the tone and temper of his guest, the audience reception, deciding when to interrupt with a question, introduce a joke, all the while alert to the station-break schedule. “You’re doing this editing at an insane rate,” Brando concludes, “and you have this demeanor of levity and lightness and amusement and zest, and it’s easy to ascertain that that finally isn’t what goes on in your mind, or your feelings at all. . . . That’s something that I couldn’t do. I couldn’t do what you do. And that’s a different kind of acting, you’re playing a different role.” Brando’s closing characterization of acting is familiar: “It is a business, it’s no more than that, and those who pretend that it’s an art I think are misguided. Acting is a craft and it’s a profession not unlike being an electrician or plumber or an economist.”8
On The Dick Cavett Show. © Bettmann/Corbis.
He picks up the same point in a 1989 interview on Saturday Night with Connie Chung, as if the conversation were ongoing: “Why did I wind up being an actor rather than a scientist who’s studying entomology or an animal trainer? Why did I make that choice?” Chung asks, “Don’t you realize that you’re thought of as the greatest actor ever?” Brando’s mastiff wanders in as if on cue, and Brando exploits the extra. “Tim’s the greatest actor ever,” he declares, slapping the dog’s rump. “He pretends he loves me and he just wants something to eat.” During this appearance, Brando gives his most dismissive views on acting, perhaps because he was airing his grievances about A Dry White Season. He berated the studio system for overvaluing profit and grimly insisted that he was done with acting and had prioritized other things. Of course, his
choice to address the situation on television suggested quite the opposite—how much acting still mattered to him.9
His flat denial in response to another obligatory question—whether he regretted playing so few great roles and giving up the stage for film—seemed comparatively sincere. Brando had a strong orientation toward his acting projects to the end, which was evident in two that he worked on with great enthusiasm during 2000 and 2001. Both utilized new technologies to democratize filmmaking techniques and disseminate theories he had been articulating for most of his professional life. The first was a DVD program begun around January 2000 with Scott Billups, an expert in special effects who was considered a leading innovator in new technologies. The idea was a film version of karaoke (empty orchestra) they dubbed “karabuti” (empty stage), which allowed people to insert themselves into movies using camcorders and computers at home. Thus, an admirer of Casablanca might don trench coat and fedora, set his video to black and white, and enact a scene, which could then be edited into the film. There would be an option, too, for making original dramas and voice-overs on animated pictures. The technology would be accessible so that anyone with a relatively updated and inexpensive computer could participate.10
Brando’s belief in the universality of drama provided inspiration for the DVD. Made conscious of their own intuitive theatricality, many could learn to replicate the performances of stars. He also emphasized the power of the most basic stories, again invoking Sidney Meyers’s The Quiet One for illustration. What resonated especially, he explained to Billups, was the idea of this “traumatized black kid . . . who couldn’t relate to people, and finally, through this relationship with this man, he was able to take some mud and make it into an ashtray,” which he gave to the man. “That was his passport to freedom . . . he learned to give something.”11 Brando’s receptivity to this picture, carried from one century into another (recalled for Time in 1953, for Billups in 2000), was informed by “Bud,” the neglected child of alcoholics, at Lathrop Junior High School, Santa Ana, California, hammering metal into a functional tool and receiving the rare gift of praise from an authority figure.12
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