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

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  48See comments, respectively, in Brando’s copies of McNickle’s They Came Here First, where he noted: “Exploitation [of the Indians] seemed not to be limited by nationality. Beginning in 1492 to the present day,” p. 121; The Old West: The Soldiers (New York: Time-Life Books, 1973), pp. 44–45, 39, 53, 25; Life of George Bent, p. 195; Fey and McNickle, Indians and Other Americans, p. 203; Nelson Lee, Three Years Among the Comanches (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957), pp. 118–19; and Irvin Peithmann, Broken Peace Pipes: A Four-Hundred-Year History of the American Indian (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1964), pp. 213–14.

  49See notes in Brando’s copies, respectively, of Broken Peace Pipes, p. 22; Fighting Indians, p. 19; Indians and Other Americans, and on the grasshopper plague, Hoig, Sand Creek Massacre, p. 55.

  50Elliott Arnold, The Camp Grant Massacre (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), pp. 26, 45.

  51Life of George Bent, pp. 180–81; Dee Brown, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1977), p. 3.

  52Notes in Brando’s copy of Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, pp. 246–47.

  53Notes, respectively, in Brando’s copies of Collier, Indians of the Americas pp. 175–76, 176–77, and Angie Debo, Geronimo (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), pp. 50–53.

  54Notes in Brando’s copy of Herbert Eugene Bolton, Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), p. 403; Broken Peace Pipes, back cover; and Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest (Albuquerque: University of Arizona Press, 1974), p. 240.

  55This is evident in the way Brando responded to the history of the Spanish in North America. Brando’s notation on the cover of Herbert Bolton’s Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains: “Look on my work ye mighty and dispair,” along with his notes inside, condemn the graphic details and Bolton’s attempts to excuse them. Throughout the book, Brando wars marginally with the colonialist historian. Yet Brando still writes at the end: “I must talk to this dolt,” Coronado, p. 323. Brando took to heart an inscription on his copy of Indians and Other Americans: “To Marlon Brando. In these things there are many questions and few answers. D’Arcy McNickle, August 1963.” See notes in Brando’s copy of McNickle, The Indian Tribes of the United States: Ethnic and Cultural Survival, p. 7.

  56Ever in dialogue with his friend McNickle, Brando wrote sadly in the margin of a McNickle book: “we had much to learn from the Indians.” McNickle, Indian Tribes, p. 7.

  57He marks emphatically a statement in Steiner’s The New Indians (uncorrected page proofs): “Like the people of Africa and Asia the Indian has now broken the silence imposed upon him by others and by himself,” p. 5½.

  58The awful paradox of the Buffalo Soldiers, Brando wrote, was that “the North won the war to free the slaves/so they could use blacks for cannon foder.” See notes in Brando’s copy of Donnie D. Good, The Buffalo Soldier (Tulsa: Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, 1970), where he is also drawn to such details as the black cavalry’s charge to establish order among “Mexican bandits” and “roving Indian bands.” Brando noted to himself to “use” a reference to a Spanish law applied in Mexico that allowed Spanish soldiers to enslave only Indians captured in war, a law that motivated Spaniards to provoke Indians into aggression. See Brando’s copy of John Upton Terrell, Apache Chronicle (New York: World Publishing, 1972), p. 84.

  59These names are in John M. Carroll, ed., The Black Military Experience in the American West (New York: Liveright, 1971), p. 356, and Steiner’s The New Indians, p. 1.

  60Uncorrected page proofs, Steiner’s The New Indians, pp. 13½, 16, 16½. Brando also wrote “mud clowns” above a passage on Indian rituals that removed the taint from tribesmen who had fought for whites, p. 13. He also annotated a passage in his copy of Edmund Wilson’s Apologies to the Iroquois, which states that Indians on reservations were refused loans authorized by the GI Bill of Rights.

  61Notes in Brando’s copy of Fey and McNickle, Indians and Other Americans, p. 73.

  62Notes in Brando’s copies of Indians and Other Americans, back cover, and Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, back cover.

  63The Brando Estate Archives contain boxes of materials from “Vision Road” and other Indian projects, extending from the 1950s to the 1990s. The materials from The Brave in private collection confirm Brando’s commitment to the project.

  64Brando’s note on the Indian warrior is in Brown and Schmitt, Fighting Indians of the West, p. 41. Brando thought himself too old to play Kit Carson, but he entertained the possibility of other white figures. Grobel, Conversations with Brando, p. 124.

  65Baldwin’s play was never made into a film. Brando’s annotations on the prospective screenplay are on his copy in KBL, Box 45.

  66Songs, p. 296.

  67Brando recalls seeing these photographs in the newspaper as well as the incident with his fourth-grade teacher at Lincoln Elementary School in Evanston, Illinois, in his August 1983 taped conversation with Michael Jackson.

  68Brando mentions this in the August 1983 conversation with Michael Jackson; in Lindsey Interviews; and in Songs, pp. 26, 30–33.

  69Brando’s annotations are in his copy of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, pp. 18, 15, KBL, Box 45.

  70Brando’s annotated copy of Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dial, 1961), p. 13, is in KBL. This observation echoes another passage Brando highlighted, in his copy of Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism: “One cannot make the fascist harmless if . . . one does not look for him in oneself,” p. xii (italics in original).

  71These quotations are from various essays by James Baldwin, in James Baldwin: Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), p. 434. See also pp. 437–38, 439, and 450 for Baldwin’s account of Brando in the civil rights movement.

  72Brando refers to the boycott, and another incident in early 1960, when black inmates at a Georgia prison protested unbearable conditions by breaking their own legs with sledgehammers, in a 1963 interview on TCM, “Marlon Brando on Civil Rights,” where he describes the early days of the movement.

  73Michael Jackson conversation, August 1983.

  74An average day from Brando’s 1964 calendar is similarly reflective of political commitments: January 25, for example, includes meetings with James and Daniel Baldwin, activist reporter Drew Pearson, and black photojournalist Frank Dandridge, and an evening discussion on civil rights with a group of congressmen. The calendar is in the Brando Estate Archives.

  75These calendars, covering events, respectively, from June 11, June 25, July 12, July 14, and July 27, 1963, are in the Brando Estate Archives.

  76The Civil Rights Roundtable is widely available on YouTube and elsewhere. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=MruG888gH50.

  77Brando discusses this in his 1983 conversation with Michael Jackson and in Lindsey Interviews.

  78Brando described these experiences with the Black Panthers in Lindsey Interviews and in Songs, pp. 298–303.

  79Brando’s notes for the eulogy he delivered at Bobby Hutton’s funeral, Brando Estate Archives. In public speaking as well as on film, he improvised extensively from his notes. His notes also record some of the comments of other eulogists, such as the metaphor of the white community as the hog in the stream of humanity. Brando’s eulogy, delivered on April 12, 1968, was broadcast on KTVU News in Oakland, California.

  80These quotations are from the Petition for Hearing filed by Brando’s lawyers in the Supreme Court of the State of California, p. 1. See Civ. No. 35362, Court of Appeals of California, Second Appellate District, Division 5, December 10, 1970, Samson B. Mullins, President of the Oakland Police Officers Association, et al., Plaintiffs and Appellants, v. Marlon Brando, Defendant and Respondent. There are numerous files on the case in the Brando Estate Archives, including court briefs, many annotated by Brando’s lawyers.

  81The Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH “Excelathon” for black youth on April 2
1, 1979, was covered by the Los Angeles Times, which featured a photograph of Brando there.

  82Brando’s letter to Toni Morrison, February 1, 1991. Response dated February 4, 1991, Brando Estate Archives. Brando’s collection of books by Toni Morrison was sold at the Christie’s sale.

  83This book—along with others on South Africa, such as Edward Feit’s South Africa: The Dynamics of the African National Congress (1962), with Brando’s marginalia—is in KBL, Box 97.

  84Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (New York: Doubleday, 1958), pp. 8, 11; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967), pp. 130, 134; Norman Mailer, The White Negro (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1957), n.p. All of these books are in a private collection of Brando’s books on civil rights.

  85Brando discusses this in Grobel, Conversations with Brando, pp. 103–4; in the Lindsey Interviews; and in the margins of his civil rights books.

  86Brando makes these comments in his conversation with Michael Jackson, August 1983 and in Robert Lindsey Interviews. The direct quotations are from the Michael Jackson tape.

  87Direct quotes are from Grobel Transcripts.

  88Lindsey Interviews and Songs, p. 232.

  89See, for instance, “The Private World of Bud Brando,” by Don Stewart, which describes Brando’s idealism, and “Brando’s Search for Faith.” Both articles, from the 1950s (the first from just before Viva Zapata!; the second from just after The Young Lions), are in the Brando Estate Archives, no dates available.

  90Lindsey Interviews.

  91See, for instance, Sunday, March 19, 1967, AP wire: “Brando returned from a five-day tour of the eastern India state Thursday. He said nobody outside Bihar could imagine the condition of its inhabitants.” See also the press release from UNICEF, April 2, 1967, sent to “International School Students” around the world, urging them to support the children of Bihar, signed “Marlon Brando, UNICEF Ambassador at Large.”

  92Brando, p. 46, in Transcriptions of Brando’s taped conversations at Mulholland Drive with Stewart Brand and Jay Baldwin from 1975, Brando Estate Archives.

  93Brando described the experience in Songs, pp. 292–95, and at greater length in Lindsey Interviews.

  94On April 11, Brando was in New York at the UN and UNICEF offices, meeting with, among others, Henry Labouisse, executive director of UNICEF, and Hugh Downs. On April 13, he met with Downs and Mike Dann of CBS. Among the people in Hollywood to whom he showed the film were Chuck Silvers, Sherman Grinberg, Jim Real, Jack Valenti, and Shana Alexander, who was there interviewing him. On October 13 and 14, he showed the film at a UNICEF event in Helsinki, Finland, for Jack Ling, Altemur Kılıç, Henry Labouisse, and other dignitaries, as a warning for what should never be allowed to happen again. Kristin L. Ahlberg describes President Lyndon Johnson’s policies in Transplanting the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), pp. 128–45.

  95These visits were listed on Brando’s daily log. The marine biologists included Wallace Heath, who had helped the Lummi Indians with their aquaculture; Tap Pryor; and Edward Tarvyd; the archaeologist from the University of Hawaii was Yosihiko Sinoto.

  96Brando’s discovery and purchase of the island are described in Lindsey Interviews and in Songs, pp. 268–75 (quote on p. 273). The documents from his purchase of Tetiaroa, completed on March 13, 1967, are in the Brando Estate Archives. I have drawn as well on the pamphlet of the Tetiaroa Society, an organization incorporated after Brando’s death to fulfill his many plans for the island. See Tetiaroa Society: Sustainable Development for Future Generations, http://tetiaroa.pf/about-3/.

  97Brando had multiple copies of the Archaeology of Teti’aroa Atoll and Society Islands in his library collection. See KBL, Box 5.

  98Transcriptions of Brando’s taped conversations with Stewart Brand and Jay Baldwin from 1975, Brando Estate Archives. The strength of coconut wood was a favorite subject of Brando’s. He mentioned it often in conversations with Brand and Baldwin, and he had a United Nations book (heavily annotated) on the subject, though this was from the 1980s: Coconut Wood: Processing and Use, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, 1985. This book is in the KBL, Box 88. Brando also owned books by Brand and by Buckminster Fuller, KBL, Boxes 83, 26, 51. The International Book of Wood was on the List of Books around Marlon’s Bed, Brando Estate Archives. Patricia Herzog, a UCLA undergraduate in the late 1960s, remembers the day she was working in Martindale’s Bookstore on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills and Brando came in to buy The Whole Earth Catalog (personal communication). The book was not in any of the lots sold at Christie’s in 2005.

  99Don Widener went so far as to clear the documentary with the UN and the US Environmental Protection Agency. These letters, from August 11 and November 15, 1972, and May 8, 1973, establishing Brando’s commitment and the various negotiations with Probus productions and the news networks, are in the Stewart Brand file, Brando Estate Archives.

  100Brando–Brand–Baldwin conversations, p. 42.

  101Brando annotated his copy of Andrew Spielman and Michael D’Antonio, Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe (New York: Hyperion, 2001), KBL, Box 84.

  102See the Gorilla Foundation’s two-page letter, September 18, 1987, signed by Francine Patterson, trainer of the famous gorillas Koko and Michael, Brando Estate Archives. Brando also befriended Jane Goodall around this time, having read some of her books and talked to her by phone. In a handwritten letter to Brando, September 6, 1991, Goodall described her plans for “Wildlife Awareness Week” and expressed her eagerness to meet him after their conversations. This letter was found in Brando’s copy of her book, Through a Window: Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), in KBL, Box 96.

  103The original version of Brando’s script for the ad, along with Brando’s typed revision from February 18, 2000, which he revised from script to performance, is in the Brando Estate Archives. The ad, directed by Tony Scott, was filmed on February 22 and 23, 2000, at Anza Borrego Springs, California.

  EPILOGUE. LYING FOR A LIVING

  1The first quote is from a Time cover story, “Cinema: A Tiger in the Reeds,” October 11, 1954. The second is also from Time: “Cinema: New Picture, June 1, 1953.”

  2One of his favorite shows was the Hasidic Chabad Telethon; he donated money to it not only because he valued the charity but also because he enjoyed the dramatic inventions of the performers (Avra Douglas interviews). Brando knew actor Jon Voigt, a devout Catholic and a regular on these Chabad shows, who appeared in 2008 on his thirteenth telethon. “Jon Voight Again Will Join Chabad’s ‘To Life’ Telethon,” Los Angeles Times, September 13, 2008.

  3“Marlon Brando: Notes for Book,” June 22, 1992, pp. 27–28, Brando Estate Archives.

  4KBL, Boxes 86 and 92.

  5See KBL, Boxes 42 (for the article on dolphins) and 78 (for the many annotated books on religion).

  6Brando marked, for instance, Bergman’s reference to “playing a role—that professional disease that has followed me mercilessly throughout my life and so often robbed or diminished my most profound experiences.” The Magic Lantern (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 7. Brando’s annotated copy is in KBL, Box 86.

  7Brando had agreed to do publicity for Morituri (1965), and the Maysles brothers decided to do a documentary on Brando talking to reporters about the film. The documentary is discussed in the Introduction.

  8Brando appeared on The Dick Cavett Show on June 12, 1973. The interview is also discussed in chapter 6.

  9The film is discussed in chapter 7.

  10There would also be a website to assist with technical problems and to provide accessories, such as scripts, instruction manuals on lighting, and dramatic techniques. These details were all discussed in “MB–Scott Billups, Meeting of 1-10-00 re. DVD Project,” transcripts in Brando Estate Archives.

  11Ibid. Brando describes The Quiet One on p. 40. The DVD project was linked to B
illups’s publications, which Brando had in his library.

  12This incident is discussed in chapter 1, in terms of Brando’s difficult relationship with his father.

  13Transcripts of organizational discussions, “Lying for a Living,” July 15, 2001, Brando Estate Archives. Brando was probably thinking about the project well before then.

  14Brando’s fax to Clinton from December 1, 2001, is in the Brando Estate Archives. Avra Douglas remembered Brando discussing “Lying for a Living” on the phone with former president Clinton, and the fact that he was intrigued at first but then withdrew.

  15The file includes photographs with detailed accounts of the social and political functions of different African tribal masks with Brando’s marks. Among the Kwele people, the “Gon” mask, fashioned in the image of a gorilla, signaled danger; the “ekuk,” or antelope mask, indicated protection, Brando Estate Archives.

  16“Random Notes on Acting” and “Outline for Lying for a Living,” July 11 and August 31, 2001, Brando Estate Archives.

  17The dozens of pages of notes outlining the sessions are dated July 11 and August 31, 2001. The sessions themselves were filmed from November 15 through December 12, 2001.

  18Quincy Jones, interview with the author, July 23, 2012, and June 17, 2013.

  19Philippe Petit, Man on Wire (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008), p. 233. Petit gave Brando a copy of his 1985 book, On the High Wire, with an elaborately inscribed letter thanking him for the 2001 workshop: “You are an ever so rare ‘Wondrous Conquistador of the Useless’ . . . with respect, delight, gourmandize and exhaustion.” KBL, Box 53. Petit’s “Conquistador” is a reference to Werner Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo—about a manic Irishman engaged in a hopeless mission to establish a rubber factory in Peru and build an opera house in the jungle—a film he and Brando may have discussed.

  20“Here’s Brando,” Collier’s, November 1, 1952, pp. 24–26.

  21Brando’s statement is from his 1989 interview with Connie Chung. Friends, lovers, and family who described Brando’s endlessly playful dramatic persona include Avra Douglas, Ellen Adler, Rebecca Brando, Shane Brando, Harry Dean Stanton, and Miko Brando in their interviews.