Cinema: The Private World of Marlon Brando

Nearly 30 years ago, Marlon Brando exploded on the Broadway stage as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Since then he has become the leading movie actor of his generation. Some of his films have been good; more have been awful. No matter. Audiences could always count on Brando for performances that were surprising, overwhelming in their power, sometimes perversely idiosyncratic—his foppish Mr. Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty, for example. At the very least, there was always an unforgettable moment or two, like the garden scene in The Godfather in which he mugs for his grandchild. Brando loves to mug in real life too, as the pictures taken on The Missouri Breaks set show (see color page).

Over the years he has become a figure somewhat larger than life. Among his colleagues he has no peer. “He gave us our freedom,” says Jack Nicholson. Brando himself is stubborn about his freedom—to champion unpopular causes, to choose his own scripts and, above all, to lead a very private life on the island of Tetiaroa, 30 miles north of Tahiti. There last week, TIME Correspondent Leo Janos became the first American journalist to interview Brando in his isolated tropical paradise.

“My first impulse,” Brando later admitted, “was to run like hell and disappear into the bush. My second was to turn you upside down and plant you, head first, like a coconut tree.” Janos spent two days with Brando on the island and escaped without being planted. His report:

Beyond the sand bar, where we had walked the skiff over the shoals at the end of a languorous afternoon, the wind freshened suddenly ahead of a curtain of rain. The usually placid tropical lagoon hurled water into the skiff. The three of us were drenched. Willie, a local fisherman, grinned at the adventure. Our hulking captain frowned, grabbed a bucket and handed one to me. Brando read my fear. “Don’t worry,” he shouted. “When the rain hits, it will flatten the sea… the weight of the rain water.” Our boat sped into the wall of rain; the sea flattened, and a few minutes later we beached the boat on the white sands of a small, S-shaped island—Brando’s bird sanctuary.

There are very few birds left on the Polynesian islands because of the local practice of collecting eggs and selling them at market. Brando plans to turn this island over to the French government as a sanctuary. I followed him as he waded hip-deep into a shallow lagoon. Brando dropped into the water floating on his back; I did likewise. A brilliant rainbow arched over the island. Above us were hundreds of wheeling birds and an early halfmoon. Our bodies turned slowly in the warm water until we faced the lowering sun. Brando smiled impishly. “Just a typical day’s end in paradise,” he said.

Loping Stride. We walked the perimeter of the island, Marlon leading the way. From the back, he looked like a young heavyweight boxer: broad shoulders, thick, sinewy arms and rock-hard legs. The loping stride is strong. Only the white hair, cut short, betrayed his age. Suddenly Brando turned toward me and the illusion of youth vanished. That famous face with its jutting forehead and broken nose is a face that has seen and experienced everything. His wet shirt hugged a fat belly. “Poachers,” Brando whispered, looking at two young Polynesian boys lying on the sand. They smiled nervously. Brando studied them hard for a moment and slowly moved away. “They’re O.K.,” he said. “They’re trapping lobsters.” The kids were lucky not to have been egg hunting. Even at 52 and 40 Ibs. overweight, Marlon Brando could have taught a forceful lesson in honesty.

Brando bought the islands ten years ago from the widow of a Canadian dentist whose father had been doctor to a Polynesian king and had received the islands as a gift. The sale ended a ten-year search by the actor “for a place on this earth to hang my hat.” He narrowed his choices to Mexico, Bali, Bangkok and finally decided on Tetiaroa, which he had first seen in 1961 while filming Mutiny on the Bounty.

Brando’s methodical search was based on the grimmest of calculations: “I’m convinced the world is doomed. The end is near. I wanted a place where my family and I could be self-sufficient and survive.” The abysmal state of the human condition is Brando’s obsession. “I know I’m a bore on the subject of the American Indian,” he said. “But people haven’t become emotionally involved in the subject.”

Brando now spends half the year in this retreat, where life and problems are simpler. He lives in a thatch-roofed hut, shaded by tall palm trees, at the edge of a white beach. It is one large room with lift-up frond shutters that invite the gentle sea breeze. In addition to a large bed festooned with mosquito netting, the room contains a refrigerator and gas-fed stove. In the back, separated by a wall, is a flush toilet and shower. The place is comfortable but fairly primitive, very much a man’s digs.

Brando’s life conforms to his surroundings. He rises shortly before sun rise (about 5 a.m.) and goes to bed early (9 p.m.). “I love to walk the beach naked at night,” he said, “with just the wind caressing my body. It’s an awesome sense of freedom and very sensual.” Sometimes, to get away entirely, he takes his boat to one of his eleven uninhabited islands and sleeps on the beach.

Two pretty girls—Eddy, a Polynesian, and Eriko, a Japanese—attend to his needs, and three men work with him on repairs and projects. “I’m never bored or lonely,” says Brando. “If there’s no one to talk to, I read. Reading is conversation in a way.” At the moment he is conversing with the German philosopher Nietzsche.

The bookshelf in his bedroom is filled with scientific journals on aqua-farming, solar energy and the like. Brando’s experiments in these areas are momentarily dormant because of a grandiose commercial enterprise that flopped, at a cost to him of $500,000. Two years ago Actor Brando became an innkeeper on Tetiaroa. On his tight little island, he constructed 21 thatch-roofed huts, including three bars and a dining room, and hired a staff of about 40.

From the outset, the scheme was doomed. Storms and high tides washed through the huts, causing constant and costly repairs. Although the cottages were filled in the summer months, the resort never came close to breaking even. Brando was driven to distraction by “middle-aged ladies from Peoria telling me, ‘Mr. Brando, we loved you as Napoleon’—Napoleon, for Christ’s sake —and asking for my autograph, while their husbands shove me against the wall to pose with the little lady.” Admits Brando: “It was a bad idea, and it was badly managed. Why did I do it? Because I love having projects, even bad ones. I don’t want to sit on an island like a meditative Buddha.”

Brando a Buddha? Unlikely. Not the pugnacious, trigger-tempered, tempestuousMarlon Brando who broke a photographer’s jaw three years ago, seduced and abandoned nearly as many women as Don Juan, insulted and scorned more than a few of the world’s notables. Not long ago, while snorkeling in his lagoon, he punched a marauding whitetip shark in the snout. The shark fled.

Yet he is a gentle and considerate man to those he likes. He detests obsequiousness. “I notice,” he says, “that the width of a Hollywood smile in my direction is commensurate with how my last picture grossed.” No one relishes candor like Marlon Brando. “I suppose you think I’m just another asshole actor?” he asks rhetorically. “No,” comes the reply, “an asshole actor with heavy pretensions.” Brando roars with glee. Tell him you think he is the acting genius of his generation and he will snort with anger and walk away.

“Acting,” he says, “is an empty and useless profession. I do it for the money because for me there is no pleasure. The fact is, there are no contemporary writers of importance. Not one. O’Neill and Tennessee Williams had moments, but I don’t regard them as great classical writers. Movies? Forget it. I’m convinced that the larger the gross, the worse the picture. Bergman and Buñuel are visionaries, wonderful artists and craftsmen. How many people in the world have ever seen one of their films or ever heard of them? How can you take movies seriously? You go on the set with the script in your back pocket. You take it out and read: ‘Let’s see … in this one Brando plays an Indian who attacks the stagecoach.’ O.K., let’s roll ’em. Commercialized glop, not worth thinking about.”

Potato Latke. But Brando does think. When he arrived in Montana for The Missouri Breaks, he had definite ideas for changing his character which he says “was as heavy as potato latke.” (Brando’s speech is loaded with Yiddishisms, from his days in New York with Stella Adler, the famous acting teacher, and her family. “I’m all Jew,” boasts the Protestant-born Brando.)

He changed the entire flavor of his character—a bounty hunter called Robert E. Lee Clayton—inventing a deadly hand weapon resembling both a harpoon and a mace that he uses to kill. “I always wondered why in the history of lethal weapons no one invented that particular one. It appealed to me because I used to be very expert at knife throwing.”

He acknowledges the theft of the movie: “For the first 20 pages of script, I’m the character everyone is talking about—’He’s coming, he’s coming.’ On page 21 I arrive. I can do anything … move like an eel dipped in Vaseline. I’m the guy they keep promising will arrive. Poor Jack Nicholson. He’s right at the center, cranking the whole thing out while I’m zipping around like a firefly. I wanted the character to be different, a serious study of the American Indian. But Arthur Perm said, ‘Gee, Marlon, not at these prices [$1.5 million for Brando].’ So I countered, ‘Arthur, at least let me have some fun.’ ”

Brando was disappointed by his most notorious film, Last Tango in Paris. “Bertolucci was a very sensitive director, but I didn’t like the movie. It was too calculated, designed to make an impact rather than a statement. Bernardo wanted me to screw Maria Schneider on the screen. I told him, ‘That’s impossible. If that happens, our sex organs become the centerpiece of the film.’ He never did agree with me. The Godfather”? What the hell did I know about a 65-year-old Italian who smokes twisted goat-shit cigars?” The young actor he admires most is Robert De Niro, who played the young Godfather. “I doubt he really knows how good he is,” says Brando.

Nowadays Brando serves notice on producers and directors that he will work no longer than three weeks on a film. In July he will put in three weeks for Francis Ford Coppola in Manila, playing the commander of a group of renegade Green Berets in the Viet Nam film Apocalypse. His pay: $2 million. Says Brando: “I’m nearing the end of the line. I figure I’ve got about two shells left in the chamber. One of them is going to be a picture I want to do about the American Indian.”

He sees himself as being little more than a tenuous survivor in the deadly game of life. He credits 15 years on a psychiatrist’s couch with keeping him in the ranks of the walking wounded. “I was shot full of holes,” he says. “But I was given a big bowl of chicken soup and told, ‘Drink this. You are going to need it because you are going down into a very cold, scary mine!’ Lots of love and chicken soup helped me through the trip.” But among his heaviest losses was the death two years ago of his closest friend, Comedian Wally Cox, a childhood friend from back in Evanston, Ill. “He was my brother. I can’t tell you how much I miss and love that man,” Brando says. “I have Wally’s ashes in my house. I talk to him all the time.”

Now Brando’s life revolves around his four children. “Four kids by three different women,” he muses. “I had a real Ford assembly line going throughout much of my life. If you’re rich and famous, getting laid a lot isn’t that difficult. I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t know why I was doing it. I still don’t have all the answers.”

He is particularly happy with his relationship with Eldest Son Christian (mother: Anna Kashfi), who is 18 and about to enter college in Los Angeles. “I not only love him, I like him. We spend a lot of time together.” Another son is in a private school in Idaho. The other day his father made a quick hop from Tahiti to “sit on him a little and shape him up.”

Brando keeps his private life on Tahiti very secluded. He has two children by Tarita, who was a 19-year-old beauty in Mutiny on the Bounty. They live on Tahiti. “I see them on weekends,” says their father. “They fly to Tetiaroa or I go to them. I don’t think I will let them go to the States. As Tahitians, they are too trusting. They would be destroyed in the pace of life in the States.”

Brando and Tarita are still good friends. Says Marlon, “I remember being furious with her because she fed so much candy and gum—so bad for the teeth—to the baby. She said to me, ‘What can I do? He wants it.’ Tahitians treat children as people who have legitimate wants and needs. None of this I-know-better-because-I’m-your-parent syndrome. I respect it. But I’ve learned not to try to go native mentally … not to try to assume their mind frame. My first seven years as a child growing up in Illinois always gets in the way, and I meet myself coming around the other side of the island.”

We returned from the bird sanctuary with the last rays of sunlight. The lagoon was a gentle green color set against the dramatic black silhouette of Tetiaroa. Brando pointed up to the first evening star visible in the dimming sky. A strange, almost mystical feeling pervaded, as if one could slip overboard and sink beneath the soft sea to become part of all that beauty. “Don’t worry, you’d swim,” Marlon laughed when I told him later about my strange impulse. “But I know exactly what you mean. It’s happened to me many times.”