Marlon Brando: No Man Is An Island (But Brando Tried)

Marlon Brando, who died in July, was arguably the greatest actor of his generation, but as a man he was, well, different. Lawrence Grobel's journal of the 10 days he spent catching flies and counting grains of sand with Brandon on his private island in Tahiti was first published in Movieline in 1991.

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Marlon Brando died on July 2, 2004. It was 26 years since I spent 10 days with him on his Tahitian island. The following is from a journal I kept there which was first published in Movieline magazine in 1991. I had been pursuing Brando for months to do a Playboy interview. Once he agreed and I was finally there, I found him fascinating. And fascinated, by anything and everything. He didn't like to talk about acting, because that bored him, but he could talk about it better than any other actor I've ever spoken to. He could go on about the inside of a camel's mouth, about sitting on a Moroccan beach with an airline stewardess listening to a Muslim priest's call, about philosopher Immanuel Kant or painter Pablo Picasso.

Of course he was a groundbreaking actor, as has been duly noted in the outpouring of stories accompanying his death. But there was also the private Brando of whom I got a rare glimpse.

He was a great student of human behavior, a games player and a bit of a tyrant. He abused his body, his talent, his psyche and his women, and tormented some of his 11 (or more) children. But when you see his films, look at his actions or read what he had to say, you understand that this was a man who cared deeply about things that mattered to him.

"Ten Days on Brando's Island" was reprinted by Hyperion Books, along with the Playboy interview, in the book Conversations with Brando. Of the hundreds of people I've interviewed in my career, I've never met anyone like Marlon Brando.

Nor do I think I ever will.

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June 13: Day 1

I'm sitting next to Marlon Brando's wife, Tarita, in the small twin engine plane that's taking us to Brando's Tahitian island. We're flying into thick gray clouds and a sudden storm. Tarita thinks we should turn back. She clutches her 7-year-old daughter, Cheyenne. Below us is Tetiaroa: A dozen small flat islands, each covered with palm trees, arranged around a turquoise lagoon. We land on the airstrip of the only one of the islands that's occupied. The plane taxis the length of the island and stops a few yards from Brando's bungalow.

It isn't the beautiful South Sea landscape or the soft tropical air or the groves of coconut palms I notice first. It's the flies. I bat two or three away in the first few seconds.

Brando is waiting. He kisses Tarita on both cheeks, then comes to greet me. He is wearing an Indian cotton hooded shirt and pants, and with his gray-white hair, paunch and wry, warm smile he has the appearance of an Indian holy man. He jokes about his outfit, which he says he wears because he is prone to sunstroke and must keep himself covered. He takes my bag and leads me to a thatched roof bungalow.

Brando comments on my sandals which, he says, will not last because sand will get between my toes and the leather.

"You can tell a man's education by the spread of his toes," he says, making one of the seemingly random remarks that pepper his conversation. He puts his own bare feet on the windowsill. "If the toes are widespread, they grew up shoeless," he says, and then he proceeds to launch into a discourse on the nature of Tahitians.

He talks about his ambitions for his island. He'd like to build a school for the blind here and invite oceanographers to come and conduct experiments. But he's had to curtail the various projects because things tend to fall apart when he's gone. "You can't bring culture here, you have to adapt to theirs," he says, swiping at some flies, catching two in his hand. And Tahitians, he says, do not have goals or ambitions. "Nothing bothers them. If they have flies, they live with them. The flies breed in the fallen coconuts, and unless you go around picking up all the coconuts you can't get rid of them. But tell a Tahitian that and he doesn't believe it."

Most people who come down here, he says, get bored after a few weeks. "When I first get here I'm like a discharged battery. It takes a few weeks to unwind, but eventually the island's slower rhythms sink in." He has stayed up to six months at one time. "When people come here to see me, they're usually all wound up, they talk fast, they've got projects, ideas, deals. And I sit here like a whale."

He asks if I'm hungry and we take a walk to his bungalow. He points out the plants growing in the sand in front of his door, which he says he waters with his urine. Inside there are two double beds, shelves of books and cassettes, a bottle of Rolaids, packages of grape Double Bubble sugarless gum. He shows me his ham radio and sits down and twirls the dial. The flies continue to bother him. He slaps at one that lands on him, swipes at others that fly by. His hands are as fast as a lizard's tongue. "If you could take all the time you spend poised to catch flies and put it together you'd have a pretty neat vacation," he observes. Brando says he was once influenced by the Jain philosophy, which holds that one shouldn't kill anything, not even a fly. He says it made sense for a while, until he thought it through and realized how, with every breath you take, you're killing something.

Brando tells me to feel free to explore the island. "I'll come by later," he says. "We can watch the sun set. There's sometimes a touch of green just as it drops."

Dinner. Brando comes to get me. We are joined by Brando's secretary Caroline and her 6-year-old daughter Petra. The dining room has 20 tables, 19 of them empty. We eat meat, potatoes, fish, salad, ice cream, fruit and cheese. Marlon says he's on a diet so he doesn't eat the bread. During dinner he tells a story of a woman in Hong Kong who brought her toy poodle to a restaurant and the waiter

took it, cooked it and fed it to her.

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