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.
June 14: Day 2
Brando is tied up with island business: developing tourism, building another house, supervising new construction of a reception area, having roofs rethatched.
He's in conflict over tourists coming to his island. He's tired of having them snap pictures of him, and at one point he closed down the hotel and fired 35 people. But for tax purposes and because it's expensive to keep pouring money into the island he has reopened it for one- and two-day tours. Because there is a limited amount of water, tourism can never fully develop.
In the evening Brando and I stretch out on the sand and talk for three hours, skipping from subject to subject. He talks about hustling, and says he's never promoted himself or his movies. "I'm not business oriented," he says. "I could have been a multimillionaire, but then I would have had to have been that kind of a person, and I'm not."
He quotes a poem about waiting by Kenneth Patchen, and I bring up T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." He knows the line I'm referring to and says, "If the mermaids can't sing for me here, Christ, they never will."
June 15: Day 3
"My favorite interview," Brando is saying, "was on television with Mrs. Arnold Palmer. The interviewer asked, 'Is there any special ritual that you go through before your husband plays?' She says, 'Well, I kiss his balls.' The interviewer did a double take. 'You mean his golf balls, right?' 'Of course,' Mrs. Palmer said. 'What did you think I meant?'"
Before dinner I join Brando at the bar. William, the island foreman, comes by and says he's been saving a very powerful palm wine for him to taste. It's been fermenting six months. Brando says to bring it and we both have a glass. He tells me he's had some really wild parties on the island. "Once we got six kinds of drunk, it went all night. Tahitians can drink, party, fuck, sleep, drink, party, fuck all through the night. I can't do that. Once I'm drunk I'm out." The one drink is enough for Brando. After dinner we take a walk. There's a circle of light around the half moon. White birds dive into the water. The sky sparkles with stars and falling meteorites. He picks up a handful of sand. "There are probably more individual grains in two handfuls of sand than there are stars in the universe," he says.
June 16: Day 4
We tape all afternoon, six hours. Brando's a bit pontifical at times, but that's to be expected. He must have caught two dozen flies.
Afterwards, out on the pier, he watches the lagoon. "If you had a 34-foot aluminum straw and you were going to suck up Fanta, you could only get it 33 feet because that's all a vacuum pump can pump," he says.
Then he gets down on his belly and stares at the water. He's puzzled by changes in the current. He says he's never seen anything like it in the 15 years he's been visiting his island. He seems very concerned.
June 17: Day 5
"Another day in paradise," Brando says with a laugh at breakfast. He entertains Caroline's 6-year-old daughter by closing his eyes and swiping at a group of flies buzzing around the grapefruit. He asks her to guess how many he's caught. She says three. He flings them onto the floor and they count. Eight. While she is counting he catches another fly and pops it into his mouth. When she looks at him he opens his mouth and the fly comes out.
He spends the morning talking on his ham radio, using another name and never revealing his true identity. He talks with someone living underground conducting medical experiments at the South Pole. A man living 500 miles west of Miami tells him how lightning once went through his phone and burned his wife's nose. One transmission clears up a mystery. Brando finds out that there was an earthquake in Samoa last night--the changing current he observed on the pier was the effect of a tidal wave caused by the quake.
He leaves the radio, listens for a moment, says a plane is coming. I hear nothing for a minute, then the faint sound of an engine. Brando tells me he has very sensitive hearing. He's been to doctors about it because even the hitting of a spoon on a cup can irritate him. The doctors told him there was nothing wrong. "You hear what you want to hear," they said. "Maybe that's so," Brando says now, "maybe it is psychological. Because sometimes I can't hear what people are saying. I can hear high-pitched noises and sounds, but I can't hear human voices."
The plane lands, bringing his son Teihotu and some friends. Tomorrow is Father's Day and they have come from Papeete, where they are still in school, to spend a few days. Brando and Tarita greet them, then he returns to his bungalow as Tarita sweeps the compound. "I never saw anybody work as hard as Tarita," he says. "All she does is work."
June 18: Day 6
Although Brando's feeling under the weather we are going on a picnic to another island. On the catamaran he asks, "How fast do you think we're going?" We all guess. "Twenty-two miles per hour," he answers, explaining that the catamaran goes 12 mph and the wind is adding another 10. He knows this, he says, because there are still flies on the boat and "flies can fly up to 22 miles per hour."
A Tahitian who had trailed a line behind the catamaran hauls in a large fish. Then he removes the hook and chops the head. Brando is squeamish. "Isn't that horrible? But that's the nature of the beast. They don't want to eat corn flakes."
When we reach the other island, Brando asks 17-year-old Teihotu to carry him on his back. He doesn't want to get wet. Teihotu complies.
We gather wood and start a fire. Tarita and her crew go off to fish by the reef. Brando picks up a crab, plays with it, wedging a sliver of wood between the crab and its shell so he can examine it.
"Do you think you could make the Brooklyn Bridge out of all the bottle caps in the world?" he asks. When I say yes, he says, "Boy, you're sure of that one, aren't you?"
June 19: Day 7
Marlon comes by in the afternoon, a glob of sun cream on his nose. It's hot, windless, and he calls to William to knock out three more windows in my bungalow so the air can circulate better. He picks up my telescope, looks through it and says, "This is a 10-power." I ask him how he knew, and he talks about looking through it with one eye and opening the other eye and measuring the distance between both views. What he actually did was read on the telescope that it was 10-power.
As we walk back to his bungalow he says, "I bet Caroline you wouldn't say anything about this shit on my nose." "You won," I say.
June 20: Day 8
In the evening Brando and I play chess. He's a bold player, and wins every game. "Nobody knows what makes a good chess player," he says. "It doesn't have to do with intelligence, it has to do with a sense of space. Architects usually make good chess players."
June 21: Day 9
There's a full moon, and after dinner we go night sailing. Caroline and her daughter wear bathing suits; Brando wears a yellow waterproof windbreaker with hood, rubber pants, and boots. Looks like something out of a chewing tobacco ad. After an hour something on the mast snaps and steering becomes difficult. We pull in.
Back at his bungalow, during our last taping session, Brando talks about women with big asses, which he prefers to women with small ones. "A woman with a small ass I treat almost as if she's paralytic."
Sometimes Brando gets a vague, distant look in his eyes and stares out at the sea. Questions go unanswered. He says he doesn't have any ambition left, doesn't want to do the major plays, act for the sake of acting. He doesn't feel he has to prove himself. As Orson Welles once said, you don't have to repeat yourself to show you can still do it. The fact that you've done it once is enough.
June 22: Day 10
The plane comes in the morning. Brando is still asleep. We had talked until 2 a.m. When I said goodnight he walked me to the door, polite, tired, a gracious host.
I fly to Tahiti with Tarita. She gives me a ride to my hotel. I ask her which she prefers, living on the island or in the city. "Here," she says, "in the city. He would like me to stay there. Once I stayed there two months. When he's not there it gets lonely. That's no kind of life."
I ask if she had any desire to be in more movies. "No," she says. Then, "Well, I would like, but he doesn't want me to. He wants me to stay home and raise the children."
At the hotel I kiss both her cheeks and say goodbye. Wondering if the mermaids will ever sing for Marlon Brando.
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Lawrence Grobel is a frequent contributor to Movieline's Hollywood Life and the author of Conversations with Brando and the just-released The Art of the Interview: Lessons from a Master of the Craft. To read his eulogy for Brando, go to www.lawrencegrobel.com.