Brando (33 page)

This incident reinforced my sense of isolation. If the shark had taken a bite out of me, I probably couldn’t have gotten off the island for treatment until it was too late. I wasn’t on Teti’aroa when the cook mistook DDT for flour, but those who ate the fish became very sick. Fortunately two people missed the meal and were able to look after the victims until a boat came by and took them to Papeete. Still, I decided we needed an airstrip.

In the mid-seventies, after I’d owned the island a few years, the hotel was operating in a bare-bones fashion and the airstrip was in, an elderly Tahitian called Grandpère went fishing and returned with a fat red fish about three feet long. He said it was a red snapper, but to me it resembled a picture I’d seen of a red poison fish that appeared occasionally off the lagoon. I told Grandpère so, but he assured me that this wasn’t a poison fish. “It looks like one,” he said, “but it isn’t.”

“Okay,” I said, figuring that if you have gray hair in Tahiti you must know what fish are safe to eat.

At two o’clock the next morning, I woke up with no sensation
in my lips; they were completely numb. My feet were tingling, the palms of my hands were itching, and I had a headache as big as a Buick. I knew it was the fish, though I hadn’t eaten very much of it. I had read stories about fish poisoning in the South Seas and didn’t want to die that way: depending on the toxicity of the species, some kill you within hours and some take three or four days to send you screaming into the arms of death. I had heard stories of people ripping the flesh off their bodies because they itched so much. I got up and went around the island and learned that everybody who had eaten the fish was sick. Being captain of the ship, I had to give what medicine we had to them, and then radioed Papeete to send a charter plane to take them off the island.

Sickest of all were Grandpère and four of his friends. They had eaten the poison fish with
fafaru
, a Tahitian version of Limburger cheese to the ninth power: scraps of fish (usually intestines and innards) are left out in the sun to rot in a coconut shell filled with seawater until the mess stinks and worms flock to it. Then the shell is emptied and fresh seawater is mixed with the bacteria left by the rotting process to create a bacterial soup that is then used to marinate fresh fish. After four or five hours the fafaru is ready to eat and it smells like the foot of a dead alligator left out in the sun for two months. It is putrid beyond description, the only thing I’ve ever seen buzzards refuse to eat. In fact, I’ve heard that buzzards have fainted from the odor.

Not all Tahitians eat fafaru, but some, like Grandpère, adore it. At meals they usually sit downwind of everyone else at the table, but you can still smell people who have eaten fafaru a mile away. Unfortunately, Grandpère and his friends had put pieces of the poison fish in their fafaru the night before, and they were in terrible shape. The plane took them to Papeete, where their stomachs were pumped and they spent two or three weeks in the hospital enjoying a vacation.

Although we established an air link between Papeete and the
island, it was never first-class service, or anything approaching it. It was usually provided by an ambitious pilot on Papeete who decided he was going to establish an airline with one and a half planes, though because of breakdowns it was more often like half a plane. Before takeoff, one of the passengers had to get out and crank the propeller.

Once, after spending a few weeks on the island, I had to go to Los Angeles for a movie and the pilot arrived from Papeete in what for him must have been a sleek, fancy, upscale airplane, a
two-engine
crackerbox that Wiley Post would have discarded. There were five of us leaving Teti’aroa that morning, but a few minutes after we took off one of the propellers stopped turning. “Mayday, Mayday,” the pilot said into his radio, “my starboard motor has quit.…” Then he turned around and told us casually, “Don’t worry, this thing can fly on one engine.”

I knew enough about flying to know that when one motor conks out, the pilot has to use a hard right or left rudder to compensate for the loss of power on one side and keep the plane from flying in circles. The pilot did what he was supposed to do quickly, and since we were only about five minutes out of Teti’aroa, he turned around and headed back to the island. But now the other motor started choking and missing.

“All right, everybody,” I said, “we’re going to have a contest. Everybody put your palms up. We’re going to have a sweat contest. The person who sweats least …”

As we descended over the reef and the pilot took aim on the landing strip, the second motor kept kicking in and out, then the motor that had failed originally suddenly came to life. But when it kicked in, it started pulling us toward a grove of coconut trees at the edge of the airstrip; then the pilot applied the opposite rudder, and we veered away in the other direction. The motor quit again. With the second engine still fluttering in and out, once more we veered toward the coconut trees. The trees, I recalled, had once stood up to a 110-mile-an-hour hurricane,
and I wondered what would happen when an airplane ran into them. While I was pondering this, the warning bell indicating that the plane was in a stall went off. As I listened to its bleating and the sound of the engines alternately dying and coming to life, I had the thought, What a funny way to go it would be, to die on this gorgeous island.

By now we were flying straight toward the coconut trees; they were only two or three hundred yards away and I admired how pretty they were up close. Suddenly the original motor that had failed came to life with a roar and the plane veered away from the trees after cutting off several fronds with one wing.

After the pilot had slammed the plane down on the runway, I sat in my seat and thought, Well, Marlon, I guess not today.

After I got out of the plane, I kissed the pilot on both cheeks as French custom dictated, looked up at the coconut trees and remembered that I had to be in Los Angeles the following day. I went back to my room, threw myself on my bed, looked out through the shell curtains at the lagoon and said to myself, To hell with it. Though they sent another plane to pick us up later in the day, I stayed on Teti’aroa for another two weeks. I simply didn’t feel like going back to Los Angeles yet.

SO MANY THINGS
happened during the sixties and seventies that now a lot of those years are a blur. I was still trying to give my life some meaning and enlisted in almost any campaign I thought would help end poverty, racial discrimination and social injustice. But that wasn’t all I did in those years; there was a lot of partying, getting drunk, having fun, jumping into swimming pools, smoking grass, lying on beaches and watching the sun go down. During the sixties in Hollywood, everybody was sleeping with everybody. It was part of the game to screw the other guy’s wife or girlfriend and vice versa, and I did my share of it. As always, making movies was a means to an end: earning enough money to feed myself and my family, make my alimony payments, pay for my projects on Teti’aroa and help people in need. I did as much playing as I did worrying about the state of the world, but I still felt that films ought to address issues like hypocrisy, injustice and the corruptness of government policies. Sometimes I would decide to stop making movies altogether and I told my secretary to send back all scripts unread because I didn’t want to make any more money. California is a community-property state, which meant that my wife of record was entitled to half of everything I made, and sometimes I refused to work.

I still couldn’t help being concerned for people who were less fortunate than me, who were up against it or were treated wrongly by others. Above all, I detested those who abused authority, whether they were parents or presidents, and trampled on other people. Injustice, prejudice, poverty, unfairness and racial discrimination offended me, whether it involved groups not fortunate enough to be favored by our political system or individuals like Caryl Chessman, whose execution I opposed because I thought he had been unjustly condemned to die.

The movie about the United Nations that I had intended to make when we organized Pennebaker in 1955 evolved six years later into
The Ugly American
, which was based on the book by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. I played a U.S. ambassador, Harrison Carter McWhite, a vain and seemingly well-intentioned man who was sent to a fictional country in Southeast Asia and brought with him all the misconceptions and self-interest of the American ruling class. I regarded him as a metaphor of the ways the United States condescendingly and selfishly treated poorer nations in the so-called Third World. In hindsight I now realize that the movie was also a metaphor for all the policies that led to Vietnam and the loss of 58,000 American lives, largely because of myths about the “Communist conspiracy” and the “domino theory” that sprang out of the heads of the Dulles brothers.

As I’ve already mentioned, when I first heard about the UN’s technical-assistance program and America’s foreign aid, I had thought of them as wonderful examples of the haves helping the have-nots with compassion and charity. But when I visited Third World countries for UNICEF, I had realized that the policies of the industrialized nations were not only selfish, self-serving and misguided, but also weren’t working. In the name of all that was decent, the United States and companies like the United Fruit Company claimed the right to run the world;
throughout Latin America and Asia the United States bankrolled any government, no matter how corrupt, that agreed to oppose communism and to favor American interests. But the populations of these countries were being alienated by us. The leaders of the so-called free world created dictatorships and propped up tyrants whose only indigenous support was among the wealthy elite, resisting ordinary citizens’ democratic dreams. Tolerating murder and corruption, the United States rationalized that it was better for a nation like the Philippines to have a tyrannical dictator like Ferdinand Marcos, who opposed communism, than a leader who would be responsive to peasants’ wanting a share of the prosperity that was concentrated in the hands of only 2 percent of the population. The CIA destabilized elected governments and intervened in other countries’ internal affairs. Our government created dictators who robbed, cheated and murdered their people with impunity, but as long as they were against communism, it let them get away with anything, including murder. Further, if we sent any aid to these countries, there were strings attached. It wasn’t because we wanted to fight starvation, ignorance, disease and poverty; it was because of self-interest, greed and the myths about communism.

   When
The Ugly American
opened in Bangkok, Kukrit Pramoj, a former government minister of Thailand who in the movie played the prime minister of our fictional country, threw a party and invited Thailand’s entire diplomatic corps, I flew over for it and, as one of the guests of honor, was seated in a prominent position where everybody could see me. The principal entertainment was a formal Thai opera, which consisted of dancers in bare feet moving very slowly. It seemed to take them years to move their eyes from one side to the other and centuries to move their hands or feet. Before long, I couldn’t stay awake, and someone beside me had to keep poking me to keep
me conscious. It would have been a terrible insult to fall asleep, because I was the guest of honor. Between acts, the music stopped and I had to get up and walk over to the players and, with appropriate gestures and greetings in Thai, tell them through a translator how wonderful they were. It was hard to make a sensible commentary about the wonders of the Thai opera, but I was told that in the next act the Monkey King would attack and there would be a fierce battle. At last, I thought, some action and excitement are coming up. It is difficult to credit, but this part of the opera was even slower than the others; the high point was some finger-wagging and eye movements that each took about a minute to complete. Fighting the two stevedores who were pulling my eyelids down, I overcompensated and must have looked like a zombie with my eyes frozen open.

I don’t know how I made it through the performance. Afterward I met all the diplomats and dignitaries at the event; there were handshakes all around and much conversation in French, Thai, English and broken English. I was nearly dead asleep, but for some reason I enjoyed it all very much. Back at my hotel, I collapsed on the floor because the air conditioning was coolest there. My feet itched terribly but I didn’t know why. Before I finally fell asleep, I remember thinking that if only the hog gnawing on my heels would stop chewing on me for half a minute everything would be wonderful.

   Strange as it may seem, it was nights like these that made being in the movies worthwhile. They gave me a chance to meet people like Justice William O. Douglas, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dag Hammarskjöld, Sukarno, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Robert and John Kennedy.

When JFK ran for president, I believed he was a new kind of politician whom I could admire, so I supported him, even though I have rarely voted in my life. He was not only charming
but bright, and he had a sense of history and curiosity and an apparent sincerity about wanting to right some of the wrongs in our country.