Marlon Brando's Paradise Lost

Today, when one asks island residents about Marlon Brando in Tahiti, where he has owned his private atoll of Tetiaroa for the past quarter of a century, the responses fall into two categories: pained silence or "Marlon? It is tragique. Such a good man, such dreams he had—" Not only has the tiny tropical isle been shaken by the May 16, 1990, killing of Dag Drollet, son of another distinguished family, but the events since the night Brando's son shot his sister's boyfriend have also somehow brought the actor and his complexities into sharp focus. Brando and his vision of a paradise in Tahiti were once taken at face value. Now, the man and his dream are called into question, their authenticities eroded by anger, sorrow and dismay.

Romantic seekers have often been drawn to this Shangri-la, intent either on losing themselves or in finding a higher truth. When Brando first arrived on Tahiti in 1960, he carried with him the same Edenic longings as painter Paul Gauguin and writers Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and W. Somerset Maugham. Widely considered to be the world's foremost naturalistic actor, Brando sought refuge from what he often denounced as the mendacity of the movie business and the mean-inglessness of Hollywood celebrity. His private atoll of Tetiaroa seemed to offer Brando an escape from complicated and often volatile family problems—divorce, custody battles and widely publicized affairs. But Tetiaroa also afforded the actor relief from the inner demons that had pursued him throughout a lifetime of psychoanalysis. He would pour millions of dollars into his environmental projects and enlist the support of some of the world's foremost scientists. He hoped for a new beginning with his Tahitian common-law wife and their children. Yet his vita nuova was doomed from the start, undermined by inattention, unrealistic expectations and the actor's insensitivity to a clash of cultures.

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Arriving on the island in late fall 1960 to shoot Mutiny on the Bounty, Brando immersed himself in all things Tahitian. He rejected the stately home provided by MGM and rented a traditional thatched dwelling, wore a free-flowing pareu, the multicolored Tahitian sarong, and adopted the native custom of wearing a frangipani blossom behind his ear. "I love it down here. I'm not Brando the star, I'm Brando the man," he told Mutiny's assistant director Ridgeway Callow after a week. "I can go around barefoot, stripped to the waist, wear anything that I want and nobody pays attention. Here one is judged by local standards."

As was often his habit, Brando's enthusiasm was a reaction to his continuing personal and professional conflicts. It had been reported that in June 1960 he had married longtime mistress Movita, who was pregnant. He and former wife Anna Kashfi had gone back to court in their ongoing battle over Brando's visitation rights with their two-year-old son, Christian. And during that year the actor had also been juggling affairs with actresses Rita Moreno, France Nuyen and Barbara Luna. To make matters worse, Brando had lost control of One-Eyed Jacks, his directorial debut, which had gone well over budget.

But to Tahitians who met the actor during this time, Brando's search seemed to be deeper than the escapism of a harried man. "He was really floating," observes Alex Ata, the onetime director general of tourism. "In the middle of breakfast or lunch, or even when they were filming, he might leave and go out to the reef alone in a canoe, maybe with a ten-pound box of ice cream. He would talk to the birds and sometimes not come back until sunset. He seemed to be desperately trying to discover something."

The desire for privacy and isolation was nothing new to the reclusive actor, who had long steeped himself in Buddhism and other spiritual interests. Equally intoxicating were the local women, whose voluptuous sexuality was unconstrained by Western conventions. "You could come home and find one woman in your bedroom with another woman, performing," recalls Jimmy Taylor, one of the production's costumers. "They didn't mind you watching. There you were, wondering what the hell they were doing in your house." Added Callow, "Sex to a Tahitian is merely an uncomplicated part of their way of life." According to another crew member, Brando was "screwing like mad, trying to fuck as much as he could—local products, including all the extras we'd hired for the crowd scenes."

Likewise, for all his proclaimed egalitarianism, Brando was not above using the privileges of a powerful Hollywood star. "His goons would pick the women up for him. He stayed at home, the town came to him," explains the production company's cook. Adds Taylor, "These stock girls were of various groups. Some were legitimate, honest family girls, and some were just plain little pufias. Little whores."

One of the actor's favorite activities was to gather a group of women and play spin the bottle. "You know, when the bottle stops spinning, you get to kiss the girl? Marlon made up stories," says Taylor. "'Your foo-foo'—foo-foo means pussy—'is ake!' Ake is like citron, sour like lime. The girl says, 'No, no. C'est pas moi, moi c'est chocolat!' And they'd sit there and laugh."

While most of the Tahitian women cast in the film had minor, nonspeaking parts, there was one role of substance: Maimiti, the Tahitian princess who becomes Fletcher Christian's lover. After auditions, the part went to 19-year-old Taritatum a Teriipaia. Part Chinese, part Polynesian, Tarita, as she was known, was a dancer in the floor show at Les Tropiques, a local nightclub, where she also worked as a dishwasher. "She had a beautiful little butt, with these little dimples high up," said Taylor, who was assigned to fit her for her costumes. "Also a prominent mound of Venus—flesh, not hair—which was visible when she was wearing a pareu, and her breasts were full and lush. When she walked, that pretty derriere went from one side to the other. Tarita's only flaw, a common one among Tahitians, were her feet. They were as big as a camel's."

Tarita, of course, would change Brando's life forever. Yet, when she first got the role she claimed never to have heard of him. Her reluctance to accept the assignment only heightened her appeal. "I'm teaching her to be Maimiti, she is my product," Brando told the crew. Tarita spoke of her acting coach as "a terrible man," but she was soon spending nights at his bungalow. Their chemistry was contradictory, but to that part of Brando engaged in searching, she radiated a deep and primitive force.

"Tarita never talks," Ata says. "She was a poor Bora Bora girl but she had her own power. She was fascinated by Marlon but refused to kowtow. She might have been at times indifferent to what he was doing with other women, but that wasn't passivity."

By early February the Tahitian rainy season still had not let up, dashing any hopes that the production could be kept on schedule. Like the rest of the cast, Brando returned to Los Angeles, only to become embroiled in the conflicts from which he had seemingly escaped. He placated Movita by buying her a house, but there seemed no way of mollifying Kashfi, who was drinking, taking barbiturates and, from Brando's perspective, neglecting their son. To complicate matters, only days before his scheduled return to Tahiti on April 19, Rita Moreno suddenly reentered his life by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. According to the Hollywood rumor mill, she had been driven to desperation by Brando's announced defection to Movita. Two days after Moreno's hospitalization, Brando, besieged by reporters, flew to Papeete.

Once again, the island must have seemed an oasis of calm. But chaos still reigned on the Mutiny set after director Carol Reed had been forced to resign. Brando was in constant conflict with Reed's replacement, Lewis Milestone. The delays continued, and on August 1, 1961, with only half the film shot, Brando's $5000-a-day overtime fee kicked in. The sum would eventually reach $750,000 above and beyond his $500,000 base pay and per diem. But even with the money rolling in, his attitude worsened. Sometimes Brando stumbled onto the set bleary-eyed, searching for cue cards to help with his lines. Sometimes he would storm off to lock himself in his dressing room while attempting to rewrite Mutiny's script.

Probably the only thing that interested him was the atoll of Tetiaroa, which he had spotted during location scouting some 35 miles north of Papeete. A true coral atoll composed of a dozen small motus, or reef islets, enclosing a central lagoon, the tiny landmass was striking for its bone-white beaches fringed with abundant coconut palms—but most of all for its silent tranquility. Equally beguiling to Brando was the atoll's history: Tetiaroa had been used in ancient times by the royal Tahitian Pomare rulers as a sacred meeting place for their pagan tabuas, or priests. The property was not listed for sale, but Brando thought the estate of the original owner, Dr. Walter Williams, once Tahiti's only dentist, might entertain an offer.

By summer's end MGM had had enough and recalled the company to finish the film in California. Industry (continued on page 108) Paradise Lost (continued from page 88) columnists slammed Mutiny's bloated budget, and press reports charged the studio with mishandling the out-of-control Brando. To add to the actor's woes, Tarita was four months pregnant at Christmastime, which promised only further complications with Kashfi. "'I have so many problems with my two wives,'" the wife of one of Brando's closest Tahitian friends recalled Brando's pleading with her. "'You're a woman, you tell her. I don't want that kid, I have too many.'" She did as she was asked, but Tarita refused to have an abortion. Tarita had the baby, a son named Teihotu, in Tahiti on May 30, 1963, saying: "I had my baby, and Marlon was very mad after me."

While Brando's relationship with Tarita was anything but serene, his fantasies about a new life on Tetiaroa remained undiminished. Throughout the summer of 1963 he commuted from Los Angeles. He returned again in November to meet with the only member of the Williams clan in residence in Polynesia, a woman is her 70s, nearly blind and living alone on one of the motus with 40 cats. He also set himself the task of dealing with local officials who, as many had predicted, had already voiced their disapproval of the atoll's sale to a foreigner.

The crux of the opposition's position was that for centuries the atoll had been the private getaway of Tahiti's royal family and was now of inestimable value to its burgeoning tourist trade. Brando, though, persevered. Dealing with the opposition within the National Assembly—headed by Jacques Drollet, whose murdered son would later figure so prominently in the actor's troubles—he insisted that he had only the purest motives. He pledged that the property would be passed on to his Tahitian heirs. Through carefully planned ecological programs the land would be kept in its natural state.

He was not above exerting his celebrity power and influence, either. He soon asked his longtime friend, French actor Christian Marquand, to prevail upon Madame Pompidou. Soon French Polynesia Governor Jean Sicurani received a letter from Georges Pompidou, prime minister of France, prompting Sicurani to tell Drollet that he and others must give up their opposition. As Drollet recalled, the governor said, "I cannot refuse the prime minister of the French Republic."

After nearly a year of negotiation, the sale was completed in two parcels, the first in October 1966, the second in January 1967. The price was a modest $270,000.

Over the next three years Brando muddled through stinkers such as The Appaloosa, A Countess from Hong Kong and Candy. But he didn't care. His attention was focused on his new Polynesian family and on Tetiaroa.

Only weeks after finalizing the purchase, he had gone to see Hugh Kelley, an American expatriate developer with several island resorts to his credit. "He said to me, 'I'm going to build this colony where intellectuals, artistic, scientific and literary people can come and trade ideas,'" Kelley recalled. "'And I'm going to build myself a really nice place down here, but on a separate island.'" Kelley thought it sounded like "a fiasco." Brando, though, was not to be deterred.

"'I've decided to give up Hollywood,' is how he put it," Kelley remembers him saying. "'My life is going to be this island. All I have to do is figure out a way for it to produce enough income.' I think he mentioned needing probably a million-something a year because of all the alimony and child support. I told him the only way I thought he could derive that kind of money would be a large development, probably condominiums. We worked on it for several weeks, but Marlon just lost interest."

Doubtless, the idea of cluttering the atoll with condos like those that despoiled Hawaii and half the world's most beautiful beachfronts had dawned on Brando. In 1969 he hired Buckminster Fuller-influenced architect Bernard Judge, head of a Los Angeles-based firm called Environmental Systems Group, to come up with an approach more in keeping with his goal of responsible stewardship. As Judge recalled, what Brando wanted most was to establish "a natural living relationship between the Polynesian people, Western man and the fragile ecology" of his new atoll—to "do it right."

"My role was to deliver a master plan for the island that was to be approved by the local government and its funding agencies," Judge explains. "The idea that you could deal with nature in a way that was nonpolluting was a strange notion back then. What struck me most forcefully was Marlon's enthusiasm, which motivated a lot of people, including myself, to be passionate about something we thought we could realize."

As supervisor of the island's development, Judge soon pitched a tent on the beach of the atoll's hub island, Onetahi, where he would live for the next two years while his boss explored the possibilities of aquaculture. No source of information was off-limits—the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, Unesco and mauor universities throughout the world—and the first of the many experts Brando contacted was Taylor "Tap" Pryor, who was living on Maui. Pryor had originally started Sea Life Park Hawaii on Oahu and was currently involved in several aquaculture experiments, not only as a scientist but as an entrepreneur.

With Pryor's arrival on Tetiaroa, Brando listened enthusiastically to the proposal to start a lobster farm in the atoll's lagoon. Other suggestions included pearl and turtle farming, raising cavao, the local coconut crab, as well as developing solar and wind power. But the major obstacle was bringing in supplies and equipment. The atoll was surrounded by a barrier reef that could be crossed only on the crest of a wave at high tide and then only by a shallow-draft vessel in the hands of a skilled helmsman. The quick and easy route would have been to blast a pass in the reef. But Brando refused to endanger the lagoon's fragile ecology, so the only alternative was air transport. That created a problem, though: A bulldozer would have to be carried across the reef to build an airstrip. Judge's solution was as wacky as it was effective. Relying on Brando's clout and checkbook to woo the Tahitian Navy, he brought a huge Cat tractor ("the biggest in Polynesia") from Papeete aboard a government-owned World War Two landing supply transport. He then offloaded it atop the reef's balcony and calmly drove the piece of heavy machinery ashore.

Building the 680-meter airstrip was more complicated, even though the runway would turn out to be little more than a swath through the palms from one side of Onetahi to the other. "The problems were unbelievable," Judge recalls. "The Tahitian work crews would rather fish than work. The runway was supposed to take four or five months. It took a year and a half."

Even though Brando's relationship with Tarita was ambivalent, he soon had a second child with her. On February 20, 1970, his daughter Cheyenne was born, though, like her brother, she was not legally given the Brando name (continued on page 208) Paradise Lost (continued from page 108) until 1973. The actor also purchased a comfortable waterside residence west of the Papeete airport to house his growing Tahitian family. Leaving Judge to build the airstrip as well as to supervise the construction of the adjacent village, Brando soon went off to film The Godfather, which was completed in May 1971. Soon thereafter, he again contacted Pryor, this time asking him to organize a "think tank" in Hawaii. Those invited were Wallace Heath, an aquaculturist who had worked with the Lummi Indians in Washington State; Carl Hodges of the Environmental Research Laboratory, whose specialty was raising vegetables; and John Hughes from the Massachusetts State Lobster Hatchery on Martha's Vineyard. Brando wanted to create a self-sufficient food supply so that the Tahitians would no longer have to depend on imports from France, New Zealand and the U.S.

After preliminary brainstorming, the group was flown to Tetiaroa, where the scientists stayed for three days. Touring the lagoon with Brando at the helm of a 16-foot Boston Whaler, John Hughes noted that the boat had been banged up against the coral reef so often that the hull was completely scraped away along one side. Brando seemed oblivious to his guests' anxiety as he steered them through the churning surf, absorbed in explaining his plan. Each specialist, he instructed, should feel free to roam on his own, take samples and then report back with his conclusions.

Hughes' summary was unequivocal: The atoll was not the place to build a lobster farm. Undaunted, Brando said he would like to be able to call Hughes when he returned to his home on Martha's Vineyard. Hughes recalls their dialogue:

"He said he wanted to be able to call me at any time, and he asked how much that would cost. I said I used to get $225 a day for consulting, so I would charge him $225 a month. For five months Marlon sent me a check and called often, sometimes in the middle of the night. Nevertheless, I still considered him a pioneer in his attempt to use the sea to produce food. It was just that a lobster farm on Tetiaroa wasn't practica—the water was too warm and you would have to construct an insulated building with complicated water recirculation, which would require a stable supply of electricity. If you were going to do that," he adds, "you might as well raise lobsters in the Bronx."

Tap Pryor remained enthusiastic, however. By the end of 1972, and with approximately $15,000 put up by Brando, Pryor had created Mona Mona Products in Honolulu to explore the possibility of establishing a lobster hatchery in tanks built under a roof at the edge of Tetiaroa's lagoon. Brando seemed pleased and explained that the French government offered long-term, low-interest loans to support such projects. Pryor, an experienced fund-raiser, advised that in order to pursue French financing, they would have to make a presentation in Paris.

A few weeks later Brando phoned Pryor and said that he had to be in Paris "for some stupid reason" (as the actor put it). He asked Pryor to meet him there, bringing with him any other experts who could help make the presentation.

The "stupid reason" that brought Brando to Paris was the French premiere of The Godfather. Because the film was opening in virtually every theater in town, Pryor had an easy time attracting an audience for Brando's presentation. Pryor was able to pack an auditorium "not only with the significant figures in the French overseas loan bureaucracy but also with the most glittering of current society, government and filmdom." After Pryor showed slides of the atoll and talked in English, Brando spoke. As Pryor tells it, "Marlon rose to the occasion with an impassioned plea in French for Tetiaroa, the Polynesian way of life, the future of children everywhere and, above all, for the glory of France. He received a standing ovation. Even the government types had tears in their eyes."

The next day Brando was filled with enthusiasm, but Pryor cautioned him that the follow-through was equally important. He suggested hiring an attorney in Paris to steer the proposal through the French bureaucracy. Brando agreed, and Pryor found a lawyer to meet with them over lunch the next day. The attorney was doing a good job explaining how to guide matters through official channels, but, Pryor says, "Marlon was becoming more and more paranoid. The lunch turned into a disaster, and I'll never know why. Perhaps it's because Marlon doesn't trust lawyers. Perhaps he thought that the follow-through was unnecessary, or maybe he was beginning to feel the heat of reality. He did not retain that lawyer, and then, having spent about $15,000 on the successful lobster trial in Hawaii, he stopped funding the project without explanation."

Erratic behavior was nothing new in the actor's life, yet his vacillation and indecision were resulting in huge and mounting costs: There was Judge's salary for two years, as well as the expense of Brando's countless trips back and forth between Tahiti and Los Angeles. There were also consultation fees and expenses for the various experts, legal and administrative costs, and money spent on such equipment as an antique sawmill flown in from Oregon piece by piece and an old 60-foot sailboat that Brando bought on an impulse. The ship had to be junked after boatyard workers found its hull to be rotten.

Still, cash alone and Brando's ingrained tendency to recoil at the slightest suspicion of being ripped off didn't explain his abandonment of various projects. Not even the actor's oldest friends could rationalize his behavior. His attention span was short (that was a given), but there were simply too many faces to the man. While he could let the lobster project slide, he might fly into Papeete to visit Tarita and their two children, then alone wing out to Tetiaroa for an extended stay, only to depart abruptly after a week or so. On other occasions, determined to rough it, he might stay as planned. Dressed in a flowing pareu and a huge floppy-brimmed hat, he would abandon his meditative retreat and talk endlessly with Judge about solar collectors and methane generators, citing data and statistics culled from his research. Those who knew him noticed that increasingly he seemed to be playing the role of le patron, which led some to wonder if his utopian dreams, presented as they were in long-winded discourse, had any true connection to reality.

On one occasion Brando invited Dolly Higgins, a friend from Mutiny days, to visit the island. Touring the huts under construction, Higgins pointed out that the buildings might not survive the stormy season. Brando dismissed her warning with the explanation that by using the fronds from hundreds of coconut trees cleared to create the airstrip, he preserved "the ambience" as well as "participated in nature." The fact that the structures wouldn't last more than five or six years was precisely the point, he explained. Having to rebuild them "like everything else in the tropics" would ensure a "sense of community."

For Higgins, who had lived in Polynesia far longer than the actor, this explanation became doubly confusing when Brando announced that he had banned all chemical products, including insecticides, from the island. Given the accumulation of standing water and garbage now that Tetiaroa was populated by workmen, Brando's ban meant an infestation of no-nos, Tahiti's killer midges. Even more puzzling was Brando's vision of his local village. "Marlon stood on the beach lecturing the workmen," recalled Nick Rutgers, another friend from Mutiny. "He told them they were going to have their own church and their own school but they couldn't drink beer. It was as if they had to be in Marlon's monastery, because he said they couldn't leave the island to go home to Tahiti for six months. You can't do that to a native," Rutgers added. "That's inhuman."

Brando, though, didn't seem to realize this. So intent was he on becoming a real-life godfather, the leader of his extended family, that his philanthropy included sending one of the island's staff, a young Vanuatu woman, to Los Angeles for medical treatment. (He also imported a dialysis machine for a close friend and advisor.) And now, pursuing his vision of a utopian community, he asked the laborers to bring their families from Papeete and promised them a lifetime tenancy in exchange for five years' service. For the ever-loyal Judge, the idea was to create a new world. "That was exactly what we were trying to do," the architect says, though whether anyone bothered to ask if there was a difference between the Tahitians' servitude to tourism or to Brando is unclear. Judge admits, however, that "very few" natives took up Brando's offer.

In 1972 the actor's attention to his environmental pursuits was diverted by other concerns. In January he began filming Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris. Then, in February and March, the custody fight with ex-wife Anna Kashfi was rekindled when Brando got word that the boy had disappeared from Ojai Valley School. He hired a private detective, who tracked Christian to a "hippie encampment" in Baja California. The story later told in court was that Kashfi arranged "a heist," promising to pay $10,000 for the boy's kidnapping. Brando flew to Los Angeles from Paris and gave several days' testimony. The court awarded him sole custody of his son.

With his share of The Godfather's profits and what was turning out to be a bonanza payday for Last Tango—$4 million to $5 million in residuals—there was more funding for Tetiaroa. But he seemed loath to spend his own money. Then, too, he had taken up another cause—the American Indian Movement, which had come into its own with a 1972 takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C. Here, as it was with the group's Wounded Knee occupation in South Dakota's Badlands four months later, the issue was the government's treatment of Native Americans. It was on March 27, 1973, in the midst of the two-month Wounded Knee siege, that Sacheen Littlefeather took the stage to reject Brando's Oscar for The Godfather.

Unwilling, or unable, to finance Judge's master plan, Brando nonetheless returned to his island on March 30 for a trial run of Hotel Tetiaroa. He soon made a loan application to the private Bank Socredo in the hope of correcting the island's continuing cash problems. More bungalows had been started by August 20, and that fall an old Tahiti hand by the name of Henry Ritmeister was hired to put things on a more businesslike footing. As part of the new regime, a full-time Papeete-based book-keeper was also hired.

Ritmeister saw at once that Brando was being pushed by his California accountants to open the hotel as quickly as possible. "That was largely for tax reasons," explains Ritmeister, "because by then only about five huts had been completed. The others were still under construction, and the kitchen and dining room were still unfinished. The place was staffed with a large crew of local people, and morale was very bad. Fights were commonplace, mainly because of all the drinking."

In short order, the island's new manager built a concrete storage bin for the liquor and fired more than half the staff. Still, he encountered problems with his boss, either directly or indirectly. Like Dolly Higgins, he criticized the design of the bungalows: Judge had been carried away by the image of African huts and called for rounded thatched roofs. As Ritmeister pointed out, the local pandanus leaves were flat and would not bend to the required shape. His warnings went unheeded.

Despite his visionary commitments, once the 15 new huts were completed Brando bowed to the pragmatism of Brown, Kraft & Co., his high-profile Hollywood accountants, and opened the hotel. Another loan application for 10 million Polynesian francs (approximately $1 million) was accompanied by tourist projections of 7300 visitors a year—un village de vacances, avec un hotel de 200 chambres. The accommodations were similar to those of a summer camp, palatable to guests who either shared Brando's nominal love for roughing it or were lured by the thought of catching a glimpse of the star himself.

In fact, Brando wasn't there that often. It was 1974, and while Brando had reportedly sunk some $5 million into Tetiaroa, his attention had swung back to the American Indian Movement. Over the summer and fall he attended the trials of AIM leaders Russell Means and Dennis Banks in St. Paul. He announced he was donating most of his real estate holdings to Native Americans in order to "entitle me to ask others to make contributions." Included in his donation was his Los Angeles home, an apartment complex in Anaheim, a 40-acre parcel in the Santa Monica Mountains and the Brando family farm in Illinois. Tetiaroa was conspicuously left out of the offered properties, which seemed to suggest that, whatever his politics, he was far from calling it quits in French Polynesia.

In January 1975 his involvement with AIM took an even more radical leap when he spent a night or two with Indians occupying an abandoned abbey near Gresham, Wisconsin. With the Indians surrounded by 750 National Guardsmen, Brando underwent gunfire, an experience that deeply frightened him. That summer his involvement went up another notch when Leonard Peltier—charged with killing two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota—went underground with Brando's close friend Dennis Banks. Brando supplied money, airline tickets and his own motor home to aid in their escape. Several months later, he arranged to have the fugitive Banks flown to Tahiti aboard a private jet and then on to Tetiaroa, putting Banks beyond the reach of the law.

Throughout this period, Brando's disgust with Hollywood seemed to reach new heights. In 1975, while he was filming The Missouri Breaks in Montana, his attitude toward the project approached outright farce—he wore dresses and camped up his role with exaggerated gestures and lisps. Yet the costs of Tetiaroa were draining him, and he was soon forced to sign on for Apocalypse Now and Superman. The latter was hackwork, hardly worthy of his genius. He diddled reporters with the comment that if Superman's producers were dumb enough to pay him huge money, who was he to object?

In November 1975 he returned to Tetiaroa and began construction of his own house about a half mile east of the hotel complex. For all his insistence on native materials, the structure was made of steel-reinforced concrete. "His rationale was that it had to withstand tropical storms and hurricanes," recalled Al Prince, editor of Tahiti's only English-language newspaper. "But I think it was really built to withstand nuclear war, because of his obsession with French nuclear testing in the Pacific. He may have had a Geiger counter, and I know he would never let the hotel restaurant serve lobster because he was sure it was contaminated with radiation."

Fort Brando, as Prince called it, was never completed. The actor continued to spend most of his time alone in his thatched hut, where he read and played electronic chess. He also had a ham radio, which, more than anything, seemed to symbolize his self-imposed isolation. He would regularly stay up late talking to strangers who were on ships at sea while identifying himself as "Mike," "Martine" and "Martin Bumby." He further disguised his identity with a variety of masterful accents, usually French and German but also Japanese.

He was contacting new advisors, too. That November he taped an interview in Los Angeles with Stewart Brand and J. Baldwin, the countercultural publishers of The Whole Earth Catalog. Brando's ruminations, particularly in the area of solar and wind power, were not lost on Brand and Baldwin, who were flown to Tetiaroa to advise on "soft technology."

"He was a fat tub, probably well over 250 pounds," Baldwin recalled, "and he spent a lot of time talking about what we were eating. He seemed to fuss about his health, so much so that I felt he was a hypochondriac. But he kept talking about how he wanted to power the whole island with solar energy. I kept saying, 'Marlon, Marlon, corrosion.' His Caterpillar tractor had rusted away into a pile of crumbs. He started joking, 'You come here and I'll appoint you minister of corrosion.' I had the clear impression that he had bought the island for essentially romantic reasons. He told me, 'There are lots of things wrong in the world. I have a lot of money, so one of the things I will do is preserve a little piece of paradise.'"

Baldwin stayed for about two weeks, making notes. His host's heart, Baldwin saw, was in the right place, but he seemed essentially naive and also very sad.

"I once saw him sitting by himself on the beach, staring out at the water, and he looked as if he were about to cry," said Baldwin. "I later tried ways to get through to him, like telling him about watching this incredible seabird make a nest. He said, 'Yes, isn't that wonderful,' and then broke it off and started playing host again, offering another baguette or whatever. Tarita was there. She ate at the other end of the table, but they acted as if they didn't know each other. It was as if Marlon was behind a barrier and wasn't going to let anyone in."

Of all the advisors so far, Baldwin had no vested interest, and after he returned home Brando began calling him. Whenever he saw items in catalogs or read about new technology, he would phone to ask Baldwin if he should try them.

"He was not above admitting that he didn't know what to do, and I admired his honesty," said Baldwin. "But I came away thinking that what he was trying to do wasn't going to work. He saw Tetiaroa as something that should be done right. Yet he didn't even see it as part of the social fabric of Polynesia, and I don't think he cared about the Polynesians at all, in fact. They were like background radiation to him."

Baldwin had also noted that Brando seemed distracted by problems he was having with 17-year-old Christian, who was on a downhill slide. Try as he might, Brando could do nothing to stop it. Christian had been living at his father's Mulholland Drive home in Los Angeles but often disappeared for days on end. He was drinking, into dope and reportedly had finally dropped out of school.

In the spring of 1976 Brando went off to the Philippines to film his scenes as Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. To compensate for the actor's weight, director Francis Coppola had to film him in shadow, mainly from the shoulders up. Still, Brando insisted on endless discussions about his lines, even though he had not taken the time, as requested, to read Conrad's Heart of Darkness, on which the script was based.

While Brando was off in the Philippines, Tetiaroa was again shut down for another round of repairs on the decaying bungalows. But when he returned to the island he seemed to be playing Kurtz with a vengeance, isolating himself even more with his radio. His mood could not have been brightened when it was announced that a feasibility study was being done to determine the best type of day tours for Tetiaroa. In O Tahiti magazine, a local publication, he insisted that the aquaculture projects were nonetheless continuing. The idea was that tourism would fund the research, even though the hotel itself was proving to be "enormously expensive to operate." As he conceded to Cue magazine, "Owning your own island isn't so cheap. So every film I do, I tell myself, 'This is for Tetiaroa.'"

Superman was the payday to fund his dream. In December 1976 it was announced that his salary stood at $3.7 million for 12 days' filming of two Superman films being shot concurrently. His scenes would ultimately be cut from Superman II, but he wound up with a reported $15 million of the profits. Even so, the facilities on Tetiaroa continued to deteriorate, and now Reiko Sato, an ex-girlfriend, was left alone on the atoll as caretaker. Emblematic of Brando's inattention was his forgetting to send promised food supplies or to arrange relief. Colin Bradley, an experienced American ham operator vacationing in Papeete, picked up Sato's distress call. He flew over to the island, where he was amazed to see the actor's bungalow filled with the latest, most expensive radio equipment. More startling was the padlocked refrigerator.

It was during these months that Tahitian acquaintances finally began to discern the depths of Brando's disillusionment. Alex Ata, now principal aide to the governor, had listened to the actor's schemes ever since Brando had purchased the atoll. Yet one day, over lunch, Ata realized that his friend was no longer talking about doing anything significant in the South Pacific.

"Before, when I was head of the tourist office, he used to talk about his plans constantly," said Ata. "He would stop by with all these sketches and drawings and studies, and I'd say, 'This is nice, Marlon, but when?' 'Let me dream about it,' he'd say. Well, all those plans, maybe two stories high, never materialized. It was always a mystery what he was trying to find here. I don't think he really knew, and that's why he failed. If one were cynical, one would say it's like all the other things Brando starts but never achieves."

If there was one theme behind Brando's vision, it was that the island represented his children's future. This was probably very much on his mind in 1979 when he divided the atoll into shares for Cheyenne and sons Teihotu and Christian, as well as additional shares for Tarita, local lawyer Claude Girard and Los Angeles accountant Norton Brown. At the same time he took on The Formula, which earned him a quick $3 million even as the atoll's hotel reopened and a New York City travel bureau offered ten-day tours of Tahiti (including a five-day stay on Tetiaroa) at $1450 per person plus airfare.

Brando went one more round with advisors. In 1980 he summoned John Todd, a biologist now at a think tank in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Todd and his wife, Nancy, flew to Tetiaroa, but Brando felt no need to make a timely appearance. For nearly a week the Todds explored the lagoons, sailed and scuba dived. Then one afternoon, shortly before she had to return to the States, Nancy was pulling a canoe up on the beach when she saw a figure appear on a nearby path. "She was wearing a red-and-white flowered sarong, a long-sleeved white shirt, tied at the waist for coolness," she recalled. "I could see saggy breasts, and the body was pasty and pale and heavy. It was a careful walk, not a casual walk. I stopped and stared, because I wondered how I could have been on this tiny island for five days and not have met this old white woman, obviously a commanding presence. This person then just glanced at me and continued along the path to the schoolteachers' house."

It was only later at lunch when Brando came over to their table and introduced himself that she realized that the old woman and the actor were one and the same. She was flying off the island that day. After meeting Brando, she was struck by how her earlier impression of a woman was contradicted by what she described as Brando's "personal magnetism, personal power."

For John Todd events grew stranger over the next few days as he became aware of the complex cast of characters on the island. Among them was another of Brando's ex-girlfriends, Ellen Adler, daughter of the great actress and teacher Stella Adler, who had sponsored the young Brando in New York more than 35 years earlier. Other guests included several paying types as well as Tarita and the children, whom Brando continued to ignore. He often locked himself in his room, leaving Todd to dine with Adler and the others. When Brando did join them, more often than not he became a "malicious mimic," at one point mocking a German guest sitting at their table. (Another time he did a wicked takeoff of Carl Sagan, whose Cosmos TV series he'd been watching on tape as a model for a series he was planning on the American Indian.)

As Todd became familiar with the family dynamics, he was impressed by the isolation of his host. "The daughter seemed quite spoiled," he recalled, "and Tarita seemed to have absolute power. In fact, I came to feel that there were two opposing camps on the island, Tarita and Marlon. She knew more about the island and what she was doing there than he could have dreamed possible. It seemed she controlled almost everything that was happening. I thought she was probably his enemy, and also that she dealt in a psychic realm that he didn't have any experience with."

As the days rolled by, Todd and Brando met to exchange ideas at 11 every morning. After talking biology for "about 20 minutes or half an hour," though, Brando would excuse himself and disappear—or change the subject altogether, often returning to his weight problem. Still more surprising was his fixation on money. While Todd outlined the costs of his proposed models for an experimental "food chain," Brando interrupted: "Why should I respect your ideas? You're not rich."

On March 9, 1981, a hurricane hit. Todd was in his bungalow, "just hanging on to keep from being blown away," he recalled. "When it was finally over the next morning I was grateful to be alive. Everything had been flattened, the gardens flooded. My response was 'Let's start to rebuild.' Marlon had the absolute shit scared out of him, though, and was still in a panic. He ordered everybody off the island. Tarita stayed but the rest of us were flown to Papeete, where he holed up in a hotel room."

That was the last Todd saw of Brando; disillusioned, he returned home. Yet within weeks Brando started phoning, repeating the same pattern he played out with Hughes, Baldwin and Brand. Here, too, there was no closure. "He never said yes, never said no," states Todd. "Brando may be a visionary, but he lacks the courage to spend money. Looking back, if I had had the confidence I would have said to him, 'I don't think this island matters a rat's ass to you. What I'm interested in is why this issue of weight matters to you. Is it sexual power? And with money, is it a loss of control?' Because these two issues were overriding," Todd continues. "He was reading Ruth Benedict and trying to understand Polynesia. But he hadn't sorted out his priorities—plus, he didn't have Tarita's authority or power. In fact, the old guy at Bob's Bar there, the bartender who had lived on Tetiaroa for a long time, said, 'Anything Marlon attempts on this island will be destroyed.'" Todd agreed that "all his plans were doomed."

Brando's response to the hurricane damage was to get back in touch with Bernard Judge to revive the original master plan for a major and elaborate resort that would enlarge the existing hotel to 65 bungalows.

Judge was not surprised. "It had become clear that the only way to attract management was to get some large money involved," he said. "And Marlon wasn't prepared or possibly didn't have the wherewithal to put up the funds himself." The idea was to offer the island on a long-term lease. Although the architect's two-inch-thick proposal would not see the light of day for another year and a half, the sum being sought was $7 million plus rent. Ownership of the atoll would remain with Brando. The lessor would be bound to implement the master plan faithfully, yet Tetiaroa, site of their envisioned ecoparadise, would boast a world-class resort hotel.

Meanwhile, as the locally based Brown, Kraft accountant continued to monitor the books out of the Hotel Tetiaroa office at Tahiti's airport, a new manager and his wife were found in San Francisco. The manager had never seen an atoll before, but once in place the yuppie couple immediately reorganized things. First on their agenda was to hire two receptionists and a wine steward, as well as gardeners to take care of the coconuts and pandanus that had been growing unaided for ages. The employees, now forbidden to joke with customers, were soon tripled in number. More absurd was the island's new dress code, which required male guests to wear long pants and jackets at dinner. For all the couple's efforts, Tetiaroa lost $532,863 in 1982.

Brando, of course, was removed from all of this, even though he spent October through December of 1982 on the island. He had a wind-powered generator installed so he could stay up late with his radio, well after the power to the hotel had been turned off. He also summoned journalist Al Prince from Papeete, irritated by a piece Prince published in The Tahiti Sun Press. Prince was flown over in the afternoon, given a bungalow and, like so many others, made to wait. Finally, about ten P.M. he was taken to Brando's bungalow, where they played a game or two of chess. The scene Prince recalled was so reminiscent of Apocalypse Now that it struck him as weird and depressing: a huge Brando wrapped in a flowing white caftan, sitting in the semi-darkness with the room lit only by a single 60-watt bulb. The actor's quarters were dominated by a king-size bed, his radio equipment and books. Half in shadow atop a nearby bureau stood a framed photo of the actor's mother, an icon even in the Pacific. Most of all, though, there was Brando's voice, the wheezing million-dollar tenor that drifted out of the shadows as the two men sat talking until three in the morning.

"He was massive, and I found that much fat a bit repulsive," said Prince. "All that was left from the young Brando were the eyes, plus the charisma and the charm. He was mimicking other guests. When he told his stories he played all the roles, including the women, changing his voice, everything. He ate fruit constantly and explained that it was because someone told him fruit would help control his weight. He had bongo drums in the bathroom and whenever he went to take a piss he would tap on them, do a little riff before coming out. After our talk he walked me back to my bungalow because I didn't have a flashlight and would have been lost. He could find his way around blindfolded. He gave me the impression that the only time he felt secure in that place was at night when nobody was visible. He was almost a phantom, wandering around in the dark."

By now any number of people were aware that Brown, Kraft had basically taken over by insisting that the only way to justify Tetiaroa was as a tax write off. But whatever Brando's lingering dreams, all plans were dashed in April 1983 by another hurricane. It was the worst yet: Four bungalows were lost. One motu was left without a single tree, and on the adjacent islets more than 500 palms were down. The usually crystal-clear blue lagoon was carpeted with dead birds. Brando, who was in L.A. at the time, was described by the tabloids as devastated, even "tearful," at the damage. In fact, his response was to call in another consulting firm to design a security system built around a pair of solar-powered TV cameras—range four miles, tower-mounted and capable of scanning the open sea. He explained that the system would monitor poachers from Papeete.

Meanwhile, the accountants insisted he do something about the continual money drain. In January 1985, Brown, Kraft, anxious to get Brando's attention, was forced to couch the tax question in terms of its client's kids. "Tetiaroa is doing nothing but bleeding us," George Pakala, Brando's personal accountant, reportedly argued. "Why don't you let the island make money for your children's trust funds?" Brando agreed and the property was listed with the prestigious real estate brokers Previews, Inc. The asking price for the lease was now down to $4 million, with a monthly rental of $4000. Yet it seems Brando was playing games just to get his advisors off his back. Despite several interested investors, Brando, through one stratagem or another, never followed through.

By 1987 Brando had hired another manager, Alex duPrel, to oversee what was left of Hotel Tetiaroa—14 bungalows, most of them dilapidated. "One day we were discussing what it would cost to turn the place around," DuPrel recalled. "We agreed that about $750,000 would do the job, give him something proper to pass on to his children. While we were talking, another pouch with scripts arrived. They came all the time via Federal Express. He took one of them out and said, 'OK, three weeks filming, a million and a half bucks.' 'Great,' I said. 'There's the money we need.' But then he started reading the script, one, two, three pages. 'I'm not going to do this kind of crap!' He threw it in the garbage pail. That was the way it was, offers coming in for $3 million. He'd just toss them."

Refusing to go back into harness, Brando again looked for other options. At one point he offered the atoll to the Cousteau Society as a research station. When Cousteau's people failed to show enthusiasm, the next plan was to turn Tetiaroa into a habitat for gorillas. Primate scientist Penny Patterson, who had done the famous experiments with Koko, had already approached Brando, who invited her to the island.

DuPrel recalled the visit: "I got the message that she was arriving as a special guest and I was to take care of her. She was about 35, blonde, fairly good-looking. In the evening I took her on sunset cruises in the motorboat. She sat in the back, always under an umbrella, with a big hat on—like Deborah Kerr in The Night of the Iguana, very much the lady of the manor. I was trying to explain to her about an atoll, which is only two feet above water, with very fragile trees. It's a bird sanctuary, and I couldn't see gorillas swinging in the trees. She said, 'No, I'll protect the birds. I'll put up electric fences.' She kept insisting she was so in love with the island. I'm sure she saw herself as queen of Tetiaroa. Finally, I said, 'If you persist in this crazy idea, I'll put out an ugly press story about you putting hundreds of apes in danger just because you want to play queen of the island.' At last she left. I suppose Marlon had a lot of fun watching me fight with her."

With no new sources of funds, the accommodations on the island became even more primitive. Guests continued to arrive for day trips, and there were complaints. DuPrel had his hands full with 40 or so Italian tourists who were marooned overnight because of bad weather. He silenced their complaints by showing them Brando's own quarters. "'This is Marlon's toilet,' I told them, and everything changed instantly," DuPrel says. "They almost kneeled in front of that toilet and made signs to Mecca. For Italians, Marlon is a god."

After 12 months DuPrel quit, as exasperated with his seemingly pointless assignment as his predecessors had been. "As long as he is on Tetiaroa, he has Tetiaroa and Tahiti in mind," DuPrel explains. "But the moment Marlon goes back to Mulholland Drive he goes back into his world of isolation. He forgets. So I finally resigned. I wrote him, 'I'm tired of being the keeper of the most exclusive slum in the South Pacific.'"

Apparently so was Brando. He retreated into the world of his bedroom on Mulholland Drive. He did no other films until June 1989, when he began The Freshman. But even as his dreams for Tetiaroa waned, his hopes faded of future serenity with his children. By then married and divorced, Christian had dug himself deeper into a pit of drug and alcohol abuse, despite several attempts at detox. Running with a group of Laurel Canyon dopers he tagged "the down boys," Christian lived with guns, fast cars and wild women. Cheyenne had grown from a spoiled little girl into a confused young woman who dabbled in mysticism and spent her evenings at discos along Papeete's waterfront. It was in one of these discos that she met Dag Drollet (son of Jacques Drollet) in May 1987. She began living with him, leading to a rivalry between the Tahitian suitor and her father. Then, in August 1989, perhaps because Brando refused to allow her to visit the set of The Freshman (he had always vowed that his children would never be "contaminated" by show business), Cheyenne sped off in a rage and crashed her brother's jeep along Tahiti's main highway.

The accident fractured most of the bones in her beautiful face, and Brando rushed to her hospital bedside when she was flown to Los Angeles for treatment. But his spontaneous and heartfelt solicitude to Cheyenne, after years of periodic absences, seemed to mirror his inconsistent attention to Tetiaroa. With Cheyenne, her brother Teihotu—and with Christian as well—he alternately spoiled them, abandoned them and, in his most paternal moods, imposed his will. Yet ironically, for all his self-absorption, the answers for which he was personally searching could not be forced.

The tragedy, of course, occurred in Brando's Los Angeles home on the evening of May 16, 1990, when Christian shot and killed Dag Drollet, father of Cheyenne's unborn child. The dream of family and Tahiti had become a nightmare: Christian pled guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to ten years in prison. Cheyenne avoided questioning by Los Angeles authorities when Brando flew her to Tahiti, where she gave birth to his grandson, twice attempted suicide and accused her father of complicity in her boyfriend's murder. For the next three years she was shuttled around the world, from one psychiatric facility to another, until she amplified her accusations against her father. The bereaved Drollet family, meanwhile, filed a civil suit against Christian. The Tahitian courts, intent on investigating Cheyenne's charges, repeatedly sought Brando's return to Polynesia.

But Brando remained sequestered in his Mulholland Drive bedroom. As he told friends, his greatest fear was that the French Polynesians might detain him indefinitely. "The messenger of misery has come to my house," he announced shortly after the killing. Now, indeed, one had to wonder which house. Over the past 30 years he had given up films for politics, politics for ecology, ecology for family. Yet today, there is no family, nor is there the lobster farm, the environmentally correct hotel or the utopian community he had so hoped to create. Nor is there even a lingering connection to Native Americans or to civil rights groups. Instead, as Tetiaroa's bungalows fall into ruin, the island itself endures, inexorably returning to its natural state without Brando's manipulations—and, for the foreseeable future at least, probably without his haunted, wandering presence.

"'My life is going to be this island. All I have to do is figure out a way for it to produce enough income.'"