Good points all, and backed with a vow: “I would have been here tonight to speak to you directly, but I felt that perhaps I could be of better use if I went to Wounded Knee to help forestall in whatever way I can the establishment of a peace which would be dishonorable as long as the rivers shall run and the grass shall grow.”
The speech implied that Marlon would travel to South Dakota to stand alongside the new Indian warriors. He never showed up. The Brando version had it that the Pine Ridge reservation was surrounded by federal marshals, state policemen, deputized rangers, “any whites who wanted to hold a gun.” He would add: “All I needed was to go to Wounded Knee and be arrested by them and give them an excuse to say I was part of a plot to make headlines. So I wasn’t able to go.” But Marlon was not through with AIM. On June 12, 1973, he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show along with representatives of the Cheyenne, Paiute, and Lummi tribes to reinforce their plea for fair and equitable treatment. And later in the year Marlon announced that he would oversee a feature about the siege at Wounded Knee. This would be Marlon Brando’s “conclusive salute,” his “retirement film.” Abby Mann, scenarist of Judgment at Nuremberg, would write the script; Gillo Pontecorvo would handle the direction. Granted, Marlon informed the press, the Brando-Pontecorvo clash had been Homeric in the days of Queimada. But a mutual respect shone through even then, and in the actor’s view no other talent could bring as much fervor and commitment to the AIM cause. Intrigued by Marlon’s phone call, Pontecorvo came to Pine Ridge, where he met a group of glowering Sioux. The director beat a hasty retreat to Italy. “I thought they were going to scalp me,” he said. In Marlon’s words, “They scared the shit out of him. Indians are strange folks until you understand them.” Martin Scorsese, fresh from Mean Streets, replaced Pontecorvo. He, too, was uncomfortable with the project. There were more discussions, meetings, wrangles over the script, negotiations about casting. They always ended in promises to film Wounded Knee. All along, Marlon stood bail for many Indians in trouble with the law, and attended trials when the AIM leaders were hauled before the court. But somehow the movie got stuck in development limbo, always a year away from going before the cameras.
So Wounded Knee would not be Marlon’s last film after all. Three years after Last Tango he decided to work on an Arthur Penn movie costarring his Mulholland Drive neighbor Jack Nicholson. Penn was excited by the prospect of working with Brando again; they hadn’t done anything together since The Chase nine years before. Nicholson couldn’t wait to begin. Marlon was the indifferent one; he was interested only in the guaranteed $1.5 million salary plus a percentage of the gross. Recent visits to Tetiaroa had reignited his interest in developing the island as a green resort and biological laboratory. As far as he was concerned, The Missouri Breaks was just “Bucks and Company.”
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In theory, Marlon’s twenty-eighth film would be his third straight winner. The scenario was by the Montana-based author Thomas McGuane, whose novels The Sporting Club and The Bushwhacked Piano had been praised as “Faulknerian.” Jack Nicholson had been nominated four times for an Oscar in the Best Actor category. Penn, a top director since Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, had earned new laurels for his revisionist Western Little Big Man. In the cast were three fine character actors: Harry Dean Stanton, Frederic Forrest, and Randy Quaid.
As usual in the film business, things were not as they seemed. McGuane had a prior commitment; he was out of the country and thus unavailable for script changes. Some of these alterations were needed to fill holes in the plot, and Robert Towne, who had tweaked the Godfather script, obligingly made them. Others had to be put in to accommodate Marlon’s eccentricities. His character, Robert E. Lee Clayton, a man defined by McGuane as a “border-ruffian-turned-contract-killer,” was unstable at best. Marlon made him into a cross-dressing psychopath. Absent for the first half hour of the movie, Clayton enters on horseback, dangling upside down, caparisoned in white buckskin, Littlefeather-style. He speaks in an Irish accent for no apparent reason. Over the next hour, also for no apparent reason, Clayton assumes the intonation of a British upper-class twit and an elderly frontier woman, complete with granny dress and matching bonnet. Penn, who believed in letting actors do their thing, indulged Marlon all the way. Sometimes the lack of discipline paid off—in a bathtub scene, with Clayton sloshing around like a voluptuous whale, the ad-libbing is very funny. On other occasions, though, Marlon’s high-camp performance threw his costar. “Jack would get frustrated by some of the stuff that Marlon was doing,” Penn confided. “Every once in a while, it would catch him unawares.”
It caught the others unawares, too, and the director’s blithe comment was a synonym for disaster: “If you want a simple, clear, coherent narrative, Missouri Breaks ain’t it.” Penn intended to make an anti-Western, a companion piece to Little Big Man, with its genocidal attacks on Indians and a sociopathic General George Armstrong Custer. There were a few instances where Penn realized his objective. The unspoiled Missouri background gradually turns to an outreach of Hell, animated by vengeance and littered with corpses. John Williams’s dark, challenging score underlines the violence of the place and period. But for the most part, The Missouri Breaks is out of control and looks it.
Reviewers were extremely unkind. John Simon coiled and struck. As Clayton, Marlon was “utterly lamentable…even more slatternly and self-indulgent than his bloated physique.” Vincent Canby criticized his favorite for having no “apparent connection to the movie that surrounds him. Brando grabs our attention but does nothing with it.” This was kindness itself compared with British notices. The Observer called Marlon’s performance “one of the most extravagant displays of grande-damerie since Sarah Bernhardt,” and The Sun complained, “Marlon Brando at fifty-two has the sloppy belly of a sixty-two-year-old, the white hair of a seventy-two-year-old, and the total lack of discipline of a precocious twelve-year-old.”
What eluded the critics was Marlon’s continuing vulnerability and his willingness to show it to the world. When he was young, slim, and handsome, distress was written on his face and in his performances. He made no attempt to hide his troubled psyche, or his lack of defenses; indeed, they were what made the early films so exciting to audiences and reviewers. Now, more disturbed than ever, weighed down by responsibilities, succumbing to heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh—particularly his flesh—was heir to, he still allowed viewers to see the whole Brando, a man at risk, a vastly overweight, compulsive figure for whom meals had become what strong drink had been to his parents. Because he no longer had the attractive qualities of youth, he made reviewers and sometimes audiences uncomfortable. But it was the same man with the same extraordinary aptitude for inhabiting a character, just older and heavier. Even though his late work was met with disapproval, a reexamination shows that often, in the middle of the most pedestrian scene, there would be a sudden, luminous occurrence, a flash of the old Marlon that showed how capable he remained. However difficult he was with directors—ever the father figures in his life—he became generous to the actors he respected, happy to dispense advice, but only when asked. According to his lights in the 1970s, if the reviewers or the public didn’t understand, that was their loss, not his.
When work was done he shifted his attention to the one area of life untainted by egos, contracts, and capitalism—Tetiaroa. At night, when all was serene, he lost himself in the ether. As a ham radio operator known only as Martin Brandeaux, licenses KE6PZH and FO5GJ, he chatted with other amateur radio operators, altering his voice, kidding around, slipping free of his movie-star identity. The irony was, to keep the island pristine he would need money. Marlon knew of only one way to fund his dreams: acting in films. Any films, as long as the studios would meet his salary requirements.
In the late spring of 1975 he signed to appear as Jor-El, father of the Man of Steel in Superman. The producers felt that Brando was still a magic name even though advance word on The Missouri Breaks was negative, and offered a highly agreeable $3
million. Six months later Marlon signed another contract, for even more money—$3.5 million—to play the part of Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, said to be an epic retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, set during the Vietnam War.
With promised riches coming his way, Marlon settled down on the island. At his side were his third wife, Tarita, and the children she had been raising more or less alone, seven-year-old Cheyenne and fourteen-year-old Teihotu. The environmental movement was then in full swing, echoing UN Secretary General U Thant’s official proclamation of 1970: “May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth as it continues to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life.” The frailty of the planet was the subject of endless discussions and demonstrations. The Clean Air Act was now in force, along with laws to protect drinking water, the oceans and the wilderness.
Marlon interpreted these activities as a sign that he was again on the cutting edge of a new social awareness. About time, too. His efforts at turning Tetiaroa into a commercial Eden had gone awry. Twenty-one thatched-roof huts had been constructed on his orders, and with his help. Three bars and a dining room were included in the scheme, along with a staff of forty. Violent storms and tsunamis had finished that. And then there were the guests: “middle-aged ladies from Peoria telling me, ‘Mr. Brando, we loved you as Napoleon’—Napoleon for Christ’s sake—and asking for my autographs while their husbands shove me against the wall to pose with the little lady.” A bad idea, he acknowledged, “and it was badly managed.” But it didn’t have to be this time. He had more money now, and could envision Tetiaroa reborn. It would be like Tahiti at the time of the H.M.S. Bounty, a sunshine oasis of breadfruit and coconuts, plentiful fish, protected wildlife, and respectful tourists. At his invitation, new consultants came and went, discussing nonpolluting power sources for the hotel, ecological improvements, fresh water sources.
Months later it became apparent that Tetiaroa and its owner were in a catch-22. If no energy-consuming amenities were available—flush toilets, electric lights, sports and entertainment facilities—visitors would be few and far between. Yet if these were put in place, the island would no longer be a paradise. It would be a Polynesian Vegas. Was the problem going to be insoluble after all? Then why had he bought the place? “I don’t want to sit on an island like a meditative Buddha,” he kept saying, but there seemed to be no other life left open to him if he stayed in the region. Fretting about it, he took off for Hollywood to work on his next movie.
Superman carried doom wherever he flew. Everyone said so. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the men who created the comic-book hero, were shortchanged of their royalties and lived in total obscurity while others grew rich off their invention. The men who played the role had met unhappy ends. Kirk Alyn, the Man of Steel in two 1940s serials, found few parts afterward and abandoned show business. George Reeves, star of the 1951 feature Superman and the Mole-Men and of a Superman television series later in the decade, also had trouble finding parts. He was found mortally wounded on June 14, 1959, a Luger nearby. The death was ruled a suicide. In April 1963 John F. Kennedy’s staff approved a Superman story promoting the president’s physical-fitness program. It was canceled after the president was assassinated in November.
Perhaps Marlon should have paid attention to the warnings, but he had his own authentic crises and couldn’t be bothered with someone else’s superstitions. Besides, the money was worth any risk. His contract specified a salary of $3.7 million, plus 11 percent of the domestic grosses and 5 percent of the foreign. Under the direction of Richard Donner, a TV director before breaking through in 1976 with The Omen, a wide-screen antichrist melodrama, Marlon did more than behave himself. As Superman’s father, he gave his lines a biblical resonance. “Live as one of them, Kal-El,” he intoned to the Spawn of Steel, “to discover where your strength and your power are needed. And always hold in your heart the pride of your special heritage. They can be a great people, Kal-El—they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you—my only son.”
For what was essentially a special-effects feature, the film boasted some unusual assets. John Williams wrote a powerful score. A picture is only as good as its villain, and in the part of Lex Luthor, Gene Hackman made a memorable and amusing heavy. Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper, Glenn Ford, Maria Schell, and Terence Stamp gave their parts a resonance missing in Mario Puzo’s script, even after some slick alterations by Tom Mankiewicz. But Superman’s main strength came from performances by the paternal Marlon and the unripe Christopher Reeve (whose tragic fall from a show horse would later be cited as an instance of the Superman curse). Reeve’s untroubled all-American good looks combined with a hint of other-worldliness. Brando, checking in at some three hundred pounds and outfitted with a white wig and green costume with enough yardage to make a pup tent, had the timbre and demeanor of a mythic deity.
Superman rose to the top one week after its opening. When the final tallies were in, the movie had grossed more than $300 million in the United States and more than $166 million in foreign markets. “I made about fourteen million dollars for less than three weeks’ work,” Marlon crowed. “When Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the producers, asked if they could use footage from the picture in a sequel, Superman II, I asked for my usual percentage, but they refused, and so did I.” It didn’t matter; he had participated in enough claptrap. Now he could concentrate all his energies on one important television show and one film of moral significance.
The TV program was Roots: The Next Generations, inspired by Alex Haley’s bestselling novel of African American history and genealogy. Marlon had no interest in playing another heroic type. He delighted in impersonating the American neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell, a plausible, cold-eyed fascist who would be assassinated by a onetime follower. Marlon received $25,000 for his work—the smallest fee he had collected in years. He also collected something else: his first and only Emmy.
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In 1977, the anguish of the Vietnam War was still fresh in everyone’s mind. Four presidents had been unable to stop the progress of Communist forces, despite heavy bombing under Lyndon Johnson and the illegal invasion of neutral Cambodia under Richard Nixon. Only two years before, the South Vietnamese position had collapsed, proving the CIA and American army intelligence wrong. They had predicted that South Vietnam would hold, and that its capital, Saigon, would remain safe from North Vietnamese forces. The collapse of South Vietnam began in March 1975; on April 21, an angry, weeping President Thieu resigned during an accusatory ninety-minute speech to the people of South Vietnam: “The United States has not respected its promises. It is inhumane. It is untrustworthy. It is irresponsible.” Aided by the CIA, he was swiftly taken out of the country and exiled to Taiwan. A week later, President Gerald Ford ordered Operation Frequent Wind, a complete evacuation of American civilians and military personnel. With the main airport under heavy rocket and artillery fire, refugees had to be taken out by helicopter—the largest such airlift in history. Saigon fell on April 30, completing the American reversal. It was a costly and humiliating defeat: Fifty-eight thousand soldiers died in Vietnam and another three hundred and four thousand were casualties. The antiwar movement had triumphed, and all the windy assurances of the generals and the White House were swept into the dustbin of history. The words of the late Martin Luther King, Jr., were quoted everywhere: “One of the greatest casualties of the war is the Great Society…shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.”
The statement jibed with Marlon’s enduring beliefs: “We could honestly believe that a people ten thousand miles from our shore were our dangerous enemies—so dangerous, in fact, that we had to lie that an American ship had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin by the North Vietnamese. It took ten or twelve years of a horrific war and tens of thousands of squandered lives to change this perception—even though I sometimes hear peopl
e insist that we made a mistake by withdrawing from Vietnam when we did because we did so without ‘honor.’” So it was that Brando considered his work in Apocalypse Now to be more than a role, albeit a highly profitable one; it was “a duty” to appear as an imperialist American colonel in the movie. “I’m nearing the end of the line,” he told a Time reporter. “I figure I’ve got about two shells left in the chamber.” One shell was Francis’s Vietnam movie. The other? “A picture I want to do about the American Indian.”
Apocalypse Now began well, with scenarist John Milius and director Francis Ford Coppola updating Heart of Darkness. The British colonialists of nineteenth-century Africa became American soldiers in the swamps of Southeast Asia. The central character, Kurtz, was changed from a Belgian ivory trader gone savage to a U.S. army colonel gone mad.
Coppola knew that Orson Welles once contemplated an adaptation of Heart of Darkness and that other important filmmakers had also been attracted to the book. Their plans had fallen by the wayside long ago, and now the still-young filmmaker, with The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II to his credit, was about to have his way with the story. With high reputation and a generous budget, he cut a deal with Ferdinand Marcos, president of the Philippines, to film in the wild and to use the nation’s military helicopters.
And then the discord began. Apocalypse’s narrator, Captain Willard, was to be played by Harvey Keitel. Coppola didn’t like what he saw, fired the actor after two weeks on location, and replaced him with Martin Sheen. The script, which had never possessed a “through line,” following logically from beginning to end, was frequently ignored. Actors, many of them drunk or stoned, started to wing it. Monsoon rains ruined the expensive sets. Sheen suffered a near-fatal heart attack. During a local insurgency Marcos took back his choppers. At the eleventh hour Marlon entered to play Walter E. Kurtz, the crackpot warrior who had crossed into Cambodia with a group of loyal mercenaries.
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