Brando’s appearance shocked everyone. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro was very familiar with Marlon; he had shot Last Tango. “It was not the image of Paul that I saw,” he remembered, “but in his place a very nice, pale, gentle, middle-aged man—fat yet fragile—dressed in a canopy of light blue, with this thick cane.” Coppola immediately realized that he couldn’t have Marlon portray the character of Kurtz as written, “a kind of Green Beret turtle in uniform, because where would you get that uniform to fit him?” The director resolved to shoot his star from the waist up, then use a six-foot, six-inch double in distant shots to create the illusion that the colonel was massive rather than overweight.
Coppola thought Kurtz should be played exactly as Conrad had conceived him. Marlon demurred—that person would be out of place in a contemporary picture. The two men analyzed the part day after day, trying to determine what sort of individual the colonel was, how he was driven around the bend, what made him tick. “Marlon talked and talked and talked and talked and talked,” said Coppola. “We did that for five days, and I realized suddenly Marlon only had a deal for three weeks and what he was doing, he was getting out of working.”
Coppola determined to put his foot down. But on the fifth day, he remarked, “I come in and I’m astonished. He’s cut off all his hair, which is the image of Kurtz from the book.” So Brando was going to revert to the original conception after all. “‘But you told me that it wouldn’t work, you said you read the book and it would never work.’ And he says, ‘Well, I didn’t read the book,’ and I said, ‘But you told me you did,’ and he says, ‘Well, I lied.’”
Ill prepared, unrehearsed, Marlon then proceeded through pure intuition to create Conrad’s fanatical recluse. The cinematography helped: A scene in Last Tango had used a tight close-up, with Storaro throwing his own shadow across Paul’s face. Marlon remembered it well, and requested the same sort of lighting. “So in Apocalypse,” Storaro said, “it’s me in front of the camera, creating the black shadow so that bits of him can emerge, like truth emerging from matter.” Marlon disliked the pages handed to him on the set and ad-libbed almost all of his speeches. Some were barely coherent. Others seemed Conradian in the best sense of the word—incantatory, mysterious, threatening. Face-to-face with Willard, the man sent to “terminate him with extreme prejudice,” Kurtz is unafraid; to him, doom is as familiar as the night:
KURTZ: You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that. But you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared.
The colonel goes on to describe one such horror.
We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying…. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. They were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember…I—I—I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do…. And then I realized—like I was shot—like I was shot with a diamond—a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God, the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized that they were stronger than we…. These were men, trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love—but they had the strength—the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral—and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment. Without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.
What had begun as extempore maundering had turned into a central truth. In the book, the last day of the colonel is recalled. He “discoursed. A voice! A voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart…. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair.” Brando and Kurtz had become indistinguishable.
The day Marlon finished his last scenes he went to Manila to prepare for the voyage home. A messenger arrived with a disconcerting request. Francis wanted to use the last words spoken by Kurtz in the novel: “The horror! The horror!” and he needed his star for one more close-up. It would take no more than an hour. Replied Marlon, “Well, first of all, it’s never an hour, you know that. And secondly, you’ll have to pay for that day—seventy thousand dollars.” He explained, “I’m in the Marlon Brando business, I sell Marlon Brando. Would you go to the president of General Motors and ask him for a seventy-thousand-dollar favor?”
Marlon’s demand was met. He returned for the close-up and on October 9, 1977, departed for Hong Kong, expecting to see a rough cut in a few months’ time. By late summer of 1979, months after the triumph of Superman, Apocalypse was still in the process of looping—adding sound and dialogue at the Goldwyn studio in Hollywood. Coppola preferred to stay home during these sessions, delivering his instructions via intercom. With only a voice to argue with, Marlon needled the director. “What am I doing now?” he asked one morning, holding his middle finger in the air. Replied Francis, “Well, eventually we won’t need actors. All we’ll need is a file of Marlon Brando in a computer, and we won’t need to go on location—we can just sit here and do anything we like with your image and your voice!” He was more accurate than he knew, but Marlon took it all in good spirits. For by then he had accumulated another $3 million.
Marlon told reporters that the reaction to Apocalypse meant nothing to him, but he was just handing them a line. He read every review—the pans as well as the raves. In the Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert called Apocalypse a “good and important film—a masterpiece, I believe.” The ending, “with Brando’s fuzzy, brooding monologues and the final violence, feels more satisfactory than any conventional ending possibly could.” Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin added, “As a noble use of the medium and as a tireless expression of a national anguish, it towers over everything that has been attempted by an American filmmaker in a very long time.” On the other hand, Frank Rich, writing in Time, excoriated the movie as “emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty. It is not so much an epic account of the grueling war as an incongruous, extravagant monument to artistic self-defeat.” Vincent Canby used his column in The New York Times to extol with faint damns, calling Apocalypse a “stunning work,” before categorizing it as “an adventure yarn with delusions of grandeur” and a “profoundly anticlimactic intellectual muddle,” and pointing out that Marlon Brando had “no role to act.” Tennessee Williams capped the chorus of nays by suggesting that Marlon had been paid by the pound.
Some of the negatives were brought on by Coppola himself. Referring to the tribulations in the Philippines, he said that his film was “not about Vietnam, it was Vietnam.” That statement was not calculated to win the approval of veterans, who knew the difference between ego contests and a shooting war. Furthermore, a heavy air of pretension hung over the Kurtz sequences. The director insisted on using literary references like Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough to emphasize the legend of the man-god who must be killed when his powers lapse. Coppola not only placed the volume in Kurtz’s quarters, but showed the book’s dust jacket, even though anyone who ever visited a rain forest, let along a jungle, would know that such an item would have rotted away in a fortnight. As for Marlon’s recital of T. S. Eliot (“We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpiece filled with straw”), that was strictly term-paper stuff, as out of place as horn-rimmed glasses on a ritual mask.
Through Apocalypse’s up-and-down reception, no words came from Brando about the studio, the director, the cast. Not until Life magazine a
ttacked him for his girth and avarice did he decide to fight back. Even then he felt that Coppola should do the complaining. Marlon drafted a letter in Francis’s voice, claiming, “Far from demanding more than his usual fee, Marlon voluntarily cut his then customary cash fee by half (to one half of the amount [Life editors] report) in order to help with my budget problems.” Peter Cowie, author of The Apocalypse Now Book, dryly reports, “Coppola appears to have ignored the appeal.”
Worse was in store, this time in clothbound form. Late in 1979 Marlon’s first wife, writing under the name Anna Kashfi Brando, published Brando for Breakfast. The book described her ex-husband’s behavior before, during, and after their unhappy marriage, ending with a list of pejoratives. She considered Marlon “a dilettante of social justice” and “a jaded but still sophomoric recluse.” One of Marlon’s friends advised him to follow G. K. Chesteron’s counsel: “Silence is the unbearable repartee,” and for once the accused made no attempt to defend himself. Anna’s book didn’t sell well, and he took some consolation in that. But what afforded him greater pleasure was an opportunity to get back in the game. Having already played a Nazi twice, he went into full wrongo mode for The Formula. The fee: $3 million.
Mass demonstrations had recently wracked Iran, disrupting oil exports and ultimately forcing the Shah into exile. The new hard-line Islamic regime resumed shipments, but at a lower volume. The price of gasoline soared, resulting in what newspapers called “the panic at the pump.” At the time, it was widely believed that the fuel shortages were caused as much by the oil companies as by political disruptions in the Middle East. Steve Shagan’s suspenseful novel took full advantage of the situation: A detective uncovers a long-lost formula devised by the Nazis. It shows how to make gasoline from cheap synthetic products. Put to use, it would eliminate dependence on fossil fuel and make oil companies as obsolete as the running board. One of those companies learns about the formula and attempts to destroy it, along with anyone who gets in the way.
With George C. Scott as the sleuth and Marlon Brando as a malicious oil baron, expectations were high. These were the only actors to have turned down their Oscars; both were explosive mavericks who liked to smash traditions and unnerve authority figures. But neither man seemed involved in The Formula. Under John Avildsen’s rather graceless direction, Scott was no more than an assembly-line protagonist. As the heavy in every sense of the word, Marlon disregarded the script in a new way. It was no longer necessary to paste his speeches on furniture or cameras. He wore a hearing aid as part of his costume, and an assistant whispered the lines to him. Too many of those were cartoonish (“We’re not in the oil business; we’re in the oil shortage business”); all the CEO lacked was the label greed on the back of his suit jacket.
Marlon had bad feelings about this picture, and about all else. Everything seemed stained by melancholia. One afternoon scenarist Stewart Stern received an odd phone call from Brando, a man he considered a friend, but not an intimate. “He said, ‘I don’t know why I feel the grief I feel.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ And he said, ‘Jimmy Durante. So much sweetness. The funeral is tonight, do you want to go?’” When they arrived at the ceremony, someone got word to the comedian’s widow. The two men were seated behind the family. “Marlon said, ‘This is very unusual because I don’t even know him.’ He just wanted to go quietly and pay tribute.”
Reviews of The Formula did nothing to alleviate his despondency. The picture opened in late 1980 and was universally slammed. Marlon’s work had been edited down to three long interludes, leading critics to wonder if anyone was worth $1 million per scene. A Los Angeles group nominated him for a Golden Raspberry award for his performance, and Variety scoffed at him for being “grotesquely fat and ridiculous.”
4
Jack Nicholson called it Bad Boy Hill; the tourists who came to gawk knew it as Mulholland Drive, the former stomping ground of Errol Flynn, and current locale of such wayward stars as Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando, and Nicholson himself. Thirteen years younger than Marlon, Nicholson had been an admirer of The Men and every Brando film to follow. When he moved to Mulholland he went out of his way to emulate Marlon and to cultivate his friendship. Marlon responded, and over the years watched Jack go from obscure character actor to leading man with more Academy Award nominations than even Laurence Olivier. Soon it was Marlon imitating Jack, acquiring a condominium at Bora-Bora right next to his fellow actor, making them neighbors in the South Seas as well as in Beverly Hills. Once more there was talk of new plans for Tetiaroa—a school for blind children, a hotel, an institute for oceanographers—and for finally making that film about the American Indian. Marlon mentioned a television project he had brought to ABC, entitled The First American. During an interview with Lawrence Grobel for Playboy magazine, Marlon went into detail about the plethora of ideas and the dearth of financing.
GROBEL: How are you researching it?
BRANDO: We’ve been on the road, listening to ancient and modern horror stories, looking at old sites, running down the facts of history, remembrances of old people, going to places where there were battles. In one massacre they cut off women’s vulvas and wore them as hat bands.
GROBEL: How are you going to show that on television?
BRANDO: You can’t. But there are other stories, of Indians getting arrested and assassinated in jail, then calling it suicide.
GROBEL: How long will each show be?
BRANDO: An hour and a half. Hopefully, there’s gonna be thirteen or fourteen made. We shouldn’t have to go around, hat in hand, scratching and tapping on doors, climbing over transoms, to get money to do a historical survey of the American Indian and how we reduced him to rubble. Jesus Christ!
But they did have to go around grubbing for backers, and thus far very few had turned up. Money was an issue just then, in part because the news from the West Coast was so depressing. Michael Cimino, director of The Deer Hunter, the only movie besides Apocalypse Now to effectively dramatize the Vietnam War, had just directed a debacle worse than Mutiny on the Bounty. Heaven’s Gate, originally budgeted at $11 million, came in at $40 million and was the biggest box-office disaster in the history of United Artists. The wrecked studio was sold to MGM. Industry-wide, wary executives closed ranks. The era of the “high-concept” feature had already begun, with carefully assembled blockbusters like Jaws reaping enormous profits. From here on, such comic book epics as Star Wars would lead the way. Filmmakers, no matter how swollen their reputations, would have to come up with safe, lucrative ideas if they wanted to work. Odds against such projects as The First American grew longer by the month.
As usual when he was thwarted, Marlon turned his attention back to the island. Through lawyers he made a will. In the event of his death, most of the atoll would go to Christian, Cheyenne, Teihotu, and Brando’s third wife, Tarita. The child he had with Movita went unmentioned. Christian would need some refuge; his life was in free fall. Early in 1981, at the age of twenty-three, he married Mary McKenna, a cosmetician. They lived with Marlon for a few months before going out on their own. A year later they separated; Christian had begun a new descent into drugs and alcohol. Marlon invited him to move in, and once again attempted to provide the support he had been denied by his own father. He paid Christian’s debts, bought him a car, sent him to his own therapist, underwrote medical and dental bills. The young man hadn’t graduated high school and his skills were few. Marlon helped to set him up as a tree surgeon, and came up with a new idea. Since he, too, was a high school dropout, father and son would get their correspondence-school diplomas at the same time, studying math, social science, history, and English together. Somehow, neither of them could work up the patience to study for the tests. The plan died of inanition.
During the same period Marlon tried to get another project going. The actor who had lately played powerful evildoers wanted to impersonate another. He had seen firsthand what drugs could do to youth: Christian’s life was marred by them, and Bryan Englund, the son of George Englu
nd (director of The Ugly American), had recently died of a drug overdose. Convinced that the CIA was suborned by drug lords, he thought to make an exposé in film form. Titling the project Jericho, he attempted to bang out a script with various scenarists. The last of the scenarists was a man as eccentric as Brando himself. Donald Cammell entered the scene with a backstory. He and Marlon had been introduced to each other back in the 1950s, when both were in Paris. Originally the two men had gotten along. Then Cammell began seeing China Kong, the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of Marlon’s girlfriends, Anita Kong. Marlon found out about it, and broke all relations with a man he condemned as a child molester. Not until Donald married China did the two begin speaking again. Cammell had since become a director of cult films, and Marlon thought he would make an ideal collaborator on Jericho, and indeed on other works including a novel, Fan-Tan, an adventure set in the South Seas.
The man who had directed Mick Jagger, lodestar of the Rolling Stones, in Performance, saw an opportunity to reinvent an icon. There were other greatly talented actors, Cammell believed, but Marlon was “the one chosen to be deified. Much as Elvis was chosen. Part of the icon role is way beyond acting, and comes from being dangerously attractive in a psychosexual way.” In the end neither the film nor the novel came to fruition. Not without reason, Cammell blamed Marlon. The actor kept delaying, turning out unusable pages and then becoming unavailable for consultation because he had winged off to Tahiti. By the end of 1988 Cammell was more than ready to give up on Jericho and Fan-Tan. Marlon refused to pull the plug. He seemed to be jogging in place, unable to go forward or back, when a new opportunity came his way—and this time he made a positive move.
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