‘The most exclusive slum in the South Pacific’: the strange saga of Marlon Brando’s eco ‘utopia’
Why did Marlon Brando, perhaps the greatest film actor of all time, feel like a failure? “I led a wasted life,” he once wept. “I’m a balding, middle-aged failure and I feel like a fraud when I act. I’ve tried everything – f––––––, drinking, working. None of them means anything.”
Brando – who died 20 years ago, on July 1 2004 – had revolutionised what it meant to perform on camera and starred in some of the best films ever made: A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Apocalypse Now.
But the actor wanted more. He thought he could change the world and fix its problems, from capitalism to racism, poverty to climate change. When the world didn’t want to be changed – there was no mass market for his higher-minded movies and his political interventions were mocked – Brando couldn’t cope.
In the 1970s he fell into a very public decline, full of sexual adventures with famous women and men – Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, Richard Pryor and James Baldwin – enormous culinary indulgence (he once went to hospital after eating a vast amount of ice cream) and familial scandal. Most infamously, his eldest son went to jail for shooting a man in the back of the head.
Yet increasingly he retreated to focus on his life’s most ambitious and peculiar project: Tetiaroa, his vision of a Tahiti island paradise for artists and scientists. He started a new life there and planned outlandish, sometimes ingenious, experiments in climate science and technology – from seawater-fuelled air conditioning to swimming pools full of electric eels. But when even Tetiaroa failed Brando finally drifted into complete isolation and misery.
The young Marlon had escaped troubled beginnings to become the most revered actor in the world. Born in 1924, he grew up trapped between a domineering father and a vulnerable mother, both of whom were alcoholics, and disappointed at school, where he was crippled by a severe stutter. But when he moved to New York to study acting in 1943, his fortunes turned around spectacularly.
Blessed with sturdy beauty, obvious talent, and refined by matchless tuition, Brando secured good parts on stage, where he delivered extraordinary performances, culminating in his unexpectedly vulnerable and psychologically complex Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. When the play was turned into a film in 1951, the world recognised Brando’s genius and he became a huge movie star.
But Brando was quickly embarrassed and unhappy in Hollywood. With some notable exceptions, including the sensational On the Waterfront, the films that he appeared in were quite bad, and those that he considered “important” were the ones audiences were least interested in. When he played a paralysed veteran, in The Men, the public didn’t care. But when he played a cheeky singing gangster, in Guys and Dolls, they loved him.
Brando needed an escape from Hollywood and a project that could match his high-minded aspirations. He found both in Tetiaroa, a remote and idyllic atol near French Polynesia in the South Pacific.
Historically, Tetiaroa was the retreat of Tahitian royalty. It was also where the rebellious sailors of the HMS Bounty had supposedly found splendid isolation and sexual freedom – and Brando wanted both. He first visited the island in 1960, during a disastrous shoot for Mutiny on the Bounty which he spent bored and gluttonous – apparently managing to split 52 pairs of trousers as he rapidly put on weight.
But his interest was piqued by Tetiaroa’s romantic reputation. As a young boy, he’d read about the island in National Geographic and as a frustrated actor he found respite while shooting there. When filming was over, Brando bought Tetiaroa for $200,000 – from a blind, rifle-carrying old woman said to be its owner – and began making ambitious plans.
He envisaged the island as an unspoilt retreat for artists and scientists, full of ecological and climatic experiments to help fight global warming. After settling on the island, he studied journals on cutting-edge research, consulted global experts in sustainability (Jacques Cousteau, Ed Begley Jr) and designed his own schemes for the provision of renewable energy. Most remarkably, he devised a system for providing Tetiaroa’s new buildings with natural air conditioning, powered by the tidal flow of seawater.
His attachment to life in the Pacific deepened when he had two children – Teihotu and Cheyenne – with the Polynesian actress Tarita. He also adopted Tarita’s nephew and her child from another relationship, and soon Brando had a parallel family on the island.
Tetiaroa was increasingly important to him as he struggled to make meaningful film work. In 1955 he had started Pennebaker Productions, a production company intended to make films with “social value”, and compensate for years wasted on lesser movies. Seeking to heal old wounds, he christened the company with his mother’s maiden name and hired his father as head employee. But Pennebaker Productions was not a success. It produced one film of lasting interest – One-Eyed Jacks, Brando’s only feature as director – and then faded into obscurity.
Brando was by now much distracted from his creative work, anyway. By the 1960s he was ravenously omnisexual and is quoted by one biographer as saying: “When I awake in the morning, the first thing I think about is, ‘Who am I going to f–k today?’”. He claimed that he’d slept with Jackie Kennedy, twice; boasted of a dalliance with Marilyn Monroe; and the full list of Brando’s alleged romantic partners – Jackie Collins, Shelley Winters, Rita Moreno, Richard Pryor, James Baldwin, Marvin Gaye, Cary Grant, and James Dean, among them – is astonishing.
With his pride wounded by a series of critical and commercial disasters, but his ego super-charged by liaisons with half of Hollywood, Brando’s designs for Tetiaroa became increasingly ambitious. Some of them were truly wacky. He imagined keeping electric eels in his swimming pool to generate organic power, and had classrooms built so that the island could function as a “university of the sea” – though they were only ever used by Teihotu and Cheyenne.
But Brando did manage to construct an impressively sustainable hotel on Tetiaroa, with much of its building work done by the actor himself, using local materials. Despite its remoteness, the hotel’s unique appeal was undeniable, and tourists came to visit the secluded Pacific Eden run by the greatest actor in the world.
Things were improving for Brando away from Tetiaroa, too. After starring as Vito Corleone in The Godfather – and investing the family-oriented crime boss with pathos as well as power – his credibility as a performer briefly returned. Job offers reappeared and they were often very lucrative.
Yet Brando’s brilliant late-career performances – The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Apocalypse Now – did not repair his personal reputation. Although he made valuable contributions to the civil rights movement, and campaigned to help Native Americans and resist Apartheid, Brando chastised himself for never fully committing to a life of good works, after he reneged on his promise to replace acting with activism following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
And despite his spectacular comeback, Brando became withdrawn and sybaritic. Praise for his performances was overshadowed in the press by stories of his monumental love of food: endless jars of peanut butter; enough ice cream to hospitalise him; a plane full of champagne and ham sent to him from halfway around the world. It’s alleged that he once got so hungry on a film set that he fished a frog from a nearby pond and took a bite out of it.
Efforts to regulate his appetite were self-sabotaged. He would break the locks off his fridge in the middle of the night, and summon friends to toss fast food over the walls of his LA mansion. His enormous bulk was surreal and intimidating when he played the deranged Colonel Kurtz in the fever dream jungle of 1979’s Apocalypse Now. But when Brando appeared as himself in public he was mocked mercilessly.
More than ever he craved the privacy of Tetiaroa, but in April 1983 a hurricane tore across the island, wrecking his bungalow and severely damaging his resort. Brando promised to rebuild things but he could never afford to. The surviving remnants of the complex fell into disrepair; one former manager called it “the most exclusive slum in the South Pacific”.
In 1990 Brando’s son Christian shot dead Cheyenne’s Tahitian boyfriend. Christian was put on trial for manslaughter and Marlon appeared in court to testify in his son’s defence. But Christian was ultimately imprisoned, Cheyenne killed herself, aged only 25, and Marlon’s defence of his son ruined his relationship with Tahitians. They made it clear that Brando was not welcome on their islands again, though his ashes would eventually be scattered there.
Brando flirted with selling Tetiaroa but couldn’t conclude a deal, and he never made arrangements for the island in his will. When he died 20 years ago this month, his paradise was desolate.
Failed ambitions both on and off the screen had left Brando dissatisfied with his remarkable achievements and condemned to relentless misery. When asked to write his autobiography, he demanded that it should not mention his films, marriages or children, as he considered himself a failure on all three counts.
Yet twenty years later, Tetiaroa finally resembles the actor’s vision. A resort called The Brando offers almost complete detachment from the outside world, while boasting of solar power and the strict protection of local wildlife. Even Brando’s once-quixotic design of natural air conditioning generated by seawater has been turned into reality. On his beloved island paradise, traces of the star’s imagination survive.
