Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [105]
As we descended over the reef and the pilot took aim on the landing strip, the second motor kept kicking in and out, then the motor that had failed originally suddenly came to life. But when it kicked in, it started pulling us toward a grove of coconut trees at the edge of the airstrip; then the pilot applied the opposite rudder, and we veered away in the other direction. The motor quit again. With the second engine still fluttering in and out, once more we veered toward the coconut trees. The trees, I recalled, had once stood up to a 110-mile-an-hour hurricane, and I wondered what would happen when an airplane ran into them. While I was pondering this, the warning bell indicating that the plane was in a stall went off. As I listened to its bleating and the sound of the engines alternately dying and coming to life, I had the thought, What a funny way to go it would be, to die on this gorgeous island.
By now we were flying straight toward the coconut trees; they were only two or three hundred yards away and I admired how pretty they were up close. Suddenly the original motor that had failed came to life with a roar and the plane veered away from the trees after cutting off several fronds with one wing.
After the pilot had slammed the plane down on the runway, I sat in my seat and thought, Well, Marlon, I guess not today.
After I got out of the plane, I kissed the pilot on both cheeks as French custom dictated, looked up at the coconut trees and remembered that I had to be in Los Angeles the following day. I went back to my room, threw myself on my bed, looked out through the shell curtains at the lagoon and said to myself, To hell with it. Though they sent another plane to pick us up later in the day, I stayed on Teti’aroa for another two weeks. I simply didn’t feel like going back to Los Angeles yet.
42
SO MANY THINGS happened during the sixties and seventies that now a lot of those years are a blur. I was still trying to give my life some meaning and enlisted in almost any campaign I thought would help end poverty, racial discrimination and social injustice. But that wasn’t all I did in those years; there was a lot of partying, getting drunk, having fun, jumping into swimming pools, smoking grass, lying on beaches and watching the sun go down. During the sixties in Hollywood, everybody was sleeping with everybody. It was part of the game to screw the other guy’s wife or girlfriend and vice versa, and I did my share of it. As always, making movies was a means to an end: earning enough money to feed myself and my family, make my alimony payments, pay for my projects on Teti’aroa and help people in need. I did as much playing as I did worrying about the state of the world, but I still felt that films ought to address issues like hypocrisy, injustice and the corruptness of government policies. Sometimes I would decide to stop making movies altogether and I told my secretary to send back all scripts unread because I didn’t want to make any more money. California is a community-property state, which meant that my wife of record was entitled to half of everything I made, and sometimes I refused to work.
I still couldn’t help being concerned for people who were less fortunate than me, who were up against it or were treated wrongly by others. Above all, I detested those who abused authority, whether they were parents or presidents, and trampled on other people. Injustice, prejudice, poverty, unfairness and racial discrimination offended me, whether it involved groups not fortunate enough to be favored by our political system or individuals like Caryl Chessman, whose execution I opposed because I thought he had been unjustly condemned to die.
The movie about the United Nations that I had intended to make when we organized Pennebaker in 1955 evolved six years later into The Ugly American, which was based on the book by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. I played a U.S. ambassador, Harrison Carter