Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [98]
Ultimately I realized that I would have to forgive my father if I was ever going to be able to get on with my life.
39
THE HAPPIEST MOMENTS of my life have been in Tahiti. If I’ve ever come close to finding genuine peace, it was on my island among the Tahitians. When I first went there, I foolishly thought I’d use my money to help them; instead, I learned I had nothing to give them and that they had everything to give me.
Tahiti has exerted a force over me since I was a teenager. It began in the library at Shattuck, when I used to thumb through the National Geographic, and it continued after I went to New York and searched libraries for any book that mentioned Tahiti and combed the film archives at the Museum of Modern Art looking for images of Polynesia. In the early 1960s MGM asked me to play Fletcher Christian in a remake of Mutiny on the Bounty and said it would be filmed in Tahiti. Previously David Lean had asked me to play T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia; I had gone to Paris to meet with him and Sam Spiegel, and they had announced I was going to be in the picture. But when Mutiny on the Bounty came up and David said he expected to take six months filming Lawrence of Arabia, most of it in the desert, I decided I’d rather go to Tahiti. Lean was a very good director, but he took so long to make a movie that I would have dried up in the desert like a puddle of water.
From the moment I saw it, reality surpassed even my fantasies about Tahiti, and I had some of the best times of my life making Mutiny on the Bounty. The filming was done largely on a replica of H.M.S. Bounty anchored offshore, and every day as soon as the director said, “Cut” for the last time, I ripped off my British naval officer’s uniform and dove off the ship into the bay to swim with the Tahitian extras working on the movie. Often we only did two or three shots a day, which left me hours to enjoy their company, and I grew to love them for their love of life.
While we were filming, reports began circulating that it was months behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget because of me. Initially I didn’t realize this, but MGM was blaming me for budget overruns that it was responsible for, just as Twentieth Century-Fox had used Elizabeth Taylor as a scapegoat for its miscalculations and production excesses on Cleopatra. When I arrived in Tahiti, MGM still didn’t have a usable script, the H.M.S. Bounty wasn’t finished, and the ordinary preproduction preparations were several weeks behind schedule. Once filming started, the studio realized it had underestimated the cost of shooting a picture on location in French Polynesia, and then it fired the director, Carol Reed, causing further delays and extra expense. Dishonestly, MGM portrayed me as the source of the delays. It wasn’t true, but reporters in the entertainment press, who didn’t like me for refusing to give interviews, and who seldom did any independent digging on their own unless it involved titillation, accepted what MGM’s press agents said; it fit their preconceived notion of an eccentric, cantankerous Brando, and quickly the distortions were carved in granite. For the first and only time in my life, I asked a press agent to present my side of the story, but then discovered too late that he was an MGM plant. Though he was supposedly working for me, he was on the MGM payroll and had been instructed secretly to keep placing the blame on me. I didn’t learn about this until many years later. At the time, I was still of a mind to ignore what people wrote or thought about me, so I hadn’t paid much attention to what was going on until the stories of my alleged profligacy had been woven into the tapestry containing all the other myths about me.
The first director on the picture, Carol Reed, was a talented Englishman whom I admired. When MGM replaced him with Lewis Milestone, we were told that Carol had had an argument with the studio and quit. Later I learned that he’d been sacked because he wanted to make Captain Bligh a hero.