Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [99]
If I had been Trevor Howard, I would never have accepted the responsibility of playing Bligh in the remake because there was only one Bligh, right or wrong, historically correct or not. Laughton’s characterization renders anybody else’s useless. Carol Reed wanted to be historically accurate and to depict the mutineers as pathetic as they were in life. But the studio didn’t want it that way, and I’ve never met a studio that had the integrity to stick to the truth if it was able to make more money by distorting it, and so Reed was dumped.
During a break in the filming, I climbed one of the tallest mountains on the island of Tahiti along with a Tahitian friend. At the top, he pointed to the north and said, “Can you see that island out there?”
I couldn’t see anything.
“Don’t you see that little island out there? It’s called Teti’aroa.” Finally, I discerned a slender pencil of land lying on the horizon about thirty miles away, and before long, it was exerting as mystical a pull on me as Tahiti itself. I asked other Tahitian friends about it and was told it was owned by an elderly American woman named Madame Duran, who was blind. It had been given to her father, a doctor named Williams, by the last king of Tahiti, Pomerae V, and Williams had lived there for years, established a coconut plantation and was buried there. After he died, Madame Duran took it over, and she too had lived there for many years.
After the movie was finished, I continued to think about Teti’aroa and reread my books on Tahiti to see if it was mentioned. Somerset Maugham had written about it, and I discovered that a leper had spent most of his life there. A friend, Nick Rutgers, told me he had once visited the island, knew Madame Duran, offered to take me there and introduce me to her, so I returned to Tahiti. Since there wasn’t an airstrip on the island, I had to hire a fisherman to take us to Teti’aroa. As we approached the island, I realized that the thin sliver of land I’d seen from afar was larger than I thought and more gorgeous than anything I had anticipated.
Teti’aroa was actually several islands: a coral atoll a few feet above sea level encompassing about 1,500 acres on over a dozen islands. By far the largest encircled a wide, crescent-shaped, breathtaking lagoon. A dozen varieties of birds watched as we waded ashore; ahead of us, thick stands of coconut trees stood in the sand like brigades of sentries adorned with feathery crowns; everywhere broad sandy beaches stretched in front of us. The lagoon was about five miles across at its broadest point and infused with more shades of blue than I thought possible: turquoise, deep blue, light blue, indigo blue, cobalt blue, royal blue, robin’s egg blue, aquamarine. As I admired this astonishing palette, several flawless, white, flat-bottomed clouds rolled past me at about two thousand feet, as if they were on parade and I were on a reviewing stand. A shadow fell across the island briefly, then moved on, and the sun shone again like satin on the riotous colors of the lagoon. It was magical.
Madame Duran, who lived alone on the island except for a friend and helper named Annie, gave me a gracious welcome. We talked for seven hours without stopping. As isolated as she was, she knew that I was an actor. She rarely left the island, but she had a radio that was her only link to the world, and once she had heard me