A tribute to Marlon Brando

The great actor passed away on a Thursday two weeks ago at the age of 80, closing a circle that went end to end in gloom. Born to pathological parents who were poor, cruel and drunk, luck came to the rescue of young Brando at the age of 23. Then he quickly soared to fame before he was even 30, money, women and luxuries showered upon him like torrential rain in the monsoon. The young man was not ready for this success. He is quoted to have said that he never understood why anyone should have made so much money from something as silly as acting.

I saw Marlon Brando for the first time in The Godfather, that also almost a decade after it was released. By that time Brando had come back to fame for the second time and gone back to his secluded life. He had won his second Oscar in 1973, but refused to attend the Oscar ceremony. Instead he sent an American Indian woman to reject his trophy on his behalf and read a diatribe about Hollywood's poor treatment of American Indians. The Hollywood never forgot this embarrassment and it never forgave him either. Both Brando and Hollywood parted that way and decided to stay away from each other. By then the young hunk that he was, Brando had started to look aged, fat and irreconcilable.

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Right afterwards I saw another Marlon Brando film named Apocalypse Now, which was a box office hit of that year and swept in the Oscar. Brando played the role of a distraught US Marine colonel who had unleashed a reign of terror in the Laotian jungles during the Vietnam War. He did not appear for very long, but his brief presence was spellbinding. But he was not considered for an Oscar.

Then I sort of discovered Marlon Brando in retroaction, watching his older movies like a newspaper reader picking up on the back issues to catch up with a story. The actor was increasingly becoming withdrawn from the world as I was increasingly learning to admire him. I wished he had made more movies, but there was no sight of him except for occasional pictures of his here and there, fleeting around like a bloated apparition.

But then Marlon Brando was Marlon Brando, an entire human race unto himself. Even as a young actor of fame, he was often sighted driving down the Hollywood Boulevard wearing a headgear that looked as if an arrow had gone through his head. His dastardly behaviour alienated many people, including his co-stars, producers, studios and even reporters. He never liked to give interviews and shunned the media. He did not learn to live up to the popular expectation that was created by his stardom. And this fine actor openly said that he never enjoyed acting and thought it was just rehearsals. " The only reason I am in Hollywood is that I do not have the moral courage to refuse the money", he resented.

Brando once said on television that fame gave nothing but false image and that money, fame and success could bring nothing but miseries to a man. There was some kind of a poltergeist about Marlon Brando, which never let him settle down in life. He fell in love with women, yet he could not remain faithful to them. One of his many loves was an actress named Leone, who refused to finish the film with Marlon Brando once she found out that he was cheating on her. She is said to have given birth to a Brando child, but spent her last years stringing frangipani flowers into leis and selling those to tourists in Tahiti. Brando tried to woo her back with a briefcase full of money, but she threw the money into the wind to be blown all over the neighbourhood.

Marlon Brando tried to live his life with both hands, as if to make up also for the shares his distressed parents never had. He ate, drank and made merry with as many women as he could lay his hands on. He married three times starting with Mexican Movita to Anglo-Indian Anna Kashifi to Tahitian beauty Tarita Teripaia. He had at least 11 children, five from his three wives, three from his Guatemalan housekeeper and three from other affairs. There are other reports hinting at other children from many other affairs. When his son Christian stood for trial for the murder of his sister's boyfriend, Marlon Brando confessed in the court that may be it was his fault because he was not a good father to his children. How the heck was he supposed to know? He never had a good father when he was a child.

Somewhere in the sub-conscious mind, Brando was a rebellious and defiant man. He had a subliminal contempt for authorities and established norms, the strains of which lasted in him till the end. He believed that Hollywood was a movie business mainly run by the Jews who exploited other racial and ethnic stereotypes. In the early 1990s, Brando once again shocked America, when he went on the Cable News Network to criticize the beating of two Mexican immigrants by the California police.

Marlon Brando was a man who was not comfortable with the world. He admitted he did not like people, and he lived most of his life in a private island 50km north of Tahiti, where he tried to build a sanctuary for the wild birds. He could forever identify himself with the underdogs, those who needed support, shelter and strength and he stood up for their rights. Yet he met the fate of heroes of the Greek tragedies, suffering in the hands of fate again and again. His daughter Cheyenne, whose abusive boyfriend was murdered by her brother Christian, committed suicide by hanging herself in one of the Brando villas in Tahiti.

As Marlon Brando died, so died a talented man, so died a tormented man. His life started with a whimper and ended with a whimper, while its middle portion resonated with the empty bangs of vainglory, vulgarity, vituperation and vindication. He has left behind ruined marriages, many sad souls, an earth strewn with his children to magnify the tragedy of their father who himself was born an unhappy child in an unhappy home. "I am myself," he once declared, "and if I have to hit my head against a brick wall to remain true to myself, I will do it." Brando never changed and he remained Brando till the end.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.