Tetiaroa Atoll

Description

Marlon Brando's private Tahitian island became a symbol of the turmoil that marked the reclusive actor's final years. Not even his death has changed that. Marlon Brando spent the last few years of his life mostly cloistered in the master bedroom of his home on Mulholland Drive, the great actor reduced to an obese, distrustful and tormented recluse. But there was a place to which he could escape by simply closing his eyes. It was a place far away in the South Pacific, a 27-square-mile island called Tetiaroa that's protected by a coral reef, about 35 miles north of Tahiti. Brando could transport himself there—to the coconut trees swaying in the soft trade winds, to the azure waters lapping against the glistening white sand, to the rare red-throated frigate birds soaring into a cloudless sky. "It was his little Zen heaven," recalls Scott Billups, a director of TV commercials who knew Brando for more than 30 years. "He could put himself in that space. It was just as good as being there." Who hasn't imagined themselves freed from the stresses of modern life, communing constantly with nature in a tropical paradise? Who wouldn't want to be a latter-day Robinson Crusoe? But Brando, unlike most of us, didn't have to rely completely on his imagination. From 1966 until his death in July 2004 at the age of 80, he was the legal owner of Tetiaroa. Before he went into seclusion, Brando made the eight-hour, 4,100-mile flight from Los Angeles to French Polynesia on many occasions, sometimes staying on Tetiaroa for months at a time. He delighted in life as an island owner, dozing on the beach, imitating the scuttle of hermit crabs, and even developing part of his domain as Hotel Tetiaroa Village, a modest resort featuring a few primitive, thatched-roof huts to which tourists were brought from Tahiti by air—the island's small airstrip being the only reliable access to the place. "My mind is always soothed when I imagine myself sitting on my South Sea island at night," Brando wrote in his 1994 autobiography, "Songs My Mother Taught Me." Brando wanted to die on Tetiaroa, preferably "sitting under a coconut palm in a very special place on the island," as he put it to an employee. In a will he signed in 1982, he put Tetiaroa in a trust so it could be preserved for posterity. "If I have my way, Tetiaroa will remain forever a place that reminds Tahitians of who they are and what they were centuries ago," he wrote. But Brando died far from any coconut palms in an intensive care unit at UCLA Medical Center. And less than a year later, acting on a revised will that included no specific provision for Tetiaroa, the executors of his estate sold an interest in the island for $2 million to Richard Bailey, a Tahiti-based hotel developer who had courted Brando without success for several years. Bailey is taking over what seems more like a dystopia than a utopia. Brando, a massively flawed product of the Hollywood dream factory, couldn't insulate his fantasy island from the storms of his personal life—the failed marriages, the wrecked relationships and the troubled children—and the strains on his finances.

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