Quintessential

The first Europeans to visit the atoll of Tetiaroa in the South Pacific were deserters from Captain William Bligh’s ship the Bounty in 1789. Bligh came and caught them; soon afterwards Fletcher Christian led a more successful mutiny. In 1967 Marlon Brando bought a 99-year lease on this ring of low-lying islands for $270,000. It was his own private colony, a fantasy of freedom that connected him to the 18th-century Bounty mutineers and their contemporaries, the authors of the American Declaration of Independence.Brando tried to make Tetiaroa the home of an international thinktank, to create a self-sufficient refuge from the coming nuclear catastrophe, to breed Atlantic cold-water lobsters in the warm waters of the Pacific. At one time he lived here in a single room. Some of his nine children, especially his eldest son Christian and daughter Cheyenne, spent a significant part of their lives here, and at Punaauia on neighbouring Tahiti. In 1995 Cheyenne hanged herself at Punaauia, after losing a custody battle for her son Tuki. This happened five years after Christian Brando shot dead her Tahitian boyfriend Dag Drollet at the Brando home on Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles. At Christian’s trial, Marlon testified, “I think perhaps I failed as a father.”

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As a father, Marlon Brando improvised, if you believe his biographers. He followed his moods, his feelings. Sometimes he lavished attention on his children, and sometimes he forgot them for years. He lived in the same aleatory way that he acted.Brando was one of the grandest and most grotesque exponents of the only purely American contribution to art: improvisation. To improvise is to be free. It is to be truly alive – unmechanical, unpredictable. Brando was the greatest actor in the history of cinema because he would bring the complex fluency of real life to performances, despite the rewrites, cuts, endless takes.

And he did it by ignoring narrative in favour of irrelevant, inexplicable, surreal gestures – improvisations. In The Godfather, as Vito Corleone, he plays with a cat while he discusses beatings and murder. He sniffs a flower, raises his eyebrows – and these little asides dominate the film, more memorable than any of its slaughters. In On The Waterfront he picks up Eve-Marie Saint’s white glove and, instead of giving it back to her, puts it on. It’s the very redundance of Brando’s asides that made him live more intensely than any other actor, because in life we don’t only, or often, do things actors are trained to do, things that are “relevant”, “telling”, that “create a character” – we do not act, or not all the time.

Brando didn’t make a good film for a quarter of a century, but to the end he had a profound influence on modern culture. He is one of three artists who define what is distinctively American about American creativity. No American art, literature, music or performance has mattered since the late 1940s unless it accepted their influence. The two others were Jackson Pollock and Charlie Parker. The American trait they epitomise better than anyone else is the compulsion to improvise. Improvisation is America’s art, its self-expression – and its disaster.

In his art, Brando created sublime images of a spontaneous, unguided, free existence. In his life, he catastrophically demonstrated the tragedy of American freedom. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness led to loneliness and injustice. Like the Bounty mutineers, like the founding fathers, Brando created a colony of chaos. His greatness and failure start to make a kind of sense only when you compare him to his peers, Parker and Pollock.

Brando, born in 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska, was 80 when he died six months ago. Charlie “Bird” Parker, born in 1920 in Kansas City, and Jackson Pollock, born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, would be 84 and 92 now. They could still be here. But the best alto saxophone player who ever lived and the painter who dripped colours on to canvases laid flat died within barely a year of each other, in 1955 and 1956.

Charlie Parker was addicted to heroin, and a lot of other things – whisky, cheap wine, anything that might substitute for heroin. He was hospitalised at Camarillo in California after a breakdown in 1946, but wasn’t drug-free for long – his trumpeter Miles Davis broke with him after Parker repeatedly spent the band’s money on drugs. Bird’s classic recordings date from 1946 to 1948. When he died, of unascertained causes, in New York on March 12 1955, watching the bandleader Tommy Dorsey on television at a Rothschild heiress’s house, the doctor who examined the body reckoned the dead man was 53 years old – an overestimate by 19 years.

Jackson Pollock started drinking when he was 15, and by the late 1930s was so dependent on alcohol that he was hospitalised in Westchester, New York, in 1937. Jungian analysis, marriage to the painter Lee Krasner, and moving out of Manhattan to the far end of Long Island freed him to paint his definitive works between 1947 and 1950. But he went back to drinking and his last years were disastrous. He crashed his car near his home on the night of August 11 1956, killing himself and a passenger, Edith Metzger.

Marlon Brando’s own addiction was less lethal, or at least not so quickly – he was a compulsive eater. His gorging was already established when Truman Capote wrote a cruel profile of him in 1957. Capote watched the star of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Wild One order a meal of “soup, beefsteak with french fries, three orders of vegetables, a plate of spaghetti, rolls and butter, and apple pie with ice cream”. In his latter years stories circulated about how when Brando went to health farms, he paid people to throw burgers over the fence.

For Parker, Pollock and Brando, to be a purely improvisational artist was unbearable – American freedom was unbearable. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness were attainable only in art – in life, the void had to be filled with addictions, narcotic crutches, gluttony.

The belief that America will be found in the improvised, the spontaneous, the truly free, dates to the late 19th century, to the birth of what was in effect a new nation after the civil war. The war between the northern and southern states was fought over the meaning of the American constitution: for Lincoln’s Union, the existence of slavery insulted the universal right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The north’s victory did not, of course, truly secure these things for African-Americans. But it did force a question: what was the nature of this American liberty for which young men had died? The idea of American democracy became charged and new: it gave birth to modern American culture. You feel the exhilaration of what a truly democratic America might be in the poetry of Walt Whitman and the fiction of Mark Twain. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” declares Whitman in Leaves Of Grass (1855-92), his epic poem of democracy. In The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer (1876), Twain anticipates every modern American novel, from Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye to Pynchon’s Mason And Dixon, in mapping a fluvial, free-flowing adventure – child’s play as improvisation, with Huckleberry Finn the original hero-improviser.

Twain openly associates Huck and Tom’s world with black culture, saying in the preface to The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer that it describes the beliefs of “children and slaves” before the civil war. This aligns Twain with the most important cultural revolution that took place in the US. The most profound reflection on the nature of American freedom after the civil war was, and is, that undertaken by black musicians. The origins of jazz are difficult to reconstruct but early composers saw the roots of the form in slaves’ work-songs. James P Johnson, “father of stride piano” in the early 20th century, said he took the call-and-response style of his Carolina Shout (1917) from listening to stevedores, whose shouts derived ultimately from west Africa. But jazz is a response to America, not a rejection of it.

After the civil war, democracy and freedom were purportedly extended to everyone. What did freedom mean? Early jazz is both pessimistic and utopian about liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The blue notes that drag the music down are a melancholy undertow of history; the blues insists on the heaviness of life in America, the facts of oppression. But the wild solo improvisations that Louis Armstrong emphatically put at the heart of jazz in his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings in the 1920s imagine a real American freedom, a utopia of self-fulfilment. Jazz musicians did not repudiate America for its manifest failings: instead they projected an image of true, creative democracy, an America that might be.

In 1945 that nation was, in theory, triumphant. America had just won a war for democracy. For the first time, it knew it was the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Yet racial inequalities crippled Whitman’s “Life immense in passion, pulse and power”, and social and political conformity strangled his “word Democratic”. Even jazz had been made corporate by the big bands, as the genuine jazz orchestras of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman had been eclipsed by the banality of Glenn Miller, a music devoid of black or blue, remote from improvisation; dead, mechanical.

The new music that appeared in New York, first at Minton’s in Harlem and then at clubs on 52nd Street – “The Street” – in the wake of the second world war, rejected this sterile America. It aggressively invented its own nocturnal country. It insisted more than ever before on the improvisatory nature of jazz. Bebop was played by small groups, not big orchestras, and mythologised the solo – which had to be played fast and complicated, with the most exquisite technical achievement, yet also be rough-toned, raw-sounding. This was virtuoso music. Its supreme virtuoso was Charlie Parker.

He reputedly got his nickname because he insisted on picking up a chicken that had been run over by a tour van in order to cook it, but calling him Bird conveyed what people felt about his music – it soared. Parker posed extreme challenges to the musicians who played with him because he took off on solos that were impossible to follow, somehow returning to sense when he seemed to have unleashed mere chaos.

Miles Davis, later to record the classic Kind Of Blue, began his career as a teenage trumpeter who abandoned his studies at Manhattan’s Juilliard School to play with Parker. “Bird would play the melody he wanted,” he remembers in his autobiography. “The other musicians had to remember what he had played. He was real spontaneous, went on his instinct … Bird was a great improviser and that’s where he thought great music came from and what great musicians were about. His concept was ‘fuck what’s written down’.”

The similarities between the art of Charlie Parker and that of Jackson Pollock are so staggering, so deep, so unarguable, that it’s tempting to suspect Pollock of obfuscation when he claimed not to like bebop. In fact it would be a still more radical improviser, Ornette Coleman, who put a Pollock painting on the cover of his 1961 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Yet Pollock insisted that he only really loved traditional jazz – and he did love it. His surviving collection of 78s reveals an erudite and passionate fan of black music who listened constantly to early Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and his contemporaries Billie Holiday and Coleman Hawkins. Pollock called jazz “the only other creative thing happening in this country”. Art critics have never really taken seriously its influence on him. It’s as if American modernism can’t handle the idea that Pollock’s most significant influence was black music.

The romance and myth that surround Pollock are so vulgar, critics seem to feel. The formal achievement of Pollock’s painting, they argue, is unrelated to the cheap, glamorous image of the painter dancing around his canvas to sax and drum solos before dying violently, a romantic burnout. Funnily enough, respectable jazz writers are similarly suspicious of the romantic cult of Bird. His dependence on heroin, they fear, falsely made musicians think they needed to shoot up like him to play like him.

But Pollock and Parker were what they were – they meant it. They lived and died their epics. They risked everything to find the authentic America beyond all the phoney talk.

Listen to Parker’s Scrapple From The Apple, recorded in 1947, and look at Pollock’s 1950 Number 27, today in the Whitney Museum of American Art. The best way to describe the structure of Pollock’s abstraction is to compare it to Parker’s music. There are several kinds of mark on Number 27, different in tone – like different instruments. There are percussive splashes, sharp bursts of white. There are underlying black bass notes. Over all this float curling green sensual arabesques – the sax solo.

Improvisation is what matters to both these artists. Listening to his jazz records, Pollock made paintings that are pure improvisatory expressions, with no given form, no figurative constraint. It is his instinct alone that leads him out into space. Yet, miraculously, in the great works of 1947 to 1950, he discovers a harmony in this freedom – his paintings are not a mess after all, but coherent, enigmatically so. Pollock is able to improvise structure. Parker has this same miraculous ability to take the music on a wild walk yet never lose sight of where he started. “Eventually Bird would come back to where the rhythm was, right on time,” remembers Miles Davis. “It was like he had planned it in his mind.”

This deep sense of form is what makes Pollock and Parker of a kind. Bird sounds sweet, and Pollock’s paintings are beautiful. Tellingly, it was one of his late, romantically failed paintings, in which despair overcomes him, that Ornette Coleman reproduced on the cover of his turbulent Free Jazz. The best Pollock paintings never have that sense of breakdown. They possess a savage grace.

If they rejected cacophony and chaos, Pollock and Parker were scarcely virtuosi in the way that classical European artists and musicians were; accomplishment is not what they are about. No Raphael, no Mozart. Both deliberately roughen and dirty their surface. Pollock uses house paints. He drops cigarette butts into the drying paint. Parker rejects the harmonious tones of earlier sax soloists and introduces a raw, hoarse sound. For him, as for Pollock, American art must be rough in texture. This is part of being democratic. It’s as if they both defy themselves to produce beauty under impossible circumstances. Why do they risk themselves like this?

It is to find the true American voice. Improvisation, for Mark Twain and Louis Armstrong, was the free American way. Parker and Pollock took this seriously, and tried, in a society at once conformist, racist and unequal, to find America’s lost music – the music that only ever existed in late-night smoky rooms for a few minutes, the music the Constitution promised. In place of the phoney freedom for which the Rosenbergs were executed, the new American art of the late 1940s imagined a bodily, sensual, shared freedom.

“Resist much, obey little,” urged Walt Whitman, and American modernism took this to heart. Everything must start anew, from the unruly self.

It was impossible to sustain this. Neither Pollock nor Parker maintained their 1940s achievements through their final years. Almost immediately, their radical interpretation of America’s affirmation of liberty turned to cliché. Most of the art produced in its name was colossally inferior to theirs. The Beats tried and failed to translate bebop spontaneity into writing; so what if Kerouac’s On The Road was composed free-form on a single roll of paper? It’s a dutiful read.

In art and music, the best followers of Pollock and Parker deliberately reversed their terms. Miles Davis created cool jazz. Jasper Johns painted Flag. Meanwhile the authentic, non-racist, egalitarian American freedom glimpsed by two dying men just after the second world war mutated into hipster kitsch, William Burroughs, Jim Morrison … Apocalypse Now. It is hard now to believe American democracy ever inspired great, beautiful, modern art, the best of our era.

Marlon Brando seemed to forget, as much as film audiences, what that was, that lost vitality. Brando was the artistic equal of Pollock and Parker. His performance on Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947-8 transformed American culture as decisively as they did – and more universally. Modern painting and modern jazz are minority arts. But after the raw, working-class, violently unpredictable American voice of Stanley Kowalski transferred from stage to screen, it became globally iconic.

Tennessee Williams was an acquaintance and drinking companion of Pollock and Lee Krasner, and spent a summer with them in Provincetown in 1944. He called Pollock “dark”. The outwardly boorish Pollock may have been a model for the character Brando was to elevate into an American myth.

Recognition that Brando was above all an improviser is sometimes obfuscated by his association with the realist postwar director Elia Kazan. Brando is seen as a realist, when in truth he is an abstract artist. This is why his best films are the ones he made for Coppola and Bertolucci in the 1970s. Neither of these directors is a realist, and the characters they gave Brando are mythic, monsters.

Brando was allowed to improvise as much as he wanted: he refused to learn lines – dialogue had to be concealed around the set of The Godfather on cue cards. Bertolucci encouraged him to improvise most of his speeches in Last Tango In Paris in their entirety. When Paul – the ageing American Brando plays – embarks on an anonymous sexual relationship with a young French woman, and remembers his childhood, it is Brando’s own childhood he describes: growing up on a farm with alcoholic parents. Paul has been a boxer, an actor, a bongo player – Brando plays bongos, and was the martyred boxer hero of On The Waterfront. When he’s helped up at the end of On The Waterfront, you can feel the weight of his body, as when you contemplate a Michelangelo pietà.

There was a mysterious grace to Brando’s best acting – just like Pollock and Parker, he seems to discover form in randomness. The reason that his playing with a cat is so hypnotic in The Godfather, rather than simply being a bit of James Bond villainy, is that instead of being held in place to prevent it squirming away, the cat genuinely loves its Godfather – it nuzzles him spontaneously. In fact it was a stray cat that Brando, whose farm childhood gave him a feel for animals, found at the studio and befriended.

As Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, he reaches the end of Mark Twain’s river. He is so disintegrated into cruel, mad impulses that Martin Sheen’s character says, “I’d never seen anyone so broken up.” Apocalypse Now describes, with hallucinatory precision, how the counterculture became the mainstream. It is the hippy photojournalist Dennis Hopper who falls for Kurtz’s fascist bullshit, who calls him “a warrior-poet”. From Twain to Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock and Marlon Brando, American artists took freedom, that word America touted so emptily, and tried to find a meaning in it; an American ethic of self-expression.

Apocalypse Now is the death of this illusion. There is plenty of freedom here – nothing else except freedom, and self-expression. Americans fire from helicopters for fun. The war is a riff. When a marksman shoots into the night to the sound of an electric guitar solo, it could so easily be a sax. At the end of the river, Marlon Brando improvises a monster so disorganised that some feel the performance itself is nothing but chaos. He lisps, “Have you ever considered any true freedoms?”

—From Jonathan Jones, The Guardian