The first Europeans on Tetiaroa found the vestiges of a pagan sex cult. The Arioi Society, as it was called, had been a sort of traveling circus that worshiped the phallic deity 'Oro' with explicit dances, raging orgies, and the occasional human sacrifice. After the cult was disbanded, Tetiaroa remained a vacation resort of the Tahitian royal family. It was acquired in the early 1900s by a Canadian dentist named Dr. Walter Williams, who made his fortune treating rotten Polynesian teeth. King Pomare V, a hard-drinking playboy, gave Tetiaroa to Williams as payment of a dental bill. When Williams set foot on Tetiaroa, the island was teeming with rats—thousands of them. He decided the best way to get rid of them was to bring in all the stray cats from Papeete, the Tahitian capital. They all but eradicated the rodents, but then they, too, multiplied. When they ran out of food, they began to eat each other in a kind of feline Lord of the Flies. Since then there have always been packs of feral cats roaming Tetiaroa.

English novelist Somerset Maugham, drawn to the mythical sensuality of French Polynesia like painter Paul Gauguin and Herman Melville before him, once spent two blissful weeks on Tetiaroa. Besides the cats, he was shocked to find a mysterious recluse snarling from a distance. This, Williams told him, was a leper who’d lived there for years.

When the good dentist died in 1937 his daughter, Madame Duran, inherited the atoll. She lost her sight shortly after and, according to lore, would fire a rifle—blindly—at anyone she heard approaching. She was living alone on Tetiaroa in 1961 when Brando caught his first glimpse of the island from atop one of Tahiti’s tallest mountains. By that time even she, blind and totally isolated, had heard of Marlon Brando.

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In 1960 Brando had already won an Oscar and been nominated for four more. He had been set to star that year in two competing epics. One was Lawrence of Arabia, but, as he told one producer, “I’ll be damned if I’ll spend two years of my life on some fucking camel.” The other was a remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, in which he’d play the role of Fletcher Christian, the dashing first mate who fell in love with the Tahitian lifestyle and spearheaded the mutiny. The prospect of six months shooting in the South Seas island won out.

The Mutiny shoot is still considered one of the most disastrous in Hollywood history. Six months turned into nearly a year and a half, and MGM lost exorbitant amounts of money thanks in no small part to Brando’s prima donna antics, script demands, and frequent no-shows. “He was a bit unwilling to learn his lines,” says Tim Seely, the film’s sole surviving principal cast member. Seely recalls one particularly frustrating scene in which Brando’s character was supposed to be saying goodbye to his love interest, played by a local dancer named Tarita Teriipaia. “In the end they had to put little pieces of paper with his lines on her forehead. They were shooting over her shoulder.”

Despite the difficulties, the shoot wasn’t all hardships; in fact it quickly turned into a hedonistic free-for-all, with the star as a kind of local sex god. During breaks in shooting—and fucking—Brando explored Tahiti, a place he’d been fascinated by since flipping through old National Geographic magazines as a boy. It was on one of these excursions that he first spotted Tetiaroa as a sliver on the horizon. Well after the movie had wrapped, he couldn’t get the sight out of his mind. He returned to Tahiti and hired a fisherman to take him to Tetiaroa.

Blind old Madame Duran was prepared to sell the remote paradise to Brando for $200,000 on the condition that he not cut down any of the indigenous tow trees. Brando vowed then he would always keep the island in as natural a state as possible.

In his first trip to his new hideaway, with a keg of beer and some Tahitian friends in tow, Brando’s dinghy crashed on the surrounding reef, and wave after wave scraped him across the coral, washing him up bloodied on the sand. Soon after he purchased the island, Brando fixed up the house of the old leper, who’d long since died. It was the first of his many pet projects on Tetiaroa, most of which he would never complete.

The one woman immune to Brando’s charms during the filming of Mutiny was his costar, the beautiful 19-year-old Tarita. “The less likely I was to seduce a woman,” Brando wrote in his 1995 memoir, Songs My Mother Taught Me, “the more I wanted to succeed.” He never respected things that came easily to him, whether it was talent, Oscars, or women. Tarita also came to represent the myth of the unspoiled, noble savage and the purity of Polynesian life. And so he pursued her.

Brando eventually wore down Tarita’s defenses through dogged insistence, and Tarita fell deeply in love. He wanted her to give him a Tahitian child, and within a year of Mutiny’s release, she gave birth to Teihotu in Papeete. Seven years later, though they were no longer sleeping together, Brando wanted Tarita to bear him a second Tahitian child, and in 1970 Cheyenne was born by artificial insemination.

Teihotu became Cheyenne’s protector from the moment she was born. As Tarita writes in her memoir, “He is constantly at her side to support her, holding out his arms, opening doors for her. Twenty years later, when Cheyenne would become ill, Teihotu would be the only one to have influence over her, the only one she would listen to, and to whom she would sometimes cry for help.”

In 1971 Brando hired an architect, Bernard Judge, to build a small hotel on Tetiaroa to offset the severe toll the island took on Brando’s continually troubled finances. Using primarily local wood and leaves, Judge erected 13 modest thatched fares (huts in the local style). Much of the hotel’s handiwork over the years was done by Brando himself, along with his first-born son, Christian, whom Brando had reportedly stranded on Tetiaroa for extended periods of time to keep him from L.A.’s excesses. “Probably the two of them enjoyed their closest relationship while building Tetiaroa,” says biographer Manso.

Brando relished his role as a Tahitian patriarch, ambling along the beach in traditional Polynesian sarongs. In 1977 Tarita had a child from another relationship, whom Brando adopted and treated as a daughter. He later adopted Raiatua, Tarita’s niece, as well. “He was like my dad,” says Raiatua, speaking in French. “He’d make fun of us because he spoke fluent Tahitian and we didn’t.” The Tahitian staff, recalls one guest, called him le patron, the boss: “They just about licked Marlon’s shoe.”

To Brando’s chagrin, Tetiaroa became a destination for pilgrimages, with tourists clamoring to catch a glimpse of the actor. They hardly ever did, though now and again his celebrity friends made cameo appear­ances. Quincy Jones once stayed for a month to meditate. And hotel patrons were surprised to see Robert De Niro, a guest of Brando’s in the late 1980s, amuse himself by waiting tables one night.

Increasingly, Brando viewed his island as a refuge from a preying public and a brutal industry. In the decade following Mutiny, word of Brando’s behavior had made him an unhirable liability. He appeared in one humdrum project after the next until, in 1972, The Godfather catapulted him back onto the A list and earned him his second Academy Award. Though he still belittled his profession, Brando could once again command exorbitant salaries, often for what amounted to cameo roles, such as in Superman, or in Apocalypse Now, where he played the half-crazed leader of a native jungle cult, a dark reflection of his Tahitian fiefdom. He would funnel much of his earnings into pet projects for Tetiaroa. “He once told me he was not an actor any longer,” says his longtime friend and mistress Ellen Adler. “He was an inventor.” (Brando has only one patent to his name: a mechanism to tighten drumheads.)

Brando’s designs for Tetiaroa ranged from quirky—like a floating picnic table on the lagoon—to grand: He conceived of the island as a lab in which he could solve the world’s ecological problems. He used his fame to invite scientists like Stewart Brand and Jacques Cousteau to Tetiaroa as advisors. He contemplated raising lobsters, pearls, sea turtles. He was especially passionate about aquaculture, the idea of harvesting crops in seawater, which could then go on to feed the Third World.

“He wanted to make it energy-independent,” says alternative energy expert Jay Baldwin, who spent a month studying Tetiaroa in the 1970s. “His ideas changed every day,” recalls Teihotu. Most of his projects, however, were abandoned as he moved on to the next one. He built a group of thatched classrooms in the jungle in the hopes that students from around the world would come to his “university” to learn about Polynesia. Teihotu and Cheyenne would be its only students.