As a teenager, Teihotu was reserved, distant, and resentful of his father’s absences. Concerned by his increasing drug use, Brando decided to send Teihotu to a hotel management school in Hawaii, where he could learn a useful trade, namely massage therapy.

Cheyenne dreamed of following him to America and pursuing modeling in Los Angeles, at her father’s side. In the meantime she had taken up with Dag Drollet, one of Teihotu’s friends and the scion of a prominent Tahitian family. The two soon lapsed into drugs as well. More alarmingly, Cheyenne began terrorizing those closest to her with random bursts of brutal violence, early symptoms of debilitating schizophrenia.

In 1989, following one of her fits, Cheyenne’s car veered off the highway in Tahiti, tumbled down a ravine, and crashed into a tree. Surgeons managed to fix her broken jaw and reconstitute her torn ear, but Cheyenne’s modeling days were over, and her mental illness worsened.

Less than a year later, believing that Drollet was beating the pregnant Cheyenne, Christian Brando shot him through the head at Brando’s house on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. Brando tried to give Drollet mouth-to-mouth, but it was too late.

The media frenzy that followed shattered Marlon Brando’s bubble of isolation, with reporters and paparazzi stationed outside his house 24/7. Christian was sentenced to 10 years for voluntary manslaughter; he served six. Dag’s heartbroken father, Jacques-Denis Drollet, threatened to have Brando arrested if he ever set foot in Tahiti again. He never did.

Cheyenne returned to Tahiti during the trial, where she gave birth to Dag’s son, Tuki, raised largely by Tarita as the increasingly unstable Cheyenne was interned at a hospital. (Tuki, 18, is now the face of Versace menswear.) Over the next four years, Cheyenne attempted suicide on several occasions, but Tarita was always there to save her. It was a cruelty of fate that Teihotu was ultimately the one to find his beloved sister, hanging in her bedroom at their mother’s house in Tahiti.


* * * *

Marlon Brando nearly collapsed on the set of Scary Movie 2 in 2001, and until his death he remained mostly bedridden and hooked up to oxygen, his once gorgeous physique bloated and grotesque.

In Brando’s absence, the tiny hotel he’d built with his own hands fell into disrepair and its debts piled up. After his family called him for help, Brando consulted developer Dick Bailey, who had moved to Tahiti in the 1980s with his Polynesian wife. Bailey, who has the weathered good looks of a Hollywood stunt man, had just acquired the Tahiti InterContinental Hotel outside Papeete and transformed it into a world-class resort. Brando eventually invited Bailey to his home on Mulholland Drive to discuss a larger project. According to Bailey, a common vision emerged for a new hotel. Jo An Corrales, however, claims Brando would routinely meet with developers just to pick their brains and estimate how much his island was worth. Nevertheless, in 2002, Brando signed a building permit application allegedly based upon Bailey’s early concepts.

Marlon Brando died of lung failure on July 1, 2004, and half his ashes were scattered over his island. “If I have my way,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Tetiaroa will remain forever a place that reminds Tahitians of who they are and what they were centuries ago.” In a will written in 1982, Brando expressed the wish that his island “go to my children and their issue…so that this property, to a large extent, will be owned by Polynesians in the future.” But the will he wrote 20 years later made no mention of Tetiaora.

In the end neither would happen. Two weeks before his death, suffering from pulmonary fibrosis and liver damage (as well as a lifelong dyslexia that required him to have many documents read aloud to him), Brando signed a codicil to his will, appointing three new executors. According to a 2006 lawsuit by his former housekeeper, Angela Borlaza, who allegedly wasn’t allowed in the room, the only people present at the time were Larry Dressler, Dressler’s lawyer, and Brando’s Spanish-speaking handyman. The new executors would sell an interest in Tetiaroa to Dick Bailey’s company for $2 million, plus $100,000 in rent and $450,000 a year to use the Brando name. According to Jo An Corrales and Alice Marchak, Brando had previously turned down offers of up to $60 million for the island. The most recent suit against the estate, filed by Deborah Brando—Christian’s ex-wife—alleges that Brando’s signature was a forgery. David Seeley, a lawyer for the estate, calls it “absurd…a frivolous lawsuit.”


*  *  *  *

Back on Tetiaroa, Dick Bailey struggles to unfold a blueprint in the wind, then lays it out on the sand. In addition to the 40-bungalow hotel and houses for the beneficiaries, Bailey plans to build a research lab as well as residential lots. “We need to have some semipermanent residents,” he says, “to help support the infrastructure.” I ask if Tahitians will live there. “If they have enough money,” he says plainly. The developer says he is pursuing Brando’s dreams of an ecological utopia, with plans to make use of wind and solar power as well as biofuels derived from coconuts. “[Brando] would be rolling in his grave if he knew it was to be called ‘The Brando,’” says Bernard Judge. There is also opposition among local activists, who fear that construction would scare away the delicate fauna and damage ancient cultural landmarks.

“I’m not saying that everything we’re doing would be what he wanted,” concedes Bailey. “He was a dreamer.”

What it comes down to, in the end, is conflicting interpretations of the desires of an inscrutable man. “People didn’t know Marlon,” says Marchak, his longtime secretary. “There’s too much that was hidden.”

Barring obstacles from either the U.S. courts or the Tahitian government, construction on The Brando is set to begin this month. Archaeologists were dispatched this year to help move marae—traditional Tahitian temples—out of the bulldozers’ path. By government decree, religious experts have to ensure that ghosts no longer linger in them.

Even though Tarita, now 66, was specifically omitted from Brando’s will, she hopes to return to the island permanently. Raiatua says she will come with her. “We grew up on this island,” she says. “My mom lived all those years there, since she was 18 years old and left her family to be at Marlon’s side. When he bought the atoll, she became invested in it.”

Teihotu returned to Tetiaroa from Los Angeles, where he worked as a masseur, in 2002. He has no plans to leave. “If I didn’t have Tetiaroa in my life, I don’t know what I’d do. I’d be in L.A. County Jail.” One of Brando’s final unfinished projects was a TV series about Tahiti. In the outline he wrote for the pilot, he asks, “Why would a man born in Nebraska and raised in the Middle West decide that the best place to raise a family and while away the years of his life was on a pinch of land peeking out of the immensity of the Pacific Ocean?” Only a legend of Brando’s stature could purchase a private island on the other side of the world for the privilege of just being a man. The passions he left on Tetiaroa ran deeper than anything he left on-screen, and they’re sure to be unleashed, in one form or another, as bulldozers start kicking up sand.