LOST HOPE

By Steve Wulf

In an early scene from his new movie, Don Juan DeMarco, Marlon Brando, playing a psychiatrist, talks the title character (Johnny Depp) out of committing suicide by pleading, "Why lose hope, along with life, along with everything else?"

If only life imitated art ... On Easter Sunday Brando's deeply troubled 25-year-old daughter Tarita Zumi Cheyenne hanged herself at the Brando estate in Punaauia, Tahiti. Cheyenne, as she was known, had tried to commit suicide three times before. She had lost hope again after a recent court decision denying her custody of her four-year-old son Tuki-whose father, Dag Drollet, was shot and killed at her father's Hollywood home in May 1990 by her half-brother Christian.

While art often imitates life, it's unlikely a movie could ever be made of the Brando family saga, because it's too complex and twisted for any screenwriter to handle. Where to start? In Brando's recent autobiography, Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, he described his mother as "an off-the-shelf drunk" and his father as physically abusive. Where to end? The two-time Oscar winner (On the Waterfront, The Godfather) partly dedicated the book to "my children, who brought me up," yet he barely mentions his 11 (at least) offspring by his three wives and numerous lovers. Christian, 36, once said of his dysfunctional clan, "My family's so weird and spaced out ... I'd sit down at the table with all these strange people and say, 'Who are you?'" Brando alternately spoiled, ignored and bullied his children; as even he tearfully admitted at Christian's sentencing, "I think perhaps I failed as a father."

From Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire to Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, Brando was best when playing characters in torment. Unfortunately, that torment spilled over into his life. According to Peter Manso, author of the 1,118-page Brando: The Biography (1994), Cheyenne's suicide is not the first in Brando's life. "There have been about five girlfriends who have committed suicide," Manso says, "and another three or four who tried. So this is not foreign to him at all." Still, Brando, 71, was deeply affected by the death of the girl he once called "the most precious thing in my life." Upon being told of her suicide, he reportedly muttered, "Oh, God, no," and slumped to the floor of his home.

Brando met Cheyenne's mother, Tarita Teriipaia, a Tahitian waitress-turned-actress, while filming Mutiny On the Bounty in 1961. (Besides Cheyenne, they also had an older son Teihotu.) When Cheyenne was 20, she had a heated telephone argument with her father when he wouldn't let her fly from Tahiti to Canada, where he was filming The Freshman, and she responded by driving her Jeep into a ditch at high speed. Brando then had her flown to a Los Angeles hospital, where he kept a bedside vigil after her extensive surgery.

While she was recovering, Cheyenne became pregnant by Drollet, the scion of a prominent Tahitian family. Eight months into the pregnancy, she told Christian that Drollet was beating her. Christian confronted her boyfriend with a .45-cal. handgun at Brando's California estate, and in the ensuing struggle, Drollet was killed. "The messenger of misery has come to my house," Brando told attorney William Kunstler that night. Christian, who was represented by both Kunstler and Robert Shapiro, was sentenced to 10 years for manslaughter, but with time off for good behavior, he may be out of prison as early as next January.

Cheyenne once claimed she was "the most beautiful, most intelligent and richest girl in Tahiti," and there are those who agreed with her. But she was also probably the most anguished. In the past few months, the onetime model gained so much weight that she began to resemble her corpulent father. Her behavior was so erratic that when she recently invited three friends out for coffee in nearby Papeete, she paid for the coffee by writing separate checks.

Cheyenne was devastated when a judge ruled three weeks ago that Tuki would have to remain in the custody of Cheyenne's mother. It was while her mother was at Easter services that she took her life. Brando decided against flying to Tahiti, but, ever the domineering parent, he tried to have Cheyenne buried on his private atoll of Tetiaroa. Instead, she was laid to rest in the Drollet family crypt in Faa'a. CHEYENNE WITH DAG FOR ETERNITY, read the headline in La Depeche de Tahiti.

The death of Brando's daughter happens to coincide with his re-emergence on screen in Don Juan DeMarco. As an added and cruel irony, his last scene in the movie is a dance on the beach of a tropical island with his wife (Faye Dunaway). Their paradise looks a lot like Tahiti.

--Reported by Al Prince/Papeete and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by AL PRINCE/PAPEETE AND JEFFREY RESSNER/ LOS ANGELES