Word: tarita
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...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...
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...
Brando keeps his private life on Tahiti very secluded. He has two children by Tarita, who was a 19-year-old beauty in Mutiny on the Bounty. They live on Tahiti. "I see them on weekends," says their father. "They fly to Tetiaroa or I go to them. I don't think I will let them go to the States. As Tahitians, they are too trusting. They would be destroyed in the pace of life in the States...
Brando and Tarita are still good friends. Says Marlon, "I remember being furious with her because she fed so much candy and gum-so bad for the teeth-to the baby. She said to me, 'What can I do? He wants it.' Tahitians treat children as people who have legitimate wants and needs. None of this I-know-better-because-I'm-your-parent syndrome. I respect it. But I've learned not to try to go native mentally ... not to try to assume their mind frame. My first seven years as a child growing...
Frustrating at first was the search for a leading lady to lure Fletcher Christian Brando, in T. S. Eliot's words, "under the bam, under the boo, under the bamboo tree." Then one day a supple vahine named Tarita broke into spontaneous dance before Brando and Director Reed, swayed sensually to the rhythm of sharkskin drums, and extolled Brando's prowess as a godlike lover and drinker of awa, a local fermentation. Brando and Reed conferred. Soon the coconut radios of Tahiti were spreading the message that Tarita had become Hollywood's newest star...
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