Marlon Brando: The Pirate King

By the 1970s, Marlon Brando had abandoned Hollywood for a South Sea island. There, he conceived a film that would reignite his fire, a romantic epic of dashing buccaneers and Oriental seduction - a film which would devolve into a novel. Then, in a storm of treachery and egotism, Marlon's dream foundered. Someone was needed to finish the job. Enter the great film critic David Thomson, raring to go...

People still marvel at his first run of pictures - The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire (in which he repeated the role that made him famous on stage), Viva Zapata!, Julius Caesar, The Wild One, and then Waterfront. So he had played a Roman patrician, a Mexican bandit, a moody biker, a dumb Polack, a punch-drunk boxer and a paraplegic. The legend and the hope were that he could do anything. He was a great actor and a very big star. It was the measure of his status that on Bounty he had a salary of $500,000, plus 10 per cent of the gross revenue on the picture, plus $10,000 a week in expenses, and $5,000 a day for every day the picture went over schedule. He also had script approval.

But those who knew Brando sighed when they heard about that deal. They could see the trap closing: that Marlon might hesitate over the script, spending days in aimless debate over motivation, and that for every day like that he would be collecting a bonus of $5,000 - for being difficult, for being dissatisfied, for being bored. This reputation was not widely known yet, but in the years just before Bounty, Brando had earned it on a picture called One-Eyed Jacks.

Once upon a time, this was a western starring Brando, to be directed by the young Stanley Kubrick. But Kubrick walked away when he had the hunch that Marlon was so in love with the venture that only he could direct it. This came to pass, but then Marlon discovered how difficult it was to direct. He lost faith and energy in his own project. He succumbed to his own version of dismay - boredom. He deserted his own picture so that others had to finish it.

And those who knew Brando saw a pattern in his life: the brave new star was already disenchanted with Hollywood and with his own stature as an actor. He had suffered a very bad marriage, with horrible repercussions in court. He had a child, but not the stamina or resolve to be a parent. And he was as weary of America as he was of Hollywood. The sense of rebellion that marked so many of his early roles had consumed the actor, but he had no focus, no perseverance, and no remedy for boredom.

Mutiny on the Bounty turned out very badly. Brando disputed the script, he argued with Carol Reed, and drove co-star Richard Harris to violence. Everyone else on the picture believed that Brando had ruined its chances out of vanity and indolence. But Marlon regarded it as just one more proof of the impossibility of doing good work with Hollywood. The picture lost a ton of money for the studio. It had cost $20m and in the end its box-office income was only $10m. Then, to add insult to injury, Brando took his 10 cents on every dollar spent at the box office (another $1 million).

However, on location, he had found consolations, the very ones that changed the real Fletcher Christian: he had fallen in love with Tahitian women, and he had been seduced by the relaxed life of the South Seas.

In 1966-7, he bought his own Pacific island, Teti-aroa - it would be a great dream project for the rest of his life, a place he developed and retreated to as often as possible. He became an amateur sailor; he learned short-wave radio to stay in touch with the world; he idealised the people of the islands; he began to read the history of the south Pacific.

Fade out - fade in. Fifteen years have passed. Marlon Brando has put on weight, dismay and the unreachable arrogance of the outsider. His career has revived with The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris. But then it has slipped away again. He is regarded as being impossibly difficult; far too expensive in his demands; a liability on any picture. Yet some of his power lingers, and in those dreamy days at sea Brando has worked out a story that might make a movie - so long as Hollywood can be kept out of it.

He needs help, and he thinks of a friend, a Scot, someone who has invited his collaboration in the past. Donald Cammell was 10 years younger than Brando, the son of a man who inherited much of the Cammell-Laird shipping fortune, and then lost it in the Crash. It didn't deter Donald: a teenage prodigy at art school, he was a fashionable portrait painter in London before he was 21. Handsome, seductive, brilliant and full of creative ideas, he went to live in Paris where, in the late 1950s, he met Marlon Brando. It was a real friendship, and when Cammell came back to London in the Sixties and involved himself with the adventurous film-making circles then current, he got the idea for a movie that would shatter every norm in sight. It was a crime film, but a musical, too, and it involved the meeting of a gangster on the run and a reclusive rock star. Cammell wanted Mick Jagger as the star and Marlon as the gangster. Brando thought about it, but he declined, and thus James Fox got the part. That's right, we're talking about Performance - at the same time one of the most audacious and ambitious films ever made in Britain, as deeply into drugs, celebrity, self-destruction, sexual novelty as it was into doing things never attempted on screen before.

From its earliest days, Performance was a cult film (co-directed by Cammell and photographer Nicolas Roeg, but written and inspired by Cammell and in many ways based on his dreams), Warner Brothers, its owners, hated it. Many of the young were stunned by it. Few people liked it more than Marlon Brando, for this had turned out exactly the kind of avant-garde picture with which he longed to be associated.

Cammell went to America - why is not clear. Many think the move ruined him. But in the mid-Seventies he began a romance with China Kong, the underage daughter of a woman with whom Marlon had been having an affair for years. There was enough of Mid-Western stuffiness in Marlon to be offended by this love affair. After all, he had played with China as a child - she called him "Godfather". And if Brando's own romantic life was regularly out of bounds and out of control, he could still be censorious if someone else followed suit and edged in on his territory. For a year or so Marlon and Donald were at odds. Then Donald married China, and Marlon decided to be grown up about it. He went further: he wondered if maybe Donald was interested in collaborating on this project he had.

It opens in 1927, in Hong Kong, in the prison of the crown colony, where we find Anatole or Annie Doultry, a sea captain of a free-lancing nature, Scots by origin, American in later life - a loner, a tease, philosophical, tough, sexy, dreamy, dangerous: in short, a fond self-portrait of that wayward actor Marlon Brando. This was a character Marlon fancied playing, and a man who had many of his tastes and habits: a love of doing accents and practical jokes; a taste for the sea, amateur radio, food and drink; and crazy about Asian women. The story Brando had cooked up involved Annie determining that at his age - 51 - he deserved a big payday. So he insinuates himself into a band of notorious pirates, led by Madame Lai Choi San - beautiful, sexy, cunning, greedy, treacherous and devious.

Over a period of time, Brando and Cammell combined on a treatment of this story - it would be over 160 pages finally - in which Brando regularly improvised in the character of Annie and Cammell wrote it all down.

There was a happy time when Donald and China went to stay on Tetiaroa, and the two spent hours every day working on their story. But then, when they were done, Brando hesitated. The idea had been that he would set it up as picture. But it was an adventure epic, with ships, storms and battles and it needed studio money. Whereas the one thing Brando hated above all was studio participation.

Cammell reached the conclusion that Brando was not serious. Whereupon, encouraged by his brother, David, he wondered if publishers might take it on as a novel. As such, the project was offered to Pan Books and its chief editor, Sonny Mehta. A contract was reached whereby Cammell would write the novel, while Brando owned the project. In fact, Cammell took only about the first third of the treatment for what would become Fan-Tan, a novel. He taught himself to write. He showed pages to Marlon, and adopted his changes and suggestions.

For Donald Cammell this was a very important enterprise. He had made other films after Performance (Demon Seed, The White of the Eye) but none had done well. Fan-Tan was something that might save him. And then, just as the book neared completion, Marlon announced that he was bored. No, he would not proceed - and since he owned the project, he was within his rights. Donald was furious. He refused even to finish his own narrative.

Fade out. Fade in. Donald Cammell is dead, a suicide, in 1996. Marlon Brando is dead, one of the most notorious and lamented wrecks of the creative world. Then China Kong shows the manuscript of Fan-Tan to an agent, Ed Victor (the man who had acted for Brando and Cammell on the original deal) and wonders if it might at last come to life. Ed reads the text so far and is impressed. He reckons that of all the publishers around no one is more likely than Sonny Mehta - who in the meantime has become chief editor of Alfred Knopf in New York. Sonny reads the pages and thinks, well, yes, if it had someone who could finish it off and then write an afterword that goes into the odd friendship and describes how it broke down. Sonny has one author in his stable at Knopf who has done some fiction-writing and who knows something about film history. And so it is that he asks me to read the pages and judge whether it's worth doing.

I had no doubt about the answer: Fan-Tan is not Joseph Conrad, but it is an exciting adventure story, with action, humour and a little sex; to trace its story was an opportunity to bring proper attention to the troubled life of Donald Cammell; but, above all, this book is like a new film to be added to the Brando canon, tormenting in that we have to picture it, but fascinating for all the ways in which you the reader may hear Brando's whimsical voice.

The two authors had left a detailed synopsis on how the novel should end. All I had to do was read the book enough to absorb its style and then execute the given outline. And so the novel ends - I hope - as so many movies end nowadays: with a clean line ahead to a sequel.

As for Cammell, I hope it's clear that he was a man of remarkable talent, all the more impressive to many movie people in that his own origins were in painting and literature, and because he had such wonderful, wild ideas about how films might work in a braver age. I was helped in all of this by many talks with China Kong - Donald's widow, his collaborator on many of the last projects, not to mention a child who had grown up with Marlon Brando as an unexplained family friend. China was there when Donald Cammell shot himself, and she tells the story in the Afterword to Fan-Tan. I think it emerges that he was a man in many ways like Brando - an outsider, charismatic, full of ideas, but not always blessed with the ability to make and fulfill tidy deals.

And so we come to Marlon Brando. No one involved in this publication of Fan-Tan more than 20 years after the real work ever supposed that we were not being carried on the insouciant shoulders of Brando. This work involved getting to know him better, and in turn that was assisted by Mike Medavoy, one of the executors of Brando's estate. In that process, I discovered that many of the conversations in Brando's life must have been recorded. If ever his muddled estate is tidied up, there is the chance of a great biography.

But it may not be happy reading. Looking into Fan-Tan, and the frustrating collaboration with Donald Cammell, I had to conclude that Brando was deeply self-destructive, drawn inevitably to disillusion, a strange treachery towards friendship and that terrible boredom - the feeling that nothing was quite worth the effort. And so it is that we have to see him not just as the great and exemplary actor of modern times, but as someone who had lost trust in his own power. He gave up theatre far too early. He ruined so many pictures - there is no other way to put it. He lived the life of a libertine and was then amazed and distraught that his family was in wreckage. He loathed being a star and a celebrity - and he loved the "secret" media of radio and telephone - yet he often behaved like a monster of ego, crushing projects with his monetary demands. He hated Los Angeles but he lived and died there, and never quite found that paradise in Tahiti that was the beckoning impulse of his last decades and the force behind Fan-Tan.

I hope readers will judge that Fan-Tan was worth rescuing. I do think that the project throws a welcome light on one of Britain's great mavericks - Donald Cammell. And I think that the enterprise adds a few more tough questions on the enigma of talent and its uneasy bearer, Marlon Brando. In the end, there are many lessons in the plain evidence that he longed to be Annie Doultry, a man with one foot in Robert Louis Stevenson and the other in Samuel Beckett.

Sail on, Captain Doultry, a flying Scotsman pursued by his burning Chinese nemesis. Maybe there is a movie in this story.