Biography: A portrait by the actor's long-suffering best friend inadvertently exacts revenge writes Donald Clarke.
A preliminary inspection of George Englund's rambling attempt to make sense of the iniquities visited upon him by the carbohydrate mountain that was once Marlon Brando does not bring happy news. Printed on coarse, grainy paper in ugly type, the book is so pathetically desperate to impress that it carries a message from Jane Fonda - "George, I love your book" - on both the front cover and the spine.
There is no index and the poorly reproduced photographs are as unexciting in content as they are meagre in number. Then, as if all this weren't dispiriting enough, there is that awful title. The Naked Actor? It sounds like something you might see on a flyer advertising an evening of weepy reminiscences by some fading ham in a cravat (or, worse, a chilling threat by Jamie Oliver's agent).
Sadly, much of the text manages to live down to the packaging. Englund, at times a producer, director and writer, first met Brando at a party hosted by actor Burgess Meredith in 1955. The two men became friends and, though there was at least one significant falling out, they remained close until Brando's death last year. The first half of the book tells us about the production company, Pennebaker, they set up together in the late 1950s. It talks us through the making of The Ugly American, Englund's turgid film of a once-voguish book, in which Brando personified various American attitudes to south-east Asia.
WE ARE PRESENTED with anecdotes showing the boys at their most rakish: the great actor entertains everybody with his ability to fart at will; on a trip to Hong Kong, the two caballeros race each other in rickshaws; Brando, eager to show he can summon any woman with just one phone call, invites Marilyn Monroe round to discuss fame. Though lengthy 40-year-old conversations are reported in direct speech, the reader is still inclined to believe every word Englund writes. Why would he make up anything this dull?
Throughout these early sections one finds oneself urging the author to break free from Brando's malign influence. The actor did offer his friend an entry to Hollywood, but Englund's main role at Pennebaker seemed to involve placating the furious studio heads when they cottoned on that Brando, a dedicated procrastinator, was never going to deliver any product.
When socialising with Brando, the junior partner in the relationship was called upon to laugh at the star's crude jokes and make excuses for his frequent outbreaks of boorish behaviour. If we were writing about this relationship today, we would describe the unfortunate Englund as a member - the sole member, perhaps - of Brando's posse. He was a one-man entourage.
Various encomiums to Brando's genius are offered as a way of explaining the author's unwillingness to tell the developing leviathan where to stick his friendship. Such passages tend to be long on superlatives and short on genuine insight. "Looking at him only as an actor, he dominates the 20th century the way Picasso dominates painting," Englund says, blithely sidestepping the fact that, whereas Brando's talent only burned at its brightest for a decade and a half, Picasso stayed at the top of his game for 70 years. Englund assures us that Brando was the greatest screen actor so frequently and with such smug certitude one feels obliged to revise one's opinion of Cary Grant upwards.
The book does become more interesting in its second half. Both Englund and Brando endured similar tragedies in later life. The actor's son, Christian, was arrested after shooting dead the boyfriend of his disturbed half-sister, Cheyenne, who later committed suicide. George, once married to Cloris Leachman, the great comic actor, lost one son as a result of a drug overdose and another to a lengthy congenital illness.
THESE TERRIBLE EVENTS took place during the most serious hiatus in the long friendship, and the subsequent reconciliation, told through quotes from emotionally raw letters, proves surprisingly moving. But these passages further point up how sinister Brando's hold over the author was.
The two men fell out after the actor sacked Englund as the writer of his biography. Brando behaved abominably during the negotiations, but, a few years later, Englund returned to sit by his old friend's deathbed. The star was still in control of his posse.
Mind you, Englund does (inadvertently, I'm sure) extract a kind of revenge in the book's final chapter. On the night before his death, Brando, his transformation into a tub of fatty ego now complete, lies immobile on his bed musing on eternity. He is reduced to mopping up his own oozing emissions with tissues and throwing the filthy, wadded balls towards - though only occasionally into - a nearby wastepaper basket.
Putting that grim image of this once-beautiful actor in readers' minds could be regarded as payback for a half- century of abuse.
Donald Clarke writes on film for The Irish Times
Marlon Brando: The Naked Actor By George Englund Gibson Square, 272pp. £15.99