Books: A Legend Writes a Novel

Anatole Doultry–known by the gender-bending nickname Annie–looks and acts a lot like the middle-age Marlon Brando. He is overweight and has a broken nose, a gift for mimicry and a taste for life in the Pacific Rim’s more exotic climes. But his most important resemblance to the actor is in that “the layers of his deceptions were like the layers of an onion’s skin.”

That sentence is the creation of a man named Donald Cammell, who, possibly to his regret, agreed to co-write with Brando a screen treatment, and then a novel, called Fan-Tan, which is about to be published in the latter form (Knopf; 272 pages) a bit more than a year after the death of the once great actor. The book is being blurbed as a “delectable romp” and as the “last surprise from an ever-surprising legend,” both claims requiring some parsing.

Set in 1927 in and around Hong Kong, the novel mainly offers a great deal of well-researched, soberly presented information about the politics, food, gambling, sailing ships, firearms and even telegraphy of that time and place. To be sure, Annie is a part-time smuggler and full-time freebooter. But he is more observer–mainly of himself–than active participant in the life around him. Two-thirds of the book drifts by before he gets into action–a typhoon, a hijacking at sea. David Thomson, the film historian and occasional novelist, edited the manuscript and supplies (from Cammell’s notes) a last chapter, in which Annie finally beds a piratical dragon lady after whom he has long lusted. Their encounter, which involves foreign objects and upturned bums, may strike some readers as less than delectable. And only borderline rompish.

Thomson’s style in that chapter doesn’t quite match that of the rest of the book. But his afterword about the novel’s creation is fascinating. The idea for the work, he says, originated with Brando. But it was Cammell–a rather louche, not untalented fellow (he wrote and co-directed the cultishly admired Mick Jagger movie Performance in 1970)–who did all the heavy lifting on both treatment and novel. Thomson says Brando chatted with Cammell about the story and scratched a few notes in the margins of the evolving manuscript. That is the not entirely surprising way that Hollywood legends write. Or should we say “write”?

He was, in short, more character model than creator of the book, which Cammell guessed Brando never completely read. That was typical of their relationship, with Cammell remaining, in Thomson’s word, Brando’s supplicant, alternately embraced and dismissed by the star as Brando’s career faded into lazy inconsequence in the early ’80s. In his private domain, however, the actor was an absolute monarch: “a small mind in hideous contrast with the overlarge body,” as Thomson characterizes him in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film. The pair accepted an advance for the novel from a British publisher in 1982, but Brando eventually repaid the money. Thereafter he teased the disappointed Cammell back into an edgy relationship in which future projects were discussed but never completed. The writer, devastated by more than the usual number of failures and humiliations endemic in the movie business, committed suicide in 1996.

It’s a sad but not unique Hollywood story, out of which one might make a far better novel than Fan-Tan. The book has some modest, largely descriptive merits but is essentially just another celebrity scam. –By Richard Schickel