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. And then, just as the book neared completion, Marlon announced that he was bored. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Cammell wanted Mick Jagger as the star and Marlon as the gangster.