Brando Unable to Visit Ill Daughter : Murder case: She remains in a Tahiti hospital after a drug overdose, but the actor’s attorney has advised him not to travel there.

Actor Marlon Brando has been presented with a gut-wrenching decision: Should he fly to his daughter’s bedside in Tahiti, where she was being treated after an apparent suicide attempt, or honor his promise to remain in Los Angeles to testify at his son’s murder trial?

Brando had made plans to fly to Tahiti last week when he was informed that his daughter, Cheyenne Brando, had overdosed on tranquilizers and anti-depressant drugs and was hospitalized in intensive care. But defense attorney Robert Shapiro advised him not to go without assurances from the French authorities there that he would be allowed to return.

Unable to obtain such a guarantee, Brando Thursday remained secluded at his Mulholland Drive estate Thursday. French authorities on the island want to question the movie star about the death of his daughter’s lover--the son of a prominent Tahitian.

“It’s beyond wrenching,” Shapiro said of Brando’s predicament. “It’s an impossible decision for a father to have to make.”

But Shapiro said that Brando had given his word--and the lawyer assured prosecutors--that he would be available as a witness in the murder trial of his son, Christian Brando.

“He is being advised by Tahitian authorities that it’s a definite maybe as to whether or not he would be detained,” the lawyer said. “I advised him that unless there is a certainty that he could fulfill my promise to the prosecution, as difficult as it would be, he would have no choice” but to remain in Los Angeles.

The trial, in which Christian Brando faces a first-degree murder charge in the May shooting death of Cheyenne’s lover, Dag Drollet, 26, has been postponed indefinitely by a state appeals court pending a ruling on prosecutors’ attempts to secure Cheyenne as a witness.

Brando on Wednesday issued a statement in Tahiti in which he blamed Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner and an assistant for his daughter’s mental condition.

“This case is tearing everyone apart,” Brando stated. He referred to Cheyenne as “the most precious thing in the world to me.”

His anguish--made public by the legal tango between his family and authorities in California and Tahiti--stems from recent events that have left him torn between Cheyenne, 20, his daughter with actress Tarita, and his firstborn, Christian, 32, his son with actress Anna Kashfi.

Authorities in Los Angeles had tried for five months to compel Cheyenne to return to testify. She is considered the prosecution’s key witness because she told police that the shooting was intentional, not an accident as Christian has claimed. She took the next flight to Tahiti after giving her statement and has been hospitalized there four times, once for the birth of her son by Drollet.

Her health and personal wishes aside, she cannot leave French Polynesia because she has been charged there as an accomplice in the murder of Drollet, a French citizen.

Prosecutors do not want to let Marlon Brando similarly slip through their fingers. But Deputy Dist. Atty. Steven Barshop, who said he has an informal agreement with Shapiro that the actor would appear “on due notice,” said the defense attorney telephoned him last week to ask if he objected to Brando’s flying to his daughter’s bedside.

“I said, ‘Of course not,’ ” Barshop recounted Thursday.

However, Brando continues to blame Barshop and his boss, Reiner, for Cheyenne’s woes, although she has a history of psychiatric illness that predates a serious automobile accident last year and Drollet’s death.

“I hold them directly, not indirectly, responsible for her present mental and physical state,” Brando said, citing the pressure she has been under and questioning her value as a witness.

“She has given six contradictory versions of what happened on the night of the 16th of May to five different people, including Judge Gatti (Max Gatti, the examining magistrate hearing the case in Tahiti). To any jury she would hardly be a believable witness.”

Barshop said her competency should be determined through an independent examination. But he said prosecutors will not attempt to delay the trial further.

Cheyenne was reported to be improving Thursday. She had regained consciousness and was eating solid food, according to doctors at Mamao Hospital. Her mother said the young woman hoped to return to work soon at Brando’s hotel on the tiny atoll of Tetiaroa, which he bought after going to the South Pacific to star in a remake of “Mutiny on the Bounty.”

Brando had booked passage on several flights while awaiting word from the French government, his lawyer said.

Then on Wednesday, Gatti told a news conference in Papeete that “if Mr. Brando came to Tahiti to see his daughter, he would very certainly be heard as a witness.” Under French law, this could mean he would not be free to leave the island without Gatti’s approval.

Meanwhile, Christian Brando, who is free on a property bond posted by their father, is “exceedingly depressed” by Cheyenne’s desperate act and undergoing psychotherapy, Shapiro said. The younger Brando has found work as a welder while waiting for the trial to begin.