In the front row

Five days before Marlon Brando died July 1, he placed a telephone call to his friend of nearly five decades, George Englund, who had directed him in the 1963 film “The Ugly American.”

“I have to hear your voice,” Brando had said. “I love you, Georgie. Those years we had, we own them, they’re ours, 48 years. I’m starting to cry. I don’t care, I just wanted to talk for a minute. I’d take a bullet for you.”

“I never heard his voice in that condition before,” Englund recalled in a recent interview near his home in Palm Springs. “It was very personal.”

A few days after the phone call, Englund arrived at Brando’s house on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles on June 30 for a visit -- and was concerned at what he found. The 80-year-old Hollywood legend was lying in bed in a cotton robe, gray-white stubble adorning his face. Brando’s eyes, Englund writes, were “dark hollow chambers,” his cheeks “concave.” Oxygen tubes were connected to his nostrils and his face showed pain. Brando had begun to lose control of his bodily functions and rolled his eyes in discomfort.

“It’s good to see you’re still acting, Mar,” Englund joked, using his nickname for Brando.

“That’s not acting, this is the face of real pain,” Brando replied.

The men conversed for well over an hour, as Brando slipped in and out of awareness. Englund said he massaged his friend’s leg for a bit and gave it a final loving squeeze before he left. The next day, he received a phone call telling him that Brando was dead. The international screen star who had electrified audiences in films like “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “On the Waterfront” and “The Godfather” had succumbed to lung failure at UCLA Medical Center.

The strong bond between the two men is the inspiration for a new memoir about the two-time Oscar-winning actor by director and producer Englund, titled “The Way It’s Never Been Done Before: My Friendship With Marlon Brando,” which HarperEntertainment publishes today.

Englund’s book captures many memorable moments -- big and small -- in the lives of both men: The day they were nearly killed while racing rickshaws through the teeming streets of Hong Kong; the night in 1958 when Brando agonized over whether he should attend the Academy Awards when he was nominated for best actor in “Sayonara,” and the actor subsequently pulling on his tuxedo as Englund gunned the car to make it on time; and the day Englund showed up at Brando’s house and found him stuffing Kleenex behind his lower lip in preparation for a visit from director Francis Ford Coppola, who was coming over to interview Brando about a part in his new film, “The Godfather.”

In the book, Englund recalled finding Brando in bed one day with a small TV balanced on his stomach. He was watching a rerun of “On the Waterfront” and offering running commentary. When the famous scene in the back seat of a limousine between Brando and Rod Steiger appeared, Brando recalled the fight he’d had with director Elia Kazan over that scene and crowed that if he’d done it the way Kazan had wanted it done, “my whole character wouldn’t have made sense.”

Even though he knew him about as well an anyone could, Englund said he still considers Marlon Brando an enigma. Among Brando’s keenest traits, Englund said, was his curiosity and intensity.

“Of course, that was a substantive part of acting. His curiosity. He’d meet people, talk to them, and he’s stealing and storing things about them,” Englund said. “Nothing was really inconsequential” about a conversation with Brando, Englund said. “Whether you were talking about insect life ... or film, or women, it always got the same address. Everything had the same intensity. There was never a shard of boredom.”

Along with the late comedian Wally Cox and the late actor Sam Gilman, there were few people as close to Brando as Englund.

Englund said Brando was intensely private -- “The law of life with Marlon was, you don’t talk to anybody who writes a story or a magazine piece or particularly a book [about him].”

But Englund, 78, said the book grew out of discussions they had had years earlier about writing a biography about Brando. “At that point in his life, Marlon’s economy was directed not toward excellence in literature but to money,” Englund said. “I got him an advance of $5 million.”

But like many projects, Brando never saw it through. “I’ve seen Marlon wreck so many deals, so many projects,” Englund writes. “Everything is going the right way and suddenly he flings in some new condition. Then he won’t budge from it.”

Englund said Brando was unaware that he had begun working on the book earlier this year, although he planned to show it to Brando when he was finished. In the wake of Brando’s death, however, when so many others were likely to offer their own take on Brando, Englund said he decided to go forward and offer a personal account by someone who knew the actor well.

Throughout Brando’s life, Englund writes, the defiant actor had done things “the way they’d never been done before,” thus the title for the book.

The men met in 1956 at a party thrown in L.A. by actor Burgess Meredith. Brando arrived late with a woman on each arm, Englund recalled. Eventually, he made his way over to Englund and his wife at the time, actress Cloris Leachman, and made introductions.

Brando asked Englund and Leachman to come to dinner with him the next evening with the Italian actress Anna Magnani because, Englund writes, Brando wanted to diplomatically avoid her advances. Englund writes that during the car ride from a Beverly Hills restaurant, Magnani made a play but Brando fended her off by lying that he had to drop off Englund and Leachman in Fresno.

A friendship was born.

Brando, who later formed his own movie production company, was an expert in all areas of filmmaking but lacked the discipline to be a screenwriter. Englund notes, for example, that Brando once wrote a treatment that came in at 312 pages. “Though there were some interesting elements in it,” Englund recalled, “the writing was undisciplined, the story incoherent and rambling.”

The men teamed up professionally for the film “The Ugly American.” But Englund said Brando tested his patience. In one scene, for example, the studio had built an elaborate living room set, but Brando insisted that Englund film the scene instead in a small foyer with a flat wall and two chairs, making it virtually impossible to shoot reverse shots.

“You can almost feel your flesh starting to crawl when he says something like that, because it’s the perfect trap,” Englund said. It was a typical Brando move designed to test you, he said. If you give in, Englund said, “then you’re dead.”

Brando and Englund were drawn together by their respective family tragedies. Brando’s daughter, Cheyenne, committed suicide, and his eldest son, Christian, went to prison for killing Cheyenne’s boyfriend. Englund lost a 27-year-old son, Brian, to drug addiction and an 11-year-old son, Max, to spinal muscular atrophy.

Englund’s Hollywood career spanned decades as a writer, director and producer. He produced, for example, 1968’s “The Shoes of the Fisherman.” Englund said he was invited to a memorial service that producer Mike Medavoy held for Brando, attended by many Hollywood celebrities, but he chose not to attend. “[Marlon] wouldn’t have wanted that,” Englund said. “He wouldn’t have wanted a gathering of people to sit around with a look of beatitude and swap anecdotes about Marlon.”