Somehow Marlon was able to draw on all these inner conflicts to create the unique role of a grieving widower. Although the groundbreaking sexuality of the film was what most people talked about, Brando's improvised monologue addressed to his wife's coffin in the film was a painfully autobiographical portrayal of his complex mix of anger and sense of lost love as he dredged up his feelings at the premature death of his mother.

But the real-life melodrama wasn't over. At times it seemed to me that some madman was writing Marlon's story and overdoing it. In 1987 his Tahitian-born daughter, Cheyenne, a troubled child on drugs like her half-brother Christian, became involved with a young man named Dag Drollet, the scion of a distinguished Tahitian family. Finding herself pregnant, Cheyenne told Christian that Dag was abusing her—which was not true—and Christian, in a righteous moment of crazed wrongheadedness, shot and killed Dag, in Marlon's living room. The movie star who had quested all his life for privacy and peace of mind was suddenly dragged into his worst nightmare, a public scandal that became a tabloid dream.

Marlon made the heroic choice to stand by his troubled son, whose trial became the most celebrated target for scandalmongering and celebrity-bashing since the Fatty Arbuckle case, 70 years before. There was Marlon Brando, no longer gorgeous now, but gone to fat and old and tired. And there, glaring at him, was Dag's father, Jacques Drollet, a former minister of education and tourism in Tahiti, who had opposed Marlon's purchasing his atoll in order to stake out a paradise. As the only eyewitness to the shooting, Cheyenne, to avoid having to testify against Christian, fled to Tahiti, where she made at least two suicide attempts, finally succeeding in 1995. The one place in the world where Marlon felt he had finally found his private escape from the fame that had almost eaten him alive became instead the last step in his descent into hell.

When I was in Los Angeles soon after Marlon's death to look up his old friends, everyone asked, "Have you talked to Harry Dean Stanton yet? In these last years Harry Dean was closer to Marlon than anyone." I found Harry Dean, a neighbor of Marlon's, on Mulholland. In his late 70s, tall and gaunt and mysterious, a Kentuckian who can play a haunting harmonica and guitar, he's an unforgettable actor you've seen in a hundred movies, including The Godfather: Part II. His house, like those of his celebrity neighbors, is behind one of those massive gates, but I was surprised to find that it's just a long, cluttered cabin, with unwashed dishes in the sink and Buddhist legends on the wall.

I told Harry Dean I had heard that he had had long conversations with Marlon at three or four in the morning, and that sometimes they went on until dawn. "So what did you talk about?"

"We talked a lot about Eastern religions—Buddhism, Taoism, the Kabbalist Jews. We talked about Lao Tse in China. And Einstein came up. Einstein said that Buddhism was the only religion that could cope with modern science, and Marlon was interested in that. He was into poetry, philosophy, and religions—everything. He was curious about everything. We talked about ego from the Buddhist point of view. We talked about Shakespeare. Marlon really knew Shakespeare, and sometimes he would recite whole long monologues from Macbeth, Twelfth Night."

I could picture these two Hollywood seekers of solace, with the first rays of the sun beginning to peek into their lives, Harry Dean perfectly cast as a misfit and the ailing Marlon—all 300 pounds of him—beginning to look like, and trying to think like, Buddha.

"One time Marlon suddenly asked me, 'What do you think of me?,'" Stanton said. "And I said, 'What do I think of you? I think you are nothing. NOTHING!' And Marlon began to laugh, and he went on laughing and laughing."

I could picture Marlon. He had finally achieved his goal. Peace, peace at last. What I always wanted to be. Nothing.

At his memorial on the Mulholland hilltop, with a number of his living children, natural and adopted, from a collection of dark-skinned mothers gathered together for the first time, with the few true friends who cared deeply for him, his sister Jocelyn made a final plea: "It's over now. Let him be."

It was a kind and gentle thought. But sorry, Jocelyn. And sorry, Marlon. It's not your fault. You were just too damned famous. And too damned good. You can turn down those awards all you want. But, like your worst dreams, they'll keep on coming. Best Actor for All Time: Marlon Brando.

Budd Schulberg, author of the 1941 best-selling novel What Makes Sammy Run?, wrote the screenplay for On the Waterfront.