American Prince
by Tony Curtis, with Peter Golenbock
364pp, Virgin, £18.99
Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times
by Dennis McDougal
484pp, Wiley, £9.99
Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando
by Stefan Kanfer
350pp, Faber, £20
Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: My Life In Cult Movies
by Michael Deeley, with Matthew Field
273pp, Faber, £18.99
My Word Is My Bond
by Roger Moore, with Gareth Owen
336pp, Michael O'Mara, £18.99
The Man with the Golden Touch: How the Bond Films Conquered the World
by Sinclair McKay
380pp, Aurum, £18.99
Anyone reading these accounts might wonder what women in the movie industry do. Hollywood remains a feudal society, much of it closeted, and Tony Curtis, straight and red-blooded, is clear on its ambiguities, noting how one respectable director of the old school threw formal dinner parties then took his guests cruising Sunset Boulevard for young men known as "after-dinner mints". Curtis was in no doubt that he was working in a company town run on favours and casting couches, male and female. He was offered $30,000 by a studio to marry one of its actresses, Piper Laurie. In Spartacus (1960), he was a slave propositioned by Laurence Olivier, lolling in the bath and coming out with the double entrendre: "Well, I like both oysters and snails." This much was confirmed, according to Stefan Kanfer, by David Niven, who saw Olivier kissing Brando in the swimming pool. Brando was in a menage with Olivier's wife, Vivien Leigh, who didn't seem to mind. "One must be sophisticated about such matters in life," said the equable Niven. Of Last Tango in Paris (1972), Ingmar Bergman perceptively noted that the actress was redundant and the film should have been about a boy. "If you think about it in those terms, it becomes very, very interesting. As it is now, it makes no sense as a film." Maria Schneider, the actress in question, was aware of her superfluity, convinced that the director was in love with Brando. She subsequently turned up in The Passenger (1975) with Jack Nicholson, who found her listless and anaesthetised to the point of having to hold up the back of her head in one shot as he delivered his lines. In retrospect, Schneider's refusal to become involved seems understandable, even laudable.
Brando belonged to that unhappy elite of supernovas who fade to myth before our eyes. The cliché goes that before him actors acted; after him they behaved, a quote often appropriated without reference to its source (drama coach Stella Adler). Brando was a star from the outset. Nicholson, by contrast, kicked around for 10 years, his career going nowhere, until he was called in to replace Rip Torn in Easy Rider (1969). For a time he represented a new spirit of independence, which got traded down the years for the art of survival. Brando on the other hand devoted his life and career to evasive action. Despite his liberal leanings, he was party to Elia Kazan's shameless careerism. Kazan had testified in the anti-communist witch-hunts and had already promised the lead in On the Waterfront (1954) to Frank Sinatra, convinced that Brando would reject him on principle. The actor left his misgivings unvoiced, signed on and won his first Oscar.
Brando's acting resists the kind of conventional analysis that Kanfer applies because, as a stage actress who worked with him remarked, "He could make terrible choices, but they were always real." Unlike others, he made performances out of his flaws and, as Richard Burton noted, "He surprises me. He's the only one that does."
Michael Deeley worked his way up through the ranks of the British film industry, starting in the early days of commercial television on Robin Hood, a haven for those blacklisted by Hollywood. As a producer he presided over the last gasp of the old-style industry, which still received tax levies under the Wilson government. He was known in the trade as Wheeler Deeley and when the money dried up under Mrs Thatcher he took EMI to Hollywood, a venture done in by backstabbing. Interesting work included Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), but his most intriguing anecdote is about a forgotten film. In 1968 he secured a tiny budget from Paramount for a movie to be directed by "a dangerous would-be Jean-Luc Godard called David Hart", who went to the trouble of hiring Godard's cameraman. The film is now forgotten, but its director later emerged as a shadowy adviser to Thatcher on "all sorts of dangerous and secret matters", acting as "enforcer" during the miners' strike.
Given the generally parlous state of the British film industry, the survival of James Bond is remarkable. Ian Fleming's mix of sadism, sex, snobbery and commercial instinct was transformed by two producers, neither English, into a series now in its fifth decade. The value of the original Flemings was that they were robust enough to withstand repeated Xeroxing: the old Etonian toff downclassed for public consumption, an act David Cameron is trying to pull off. Fleming was prescient in sending Bond to Eton (Cameron) and Fettes (Blair).
Being introduced to the films at an impressionable age probably accounts for the author's larky, juvenile tone, which reflects the films' strident insistence that fun must be had. Of Somerset Maugham's Ashenden he writes: "After the war, nary more a squeak was heard from this Ashenden fellow," a sentence that would be irritating even if it were right. The Ashenden stories were adapted by the BBC.
By the time Moore took over Bond, the role was little more than an MC to ever more ingenious set pieces, banter and familiar repetitions. He and Nicholson were both eyebrow actors but Moore was by then an anachronism as a leading man. Fading actors met him on the way down (Burton, Harris, Marvin, Granger): if you found yourself in a non-Bond Moore film you knew your career was on the slide. Old topers (Ronnie Fraser, James Villiers) were indulged for the sake of that actor's essential, future anecdote. Moore has made a career out of self-deprecation, practical jokes and being polite on set, but the fact that he has gone through four wives suggests he isn't as bland as he makes out.
Curtis, now on his second autobiography, is the breeziest (of early bedwetting: "I just pissed my way through that whole period"). A curly-headed nuthin' from a poor background, he beat all the odds. From 1949 to 1951 he was more famous for his hair than his acting, but he worked hard to become an accomplished actor in films such as Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and Some Like It Hot (1959). He sets the record straight on the rumour that he said screen-kissing Monroe was like kissing Hitler; it wasn't. She gave him an erection. Later, he went through his obligatory "drugs hell" period, ground out countless forgettable films, and downaged, as is the custom, to younger wives, observing gallantly that "when you get to a certain age in life, women your age seem ancient". Hooray for Hollywood.
• Chris Petit's novels include The Passenger (Pocket Books). To order American Prince for £17.99, Five Easy Decades for £9.99, Somebody for £18, Blade Runners, Deer Hunters ... for £17.99, My Word Is My Bond for £17.99 or The Man with the Golden Touch for £17.99, all with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. theguardian.com/bookshop
