Overrun with tropical weeds, the airstrip on Tetiaroa—Marlon Brando’s private island in the South Pacific—is barely detectable from the sky. It was shut down in 2004, the year the actor died. Now it can only accommodate a helicopter. From above, the atoll, which consists of 13 white-sand islets encircled by a coral reef, shimmers like a turquoise amulet. Once the retreat of Tahitian royalty, it became the island kingdom of one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic figures.

On the ground a Polynesian man dressed like an L.A. gangbanger waits for us to land. He is sitting in a wheelbarrow, a peculiar but fitting throne for the new king of Tetiaroa. At 45, Teihotu Brando, Marlon’s third-born son, has his father’s noble profile and a hint of his generous waistline. Teihotu lives on the remote island alone with his wife and the youngest of their three children, surviving on the fish he spears, the fruit he picks, and whatever pro­visions his occasional visitors can bring from Tahiti, 30 miles away.

The first to disembark from the helicopter is Dick Bailey, a Louisiana-born developer who is about to build a controversial five-star “eco hotel” called The Brando on Tetiaroa, employing Teihotu as its caretaker. Teihotu embraces him as a friend. Bailey has brought a bag of essentials that includes bread, fresh produce, and a Nintendo Wii, which Teihotu will plug into a generator, the only power source on the island. He packs the provisions into the wheelbarrow and navigates his way to a ramshackle cabin, the former staff quarters of the hotel his father had built decades ago and which has since fallen to ruin. The clearing around it is littered with lawn toys and coconut shells, which serve as food bowls for a dozen scrawny cats.

“Welcome to paradise,” he says, rolling a cigarette. At first glance Tetiaroa indeed appears to have all the elements of a postcard Eden: the white sand, the coconut trees, the briny breeze, the limpid lagoon with schools of fish winding through mazes of coral.

But within its jungle—aside from rats, swamps, and swarms of mosquitoes and parasites—looms the tormented ghost of Marlon Brando. Like Charles Foster Kane’s “Rosebud,” Tetiaroa remains the key to understanding the late, great actor—a metaphor for his ravaged beauty and shattered dreams. And in the years since Brando’s death, it has become the battleground for an epic struggle over his legacy.

When Brando bought the island, in 1966, he was at the height of a fame he never wanted, hailed as the finest actor of his generation but quickly becoming its most eccentric. On Tetiaroa, among his native children (including Teihotu and his younger sister Cheyenne), Brando transformed into a benevolent Dr. Moreau, concocting experiments he dreamed would save the world, most of which would remain castles in the sand. Brando had wanted to die on Tetiaroa, sitting under a coconut tree. But he never returned to the island after 1990, when a series of events—beginning with the conviction of his son Christian (from Brando’s first wife, Anna Kashfi) for the killing of Cheyenne’s Tahitian boyfriend and culminating in Cheyenne’s suicide five years later—associated Tetiaroa, once his only sanctuary, with unspeakable tragedy.

Brando’s final will made no mention of Tetiaroa. Two weeks before his death, the bedridden Brando signed a codicil appointing new executors to his estate: Hollywood producer Mike Medavoy, accountant Larry Dressler (who is Medavoy’s brother-in-law and had reportedly never met Brando), and Avra Douglas, a former friend of Cheyenne’s. In 2004 the new estate sold an interest to develop the island to Dick Bailey, a local luxury hotel developer who had worked with Brando on plans for a luxury eco hotel on Tetiaroa, applying some of Brando’s wackier ecological concepts. “[Brando] had conversations with literally hundreds of investors and hoteliers,” says David Seeley, a lawyer for the estate. “The furthest he ever got was with Bailey.” After years of administrative and legal delays, construction is set to begin this month. If it happens, it will be the first successful project on an island full of pipe dreams—but it has outraged those who believe it violates Brando’s wishes.

The abrupt transfer of Brando’s estate triggered a slew of lawsuits, notably from the two dismissed executors: Alice Marchak, now 88, who had been Brando’s secretary for half a century; and Jo An Corrales, his longtime friend and business manager. “The people who knew him the best knew what he wanted, and he certainly didn’t want a big hotel project,” says Bernard Judge, the architect of that first small hotel on the island. Judge also sued the estate, not for money but for the right to build a house on Tetiaroa on a lease Brando had purportedly granted him.

“Suddenly everyone knows what Marlon wanted,” says Bailey. “What I know is that the estate wants the hotel, and the beneficiaries want it,” he says, referring to Brando’s nine surviving children, who would each see a portion of the hotel’s profits. (Bailey has granted each of Brando’s children the right to live on the island should they choose to.) Marchak, who knew Brando well and is a beneficiary herself, says, “The children didn’t know anything about Marlon’s finances. When they make statements that this is what their father wanted, I just have to laugh.”

“This is a ship of fools, the whole deal,” says Peter Manso, who wrote the authoritative biography of Brando. “There ain’t too many heroes in this story, and it’s a terribly sad one.”

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Teihotu knows that being a Brando will make him part of the draw of the new hotel—a living relic of Old Hollywood tucked away in the heart of darkness. “I’m not sure what my role at this hotel will be, but I think I’m already doing it,” he says. Though he lives in the shadow of his father’s legend, he knows a tranquillity Brando could only dream of. “This is my rolling chair,” he says, pointing to his motorboat, “and this is my office.” He sweeps his hand across the placid lagoon, protected from the crashing open sea by a ring of coral. Much of his job currently consists of keeping poachers at bay, mostly by throwing stones, since Bailey’s company, Tahiti Beachcomber, has no legal rights over the water. As far as the poachers are concerned, Teihotu says, the lagoon is one big barrel to shoot fish in. “When I was 10 years old,” he says, “you could catch fish with a knife, just slashing the water. Today you have to take the boat out with a spear and throw it.”

It certainly doesn’t seem like stocks are depleted. A needlefish flits along on its tail fins as if walking on water, and an entire school of mullet spring through the air. There are sharks, too, but they rarely attack.

There is a small satellite dish on the island, but Teihotu only turns on the TV to stop it from corroding. In addition to spearfishing, he works out by pummeling a makeshift punching bag made from a sand-filled burlap sack. His old man taught him how to spar, passing on the moves he learned playing washed-up boxer Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.

Teihotu spends the rest of his time exploring the atoll, some corners of which are still a mystery to him. No surprise: It comprises 1,400 acres of untamed land. His father believed that there are remains of encampments from the British sailors who, in 1787, overtook the HMS Bounty, threw the captain overboard, and set off with a group of Tahitian women in search of an island paradise where they could hide from the English crown. “They say the Spanish buried treasure here,” adds Tei­hotu, “but I haven’t found anything.”