Lee Marvin: Point Blank

by Dwayne Epstein

  In 1908, Peary was ready to try for the Pole one more time, and so too was Ross Marvin. While Ross petitioned Cornell for a leave of absence, Monte was sent to Brooklyn in the care of his mother’s sister and brother-in-law, Elizabeth and Thomas Wynn. When Ross met up with fifty-two year-old Commander Peary, he was informed that the crew and assistants had all been chosen. However, Peary decided to include Marvin in the 1908 expedition’s bulging ranks, later writing, “Quiet in manner, wiry in build, clear of eye, with an atmosphere of earnestness about him, Ross G. Marvin had been an invaluable member of the expedition.”

  On July 6th Monte, accompanied by his aunt and uncle, bid farewell to Ross on Peary’s specially built ship, the Roosevelt, as it prepared to leave New York harbor. Ross made Monte and his aunt and uncle promise that no matter the outcome of the voyage, his beloved nephew would go to school and finish college. Monte and his relatives said their good-byes and watched from the dock as the schooner sailed out of sight on its way to Greenland and into the history books.

  The Roosevelt made several stops on its way, picking up supplies and crew until finally all the players were in place: Robert E. Peary (Commander); Robert A. Bartlett (Ship Master); John W. Goodsell (Medical Officer); Matthew Henson (Assistant); Ross G. Marvin (Secretary/Assistant); Donald B. MacMillan (Assistant); George Borup (Assistant), along with 15 ship crew members, 49 Eskimos (22 men, 17 women and 10 children), and 246 dogs. This would become one of the most debated and controversial expeditions in human exploration.

  Much has been written over the years concerning the expedition and the individuals involved, especially the rivalry between Peary and former colleague Dr. Frederick Cook, Peary’s questionable relationship with the indigenous people of the region, and African-American Matthew Henson’s role in the race to the Pole. Largely forgotten amid these debates, however, is the vital part that Ross Marvin played on this expedition.

  Never in question was Peary’s unique method of travel across the frozen wasteland. He created a system of support teams that spread out on their dog-driven sleds, took readings, and doubled back to the ship as other teams advanced ahead of them. Peary and Hen-son would lead the first two support groups, with Marvin and then Bartlett behind them, each accompanied by two Eskimos. Marvin’s Eskimos were two young male cousins named Kudluktoo and Inukitsoq, the latter nicknamed “Harrigan” by the crew for his ability to learn and repeat a popular song of the time.

  After wintering on Ellesmere Island, the Roosevelt went up to Cape Columbia at the northern end of the island. Peary and Henson set out from there on the morning of March 1, 1909. They were accompanied by or met up with various advance teams along the way. By March 25th, Peary instructed Marvin and his team to work their way back to the ship. Six days later, Peary and other members of the expedition had arrived at the farthest point in the Arctic any man had reached, about 150 miles from the North Pole. What happened afterwards has been a point of contention for more than a century since Peary and Henson both claimed to have reached the Pole on April 6th. But, without having had the proper documentation as proof, and with possible miscalculations involved in their navigation, they were never able to confirm their exact location.

  By the time Peary arrived at Cape Columbia on April 25 with the news, the celebration was short-lived. Captain Bartlett informed Peary that Kudluktoo and Harrigan had returned, but without Ross Marvin. When questioned, the two young men sadly recounted how, on April 10th, they had spread out as Marvin instructed but when he alone came to an area of thin ice, Marvin fell through, and the two Eskimos were too far away to reach him in time. By the time they got to the thin ice, they saw Ross Marvin sink face down and disappear into the current of the icy water. A makeshift marker was left near the site where twenty-nine year-old Ross was believed to have drowned. But, the body was never recovered.

  Back in America, the many newspapers of the day wrote daily headlines of Peary’s telegraphed progress as the world waited anxiously for any word they could get. Historically, the only thing comparable in recent memory would be the Space Race of the 1960s.

  In Brooklyn, thirteen year-old Monte Marvin was more anxious than most; to compound matters, he was being interviewed several times by major dailies concerning his uncle. One journalist even accompanied him that morning on his regular routine to read the local paper. Along the way, several local kids taunted him that his uncle had died. He ran home without the paper and fell on his bed crying, while the reporter chronicled the tale of Monte sobbing to his Aunt Elizabeth about the tragic news he had just learned.

  The news of Ross Marvin’s untimely death,—the only fatality of the expedition—although reported, was quickly overshadowed by the controversy surrounding Peary’s claim of victory. Dr. Cook made a similar claim, but stated he had reached the Pole earlier than Peary. The controversy continues to this day as to which, or for that matter, if indeed, either expedition had actually ever made it to the North Pole.

  None of those facts mattered to the family and friends of Professor Ross Marvin, however. Young Monte was inconsolable and the family publicly acknowledged the difficulty in attempting to break the news to Ross Marvin’s aged mother. Cornell honored their martyred alum with a memorial and additional plans of remembrance. Until his death in 1920, Peary continued to praise his fallen comrade by writing of Marvin in his memoir: “He who had never shrunk from loneliness in the performance of his duty had at last met death alone.”

  Monte’s maternal aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Thomas Wynn, made sure their nephew stayed in school as Ross had requested. According to Monte’s first son, and Lee’s older brother Robert, “Uncle was a big bookie with ties to Tammany Hall. They were Catholics so my father took the name Thomas. So his name was Thomas Lamont Waltham Marvin. He later dropped the Thomas.” By the time Monte had turned seventeen, his mother had succumbed to cancer, leaving him a virtual orphan in the care of the Wynns. He was attending NYU as a business major when the United States entered World War I. Ross Marvin’s wish that his nephew finish college was dashed when Monte volunteered for active service and left for the Front in May, 1917. He attended Officers Candidate School and went to Europe as a 1st Lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers.

  His time in the war provided fodder for great storytelling years later. “As a matter of fact, he said he was out in Leavenworth,” recalled his son Robert. “They opened up Officer’s Candidate School, and he was surprised they took him in. So, he was commanding officer of I think an all black infantry. They did this work, reinforce the trenches and stuff like that. They didn’t do any real fighting. But still, it’s military life and it was very strict.”

  Lee also recalled his father’s experience retold to him about WWI: “My father was the classic puritan. Hold the emotions in check. Keep up appearances. Tight-assed. He had feelings but he’d never show them to you. I remember once he told me about a bunch of horses he saw in World War I. They were twisted and dead from mustard gas. He cried talking about them. He had feelings. It took something like that to bring them out.”

  Hoping to make the army a career after the war, Monte left active duty in 1919 but remained in the weekend reserves until 1925, working as a clerk at a midtown Manhattan branch of the Bank of Montreal during the week. Monte’s request for a promotion in the reserves was denied as the Army stated it could not financially afford to approve his request. It was during this time, that, if family history is to be believed, Monte had a life-changing experience. “He said it was in a building in New York City,” according to the story he told Robert’s wife, Joan. “He was waiting for the elevator and this beautiful young woman walked off the elevator. He saw her and he fell in love with her but didn’t know her name. It was love at first sight. “

  He soon found out that the beautiful young woman was Courtenay Washington Davidge, the pride of northern Virginia. The oldest of William and Estelle Davidge’s three children, Courtenay and her mother often called each other “sister” as was the southern custom. Her b
irth certificate states her father’s occupation as lawyer, but according to Robert, he earned a living raising and selling horses to the military. Courtenay’s siblings were close growing up but, as Robert points out, “William, Jr. [‘Willie’] died in a car accident under mysterious circumstances. She never talked about it much.” Courtenay’s sister Anne, born Feb. 14, 1898, “…had a problem. Her father had to bail her out of a situation where she had been made the caretaker of a trust fund in which she had borrowed money to drink with. So he bailed her out. I think my mother had a, not a phobia, but a mild fear of booze. Her brother had been quite a drinker and maybe her father, too.” It was a mild fear that, others noticed, diminished over the ensuing years.

  As a young girl attending grade school in Washington, D.C., Courtenay entertained dreams of becoming a dancer. She graduated from Washington Business High School in 1915, and a few years later, sold war bonds during WWI. The closest she ever got to show business in her youth was designing the costumes for a musical version of the poem “Trees” in the early 1920s. She also loved the written word and continued to hone that craft through constant submissions to newspapers and magazines. Her masculine-sounding first name often got her work published, but when it came to getting into The New York Times training program, she was accepted, but only at half the pay a man would have received at that time.

  It was while she was working at the Times to seek her fortune that she met Monte Marvin. “I didn’t make my fortune,” she would later say, “but I found my husband.” After a brief courtship, Courtenay and Monte married September 3, 1921 in her parents’ home in Washington, D.C. On their 20th anniversary she would later write Monte, “ I see you again, quite as you were then, so young, so serious, and, I suppose, so frightened. I see you and me kneeling before Dr. Dudley who is no more. I see my father feeling for my elusive ring, and I hear plainly now words that were then just a sound. Now, I think of those words seriously. How serious was that act, how long reaching, how very indelible the effect on our lives. And from that came two more lives.”

  Such purple prose was typical of both her writing and personal style, which she utilized to the fullest in her correspondence to Monte. The young couple was truly in love during the heady early days of the jazz era. They lived simply in a sparsely decorated apartment, first in Washington after their marriage, and later New York. On a Father’s Day in the early 1940s, she wrote Monte, “Since I can’t send you a gift, let me send you a memory or two of you, as I shall always think of you, when I can push aside the dark, stifling curtains of the moment and look backwards. First, recorded for the duration of this life the sound of your footsteps coming down the long hall in Mrs. Beegle’s apartment, where we first lived. Perhaps it was five thirty or so, and I would be there, because I was then looking for a job and would get home early. That hall had a kind of polished linoleum covering and the footsteps had a kind of pat and yours had a special swift rhythm. Later on in life, the footsteps transformed themselves to the sound of a key in a door, the click, the opening, you and your greeting. The nightly return of the loved one.”

  In the same letter, she wrote Monte a reminder of the event of July 18, 1922, when she gave birth to their first child, Robert Davidge Marvin, born in D.C. and named in part for her legendary Confederate ancestor, Robert E. Lee: “A very hot Saturday afternoon in Columbia Maternity Hospital. I knew you would come, but not just when. The door opened, and you stood there, still for an instant, and then it seemed you flew and were kneeling beside my bed. But it was the eyes I still see; your young face, taut and drawn, your eyes burning in anxiety and love and suffering, for Weensie had been born four or five days before. Though I could not turn or move, I can still remember that great desire to take you into the bed with me, only because you looked as if you had suffered. And then your face as you held Weensie with his little fattened head, and your deep, deep concern. Had everything been done for both of us?”

  As flowery as they were, these letters were written as a way for Courtenay to get an emotional response from the usually reserved yet gentlemanly Monte. They were not necessarily physically affectionate with each other, but as Robert remembers, “Their gestures were different. Some of these guys are always pawing their wives, pulling them around. I didn’t see much of that. My father could be a very warm and affectionate man, but he wasn’t very demonstrative, the way you see some people are, guys who like to kiss all the wives and stuff.” With a young family to support, the not quite thirty year-old Monte sought gainful employment wherever he could find it. Once his time in the army proved a dead end, he began looking for opportunities beyond his bank clerk job.

  They were living in New York, and Monte was working in field sales for the Frank Seaman Agency when Courtenay next went into labor. As was the custom, the child was named for the same ancestor as Robert, Robert E. Lee, and on February 19, 1924, in New York’s Booth Memorial Hospital, Lee Marvin was born. The actor would later joke that his memory was so strong he could actually recall his birth, stating proudly, “I once tried to figure out the first time I felt guilt, and it goes so far back that I might have been an inch long at the time.”

  It was while working in field surveys that Monte and the rest of the world discovered the truth surrounding his Uncle Ross Marvin’s fate. The New York Times ran an exclusive article by then noted Arctic explorer George Palmer Putnam. Putnam would later gain fame as a publisher and as promoter of his wife Amelia Earhart’s exploits, but in September, 1926, he was the english translator of a remarkable confession recorded the previous year: Danish missionary Knud Rasmussen had heard the testimony of Kudluktoo, the Inuit he had converted to Christianity which, told sixteen years after the fact, revealed that as one of two Inuit guides, he and his cousin nicknamed “Harrigan” were responsible for Ross Marvin’s death.

  The confession was thoroughly checked out before it was made public. Harrigan was questioned separately following Kudluktoo’s statement, and the story stood up even in minute detail. When Ross and his guides were attempting their trek back to the ship over the frozen waters, Harrigan had stayed behind briefly to untangle the dog lines. Marvin and Kudluktoo diverged on foot approximately a half mile apart in an effort to chart the route back. Harrigan caught up with Kudluktoo’s trail, and together they had waited until Marvin could catch up with their trail. “He lost his temper,” Kudluktoo stated. “He threw Harrigan’s things off the sled and said he could not stay with us.” This sudden rage on the part of the normally restrained Marvin frightened the cousins. Harrigan knew he would surely die if left without food or water; he followed from a distance as Marvin continued to rail against the Inuits, and Kudluktoo wept in fear. When Marvin stopped the sled to check the trail ahead on foot, Kudluktoo waved over to the nearby Harrigan.

  “He yelled at me that I should bring him his rifle,” recalled the frightened Harrigan. “He had seen a seal in the open water. I brought him his rifle and went back again to the sled. I heard a shot a moment after and expected that Kudluktoo had shot the seal. But right away he came over to me and told me what happened, that there was no seal. He had shot Marvin in order to save my life… Marvin was shot just behind the ear and was killed instantly. We took the body out where the ice would cover him and wiped out all tracks.” Four days later they reached the ship and told the concocted tale of Ross Marvin’s drowning.

  When The New York Times ran the confession on its front page, it was picked up around the world to instant repercussions. President Coolidge’s Secretary of State Frank Kellogg ordered an official investigation into possible criminal charges, but none were filed. It proved to be not only a case of self-defense, but had occurred in an area of the world in which no jurisdiction existed. At the time of the incident, it was literally no-man’s land until Denmark claimed the region a few years later.

  Monte Marvin’s legal guardian and beloved uncle died as a result of the ultimate act of violence on the last uncharted area on earth. The devastating effect this had on Monte was incalcul
able. For the rest of his days he kept his most vulnerable emotions in check as a result of this primal act. In contrast, his son, a recognized international film icon, would spend his adult life exploring the emotional impact of violence, and its effect on the human experience.

  The surviving family decided the “official” explanation would be the only accepted one and never told Ross’s then eighty-six year-old mother. In their minds, it would do no good to have her grieve again years after the tragedy in her weakened condition, nor did they believe the facts of the confession. It went against all that they held dear to think Ross had lost control of his faculties in the midst of his dilemma. Monte kept a meticulous scrapbook of the events as they unfolded but never mentioned it to his family. “If I didn’t know about it, which I didn’t” recalled Robert in 1995, “I can guarantee Lee didn’t know.”

  Monte told his sons of his idolized Uncle’s brave sacrifice but not the truth of his demise. By all accounts he never spoke of it to anyone. Any anger, resentment, or disillusionment he may have felt over the murder of his uncle was channeled instead through the puritan ethic of silence, hard work, and discipline. Ironically, the recipient of such discipline was his often rebellious youngest son.

  Whether it could be called a response to discipline or abuse, Lee’s reaction was swift and decisive: at the age of four he ran away from home. He had disappeared for two days before he was finally discovered hiding on a train bound for Baltimore. It proved to be the first of many such incidents perpetrated throughout his childhood, always ending with young Lee reluctantly returning to Manhattan and the brunt of his father’s wrath. The actor later said of his constant conflict with Monte: “I wasn’t having any too much discipline, even then. My father was tough. At least he thought so, and I guess I have a lot of his traits.”