To be buried? Perhaps, but that is of little importance to him now or ever. His clenched hands still but firm, grasping the dirt in his last attempt to keep from sliding into the unknown.
Monte had hoped Lee would get his diploma and use the G.I. Bill to become an engineer. Lee had contemplated several other careers, including forest ranger and car salesman, but when requirements like geometry became insurmountable, he again disappointed his father by dropping out of school altogether.
In Woodstock, Lee could often be found at a favorite hangout: The S.S. Seahorse. One longtime resident referred to it as “The greatest dive I’ve ever seen in my life. People used to line up in the summer just to get in to it.” One attraction of the oddly shaped tavern was the architecture, which resembled a landlocked ship complete with appropriate decor and even portholes for windows. The local artisans and bohemians welcomed Lee as the most popular reveler in their midst.
The music and laughter offered only a fleeting refuge from the nightmares. According to Robert, “When Lee would come home, he was a little disturbed at night. He had a lot of nightmares. He wasn’t exactly yelling but the poor guy would go through all kinds of convulsions.” In rare moments of candor, Lee confessed to his brother he saw snipers in the trees just as he drifted off, or that he had relived the battle that decimated his outfit.
On occasion, he would drink at home with his family. The evening would start innocently enough, but would spiral out of control at the slightest provocation. Courtenay would sneak off to safer grounds when the dark clouds began forming. Inevitably, as the night and alcohol wore on, Monte would declare, “You Marines are a lot of bullshit!” or “My outfit in the artillery can do anything the goddamned Marines can do!” Sometimes Lee would be the provocateur, making the same pronouncements about the Army. Whoever started it, the end result was often physical.
Once, Robert brandished a hunk of firewood at his brother while Lee berated his father. When the intoxicated Robert missed his swing, the equally drunk Lee caught his brother with a fist that sent Robert sprawling face up on the front lawn. “I was wearing a good pair of pants and the next morning I saw a rip in it,” Robert recalled smiling. “I said to him, ‘Lee, would you mind putting up the money so I could get my pants fixed?’ he said, ‘Fuck you, too.’ That was the end of that one.”
Even though Monte and Lee were both dealing with the same issues, the men were too polarized to reconcile with each other. The guilt Lee suffered the morning after a family brawl often kept him away for days at a time. Sometimes he would inexplicably find himself in a bar somewhere in Brooklyn. Other times he’d wander down to Greenwich Village and hang out with the bums that drank through the night. They would string a rope across a building and hook their arms on to it so they could sleep standing up without getting arrested. The next morning, someone would untie the rope and send everyone sprawling. Marvin would then join the denizens in a concoction known as “smoke,” a powerful mixture of illuminating gas blown into a jar of water that resulted in a high akin to LSD. Whatever he did, Lee could never travel far enough or drink enough to escape his war-induced or domestic trauma.
When he would return, dutifully apologetic, the cycle would start up again, often at Courtenay’s subtle instigation. Her attempts at maintaining the facade of domestic bliss would result in Lee and the other Marvin men having to sit through meaningless social teas or Sunday afternoon art lectures. On one such occasion, the entire family made an appearance on local radio for a show based on “Thanksgiving in Strange Places.” The Marvin men discussed their war experiences while a Girl Scout Choir sang in the background. Unfortunately, no tape of the show exists, or of the drive home.
Monte had become fairly well known in the rural community, to the point he could get jobs for both of his sons. By early 1946, Robert was working for a printer and saving for college, while Lee became a plumber’s apprentice under the tutelage of Adolph Heckeroth. A native of Diddledorf, Germany, Heckeroth had migrated to the U.S. in the 20’s, and eventually settled in Woodstock, where he put his plumbing skills to good use.
To anyone willing to look, Bill Heckeroth—who now runs his father’s business—will gladly point out a treasured memento carved in the wood of his father’s wall-hung toolbox: “This is Adolph’s. Help yourself.” The engraver was, of course, Lee Marvin. Bill was just a child when Lee worked for his father, but he remembers with great affection the oversized young man with the booming voice who’d put his feet up on his father’s desk and tell fascinating stories to anyone within earshot.
Lee’s work consisted of digging septic tanks and hand-threading pipes for $1.25 an hour. Hard as it was, this work proved therapeutic. “A guy digging ditches or a plumber wiping joints, it solves problems, you know?” Marvin later said. “You have to dig this hole so wide, so long, so deep. You dig it and that’s it. You climb out and say, ‘Boy, I don’t know what it was, but I solved it today.’ Good therapy for my back.” Marvin found such comfort in this work that he maintained his union card even after his rise to cinematic stardom, and often worked on the plumbing in his Hollywood agent’s house.
Adolph Heckeroth genuinely liked Lee, who impressed the veteran plumber with his natural prowess for the job. Once, when Heckeroth wanted Lee to help him measure the depth of a well, Lee told him not to bother with the old knotted string and weight device. Lee boasted he would merely drop a pebble and could tell by its acceleration the exact depth of the well. Heckeroth was astonished when Lee’s measurement proved to be exactly what Heckeroth’s string registered. He never knew Lee had measured the depth the night before.
Such pranks kept him in good graces when he would occasionally incur the old man’s wrath. On a day off, Lee showed up with a deer he had shot out of season and nonchalantly asked his boss to keep it in his basement freezer for a short time. Bill Heckeroth recalls, “It wasn’t long after, the state police arrived. Dad’s in a tight spot with them now. They wanted to know if he knew anything about this deer and if he’d seen Lee. My father gave him hell after that.”
In spite of these occasional trespasses, Lee and Heckeroth remained on good terms. Long after his success, Lee would sneak in the back door to visit Adolph and Bill Heckeroth whenever he was in Woodstock. His presence drew triple-takes from the current employees as the internationally famous film star would put his shoes up on the nearest desk, and with beer in hand announce, “My next film is going to be your life story, Adolph. It’ll be called Return to Diddledorf.”
Lee’s off-hour pursuits in Woodstock were often spent in the company of another local, David Ballantine. The diminutive Ballantine may have seemed an unlikely partner in Marvin’s revelry, but the two shared many common interests. “We fished,” recalls Ballantine. On one memorable occasion Ballantine—appropriately attired in hip waders—lost his footing and plunged into the roaring stream. Lee did eventually help his struggling comrade, after taking his time to cast his line first. “That was just Lee,” adds his friend.
Ballantine had met Lee after his own discharge from the service in June of 1946. “I fought WWII in the Zone of the Interior, which is a euphemism for the United States. When I met Lee, I was in Woodstock on the 52/20 Club, the unemployment thing,” he jokes today. “He was quite strong, too. He would do things I think sometimes to show everybody he was Lee Marvin and they were not, like carrying Heckeroth’s big pipe-cutting tripod one-handed, or lifting up the front end of a car. When people ask me what was he like, I usually say, ‘Try to imagine a non-effeminate Clint Eastwood!’”
Ballantine’s interest in and knowledge of firearms, as well as his individualism made him a willing and able Tom Sawyer to Marvin’s Huck Finn. Their mutual interest once took a near disastrous turn. To show their forays in gun handling were not all macho swagger, they took it upon themselves to demonstrate to a gathering of gawking youngsters the proper way in which to dispose of surplus gunpowder. Their good intentions resulted in a blinding flash. When the smoke cleared, the children laug
hed uproariously at a blackfaced Lee Marvin, sans eyebrows.
Studio biographies have said the Ballantines and the Marvins were good friends. “I knew Monte and Courtenay very, very slightly,” corrects David. “Children now will invite friends in for dinner and such. In those days, there was a separation. I was Lee’s friend, really. Not that they weren’t friendly to me. Courtenay was pleasant enough and Monte had a dignity to him. Lee told me, if someone went in a bar to give everyone shit, they’d walk a wide circle around Monte. Monte was pretty tough.”
David Ballantine did not often share his friend’s penchant for what he called “the gargle.” As he recalled, “A couple of times Lee was just snot-flying drunk. I remember many years later, when he came to visit, he was just causing shit in a bar. I took him aside and said, ‘You know what’s going to happen one of these days? You’re going to walk around the corner and there’s going to be a younger Lee Marvin and he’s going to pound the shit out of you. Stop pushing your luck!’ He understood. He wasn’t stupid.”
On a cool March night in 1946, Lee was sleeping off one such episode on a bench in the village green. At sunrise, children familiar with the sight of him in this condition as they passed him on the way to school, knew that even prodding the unconscious giant with a stick was a dare not worth taking. One local resident, either not aware or braver than most, disregarded the danger and proceeded to talk to the prone figure. When Lee’s vision came into focus and the buzzing in his head had sufficiently dulled, he saw a very proper young woman beside him discussing the virtues of community services.
Scanning the area and realizing she must be talking to him, Lee smirked at the irony when she asked him to appear in an amateur Red Cross Benefit at Woodstock’s Town Hall, titled “Ten Nights In a Barroom.” He had been in school productions as far back as grade school and, as previously stated, had made a notable impression in St. Leo’s production of “Brother Orchid.” Figuring it might be a similar kick, he shrugged his shoulders and proceeded over the next several weeks to rehearse the farce with his young fellow amateurs.
“Lee’s performance was the most hilarious I’ve ever seen,” a proud Monte recalled in 1966. “The mustache kept falling off. Everybody in the cast forgot their lines and Lee’s hands were very much in evidence pushing out scripts from the wings. Even then, he left them in the aisles.”
Like the tales of Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan, the story of Lee’s professional acting debut has become the stuff of legend that begins with a kernel of truth and grows with time into larger-than-life proportions. Some versions claim Lee was being boisterous in a local bar, and instead of being bounced, was asked if he could be just as obnoxious onstage. There are even more creative tales, but the most consistent, started by Marvin himself, is that the door to acting was unlocked through his career in plumbing.
Marvin told several interviewers that it was while he had his head in the Maverick Theater commode that he heard his destiny beckon. As he recalled many times over the years, “The director needed a tall loudmouth to play a Texan. The actor who played the part was sick. I was standing in the wings after fixing the head, eyeing this redheaded actress. Later, the director looked at me and figured I was made for the part. The other actor took longer to recuperate than expected. By that time, I was in the business and I loved it.”
When told of this, Monte Marvin later commented, “Nothing could be further from the truth since the theater had no toilet, only a one-holer outside.” David Ballantine also concurs on this point. However, the event that actually catapulted Lee Marvin into acting was just as good a story.
When David Ballantine turned twenty-one, his family held a celebratory birthday party in his honor. Lee always looked forward to any party but especially enjoyed the Ballantine family. David’s brother Ian was publisher of Ballantine Books and his mother Stella was a founder of Lee’s progressive school, Manumit. David’s father, E. J. ‘Teddy’ Ballantine, had an illustrious theatrical history, which included membership in Eugene O’Neill’s Provincetown Players and—most impressive to Lee—drinking bouts with the great John Barrymore. Teddy was also an integral part of the aptly named Maverick Theater. Among the guests at the informal soiree, Lee endeared himself with his usual array of outlandish and almost boorish antics. Also in attendance was Ian’s wife, Betty. A petite woman known for wearing long flowing dresses, even in the muggy summer, she eventually became a confidante to the young Lee Marvin.
Lee himself recalled the events that transpired that night when his tale-spinning talent was still in its infancy: “I got swocked. I was dancing with a girl named Joy, which is what she was: 145 pounds and all of it pink and beautiful. At the party I found out the leading man of the local theater had run out on an upcoming production.” It was just this fact E.J. Ballantine was discussing with the director when he noticed Lee jumping for Joy amid the other revelers.
“He was a very impressive character even then,” recalled Betty Ballantine. “First of all, there was his voice. His voice was absolutely amazing. Then, he had a real gift for telling stories with a great sense of humor. He used body language, since Lee had an extraordinary control of his physical presence. He was the kind of a person who comes into a room and you damn well notice him. The play they were preparing was called ‘Roadside.’ They wanted a loudmouth Texan. Teddy said, ‘We got a loudmouth right here. Hey, Lee! Come over here!’ Of course, we were all feeling no pain. Lee with that wonderful voice he had, read for the play. He got the part and Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday, I sat with him. Teddy and I both walked him through it. Well, he never really learned the script. How could he? He only had a day and half.”
When Lee heard his cue opening night, “It grabbed me just like that!” he would say with a snap of his fingers. “Suddenly I felt… Expression!” After years of rebellion, masked fear and uncertainty, Lee stepped out on to the stage that rainy summer night and made it his own. Lee’s powerful voice rumbled through the Hudson Valley like a small earthquake to let one and all know that he had discovered his true calling.
On the last weekend in June of 1947, the Ulster County News proudly proclaimed, “Lee Marvin as the 6’3” ‘Texas,’ loomed even taller when silhouetted against the intense blue of the sky. It was very effective.”
Lee found what he had been searching for during the short run of “Roadside.” With absolutely no professional training, he came to acting fully endowed for what the work entailed. Although he never really learned all the dialogue for the opening show, “He had such presence onstage he could pick up and carry the story through and the other actors would pick up from him and keep the story going,” recalled Betty Ballantine. “I went to the play I guess four or five times because he was so funny. He gave a different performance every night.” He quit his job at Heckeroth’s the very next day.
The summer of 1947 saw Lee devoting all of his considerable energy to the Maverick Theater’s summer stock productions. He later reasoned, “It was the closet thing to the Marine Corps way of life I could find at the time —hard work and no crap.” The camaraderie was key, but acting also did something else for the combat veteran: it gave him an outlet to express his inner demons that had been frustrating him since the war. “Acting is a search for communication,” he later explained. “This is what I am doing—trying to communicate, get my message across. I can play these parts, these horrible, animal men. I do things on stage you shouldn’t do and I make you see you shouldn’t do them.”
Although the Maverick did have an impressive roster of talent, only one other alumnus would achieve any level of celebrity. Canadian-born James Doohan, best known as ‘Scotty’ on the original “Star Trek” series, remembers the Lee Marvin of that summer and concurs: “Hard work and no crap, no doubt about it! We were a cooperative where everybody did everything to get the play going. Being Lee’s first entrance into the theater, that was probably the thing he liked more about it than anything else. It was, ‘Hey, I’m a partner here!’”
The
short run of “Roadside” was not without other incidents— David Ballantine perpetrated a prank on his newly stagestruck friend. During a performance, Lee’s intensity was tested when his gun exploded in his hand due to an abundance of gunpowder. He managed to stay in character, but privately fumed at the knowledge that only one person had the expertise to pull off such a stunt.
Following “Roadside,” the Maverick staged ten other productions that summer, with Lee contributing to practically every one of them. Later he would recall, “When I put on the rags, I didn’t feel it was make-believe. I felt it was real… Besides, a combat Marine doesn’t get intimidated easily. The Corps teaches you when it’s time to toe the mark, you toe the mark. I’ve applied much of what I learned in the Marine Corps to acting.”
Doohan also appeared in every production that summer, honing a talent for accents and voices that would become a trademark. “We slept in cabins with three to four guys to a cabin. There were some terrific women there and I slept with a few. Hell, you needed it, you know? It was terribly romantic just by the setting alone.”
Doohan was not alone in taking advantage of the Maverick’s bucolic setting. According to Betty Ballantine, when it came to women, “Lee was a killer. Jesus, he had them trailing around him all over the place. At that time in his life, he had a very bad attitude about women. All he basically wanted to do was lay them… He had two or three affairs concurrently which I guess most of us knew about. He was only twenty-three then, but I wondered when he got married if he had changed at all.”
Lee’s attitude is apparent in the correspondence he maintained at the time. Letters from women he knew in Chicago, Texas and New York all profess undying love for him alone. “He also of course had an affair with the company’s leading lady,” recalled Betty Ballantine. “She was a very white-skinned, very big woman, which he liked, this kind of red-gold hair.” A pretty young Woodstock resident named Pamela Feeley also fell under his spell. Their relationship was brief, and, according to her autobiography, resulted in an abortion.
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