Lee Marvin: Point Blank

by Dwayne Epstein

  Marvin’s career received a well-needed jolt in 1953 with a performance that became a classic of its genre. As fancy-dressed yet sadistic henchman Vince Stone, Marvin was well cast. First, he stubs his cigarette out in Carolyn Jones’ hand. Later, when he thinks his moll Gloria Grahame has been talking to Ford, he angrily tosses a pot of scalding hot coffee in her face, creating one of the most horrific acts of brutality in movie history. It made James Cagney smashing a grapefruit in Mae Clark’s face seem playful by comparison. New York Times film critic Vincent Canby appropriately dubbed Marvin, “The Merchant of Menace.” A new era of filmmaking had clearly arrived, and Lee Marvin was poised to be at its vanguard.

  During the making of the film, Marvin impressed the legendary Lang. “We’re sitting around a coffee table between scenes, and Fritz Lang is reminiscing about the original M that he directed in Germany with Peter Lorre,” recalls fellow henchman Chris Alcaide. “Sitting around the table was Adam Williams, who was also in the film as one of the henchmen, Alexander Scourby, and myself. As he’s talking of it, Lee, who was smoking large cigars in the film, took the cigar out of his mouth and said, ‘Tell me Mr. Lang, what other films have you done?’ Fritz Lang got hysterical. Lang loved him for that line. Lang said, “You son-of-a-bitch, I love you.”

  His costar Gloria Grahame had a strange obsession of abnormally protruding her upper lip that effected her speech. Alcaide recalled, “Lee’s girlfriend, Gloria Grahame, had a sequence where she was supposed to say, ‘When he cracks the whip, you all jump. Hup Larry! Hup Vince!’ Lang kept her going all morning on that. We were waiting outside the door, Lee, Alexander Scourby, and myself to make an entrance, all morning. We broke for lunch because in the middle of it, she kept saying ‘Hump Larry! Hump Vince!’ Fritz would say, ‘Zere vill be no humping in ziz picture!’”

  The graphic film noir resulted in Marvin getting more work, albeit still in support of bigger named but less talented stars. On the set of Gun Fury, another forgettable 3-D western, this time with Rock Hudson and Donna Reed, fellow bad guy Leo Gordon recalled, “In those days, the [3-D] cameras weren’t quite as effective as they are now. The westerns in particular, it happened every damned time. The cameraman would say, ‘Could you push your hat up, a little bit? I can’t see your eyes.’ That’s why you’ll notice in those pictures all the guys are running around with a forelock hanging out from their forehead. Lee said, ‘To hell with that. All they gotta see is my mouth when I’m talking.’ He’d pull it down to the bridge of his nose. They just accepted it. It worked.”

  In spite of the hard work, Marvin did manage to have fun, usually at another actor’s expense. “He was a pretty muscular gun nut. So am I, or was,” recalled Gordon. “We were on the set one day and I happened to have a Garand M-1. He showed me a little trick. He just brushed the trigger guard in a certain way and the whole assembly came out in one piece. So, I used to get a kick out of doing that with these actor types who wouldn’t know a Garand from a plunger. I’d just take the whole assembly out and put it on the side. They’d go to pick up the gun and the rifle and the barrel and everything else would become detached. [They would shout] ‘It broke! It broke!’”

  Such pranks relieved the tedium of location shooting as the actor strove for better roles in better films. His wife recalled what his early goal in Hollywood was: “When he was a young actor, and we were just married, we were just kids. He would say, ‘What I want more than anything is just to be a character actor. I only want to be a character actor.’ That’s what he loved.”

  Getting the chance to create a character role against one of the biggest stars in Hollywood was in the offing. He wrote his brother, “There are big things in the wind in a thing that Stanley Kramer, the producer of Eight Iron Men is going to do called The Cyclist Raid. It’s a great idea for a script and they say they definitely want me for the second lead, a damned good part. The idea is it is a motorcycle club that has broken up into two clubs and you see what those crazy bastards are like. I will lead one group and the other group is led by a good quiet type, get this, Marlon Brando. If I get this part, which I think I will get, I think it would do the trick as far as a career is concerned. Keep your fingers crossed.”

  The wind was in his favor as both he and Brando were signed to the retitled seminal biker film, The Wild One. Remembered now mostly as a showcase for Brando, the film was actually based on a true story in which bikers wreaked havoc in the sleepy little town of Hollister, California shortly after WWII. As one of Brando’s gang members, Alvy Moore watched as novice biker Lee Marvin wrestled with a Harley: “Lee passed me coming in over at the Columbia Ranch on a motorcycle. He asked me, ‘So, you want a ride?’ I said, ‘Lee, I wouldn’t get on that motorcycle with you for any amount of money.’ He was in costume at the time. He took off, lost control, and ran it right into the women’s john.”

  Marvin learned quick and, as Moore recalled: “When the director [Laslo Benedek] walked down the street one day and saw Brando and Marvin doing ‘wheelies’ he said, ‘No! No! No more riding unless it’s in the scene. When you see them doing that, take those motorcycles away from those guys.’ That was the perfect picture for Lee. He loved that.”

  Producer Kramer remembered that in spite of the subject matter, the actors took their parts very seriously. “He [Marvin] and Marlon Brando… spent three days practicing getting on and off a cycle the way they would because it was a very special thing. It wasn’t just a simple maneuver. It was a style, devil-may-care. He was very attentive to that kind of detail… Lee wasn’t a fancy guy. He did a more difficult thing. He reduced to utter simplicity something that seemed terribly involved for most other actors.”

  Brando, the biggest star in Hollywood at the time and the one actor everyone wanted to emulate, met his match in Marvin—and vice-versa. “They got along but it was a tolerance,” explained Kramer. “Two strong personalities that came on as actors, they were heads of rival gangs in that film, so it stood up. Marlon Brando was a star by then.” Asked about any off-screen rivalry and Kramer responds, “Nah, neither one would have cared one way or the other.”

  In spite of the film’s showcase of Brando, Betty Marvin recalled, “Lee was always, in the tense scenes, it was like a glass had been thrown against the wall and hadn’t yet broken. When’s it going to shatter?… You just saw that adrenaline pumping. Also, they were both young actors, but Lee had a maturity that Brando didn’t have yet. Brando was kind of a kid next to Lee. Lee was like the adult in that gang. Remember, he was the older guy.”

  Over the years, legends have grown concerning the two actors’ interaction, many of them fanned by Marvin himself. Off-camera, the two men were anything but rivals. “When they did The Wild One, he was our son’s baby-sitter,” recalled Betty. “We were together all the time. Brando taught me to play bongos on the peanut butter jars. We did things together. They were different in some ways in that Brando compared to Lee was very childlike. Brando was one who would make Lee laugh. He’d tell me that they would drive to the studio and he’d tell me later, ‘Do you know Bud was trying to pick up a girl at the red light?’ He was like a kid, flirting. I liked his honesty. I also think he’s very bright.”

  Brando never cared for the film despite the fact that young girls swooned over him and young men tried to emulate him. Critics felt the film was exploitative, and singled out Marvin particularly as too old to play the rival biker. What the critics did not realize was that Marvin’s look and over-the-top performance was actually more in line with the real bikers who had invaded Hollister. Future Hell’s Angels founder Sonny Barger was so inspired by Marvin’s character Chino, that he bought the iconic striped shirt that Marvin had worn in the film. After the movie was released, the real bikers it was based on camped out in front of the Marvin home. Betty made them meals, but in time they drifted off to greener pastures. When they were on the property, Lee avoided them, warning his wife, “Just don’t make eye contact with them!”

  Other than pioneering the genre
of biker movies that flooded the theaters the following decade, The Wild One earned another footnote in cultural history. Though this theory is often disputed, the story goes that, when the film was released in Britain several years later after censorship battles, a young John Lennon was also inspired by Marvin’s gang, especially its name, “The Beetles.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “You Look Like You Need a Hand.”

  WHILE AUDIENCES and critics enjoyed Marvin in some of their favorite films, industry insiders recognized his ability to do whatever was required of him. Lee Marvin clearly understood this role in the business, stating, “I was a troubleshooter. If they didn’t know what to do with a role, they’d say, ‘We’ll give it to Lee Marvin. He’ll do something without overpowering the stars.’” Stardom may have been out of reach, but his ability to do impressive work remained a constant.

  He appeared in three films in 1954, securing himself a decent living of roughly $15,000 annually. The pay was well earned since not overpowering the stars was not always as easy as it sounded. Sometimes the star was a stuntman in a gorilla suit, as when the actor appeared in yet another 3-D opus, Gorilla At Large. The self-explanatory title takes place at a circus and starred such embarrassed actors as Cameron Mitchell, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Burr and a very young Anne Bancroft. “I caught Lee’s first screen triumph,” Woodstock friend David Ballantine joked about his friend’s minor role as a dimwitted cop. “I think his one line was, ‘The ape has not been born yet that can outsmart Shaunessy’… Great writing.”

  Such lowbrow projects were the chaff he had to cut through to get to the wheat. In this case the harvest was a minor role in The Caine Mutiny. Based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel by Herman Wouk, the story concerned the breakdown of a mentally unstable captain of a minesweeper during WWII. Humphrey Bogart starred as Captain Queeg with Van Johnson, Fred MacMurray and Robert Francis as the mutinous officers. The last half of the film included an impressive turn by Jose Ferrer as their defense lawyer. Much further down the cast list was Lee Marvin as ‘Meatball,’ who, along with Claude Akins as ‘Horrible,’ provided the film’s comic relief.

  Producer Stanley Kramer liked what he saw in Marvin and hired him for the third time for this production. Eight Iron Men’s Edward Dmytryk again directed, and said of Marvin, “He was a goofball but he was a fun goofball. The scene where he gives the watch to the retiring skipper was a very nice scene.” He also stated that none of Marvin and Akin’s antics in the film were scripted, allowing them to be wildly improvisational and very funny within the confines of their scenes.

  He also dispelled a popular myth that Marvin was an unofficial technical adviser on the film. This seems unlikely since a naval film would certainly not go to a former Marine for advice, especially since several members of the cast, such as Bogart and Jerry Paris, had served in the Navy. The legend may have started due to an incident just prior to filming. Producer Kramer had a major headache trying to get the military’s cooperation for the film and, once negotiations were finalized, a celebratory cocktail party was held to smooth things over on the site of the film’s Pearl Harbor location.

  “There they were, ‘admiral’ this and ‘general’ that, the high command,” recalled Lee’s brother. “They’re all being introduced around. He (Lee) comes to a fella, a Marine general. He’s shaking hands and so, either he or the general said, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ My brother says, ‘Excuse me, were you Colonel Franklin Hart in the Second World War?’ All of a sudden, it turns out that Lee was in the colonel’s battalion. Then, the emphasis shifts a little. Now they’re back in battle and so forth. Hart is introducing my brother, according to him, to half of the people there that they fought the battle of Saipan together. The whole show begins to shift. Now you have this somewhat obscure actor coming off as one of those heroes. Kramer said to my brother, ‘Never upstage me like that again. I’m gonna blackball you.’ It’s a great story. Christ, how often do you get this satisfaction in front of the crew?”

  The fifty-four-day production also provided Marvin the only opportunity he would ever have to work closely with the legendary Humphrey Bogart in one of his last and best roles. Over the years, comparisons were often made between the two actors whenever Marvin was profiled in the media. Such comparisons were both obvious and inaccurate; obvious, since they did both work their way up the ranks playing small roles and villains until achieving major success later in life as unhandsome cinematic anti-heroes. This analogy would be acknowledged by Marvin, but only on a superficial level as he modestly thought he did not qualify to be mentioned in the same breath as Bogart.

  The inaccurate comparison between the two actors can be seen in viewing any of Bogart’s pre-stardom films. There is an undeniable quality of uneasiness that comes through in which the audience can discern Bogart’s disinterest with his minor roles. Such was not the case with Lee Marvin at the same point in his career. Marvin’s instincts and natural ability were infinitely more advanced in his early career, to the point the audience senses his mischievous wink of enjoyment while Bogart often seemed ill-at-ease or bored. Nonetheless, Marvin was humbled at being in the great man’s presence.

  His other film appearance of 1954 was in the Civil War era drama, The Raid. Based on the book, The Raid At St. Albans, it told the true story of escaped Confederate P.O.W.’s who go undercover in a sleepy Vermont town only to betray the townsfolk’s trust and burn it down. Van Heflin played the Confederate officer leading Peter Graves, James Best and Lee on the raid. Lee never even makes it close to the titular event as film critic A.O. Scott wrote: “Lee Marvin plays his role more than effectively, still Mr. Heflin is forced to bump him off.” A well-intentioned story was given the stereotypical Hollywood treatment while the lame plot concerning a secondary love triangle involving Heflin, Anne Bancroft and Richard Boone helped undermine the proceedings.

  Marvin’s cowering death scene provided the film’s highlight and, as he observed, “I was mainly hired as the dummy with the flat nose and the thick ear. I’ve got this sagging mouth, makes me look like an idiot—actually it’s because I can’t breathe through my nose. But I didn’t mind it for a while. I figured it’s the obligation of the bit player to make the star look better… I was earning fifteen thousand dollars a year and living well…”

  The salary came in handy on the home front because, following the birth of Christopher, Betty became pregnant again. It was the mid-1950s and, despite having her own promising musical career, she abandoned it for domestic life. According to Betty, “We had babies one right after another. I was so determined on getting pregnant, I said, ‘Well I’m pregnant now for nine months. Thank God, that’s over.’” She adds with a laugh, “People would say to me by the fourth child, ‘Betty, this is obscene.’ But Lee loved it when I was pregnant.”

  The remaining Marvin babies were all girls: Courtenay Lee, born in 1954; Cynthia Louise in 1956; and Claudia Leslie in 1958. The names were Betty’s idea, “The ‘C’ and ‘L’ names all came from family. Lee loved the idea. It was like we were naming orangutans or something,” she stated whimsically.

  This baby boom naturally required more room so the Marvins moved from their small West Los Angeles apartment to an actual house. “The first house we bought was up in Hollywood Knolls,” recalled Betty. “We had two children when we moved there and had our third child there. It already was too small.” Larger digs finally came in 1958 when the couple had their fourth and final child.

  While The Raid was having its short run in movie theaters in 1954, one of its stars could be seen onstage in a musical performance at the San Francisco Opera House’s premiere of Honneger’s “Joan of Arc at the Stake.” It was an oratorio with a full choir backing the speaking performances at the podium of Dorothy McGuire as Joan and Lee Marvin dramatically reading as Father Dominic. The two-week run would have made the Brothers of St. Leo proud.

  Marvin did not sing for the oratorio; that dubious distinction would come later in his career. However, he
did audition for the role of Jud in the film Oklahoma! that same year. “Lee had never sung,” remembers Betty. “I had all this voice training. I was mezzo-soprano. I said, ‘C’mon, I’ll take you to Irv, my voice teacher.’ He was the head of voice at UCLA and I worked with him for years. Irv works with him a couple of hours and says, ‘Oh God, you could be the greatest singer in the world.’ He had Lee singing full voice and just fabulous! So that’s a natural gift.”

  In 1955 any fans Lee Marvin may have had at the time would have been overjoyed with the presence of the actor in eight different films that year. The first was Bad Day at Black Rock, one of the best ensemble films of its day, and, arguably, one of the most influential of all time. It starred Spencer Tracy as a one-armed man on a mission coming to a desolate desert town lorded over by vicious Robert Ryan and his even more vicious henchmen headed up by Marvin and Ernest Borgnine. Millard Kaufman’s Oscar-nominated story unfolds expertly under the underrated direction of John Sturges who ratcheted up the tension like the slowly tuned strings of a guitar nearing the breaking point. “Like Lee, he was another guy who did things that were so good they went unnoticed, except subcutaneously. You felt them,” remarked Kaufman.