Lee Marvin: Point Blank

by Dwayne Epstein

  Marvin is a standout as Orville ‘Flash’ Perkins, a brash rival of Clift’s who transforms from a local braggart to a war hardened soldier during the lengthy film. It is a wonderfully nuanced performance, but lost in the gargantuan production. Marvin was able to show off his high school athletic prowess during an early scene in which his character challenges Clift to a foot race and then believably appears to have lost to his less coordinated rival. “There’s a scene in the bar in which he goes kind of wild,” recalls the film’s writer Millard Kaufman. “He attacks a post in the building and swings completely around on it. We had a stuntman in for that. The stunt guy couldn’t do it. So, Lee did it himself.”

  Early in the production Clift survived a horrific, near fatal car accident. His painful recovery hampered the remainder of the filming during which he immersed himself in massive quantities of pills and alcohol that resulted in very erratic behavior. Costar Rod Taylor recalled Marvin’s feelings towards Clift: “I think he felt like I did and felt sorry for him. Lee didn’t socialize much with him. I did that and I was the one who had dinner with him and got mashed potatoes thrown in my hair.”

  Off camera, Marvin got along with Rod Taylor who said, “Lee and I went with photographer Bob Willoughby and actor Nigel Patrick on this picnic. Now I’m from Australia and have some knowledge about waters and what not. Bob accidentally dropped this very expensive camera into the water. Everyone looked at the fucking swimming champ. I jumped into this murky water to look for the camera. I looked and looked. Nothing. Lee put down his tall, frosty, mint julep, cut through the water like a knife and brought up the camera as if guided by the hand of God, while I sputtered and choked on the swamp water.”

  The film proved to be an expensive failure upon its release, but the role did earn the actor enough money to finally purchase a larger house. The former home of Johnny Weismuller was nestled in a region of Santa Monica known as the “Uplifter’s Ranch.” Betty had discovered it by accident while Lee was filming Raintree. “Lee was on location so I called our business manager Ed Silver,” recalled Betty. “I said, ‘Ed, I found this great house for us. It’s the most wonderful house for us to raise our family.’ He said, ‘I’d love to see it.’ So he came out, looked around and all he saw was this mess. Then Ed called Lee. He said, ‘Lee, you don’t want this house. This house is a big mistake. It’s a mess. It’s going to take so much work.’ Lee said, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh. Does Betty like it?’ Ed said, ‘Well, yes.’ Lee said, ‘Then get it.’ He never saw it. He just said, ‘If she wants it, if she likes it, she’s gonna have it.’ That’s what I mean about him being a feminist. Not: ‘What does she know?’ He’d never admit it, but he was a real feminist.”

  Marvin finished out the decade with The Missouri Traveler, a folksy turn-of-the century family film starring Brandon DeWilde as a young runaway who finds comfort in a small town of quirky characters but is mistreated by Marvin’s wealthy and unscrupulous character, Tobias Brown. All works out in the end with Marvin getting his proper comeuppance and for the first time ever, actually getting the girl.

  His leading lady was Mary Hosford, making her sole film appearance before marrying wealthy Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. The scion of two of the richest families in America and a financial backer on the film, Whitney made the mistake of acting unnecessarily snide towards Betty at a dinner party during the making of the film. Lee Marvin witnessed all this and held his tongue. The next day on the set he approached Whitney when no one else was around and said, “If you ever talk to my wife again, I’ll tear your head off. Now, let’s roll. Let’s shoot this movie.”

  After nearly a decade of great performances, major stardom still eluded Marvin. Audiences might have been able to remember his face or possibly his name, but in order to put them both together required working in a medium he despised. Television would help audiences remember exactly who he was on a weekly basis. After much cajoling from his agent, who pressed this argument on his recalcitrant client, Marvin finally gave in to Meyer Mishkin’s pleadings and agreed to do a TV series. The decision to move the actor to TV proved Mishkin correct, but the effort nearly ruined their partnership, Marvin’s marriage, and any future he may have had in film.

  CHAPTER 7

  Man in a Straitjacket

  LEE MARVIN HATED television. Despite several previous offers, Marvin had avoided being tied down to a TV series. The emphasis on commercials over content, the rushed schedule, and the mediocre output, all conspired to make the actor feel, in his words, like a man in “a straitjacket.” Having appeared on the small screen since the very beginning of his career, he knew of what he spoke.

  Despite his initial aim to become a successful character actor, after nearly a decade of doing just that in feature films, his goal had morphed into something else entirely. As such contemporaries as Ernest Borgnine, Rod Steiger, and Jack Palance ascended to stardom throughout the 1950s, Marvin was understandably anxious to attain the same status. Meyer Mishkin finally convinced Marvin that the best chance he had to break through was by starring in a weekly television series. It would take some time for Mishkin to win over his client, because Marvin’s relationship with television—as recounted in the following pages—was a tempestuous one.

  Marvin often claimed he appeared in more than 200 live TV shows. While that number may be questionable, the abundance and variety of his work within the infant medium—concurrent with his movies—did give him the opportunity to prove his talent much more than films did during that time. Ironically, some of the most impressive and realistic acting he would ever do would be on the network soundstages.

  Starting out mostly playing henchmen and heavies in westerns and crime shows, Marvin quickly discovered that television provided him the opportunity to display his amazing versatility in every genre imaginable. In both early anthology and later episodic shows, he played complex individuals in genres running the gamut from science fiction/fantasy, biography, medical shows, and he even made appearances on variety and game shows. His various roles included everything from an astronaut to an immigrant grape picker, and he also once played a believable Lenny Bruce-styled comedian.

  Chronologically, Marvin’s first foray in television occurred while he was still working in New York, in such early shows as “T-Men In Action,” “Escape,” “Suspense,” “The Big Story,” and other holdovers from the radio era. Many were aired live, resulting in infamous gaffes that have become the stuff of legend. When TIME magazine profiled Marvin years later, he recounted a story of working in live TV with Rip Torn, who was supposed to shoot Marvin in an old-fashioned western showdown. According to Marvin, he drew a bead and shouted, “Now!” so convincingly, Torn dropped his gun. “No matter how fast they are, when you’ve got a white eye for a guy, it really gets them,” Marvin told Richard Schickel. In response, Torn wrote a letter to the magazine, stating: “Lee is a mythomaniac. Enclosed is the moldy kinescope of that show… It shows I hold on to the pistol even when dead. As my father once remarked, ‘That boy’s dropped a lot of things in his life, but I doubt he would drop a pistol.’”

  Marvin’s own questionable myth-making aside, there were other incidents that costars recalled more fondly with the passage of time. Eddie Albert remembered working with Marvin on “Outlaw’s Reckoning,” a western episode of an anthology show that was broadcast live on November 3, 1953. The actors had rehearsed diligently for more than a week on the climactic fight scene at a nearby gym on 57th Street. In spite of their preparation, when the show aired, things went slightly awry: “The fight was supposed to last about four minutes, but went for seven minutes on screen, which is a long time for such a physical workout,” recalled Albert. “After a round, or two minutes, you get pretty winded. That’s why we worked so hard on it. Lee was a pretty impressive physical athlete, and knew how to do a fight on stage.

  “What happened, we had some furniture in that room. It was real furniture, heavy furniture. Since we weren’t supposed to hit each other with it, the furniture was not brea
k-away. I think we did about four minutes, and were still fighting when he picked up this big table. Well, it happened because he took it easy with me to give me a chance to duck, but it hit the floor and fell the wrong way. He threw this thing, and he hit me, and down I went. It caught my leg underneath, and I couldn’t get up to fight anymore. Remember, this went out live, and I was supposed to win the fight! He jumped on me with his back to the camera and wriggled me so I could get out, and we went for four minutes on that thing. We were so tired, we’d hit each other and then pick each other up. It was a wonderful battle. I have nothing but the highest respect for him as an actor because of that.”

  In spite of such unplanned gaffes, Marvin still managed to have fun within the confines of the small screen. Veteran actress Beverly Garland remembers appearing with the actor on the 1955 pilot of the popular Richard Boone series, “Medic.” It was a somber tale of newlyweds, in which the pregnant wife was dying of leukemia. Filmed at a real hospital, Garland wore a very believable prosthetic to make her look eight months’ pregnant. “We would walk down the hall to go to the cafeteria, all these people are coming in and out,” recalled Garland. “Lee would go, ‘Pow!’ He’d hit me in the stomach and I’d go, ‘Arrgh!’ People would say, ‘My God, did you see what that man did to his wife?’ I’d say, ‘Lee, you’ve got to stop doing this.’ He thought it was the best thing that ever happened. I thought somebody was going to lynch the man.”

  Generally, Marvin got along with his fellow actors, save for one possible exception. According to Meyer Mishkin, “In the early days, he was doing a show with Reagan. I asked him, ‘What do you think of Ronald Reagan?’ He said, ‘He’s a jerk.’ I don’t remember him ever blasting any other actors or putting them down.” Marvin did not elaborate further, but would go on to work again with the future president in Reagan’s last acting role, and would not find reason to change his opinion.

  Working in the medium also allowed Marvin to forge relationships with directors who would later prove beneficial to his film career. “I did ‘Bailout At 43,000’ on ‘Climax!’ in 1956, I guess it was,” recalled John Frankenheimer. He later directed Marvin in 1973’s The Iceman Cometh, but recalled, “He didn’t drink at all when we were doing ‘Bailout.’ No drinking problem whatsoever. He and Richard Boone used to race their sports cars up and down Sunset Blvd., but there was no drinking.”

  The prolific TV and film director Buzz Kulik directed Marvin several times, and remembered, “He was a terrific personality. A real ballsy kind of guy. Had a great humor about him. He was a Marine, through and through. He wasn’t one of those kinds of guys who were into method acting. He didn’t dig deep into his inner soul. He was very instinctive. He wouldn’t ask what his motivation was. It was all instinct with him. He had very good instincts… He had a wonderful presence that came from the energy he generated. Some actors go through all kinds of machinations for a role. Lee would have none of it. He just worked through his incredible energy. I think that’s why he drank, [to] work off some of that energy.”

  The heyday of the live anthology show (“General Electric Theater,” “Pepsi-Cola Playhouse 90,” “Studio One,” etc.) did not last long as the more creative entities found it frustrating to establish plot and character development within the medium’s time constraints. According to veteran TV director Leslie Martinson, “You must understand that anthology TV is a very difficult form. The canvas is very small in which to develop… Audiences had to latch on in Scene One, Act One with the character. That’s why anthology never worked. The successful shows were rare ones…”

  Martinson directed Lee Marvin in one of the actor’s most offbeat TV anthologies. “How Charlie Faust Won a Pennant for the Giants” was a 30-minute episode of “TV Reader’s Digest” that aired April 1955, and, according to Martinson, “The truth is it was Lee Marvin’s show. He was just tailor-made for the part of Charlie Faust.” It told the 1911 baseball legend of a not-too-bright big league pitcher who never played the game, but was considered by manager John McGraw a good luck charm just by being in the dugout. “He was simply great,” Martinson said of Marvin’s performance. “In comedy, he had a built-in thermostat to his humor. Some comedians don’t, and would go over the top, but Lee instinctively knew what his limit was. When you encounter a performer who doesn’t [have a built-in thermostat], that’s when you need a strong director.”

  Marvin’s film appearances had yet to take advantage of his comic timing, but television certainly did. On a 1961 episode of “General Electric Theatre” titled “The Joke’s On Me,” the actor played a cynical nightclub comic opposite comedy legend Bud Abbott as his long-suffering agent. Marvin’s delivery of his standup material in the beginning and end of the show’s otherwise pedestrian plot is executed with razor sharp timing and gestures that lead one to wonder why he was not allowed to do more comedy in his career.

  One of the best and least known of Lee Marvin’s TV performances was in an episode of “Studio One” that aired in 1955. “Shakedown Cruise” was directed by future Oscar-winner Franklin Schaffner (Patton), and costarred Richard Kiley, Don Gordon, and a very young Walter Matthau. Marvin played Lt. Mark Peele, the executive officer of a submarine who desperately wants his own command, and says as much to Captain Kiley who is about to transfer. During a routine assignment, the torpedo room floods, and the lives of fifty men are now at risk. Peele shows his true colors during the crisis and becomes unhinged, shouting, “I’ve sunk in one of these things before!” The live show was a remarkable example of the dramatic capabilities of television: the creation of a premise in which tension can be built through plot and characters in a claustrophobic setting.

  “In those days I did a lot of “Studio One,” recalled Don Gordon. “It kept me alive. Don’t get me wrong. It didn’t pay that well. Only about $200, but it kept you going. I did one or two a month in those days, and it was hard work. You would rehearse for about ten to twelve days, and then go out there live. The next day, you’d be walking around New York and all the cab drivers would say, ‘Hey, I saw you last night in that show, and you were great.’ So the reaction was immediate. Cab drivers are the best that way. They wouldn’t have any problem saying, ‘Hey I saw you last night, and you stink!’ I love New York cab drivers.”

  By the late 1950s, when Lee Marvin’s film career had reached a plateau of portraying brutal bad guys and interesting second leads, the actor reconsidered the idea of a series. “Everybody knew me, but nobody knew my name,” he later said. “Every young actor should do a TV series to establish himself. That’s the only way you can stand out from the crowd.” Now that he had acquiesced to do a series in an effort to improve his film career, he ironically had no time available to make any films during the entire run of the show.

  The program he chose was “M Squad” and, as was the custom, it first aired as a pilot during an anthology series, in this case, “Schlitz Playhouse.” What sold the American Tobacco Company sponsor on Marvin was the way in which the actor handled his four-pack-a-day cigarette habit. “That kid really smokes,” noted one admiring executive.

  “M Squad” premiered in September 1957 on NBC with Marvin as Lt. Frank Ballinger, detective of a special detail of the Chicago Police Department called in to handle difficult cases. Episodes with titles such as “Grenade for A Summer Evening,” “Lover’s Lane Killing,” and “Ten Minutes to Doomsday” were played out in gritty black and white in which the crime is committed at the outset, and the remainder of the screen time belongs to Marvin as he solves the case. The only other regular cast member was Paul Newlan as Ballinger’s boss, Captain Grey. Marvin described Ballinger’s bristle-haired, .38-wielding detective as “No broads, no mother, no sleep, no eat, just a dumb fair cop.” The show was done in the popular procedural style of “Dragnet,” with Marvin providing voice-over narration as he hunted down his prey in each week’s 30-minute episode.

  “M Squad” did fairly well in the ratings, and Marvin smoothly made the transition from movie heavy to TV hero.
He also made money with his Latimer Productions co-producing, but the grind was anathema to the actor. “Making movies rather than a television series is like the difference between playing for the New York Yankees and the Peoria Tigers,” he later claimed. “You’re in the big leagues with one team and you’re struggling in the minors with the other.”

  A month after the show had premiered, Marvin did promotion, but audaciously remarked, “Cops and robbers series sell. You don’t make TV shows for fun—you make them for money.” Interiors were filmed mostly in Los Angeles, but once or twice a month Marvin filmed in Chicago for background exteriors. He said of the Chicago police department, “They arrested our cameraman twice. They don’t like the idea a bit. They go on the theory that there is no crime in Chicago.” When asked if the show had a message or a purpose, he said, “The purpose is to enable me to get rich so I can quit the show in three years knowing my wife has a paid-up insurance policy of $100,000 and my kids are taken care of. Then I’ll go to Tahiti, take it real easy, and do the Gauguin bit with the paints. As for the message, I have only one—watch the show!”

  While journalists loved the actor’s candor, the network and sponsor executives were less amused. Marvin got heat for such comments, and made sure to cover his flank with such statements as: “I’m never ashamed of anything I do. If you accept a part it’s because you think you can do something with it. I’ll play the worst scene in the worst script and you can judge me by it. If I’m out in front of an audience, I’ll answer for it. There’s no such thing as a lousy script—there’s only lousy actors.”