Lee Marvin: Point Blank

by Dwayne Epstein

  Ford himself had ulterior motives for making the film. For tax reasons he had to sell his beloved yacht, The Araner, so he decided to use it in the movie before selling it off, and figured he could have a good time drinking on board during the film. But, for health reasons the 68-year-old was not allowed to drink during the production and had to referee as Wayne and Marvin imbibed. Betty Marvin recalled those moments fondly, and observed an interesting contrast between her husband and John Wayne: “Duke would talk slow. The more he drank, the slower he talked. He was a big kissy bear. Lee was fast. Lee was like a leopard. So, you have these two animals, you could imagine. I’ll say one thing, Duke was very honest about himself: ‘Look, I’m not an actor. I just stand and move.’ He was not pretentious. Not at all. But Lee was a totally different breed. I don’t remember that Lee and Duke ever discussed filmmaking. They were instinctual. Lee Marvin’s presence was very different than what John Wayne’s was.”

  The production started out to be the fun romp Ford had intended, with cast and crew taking full advantage of the tropical setting. Betty had fond memories of teaching her husband and John Wayne the hula, which was in keeping with the film’s theme of rowdy yet harmless shenanigans in the South Seas. Wayne played Michael ‘Guns’ Donovan, proprietor of the saloon, “Donovan’s Reef.” He and his former WWII cohorts, Thomas Aloysius ‘Boats’ Gilhooley (Marvin) and Doc Dedham (Jack Warden), remained after the war, and made a life for themselves away from the structured, and in their view, hypocritical lifestyle back in stuffy Massachusetts. Enter Warden’s grown daughter Amelia, played by Elizabeth Allen. She has come to judge her father’s lifestyle, but inadvertently falls for Wayne, whom she is led to believe is the father of Warden’s native children.

  By film’s end, Ford has managed to throw in a good many barroom brawls, the best of which is the comical opening between Marvin and Wayne. There were a number of exasperated nuns and priests, a statement about racial intolerance, an older Dorothy Lamour for Lee Marvin, and a dated yet appropriate happy ending, all of which proved to be the swan song of Ford and Wayne’s many years together.

  According to Marvin, whenever the script became dull, Ford staged a brawl, and, in spite of his experience with his broken nose, Marvin did most of his own stunts. “I won’t jump out a third story window, but I’m willing to do anything short of that,” he said. “I have an identifiable way of moving, which most men can’t duplicate, and scenes usually ring true if I do them myself. Besides, I’m a pretty physical guy, and since I don’t go in for pushups or gym work, this is my only outlet… With a face like mine, one more scar or less doesn’t really matter anyway.”

  The tropical bliss soured, however, when Lee continued to drink too much, far beyond the capacity of the rest of the cast and crew. Back in Los Angeles, neighbor George Rappaport and his wife were sound asleep when they heard someone at their door. “This is like six in the morning,” recalled Rappaport. “My wife Page says, ‘I think I hear the doorbell.’ I go downstairs, open the door, and there’s Lee. I said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I got to borrow a razor.’ He was in skivvies, had a T-shirt, canvas loafers. I said, ‘How did you get here?’ He said, ‘I just got on a plane.’ How he got on that plane, I really don’t know, because he didn’t have any money. Somehow, I guess they knew who he was. I didn’t know what to do. I ran to my wife, ‘It’s Lee Marvin.’ She said, ‘It can’t be Lee Marvin. He’s in Hawaii.’ I said, “No, Lee’s here.’ So she said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ I asked Lee, ‘What do you mean you want to borrow a razor?’ He said, ‘Well, I got some things I gotta do.’ I said, ‘You gotta be crazy!’ He said, ‘Just give me a razor.’ I said, ‘Come in and I could make you some coffee.’ ‘Nope.’ So, I gave him a razor, some shaving cream and he took off. I got on the phone to Mishkin and he said, ‘Where the hell did he go?’ I said, ‘I don’t know where the hell he’s going.’ I guess Meyer knew, all along, the haunts he would go to.”

  The recalcitrant Marvin was willing again to take the pledge, but this strange occurrence would be a sign of darker things to come. As he waited for the right role and tried to stay sober, there was still the occasional ray of hope. One in particular proved to be amazingly prophetic. “I was talking to what’s-his-name, Eddie G. Robinson,” recalled Marvin years later. “I was stuck at some fucking party. One of those lawn-type things, right?… And I’m not drinking. But I’m sitting at a table with all the Jack Lemmons, all the quick one-liners, you know? And Johnny Carson. Snappy conversations, zing, zing, zing. And you know, I don’t worry about it ‘cause they ain’t in my league anyway. Or I’m not in theirs—let me put it that way.

  “And Eddie G. walked by with a cigar. The first time I ever met him, right? ‘Hello, Lee, how are you?’ And I said, ‘I wanna tell you that I never got over Tiger Shark.’ He said, ‘You ought to play that role.’ And I said, ‘I couldn’t.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you could.’ And all the guys have stopped, right? The smarties. He said, ‘Lee, I give you the torch.’ And he walked away. And they all looked at me…”

  After a few months of frightening sobriety, news came from Woodstock that on March 23, 1963, Lee’s mother Courtenay had died suddenly of a massive stroke. Mother and son had never truly reconciled, and becoming an actor, husband, and father did little to rectify his feelings towards her. The Marvin clan attended the funeral with Lee on his best behavior, until the return trip to Los Angeles. Betty recalled, “On the plane is when he said to me, ‘Well, I don’t have to go back anymore for treatment.’ He had a drink and said, ‘Here’s to analysis.’ My heart sunk because I thought maybe this would work. I said, ‘Why have you decided now, all of a sudden?’ He said, ‘Because Mother’s dead. I can deal with it.’ I know that torment was so deep. I think it was very indicative. When Lee would be drunk, he would always call me ‘Mommy.’ ‘Mommy’ this and ‘Mommy’ that. I used to say, ‘Your mother is in New York.’ See, I would get irritated, but I think that’s a longing for a mother he never felt he had. I really feel that very strongly.”

  Neither Lee nor Betty would be fully aware of a contributing reason why he started drinking again following his mother’s death. According to a report cited by the Veteran’s of Foreign Wars (VFW) in 2009, WWII veterans were showing up in VA hospitals as late as the 1990s with renewed symptoms of PTSD, despite their having made a relative adjustment throughout most of their civilian life. “Yet they still suffered from recurring nightmares, problems with close relationships or anger,” stated the study. “Big life changes, retirement, a death in the family, divorce, could trigger symptoms of PTSD, reviving long repressed traumatic experiences.”

  At the time of Courtenay’s death, Marvin’s career remained stagnant, and he found himself still playing second lead roles of villainy in film and occasional interesting leads on television. Years later, he explained his desire for leading roles in film: “As you progress from bit to feature player, they naturally look at you as a type. Don’t forget —when it came to dramatic roles with good dialogue, they went to the leading men and ladies for that. Because there was no such thing as a sympathetic heavy in those days.”

  There was no way he would know, but that would soon change due in part to his physical appearance. Gone was the gangly posture of his youth, and as he neared the age of forty, his hair had gone prematurely gray, and had even begun to show signs of a silvery steel hue. His face had filled out more with age, making him appear more world-weary, bordering on ruggedly handsome. He may have thought these physical changes would again hamper his chances of success, but in reality, they would actually enhance those chances.

  The personal and professional events in the actor’s life came to a symbolic crescendo later in 1963. The decade had begun with the same optimism and high hopes of the 1950s, as an energetic young Democrat was sworn in as president. Lee Marvin had actively campaigned for Kennedy and appeared onstage with Frank Sinatra and other celebrities for the inaugural ball. When it came to Marvin’s political p
hilosophy, neighbor George Rappaport remembers, “When he was really lucid, and off the stuff and feeling good, you could not find a better guy to talk with. We had some really nice conversations about everything… You would figure the macho guys were always like the rednecks and all. But that’s not true. That’s why I say on the inside, he was as soft as a pillow. He really cared about people and he cared about issues.”

  After the news from Dallas on November 22nd, 1963 stunned the nation, Marvin would never again publicly endorse a candidate. The assassination occurred on Christopher Marvin’s 11th birthday, for which Betty had planned a party. “I called the parents of the kids I invited and canceled,” she recalled. “School was dismissed and Christopher came home. I said, ‘I canceled the party’ and (according to her), he said, ‘Oh good, mom.’ He said, ‘I have to tell you something. Well, you know dad gave me a gun. I knew I could never shoot it. So, I took it down to the garden and I buried it.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell dad. I would never know what to do with it.’ Here we are, a gun had assassinated our president. Even before that happened, our son got up and buried a gun in the garden.”

  The project Lee started just one day prior to Kennedy’s assassination was a remake of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “The Killers.” It was to be the first movie made directly for television and, for the first time in his career, Lee Marvin was top-billed as an aging hitman, costarring with Clu Gulager as his protégé. As the title characters searching for the reason why their target, John Cassavetes, gives up without a fight, they encounter a tangled history involving femme fatale, Angie Dickinson, and in his last acting performance before switching to politics, mobster Ronald Reagan.

  “Movies went to TV from the theaters until The Killers,” stated Dickinson. “It was Lew Wasserman who said, ‘Hey guys, how about making movies that go right to television?’ That was the genius of Lew Wasserman, and they made three. The other two I don’t remember… It was a low-budget movie that looks like a B-movie because it is a B-movie. But it was made as a TV-movie for people who don’t realize the production qualities are vastly different than they are for a good movie. That’s why it has that look of it, of cheap. And yet, it’s very good.”

  The project was directed by the versatile Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dirty Harry, etc.) who, during a lunch meeting, attempted to convince Marvin to play the older hitman. Marvin suggested a preference for the role of the younger hitman. Exasperated, Siegel claims in his autobiography that he asked Marvin, “Are you going to play the older killer?” The actor replied, “Always was from day one.” With an impressive supporting cast that included Claude Akins, Norman Fell, Bob Phillips, and Virginia Christine, the production shut down for a day of mourning before resuming what would be one of the seminal films in Lee Marvin’s career.

  Clu Gulager appeared in practically every scene with Marvin, and states emphatically, “He was, in my view, one of the foremost actors of his time. You never know about actors in their formative stages. Lee formed fairly early on and became a great actor, fairly early. Whereas an actor like Paul Newman, for example, became a great actor in his older age. I think Marty Landau did also. You never know. But Marvin was… by way of contrast, we all have our time.”

  The making of the film became an interesting drama unto itself as Gulager did little bits of scene-stealing business during his and Marvin’s dialogue. Marvin let the younger actor have his way, but created an interesting competition no one but Gulager was aware of. “He started putting down and condemning every other actor on the set,” recalled Gulager. “Well, every actor except me. Then again, he may have done it with another actor about me to, who knows. I don’t think so, though. He said, ‘You know, these actors are just shit.’ And one by one he would do things to them, but before he did it, he would say ‘watch.’ He did this while we were making the movie, before rehearsal, before scenes… I’m going to name the names because it’s fascinating to me. Each time, ‘I’m going to get them all.’ That’s what he said. Say, for instance, Norman Fell was a great actor. He had his sweatbox scene. So Lee had told me he was going to get every actor: ‘You watch me.’ He got up behind him during rehearsal, right behind his head. He held up two fingers; ‘This is the second actor I got.’ He did some things to Norman that were not too good.”

  On this, Norman Fell concurred, “I used to look at his body language. His hands and arms were totally relaxed, which I can’t say for all actors. He was just there… that was a joy to see. I didn’t see any tension. I didn’t see any acting. That’s the ultimate. That’s the key. Basically, that’s what it’s all about.” When it came time to shoot the scene in which Marvin terrorizes Fell, who’s locked in a steam box, Fell recalled, “Well, being who he is, he scared the crap out of me. I was in there with my head sticking out and this guy comes in. I knew that he could kill me within half a minute. Just absolutely rip me to pieces. So, he gave me a chance to give that to the scene. The fear you saw was real. But then again, afterwards, I knew he was a pussycat. But he helped me by really scaring the crap out of me.”

  Such results turned an otherwise mediocre project into a full-fledged watershed production in which Lee Marvin was the catalyst. Angie Dickinson took note of his performance and said, “He was a gifted actor who could rehearse and perform. Don’t give me these guys that say, ‘I had to pull your hair because I’m a method actor…’ ‘Well, fuck you!’ Don’t give me method actors out of control. Give me method actors in control and that’s what Lee was. Lee was a method actor in control, and that’s the brilliance of him… Everything was unexpected, mostly in his acting. He was just brilliant in his realism, and yet to be so interesting and exciting, you might have to create a lot of schtick. He was just a fascinating man. Fascinating. Brilliant, brilliant movie actor…”

  When it came to Ronald Reagan, Marvin still did not care for the man, but kept his distance for the sake of the project. In the handful of scenes they had together, Marvin quite simply acted circles around the former SAG President, changing the moments to suit his whim while Reagan stubbornly played every scene the same. Marvin then told Gulager, “This guy couldn’t act worth shit. He couldn’t act his way out of a fucking paper bag.”

  The film’s climax remains one of the best of its kind. Following a wonderful moment of dialogue, the mortally wounded Marvin stumbles out of a suburban home, only to topple in a heap just as the police arrive. A memorable piece of business adds a perfect Marvin touch that Gulager proclaimed, “That’s the greatest death scene I believe I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if you noticed it or not, but he was drunk. Many times, a drunken body doesn’t feel what we feel. Did you see him come down the stairs from the porch, fall right on the cobblestones? He fell hard. He didn’t put on knee-pads. He didn’t put on elbow pads. No one knew he was going to fall. He just went down and hit hard. I thought he was never going to be able to continue. He got up and went on with the scene, which amazed me. Then, when he fell at the end, he’s a big, huge hulk of a guy. When he falls, you can break all kinds of bones, collar bones, everything. He just hit the deck. When he did those two falls, without any rehearsals, any pads, no one knew what was going to happen. It was marvelous.”

  Ironically, following the President’s death, NBC executives deemed The Killers too violent for television, and instead released it in theaters in 1964 where it became a financial gold mine. When it played in England, Marvin won the British Academy Award for Best Foreign Film Actor, for a film that was made for television. According to Clu Gulager, “Schools like NYU, UCLA, and USC, and all kinds of film schools around the United States, somehow took that film on as a cause celeb. They made it theirs, and all of the film students for years thought that was one of the greatest films ever made.”

  Marvin’s last line in the film, “Lady, I just don’t have the time,” was uttered just before he murders his cowering victim. It became a classic moment of macabre humor, later emulated by every action film star from Clint Eastwood to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Just as Eastwood’s “Go ahead, make my day” came to mean more than just its literal meaning, Marvin’s line symbolized something deeper as well. As the 1960s progressed, the decade exploded violently with the Civil Rights movement, race riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, and most polarizing of all, the Vietnam War. America underwent a belated midlife crisis, and no longer had the time to be polite about it. As a silver-haired, granite-faced, middle-aged man of violence, Lee Marvin came to represent the anxiousness of the times, and, as far as his career’s impenetrable ceiling was concerned, he too, just didn’t have the time.

  PART THREE

  TAKING THE POINT

  Lee Marvin in the aptly titled The Professionals (1966). In describing his character’s opponent he solidified his own screen persona with such economic dialogue as, “Men tempered like steel. Tough men. Men who learn to endure.” The audience knew he could have been describing himself.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Tension, Baby, Just Tension”

  IF THE MEDIA HYPE from the time was to be believed, 1965 was hailed as “The Year of Lee Marvin.” It was almost impossible to pick up a periodical or turn on a TV talk show without seeing his by now familiar visage. Paradoxically, his personal life spiraled into free-fall, just as two films released the same year established forty-year-old Lee Marvin as a major film star beyond anyone’s expectations.