The finalized version of the story revolved around Catherine Ballou, a young school teacher returning home to Wolf City, Wyoming in 1894, only to discover her rancher father harassed to death by an unscrupulous railroad magnate and his henchman with an artificial nose (also played by Marvin). She and her newly formed out-law gang—headed up by the once infamous, but now broken-down, drunken gunslinger, ‘Kid Shelleen’—wreak havoc on those who “done her wrong” while two strolling minstrels, Nat King Cole and comedian Stubby Kaye, sing to the camera of the gang’s exploits.
During the early rehearsals of the film, Hecht became even more nervous watching Marvin not really doing anything as the cast ran lines. Silverstein suggested to Marvin that he have some spasms or something just to appease the anxious-ridden producer. Marvin chuckled, “Sure, kid,” but three days later Hecht called Silverstein into a meeting just before the company was about to leave for location shooting in Colorado. Hecht wanted Marvin fired and replaced. After much discussion, Silverstein boldly told his boss, ‘There’s too much chaos here and its too much uncertainty to begin with. So, I’m telling you, now. We’re going to Colorado in forty-eight hours. We’re going with Lee Marvin, or you’re going with a different director.” Later in the production, when Hecht considered firing Silverstein, Marvin returned Silverstein’s favor by making the same pronouncement.
Such pressure was not the best environment in which to make a comedy, but it did not seem to faze Marvin, at least on the surface. “He was a wild man,” remembers costar Dwayne Hickman. “The police used to stop him all the time on PCH and cuff him. It didn’t take much to set him off. I remember one day, we were shooting at the old Columbia Ranch on Hollywood Way. We shot most of the interiors at the studio on Sunset & Gower. He used to go to the Blarney Castle for lunch. Naturally, he wouldn’t go to a restaurant unless it served cocktails. He came back from lunch and rear-ended the producer’s car. He got out and yelled, ‘I am here!’ He went to his dressing room and slammed the door. That’s the kind of thing he would do.”
As he had in the past, Marvin would bond with one or two other costars, in this instance his younger cohorts, Callan, Hickman, and Nardini. “As filming went on, we socialized in California at my house a couple of times, and I got to know him pretty well,” recalled Callan. “When we were filming in Colorado, we hung out on the set a lot, or in the hotel room. We were both going through some tough times in our personal life, so we talked about that. I talked to him about my ex-wife and he talked about Michele, I guess it was at the time.”
One of the cast members Marvin did not bond with was his young leading lady. While the passage of time has allowed Jane Fonda to write warmly about working with Marvin, observers during production saw it differently. “What bothered Lee about Jane was that she was kind of pretentious,” observed Hickman. “Jane was a product of Henry, and finishing schools in Europe, and was a proponent of ‘The Method.’ She was very serious about acting. Lee was serious in his own way, but also a bit outrageous, so she was his target. Of course, she was very good, too, but approached her role in a different way. He was crude and bawdy, and kind of offended her sensibilities.”
When the production moved to Canyon City, Colorado, the cast stayed at a hotel an hour’s drive from the location. “I remember early on, Lee had the driver stop and get a bottle of vodka,” Hickman recalled. “I thought to myself, ‘Geez, it’s 7:00 am.’ I must say, to his credit, his first scene was a tough one. It was the scene where he starts drinking and explains how sad a gunfighter’s life is when he grows old and is forgotten. He was brilliant. In all fairness, it was the first day of location shooting and it’s usually pretty easy in the beginning, because everyone is just familiarizing themselves and getting to know one another. But he had a hard day’s work ahead of him. He would take little nips from the vodka throughout the day. When I asked if he was okay, he just said, ‘Tension, baby, just tension.’ He was a lot of fun, but I enjoyed him from a distance.”
The brilliance did not come forth right away, as the actor who rarely required more than two takes per scene was racking up several for his difficult, yet all-important opening monologue. In front of the entire cast and crew, producer Hecht would call Silverstein over to the side after each take, wanting to know why they were not moving on to the next setup. The director of many episodes of television’s ‘Have Gun, Will Travel’ and ‘Naked City’ had something in mind that he was not quite getting from his actor.
Silverstein approached Marvin after the seventh take, and as he recalled, “He had seen Harold call me over each time… I said to Lee, ‘We got seven in the can that are pretty good. I’d like to try one more that’s completely different.’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah. What do you want me to do?’ I said, ‘Try to play this like a ‘Naked City’ bum. Don’t make me laugh. Make me cry. Let me see the sadness of this guy because in the sadness, I think there may be some fun.’ He thought about it, and answered in that mumbling way of his, ‘Naked City’ bum, yeah. What the hell, let’s give it a whirl.’ I stepped back, and we rolled it. Then, he broke me up. I printed that take and looked at Harold, breathing a sigh of relief. That was take eight. That set his character… I later bought a boat and called it Take Eight.”
The rest of the filming in Colorado was fairly uneventful. The flipside of Marvin’s professionalism concerned his escapades away from the camera. “Well, I remember one day,” recalled Michael Callan whimsically, “We were shooting a scene, and the light was going down. Lee was kind of depressed, because it meant he was not going to be able to get his close-up. I told him, ‘I’ll take you out drinking tonight, and I’ll match you drink for drink…’ Well, you probably know how the story ends. I was drunk under the table, and he was fine. The next day, I was totally hung over, and he just had a little headache.”
The day the company left Colorado to return to California, life seemed to imitate art. According to Callan, “Another funny incident was on the last day. He was in his hotel room when we were getting ready to leave. It was a pretty funny sight when we came to get him. He had a hairnet on, had both his legs in one leg of his shorts. I mean he was a mess. He had to be poured into the car, and then the plane. Somehow he had gotten a hold of a .45, and started shooting things on the road as we drove. If you think about it, it was just like his character in the movie. After we got back, he found out he had to shoot a scene.”
The scene Marvin was called in to shoot, on what was supposed to be his day off, was a relatively simple one. Wearing his full gun-slinger regalia, he was to walk slowly down the corridor of a whorehouse, and check each room quickly for the presence of his nemesis. The scene required a specific rhythm to his movements, but Marvin’s inebriated state made it difficult. Director Silverstein tried everything he could think of, including handclaps and, at one point, a metronome to time the actor’s steps. After five takes, the director managed to get what he wanted. “If you watch that scene closely,” adds Silverstein, “you’ll see he lumbers a bit.” According to Silverstein, there was actually very little difficulty in working with Marvin. Whatever he suggested, the actor was willing to try. “Lee was a kind of ‘do-it’ guy,” recalled the director. “He wasn’t for talking much. He just did it. If there was something different I wanted, we would talk about that. I never had any problems with him as an actor.” When Silverstein thought it would be funnier if Marvin sang “Happy Birthday” to a corpse in a voice like Mortimer Snerd, Marvin was up for it.
The company’s return to California also meant a return to Lee Marvin’s domestic problems, as well. When he told Betty when he would be home, she went to buy herself a new dress for the homecoming. “I was in a changing room in I. Magnin’s trying on something. Lee was due to come back that evening. He had called me from location, I don’t remember where. He had his problems and I know Michele existed… I was actually trying on something in a dressing room. Who should come into the dressing room next to me but Michele and a friend. We’re trying on clothes, and they’re ta
lking about Lee coming home. Isn’t that eerie?”
Lee’s wife found out about Triola’s existence when Triola called their home, bluntly asking for Lee: “This woman calls and I answer, ‘Hello.’ She says, ‘Betty?’ and I say ‘Yes.’ She says, ‘Michele.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry?’ She says, ‘You know, Michele. You know who I am.’ I said, ‘I’m very sorry. I don’t know you.’ She said, ‘I’m Lee’s mistress, you know.’ I was so shocked.
“Meyer called shortly thereafter, something for Lee. I said, ‘Meyer, who’s Michele? She just called here.’ Poor Meyer started with the ‘Oh-my-God!’ Poor Meyer never knew what hit him. So there was Lee, stuck between a rock and hard place and I was just devastated… I couldn’t believe this woman. Then of course, everybody started calling me and started telling me, ‘Oh well, she’s a hooker from Vegas, she’s a call girl, etc.’ This one guy said, ‘I don’t know of any actor in town who hasn’t had her…’”
These painful episodes required that Lee move into the Malibu beach house the couple had purchased. At one point Betty told her husband, “I wish you well but it’s so hard for me to understand that you choose a woman so different from me.” He responded, “Why wouldn’t you understand that? I don’t have to be with her. I don’t have to talk to her. I don’t care about her.” Years later, Betty considered her husband’s words and said, “I thought that was so fascinating. He was always honest about us. I feel, to the best of his ability, he did the best he could. I know that in my heart. He was always totally honest with me. When he deceived me, when he disappeared and he was very bad. He didn’t bring that home. It was the dark side of him.”
At the same time, Marvin was finishing his work on Cat Ballou, which included one of the most famous sight gags in movie history. When ‘Kid Shelleen’ is found, having fallen off the wagon, both he and his horse appear to be drunk and leaning against the wall in a parody of the iconic James Earle Fraser statue, “The End of the Trail.” It also proved to be one of the film’s most difficult sequences to shoot. Before the days of high-tech wizardry, filmmakers had to rely solely on their ingenuity to achieve the impossible, which is precisely what Silverstein did to make the horse appear drunk and leaning against the wall.
The problem arose due to the simple fact that horses do not lean, and when Silverstein thought the illusion could be created if the horse were to cross his legs, the wrangler explained to him that horses do not naturally cross their legs. Silverstein told the wrangler, “When I first came to town, I was told a director could have anything he wanted, and I want the horse to cross his legs. How long will it take?” When the wrangler said, “Oh, about two days,” the director told him, “You got an hour and a half.” Marvin went to his dressing room to study his lines, another shot was set up, and the wrangler coaxed the horse named Smoky to cross his legs briefly with the help of a sugar cube and a strand of piano wire.
Silverstein recalled, “The horse uncrossed his legs, and the wrangler rapped the horse’s shin with his hand or a stick, or something. He repeated that over and over again until the horse got the idea that crossing his legs would get him sugar. All I needed was to hold it for ten seconds. We got it. We then brought Lee back out, and he got up on the horse. He said, ’What’s happening? What’s this?’ I said, ‘Nothing, Lee. I just made a little change in the way the horse behaves.’ He got up there and leaned against the wall. We got a little piano wire tied to the horse’s bridle, and pulled it around to the corner of the building. So, we kept the horse’s head down with the piano wire.
“The wrangler placed the horse’s legs in a crossed position. He let the horse see the sugar, and then backed slowly out of the scene. We insulated, which means we didn’t use the clapper to begin the scene, so we wouldn’t spook the horse. We just rolled, silently. Then, with a visual nod, the piano wire pulled the horse’s head over to the left. They let loose the piano wire, and the horse turned away. So, I had my ten seconds. The producer, as it turns out, had walked by on that take. I said, ‘Harold, Harold! Look at that.’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ He was very concerned, because I think we were a half a day behind or something like that, which is nothing. He was very nervous.”
The difficult situation, solved with old-fashioned ingenuity, provided one of the most talked about comedic moments of the year. In fact, the film was a major success. “The film was a lucky strike,” declared Silverstein. “It just happened that everything came together. Out of all the chaos came something I don’t think anybody expected, including me. I had a conversation with Frank Pierson during all these troubles I was having with Harold. I said, ‘Frank, if we could just hang in there and get through this, we will open the golden door to doing other features. We’ll have a nice little film. It’ll be different.’ I remember saying that. I had no idea. I knew what we were doing was something unusual, but I had no idea that it… I’m not one of those people who knows what’s commercial and what’s not commercial.”
The moderately budgeted, twenty-eight-day scheduled shoot took everyone by surprise when it was previewed. Receiving the lion’s share of the credit was Lee Marvin, in spite of the good work done by all concerned. “I’ve been doing good things for years, but no one had ever seen it before. But Cat Ballou was something else,” explained the actor. “Know what I was thinking when we were making Cat Ballou? I was thinking that this would be my last picture. I was going to quit the business. It was that difficult for me. Nobody has to work that hard for a million dollars—constantly reaching beyond himself. Or at least I thought so. I’m not over it yet. If anything, it’s getting worse. I have a feeling this reaction is going to set in after every piece of work I do from now on. Now that I think I know what I’m doing, I’m scared. Before this, I just didn’t know any better.”
Just prior to the general release of both Ship of Fools and Cat Ballou there was a positive buzz in Hollywood. Mishkin had talked Marvin into hiring a publicist a few years earlier, and it proved a wise investment for 1965. The interview requests were almost overwhelming, and, at the time, Marvin was able to proclaim, “The slow growth for me into the big time was actually planned ahead. It was the idea of my agent, Meyer Mishkin. He believes in selectivity, and his taste is impeccable. I wouldn’t have had it any other way because I’ve had the opportunity to develop my craft. If I’d come in slam, bang! I would probably have remained a frustrated one-part type actor.”
The interview requests via the buzz in Hollywood were growing loud and incessant. Publicist Paul Wasserman recalls, “I went to a [prerelease] screening of Cat Ballou. I called him [Marvin] up on the phone afterwards, and said, ‘I’d like to sit down with you and talk to you about the Oscar campaign.’ He said, ‘What Oscar campaign?’ I said, ‘I think you are going to win the Oscar…’”
CHAPTER 10
Everybody Gets Their “Vicaries”
THE MID TO LATE 1960s was a period of immense change in both America and the film industry that reflected it. The studio system had become a memory only to be joined soon by the old production code, which would eventually be replaced by a controversial rating system. With such massive changes taking place, it was inevitable that the concept of the American leading man would also undergo a metamorphosis. New actors were being touted and each would fall into a pattern for audiences to admire. Jack Lemmon may have been funnier, Steve McQueen cooler, Paul Newman sexier, even the aging John Wayne more reliable, but when it came to channeling the angst and violence of the turbulent era, only one actor did so with every performance.
Lee Marvin was so much in demand during the 1960s, that whenever he granted an interview, reporters found him to be immensely entertaining and eminently quotable. Meyer Mishkin believed his client did his best acting for the press, and, rising to the occasion, Marvin would often do his best to challenge his interviewers with unsettling mindgames, by playing with a knife during the session for instance, or making frightening pronouncements accompanied by strange gesticulations. Just a small sampling of some of Marvin’s quo
tes bears this out:
— “Let’s just you and me face it, buddy. War isn’t like it is in the movies, and death is not the worst of war—after all, everyone’s gotta die. No, what’s left is the worst.”
—“If someone’s going for my life—and it’s a question of him or me—well, it ain’t gonna be me. The Marquis of Queensbury went out of style with wing collars.”
—“Most people only wise up when they are down on the floor with the blood everywhere.”
—“The only thing in life that’s really interesting is the contest. We are all contestants—whether we admit it or not. If you read a good book—the author has won. If I read 20 pages of a book and they’re no good, I put it down. Maybe it’s good after 100 pages, but I can’t wait. The author lost.”
—“The whole thing of success is just a big accident. I don’t think a man even has a ‘stride’ till he’s about 40. I’m not talking about the brain-work you can do at the age of 22, as a construction worker or a plane engineer, say. But around 38-45 is the time when a man develops whatever his ‘smell’ may be…”
—“I like a martini. I like rum. I love tequila straight. It is the perfect drink. You keep right on drinking until you finally take one more and you know you’ve reached your limit. A very polite drink. It tells you when to quit.”
—“When I do a scene I make it as rough as I can. Knock a man down with one round, then walk up on him and put three or four more in his face. Roll him over and put one in his back. Make it ugly… I say make it so brutal that a man thinks twice before he does something like that.”
— “People get a vicarious thrill out of what I do; I know that. But I don’t reckon my films have a bad influence on anyone; they won’t send people out into the street with axes, or anything. The Shirley Temple movies are more likely to do that; after listening to ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’ you just gotta go out and beat up somebody. Stands to reason.”
Lee Marvin: Point Blank Page 17
