Lee Marvin: Point Blank

by Dwayne Epstein

  Filmed in the uncomfortable climes of Durango, Mexico for nine weeks and directed by former actor Don Taylor, the disparate cast got along surprisingly well. According to costar Kay Lenz, who was only twenty-two at the time, “You couldn’t have gotten seven people who were more different. I was there for about three weeks before either Sylvia [Miles] or Elizabeth [Ashley] came, so it was me and all the guys. Most of my stuff was with all the guys. I became close with Strother, because he and I drove out to work every day together. He was just an incredibly wonderful man! Multifaceted. He collected opera. I think he was an Olympic diver, at one point. He was fascinating.”

  Working with Marvin was an especially memorable experience for Lenz. “He’s not a man of many words,” she chuckled. “I rode double on a horse with him for I think ten days of filming. I knew he always had an eye on me in terms of wanting to make sure I was okay, because there were a lot of stunts. My stunt girl broke her leg. The stunts were… there were a lot of little bumps and bruises… I just knew he was always making sure that I was going to be okay… It’s not that he said, ‘I’m looking out for you.’ It’s not that he made overt gestures. I just knew that he was. He was just always very aware of making sure that I was safe, and okay with all the stuff that we had to do.”

  Marvin’s drinking bouts with costar Oliver Reed proved to be more interesting to the press than the film. When not being asked about the marathon sessions, Marvin would bristle at the obvious comparisons to Cat Ballou: “Any time you do something like that—revert back to the hit of your life—they say, ‘Oh, he’s pulling that stuff again.’ It’s called pigeon-holing, and I don’t have a lot of patience with it.” Promoting the film during it’s June, 1976 release, Marvin described it as: “A fun picture, a summer romp, if you’re out of school and have nothing to do… I can’t say this is my greatest film or my worst… I did my message films and they’ve all bombed. I wanted a lets-have-another-beer-type film and I liked the script.” Audiences and critics did not agree.

  His next film for AIP, Shout at the Devil, was based on a popular novel by Wilbur Smith, which in turn was based on the same true story that was the basis for the climax of the classic Bogart/Hepburn film, The African Queen. Marvin’s character of ‘Flynn O’Flynn’ and costar Roger Moore as ‘Sebastian Oldsmith’ played ivory poachers in WWI-era Africa who plot to sabotage a German gunship. Moore also romances Marvin’s daughter, played by Barbara Parkins, resulting in an old-fashioned brawl between the two men, a scene that seemed straight out of a rowdy John Ford comedy. Actor Reinhard Kolldehoff appeared throughout the film as a sleazy caricature of a German villain, complete with twirling mustache.

  Because the movie was largely filmed in South Africa (and later Malta), over eighteen weeks in 1975, criticism was aimed at the filmmakers for contributing to the economy of the country’s racist Apartheid regime. It did not seem to matter much to Moore, who was making several other films in the region at the time. The entire production comes off as if it really did not seem to care about the inhabitants of the region, which is not surprising, as it was directed by James Bond veteran Peter Hunt with a mostly Bond-related production crew. The film has some moments of interest, but the overall effect is one of a retread cliché that had been done better in earlier films, including Marvin’s performance, which is also a retread of Ben Rumson from Paint Your Wagon.

  Marvin had actually recorded a bawdy musical number entitled “Shagging O’Reilly’s Daughter” that was cut from the film. It still appears on the film soundtrack, credited as performed by Lee Marvin and The Barflies. “There’s nothing you can do about it,” he said at the time. “You talk to them, and then, when you go away, they say, ‘Next,’ and forget it. Sure, you get upset when you’re young. I’m not young.”

  Marvin still dutifully publicized the film, resulting in such tongue-in-cheek quotes as, “Has it ever occurred to you that some of the actors who won’t talk have nothing to say, anyway. Reporters don’t make actors sound stupid. Some actors can take care of that themselves. I don’t care what’s written about me as long as it’s interesting.”

  TIME’s staff writer Stefan Kanfer remembers a typical example of a Lee Marvin encounter with the press. The meeting took place while Marvin was in New York to promote his latest film. Kanfer and his assistant, Jay Cocks, were to meet him in his hotel room, and called from the lobby. Kanfer remembers, “I called from downstairs and he said, ‘I don’t have my pants on yet.’ I said, ‘Well, put your pants on. We’re coming up.’ See, I knew that if you didn’t give him lip like he gave you, it would go nowhere. He’d control the interview. So, we went upstairs and he was there with his p.r. guy. When we walked in, you couldn’t see him. But from the next room [we hear] ‘Are the assholes in, yet?’ So, I said, ‘Did you get your pants on, yet?’ He said, ‘No,’ and he came out in his underwear. He was not a heavily muscled man, but he kept trim. He had that kind of Marine build, you know?

  “I wasn’t gonna take any shit from him, and he knew it… Then he began to smile, and we had a terrific interview. He’s a very nice guy. I said to him quite openly, ‘I don’t think that Cat Ballou is your best performance, by a long shot.’ He said, ‘I do agree with you. But y’know, you run this track and that’s the track that the racers are on; it’s the Oscar track. It really isn’t based on skill as much as it’s based on luck and popularity.’”

  Kanfer’s assistant, future Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jay Cocks, had been greatly looking forward to meeting Marvin, and was not disappointed. Asked what he thought of the meeting, he said he was “Over-awed and amused. Great, crazy fun. Talked like a bop musician and whistled for emphasis and punctuation. Hearing him talk was like listening to Dizzy Gillespie play.”

  After promoting the slate of AIP films, Marvin was not seen on the screen again for a full three years. The sabbatical was partly by choice, but also a matter of circumstances based on his inability to find worthy projects for which he felt any enthusiasm. He continued to battle the bottle, on and off the wagon, while pursuing his other passion, deep-sea fishing. He had long ago given up motorcycles after injuring his knee, and big game hunting had also fallen by the wayside.

  Fishing for the giant marlins found along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef gave him the thrill he had not known since World War II. This obsession began in 1973 when he met Australian charter boat captain Dennis “Brazaka” Wallace in Hawaii, who convinced him to visit “Down Under.” When Marvin arrived in Australia, he claimed that the first fishing trip correlated to the night he was hit on Saipan thirty years earlier. Hooking the mammoth marlin prompted the actor to state, “Then you realize he has you hooked, and I must say that never since World War II have I experienced such fear. The funny thing is, that when it’s over and you’ve made a kill, you’re glad it’s you who won in the end, but by the same token, here’s this dead beautiful thing, and you’re responsible for it. You get some sleepless nights over it, believe me…”

  Lee Marvin finished the decade with the tepid Cold War spy thriller Avalanche Express. Based on a novel by Colin Forbes, the needlessly convoluted plot had Robert Shaw as a KGB agent defecting to the west with CIA agent Marvin using the defection as bait to catch arch-nemesis Maximillan Schell.

  The cast was a strange ensemble consisting of NFL great Joe Namath, TV detective Mike Connors, fading German film star Horst Bucholz, and future “Dynasty” star Linda Evans. To his fans, the three years Marvin had been off the screen proved quite jarring. He looked surprisingly drawn and haggard for his fifty-five years.

  Marvin made the film as a chance to work with Shaw, but Shaw himself was ill with cancer throughout the production, and died before his dialogue could be re-recorded. Veteran director Mark Robson had also died, suffering a heart attack near the end of the film’s production, and the entire fiasco was turned over to cult director Monte Hellman who had the thankless task of trying to salvage something for release.

  According to Hellman, “There were script problems as well as
production problems… I never read the book, but I assumed a lot of the problems came from the original material. We actually wrote a new script. We brought in a writer to rework the script, given the material that had already been shot, and see what we could shoot in addition that would make it a better movie. So, we felt that the problems went back to the script. The reason I say thankless is because you never solve the problems, and I don’t think it’s a good movie now.”

  For Lee Marvin, who had pioneered the innovative portrayal of violence in American films, the latter years of the 1970s were spent making substandard films that were throwbacks to a previous style of filmmaking: Spike’s Gang and Great Scout were embarrassing westerns; The Klansman was a badly rendered melodrama; Shout at the Devil, a poorly scripted old-fashioned adventure film; and Avalanche Express, an outdated and ill-fated Cold War spy thriller.

  It was ironic for Marvin that the most popular film of the decade was George Lucas’s 1977 opus Star Wars, a revamped nostalgic take on the old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, albeit on a much more stylish scale then any of the retro-like films Marvin had made at the time. The door that had begun to close by the mid-70’s had slammed shut by decade’s end. The wildly popular Star Wars series of films sealed the fate of smaller studio productions, making it that much more difficult for Marvin to ever return to such innovative films as Monte Walsh or Point Blank. He wryly commented at the time, “I know my career is going badly because I’m being quoted correctly.”

  His career at the end of the decade looked longingly over his shoulder. When he attempted to look forward again, the white eye was staring resolutely back at him. Just when it seemed that such a downturn would force him to slip into relative obscurity, the California State Court of Appeals prepared to hear the landmark case that would thrust Lee Marvin back into the national limelight.

  CHAPTER 13

  May the Best Script Win

  DURING THE NOW infamous palimony suit, Lee Marvin was asked by a reporter outside the courtroom who he thought would win. “The one with the best script,” he quipped. The next day in court, opposing attorney Marvin Mitchelson had the actor on the witness stand and asked him why he thought his script would win the case. The actor stated, “Because my script is real, based on fact. Yours is based on fiction.” Revisiting the chronology of events of Lee Marvin and Michele Triola’s relationship, via the individuals who witnessed and participated in it, sheds considerable light on Marvin’s script metaphor. It then becomes quite apparent that Marvin, while no angel, was hardly the chauvinist portrayed in the media at the time, nor was his ex-girlfriend the victim she claimed to be.

  From the start of their relationship, Michele Triola had exhibited behavior that those closest to Lee Marvin found questionable. “She was having one scene after another,” recalled the actor’s first wife. “She went in every place where I shop, had my hair done, it didn’t matter. She went in and introduced herself as Mrs. Lee Marvin. Everybody got so mixed up. Everybody would say things like, ‘Well, Mrs. Marvin, you made a reservation for yesterday.’ It was crazy.” The actor’s friend Ralph O’Hara lived near Marvin’s Malibu property and witnessed the way in which Triola had worked her way into Marvin’s life following their first encounter during the making of Ship of Fools: “Then, he bought the house on La Costa Beach. Pretty soon, she’s down there doing the laundry with one little ditty bag. Pretty soon the other bag, and another bag, and she was there.”

  From October 1964, when the actor was still married but separated from his wife, until May of 1970, Michele Triola and Lee Marvin co-habitated in Malibu. In March1966, Marvin diplomatically told columnist Sheila Graham, “We [he and Betty] separated a year and a half ago, while I was making Cat Ballou… Success brings a form of acceptance, so there is a greater availability of more interesting people. Also, an individual undergoing success becomes more introspective. Therefore his demands on his wife become more picayune. He wants more, he is not satisfied with less. I’m filing for divorce as soon as our attorneys arrive at a reasonable settlement on what is community property. But I’m more than willing to have them share in my success. They suffered with me when I was struggling to make it.” When Graham asked if Michele Triola would be joining him in London later in the year to film The Dirty Dozen, he responded, “Good grief, no!”

  From the onset of their relationship, columnists had been reporting the couple were engaged, would marry soon, or any number of allusions to their deepening bond. In truth, Marvin had enjoyed the physical aspect of his relationship with Triola as long as nothing else was required. “They had a good relationship,” recalled Keenan Wynn’s son, Ned. “They seemed happy within the framework of partying and doing those kind[s] of things. There was a place in Malibu where we would all meet and have a good time. It was all the same thing with my dad and Lee.” Marvin admittedly always had a drinking problem, but it escalated unchecked once he became a major star.

  As previously mentioned, Marvin first met Ralph O’Hara at one of his favorite watering holes in Malibu called The Raft, where O’Hara was tending bar. A friendship developed in which O’Hara was able to see for himself the extent of the actor’s drinking behavior while filming Point Blank and later Paint Your Wagon. “Lee was generally around people who worked with him who were unprofessional. They didn’t know their lines. He was tired of doing the same scene; take twelve, take thirteen, you know. To him, that’s bad news. Then he would start to get uptight and get these anxiety attacks. I call them anxiety attacks because I’ve had them myself. I could see it coming on him when he’d start to get nervy. He’d start to get unsettled from his normal self.

  “A prime example is if he were on a set doing a take and retake and somebody couldn’t remember their lines or whatever. He’d get up and say, ‘I’ll be back when you all get it together.’ So, he would leave. What he would end up doing is, if he had a driver, he would get the driver to take him out. ‘Let’s go and hit the first bar.’ He’d find a bar full of strangers and he’d start to talk to them. He’d pick their brains and he loved this type of conversation. This was his thing.”

  When Lee was married to Betty he would often drink too much, feel contrite, and then try unsuccessfully to quit. When he was with Triola he gave up all attempts at sobriety, which initiated some of his most notorious drinking escapades, such as riding on the top of John Boorman’s car, several drunk driving arrests, attempting to reenlist in the Marines in the middle of the night, and more. According to his business manager Ed Silver, “I don’t want to be that negative about Michele because she was good for him. He was stoned. She would take care of him; try to get him to al-anon and these things. She went through a lot of situations when he was drunk. It was not that easy to live with him. His mind was often out in the clouds…”

  Unfortunately, when he would binge drink, Marvin often found even his debauchery exacerbated by Triola’s presence. While filming The Professionals in Las Vegas, Marvin and Tony Epper played blackjack, with Epper witnessing a rather distressing side to Triola. “He had ten thousand dollars sitting right there. She’s taking ten before he hit the twenty grand,” recalled Epper. “She’d come and grabbed it. She’d say, ‘That’s none of your business.’ I really didn’t get involved with her. I really just backed away from all that. But it came out later in the trial. I said I saw her. I can tell you, plus what he was giving her, she must have stole twenty, thirty thousand dollars off the tables.”

  It was during the making of The Professionals that one of the most legendary nights of Marvin’s heavy drinking days took place, the story of which was to reemerge during the palimony suit a decade later. “A couple of girls wanted to be stunt girls,” recalled Tony Epper. “so, we tied sheets around them and hung them out the goddamn window. We did do that. They were just dancers and they were drunk and screaming and hollering. It did scare the crap out of them. It should have. They didn’t want to be stunt women after that. Sixteenth floor of the Mint Hotel… But they were safe. I wouldn’t let a
nything happen to them. We had bed sheets tied to their foot, or something, I don’t know. Lee was there when we hung the young ladies out. Matter of fact, it was his idea, if the truth must be known.”

  Then, according to Epper’s testimony, as the party crept into the wee hours, he, Marvin, and Strode continued to drink and take decisive action. Earlier in the day, Marvin had told a reporter that he wanted to shoot the famous Vegas Vic sign as well as the giant inflatable King Kong in front of the Mint Hotel. The next morning, both goals had been accomplished and the blame—or credit, depending on one’s point of view—was placed squarely on the proud shoulders of Lee Marvin. “They ended up calling it in the newspaper, ‘The Robin Hood Party,’” remembered Epper. “Today, they’d lock you up forever, I don’t care who you are, forever.”

  When Marvin’s success was at its zenith, publicist Paul Wasserman had the unenviable task of dealing with the couple. “My greater association with him was with Michele, who I always tried not to do interviews with in their home in Malibu, and things like that,” recalled Wasserman. “Not At-home-with-Lee-and-Michele,’ and that’s what she wanted. Those few times when we did things at the house, I would always say to her, ‘Can we be alone?’ She wanted to be a star. Anything that interfered with her being a star, she got ugly about.” Of the relationship, Wasserman observed, “I didn’t see any feelings of love. I looked at it like most marriages I know: a convenience.” The actor’s business manager concurred, “Sometimes, Lee talked positively, but a lot of times he talked negatively. He said to me once, and this is a quote: ‘When I think of Michele, it goes down.’”