Lee was a shrewd judge of people and could sniff out bullshit a mile away. At the same time he had sympathy for anyone less fortunate than himself. But he did have an ornery streak, and it came out at an early age: He ran away from home when he was four and was later expelled from a series of exclusive boarding schools, including a Catholic academy in Florida “for pushing a kid out of a window,” he said.
Lee joined the Marines at seventeen with his father’s permission and saw action as a scout-sniper in the Pacific island-hopping campaign. On Eniwetok he killed half a dozen enemy soldiers with a grenade and bayoneted another in hand-to-hand combat. He got a Purple Heart for a near-fatal wound he received during the invasion of Saipan when a sniper’s bullet hit him in the butt. “Not a very romantic place to be shot,” he said. He thought it must have been a flat-nose round because it didn’t leave a small entry hole, but a deep eight-inch gash across his backside just below the beltline that missed his spine by a fraction of an inch.
Lee believed that the wound saved his life. He’d been close to the breaking point and worried that he could no longer function in combat. The bullet put him out of action and, he said, kept him from embarrassing himself in the face of the enemy.
He was evacuated to a hospital ship anchored offshore. A nurse asked if he wanted anything—ice cream, ice water, whatever. “Moonlight Serenade” was playing over the PA. Lee could hear the gunfire from the battle still raging on the island, but he had ice cream, clean sheets, Glenn Miller, and nurses.
“My company, what was left of it, was still there,” he said. “I was safe on a hospital ship. I was a deserter and a coward, and I cried.” He could never shake the guilt from surviving while so many of his buddies died.
Lee obviously suffered from battle fatigue or PTSD or whatever you want to call it, but he thought it was cowardice and nobody could convince him otherwise. No matter how hard he tried to escape it, the war never left him. He had nightmares and once confessed that he relived the battle so vividly that he saw snipers in the trees.
After thirteen months in the hospital, Lee got a medical discharge and found a job as a plumber’s assistant in Woodstock, New York. He was fixing a toilet at a community theater when an actor fell ill at the last minute. Lee was pressed into service and he was hooked. He went to New York and enrolled in the American Theatre Wing under the GI Bill. He made it to Broadway with a small part in the original production of Billy Budd (1951), then went to Hollywood and started working right away, mostly in Westerns and war movies.
For the first twenty years of his film career, he played so many sadistic heavies they called him “the merchant of menace.” Some of those performances are chilling: He throws scalding coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face in The Big Heat (1953) and enjoys it just a little too much. And for my money he blows Brando off the screen as a psycho motorcycle punk in The Wild One (1953).
Lee told me that he learned to act in the Marine Corps, trying to appear unafraid by concentrating on some task, like digging a foxhole or cleaning a weapon. He also credited the Marines for his actor’s discipline: “The Corps teaches you that when it’s time to toe the mark, you toe the mark,” he said.
One of Lee’s strengths as an actor was his power of observation. He noticed details that other actors ignored and it shows in his performances. He was especially knowledgeable about the technical details of firearms. He loved guns, and on the screen he handles them deliberately, almost lovingly. He was always original in whatever he did on the screen. He invented most of his own business and never repeated himself. As a supporting player and costar, he stole just about every scene he was in from some of the best actors in the business, including Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) and Duke Wayne in Donovan’s Reef (1963).
But Lee didn’t begin to get the recognition he deserved until he appeared on television as Lieutenant Frank Ballinger in the police series M Squad, which he described as “Dragnet on speed.”
It was the first TV show I ever did. On the first day I got a call sheet that read, “7:00 for 7:30.” I assumed it was multiple choice. Hey, if that’s the case, I’ll take seven-thirty, I thought.
So I arrived at seven-thirty and the assistant director, a little wisp of a fella named Carter DeHaven, went berserk. He was chewing me out mercilessly in front of everybody, and I snapped.
“Listen, pal,” I said, grabbing him by the throat, “If you don’t shut the fuck up, I’m gonna hit you so hard both your parents will die.”
At that instant Lee walked by and said, “What the hell’s the matter?”
I told him the dumb thing I did with the seven o’clock call and he said, “Well, that makes sense to me,” and we walked off together, leaving the poor AD muttering to himself.
We went to Lee’s dressing room and I began to apologize. “I’m sorry, Mr. Marvin. I think it’s because I’m scared.”
“Me too!” he said. “Let me tell you what you should do, kid. Every morning before you shoot, go up to the camera and tell her you love her. Don’t give a shit if anybody’s watching you. Say, ‘Good morning. I hope we have a good day today.’ And if you want to give her a kiss, that’s fine, too.”
“Do you do that?” I asked.
“Yes!” he said. “It helps me get through the day. If the camera likes you, everybody likes you.”
I’ve been doing it ever since.
—
LEE GOT BORED with M Squad, despite its success. He said it felt like a straitjacket creatively. He got out of the contract after three seasons and was happy to go back to feature films.
He got his first starring role in Cat Ballou (1965), a comedy Western in which he plays a drunken gunslinger who rides an equally drunken horse. In one of the great sight gags, a takeoff of the famous James Earle Fraser statue The End of the Trail, both Lee and the horse lean against a wall, both obviously soused. The Academy doesn’t usually give Best Actor Oscars for comedy performances, but Lee beat out Laurence Olivier (nominated for Othello), Richard Burton (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), Rod Steiger (The Pawnbroker), and Lee’s Ship of Fools costar Oskar Werner.
It was a popular win. Lee took the podium to huge applause and said, “There are too many people to correctly thank for my career. I think, though, half of this belongs to a horse, someplace out in the Valley.”
Cat Ballou finally tied Lee’s name and face together for the public. His quote shot up to a million dollars a picture and he was suddenly a leading man. When Duke Wayne turned down the part of Major Reisman in The Dirty Dozen (1967), Lee took it. He hated the script, but couldn’t resist the money. He wound up hating the picture, too. He thought it was way over the top. He believed that war should be shown in all its horror, not as an adventure. The Dirty Dozen was a huge hit—a “dummy money-maker,” Lee called it, and it made him a superstar.
One of the things Lee and I had in common was our regard for John Boorman. They teamed up on Point Blank (1967), in which Lee plays a hard guy on a quest for revenge. By then Lee’s star had risen so high, he was given control of the whole picture. He chose Boorman to direct and put him in charge of everything, including approval of the script, the cast, and the crew. Boorman made all the decisions and Lee backed him at every turn, even though it was Boorman’s first Hollywood picture.
Lee made another picture with Boorman, Hell in the Pacific (1968), about an American pilot and a Japanese naval officer marooned on a Pacific island. Toshiro Mifune was the only other actor in the film and Lee said he loved working with him, even though they had no common language. The critics liked the film, but it flopped at the box office.
Lee was now making a million dollars a picture, but he was getting cynical about the business. He resented that Paul Newman made $200,000 more than he did on the Western comedy Pocket Money (1972). “You spend the first forty years of your life trying to get in this business, and the next forty years trying to get out,” Lee s
aid. He was also disgusted with being a movie star. “They put your name on a star in the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard and you walk down and find a pile of dog shit on it. That tells the whole story, baby.”
Lee also began to have a problem with alcohol. “I quit drinking every morning and I start again every evening,” he used to say. Like a lot of people, he got physical when he drank. He’d pick a fight with the toughest guy in the room and usually win. Sometimes he got so drunk he couldn’t speak, just wave his arms. Or he’d do crazy things like go down to the Marine recruiting office in the middle of the night and try to reenlist.
One night Lee and I went for drinks and he got smashed and I said, “I promised your wife I’d get you back by one o’clock.” I dragged him to the car and he got on the roof and wouldn’t come down. I’d had a few drinks myself and I figured, what the hell, it’s late, there’s no traffic, I’ll just go slow. So I drove at about ten miles an hour up the Pacific Coast Highway. I looked in the mirror and saw two cops in a cruiser behind us and thought, Oh, shit! But all they did was drive up beside us and go, “Hi, Lee,” and drive off. I guess they were used to seeing Lee Marvin on the roof of a moving car.
—
I THINK MICHELLE TRIOLA started out as more or less a convenience for Lee, but she became a predicament. I don’t think he loved her, but he might have been afraid of her or of what she was capable of doing. She threatened suicide more than once, and on the night of the Oscars, when Lee intended to take his ex-wife Betty, Michelle said that she’d kill herself if she couldn’t go. Lee caved and took her instead of Betty.
Michelle was a wannabe actress and singer. She met Lee while working as a stand-in on Ship of Fools (1965). They became an item, and before long, Lee separated from his wife and Michelle moved into his Malibu house. She legally changed her name to Michelle Marvin. After living with Lee for six years she sued him for “palimony” in what became a landmark case.
Michelle demanded half of the millions Lee earned while they lived together, plus extra money for the loss of her “career.” The judge denied her claim for Lee’s income but awarded her $100,000 to help her learn a marketable skill. Lee appealed, and the judgment was thrown out on the same day that Michelle was arrested for shoplifting in Beverly Hills.
A short time later, Lee married his childhood sweetheart, Pamela Feeley, and settled down in Tucson. When he wasn’t working, he was riding a motorcycle or big-game hunting or deep-sea fishing. (“Fishing gets rid of the bloodlust at sea, so I don’t have to take it ashore with me.”) But the booze and the four packs a day finally took their toll. He could never give up cigarettes despite violent coughing fits, and in his final days he would take off the oxygen mask to smoke.
Lee died of a heart attack in 1987 at age sixty-three. He’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery. There’s an old showbiz adage that you have to be lucky that somebody more famous doesn’t die on the same day you do. The news of Lee’s passing was overshadowed by the death of John Huston the day before, but I don’t think Lee would give a damn.
Lee was a serious, intelligent actor who took pride in his craft, and a loyal friend who went out of his way to warn me of the perils of Hollywood success. Before Clint Eastwood, before Sam Peckinpah, Lee changed the way violence is portrayed on film. He hated senseless screen violence and made sure there was always a point to it in his performances. If the violence looks too easy, he believed, it becomes an invitation to try it. He wanted to make it so horrible that nobody would want any part of it, and I think he played all those “animal men,” as he called them, not only because they were part of him, but also because he wanted to influence people not to be like them. But there’s no doubt that the key to his personality was violence: the violence inside him, the violence he experienced in combat, and the violence he put on the screen. But, deep down—and he’d probably slug me for saying it—Lee was a gentle man.
Roy Rogers
Thomas “Snuff” Garrett (he got his nickname from Levi Garrett Chewing Tobacco) started as a disc jockey in Lubbock, Texas. Snuff didn’t play an instrument, he didn’t sing, but he had an uncanny ear for hits. He became a record producer and worked with everyone from Del Shannon to the Johnny Mann Singers. He wrote songs and owned his own record label. Back in the 1970s, he bought up all the old Republic Westerns and made a lot of money selling them on cassettes and DVDs. He retired to his ranch in Arizona and still lives there.
Snuff is one of the funniest people in the world. And legendary in Hollywood. You’d go to his house for dinner and you never knew who would be there, because he knew everybody.
Snuff produced the music for Sharky’s Machine (1981) and The Cannonball Run (1981), which earned us music publishing royalties. When John Ford died, they auctioned off his paintings, and Snuff used our royalty money to buy two of them. One showed a scene from The Searchers (1956), the other from Fort Apache (1948). Snuff liked the one from Fort Apache, but he gave it to me because he thought it was a better painting, and he kept The Searchers.
Well, The Searchers is one of my favorite films, and I was disappointed, but I didn’t say anything. A few weeks later I was having dinner with Snuff and his wife, Nettie, at their new house in Beverly Hills. We were sitting in the dining room with The Searchers hanging on the wall over us, and I couldn’t take it anymore.
“How did you end up with the painting from my favorite movie, The Searchers?”
“You got the best goddamn painting, the one from Fort Apache,” he said.
“I don’t want Fort Apache.”
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I never wanted the fuckin’ Searchers.”
The next morning we switched paintings.
—
SNUFF WAS A good friend of Roy Rogers. One day he said to Roy, “Would you record a song called ‘Hoppy, Gene, and Me’?”
Roy said, “I don’t know, I’ve never heard it.”
And Snuff said, “I’ve never heard it either, Roy, because I just now got the fuckin’ idea!”
Snuff came up with a song in about a week. Roy recorded it and it was a smash hit.
—
I’VE ALWAYS LOVED WESTERNS. As a boy I went to Saturday matinees to see Hoot Gibson, Charles Starrett, Rex Allen, Gene Autry, and my favorite, Roy Rogers, “The King of the Cowboys.”
When I came to Hollywood, Snuff introduced me to Roy, and we hit it off right away. (I knew Gene Autry, too. Roy and Gene weren’t the best of friends, but they pretended they were. They were always friendly in public, but they didn’t much like each other.)
Roy and I talked a lot about the movies, and I loved running around with him, because wherever he went, people would go crazy. There was always a much bigger hubbub about him than about any other movie star I’ve ever been with, because they grew up with Roy and absolutely adored him. He was giving to his fans and kind to everyone who approached him for an autograph or just to chat. It was a great lesson for a young actor.
Roy’s real name was Leonard Slye, and he was from Ohio. He didn’t grow up on a ranch, but on a farm with cows and chickens. They did have one horse, and Roy taught himself to ride. He worked like hell with it, and by the time he became Roy Rogers, he knew what he was doing. Roy and his mother used to yodel to each other to communicate across distances on the farm, and yodeling became one of Roy’s musical trademarks. He had a beautiful tenor voice, and long before he hit the silver screen he was the leader of the Sons of the Pioneers. The group performed what was then a new kind of popular music: not country, not bluegrass, but “Western” songs such as “Don’t Fence Me In,” “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” and “Cool Water.”
One day Roy was in a hat shop in L.A. having his Stetson blocked when a guy ran in all out of breath and bought a cowboy hat. Roy overheard him tell the clerk that he needed the hat right away for an audition at Republic. Roy slipped out the back and snuck into the audition. He did a number on his guitar and th
ey hired him and gave him a long-term contract on the spot beginning with a low-budget oater called Under Western Stars (1938).
Roy had these tiny little eyes, and of course Republic tried to change the thing that made him stand out. They made him use drops to widen them, but fans wrote in to protest, so they got rid of the drops and let Roy be Roy.
Audiences loved him. He went on to make nearly a hundred feature films, and they all made money. He shot each one in a couple of weeks for under $10,000, and on average they grossed $50,000. Between 1943 and 1954, Roy was the top Western star in Hollywood.
Even so, Republic wouldn’t pay him more than $300 a week, so Roy struck a deal for his own merchandising rights that turned into a bonanza. He was second only to Walt Disney in licensing sales, with Roy Rogers cap guns, pajamas, comic books, action figures, and of course about a billion lunch boxes. There’s even a chain of Roy Rogers fast-food restaurants. He also had the Roy Rogers Museum in Apple Valley, California, where they had Roy’s stuffed horse Trigger on display.
—
ROY WAS a straight shooter on the screen, but he didn’t shoot to kill. When he plugged an hombre, he only winged him or shot the gun out of his hand. He was a marksman in real life, too, a champion shotgunner and big-game hunter with a den full of trophies. Not long after we met I went hunting with him and three or four other guys in Canada. It was one of the great thrills of my life. When everybody partnered up, I was honored that Roy asked to be with me.
The two of us took a small boat out to a remote island. We set up in a spot where Roy thought we’d have a good chance of finding game. We were talking about our favorite movies when we looked up and saw a moose walk out of the woods and begin to drink from a creek about fifty yards way. It was huge.
“Go ahead, take it!” Roy said.
“No, you go ahead,” I said.
But Enough About Me: A Memoir Page 10