Life Itself: A Memoir

by Roger Ebert

  I typed up that Marvin interview and mailed it over the transom to the Sunday New York Times, which was then the venue of the newly celebrated Rex Reed. I took a minimalist approach, the opposite to him. The Times bought it and later took similar pieces from me about Groucho, John Wayne, and Bob and Ray.

  I don’t intend to make this book an anthology of my best newspaper pieces, but I think I’ll print that interview from December 1968 because it has some interest as my breakthrough into national print, and my discovery of what would become my frequent method.

  “Well, here we are at the Paramount commissary and Lee Marvin is facing straight into the corner,” Lee Marvin said. “It is what Lee Marvin should expect, because Lee Marvin was late getting to lunch, and he got the only chair left. Pauline? Could you get me a Heineken’s?”

  “Only the Heineken’s?” the waitress said.

  “Whaddya mean, only the Heineken’s?”

  “I mean, you won’t be eating?”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I’m only having the Heineken’s.”

  Marvin was in costume for some studio scenes on “Paint Your Wagon,” and he had silver locks down to his shoulders and whiskers and a moustache-sideburn combination, and he looked hairy. He was wearing an old blue blazer. This was Monday and his call had been for 7:30 a.m. and now here it was past noon and he’d been waiting all morning and had worked himself into an interesting condition. He twisted around in his seat and saw John Wayne three tables down. Wayne was in Western costume for “True Grit.”

  “He wears his gun to lunch,” Marvin said.

  The beer came. “You ever hear me sing an Armenian song?” Marvin sang an Armenian song. “What else? Let’s see. Did you see that article in Life? By that Peace Corps kid, about the picture I was making with the Jap, Toshiro Mifune? ‘Hell in the Pacific’? That article was written by a kid 21 years old, and he already has his Ph.D.” He pointed his finger like a pistol and made a noise that began with a whistle and ended with a pop. “Twenty-one.” Whistle-pop. “I’ll give it to you straight, I liked the picture. Here I am—me, the combat veteran—20 years later and having bad dreams at night about the Pacific. The dreams go away, and where am I? Back on that island. Back in the goddamned Pacific. It was a rough picture. It was hotter than hell out there. I was hot, Lee Marvin was hot, we were all hot. The Jap was great.

  “My next picture after ‘Paint Your Wagon’—which of course we all remember is this picture—is going to be called ‘Diehard.’ About older men confronted by younger men and all those obvious phrases. Phrases. I mean I could go on, but—” Whistle, ascending to a suggestive note. “I mean I could, but—” Pop! Significant wink. “I was in the Pacific. I was young and tough at the time. But I got it whipped: Now I’m old and tough. Tough as nails. Mean. All those words. You know all those words. Save time.”

  Marvin poured his beer into a glass, drank, looked at the glass, drained it, held it up to the light and said: “Well I’ll be good goddamned. Look at this. D.S.C. Who the hell’s D.S.C.?”

  “D.S.C.?” asked the studio press agent.

  “Yeah, right here. Damnedest thing you ever did see. The initials on this glass spell D.S.C. First time I ever heard of coming into the Paramount commissary and they give you a monogrammed glass. Now who could it be? Darryl S…. hmmm.

  “But let’s talk about ‘Paint Your Wagon.’ That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? The way I see it, the picture has seven saving factors: Josh Logan, Clint Eastwood, Jean Seberg and, of course, me. I’m established, right? I mean, I am established, right?”

  “That’s only four, Lee,” the press agent said.

  “Four what?” Whistle-pop. “Pauline? Hey, Pauline? Look at this glass. Funniest thing you ever saw. Look here. D.S.C. Dudley S. Conover? Might be, could be… trouble of it is, nobody around here by that name.”

  “I’ll check on it,” Pauline said. “That really is something.”

  “No hurry about it,” Marvin said. “Think of D.S.C. having lunch right now, thinking, where’s my monogrammed glass? Let him cool his heels, what I say. Teach him the value.”

  A woman at another table came over with a photograph of Marvin and asked him to autograph it for her daughter. Marvin wrote his name in the shape of a tattoo on the arm. The woman said she’d liked Marvin in “The Dirty Dozen.”

  “I really don’t care about it, ‘The Dirty Dozen,’ ” Marvin said when the woman had left. “The D.D. was a dummy money-maker, and baby, if you want a money-maker, get a dummy. ‘Hell in the Pacific,’ now, that’s a rough movie. I think it’ll be a failure. If you say it’ll be a success, who listens? Say it’s a failure, they listen—because it sounds as if you’re saying something. Interviews like this, after a while you try to get beneath them. Things happening on all kinds of levels. See what I mean? Tunnel under the situation, come up behind the guards, and—”

  His hand made an airplane dive. “Pow! It’s the only way to do an interview, take my word. Hit them straight on, and the s.o.b.’s will clobber you every time. Of course, I’m in a very raunchy mood this morning.”

  A long pause. “So the Algonquin Hotel is dead… they think! Pack up the old round table. Zappo! When things started getting better for me financially, I went to the Algonquin. I was drinking Jack Daniels and water, reading the label. Elliott Nugent, a writer, had a typewriter, sitting there, took him 25 minutes to type ‘and.’ Bartender said… Never mind what the bartender said.

  “That of course was during my righteous period. I was married at the time, and so… I ordered breakfast. The room service guy kept his head down. Subservience, and I’m an American. Can’t stand it. So I said, it’s O.K., sweetheart, we’re married. Still kept his head down. And my mother of course loved the Algonquin. The dear, dear old Algonquin… Pauline?”

  “Right, Mr. Marvin, we checked and you know who that glass belongs to? Douglas Cramer, one of the TV executives next door.”

  “Well,” Marvin said, “send it back with my compliments. Cramer? With a C? Must have chickened out.”

  He lit a cigarette. “Come on now, ask me questions,” he said. “Is it true? Ask me something is it true?”

  Is it true you’re the highest-paid actor in Hollywood?

  “That’s it. Not a great question, but a good question. No, it isn’t true. No, Paul Newman makes more money, a million two, I think it is. But what you gonna do?” Conspiratorial wink. Pause.

  “Listen, stop me. I’m rambling. I’d go on like this all day. It’s up to you. I never rise above any situation.”

  Is it true you and Josh Logan have been at each other’s throats during the filming of “Paint Your Wagon”?

  “Logan and me, I’ll tell you the truth, we’re so simpatico we refuse to accept the other person. That’s beautiful. I mean, he’s so right, and I’m so right… we’re both so right… well, what you gonna do?”

  Marvin’s agent, Meyer Mishkin, arrived at the table and suggested that everybody walk on over to the set. Everybody got up and, on the way out, there were two women at the commissary door selling raffle tickets for a charity. Marvin pulled some money out of his pocket. “Meyer, I told you, never give me anything smaller than hundreds,” he said. He put a $20 bill on the table and said, “Here, baby, buy yourself a drink.” As he walked away, he grumbled under his breath: “Big shot movie star, throwing money around.”

  “This isn’t the way to the set,” the studio press agent said.

  “Nope, going to my D.R. first,” Marvin said. “To save you all embarrassment, we’ll go in the back door.” He led everyone to the back door of his dressing room, but the key didn’t fit. “Well,” he said, “to save you all embarrassment, we’ll go in the front door. What the hell, the whole world knows anyway…”

  “He started out rough,” the press agent said, “but you know why he’s bringing you along to his dressing room? He likes you. This is one great guy…”

  Marvin decided not to stop at his dressing room after all, and he walked on down the studi
o street. Three doors down was Barbra Streisand’s dressing room. Marvin took a nickel out of his pocket and left it on her door mat.

  “She’s a good broad,” he said.

  A few yards farther down the street, he was stopped by a young Negro woman who said: “Mr. Marvin, do you remember when you embarrassed me the other morning in Alan Jay Lerner’s office?”

  She was smiling.

  “What?” Marvin said. “Me? I mean, me?”

  The girl laughed. “You came in and… remember? You tried to rub the color off my skin. Like this.”

  “Well,” Marvin said, “did I win?”

  “I… don’t know,” the girl said. “Well, goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” Marvin said. He walked along the street in silence. Finally he said, “Did you hear that? She was stuck for an answer. She brought up the subject, and then she didn’t know how to get out of it. Stuck! And I even gave her the straight line. If it was my daughter, baby…”

  The set was across the street from the main Paramount lot, and along the way was a lounge, the Playboy’s Buffet. One moment Marvin was walking straight ahead and the next he had made a sudden left turn and was inside the lounge.

  Mishkin hurried in after him. The studio press agent walked on toward the set. Inside, Marvin ordered a beer. Mishkin sat at the bar next to him, a short, apple-cheeked man in a business suit next to Marvin’s hairy bulk. Nobody said much. The press agent came back with Michelle Triola, Marvin’s girl friend. Marvin and Miss Triola spoke quietly for a few minutes, jokingly, and then Marvin said he’d be right back and he walked alone toward the dining room section in the next room. Before long, laughter and rumblings floated back into the bar.

  “Listen to him,” Mishkin said, shaking his head wonderingly. “I’m telling you, this man is loved every place he goes. The only thing is, if they would only get him in the morning and get him set. But when he has to wait around all day…”

  “I’m going to see what he’s doing,” Miss Triola said. She went into the other room.

  “I’ve been with Lee Marvin for 17 years,” Mishkin said. “We’ve gone from scale to a million dollars a picture. You know what scale was in those days? We were getting $175 a week. That was $17.50 for me, and now look where he is. Paul Newman gets more a picture, but he committed on that deal at Universal. We have freedom. We never sign a multiple picture deal. We sign one picture at a time. We won’t even sign a two picture deal unless we know what the second picture is. And we won’t sign a deal for a picture to be made two, three years from now. Who knows? The market might change.”

  Another wave of laughter floated in from the dining room. Marvin’s voice could be heard saying something undecipherable in a rhythm which suggested it was a joke.

  “Now will you listen to that?” Mishkin said, inclining his head toward the dining room. “There’s something about that man, when he’s in a room, people just naturally look at him, they admire him. He’s got some quality, I don’t know what it is. Let me put it this way, have you ever seen Lee Marvin in a picture that wasn’t right for him? Where he didn’t look good? Sure, we could go to Universal, sign the contract, get the extra two, three hundred thousand a picture, but when you’re making the money Lee Marvin’s making, who needs it? I mean, who needs it? And Paul Newman… let me put it this way. Think back. Has Lee Marvin ever done a ‘Harry Frigg’? Go right ahead, think back. Has Lee Marvin ever done a ‘Secret War of Harry Frigg’? That’s what it gets you into…”

  His head was inclined more anxiously now toward the dining room, where the noises indicated some change of mood, although there was still laughter. In a moment Michelle Triola came back out of the dining room and sat on her stool at the bar again.

  “No, I won’t have anything,” she told the bartender. She is a pretty girl, very soft-spoken.

  “What’s going on in there?” Mishkin asked.

  “Oh, you know,” she said.

  “Well, they haven’t come looking for him,” Mishkin said. “They know where he is.”

  “Look what time it is,” Miss Triola said. “Almost 2:30. He comes to work at 7:30 in the morning, ready to work, and they make him wait. And you know how that drives him up the wall. I’m sure he doesn’t mean to be rude, but…”

  “He hasn’t been rude,” the studio press agent said.

  “Well,” she said, “he just was to me.”

  31 ROBERT MITCHUM

  ROBERT MITCHUM DIDN’T give a damn what anybody thought about him. He never seemed to be making the slightest effort to be a movie star. But of the stars I met in my early years on the job, he was the most iconic, the most fascinating. That fits into my theory that true movie stars must be established in our minds well before we reach a certain age, perhaps seventeen. Mitchum was embedded in my mind from an early age when one night in the basement I came across a copy of my father’s Confidential magazine and electricity ran through me when I saw a photo of the topless starlet Simone Silva at Cannes, embracing Mitch. He looked pleased but not excited. Perhaps it was his composure that made such an impression.

  I met Mitchum for the first time in autumn 1969 in a stone cottage on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, where he was filming Ryan’s Daughter for David Lean. I walked up to the cottage one afternoon with John McHugh and John’s brother Eugene. Mitchum was utterly relaxed. His voice played the famous low laconic melody. His eyes were hooded, his manner lazy. It was his day off. He stretched his legs out long under the coffee table, whirled the ice in his glass, and whistled My heart knows what the wild goose knows. I sensed that Mitchum would not be patient with standard questions. He spoke in streams of consciousness, and that’s how I quoted him. That afternoon and evening, he taught me as Lee Marvin had how I would write interviews in the future. I would not ask formal questions and write down the replies. I would drift with the occasion and observe whatever happened. Because that’s what I did with Mitchum, I think he grew to tolerate me. He didn’t mind me being around, even during unrehearsed moments as when he smoked pot while being driven through Pennsylvania and parts of Ohio in search of a movie location. During a day like that, he never made the slightest suggestion that I shouldn’t quote him in full or mention the pot. He didn’t care.

  At some point that first time in Dingle I asked him, “How long you figure you got to live?” His answer was like free verse: “About… oh, about three weeks. I have this rash that grows on my back every twenty-eight days. I was bitten by a rowboat when I was thirteen, in a park in Cleveland, Ohio, and every twenty-eight days a rash appears on my back. I’ve offered my body for science. Meanwhile, I sit here in Dingle and vegetate. I was a young man of twenty-six when I arrived here last month. The days are punctuated by the sighs of my man, Harold, as he waits for the pubs to open. But don’t get me wrong. Usually I’m gay with laughter, fairy footed, dancing about and rejoicing. But this afternoon, well, I just woke up. So I sit here and weep. Finally everyone staggers into town to Tom Ashe’s pub and leaves me here alone weeping. That’s my day.”

  Mitchum’s attention drifted. Outside the window, children played in the road. They called to each other in Gaelic. We began talking about some recent movies. “I never saw The Sand Pebbles,” he said. “Of course that was a problem picture out in front, with Steve McQueen in it. You’ve got to realize a Steve McQueen performance just naturally lends itself to monotony.” A melancholy shake of the head. “Steve doesn’t bring too much to the party.”

  A silence fell. Mitchum yawned and let his head drop back. He stared up at the ceiling. “No way,” he said. “There’s just no way.” Drawing out the no. “Noooo way.”

  He emptied his glass.

  “I’ve put away more fucking scotch since I got to Dingle than I’ve put away in my whole life,” he said. “No, there was Vietnam… one day we were out there in the boondocks and I must have had fourteen, no, sixteen cans of beer and the greater part of a bottle of whiskey. And that was at lunch. Then they took me back to base in a helicopter and all the clubs�
�the officer’s club, the noncom’s club, the enlisted-men’s club—they all said, ‘Come on, Bob, have a drink.’ ‘No way,’ I said. ‘No way. I’m a Mormon bishop. Sure, Bob, we know.’ ”

  Mitchum took a fresh glass from his man, Harold. “No way,” he sighed. “I’ve looked into it, and there’s just noooo way. My father was killed when I was three, so I was principally shipped around to relatives. I finally left when I was fourteen. Jumped on a train, came back, left again when I was fifteen, wound up on a chain gang in Savannah, came back, went to California. My first break was working for Hopalong Cassidy, falling off horses. So now I support my favorite charity: myself. That’s where the money goes. My wife, my kids. I have a brother, weighs about 280 pounds. Two sisters, a mother, a stepfather. I think my sisters are religious mystics. They belong to that Baha’i faith. Somebody asked my wife once, What’s your idea of your husband? And she answered: He’s a masturbation image. Well, that’s what we all are. Up there on the screen, our goddamn eyeball is six feet high, the poor bastards who buy tickets think we really amount to something.”

  Mitchum stood up and walked over to the window. “Let’s take a walk around the house,” he said.

  It was nearly dark outside, cold and damp, the lights of Dingle on the hill across the river. “It’s going to be a good picture,” he said. “I trust Lean. He’s a good director. He’d better be. This is eight goddamn months out of my life. I’ll be here until the last dog dies.” He kicked at the grass, his hands in his pockets, his face neutral.

  “Any more questions?” he said.