A year later he was confronting a fellow student in kindergarten over the territorial rights of that wooden chair. From Matthew Marvin’s fiery pub raids, Ross Marvin’s ill-fated Arctic adventures and his father’s tightlipped discipline, Lee Marvin was on a collision course with confrontations that often led to pure physical violence. “I left kindergarten, and for the rest of my life I was never happy to go to school,” he later said. “Because it was my chair wasn’t it?”
CHAPTER 2
“Dogface” vs. St. Leo
THE STOCK MARKET CRASH in October 1929 that brought about the Great Depression of the 1930s had Lee Marvin’s parents doing all they could to maintain a semblance of normalcy despite economic uncertainty. While other children were wondering where their next meal was coming from, Lee’s 1929 letter to Santa told a different story. He dictated to his mother the following: “I am a good boy but sometimes I am bad. I am sorry that I am sometimes bad. I am 5 years old. I would like a soldier castle, a battleship, a cannon, a radio set, a war wagon, a soldier suit, a typewriter, a jack-in-the-box, a railroad station, a tricycle, a sand chute. Thank you for the toys.”
Because Courtenay worked fairly frequently writing freelance articles for women’s magazines, they were able to afford toys for the kids, and all the comforts of home. As Robert recalled, “She had a job in the Depression. She stayed home at night pounding the typewriter from time to time when my father didn’t have a job. At least it was what you would call a middle-class life. See, the word middle-class now is spread so far it doesn’t mean anything. Well, neither one of them had a college education so they weren’t professional, in that sense. Otherwise, they were people who got creative jobs. We had a comfortable childhood. We went to both public and private schools. We didn’t have what you might call a Depression-era life. Sometimes you get that impression of people’s past but in our case it was pretty comfortable.”
Robert recalled his father’s work history somewhat differently: “He started off in the Bank of Montreal and I think a friend said, ‘Why don’t you try sales?’ He had a very tough time for a while. Then he got a job with Eastman Kodak through the Frank Seaman Advertising Agency, one of the biggest in the world at the time. He made surveys about how to sell cameras and film. So, he went through all kinds of situations: coal mines, steel mills. He had a great deal of this sort of thing in his background. He wasn’t a high-type executive in those years, where you sat in an office somewhere. He was a field guy… At the same time, my mother was working for magazines so she had an income. Between the two of them we were in pretty good shape.”
The Marvin family was very keen on keeping up appearances no matter what the finances dictated. Lee’s first wife, Betty, knew the family’s inner workings and stated, “Well, there was money but there was no wealth. I think of wealth, I think of a lot of money. They lived okay. They lived quite frugally. Monte, you know what he did during the Depression? He went door-to-door selling “Book of Knowledge” encyclopedias. People with financial means don’t do that door-to-door.”
The family’s seesaw finances also meant moving a lot throughout the greater New York area, from Jackson Heights in Queens, to Brooklyn, to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Through it all, an African-American nanny named Erlene tended to Robert and Lee. Being from the South, such things were important to Courtenay, but as Betty points out, “Here’s a little insight which I think was fascinating. It’s like right out of Tennessee Williams or any Southern writer. When they were raised as children in New York City, Courtenay always had a Southern accent, with this little whisper. Monte, Robert and Lee always had such very fine English. Years later, Robert was in the army in a company from Brooklyn. That used to drive Courtenay crazy! His mother used to say, ‘Oh Robert, how could you speak that way?’ She’d go on and on and on about it. His mother was a complete snob. And those two guys, Robert and Lee, never had a chance with that mother.”
Betty also recalled seeing for herself what Courtenay’s relationship with Lee was like. “Lee had the most difficult time with his mother,” who, she stated, “was a real Virginia Southern lady. Oh, tough as nails. I don’t think there was a maternal bone in her body. Erlene, the maid whom they adored, raised both Robert and Lee. Their father was a real doormat to Courtenay. She never let anyone forget for a second about her heritage being of the George Washington strain. She came to New York from Virginia not as a fashion journalist but, well, she wanted to be a journalist. She was always exaggerating what she was. She was really more with Helena Rubenstein. She was more into cosmetics, not clothing. There was that interesting talk about matriarchy. I was the first woman that ever crossed that threshold. Robert never married until after his mother died. Lee, according to himself, really hated her. He would just go crazy when she was around. He would. He kept away from her.”
Another reason for Lee’s animosity towards his mother arose from the importance she would place on the facade of gracious living, while all around him he could see the effects of the struggling economy. “I always envied the street kids,” he said years later. “Even though we went to public schools, we weren’t allowed to have orange-crate skateboards or to wear the little stocking hats with the two buttons. We couldn’t have them, and so the fights followed. I went to a lot of schools in New York City until I couldn’t go anymore.”
From Lee’s point of view, school was a waste of his time, time he would rather have spent hunting or fishing. When the family first summered in Woodstock, five-year-old Lee discovered his love of fishing by walking off with his father’s rod and reel, that is, until the state police found him and brought him back. He later went fishing on Sheepshead Bay but often ended up giving the fish away on the subway. “My parents just didn’t know how to deal with fresh game,” he explained.
He also loved going to the movies, Errol Flynn’s being particular favorites. But the all-time favorite film of the often truant young film fan was the 1931 antiwar classic, All Quiet On the Western Front. He claimed it was the second film he ever saw and he never got over it, identifying closely with the tough but fair sergeant who oversaw his young charges.
School was an obvious letdown by comparison. “I didn’t like school,” he later reasoned. “Everyday it was a toss-up whether I’d go or skip.” When he did go, the only things that held his interest were history and sports. When it came to grammar, spelling, math and other core curricula, his grades reflected his lack of interest. A teacher’s note to his parents on his grade school report card read, “Please see that Lee gets to school on time.”
Part of the problem went beyond his rebellious and non-conforming nature. Teachers at that time had no concept of either his Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) nor of his dyslexia. His first wife Betty witnessed it herself, and, when asked if her ex-husband was dyslexic, immediately replied: “Yes, and so is his son Christopher. Again, there was not the proper attention paid to Lee growing up, and I’m not blaming him because it was part of the times, but they were not sophisticated about dyslexia. I think Lee could have done anything if those problems had been worked out. He was a very slow reader. It’s too bad because he had such a quest for knowledge. He used to say to me, ‘Look at all the books around here.’ It used to drive him crazy I was always reading.”
Ironically, there were certain subjects and writers that held his interest, such as biographies of native-American warrior Osceola, the Civil War and authors Bret Harte, Jack London, Herman Melville and others. “Oh yes, and he would recite Robert Service by heart,” recalled Betty. “When he read someone he really loved, he would do that. He loved literature.” His ability to memorize passages while struggling with the written word itself aided him greatly with scripts when he became an actor, but frustrated his childhood teachers who were for the most part unaware of this coping device to compensate for his condition. Although dyslexia was recognized by astute and sympathetic educators, it would still be several decades before it would actually be treated in schools.
Most of t
he time however, school proved too frustrating to hold his interest, which resulted in another habit that carried over into adulthood: running away. His adventure to Baltimore at the age of four was just the beginning. To Betty, Lee’s boyhood escapades became a regular part of their marriage. “It was a pattern,” she recalled. “I believed that’s how we really know people. Lee could say anything, but what he would do, from the time he was a little boy, he would run away. He would hide. While we were married, he wouldn’t come home. He would call and say, ‘I bet you don’t know where I am.’ That running away he did when he was at school. He was always truant and disappearing.”
By his own admission, Lee stated, “I’ve never been able to accept any kind of discipline. My father was supposed to be pretty tough, and I rebelled against him by running away from home when I was four years-old. In school I couldn’t see any sense to reading, writing, and arithmetic. Sure, they kicked me out, but for trifles like continual daydreaming and smoking that wouldn’t be grounds for expulsion nowadays.”
His transgressions were an ongoing concern to his family. “I once kicked [radio show host] Uncle Don in the shins at a performance in Jackson Heights,” he once admitted sheepishly. Such actions required Monte to step in and, on more than one occasion, it got physical. “My father rarely punched my brother, rarely in any physical sense,” rationalized Robert. “I can think of an incident or two when we were little children that he might have given him some verbal heat, which he could do in pretty good fashion. If your father can’t do that to you, then what the hell is left?’”
Upon further reflection, Robert recalled a particular time when Monte administered more than verbal heat to ten-year-old Lee: “My brother owed some kid some money, five or ten cents. Apparently, the kid came up and rang the apartment door. My father got wind of it. My father said, ‘Okay, let’s go out and straighten it out.’ There was a gang of little kids, about eight to ten of them. My father said, ‘Okay, you’re going to take each one of them in a fight,’ which Lee did. Of course, he was small. I remember I was awfully upset.”
Such unorthodox—and in Robert’s opinion, upsetting —discipline did not have the desired lasting effect on Lee. If he felt strongly about something, even at that age, he held his ground no matter the repercussions. The New York City Public School System relented and expelled him, first from P.S. 66 in Queens and then P.S. 69 in Manhattan. Following his expulsion, Lee’s parents had no choice but to enroll him in a private school. The first was an experimental school in upstate New York known as Manumit. Robert remembered it as a “Very liberal private boarding school. The kids had their own garden. I think in those days it was probably considered Communist.”
Priding itself on its reputation for nurturing a child’s individual character, the school was progressive for its day, with group teachers, role-playing classes, and an emphasis on the arts and agriculture. Lee would recall it fondly, stating, “It was an outgrowth of the Little Red Schoolhouse-type of progressive education. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, the instructors defected to fight with the Loyalists. The school was run by Stella Ballantine, a protégé of the old anarchist, Emma Goldman. Stella’s husband, E.J. [Ballantine] was a noted Shakespearean actor. They got me into acting and I was always very proud of that relationship.” Letters he wrote home at the time told a different story. “I am writing this letter at the point of a gun,” he would often start and then conclude with, “The other day I killed a mole and am treating its skin. Some of the girls are ordering moleskin coats.”
Teachers were required to write regular summations of each student’s progress and make it as positive as possible. The summary for Lee’s brief tenure for the Fall/Winter term of 1937 was composed by group teacher William Mann Fincke, and included the following:
Lee is an exceedingly restless, extroverted, vital thirteen-year-old human male, but the Manumit environment appears to be big enough to take care of his restlessness. There are plenty of trees for him to get to the top of and he can build as many huts as he desires.
While Lee has arrived at the age at which he is well aware that girls exist, he has not yet, it seems arrived at the age where this awareness affects [sic] his washing and dressing habits.
From Lee’s evidence of interest and stock of fairly accurate information, revealed in conversation about history, I am convinced that his difficulties with his history paper lay in his need for mastery of the simple tools of getting down the words.
…I have refrained from putting the screws on Lee in academic work pending getting completely next to him. This, I believe, I have gone a long way toward doing.
…In summarizing I should end on an optimistic note that Lee and we will be able, given time, to work out a solution of his problems and that his stay at Manumit will be on the whole a pleasant one. Occasionally I have had to speak sharply to him, chiefly to reassure him that there is present a friendly authority that does demand from him certain standards. Lee’s attitude either when advised or when sharply corrected is marked by a total absence of vindictiveness and seemingly by a bona fide desire to come through.
The school’s friendly authority was sorely tested during Lee’s short stay. He was caught smoking with several female students behind a shack and expelled. What upset him the most was the extra charges the self-proclaimed progressive principal heaped upon him. “We were smoking, that’s all,” Lee later stated. “But the principal was a dirty-minded man. He kicked me out of school and sent me home with a note for my father. It said I’d been having sexual intercourse with the girls. Hell, I didn’t even have hair on my chest.”
After the Manumit debacle, his parents tried a less progressive institution. The Oakwood Academy was a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, New York that Lee attended long enough to leave an indelible mark. In a letter to his brother he boasted, “Today we took four guys’ pants down and put some Dr. Elles permanent wave set and mixed it with some scouring powder and poured it all over their wang. [One of them] practically bit my finger off!”
That particular incident remained undiscovered, but another one became one of the most legendary events of the actor’s formative years. Waking up late one morning, Lee and his roommate scurried to organize their room in time for inspection. Lee put things away while the roommate swept. “He took the sweepings and dumped them out the window,” the actor later recalled. “I said, ‘That was a stupid goddamn thing to do. Now we’ll have to go down there and clean’em up again.’ He called me a son-of-a-bitch, and I said, ‘Call me that again and I’ll throw you out the window.’ He called me it again, and I threw him out the window. So, they kicked me out of school.”
The roommate wasn’t hurt, but over the years Lee proudly inflated the details of the incident with each retelling, such as the height of the window. Here is Marvin’s own take on the repercussions: “They asked me to go home and commune with God and see the injustice of all this shit…”
Since progressive and Quaker did not work out too well, Monte then decided to enroll his son into a military school, the Admiral Farragut Naval Academy in Toms River, New Jersey. Lee was required to wear an expensive uniform and take flak from the retired sixty-one year-old naval officer, which did not sit well with the young rebel. His version was, “My uniform cost eight hundred dollars. I lasted a month. The guy in charge was a rear admiral. He kept pulling rank on us kids. I couldn’t stand it. I called him a son-of-a-bitch.” Lee was on the train back home in less than two weeks.
Over the years the actor boasted of having been thrown out of fifteen schools and of simply being misunderstood by his teachers and parents. Monte dispelled that legend by calling his son a “…wild, harmless, innocent but crazy kid. But there was never a period of misunderstanding. I wouldn’t say that he understood me but I understood him. I used to take him fishing. He was thrown out of not fifteen schools, but let’s say six schools. What a kid. I just had to put him someplace…” Lee understood what his parents were attempting, stating, “I’m not kn
ocking what my parents were trying to do, but boy, did they waste their money.”
Since Courtenay’s freelance work was infrequent and Monte’s job history remained sketchy, it was a waste of money they could ill afford. Then, a golden opportunity appeared for Monte in 1936 when he was offered a position with the newly formed Florida State Citrus Commission. On the face of it, financially speaking, it was an answer to the Marvins’ prayers.
Unfortunately there were problems that went deeper than either finances or even Lee’s incorrigibility. Monte was never one to show his emotions and Courtenay was never one to keep them in check. The family was spread across the country with Lee accompanying his father to Florida, Courtenay often in Hollywood or Manhattan on business, and Robert in Poughkeepsie at the Oakwood Academy after a brief stay in “The Sunshine State.” The result left Courtenay feeling abandoned, as she pointed out in her letter-writing campaign to Monte, “The past few weeks seemed unbearable and I can’t tell you exactly why,” she wrote in 1938. “Perhaps I do jump to false conclusions but you must know I have little to live upon, mentally or spiritually here, so far as my family is concerned. Please do try to overlook this bad lapse and I will gird my loins once more. Oh Lord, would that I could in another sense. It has, darling, been kind of a concentration camp for years.”
Monte, himself, was not having an easy time of it in Florida. He enrolled Lee into public school and battled daily with the growing politicization of the Commission. Because Monte was a sales manager and not a political appointee as were the rest of the Commission members, there were constant attempts to undermine his position by others in his office. The stress of this daily tug-of-war escalated his drinking and put an obvious strain on his long distance marriage. “For God’s sake, don’t let anything that can happen get to your morale,” Courtenay wrote to her husband. “Don’t let those crooks put anything over on you. Don’t take the blame for the agency’s refusal to give you good men to work with. Tell those damn fools to go to hell and get the hell out of that hole yourself. I tell you this, Monte, before it is too late.”
Lee Marvin: Point Blank Page 3