Lee Marvin: Point Blank

by Dwayne Epstein

  Keeping the show fresh, even after just a few episodes, proved a challenge to Marvin. One aspect that set the show apart was the popular, swinging Count Basie theme that Marvin himself commissioned for the second season, and also wrote the liner notes to the bestselling soundtrack album. Frequent costar and fellow movie bad guy John Dennis noted the way in which Marvin kept the proceedings from becoming mundane. “You never quite knew what he was going to do,” recalled Dennis. “Lee was a very challenging actor to work with because he really made you watch the little things that were happening. You’d watch that twinkle in his eyes when there should be no twinkle.”

  Specifically, Dennis noted how Marvin changed from rehearsal to performance: “He was, all of a sudden, in rehearsal like this with the booming voice. In the filmed take, he’d be down here like this [speaking softly] and you’re up here anticipating what you rehearsed. But, he didn’t do it that way. ‘Son-of-a-bitch! Where the hell is he going?’ Well, we were doing it in rehearsals. So, when he dropped, I dropped. But now I knew that when I got low, Lee couldn’t get any lower because you couldn’t understand him. He was on top of it. He had an intensity, it was just great.”

  As was common for the time, several future stars appeared on the show, such as frequent film costar Charles Bronson, as well as a young Burt Reynolds, Tom Laughlin (Billy Jack), James Coburn, and Leonard Nimoy. Marlon Brando’s sister Jocelyn appeared in an episode as well as a fairly unknown actor named Duncan McLeod. At the time, he happened to be the second husband of Pamela Feeley, whom Lee had dated back in Woodstock, and with whom he remained in periodic contact through the years.

  Angie Dickinson, another actor to make an early appearance on the show, was to recall, “That is one of my good early jobs, when I probably had five or six lines. I don’t remember anything about that except that I got the job and I did it. I was very nervous at those times, especially working with people like Lee, or any kind of good job. I was still very new. I was literally three years in the business. It was just something… I was probably too involved with my own personal life—which was rather in turmoil at the time—and trying to do a good job.”

  On the domestic front, at least on the surface, the Marvins were doing well. Betty and Lee made a good team when it came to providing a home and maintaining a social existence. “We had themes and what not,” recalled Betty of the Marvin family get-togethers. “We never went out much but I could entertain for a hundred people and not think about it, seriously. I’m not exaggerating. Lee would call and say, ‘Listen honey, what’s going on? Everybody’s on location, and I’m tired of eating out…’ I’d say, ‘How many?’ ‘Oh, about thirty.’ ‘See you then.’ It was great, because I was good at what I did and he was good at what he did. It was okay.”

  Lee invited his brother to stay for the summer while Robert awaited word from the New York Board of Education concerning his teaching position. Robert would go on to become an art teacher in the Fort Apache district of the Bronx, but in the summer of 1958, the heated topic of conversation for the Marvin brothers was baseball, which led to a revelation. “We got on the subject of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had moved out to California,” recalled Robert. “With Lee were one or two guys, and I know one man was a lawyer. I had said, ‘What the hell kind of baseball team leaves its fans…?’ You know, the usual beef. The lawyer said, in effect, they went where the money is. Of course, I immediately hated the lawyer. Then I asked Lee, ‘What do you expect to make?’ I was making about four thousand. I was just starting out as a teacher. My brother mentioned $250,000, and I said, ‘Christ!’ Then I got mad at him… I had no idea what was going on. That’s how dumb I was.”

  The effect the financial success and growing fame of “M Squad” had on Lee Marvin’s family became apparent to Betty. “When Lee became somewhat successful, Robert at times became quite vicious,” she recalled. “I don’t want to say jealous, but very resentful. His life wasn’t working. As Lee became more and more successful, the family’s behavior towards him changed. I don’t know, maybe it’s just human nature. Someone said to me once, ‘You know, Betty, you never let Lee get away with a thing.’ I said, ‘Why should I? I loved him.’ It used to upset me so much that in the business, that there was so much ass kissing.”

  For all of his instinctual good sense, Lee Marvin was not entirely immune to the industry’s seamier underbelly. Former cop and actor Bob Phillips became a close friend of the actor and related this example: “Lee told me a story during the time of “M Squad.” He had a little notoriety. So, this independent producer contacts him. He wanted to do a picture about the Marine Corps, and a lot of it was going to be shot down in Camp Pendleton. So, Lee’s all enthused. It was going to be kind of a low-budget picture, but what the hell, he was going to have his name above the title. The guy makes the arrangement for them to go down Friday night and tour a Marine base. They went out to dinner and drink, drink, drink. They come back to the motel and the guy says, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you, all I could get was one room, just one bed. I’ll sleep on the floor.’ Lee said something like, ‘Fuck it. I don’t care. As long as you don’t snore.’ Something like that.

  “So, they go to bed and Lee’s sound asleep. All of a sudden, an arm comes over. A fucking leg comes over. Then he’s moving in and all that kind of stuff. Lee said, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ The guy says, ‘What? What? Oh! I was asleep.’ Lee jumped out of bed, got himself a fucking blanket, got a little chair and curled up. The morning comes and he told the guy, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ The guy never said a word. Drove all the way back to L.A. Lee said he never seen him since. He was a total phony. Lee Marvin got taken in.”

  By the middle of the second season of the series, Marvin was clearly fed up and frustrated. He told TV Guide, “I would get out of this series if I could. It’s a straitjacket. Anything that’s that much work, I’d try to get out of. Trouble is, I don’t know how to do it legitimately. Can’t pull the morals clause. And anyway, darn it, I agreed to do it, so I have to live up to my word.” After explaining that he could speak so bluntly because he owned fifty percent of the series, he added, “I can’t slough it, because I’ve never walked through anything in my life, and I don’t want to have to apologize for anything I do. That makes the strain doubly great.”

  Not surprisingly, the series began to take a toll on his marriage. “We were really tight it seems to me until ‘M Squad,’” recalled Betty. “He was working those long hours, and he was not happy with the series. He had this outrageous sports car, and he was drunk and driving like a maniac. I was trying to think of everything I could do to keep him alive. To keep him there… I leased an apartment for him right across the street from the studio. I furnished it. I put in the best of everything. I said, ‘Now, sweetheart, you just crawl over there every night. Don’t drive. Don’t go anywhere.’ Great setup, right?”

  The series also had a detrimental effect on his relationship with Meyer Mishkin. The studio system had lost a number of debilitating, high-profile lawsuits that diminished its control of the industry. With the studios’ autonomy wavering, the Music Corporation of America (MCA), under the auspices of Lew Wasserman, decided to take advantage of their weakened condition. Branching out beyond artist representation, MCA pioneered the concept of packaging deals between actors, writers, directors and producers to create projects in which all concerned received a percentage of the profits. It was during this innovative period in the industry that Lee Marvin, frustratingly trapped in a TV series, found himself vulnerable to a new offer from the interested third party.

  Although MCA successfully wooed him away from Mishkin during the end of the show, when he tried to get out of ‘M Squad,’ he was put on suspension. “Well, Lee was wined and dined by MCA, Jennings Lang, and that whole group,” recalled veteran agent and family friend Bob Walker. “Then he left Meyer, but it didn’t take him long to figure out that this wasn’t the answer. Lee Marvin said to me, ‘Every time that there’s a part for me, Charlton He
ston is up for it.’ They were looking for big bucks. Of course, Lee was the big bucks, and they just weren’t aware of it. He didn’t stick with MCA very long. He went back to Meyer about a month later.”

  At the time of his suspension, Betty was in the midst of setting up the first French Haute Couture salon in Beverly Hills. She remembered, “‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to do ‘M Squad’ anymore.’ MCA was not like Meyer. They said, ‘Swell, we’ll put you on suspension.’ He didn’t want anything like that. Of course, every now and again they’d offer him jobs, and he can’t do it, so he got suspended again… And I was in Paris, and he got real depressed. He said, ‘You got to come home.’ That’s when they had him on suspension at MCA. It was so horrible. He sat it out and then went back to Meyer. I don’t remember the details of how he got out of the contract with MCA, but he got out of the series. He was so desperate, he flew back east to the sponsors, Pall Mall, and said to them, ‘Get me out of here!’”

  The last episode of “M Squad” aired June 28, 1960, and no one was happier to see the series draw to a close than its star. Marvin was extremely anxious to get back into feature films now that he had established his name and face with audiences. Moreover, the grind of doing the show made him feel the closest he would ever come to actually dreading his chosen profession. “Creatively, an actor is limited in TV,” he said after he left the show. “The medium is geared for pushing goods. Sell the product, that’s the goal… But, I’m not interested in pushing the products; I’m interested in Lee Marvin, and where he’s going as an actor. There’s the rub. Lee Marvin was going nowhere creatively in the series. Now that I’m back in feature films, I can feel the excitement all around me.”

  Marvin may have been excited to get back into films in the early 60s, but his contentious relationship with TV continued throughout a good part of his career. When film roles were scarce, he turned in excellent performances in several episodes of such shows as “The Untouchables.” Series regular Paul Picerni remembered an episode titled “Fist of Five” in which Marvin gave a revealing glimpse into his acting persona: “Ida Lupino was directing that one. Lee and I were sitting on the set, and it was the last scene of the picture. He’s trapped in a tunnel or something, and he’s caught. It’s a very powerful scene. We shot one take, the master, and he came out. He sat next to me, and I said to him, ‘Lee, you know, wouldn’t it be interesting if you broke down and cried in that scene?’ He looked at me strangely and said, ‘You might cry, but I wouldn’t.’”

  By the time “M Squad” left the air, live TV and anthology shows had faded, replaced by quickly filmed, character-driven series. When the film work was hard to come by, Marvin still found suitable work guest-starring in episodes of “Wagon Train,” “Dr. Kildare,” “Bonanza,” “Combat!,” “The Virginian,” (directed by Sam Fuller) and other popular series. A “Twilight Zone” episode (the last and most enduring of all the anthology shows), penned by cult writer Richard Matheson, titled “Steel” would be proclaimed as the writer’s favorite of all his episodes, and later became the basis for the 2011 Hugh Jackman feature, Real Steel.

  Not all of Lee Marvin’s TV work was episodic or formulaic. In early 1960, he gave one of his most poignant performances in the dramatic special “The American,” directed by John Frankenheimer. He portrayed Native-American Ira Hayes who, as a Marine, helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima, but, as a civilian, died an alcoholic. Unlike his film roles up to that time, Marvin was able to convey with amazing restraint the postwar guilt and trauma he was still grappling with himself. The performance remains one of the most realistic and heart-wrenching he would give. Marvin said at the time, “He [Frankenheimer] called me, outlined the story, and asked if I’d like to play the role. I said, ‘Yeh,’ because I sympathize so much with Hayes. You know he never could escape being a hero. He was buried at Arlington.”

  The following year, the actor again played a psychologically tortured soldier in a special titled “People Need People.” Based on the true story of Dr. Harry Willner, who introduced the idea of group therapy to traumatized veterans, Marvin played an emotionally unreachable and violent Marine as therapist Willner—played by Arthur Kennedy—forces him to confront his demons. The harrowing performance earned the actor his only Emmy nomination, and co-starred James Gregory, Keir Dullea, Marion Ross, Jocelyn Brando, and Bert Remsen. Marvin made friends with the real Willner during the show, and even helped him stage the story for inmates at San Quentin the next year. “The prisoners and I hit it off without any trouble. One of them came up to me and said he didn’t think of me as an actor, but as one of them. It was a great compliment—I think,” joked Marvin.

  Marvin also hosted and narrated another short-lived series titled “Lawbreakers,” which is largely forgotten now. “I regard the series as a public service rather than a dramatic effort,” he said at the time. “Many people in a TV audience think of a cop as some s.o.b. who gives out parking tickets for kicks. With this in mind, we thought it would be beneficial to give a complete picture of police work in a realistic way. To achieve the broadest possible spectrum, we’ll utilize the police files of major cities from all over the country.” The ill-fated syndicated show went off the air in April 1964 after only twenty-six episodes.

  While “Lawbreakers” was still airing, Marvin lent his name to an interesting promo for the show. A movie magazine used his name for an article, “There’s Not Enough Violence on TV!,” written by the show’s publicist, Peter Levinson, but credited to the actor. Cop shows, westerns and documentary style shows like “Lawbreakers” were coming under fire for their violence, and ironically, the soon-to-be pioneer of film violence found himself defending the concept in the context of television. An abbreviated excerpt of the piece proves the words were Levinson’s but the sentiment was pure Marvin:

  “Violence on the screen is totally different from violence in real life… [it] seems to me pretty ridiculous because the fights are so exaggerated, it’s obvious to the viewer that they’ve been carefully “staged.”

  “[…]If the situation isn’t “real,” the question isn’t: Is there too much violence? The question really is: Is the violence plausible — is it understandable or constructive in relation to the story being told?

  “[…] I play these violent roles to the hilt, but the reason I handle these parts so graphically is pretty simple: I figure out what action or words might be injurious or painful to me, and I project that on the other character. What offends me will pretty generally offend the other character — which, in effect, offends the viewer.

  “If I can demonstrate the horror that violence entails I feel I have made a contribution against violence to society. If violence isn’t effectively portrayed so it captures the viewer as a participant in a show, then it becomes violence for violence’s sake and I’m against that!

  “… In my own life, I’ve seen a lot of guys hurt and killed in a number of different violent ways. That’s why it seems to me when a war or fight scene isn’t made vicious and horrifying — the way it really is — it loses its impact. War should be shown in all its horror. Otherwise, it becomes an attractive “adventure” to the audience.

  “[…] I admit I sometimes underplay violence in vicious fight scenes. If I played such scenes with realism, it would really horrify you—and myself! But I am still as close to realism as my own censorship will allow.

  “You see, I have my own code of ethics on acting.

  “I think to myself, ‘Does it have a theatrical value to the audience instead of being realistic?’ Sometimes I go past realism for theatrical value—yet the effect is even more realistic than it would otherwise be.

  “[…] Regardless of how I play a violent scene, you’ll always see me making it as violent (theatrical or otherwise) as I know how. If I can show how horrible it is to kill a guy slowly, I know the audience will see it, too.”

  Karma had its say, however, during the filming of an episode of the popular travelogue show “Route 66.” Frustrated with
his career, at odds with director Sam Peckinpah, and hating the dreary Pittsburgh location, the actor drank too much during work hours, and paid the price. “What I remember most was his eyes,” recalled co-star Bert Remsen. “He’d come in from the night before with his eyes all red with that strange walk he had, and say with that voice, ‘Hiya baby! You going out drinking with me tonight?’ I’d say, ‘No way! I gotta work the next day.’ He could do it though. He’d come in all disheveled and go throw up in the corner. Sam would say, ‘Wash his face. He’s fine.’ He’d do the scene and never miss a line. He was a total professional.”

  But, in a climactic fight scene with costar Martin Milner, either Marvin stepped incorrectly or Milner did; the end result was that his costar accidentally broke Lee Marvin’s nose wide open. “I’m not quite sure how it happened during that fight scene; it could be either one’s fault,” recalled Milner. “Lee said on that occasion that the only reason he didn’t punch me back is because we were such good friends. What was funny was when we took him to the emergency room, the intern looked at Lee’s bloody face and my bloody hand, and asked, ‘Okay, what happened?’

  “By the time we got back from the hospital all stitched up, Lee started to get these big black eyes. For the rest of the show we really had to be careful how we photographed him. It either had to be from the side or in a darkened room, not up close or anything. It was almost impossible to cover with make-up.”

  Marvin was given the choice between medications that would either help him deal with the pain or contend with the repulsive swelling and discoloration. Knowing his familiar face was his fortune, he chose to live with the excruciating pain, and silently drank himself into a stupor on the plane back to Los Angeles.

  Before drifting off, he was struck by the ironic fact that television, the medium he despised, had quite possibly ruined any chance he might have had for film stardom. Getting slowly drunk on the flight back, he tried to shrug off the realization that timing and events were working against him. The film industry was in flux but, now, poised to star in film projects in which he could take advantage of both his recognized talent and TV-spawned popularity, as well as his by-now familiar craggy features, he found himself instead with his nose plastered all over his face. He loathed to admit it, but, at this point in his life, after all his hard work, he wondered if he might have any film career at all.