Depending on his mood, which largely had to do with his alcohol intake that day, or the opinion he held of the interviewer, he often peppered such comments with his own vocabulary, which included Marine barracks jargon, sound effects for punctuation, and made up words, such as “vicaries” (pronounced ‘vy-care-rees’) for “vicarious.” Sometimes, what transpired could not translate to the printed word. “He had a body language that was altogether different than most people,” recalled Alvy Moore. “It was almost laughable at times because he had that light, easy way of explaining something. When he explained something, you assumed you understood what he just said, but it was amusing watching him say it. He was always emphasizing his words with ‘Crack! Bang! Phfft!’ He did manage to say something in all those gyrations and motions he went through. He would have some gyrations that were really something else.”
Generated by the rave reviews and word-of-mouth attention in the wake of his performances in Ship of Fools and Cat Ballou, these non-stop interviews were to become a necessary evil to Marvin; for along with the widespread publicity came better film offers, such as his next project. Based on the novel A Mule For Marquesa by Frank O’Rourke, and adapted by writer/director Richard Brooks, The Professionals was a rousing adventure story about four mercenaries in 1917 (Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan and Woody Strode) who are hired by a rich man (Ralph Bellamy) to retrieve his wife (Claudia Cardinale) from the clutches of a Mexican revolutionary (Jack Palance). Brooks managed to include salty yet quotable dialogue, graphic violence, a twist ending, and, for the first time ever in the sacred genre of mythic westerns, a glimpse of frontal female nudity.
Given that the veteran cast was one of the first in which seasoned actors, all in their forties, played all the leads, the film was aptly titled. “They were some group,” recalled production assistant Phil Parslow. “Lee came to the set in a big, white Caddy limo. So would Burt. Claudia came in a Lincoln, and Palance had a Mercury. It pissed him off, because he was supporting guys that used to be supporting him, and now it’s the other way around. But, he got the last laugh because he practically stole the picture. I remember Robert Ryan would put his hand on my shoulder and say, ‘You and I are the only sane ones in the group.’ I got to be pretty tight with Ryan and found out he had his own problems.”
Ryan was apparently not alone in that department. Like Lee Marvin’s, Burt Lancaster’s decades-long marriage was crumbling, he was having an ongoing liaison with his hairdresser, and, worst of all, his underage son had eloped with Ernie Kovacs’ underage daughter. Marvin and Lancaster could have commiserated over some of their troubles, but Marvin sized up the situation of the entire cast differently when he noted, “Shooting was postponed one day because of rain. I turned to Burt Lancaster and joked about rain never bothering a Marine. Lancaster nodded and said he’d been a Pfc. in the Army. I told him that didn’t count. Brooks, Ryan, and I also held the rank of Pfc. —in the Marine Corps. Then the irony of the situation dawned on me —all those millions riding on the backs of Pfcs made me wonder what the colonels were doing on that day.”
Despite their wonderful chemistry on film, Marvin and Lancaster did not warm up to each other off camera. Instead, Marvin found one of the perks of the film was in being reunited with his old companion, Woody Strode. Although they had not worked together since Liberty Valance three years earlier, the two men had held a genuine affection for each other ever since. “From then on [after Valance], we were cool,” said Strode. “We were together all the time. We didn’t go into nothing crazy… I would go to his Malibu home. He was going with this little girl, Michele. I would sit around there with him, and we’d just be looking at that ocean, having drinks and cooking steaks. If I got too drunk to drive home, I’d stay overnight… From 1960 on, anytime that I had to go, that’s the only time I’d go to Malibu. I wouldn’t go out there because it was all white places. But for Lee Marvin, I would go… Those were good years.”
Strode and Marvin were good enough friends that Marvin was able to pass on some confidential information to him. Each character had an opening vignette before the credits, and the well-chiseled muscles of Strode were on full display as he was shown riding into town wearing little more than jeans and a leather vest, but only in the opening. “See how I was cut out in that vest?,” reminded Strode. “Lee Marvin said to me, ‘Burt couldn’t take that.’ That’s why they put clothes on me. I could have run through the whole picture naked, but Lancaster was jealous, yeah. Didn’t want me looking that way, and he’s the star. Lee Marvin told me. That’s how good Lee was. Lee didn’t give a shit… If an elephant was there, he was going to out-act it. Hear me? That’s what a great actor he was… He told me why they took it [the costume] off me. He was sitting with the muscle when it went down.”
Tony Epper, the six-foot-four solidly built member of a movie stunt family dynasty, began his long professional association with Lancaster on The Professionals, although the acrobatically-trained fifty-two-year-old Lancaster did scale the side of a steep cliff on his own for the film. As for Epper, “He had no fear,” said Phil Parslow of the legendary stuntman. “Some guy picked a fight with him in a bar once, and Tony hit him and killed him. He was charged with involuntary manslaughter, I think. It was self-defense, and he didn’t do any time. There was nothing phony about him. He was the real thing.”
Nevada’s blistering Valley of Fire desert region became the location for the film, during which Epper formed a bond with Marvin. Since both men were familiar with the weaponry used in the movie, they took it upon themselves to clean and maintain all the guns. Epper was also an aspiring actor and had a small role in the film. He recalled a moment when Marvin shared his wisdom garnered from years of playing supporting roles to the stars: “Lee Marvin told me one thing that set in my mind my entire career. He said, ‘Look, this is Burt Lancaster’s picture. We are supporting actors. Let’s do our very best to find our niche and make him look as good as we can.’ That right there is Lee Marvin… You ever watch him handle a gun? Those were well thought out moves. I don’t know if anybody is aware of that.”
Epper was also impressed by Marvin’s ability to do difficult and dangerous stunts if called upon. “Yeah, he’d do a lot of fight scenes. He fell down some stairs one night,” recalled Epper. Asked if the fall was in a film, Epper wryly responded, “No, from coming out of a bar with me. It would have killed anybody else. He’d brush himself off with that look he gets about him, you know? You’d say ‘Buddy, what happened?’ He’d say ‘Nope, nope, didn’t hurt me.’ Sat down, glug, glug, glug. ‘Ahh!’ That was Lee.”
Richard Brooks was an old-fashioned, screaming director who drove his cast and crew to exhaustion, causing them in turn to blow off steam at night when they got back to their hotel in Las Vegas. Marvin, Epper, and Strode created legendary debauches in the casinos, but still managed to perform the next day. Not included in the masculine reverie was Jack Palance, of whom Epper claimed: “He’s crazy. He pulled a thing, once, geez! We were sitting with some hookers… God, Palance had a weird sense of humor. I remember, he went and bought condoms. Must have spent twenty bucks on them… He dumped them all on the bed and shouted, ‘Now we can all fuck! Ha, ha!’ You can hear him all over. I don’t know what he thought was funny about it. I still, to this day, don’t understand it.”
No matter what they had been up to the night before, Marvin was a total professional by the time they got to the set the next day. According to Strode, “I saw it when we’d drive to the set. He’d study the dialogue, and by the time we got to the set, he got it all in his head. He’d say, ‘Now, watch me make Burt blow all his lines.’ Burt’s been up all night studying and going through the regular routine actors would go through. Lee didn’t have to do that. Guy was gifted!”
Some of their nightly escapades even outdid the antics of the legendary “Rat Pack.” They dangled nude showgirls out of their hotel-room window, and shot out the famous “Vegas Vic” sign with armor-piercing arrows. The trio almost landed in
jail, but Marvin’s newly acquired stardom kept them at peace with the local constabulary.
Phil Parslow was the person responsible for making sure Marvin and the others got to the set. As far as he was concerned, “The sober people on that film gave me more problems than the drunks. As long as Lee made it to the Caddy, I knew he was going to be okay. When he got to work, he was professional. The trouble was sweating out whether he was going to make it or not. I remember he’d get in the limo, and you’d throw in a six-pack with him to keep him happy and he’d be fine. He would shout out for Woody, ‘Where’s my nigger?’— and Woody would show up with a six-pack. Lee would be the only one who could get away with saying stuff like that. Woody loved him dearly.”
The company mercifully left Nevada after more than a hundred days and finished filming in the California desert town of Indio. Just as Parslow may have thought being away from Vegas would end his troubles, he encountered another. Marvin’s stand-in was his friend Boyd “Ty” Cabeen, a dubious figure in the film industry, who often bragged about stepping in to take punches for Marvin and Robert Mitchum. According to Parslow, “Cabeen was an asshole. He was a parasite, but Lee liked him. Michele hated him. They were eating in a restaurant we were staying at in Indio. We stayed in small motels. It was one of those typical little roadhouse motels with the pool and stuff. We heard a racket going on in the restaurant. Tyrone and Michele were fighting about something, and he threw his drink in her face. The only thing is he forgot to keep the glass. He wound up breaking her nose.”
The film did very well with preview audiences in 1966, and, while most critics praised it, they rarely commented on the advanced age of all the leads playing action heroes, or that an African-American had second billing in the cast. “Oh, if it weren’t for Lee Marvin, I wouldn’t get billing,” stated Woody Strode. Due to his immense popularity, the studio gave Marvin the choice of selecting which actor’s opening vignette, after his own, would be seen by the audience; Marvin picked Strode to appear before Lancaster. That one magnanimous gesture helped establish Strode in the world market, and got him steady work in Spaghetti Westerns. “He got me some kind of half-assed billing for The Professionals. He was a nice, decent Marine. Pure in heart.”
For Marvin, his solid performance as Henry “Rico” Fardan, a leading role in this wildly successful film, built on his growing screen persona. The muscular, well-written production allowed him to demonstrate his unequaled prowess with firearms, substitute gestures for dialogue, and give a rugged new look to the cinematic anti-hero. It also firmly set in place a trend in his work that began with 1964’s The Killers, which was to continue for more than a decade, during which he would make a string of now classic action films that redefined their various genres. Some were wildly popular upon release, others took time to find an audience, but all of them helped to create the first modern action hero. Void of either sentiment or family, his characters were loners with a past who allowed film audiences to get their “vicaries” watching them pursue a mission or goal with singular purpose. The scenarios found Marvin thrust into violent situations, leaving a trail of blood in his wake, often mingled with his own, by film’s end.
Other film stars had dabbled in similar projects and characters of course, and the popular foreign films of the likes of Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone had also helped transform film violence. However, only Lee Marvin maintained this persona in his canon of work, thereby cementing the most purposeful and consistent portrayal of man’s violent and primal inner demons in the history of modern American cinema.
It was also the beginning of award season in Hollywood for the previous year’s films, which added yet more gasoline to the considerable fire of his success. When Marvin was named Best Actor in a Comedy for Cat Ballou in February of 1966 at the Golden Globes, he graciously accepted his award and quipped, “Oh—I didn’t think it was all THAT funny.” Other awards followed, and the goodwill media attention he gained through columnists’ write-ups proved Paul Wasserman’s prediction: Marvin was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.
Marvin knew that comedy performances rarely, if ever, won Oscars, and his fellow nominees were some of the best actors in the industry. His competition consisted of: Laurence Olivier for Othello; Richard Burton for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; Rod Steiger for The Pawnbroker; and Marvin’s Ship of Fools costar, Oskar Werner. Handicapping such competition, Marvin at first said, “Two will get you twenty that I’ll win no Oscar. The competition is too stiff, but I’ll be there.” He then predicted the winner would be Werner, graciously proclaiming, “I want to be in competition with the best. I’m in tremendous company… I think I have a fifty-fifty chance.” Four days before the awards show, he said, “The men with whom I’m competing for the Academy Award can all act circles around me, but this is the land of milk and honey. If you have the right gimmick, you’re in. I never got out of high school, and here I am making many more times the money the president of the United States makes. It’s pretty ridiculous really, but that’s how it is.”
The night of the Oscars, Marvin had flown in from the London location of The Dirty Dozen to fulfill his promise of taking his wife to the awards ceremony, even though by that time they had already separated. However, just a few hours before the show, Lee informed Betty that Michele told him she would commit suicide if he didn’t take her instead. Betty recalled with a laugh, “I just said, ‘Oh Lee, I think you should reconsider it.’ I took the dress, folded it up, and put it away. I put on my sweats or something. It wasn’t a big deal to me that I didn’t go to the Academy Awards. It was just the whole thing he did was so tacky. A friend called, and I said to him, ‘I think I’m going to dress the kids up in something shabby and I’ll go in some rags. We’ll go down to the Academy Awards, and I’m going to sit inside and have the kids say, ‘Hi Daddy!’ My friend said, ‘You wouldn’t do that.’ I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I probably could…’”
Betty graciously changed her mind, and Lee sat nervously chainsmoking, and hiding the cigarette under Triola’s dress during the ceremony. To ease his tension, he leaned over to fellow nominee Rod Steiger, and whispered that, if Steiger won, he would trip him on the way to the stage. When Julie Andrews announced the nominees for Best Actor, Meyer Mishkin recalled, “Lee was on the aisle. I was next to him, and then Michele, and then my wife. So, he’s sitting on the aisle, they announce the winner is Lee Marvin. He gets up and buttons his jacket. He always had an attitude with it. He buttons his jacket, and says to me, ‘I love you, you cocksucker.’ I said to him, ‘Go get it!’”
He came to the stage to the largest applause of the evening. Tears welled up in his eyes, and when the applause had died down, he composed himself and famously said, “Thank you, thank you all, very much. I don’t want to take up too much of your time. 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. Thank you.” After his acceptance, he left the stage, got to a phone, and immediately called Betty to thank her for all that she had done for his career. He tried calling his father, but Robert answered, and told him that though Monte had watched the acceptance on tv, he refused to come to the phone when he saw that it was Michele and not Betty in the audience.
Backstage, Marvin fielded the usual harangue of questions from the Hollywood press corps as cameras flashed and fellow Oscar winners congratulated each other.
“He certainly didn’t act like that tough, hard-drinking character of Cat Ballou, because he cried more backstage than Shelley Winters,” wrote columnist Sheila Graham. “I asked him if he thought the award would change his life, and he said, ‘Hell, yes, I’m not Superman.’” In the limo on the way to the after-party, Meyer was able to get Monte on the phone, who told his son how proud he was of him. At a red light Marvin then saw Rod Steiger in the car next to him, hunched over in the backseat and apparently crying. Marvin tapped the glass, and when Steiger made eye contact, he held up his Oscar and beamed a smile.
By the time Marvin had landed at Heathrow, he’d missed a good deal of the hubbub over his acceptance speech. Asked if he was bothered by the speech, director Elliot Silverstein said, “Yes and no. Yes, because everybody likes some acknowledgment. Frank Pierson was very upset by Lee’s statement. He said, ‘The only half of the horse not represented that night was the head.’
“No, because Lee did what he had to do. We worked professionally, and he was not a person for love, hugs, and kisses. I guess I wasn’t either. There’s a whole lot of that that goes on in the filmmaking world: ‘Oh, I couldn’t have done it without you…’ The fact is, he may have been able to do it without me. I may have been able to do it without him. I don’t know. The only thing I contributed, I think, was standing up for him when the chips were down. Not because I loved him, but because I thought he was right for the part and would deliver it.”
Over the years, talk would arise about a possible sequel to Cat Ballou. There were two 1971 TV-movie pilots, one with Jack Elam and the other with Forrest Tucker. Silverstein remembers meeting Marvin at a party and mentioning a sequel: “I was willing to try it, and Lee mumbled something that’s still not clear to me. He said something like, ‘Ahh, mumble, mumble, CAREER!’ I think he was trying to say he wanted to broaden his career and not simply repeat. I think that’s what it was.”
Back at work on the early stages of production on The Dirty Dozen, Lee Marvin received hearty congratulations from the all-star cast and director Robert Aldrich. The World War II film featured Marvin as maverick Major John Reisman, chosen to train a group of violent and condemned military prisoners for a suicide mission behind enemy lines the night before the D-Day invasion. The almost all-male cast consisted of actors who either had starred, or would soon star in their own films. Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, John Cassavetes, Robert Ryan, Telly Savalas, George Kennedy, Jim Brown, Robert Webber, Richard Jaeckel, Ralph Meeker, Donald Sutherland, Clint Walker, and Trini Lopez, all played in support of Lee Marvin’s leading performance.
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