Lee Marvin: Point Blank

by Dwayne Epstein

When he was home in southern California, he and Michele cohabited on his Malibu beach property not too far from where Betty lived. “He didn’t have a place to live so, what I did, I had his power of attorney, and I bought him a house in Malibu on the sand,” recalled business manager Ed Silver. “What I paid for it was seventy-two thousand, five hundred, and it was furnished! He lived there until he moved to Tucson. It was on Pacific Coast Highway. His neighbors were Lloyd Bridges and Ryan O’Neal. It was a damned good house. Burgess Meredith lived a couple of houses down. It went from the highway to the sand…”

  Another means by which Marvin was able to leverage his celebrity status lay in his ability to nurture promising movie projects, a case in point being The Wild Bunch. In this instance, over the course of several months, he had been helping a friend named Roy Sickner write the screenplay, and had then passed the finished treatment on to friend and Malibu neighbor, Sam Peckinpah. Revisions on the gritty western continued for some time, however, forcing Marvin to look elsewhere.

  Although offers were plentiful, the actor’s expectations were set extremely high when it came to evaluating scripts; he would only read those that he felt were worthy of his time, and that he believed would result in projects in which he would not be repeating himself artistically. Publicist Paul Wasserman recalled, “I don’t know if I remember it correctly… but [Lee] would always look for the thing in the character that reminded him of himself. That he was aware of the feelings or experience that he shared.”

  He turned down more films than he accepted, and without regret, even after they were bona fide hits, such as was the case with Patton. Marvin had his own unorthodox method of choosing projects. “He’s one of the very few stars that would bring a bunch of scripts that was sent to him, to his agent to read,” stated Mishkin associate Don Gurler. “Usually, the agent gets it and calls up to say, ‘Lee, I’ll messenger this stuff over to you.’ He didn’t read anything until Meyer got it all. He’d come into the office with a bunch of scripts. Stars didn’t do that.”

  Although his last film, Point Blank, did not find a responsive audience until somewhat later, the experience of working with John Boorman had been so rewarding for Marvin, he was willing to listen to the director’s idea for a new film. The subject intrigued Marvin, but another aspect proved even more enticing. Marvin admired only a handful of other actors, and the one that towered above all was Japan’s Toshiro Mifune.

  When Marvin was first married, “Lee and I always, from the beginning, would see Japanese films,” recalled Betty. “He loved Toshiro Mifune so much. He used to call him on the phone. Couldn’t understand a word of Japanese. Mifune spoke no English. It was just a joke. They’d have these long conversations, about what? He just adored him.” Marvin himself expressed his admiration for Mifune by glowing, “This guy hypnotizes you with his genius. Those eyes! The battered samurai warrior standing alone, not wanting outside help.”

  Boorman’s project was Hell in the Pacific, an allegory in which Marvin is cast as an unnamed American pilot and Mifune as a similarly anonymous Japanese soldier, stranded together on an island during WWII. Marvin was sold on the concept in spite of the unfinished script. Mishkin negotiated the actor’s fee at three quarters of a million against ten percent of the gross, setting the stage for the on-location project to begin with an international crew.

  The promising concept proved to be extremely difficult to film with its problematic location shooting in Micronesia and a multinational crew further hampered by language and cultural conflicts. According to Marvin, the problems within the film mirrored the problems of the filming: “It all paralleled beautifully. The more tense things became between us all, the more tense the plot was supposed to be getting. Let me tell you, the plot got pretty rough.”

  As the tension increased, so too did the problems of language, culture, living accommodations, and more. Marvin lost almost twenty pounds during the film and it showed in the final product. Although communication was strained, the one constant throughout remained Marvin’s admiration for his costar. “Mifune is beyond professionalism, he’s even better than that. What he did off the set was his own business and I won’t discuss that. I admire his talent and abilities tremendously… Let’s just say Mifune was displeased, and that we were all fed up with living on a ship… Oh yes, and Mifune had his troubles with the director, too. I kept out of that, even tried to make the peace a couple of times.”

  Mifune had his own concept of how the film should play out, having deep-rooted feelings about the war. Like his costar, Mifune had been in the war, but as a petty officer for seven years, the last few spent giving ritualistic sake to Kamikaze pilots. At one point during the film, Marvin and Mifune both visited the battleground of nearby Peleliu, laying wreaths in memory of the dead. Later, Mifune solemnly told a visiting reporter, “Those who died, if they were still alive, they would be the same age as Lee here and myself. Their deaths were useless. It is hard for me to explain how I feel about the bones in the caves, in the jungle, along Orange Beach. How wasted…”

  According to Meyer Mishkin, the film opened successfully in Tokyo. He remembered the night of the premiere as one of the last times he had ever got truly drunk. Mifune had invited him and Marvin to his home for dinner and kept the sake flowing all night. “We had a limo that we had come in from the hotel,” recalled the smiling Mishkin. “When we got back to the hotel, Lee Marvin stepped out of the limo and disappeared. We did not see him until the following night. We don’t know where he went. He was not at the hotel. When we did see him again, he was surrounded by Japanese fans saying to him, ‘Oh, wonderful male! Great actor!’ and so forth.”

  Mishkin proudly framed a letter from the trip that he had translated, and hung on his living room wall. It read: “Mr. Meyer Mishkin; Seeing your truly happy, smiling face has blown away all the hardship and unhappy moments we had in our work. I sincerely appreciated your calling Lee Marvin, the drunken Santa Claus, for the great reception party. I sincerely hope I can do the next work in Japan with you two. Toshiro Mifune.”

  The film was less favorably received in Marvin’s native land, however. The allegorical style and ambiguous ending left American audiences scratching their heads. Friend L.Q. Jones recalled, “They released it during the Christmas weekend in Westwood. For some reason, I was over there and talking to the manager and some of the ticket takers. I asked him how it was, and he said, ‘You can’t believe this disaster. You can not believe it. We don’t get sixteen people a day.’ It was the wrong timing for the picture. It’s a strange picture anyway. During the holiday season, who’s going to go see Hell in the Pacific?”

  The box office failure and mixed reviews greatly disappointed Marvin, who felt the film expressed much of his own sentiments concerning war. He later claimed that he would never work that hard again, despite how much he personally liked the finished product. When a friend told Marvin that his fans were disappointed by the film’s lack of violence, the actor snarled, “Screw’em. Let’em do their own killing!”

  What Marvin planned to do next looked to be his most impressive endeavor yet. Old friend and sometimes-drinking rival Sam Peckinpah was preparing The Wild Bunch, and Marvin definitely wanted in. A series of memos from producers Phil Feldman to producer Ken Hyman illustrate how desperately they too wanted Marvin to play the lead.

  August 30, 1967: “A friend of Lee Marvin’s called Roy Sickner wrote a story some time ago which Lee Marvin wants to do. Sam subsequently collaborated on a screenplay based on the property and in his recent conversations with Lee it was brought up again. Sam tells me he spent several hours with Lee just the other day on it… Meyer is aware of The Wild Bunch and is not in favor of Lee doing another ‘violent’ picture… Meyer would like to get him in a romantic lead at this time… My own feelings on The Wild Bunch, now having read it is that’s it’s a ‘gasser.’ It needs changes that Sam and I have discussed and I think if you have time to look at it, it will prove to be the kind of picture with Lee Marvin that you
would be most sympathetic with.”

  September, 12, 1967: “Marvin suggests that you and I and Sam meet with Mishkin, who, as I advised you is not in favor of The Wild Bunch, explains the facts of Marvin’s desire to do it and make a deal. Marvin does not want to be present but will advise Mishkin that he wants to deal… Sam is of course pre-approved by Lee as director and writer…”

  December 5, 1967: “I have been advised among other things by Meyer Mishkin that Lee Marvin has accepted the Paint Your Wagon book… that makes him totally unavailable in the year 1968…”

  In signing instead to do Paint Your Wagon, based on the 1951 stage musical, Marvin had earned his first million-dollar payday. Paramount had hoped it would repeat the success of The Sound of Music. This might have been the case had not Alan Jay Lerner tinkered with the script by Paddy Chayefsky that Marvin read and loved, or had not the manic-depressive director, Joshua Logan, skewered the production. In a misguided effort to seem relevant, the musical numbers were wrapped around a new plot of 19th century California gold miners involved in a menage-a-trois of Marvin and costars Clint Eastwood and Jean Seberg, who were both paid considerably less than he.

  Filmed in rustic Baker, Oregon, the overblown production became a standard-bearer for out-of-control Hollywood. The chaos began to escalate when Chayefsky butted heads with Lerner over the script. Chayefsky quit, had his credit changed to adaptation, and later fumed, “I don’t think there were six pages of mine left in the whole picture. A couple of ideas of mine are left, but barely recognizable.”

  When filming began in Oregon during the summer of 1968, things became progressively worse. The fifteen million-dollar budget quickly went to nineteen million as Lerner tried to wrangle control from Logan for ruining his picture, and Logan accused Lerner of pretty much the same thing. A cast of more than two hundred, as well as animals of every shape and size, converged along with transient hippies, bikers, groupies, and lumberjacks on the location that had turned into an unmanageable three-ring circus. Unsavory characters, such as Dr. Max “Feelgood” Jacobson, were seen lurking about, and daily stories persisted in the trades that Richard Brooks was on standby to take over the reins from Logan. Through it all, when the production was at its maddest, Lee Marvin simply found the nearest establishment that served any available libation.

  “I saw what happened there,” stated Tony Epper. Epper, officially hired as a stunt man, worked unofficially with Marvin to rehearse his singing and watch over him when he traversed the watering holes. “I saw them shut the company down for a week, waiting for some ponies to come from France. They also built realistic sets they wound up not even photographing… Over it all was the fear of Josh Logan. They never knew which way he was going to go. As I think back on it now, he was totally unprepared in a lot of ways.”

  When Paint Your Wagon finally wrapped, post-production kept the film from general release until October 1969. In April, Marvin accepted an invitation to receive an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degree from St. Leo, along with several other luminaries. Accompanied by both Michele Triola and his ailing father, he met and reminisced with old schoolmates, and was introduced by his former teacher, Fr. James Hoge, who recalled, “He and I were standing there by the microphone. I mentioned that, ‘I taught Lee in his high school classes and I have to say that he was not the best I ever had, nor was he the worst. He was the damnedest student I ever had!’ It got a roar of applause from the people. When I said that, Lee sort of ducked as if I was going to attack him or something. You know, as a student would do if the teacher were wielding a rod. He was a great actor.”

  Back in California, the biggest buzz in Hollywood concerned The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah biographer David Weddle recalled, “They had a screening at Warners and Marvin was invited. He showed up totally bombed. During the film he’s shouting out stuff: ‘More blood!’; ‘Aw, c’mon, kill’em some more, Sam!’ One person even said he was crawling down the aisles saying things. Someone finally said, ‘Shut up, Lee!’

  “They went to dinner afterward, and Sam’s sister Fern Lea was there with her husband, Walter Peter. She said she took one look in Marvin’s eyes and she was petrified. He sat down opposite her with Walter Peters sitting right there and he looked at Walter Peters and said, ‘So, is this your cunt?’ She got up and went over to sit next to Sam. She said, ‘Sam, you know…’ He said, ‘I know, I know. Just leave him alone.’ They ignored Marvin and he finally left. About a week or two later, they went to some other gathering and Marvin showed up sober this time, totally different guy. He had iced tea or something. He’s standing next to Fern Lea and he said, ‘I’m drinking iced tea tonight because people don’t seem to like me when I’m drunk.’ Fern Lea said, ‘That’s right, and I’m one of them.’ He didn’t say anything.”

  Marvin never publicly claimed disappointment in not starring in the film that remains one of the greatest American films ever made. Instead, he said, “[Sam] approached me about doin’ The Wild Bunch. Shit, I’d helped write the original goddamn script, which Sam eventually bought and rewrote. Well, I mean I didn’t do any of the actual writing, but I talked it out with these guys who were writin’ it, Walon Green and Roy Sickner. Sam said, ‘Well geez, aren’t you even interested?’ I told him I’d already done The Professionals, and what did I need The Wild Bunch for? And when the picture came out, I don’t think it really succeeded. It didn’t have the—I mean, it had all the action and all the blood and all that shit, but it didn’t have the ultimate kavoom, you know? It didn’t have the one-eye-slowly-opening aspect it should’ve had.”

  Paint Your Wagon premiered in October to scathing reviews. In time it turned a small profit and, other than Lee’s lack of singing ability, the remarks aimed at Marvin were not that bad. In fact, he managed to give a perceptive and enjoyable performance when Chayefsky’s surviving dialogue allowed Marvin’s character to pontificate on the state of the world and his place in it. Marvin received a Golden Globe nomination for his performance and when his song “Wanderin’ Star” was released as a single in the U.K., it knocked The Beatles out of first place in the charts. The critic David Denby may have summed it up best when he wrote, “Lee Marvin is a superb physical actor and a much more interesting one than Clint Eastwood. That long face with its great, heavy warlord’s brow, sardonic eyes, and huge snout, is a movie all in itself, both funny and threatening. The voice is a rich actor’s bass, gravelly and black, yet with a surprising lilt that makes the simplest line vibrate with insinuation.”

  Marvin was already in the midst of his next project when Paint Your Wagon was playing in theaters. It was another change of pace for the actor who specialized in films of graphic violence. Monte Walsh was based on a lesser known novel by Shane author Jack Schaefer, an elegiac tale with Marvin as the title character, who along with his cohort Chet Rollins—played by Jack Palance in a rare sympathetic performance—must confront the stark reality that their cowboy days have come to an end. As Rollins poignantly tells Walsh, “Nobody gets to be a cowboy forever, Monte.”

  Officially credited as an actor, Marvin was more involved in the production than on any other film of his career. He met with producers, suggested actors, and even convinced William Fraker to make his directorial debut. Fraker, a multi Oscar-nominated cinematographer, had also worked on The Professionals and Paint Your Wagon. It would also be the first time in which Marvin would have a true romantic interest in a film, something he had wanted as far back as 1962, stating, “I would love to do love scenes. In fact, I don’t have a friend who doesn’t love them. Maybe I’m not fascinated by death any more. I think life is much more interesting and love is one of the most beauteous forms of life. I play what I hate. Now I’d like to play what I love.” Producers Bobby Roberts and Hal Landers suggested Deborah Kerr to play Marvin’s romantic interest. Instead, Fraker and Marvin flew to Paris and convinced French film icon Jeanne Moreau to help Marvin play what he loved. The rest of the cast was made up of such veteran western regulars as Jim Davis, G.D. Spradlin, John
‘Bear’ Hudkins, Ray Guth, Matt Clark, Billy Green Bush, and Bo Hopkins.

  For the pivotal role of ‘Shorty Austin,’ a character who starts out as a protagonist but inadvertently becomes an antagonist, the producers and director approached Mitch Ryan, having been impressed by his stage performance in O’Neill’s “A Moon For the Misbegotten.” Ryan had first appeared in Robert Mitchum’s 1959 cult film Thunder Road but had not been in a film since. Marvin not only approved of the choice, he stood by Ryan when the producers raised concerns over Ryan’s admitted drinking problem.

  Ryan first met Marvin and Palance in a meeting prior to production, which he recalled with a laugh, “It was really very strange. The first thing Lee said after I came in was, ‘What’s the story with this Eugene O’Neill? I mean what’s his problem?’ And Jack said, ‘What the fuck kind of talk is that? Jesus Christ! Welcome, Mitch, come in.’ Then Lee said, ‘Oh shit, tell us about Shane, Jack. That was your last big hit, wasn’t it?’ So, it was like that. They were great and then Michele came in with Fraker. She angrily said, to Lee, ‘I thought you weren’t going to drink today.’ He was drinking a beer. He said, ‘Mitch, this is Bill Fraker, the director, and this is Michele, the cunt.’ This is my initiation to Lee. Then after that, everybody left except Lee, and he and I had a nice chat about acting.”

  Once Ryan got past Marvin’s verbose veneer, the two became fast friends. “One of the other things he did was when we first got there,” recalled Ryan, “we all went to the wardrobe, and he very meticulously picked out a hat, that great hat he wore. He must have gone through ten hats until he found the one he really liked. Then the kerchief that he wore, and the chaps, he went over those.” Ryan also took note of Marvin’s attention to detail: “Well, he knew really who the guy was. I mean he really knew. He’d say, ‘The way I needle Jack, is exactly the way these two characters in Monte Walsh should behave with each other.’ So he would bring all that on, but he never let on anything like it was acting. Jack was really funny because he sort of took it rather well, but he also didn’t like it a lot. He wasn’t about to show that it was getting to him.”