When the April 1979 verdict came in, Judge Marshall’s thirty-three-page verdict found Lee Marvin victorious on all counts. The fact that the trial judge ruled that Marvin should pay Triola one hundred and four thousand dollars so she might be able to get training in a new profession, has led many to believe Marvin lost the case. It lead to more speculative editorials in the media, a famous debate sketch on “Saturday Night Live,” and several similar high profile cases including the likes of Nick Nolte, Peter Frampton, and Rod Stewart. For all of the media outcry vilifying Lee Marvin, he was proud to point out, “Not one feminist organization came out for Michele. All the big-time feminists were mum on it. Every woman I’d see on the street—every single one—said, ‘I hope you win.’ Old ladies, young ladies. So all I got was positive vibes, which is a boost to any actor’s ego, right?’” It should also be noted that his wife Pam Marvin remained faithfully by his side throughout his court appearances.
Immediately following the trial, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office investigated the possibility of filing perjury charges against Marvin. The charges stemmed from an interview he gave with Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin in which he claimed the only thing he learned from the trial was how to lie in court. Kagon quickly stepped in and clarified the actor’s statement, saying Marvin meant he learned by watching others lie in court. The investigation was dropped, but it allowed Marvin the opportunity to expand on what he said without fear of reprisal. When asked in 1981 why he did not simply settle out of court, he said, “I never considered settling. Was it a matter of principle? Who’d spend that kind of money I’ve spent on anything else but principle? And yet, a smarter man might have just paid it off, just gotten rid of it, but I couldn’t do it. I just cannot stand a lie and so I refused to bow out. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t deal with trash.”
Of the major players in the case, Michele Triola remained involved but unmarried to Dick Van Dyke, until her death from lung cancer in 2009. Van Dyke made a point in his autobiography that he gave her the $104,000 the court had first ordered. Triola often said she would pen her own version of the trial events, but like her long sought marriage contract, it never saw the light of day. Marvin Mitchelson was eventually disbarred for inappropriate behavior based on complaints filed by several of his clients and later jailed for tax evasion. He died in 2004.
The case did indeed change California family law, via the precedent-setting proceedings that allowed it to move forward. However, the flood of further palimony suits did not inundate the courts as the media and Marvin Mitchelson had predicted. The only financial compensation Triola ever received was from Van Dyke. Marvin’s lawyers appealed the ruling and received a judgment that not only won back the $104,000, but also made Triola pay the $6,000 in court costs, ironically, on the same day she was arrested for shoplifting in a Beverly Hills boutique. David Kagon, who passed away December 20, 2008, had agreed to be interviewed for this book in 1994. As if to prove that the best script did indeed win, Kagon sat back slowly in his wingback office chair and stated with a smile, “We didn’t collect.”
CHAPTER 14
The Last of the Wintry Heroes
IN THE 1980s, the blockbuster syndrome was in full effect, with the youth market taking over, and where even casual film fans were well aware of a film’s opening weekend box office numbers. Despite the even younger audience members, a few postwar actors had experienced a renaissance, such as Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City (1981) and Paul Newman in The Verdict (1982), which were exemplary vehicles for their well-known screen personae. For Marvin, already in the winter of his years, it was not to be, at least not in his lifetime. It did not help that Marvin’s years of hard drinking and a five-pack-a-day cigarette habit had aged him considerably beyond his fifty-six years. Coming off the successful palimony suit, he did luckily have a film about to be released that could capitalize on his notoriety and, more importantly, would showcase what he did better than any other actor of his generation.
Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One had been the maverick director’s “Holy Grail” for decades. Beloved in Europe for such strikingly independent films as Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964), the former newspaperman and WWII veteran had a distinct in-your-face style that matched his cigar-chomping, tough-talking personality. His dream project was based on his own nightmarish experiences in the war with a rifle company through North Africa, Sicily, the D-Day Invasion, and culminating with the liberation of the Falkenau concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. His main character was an unnamed veteran sergeant of “The Great War” who leads his four young riflemen through these pivotal battles of WWII.
“John Wayne wanted to do The Big Red One in the 50s, and got me a deal at Warners,” recounted Fuller. “As much as I admired The Duke, it would have been a heroic picture —with Lee’s persona it was a tragic picture of survivors. Closer to reality than a John Wayne picture. Lee was physically and emotionally my Sergeant.”
The task of securing Marvin for the part began nearly twenty years before the film was even made. Although the two men had worked together previously on television’s “The Virginian” and almost again on The Klansman, the film Fuller had dreamed of making with Marvin predates both projects. “I ran into Lee at the cigar store on Fairfax and he asked me about my pet project, The Big Red One,” said Fuller. “I promised him right there and then the part of the Sergeant. Lee had one of the most sensitive souls and understood people immediately. No lengthy explanations. He knew right away what I wanted from him. There was this feeling of mutual trust and understanding. Even though he was playing a fictional character, he knew how much was based on a real history, real characters. Painful events and memories I lived through and survived.” The conversation ended with a handshake in which Marvin promised, “If you ever get funding for this, I’m your Sergeant.”
A circuitous path to funding followed, that included everyone from Peter Bogdanovich to Roger Corman’s brother Gene, until a relatively small budget was finally secured. Once the contract had been signed, Marvin was true to his word and ready to play Fuller’s Sergeant. Production began in Israel in 1978 with Marvin and Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Bobby Diccio, and Kelly Ward as his charges. Observing the interaction between Marvin and Fuller, Kelly Ward stated, “There was a lot that went unsaid because it was just a natural. Lee would nod, ‘I know what to do.’ Sam would smile, ‘Atta boy. What a lad!’ There was a real nice collaboration between the two because they made things happen. Kind of infused the whole cast with confidence.”
Not since the likes of Robert Aldrich, John Ford, Frankenheimer, and Boorman had Marvin been so in tune with a director. The two men not only instinctively knew what was required of the other by virtue of their own war experiences; they also shared a vision of creativity that went beyond the norm of film making. There was no effort toward glorification or heroism. It was a story of survival, with both men making the challenge a greater one; putting it across viscerally to an audience.
Fuller claimed that the Sergeant he created was based partly on his commanding officer. “For me, I was inspired for the Sergeant by Terry de la Mesa Allen, who hit the covers of Time and Newsweek,” Fuller stated proudly. “We loved him. He made the statement, ‘Dead men made me a general.’ He was an anti-Patton character, modest, taciturn, no overblown ego.”
For Marvin, the inspiration came elsewhere but was just as strong. “He was a fifty-year-old first sergeant in an antiaircraft battalion that fought across Europe while I was in the South Pacific,” the actor said of his inspiration. He also elaborated that, “He was a lieutenant in the First War, then when World War II came along, he enlisted as a private. My brother and I had enlisted, and all the junior executives in his firm were going in as lieutenant colonels right off the street. He didn’t believe in that. Being a military man himself, he thought he could do more in the sergeant ranks. He became a high-powered sergeant… His paternal feelings for the men in his squad… hoping that someone would do the
same for his two boys, wherever they were.” Monte Marvin would have been proud of his son’s assessment.
Fuller and Marvin put the young actors through a mini-boot camp of their own just prior to filming. “We were all shooting M-1’s, the exact specs of which we were made to memorize at the time, but Lee had them down,” remembers Ward. “We all put rifles to our shoulders, and shot very carefully at empty gas cans. They complimented everybody after you squeeze off eight rounds, which is the magazine of the weapon. Then, the clip pings out. They gave us little tips like, only shoot seven rounds. Don’t shoot the eighth round because when the clip pops out of the rifle that can tell the enemy, if he’s close enough, that you’re empty, man. You’re a target… It was an intense education in a very short period of time. The thing that was impressive was that, after we were all shooting properly—guns at shoulder level —he [Lee] grabs a rifle, puts in a clip and walks these steep banks. We were on a berm. Now, with the gun at hip level, he shot the gas can and hit it. It pings up in the air. At hip level, the real thing!”
The filming was tough in the blistering desert, though not entirely without moments of levity. Extras on the Israeli location consisted of residents in the area appropriately costumed for the scene. “To see those guys wearing those German coal-scuttle helmets, pull them off, and have yarmulkes on underneath—that was really something!,” chuckled Fuller.
Another lighter moment occurred during one of the many hot and cramped scenes filmed in the hold of a ship as the men prepared to attack the shores of a French beachhead Marvin tells them is named “Colleville-sur-mer.” “He couldn’t say ‘Colleville-sur-mer,’ recalled Ward. “He would always flub the line on those words. I heard it in so many variations that day. Plus, it was 130 degrees in that vehicle. The cameras were seizing because the gears were expanding and they wouldn’t turn the film. They had to put ice packs on the cameras. The lights made it even hotter. Lee kept going after ‘Colleville-surmer.’ Even to this day, in the film, the one take where he said it close to right, is in the film. It’s a very deliberate reading: ‘Nothing but combat rejects on the beach at ‘COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER.’ Nobody would notice but there’s a kind of ‘There! Fuck that line!’ look all over his face. We all kidded him about it. We’d say, ‘Get rid of this fucking guy. Let’s get James Coburn.’”
Marvin was professional throughout the filming, and often surprised those gathered with impromptu vignettes not caught on film. A sequence shot in a Roman amphitheater earlier in the day was the perfect setting for one such moment. His training from the American Theater Wing intact, he walked up to the center of the stage just as the sun was setting. The natural lighting and his aged yet still resonant voice complemented the classical setting as Marvin recited a soliloquy from Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” All in attendance listened in awed silence as the drama and power of the extemporaneous performance filled the ancient arena that had stood silent for centuries.
The concentration camp sequence that climaxes the film remains one of the most moving moments Marvin would ever have on screen, accomplished without almost any dialogue. Each of the soldiers react to the horror they are witnessing in their own way, and for Marvin’s Sergeant, it is through the eyes and fading life of a malnourished child. “The kid was not supposed to drop the apple,” recalled Ward. “Now again, it’s an interesting and ironic touch in the film that most of the communication between the four soldiers and Lee is all hand gestures. It also enables him to communicate with this kid. He communicates with hand gestures.” In a moment left in the final cut of the film that proved to be a fortuitous accident, “He gets the kid on his back and the kid is eating the apple. And the kid drops the apple and Sam only does one take. The take is in the film and you see Lee go, ‘Aw shit.’ But you know? It was honest. It was an honest moment.”
When The Big Red One opened in the summer of 1980 after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, it received mixed reviews albeit with the lion’s share of praise going to Marvin. The actor went out of his way to promote the film. When he was asked why he wanted it to succeed he said it was, “My chance to make my own personal statement —with a good script, a good director and marvelous actors to work with. Sam shot all the stuff I felt about combat, the madness, the no-recall aspect. It’s so fast when it’s happening that everybody has a different story about the same instance.”
Fearing the film would not attract an audience, Lorimar Pictures cut it down by more than an hour, rendering it almost incomprehensible and ensuring its failure at the box office. Fuller was so disgusted, he left the U.S. for France and did not return until shortly before his death in 1996.
For Lee Marvin, who gave his last great performance in the film, the film’s failure raised the level of scorn he felt for contemporary audiences. When asked in an interview at the time what he thinks the current audience expects, he said, “Well besides complete idiocy, they want lack of respect. They want all the rules broken. The underdog has now become the leading man. He’s the heavy, because he’s kicking mother or shooting a bazooka into the sheriff’s office. Next, he’s got to burn down the town until there’s nothing left. And the audience reaction is, ‘Geez, ain’t he great?’ I think this all reflects on our times.”
The contentment of semi-retirement in Tucson had reached its limit for him by 1981. Ralph O’Hara visited Marvin and remembers being told by the actor, “He said, ‘Avoid any script that says, ‘As you were riding the horse, you fell off and went down the hill, head over heels.’ Avoid those scripts. Avoid the scripts that say, ‘As he put on his snowshoes…’ which he ended up doing with Bronson up there in Canada with Angie Dickinson.”
That particular script was originally titled Arctic Escapade, and although Marvin’s first reaction to the title was that it “sounds like a bunch of gays in Eskimo outfits,” he was enticed by the prospect of working once again with director Robert Aldrich and costars Charles Bronson and Angie Dickinson. Ultimately, Peter Hunt directed this fictionalized account of the greatest manhunt in Canadian history. Retitled Death Hunt, it had Bronson cast as fugitive ‘Albert Johnson’ with Marvin as the grizzled career Mountie ‘Edgar Millen’ who leads a ragtag posse in pursuit of the outlaw.
Angie Dickinson, who had worked with him more than any other actress (“M Squad,” The Killers and Point Blank) noticed a very different Lee Marvin on the chilly Alberta, Canada location. “He was quite bitter. Not so much sad as bitter. I’d say, ‘Lee, look at the mountains!’ ‘Yeah, I saw ’em. I’ve been looking at them for two months.’ He was drinking. We all just hated to see it.”
She was still impressed, however, with what Marvin could do wordlessly in the film’s best scene in which he goes through the aged contents of his foot locker: “It was a tough sequence because it was written a certain way, and Lee didn’t want to do it. There I am with fourteen lines in the whole movie and all that. It was testy… The recall in his hands and in his eyes with every article! What is it like? It’s thrilling to be part of the scene and a witness to the scene.”
Marvin dutifully promoted the film on talk shows and the like, but often did so while inebriated. He slurred to one interviewer, “… with this kind of picture, if you just tell them the title, they know a lot. Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin. Death Hunt leaves no doubt in their minds. They know it’s not a love story…”
Good scripts for actors in the winter of their years were getting harder to come by, especially for an actor who looked ten years older than he was. There were glimmers of hope in projects he felt would make excellent films, such as the deep-sea fishing adventure novel Tournament. There was also talk of a possible return to the stage in a worthy production. Unfortunately, none came to pass for almost three years, and funding for interesting projects such as Tournament, were nonexistent. As John Boorman so eloquently stated: “He picks through the midden of scripts, tossing them into the ashcan after a few pages. Only big-game fishing truly absorbs him today, but he reads on, waiting for the big one—the one that will re
deem the rest, test him, draw out his powers in primal combat. He awaits the challenge, the call to heroic action. Part of him knows with a terrible clarity that such a test will not come, its time has passed. So it is with a cynical lilt of a smile that he greets the visitor… He casts the long shadow of Australopithecus, our mysterious animal ancestor that invented weapons and gave us our genetic compulsion for meting out death.”
Given the strenuous challenge of his last films, The Big Red One and Death Hunt, Marvin was more than ready for a change of pace. “Those films absolutely kill me and I always get those kind of parts,” he complained. “I must say, I’m looking forward to those executive parts, because the knees are gone. You know, it’s true. The legs are the first to go.”
True to his word, his return to the screen came with 1983’s Gorky Park, based on the bestselling thriller by Martin Cruz Smith, and the first in a series of popular books featuring the lead character of ‘Arkady Renko.’ ‘Renko’ is a Soviet police investigator searching for a killer after three mutilated bodies are found in the titular locale, which leads to a complicated tale of political intrigue. The whodunit featured an international cast with William Hurt as ‘Renko,’ Marvin as American businessman ‘Jack Osborne,’ Polish actress Joanna Pacula, Brian Dennehy, Britain’s Ian Bannen, and a host of other veteran British actors.
Lee Marvin: Point Blank Page 25