Lee Marvin: Point Blank Read online

  Copyright © 2013, Dwayne Epstein

  Afterword copyright © 2013 Christopher Marvin

  Published in the United States

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the publisher, Schaffner Press.

  For permission to reprint, contact:

  Schaffner Press, Inc., POB 41567, Tucson, AZ 85717

  ISBN:978-1-9361824-0-4

  For Cataloguing-in-Publication Information contact the publisher:

  Schaffner Press, Inc: POB 41567, Tucson, Az 85717

  To My Parents

  Morris Epstein

  1927-2005 Royce Epstein

  1930-2008

  And

  Claudia Leslie Marvin

  1958-2012

  In Loving memory

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Marvin Matters

  PART I: BOOT CAMP

  1: The Guilty Puritan

  2: “Dogface” vs. St. Leo

  3: “I Have Had My Fill of War”

  4: “These Horrible, Animal Men”

  PART II: IN THE TRENCHES

  5: The Merchant of Menace

  6: “You Look Like You Need a Hand”

  7: Man in a Straitjacket

  8: “Lady, I Just Don’t Have the Time”

  PART III: TAKING THE POINT

  9: “Tension, Baby, Just Tension”

  10: Everybody Gets Their “Vicaries”

  11: “I Ain’t Spittin’ On My Whole Life”

  PART IV: THE REAR ECHELON

  12: The White Eye

  13: May the Best Script Win

  14: The Last of the Wintry Heroes

  Epilogue: The Inglorious Bastard Sons Of Lee

  Afterword by Christopher Marvin: My Father

  Appendix:

  Important Dates in Lee Marvin’s Life

  Unmade Films of Lee Marvin

  Films Lee Marvin Could Have Made

  Acknowledgments

  End Notes

  Bibliography/Author Interviews

  Index

  Photographic Credits

  “You plan the wars you masters of men plan the wars and point the way and we will point the gun.”

  from Johnny Got His Gun

  by Dalton Trumbo

  Lee Marvin as he is best remembered, in the World War II classic, The Dirty Dozen. Of his own time in the war, he said, “I concluded it’s every man for himself… The most useless word in the world is h-e-l-p.”

  INTRODUCTION

  Marvin Matters

  APRIL 5, 1950, on a windy New York night, twenty-six-year-old Lee Marvin did the unthinkable. For young actors in the 1950s hoping to be the next Marlon Brando or Marilyn Monroe, their Mecca was the Actor’s Studio in Manhattan, which taught the so-called Stanislavsky Method, pioneered by the renowned acting coach Lee Strasberg and the equally venerated director Elia Kazan. It was fated on that Thursday night that Lee Marvin, who was auditing the class, would do a scene to be critiqued by Strasberg. Marvin had prepared a monologue based on the Hemingway short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which a man dying of a gangrenous leg wound looks back on the disappointments in his life.

  When Marvin had finished his piece, Strasberg led the students in deconstructing all that he decreed was wrong with Marvin’s performance. He stated coldly that the scene failed since the actor never conveyed the pain of gangrene to the audience. But Lee Marvin, a former combat Marine, informed Strasberg that it was he, the teacher, who was mistaken. Marvin, having seen the effects of gangrene up close while fighting in the jungles of the Pacific, explained to Strasberg in the presence of his disciples that in the terminal stage of this condition there is no pain. The small theater fell into stony silence, which was suddenly shattered when Strasberg, furious at being corrected by a student, told the young actor to get out and never come back. Marvin had no problem with that, bellowing “fuck you!” as he turned on his heels, never to return.

  Whereas young non-conforming actors were begging just to get into The Actor’s Studio, Lee Marvin walked out. Although Marvin had shown Strasberg to be the Emperor with no clothes, this school of modern acting still remained Strasberg’s empire. Banished from the realm, and unwilling to conform to Strasberg’s idea of a naturalistic—yet basically still European—method, Lee Marvin continued to toil in the Hollywood dream factories for over a decade before he was finally able to make his mark as a film star. He accomplished this by believing steadfastly that his time would come via a less refined but even more realistic concept based on this incontrovertible truth: Man is a violent animal, and the American male the most brutal of them all.

  As noble as America had always tried to be in attempting to rise above this tendency, the fact is that this trait towards aggression had existed since the nation’s inception. Benjamin Franklin had said as much in defending the colonies’ right to exist autonomously. England’s legal concept of a duty to retreat to the wall when confronted by violence was changed in America to standing one’s ground in similar circumstances.

  It is a peculiarly American point of view that has affected the nation’s collective consciousness and culture. Author Richard Maxwell Brown stated succinctly in his book, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History,1 “…the metaphorical and symbolic impact of the transition from duty to retreat to standing one’s ground is obvious and is crucial to the American identity. In the realms of both peace and war, it is not in the nature of America to approve retreat. Standing one’s ground is an attitude that has deeply permeated our foreign relations and our military habits as well as the peaceful pursuits of daily life.”

  American films rarely reflected this violent nature as it truly existed, choosing instead to justify it with nobility and bravado. Lee Marvin, a veteran of some of the bloodiest battles of WWII, knew this better than most, stating some years later in a Playboy interview (January,1969), “In a typical John Wayne fight in a barroom… tables and bottles go along with mirrors and bartenders, and you end up with that little trickle of blood down your cheek and you’re both pals and wasn’t it a hell of a wonderful fight. That’s fooling around with violence. It’s phony; it’s almost a character…”

  The curtain had slipped from this facade following World War II, when war-weary audiences no longer accepted “the hero in the white hat” mythology. The true American character had peeked through on occasion in such action-oriented film genres as westerns, gangster films and war films, despite the puritanical restrictions set forth by production codes and societal standards of decency. While there was still an abundance of vacuous entertainment during the 1950s, a much darker tone was creeping like an uninvited guest into American popular culture, and staying long after the party was over.

  A new breed of postwar male screen icons, beginning with Marlon Brando and rippling out to include the likes of exhibitionist Burt Lancaster, overly-sensitive Montgomery Clift, and apathetic Robert Mitchum, forced the stalwarts of the old guard to give their performances a previously unknown edge. Consider Tyrone Power in Nightmare Alley or James Stewart’s later westerns and Hitchcock films. Even John Wayne, the champion of American virtue, portrayed such sadistic and psychotic characters as Tom Dunson in Red River and Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. Now, it seemed, movie villains of the era were required to be even more loathsome than ever.

  Enter Lee Marvin. Middle-aged and not movie-star handsome, the most unlikely of film superstars, he would go on to forge a unique screen persona. He had his own “method” based purely on instinct and personal experience. Serving his apprenticeship by portraying countless villainous demons, he once told fellow grotesque character actor Strother Martin, “You know, as character
actors we play all kinds of sex psychos, nuts, creeps, perverts and weirdoes. And we laugh it off saying what the hell it’s just a character. But deep down inside, it’s you, baby.”2

  By the mid-1960s, the studio fiefdoms had crumbled and the production code eventually morphed into a controversial rating system. By then, Lee Marvin had become an iconic figure with silver hair, granite features, and a voice to match, and his films were revered by audiences half his age. The year 1968 proved to be a turbulent time in the country and, by extension, the world. Assassinations, the Vietnam War, rioting in the streets and violence in general permeated the nation’s consciousness. Popular film, which had once been a haven from such ills, was suddenly being perceived as part of the problem. As a progenitor of this distressing phenomenon, Marvin, when asked by Richard Lewis in the aforementioned Playboy interview whether there was a connection between real and celluloid violence, responded, “Only in the sense that if the violence in a film is theatrically realistic, it’s more of a deterrent to the audience committing violence themselves. Better on the screen than off. If you make it realistic enough, it becomes so revolting, that no viewer would want any part of it. But most violence on the screen looks so easy and so harmless that it’s like an invitation to try it. I say make it so brutal that a man thinks twice before he does anything like that.”

  It was a philosophy derived from his own personal experience, resulting in brutality heretofore unseen in American films. His characters did not feel the need to be gentlemanly or apologetic concerning the extreme acts they perpetrated. This new concept of violence was Lee Marvin’s pioneering contribution to American cinema. It had no name or title, but if it were given one, it would have to be as stark as the method and its creator himself: point blank.

  Dwayne Epstein

  November, 2012

  1 Brown, Richard Maxwell, No Duty To Retreat: Violence and Values in American History. NY: Oxford University Press, 1999, p 6.

  2 “You know, as character actors…”: Shipman, David, Movie Talk. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1989 p.140.

  PART ONE

  BOOT

  CAMP

  Six-year-old Lee (left) and older brother, Robert. Lee is holding the family dog named, ironically enough, Whiskey.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Guilty Puritan

  IT WAS INEVITABLE that the name Lee Marvin would become inextricably linked with the theme of violence and its culture. During his belated ascent to stardom in 1967, Marvin was a popular media subject for interviews, in which this topic was always on the agenda. In fact, it was his predisposition to aggressive behavior that informed one of his earliest memories. In response to a question put to him by “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson about his childhood, Marvin said: “I remember fighting with my brother. He’d hit me with a leash and I’d hit him with a stick, so we’d fight.”

  For Lee Marvin, this tendency towards violence would start early. He even recalled the first day of kindergarten as one filled with unchecked emotion and rage. “You’ve just been deposited here, right?” he would sarcastically state years later. “Boy, Mommy and Daddy are gone, and here’s the big world, and it’s working on you. And I remember I guess at one point I had to go to the john or something —it was probably down the hall—and when I came back some kid was sitting in my chair. And all I can remember is tremendous anger. I don’t know whether I punched that kid, or if he punched me, or if I got into a fight. But I do remember my anger…”

  The roots of physical aggression were genetically set in place long before his very existence. Its antecedents can also be traced among his ancestry, and the characteristic of the violence-prone male would go on to wield a powerful influence over his life and work. The first of his paternal ancestors to come to America from England was Puritan civic leader Matthew Marvin, who went on to lead Connecticut’s militia in the 1600s. But, when the farmers wanted to relax after a hard week in the fields, they would drift en masse to the local pub for some ale instead of going to church on Sunday morning. Brandishing his musket, in rode martinet Matthew Marvin and his militia to physically force the transgressors out of the pubs.

  On his mother’s side there was a distant relation to Revolutionary War general and first President of The United States, George Washington. His mother took such great pride in the lineage that when Lee was sweltering in the jungle islands of the Pacific during WWII, she attempted to rouse her son’s spirit by writing, “Maybe blood is thicker than water, and maybe some of the qualities, both good and bad, do come down to us through the generations. In this case, I get a little more of George than you, being one generation closer.”

  In truth, he had strong feelings about his heritage, as his publicist Paul Wasserman once recalled, “I think he was a guilty puritan. Also, if memory serves, his ancestors were in the Revolutionary War. He was always saying, ‘It’s my country. We fought for it, we Marvins.’ You know, shit like that.” Yet, it wasn’t so much those ancestors working menial jobs in the fields or factories whom the actor revered, but the valiant ones who fought and often died for glory in nearly every war and skirmish in American history.

  The Marvin family first settled in New York after the Revolution when General Seth Marvin moved into the Hudson Valley. The following century, in the War Between the States, both the northern and southern sides of his ancestry suffered terrible losses, and as Marvin himself put it, “During the Civil War we were pretty well shot up and the family is very depleted.” With such impressive names as Washington and even Robert E. Lee in his ancestry, Lee himself would often joke that he was “the charcoal gray not quite black sheep of the family.”

  The actor’s maternal great, great grandfather William ‘Uncle Billy’ McCann became a local hero of sorts in the town of Elmira, New York and was the catalyst of an event that seems right out of a Lee Marvin movie. McCann, who lived well into his eighties, had been the County Under Sheriff in the Chemung County Seat of Elmira. According to The New York Times, “In 1863, while Sheriff McCann was in charge of the county bastille, a jail escape was planned by Leroy Channing Shearer, a soldier who was held for the killing of two comrades at the Elmira Prison Barracks. McCann, single-handed, fought a score of convicts. Shearer alone escaped after McCann had been left for dead [but survived]

  But, of his many illustrious and colorful ancestors, none proved to be more symbolic of Lee Marvin’s legacy than his great uncle, Arctic explorer Ross Gilmore Marvin. Ross was born January 28, 1880, in Elmira, and was the youngest of Edward and Mary Marvin’s six children. His father had been elected “Overseer of the Poor,” but died when the boy was only six years old. His mother and older siblings raised Ross and, though small, he made a name for himself due to his determination to take part in school activities and sports.

  Early on in his life, Marvin had exhibited a maverick spirit that seemed to foreshadow his great nephew’s own outlook on life. Decades after his death, the Elmira Star Gazette wrote glowingly of Ross, “Marvin fought his way into everything. The places hardest to acquire were the places he sought. The things hardest to do, whether the road presented work or danger, were the things he wanted to do. He was that way from a boy.”

  That legendary perseverance would propel him through Cornell University where he graduated with a degree in civil engineering, as well as a stint on a training steamship for the New York Nautical School, conducting scientific experiments in oceans around the world. The same month of his graduation from Cornell in June 1905, in search of further adventure, Ross contacted Commander Robert Peary in the hope of joining the legendary explorer in his sixth attempt to reach the North Pole.

  Peary wrote him back, stating, “I may say that your application is one of two or three which has impressed me very favorably, and though the time is limited, I trust that it may be practicable, in the event that, after personal interviews, my choice should fall on you, that you may be able to arrange your affairs so as to accompany the expedition. I assume that you are familiar with the program of the
expedition and my plan of campaign in general.” After hearing a short while later of his acceptance to the expedition, Ross Marvin quickly got his affairs in order and spent the next two years in the last unexplored territory on earth in the employ of Commander Peary.

  In contrast, Ross’s older brother Henry had a much less adventurous existence. He and his wife, Elizabeth, struggled to get by, but were plagued by bad luck. Their son Edward had died six days after being born on January 28, 1895, but a second child fared much better. Lee Marvin’s father, Lamont Waltham Marvin was born December 19, 1896, also in Elmira, New York.

  Monte, as he was known throughout his life, had a childhood marked by sadness. His father was rather sickly and, on a doctor’s advice, moved his young family to Denver for his health where he obtained a job working for Wells Fargo. In spite of this, thirty-five year-old Henry Marvin’s health continued to deteriorate at an alarming rate, and three years later, he was hospitalized. As Lee recalled his father telling him, eight year-old Monte, “Went out to Denver to see his father, who was dying in the hospital. It was Valentine’s Day, and they wouldn’t let him see him because he was already dead. My father slipped the card he had under the door. He never saw him again.”

  Monte and his now heartsick mother took the train back to New York where they stayed with relatives until they could figure out their circumstances. A single mother at the turn of the century had few options when it came to raising a child, and her own failing health was only making matters worse. Henry’s siblings were willing to help out, including younger brother Ross, who, having just returned from Peary’s unsuccessful attempt to reach the Pole in 1906, and upon hearing of his nephew’s plight, petitioned the court to adopt Monte as his legal ward.

  Monte idolized his uncle and with good reason. Uncle Ross had been described in both local and national newspapers as one of Peary’s most trusted aides. His cool-headedness during the expedition’s perilous retreat after a failed attempt to reach the Pole during an Arctic storm made headlines, and garnered him a teaching position of meteorology at his alma mater, Cornell. Ross relished his nephew’s attention, in return filling the boy’s head with amazing stories of the frozen North, and lavishing him with gifts of exotic animal pelts.