Macho Marvin hid behind his image

Press, 12 September 1987, Page 20

Macho Marvin hid behind his image

DAVID LEWIN reveals the real man behind Hollywood’s favourite anti-hero.

Lee Marvin was born not under a wanderin’ star — the one about which he sang in his film “Paint Your Wagon” — but a fixed and Puritan one.

That may come as a surprise to those who knew him only from the set-’em-up and knock-’em-down parts he often played in films like “The Dirty Dozen,” "The Wild One” and “The Killers.” He was strong and tall — over 1.8 metres — and lean and always good for a fight. He died recently at the age of 63 after a heart attack in hospital near his ranch in Tuscon, Arizona. Had he been able to, he would have seen the funny side of that. "What keeps you alive and healthy,” he told me, “isn’t a diet of an apple a day — how boring that would be — but good

honest-to-God-rage. Rage stops heart attacks and keeps the doctor away. Not an apple. “You don’t need rage in your performance onscreen — that is timeconsuming and wasteful — but in life. There are times when you have to be in a certain rage in order to get things done. You can’t and shouldn’t control it. So when you see something is wrong and you want to shout about it — let yourself go. Don’t bottle it up."

He came from a New York-East Coast of America formal background — his father was an advertising executive — and he went to boarding schools, several of them, as a boy. Even then the young Marvin wps prepared to experiment — not always to the pleasure of the headmaster. One of them

sent a note to his parents. It suggested that they remove their son “and transfer him to another establishment.” He had, it seems, dropped another casually from a first floor window onto the quadrangle below. When I re-

minded him Of this, Lee Marvin said: “Hell — he wasn’t hurt very much.” At 19 he joined the Marines and served with distinction. When he talked about his war service in the Pacific later, he-managed to omit the

fact that he was awarded the Purple Heart for bravery under fire and was in hospital for 18 months before returning to action.

He wandered west. It seemed the thing to do, and wound up in Hollywood where, at that time, there was a need for tall, lean and fit young men to appear in crowd scenes for bit parts. He went on studio “cattle calls” and was offered jobs. He made it all seem deceptively simple: “I was the ugliest and the tallest. They couldn’t very well miss me.” He learned about acting the hard way and from a master. One of his earliest movies was “Bad Day At Black Rock.” The star was the great Spencer Tracy. Lee Marvin fiddled around with his words, changing (he emphasis here, jumping around a bit there. Finally Tracy, who was one of the great understated actors, could stand it no longer. “I am too old, too rich and too good to waste time waiting for you,” he told Marviri. “Let’s go and get on with it.”

Lee Marvin said: “It was an object lesson for me and I never forgot it. Later when he appeared as the drunken gunfighter in “Cat Ballou,” with a horse who seemed to have equal difficulty in standing up straight he won an Oscar.

He wasn’t the easiest fellow around in the earlier days. That was the time of “booze and i broads” as he described it and he had his share of both.

He was married twice — his second wife Pamela was his childhood sweetheart and they were together for 18 years until his death. “I am much softer than I appear, but I don’t always reveal that. So when I got into bar-room brawls the police expected it and I could hide behind it.

Nine years after his marriage he became the star of a real-life courtroom drama. His former mistress, Michele Triola, sued him for $1 million as compensation for their six years together. The redoubtable lawyer Marvin Mitchelson repre-

sented her in the legal battle. Even then Lee Marvin found he could still exchange civilities with the opposite side. "Thus is likely to last three months — as long as it takes to make a movie,” he told Mitchelson one day during the hearing. “And" the guy with the best script is going to win.” Finally the judge gave his verdict. Miss Triola was entitled not to a million dollars but $104,000 for “rehabilita-' tive purposes.” Everyone else on his side, including his wife who stood by him, seemed, content. Not Lee Marvin.“I was not very keen on’ those words,” he explained to me. “They made it seem as though she had been wounded in action.”

A few years ago he moved out of HollywoodWith his wife and family to the ranch in Arizona. He went because “the' musicians had taken over the studios” and they were just "fruit-balls with a script” as he dismissively described them. When they wanted to discuss parts with him they had to fly to Tucson where he met them at the airport hotel — but never at home. “I don’t want anyone to discover the truth about me,” he said. “That there are no gun racks around or scalps on the wall.”

— Copright Duo.