Lee Marvin: Playboy Interview

When Lee Marvin loped to the stage of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in April 1966 to accept an Oscar for his tour-de-force performance in Cat Ballou, his granitic features creased into a rare smile. After 19 years and 40 memorable roles in forgettable films as a belligerent bully—the screen's definitive villain—he had finally proved himself as an actor and made the big time as a good guy. The vehicle for his transformation was a low-budget lampoon of the Hollywood horse opera in which he enacted the roles of two brothers—the sinister, black-garbed professional killer Tim Strawn, who replaced with a silver proboscis a nose bitten off in a street fight, and the drunken gunfighter Kid Shelleen, whose unrequited letch for the lissome young leader of an outlaw band, Cat Ballou (Jane Fonda), overcomes his affair with the bottle long enough for a showdown shootout with his bad half.

In the wake of his critical and commercial triumph in Cat Ballou, for which he was paid a fee of $87,000—minuscule by movie standards—Marvin's asking price escalated to more than $1 million a film and Motion Picture Herald, an influential trade journal, named him the screen's second-ranking box-office attraction, just behind Julie Andrews. The public's overwhelming response to the nasty characters Marvin subsequently portrayed in The Dirty Dozen, The Professionals and Point Blank has dramatically underscored the renaissance of the Bogart-type antihero as a viable movie commodity and the replacement of Hollywood's pretty-boy matinee idols with such homely-handsome sex stars as Steve McQueen, James Coburn and George C. Scott, a maverick breed of which Marvin is indisputably the best of show.

Born in New York City of Brahmin bloodlines dating back to pre-Revolutionary Colonists, Marvin was a precocious rebel. He ran away from home at the ripe age of four and returned only to be sent away—this time to a succession of exclusive Eastern boarding schools, from many of which he was expelled for such infractions as throwing a roommate from a second-floor window and illicit cigarette smoking with three female classmates at a progressive coed school. This checkered educational career came to an abrupt—if predictable—end when he dropped out of high school in Florida and joined the Marines in 1942. After spending an inordinate amount of time in the stockade, he finally saw the action he craved—more than he bargained for, in fact. Storming ashore on 21 beachheads from Kwajalein to Saipan, he earned a Purple Heart and a 100-percent-disability pension for a Japanese bullet that severed his sciatic nerve and hospitalized him for 13 months.

Marvin, discharged in 1946 at the age of 22, drifted aimlessly through a score of civilian jobs, until his work as a plumber's apprentice—digging septic tanks near the family home in Woodstock, New York—took him to the premises of a local summer-stock playhouse. As a lark, he asked for and won an acting job, and forthwith abandoned sewage for the stage. After scuffling from one show to another in small roles, he finally debuted on Broadway in Billy Budd. Next came a marathon procession of promising featured roles in more than 200 television dramas; they led, finally, to a movie bit part that prompted him to pull up stakes and move to the West Coast. Soon he played the widely acclaimed part of a psychopathic multiple murderer in an early episode of Dragnet—a harbinger of roles to come. Within a few years, Marvin was a veritable merchant of menace—terrorizing old ladies, cuffing blind kids, tormenting cripples, shooting, stabbing, strangling, bludgeoning and battering almost every leading man in Hollywood, and inspiring critic Bosley Crowther to comment, with an editorial frisson: "He is rapidly becoming the number-one sadist of the screen."

Though this dubious reputation kept him profitably employed, it was also a stereotype, and Marvin began to chafe at his typecasting as the hairy brute. For a while—from 1957 to 1960—he was able to break out of the mold, as a tough but sympathetic police lieutenant in the popular television series M Squad; but the money and fame failed to compensate for the weekly grind he grew to detest or for his deepening artistic ennui. Soon he was on the bottle, and soon thereafter he was divorced by his wife of 14 years and mother of his four children; he started drinking doubles and occasionally brawling in bars; and he went back to playing heavies.

But the phenomenal success of Cat Ballou dramatically changed both Marvin's professional stature and his private life. Though he still found himself cast in hard-boiled and violent roles, Hollywood began to recognize his dimension as an actor and to accord him a wider range of parts. He has since alternated his portrayals of cold killers with sensitive and evocative performances such as the one he gave as a washed-up baseball player in Ship of Fools. The metamorphosis is completed in his current release, Hell in the Pacific, a two-character film in which Marvin plays the role of a Marine pilot marooned on a remote South Pacific island during World War II with a Japanese naval officer (Toshiro Mifune). The picture, in the production of which he actively collaborated, clearly conveys an implicit message about the futility of war and the need for people of divergent philosophies and nationalities to live together in peace and understanding—a far cry from Marvin's past roles as a dispenser of death. "The old lion," commented one reviewer privately after seeing an advance screening, "is beginning to evidence disconcertingly lamblike tendencies"—as well as an acting depth that ensures a long future at the top of his profession.

To probe the professional and personal complexities of this paradoxical star, Playboy interviewer Richard Warren Lewis visited Marvin at his Malibu Beach home, which he shares openly with a female friend. Despite Marvin's reputation as a taciturn and hostile nemesis of journalists, Lewis reports that he found him both cooperative and responsive: "In fact, he was almost docile—a marked contrast to his public image as the skull-crushing heavy. His long, baleful face was gaunt and heavily lined, showing the effects of the 25 pounds he'd lost filming Hell in the Pacific on location; and constant exposure to the tropical sun had bleached his prematurely white hair and long shaggy sideburns with swirls of blond. As we started talking on the sun deck over strong bloody marys, Marvin set aside the script for his next movie—the $18 million production of Paint Your Wagon—and lit up the first of an uninterrupted chain of filter-tipped cigarettes."

The interview commenced shortly after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, and the climate of violence in America—particularly as it related to the mounting violence on movie screens—was on the minds of everyone in Hollywood. It seemed appropriate to begin the interview by asking Marvin—whose history of violent roles is unique in films—to articulate his views on this subject.