No Celebrity Told WAR Stories Like Lee Marvin

Lee Marvin was wounded on Saipan, won an Oscar for a comic western, and spent 40 years giving talk show hosts the shortest answers they ever got. How often do you come in and visit the Hollywood friends? As seldom as possible. Celebrities never quite knew what to do with his deadpan comebacks, or with his war stories. How does a guy like you with that big booming personality get to be an Academy Award winner and roll right along? Lee Marvin joined the Marines at 18 and fought in the Pacific as a scout sniper. On Saipan in 1944, he was wounded, and for the rest of his life, he described the wound in as few words as he could. Could I ask you where you were wounded during the war? Yes, I was shot in the a**. I hate a guest who won't be specific. The record is less cheerful. Machine gun fire on Mount Tapachao, a severed sciatic nerve, and more than a year in hospital. Back home in New York, his mother was about to get a telegram. I had written my mother saying that I'd been injured, so don't be disturbed by the telegram. She wrote me back a letter and said that she had a dream. Roughly at the same time there, I was standing in the door of her bedroom, the doorway, and I was in my dress blues and my head was bandaged. And I said, yes, she's my mother. How sweet of her, right? Bandages were somewhat lower in reality. One famous story says he told Johnny Carson the bravest man he served with on Iwo Jima was Captain Kangaroo. It never happened. Marvin was never on Iwo Jima, and Bob Keeshan joined the Marines too late to see combat. Well, you picked up a Purple Heart, which is something we don't hear too often. You're suitably modest about it. How did you win that? You don't win them. You get them when you get hit. So, in other words, I'd rather not have it. after the war he was working as a plumber's assistant in Woodstock, New York when a summer theater company there needed someone to stand in for a sick actor he stayed and he never dressed up the reason when did it hit you uh well i think when i was 23 there was a young lady that moved into this very small town that i was staying in and i said who's that they said oh she's an actress and this, you know, crazy actors group that came up to do some summer stuff. And I became an actor. That simple. The G.I. Bill paid for acting classes, and by 1951, he was on Broadway and in his first film. Hollywood cast him as thugs and killers in The Big Heat, The Wild One, and Bad Day at Black Rock. And the casting directors had their reasons. This tough appearance made them first cast you as a gangster and a killer. No, actually, I think the reason I was cast as that is that I wasn't a model-looking, young, leading man. Do you enjoy punching John Wayne, for instance? Well, anybody enjoys that. And getting away with it. Television made him the hero for once. A Chicago detective in a hundred episodes of M-Squad. Then, in 1962, John Ford cast him as Liberty Valance, the outlaw John Wayne's character finally shoots. Wayne got his own back. For the death scene, Marvin brought forward an idea of his own. I said, well, I'm such a bad guy, I thought I'd fall down on my knees like I was praying and then realized that didn't work enough. Give me a bunch of silver dollars and stick them in his hat. So when I went down, you know, silver flies out of my head onto the boardwalk and one of them's spinning and you can hear it. And it was so good that they had to cut it out because it was, it was going through the mythology, see, or too far into mythology. In 1964, the Killers gave him top billing for the first time. Then came Cat Ballou, a comic western with Jane Fonda, which put him up for Best Actor against Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, and Rod Steiger. Steiger sat right behind him, and Marvin had a word with him first. Well, Rod Steiger was sitting behind me because he was nominated that same year, and he's since won one, as you all know. So I could tell the story because I saw him and I said, what are you doing here? And he just looked at me and I said, Well, if I see you heading down there, buddy, you're going to have to get over me. Fortunately, we didn't have to prove that test. You're bigger than Rod Steiger. No, not really. Steiger stayed in his seat. The winner is Lee Marvin. I don't want to take up too much of your time. There's too many people to correctly thank for my career. I think, though, that half of this belongs to a horse someplace out in the back. Now he was a leading man. The Professionals followed, and in 1967, The Dirty Dozen, with Marvin as the major ordered to turn 12 condemned soldiers into a commando unit. Jim Brown, Charles Bronson, and John Cassavetes were among the 12, and keeping up with them was its own campaign. of great characters and you had to take the scene from them because they wouldn't give it to you." The same year he made Point Blank and picked its director himself, a young Englishman called John Borman. His co-star, Angie Dickinson, had also played opposite him in The Killers. I work with Leon Tupich. The killer, extremely violent. Point Blank, more violent. You like him. You like him maybe because he's such a good villain. In 1969, he sang, after a fashion, in the musical Paint Your Wagon, opposite Clint Eastwood. Eleven years later, on a press tour beside Mark Hamill, people were still bringing it up. We were sitting there having a pizza, and some gentleman with a camera around his neck came up and said in broken English, Oh, Mr. Marvin, I like you so very much. I like you in Paint Your Wagon when you sang I Was Born Under a Wandering Star. Boring? You didn't correct him, did you? He was right. How could I do it? Plenty of people bought it anyway. Wandering Star went to number one in Britain in March 1970 and kept the Beatles' Let It Be at number two. That October, on the Dick Cavett Show, he gave away his method for playing a heavy. Is there any way you can give anybody a formula or a secret to playing a bad guy on the screen? Well, I don't think there's a secret to it. I simply know that I just do what I'd hate to have somebody do to me. So you're actually using other people's faults, not your own. I wouldn't dare expose my fault, would I? In 1973, he made Emperor of the North with Ernest Borgnine, two hobos fighting on top of a moving freight train, and Borgnine remembered exactly how long that fight took. That what, that fight scene on the train? On the train, yeah. It took 35 days to shoot that one. 35 days. A little bit every single day. We had to choreograph like a ballet. There were times we hit each other pretty good. Two-by-fours, chains, even an axe. Of course, it was a dull axe. Marvin, asked about the same fight years later, put it at almost 14 days. By then, he had moved to the desert outside Tucson, a Western star who no longer cared to ride. Do you have horses? Do you lead an outdoor life? and I've been under too many of them, so I don't like to get on them. By 1976, he had spent 25 years being punched, shot, and killed off on screen. You know, I guess you're bringing entertainment to other people, but when you look at yourself, you think, what am I doing? A full-grown man up here, you know, wearing a cartridge belt full of blanks, and I always miss my punches, and, you know, you know you're not going to get the girl because she's married to the guy standing over by the camera, and you're pretending. He had played soldiers on screen for 30 years by then, and been one for three. But did the combat seem real to guys who actually knew what it was like in those movies with John Wayne? Oh, combat's a very personal thing. I don't think two people will agree on anything in combat. I mean, nobody wanted to see a newsreel, you know, of true death and destruction, so it's much better to do it theatrically, which is less painful. In 1980, he made The Big Red One, written and directed by Samuel Fuller, who had landed on Omaha Beach with the 1st Infantry Division. Marvin played the sergeant, and Mark Hamill and Robert Carradine, two of his young riflemen. Carradine remembers their first car ride together. So we're all sitting in this car out in front of the hotel, and we're waiting for Lee, and we're waiting for Lee. And finally, he comes down. His daughter was with him. He looks at the driver, and the driver hits it. Nobody has said a word. And without turning around, he says, which one of you is Carradine? I went, I am? He says, f**k you, Carradine. It was not a request. Well, I finally worked up the gumption to ask him a couple of weeks later what was going on there. And he said, well, you know, I figure I got to keep up with four of you young sons of b*****s. So I wanted to set the deal straight right from the get-go. Next came Death Hunt with Charles Bronson. 30 years earlier, both men had made their film debuts as sailors in You're in the Navy Now. On the press tour in Dallas, Marvin explained how friendships made on film sets work. back in 1972 on Pocket Money a western with Paul Newman a young actor called Hector Elizondo went up to Marvin to pay him a compliment i gotta tell you how much i've admired your your work especially when you play bad guys just terrific so i never played a bad guy in my life and i knew I was going to get a lesson. He said, where do you come from? Where are you from, he asked me. He says, I'm from Harlem, New York City. You know bad guys? I know a few bad guys. Did they think they were bad guys? No, not one thought he was a bad guy. He says, that's how you play a bad guy. Lee Marvin made his last film, The Delta Force, in 1986 and died the next August at 63. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. If you could ask him one question, what would it be? And how many words would he use? Leave yours below, and if short answers are your thing, subscribe!