“Tequila. Straight. There’s a real polite drink. You keep drinking until you finally take one more and it just won’t go down. Then you know you’ve reached your limit.”
Known for stone-cold badass characters in films such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and The Big Red One (1980), Lee Marvin was named after the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, a first cousin (four times removed). He received a Purple Heart as a Scout Sniper in the Marines during World War II and turned to acting when he was no longer able to continue in the military. (And even then, largely by chance: while working as a plumber’s apprentice near a summer-stock playhouse, he asked for an audition on a lark). Marvin would earn a spot in a Broadway production of Billy Budd in 1951 and make his movie debut later that year with You’re in the Navy Now. He landed numerous supporting roles over the next several years, carving out a niche as cinema’s definitive villain. Terrorizing everyone from kids to old ladies, one critic would comment that Marvin was “rapidly becoming the Number 1 sadist of the screen.” It wasn’t until NBC’s M Squad (1957–1960) that he began to broaden his range. After a series of costarring roles with John Wayne (including Liberty Valance), he received top billing for the first time in the 1964 remake of The Killers, and won a Best Actor Oscar the following year for his dual role in Cat Ballou with Jane Fonda. After The Dirty Dozen (1967), he briefly became one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood, but his career started to fade in the 1970s as Westerns and World War II pictures proved less profitable.
JUST START DRIVING, he’ll come down. At least, that was the logic. Director John Boorman and his wife, Christel, had just finished dinner with Lee Marvin at Jack’s at the Beach in Santa Monica. Well, that’s not entirely true. It had started as a dinner, but the hour was now 2 a.m.—and Marvin was ripped on martinis. They’d all arrived together in Marvin’s car, which he now insisted on driving, even though Boorman was trying to take away his keys. “Fuck you,” Marvin had said, rearing back, gesturing with an imaginary samurai sword. This was a man who had made twenty-one beach landings in the South Pacific during WWII. Still, the imaginary sword didn’t prevent anyone from getting into the car. And so Marvin persisted. He felt he was completely capable of driving, and to demonstrate this, he climbed up onto the top of the vehicle like an orangutan and crouched on the luggage rack.
Pity John Boorman, the British filmmaker who was directing his first American feature, Point Blank, with Marvin as the lead. Boorman was as yet untested. He was also rewriting the script on the fly, since Marvin had thrown the original shooting draft, based on the pulp novel The Hunter by Richard Stark, out the window. Locations were being scouted, sets were being designed, and still no one knew exactly what they were filming. Boorman would regularly meet with Marvin at his Malibu beach house to apprise him of his progress. The meetings typically went well—unless Marvin had too much to drink. “Beyond a certain level of vodka,” Boorman would write, “he sailed out on his own into deeper waters where no mortal could follow.”
Boorman would regularly meet with Marvin at his Malibu beach house to apprise him of his progress. The meetings typically went well—unless Marvin had too much to drink. “Beyond a certain level of vodka,” Boorman said, “he sailed out on his own into deeper waters where no mortal could follow.”
Indeed, when drunk, Marvin left everyone behind—often even himself. One morning, he arrived home from an all-nighter without his house keys. After ringing the bell, he was greeted at the door by an unfamiliar woman. When he asked what she was doing in his house, she replied, “You sold it to me three months ago.” He had to buy a Star Map to figure out where he currently lived. Prior to Point Blank, Marvin had been in Vegas for production of The Professionals. One night, returning to his hotel after a long day’s shooting in Death Valley, he’d put quarter after quarter into a slot machine he couldn’t get to work—not realizing it was actually a parking meter.
Anyway—the luggage rack. Marvin’s car was parked at the end of a pier jutting into the ocean. Boorman figured if he drove the length of the pier, he could demonstrate he was serious about this, and Marvin would relent. So he gave it a shot, to no avail. Before reaching the actual road, Boorman got out and asked Marvin if he was ready to come down. Marvin snarled. Boorman got back behind the wheel. It was late. The Pacific Coast Highway was practically deserted. And Marvin had left him no choice.
Boorman turned onto the highway and slowly headed toward Marvin’s beach house. It wasn’t long before rolling lights appeared in the rearview mirror. The police. Boorman pulled over. An officer approached the car, assessing the scene. Finally, he looked at Boorman and asked his first question: “Do you know you have Lee Marvin on your roof?”
BATHED IN BORDELLO RED and adorned with checkered tablecloths, Dan Tana’s tiny dining room could pass for any number of East Coast family-run Italian pasta joints. But in keeping with Hollywood’s taste for reinvention, the restaurant’s namesake and owner not only isn’t from New York or Italy—he’s a former Yugoslavian soccer player who immigrated to Los Angeles in the 1950s.
Before opening his own humble establishment in 1964, Dan Tana worked in a variety of restaurants (and briefly as an actor). The place is famous for its steaks and martinis, but initially the restaurant’s hours were its main appeal. In a city where even the most popular eateries shut down by 11 p.m., Dana Tana kept the kitchen open late. (Last seating is at 1 a.m., making it especially attractive to patrons leaving the Troubadour, located just down the block.)
Deliberately unfussy and stridently old-school, Dan Tana’s has remained a favorite of L.A. celebrities young and old for nearly fifty years. MCA power broker Lew Wasserman was a regular up until his death in 2002. Fred Astaire and John Wayne loved the place. Drew Barrymore claims she’s been going there so long, her diapers were changed in one of the booths. Dabney Coleman, James Woods, George Clooney, and Karl Malden all have items on the menu named after them, as does former L.A. Laker Vlade Divac. Phil Spector had drinks there the night he shot Lana Clarkson.
With the restaurant’s “seen it all” cool, simply being famous is not enough to get you a table: seating is limited, and if you’re not a regular, you may have a long wait ahead of you. Ask John Travolta: at the height of his Saturday Night Fever fame, he showed up one night with a date but without a reservation. When told it would be two hours before he could be accommodated, Travolta dropped his name with a defiant “don’t you know who I am?” tone.
“Well, for you, Mr. Travolta,” the maître d’ allegedly replied, “it will be three.”
