Burt and Lee

(with Lee Marvin, who reportedly held his liquor better than Burton);

It's interesting that you say that, ecarle. According to Clint Eastwood, who worked with both actors in 1968 (and had to take second billing to both, even though he had probably overtaken them by the time of filming), it was Marvin who registered the effects of alcohol more egregiously, at least on the set if not on the screen. Writes Richard Schickel on pages 217-218 of Clint Eastwood: A Birography about the production of Paint Your Wagon (1969):

The production was now "a ship, literally, with no captain on the deck," as Clint describes it, a condition particularly upsetting to that very queasy sailor Lee Marvin. An alcoholic exactly the opposite of Richard Burton in that he showed the effects of drink almost immediately, he was, as Clint says, a man who needed to know on a daily, perhaps hourly, basis what course they were on. "The minute you said, 'Well, I'm not sure about this or that,' Lee immediately went, 'Pour me a double.'"

In his autobiography, [director Joshua] Logan was still speaking of Marvin as a courtly Southern gentleman, at heart not very different from the director himself, and that, unfortunately, was how he treated him on the set. Only once did he let his true feelings publicly slip, when he told Marvin's biographer, Donald Zec, "Not since Attila the Hun swept across Europe leaving five hundred years of total blackness has there been a man like Lee Marvin."

What Marvin obviously needed, what he had received from other directors when he did his best work, was stern discipline administered by a man's man. To [producer Alan J.] Lerner and to [associate producer] Tom Shaw that suggested Richard Brooks, a literate, tough-minded character, as blunt in conversation as Logan was circumspect, who had a reputation for handling complex productions (among them Elmer Gantry and Lord Jim), and difficult actors (among them Lee Marvin, whom he had directed without incident in The Professionals).

Brooks, who had a powerful collegial feeling for others of his profession, refused to take over the picture.

If not Brooks, then Marvin would have liked Don Siegel, who'd directed him in The Killers (1964). As British film journalist Michael Munn reveals in Clint Eastwood: Hollywood's Loner, page 88:

The problems got worse. Drunk or sober, Marvin kept holding up filming. His problem, he told me, was his lack of confidence in Logan as a movie director.

'Josh Logan has wanted to make the film in the studio and I figured he thought a sound stage was like a theatre stage because that's where he felt comfortable and in control. But he was out there in the middle of Oregon with real people and real wagons and real guns. And there was just a whole buncha crap going on up there. They had Clint Eastwood singing—I mean this big tough guy who usually killed ninety-seven people in each of his films, and he's sitting there playing a guitar and being Elvis Presley and they didn't know what to do with him. And they had all these buildings falling down and it was just lunacy. Or at least, that's how I saw it. Well it was crazy. I got along just fine with Josh in the end but we could have used Richard Brooks [who directed Lee in The Professionals] or Don Siegel.'

As it turned out, Siegel visited Marvin and Eastwood (who had also worked with the director in late 1967 on Coogan's Bluff) on the set of Paint Your Wagon. But by then, Marvin had already lost his focus. Writes Munn on pages 87-88:

Logan was shooting a scene in which Jean Seberg had to gaze into East Eagle Creek where the cool clear water bubbled over the rocks. As the cameras rolled, Marvin, from behind a tree, suddenly roared, 'Stop!'

Jean lept back. 'What's wrong?' she cried.

Marvin staggered forward. 'What's wrong?' he repeated in mock indignation. 'Don't you realize the fish are f!cking in there?'

Seberg burst into laughter. But Logan groaned under his large-brimmed straw hat and hoped that things wouldn't get any worse than this. Marvin, meanwhile, was hoping the same thing about Logan. An earlier choice for the film had been Don Siegel with whom Marvin had made The Killers, and Lee would have preferred to have Siegel direct this film. Logan was predominantly a stage director, and Marvin was nervous of the fact. And the more nervous he became, the more drunk he got. Clint Eastwood began to wonder what he'd got himself into.

One day in the middle of a scene, Marvin said, 'I don't see any point in wasting money here. I'm going fishing.'

Don Siegel came up to the location to visit Clint and Lee Marvin. He told me, 'When I arrived I found that the whole picture had closed down because Lee Marvin was somewhat...unavailable—incapacitated. Everyone was unhappy and I was rushing around telling everyone that everything would be okay, that I'd worked with Lee a lot and that he'd pull himself together and get back to work. Nobody believed me, not surprisingly. But I did prove to be right eventually. Anyway, I went up to Lee's to have breakfast—breakfast with me is something of a sacred ritual. I got there and found he had no food in his house except for one wrinkled old avocado.

'Clint came over to pick me up and Lee started talking gibberish; just sounding off, making no sense at all. I said to Clint, "Do you understand anything he's saying?" Well, Clint couldn’t make it out at all. I said, "Look, I came here for breakfast but there's nothing to eat except this wrinkled avocado. I've had four beers but I need something to eat." Lee just sat there grinning, and I got mad at him so I picked up the avocado and squashed it on his head. Lee burst into laughter, and I began laughing, but Clint thought we'd both gone crazy. As I told Clint, there are moments when one act can be more expressive than dialogue with Lee Marvin.'

What's ironic is that Eastwood agreed to Paint Your Wagon in late 1967 after reading Paddy Chayefsky's "dark, moody" adaptation of Lerner's Broadway book. After he saw Lerner's "fluffy" script re-write some months later in London while working on Where Eagles Dare, Eastwood wanted to exercise his escape clause and leave the project. But by then, pressure poured in to stay, because people were depending on him and the vehicle was in full-gear. Lerner and Logan flew to London to convince Eastwood of the project's continued merits, and the star remained on, however reluctantly. Of course, matters would only spiral downward from there. Writes Schickel of Marvin, page 219:

Overt rebelliousness eventually disappeared and Marvin became something like a scary ghost haunting the production's by-ways, spreading chaos whenever he appeared. Clint credits Michelle Triola, Marvin's longtime companion and eventual intiator of the famous "palimony" action against him, for doing her best to restrict his intake of alcohol, but she could not be everywhere with him. Typically, Clint says, "His stand-in would come over to my trailer and say, 'Lee's going to come by here in about ten or fifteen minutes asking for a beer. Tell him you don't have any.' So I hid all the beer and it became this kind of game all the way."

Except whenever possible Clint chose not to play in it. Logan would later describe Clint as "warm and decent," his words correctly implying that, as much as possible, Clint distanced himself from the on-going hubbub. He did his job and maintained a pleasant, cooperate, but reserved, manner.

That said, not all the blame for Paint Your Wagon should be laid at Marvin's feet by any means. But Marvin, unlike Eastwood, was not someone who could deal with a shaky production, and his collapse made everything else collapse even more forcefully.

After a stalwart career as a supporting heavy ("The Big Heat," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance") Marvin was absolutely huge as a star from about 1965 (with "Cat Ballou" and "Ship of Fools" in the same year) to about 1969 (when the musical "Paint Your Wagon" rather unfairly sunk his reputation).

Marvin holds the distinction of being one of the screen's most dominant tough-guys and one of its most audacious villains, espeically in Westerns such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (John Ford, 1962), The Comancheros (Michael Curtiz, 1960), Seven Men From Now (Budd Boetticher, 1956), and Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955). I have to believe that Marvin's brief yet showy role alongside John Wayne in The Comancheros represented a case of art imitating life.