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beginning to think he should have been making something else. I was awestruck. He didn't simply fill a room, he wore it like a T-shirt.
    My questions sounded inane: "What it is like, working with Mr. Lean?" His answers turned and coiled upon themselves, following paths of invention and whimsy. I realized that he had a technique for not getting bored during interviews. His technique was to free-associate about whatever he damn well pleased, and to invent stories if the real ones weren't entertaining enough.

    When we met the next time, I just let him talk. I was an audience, not an interviewer. Once in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, he dismissed his driver and announced that he and I would be driven to the movie location by his friend and stand-in. We spent four hours being lost. At one point, we had left Pennsylvania altogether and were in Steubenville, Ohio, with Mitchum wondering if a snowplow operator could be bribed to lead us back to town. And all the time he talked, free-associating. I don't know if he was the best conversationalist in the movies, but he might have been the best monologist.
    The last time I saw him was at the Virginia Festival of American Film, in Charlottesville, four years ago. They did a tribute to film noir and I interviewed Mitchum onstage after the screening of Out of the Past. He'd gone out to dinner rather than see the film again ("I don't know if I've ever seen it") and at dinner he smiled at his wife of fifty years, Dorothy, and told this story:
    "Once there were a lot of fans under my hotel room window. I turned to Dorothy and asked her, `Why do they make such a big deal? You've been married to me for years, and you're certainly not impressed. And Dorothy said to me, `Bob, when you're up there on the screen, they're smaller than your nostril.'99
    There's a truth there that applies to every movie star. But not many of them would have told the story.
    So, Mitchum or Stewart? I cannot chose. I cannot do without either one of them. They are among the immortals. But when Stewart died, the entire nation went into mourning, and the president issued a statement, which he had not been moved to do the day before, when Mitchum died. And I thought, yes, all honor to Jimmy. But let us also love and remember Mitch. And I put on my laser disc of Night of the Hunter, and listened to Mitchum's voice coiling from the screen ("Chil ... dren?"). And I thought, Stewart was the heart, and Mitchum was the soul.

     

INTRODUCTION
    interviewed Lee Marvin the first time in 1968, on the set of Paint Your Wagon. I went back to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, wrote the interview immediately, and submitted it to the Sunday New York Times. It was my first appearance in the newspaper (which agreed to run it the same day as the SunTimes). He was drinking Heineken's that day, too. We began in the Paramount commissary, where he observed of John Wayne, "Look. He wears his gun to lunch." We ended hours later at a lounge named the Playboy's Buffet, outside the studio gates. His director, josh Logan, took the whole day to set up a shot and the actors were never called.
    Despite the things I quoted Marvin as saying in 1968, he spoke to me again for the interview below. Despite what I wrote in this piece, he spoke to me again in 1983. Like Mitchum, he didn't give a damn about image, or perhaps knew that no matter what he said it would simply make him more perfectly Lee Marvin. By 1983 he had split up with Michelle Triola and was living in the desert outside Tucson with his wife, Pam, who had been his childhood sweetheart. She prepared lunch, and Marvin broke out the Diet Coke.
    "You're not drinking so much these days?" I said.
    "If I were," he said, "I'd be dead."
    NOVEMBER 1970
    MA]LJI8N, 197D-The door flew open from inside, revealing Lee Marvin in a torrid embrace, bent over Michelle Triola, a fond hand on her rump. "Love!" he said. "It's all love in this house. Nothing but love. All you need is love ..."
    Michelle smiled as if to say,