Co-Starring at Last

Lee and Michelle share billing in court

It is the best soft-core extravaganza in Los Angeles. There sits Actor Lee Marvin, 55, squirming at times as he plays an unaccustomed courtroom scene, his rasping familiar voice sometimes fading so softly that the judge has to urge him to speak up. Just a few feet away sits the woman who is the cause of his troubles: Michelle Triola Marvin, 46, petitely Rubenesque, who took the actor's last name but who never was married to him --and that is just the point. She is suing Marvin on the grounds that she is entitled to get up to half of the $3.6 million he made while they were living together, from 1964, when they met on the set of Ship of Fools, until they broke up in 1970.

California's courts have ruled that unmarried cohabitants have the right to bring such an action, and 1,000 or so similar cases have already been filed in the state, including suits by the onetime great and good friends of Rock Star Alice Cooper and Comedian Flip Wilson. Actor Rod Steiger found himself sued for $2.4 million by Sherry Nelson, his estranged wife. She is arguing that she is entitled to half of his earnings, including those in the four years they lived together before they were married. Even more bewildering is the suit, now being considered in New York State, brought by Etan Merrick against Producer David Merrick. They were married in 1969 and secretly divorced a month later, but then lived together until 1976. A New York court once denied her alimony for the years following her divorce, but her lawyer thinks that the precedent of the Marvin case may help her cause.

By no strange coincidence, Sherry Nelson's attorney is

Marvin Mitchelson, 50, the high-octane divorce lawyer who is representing Michelle against Lee. Since Mitchelson and A. David Kagon, 58, Marvin's lawyer, agreed to try the case solely before a judge, there is no jury for Mitchelson to play to, which is a pity. With his I, Claudius haircut and natty suits, Mitchelson easily upstages the Hollywood star. The lawyer leans menacingly over the witness box, especially when the actor is pinioned on the stand, and then checks out the rows of newsmen as he stalks back to his chair. Although he is outshone by Mitchelson, Marvin worries that the fact he is a star may work against him, no matter how the judge rules. Referring to his Oscar for Cat Ballon, he asks, "You think that's not going to be considered? People will think, 'That s.o.b. He's an actor!' "

Michelle's plea is that only the lack of a preacher made her relationship with Lee any different from that of any married couple. She produced a sheaf of love letters in which the actor claimed he lusted after her, saying that her coming to him on location was his "bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow." Lee pooh-poohed the missives as the kind of thing fellas tend to write. If measuring love was like a fuel gauge, he said gallantly, his feelings for Michelle never got above "half a tank."

For her part, Michelle at one point told how they were so comfy together that Lee "would hold up a woman's magazine and say, 'Can you cook this?' And then we'd get in the car and go to the store and get all the ingredients." She told how they went to Sears to get a new fridge and a washing machine. But she also told how she had to cope with his drinking jags.

Michelle said she had thrice become pregnant because Lee had an aversion to her using birth control devices. The first and third pregnancies were ended by abortions, she testified, the second by a miscarriage. She said that afterward she was unable to have children.

To buttress her claim, Michelle testified that a friend named Patricia Hulsman had found an abortionist for her and taken her to the doctor's office. But Hulsman denied this on the stand. Tears streaming down her face, Michelle later said outside the courtroom: "I'd like her to stand here and say that to me close up, face to face, because I have never forgotten that Lee told her to take me. He was afraid I might change my mind."

There was other anguish for Michelle.

Actor Richard Doughty, 34, who had met the couple when Lee was filming Hell in the Pacific, testified that he had made love to her about 25 times before begging off in a fit of morality. The reason: he had felt he was being a "false friend" to Lee. But Doughty had told Mitchelson in 1973 that he had never made love to Michelle, a contradiction Judge Arthur K. Marshall said he would bear in mind.

Having dealt with Michelle's character, the defense next attacked her pride. One of her claims was that she had given up a promising career as a singer to live with the actor. But witnesses testified that her voice was so poor that she was hired on occasion only because she was known as Lee's companion. Said Wally George, a talent booker for a club where she had worked: "I thought she was a very mediocre talent."

So it went in a trial that is not expected to end until late next month. Mitchelson produced a letter from Lee in which he had written Michelle:

"Is there no place in the world for us missfits? [sic] Well, I guess we will have to spen [sic] the rest of our lives hideing [sic] in bed. Hmmmm." If they had, they would have saved the state of California a lot of trouble, and saved a lot of former roommates, male and female, the suspense of wondering how Judge Marshall will rule in the case of Marvin vs. Marvin.

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