According to “Tales of a Hollywood Housewife“, a 2010 tell-all by Lee Marvin‘s former wife Betty Marvin, serious hunka-chunka happened between her disloyal husband and (believe it or not) the 23- and 24-year-old Anne Bancroft.
It happened during the filming of Gorilla at Large (’54) and A Life in the Balance (’55), in which Bancroft starred and Marvin played supporting.
The double-barrelled extra-marital affair (Bancroft was married to attorney Martin May while “seeing” Marvin) lasted for a year and a half or so.
I somehow hadn’t read about this until earlier this evening, and it shocked me somewhat. No offense to Marvin’s illustrious memory but Bancroft doesn’t seem to have been his type, or vice versa. Their affair doesn’t calculate.
How could the gifted, ultra-classy Bancroft (The Miracle Worker, The Slender Thread, The Pumpkin Eater, 7 Women, The Graduate, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, The Turning Point) have hooked up with Marvin during his relatively unsophisticated, second-fiddle tough guy era AND then radically switched gears by falling for gifted comedic maestro Mel Brooks six years later? (They first met in 1961.)
Marvin was big (6′ 2″) and broad-shouldered and deep-gravel-voiced, and the “spectacularly Jewish” Brooks was around 5’4″ with a gusto-ish, somewhat high-pitched voice. Each man had his own manner and tool kit but Bancroft couldn’t have chosen more differently. She said repeatedly that she hooked up with Brooks because of his humor, but she never talked about Marvin. Marvin never discussed Bancroft either.
I’m sorry but I’m having trouble imagining Point Blank‘s Walker or Cat Ballou‘s Kid Shelleen talking a similar romantic language with The Miracle Worker‘s Annie Sullivan or The Graduate‘s Mrs. Robinson.
