There’s a wonderful throw-away scene near the beginning of George Clooney’s 1996 zombie flick, “From Dusk Till Dawn,” in which Clooney stops at a fleabag motel, pounds the desk for service and is confronted by a skeletal coot identified in the credits as “Old Timer.”
Clooney appears rattled.
No play-acting here. Old Timer has a murderous glint in his eyes, and Clooney is spooked.
Look closely. Pause the frame. Clooney’s been drilled clean through by the same .38 caliber stare that Old Timer nailed Sidney Toler with in 1940, when he played mad-dog killer Steve McBirney in “Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum.” He was a strapping 30 then, a period study in gangster swagger, replete with black fedora, pencil mustache and sausage pizza complexion. By 1940, he’d been around Hollywood for eight years, creating a series of cruel-eyed thugs and sinister cons in B-film classics such as “Invisible Stripes,” “Homicide Bureau” and “Penitentiary.”
Older viewers might recall Old Timer as Marc Lawrence if they remember him by name at all.
Lawrence made his film debut in 1932, as Gene Raymond’s cellmate in “If I Had a Million.” He glad-handed Edward G. Robinson as Zyggy the counterfeiter in “Key Largo” and played the mute hillbilly in “Shepherd of the Hills.” Did you catch “Marathon Man” with Dustin Hoffman? Lawrence is there as Laurence Olivier’s stiff-legged flunky, Erhard, lurking in the background during Olivier’s sadistic torture scene. (The dental tools, remember?)
Lawrence has made 150, maybe 250 films if you count all the Italian gangster movies cracked off between 1950 and 1960, when the House Un-American Activities Committee blacklist rendered him all but unemployable stateside. Later, he alternated between directing (“77 Sunset Strip”) and portraying aged Mafia dons and ice-pick killers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Painfully thin at 88, Lawrence is still a player, still snapping up interesting parts like Old Timer and that of Carlo Gambino in the 1996 HBO production “Gotti.” Ask the smiling hit man today how he feels and he’ll tell you, “I’m here, I’m alive. Is that what you wanted to know?”
Yeah, he’s no tough guy, not the half of it.
And please have no doubts, Lawrence remains the same hard cookie he was at James Monroe High School in 1927, when the world knew him better as Max Goldsmith. “I grew up in the Bronx near Claremont Parkway and 3rd Avenue where my dad was a builder,” says Lawrence, who now lives in Palm Springs, drives a splendid pearl-white Lexus and enjoys evenings out with assorted old cronies and dear friends. “He put up gambling houses for Arnold Rothstein; I think he did OK.” (Yes, he means the same Arnold Rothstein who rigged the 1919 World Series.)
“I was the best actor in our school,” he says. “I had the memory. I could memorize faster than anyone and my old uncle in the Yiddish theater said I had stage-guts, so I guess he inspired me.”
Lawrence attended City College of New York for two years before going on to apprentice in repertory company productions around Manhattan. In 1932, just as the gangster film craze was taking off, he hopped a freight train bound for Los Angeles. Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson had scored in “Public Enemy” and “Little Caesar” the year before, which meant hook-nosed criminal types like Lawrence were in serious demand.
The tough guy found instant employment.
“I had this effect on people,” he recalls. “I remember walking along the street and seeing Eddie Cantor’s name up on one of the theaters, so I stopped by the ticket seller and asked him, `When does Eddie go on?’ He looked at me and went pale and said, `You-you-you-you’re the guy in that picture up the street!’ He was petrified of me.
“So I went and watched that movie again and thought to myself, `Christ almighty, what an ugly (expletive)! Holes in my face, black eyes that pierce right through you. Here I thought I looked like Ronald Coleman, and the ticket seller was right.”
Lawrence, almost always cast as a hood in those years, says he enjoyed making “White Woman” with Charles Laughton and Carole Lombard (“Lovely girl, she swore like a sailor”), and got a tremendous boot out of Warner Oland in “Charlie Chan on Broadway” (“The Swede would say two lines, then fall asleep. We never knew where to look”).
Point of historical perspective: Oland passed away in 1938.
Lombard died in a 1942 plane crash.
Lawrence’s great friend, John Garfield, went in 1952, and old co-star Humphrey Bogart in 1957. John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Robert Taylor were born within five years of Lawrence, yet all are long gone.
Indeed, few performers from that era remain vertical, and Lawrence, who freelanced through half of the ’30s before signing with Columbia, certainly doesn’t recall much in the way of glamor. “I was a guy who worked in a factory called Columbia Pictures,” he says. “Columbia was on Gower and the operation was tiny. It looked like a store. We’re not talking about Metro, where they treated you like a king. I made $150 a week working for (Columbia boss) Harry Cohn, who always liked me. He told me Johnny Roselli (the mobster) said I was the best hood in films.”
Lawrence’s son, Michael, a painter and sculptor living in Greece, says he remembers the family’s Hollywood period as an adventure. “I met Bogie, I performed in the living room for Errol Flynn,” he says. “Dad knew George Tobias, and I sculpted a bust of Richard Basehart. They all seemed part of a club, a marvelous club of actors. There was a richness to their camaraderie. I learned from them, and have used acting as a way of dealing with people and the world. The actors have given me the theatrics for performing my own art.”
Lawrence, his late wife, Fanya, Michael and his sister, Toni, remained in southern California through the 1940s, with the tough guy accepting prestige roles in “This Gun for Hire,” “The Ox-Bow Incident,” “Captain from Castile” and “Key Largo,” among others.
“After `Captain from Castile’ I found I liked Cesar Romero very much,” he remembers. “We called him Butch, you know. Nobody called him Cesar. I admired the way he handled questions about his personal life. He’d look down and say, `None of your (expletive) business!’ “
Opinionated, but not terribly political, Lawrence eventually drew fire from the House Un-American Activities Committee. The actor Ward Bond may have ratted him out to investigators; whatever the case, he was called to testify and screwed up royally by flipping wisecracks at his inquisitors.
The committee applied pressure, Lawrence gave up a few names, and for years afterward he suffered from guilt and depression over it. Today he says only: “I spoke against my own conscience. There was a knock at the door — and just like that I lost eight, nine years out of my career. And I had to work, so we went to Italy.”
There, strangely enough, he bumped into HUAC backer John Wayne: “I was sitting in a cafe. He walked in and said, `Hiya, Commie, how’ve you been?’
“What did I do? I invited him for lunch,” Lawrence says. “Duke had cancer then, and I think a lot of his old friends ran away from his disease. They turned their backs on him. “
Returning to the U.S. in the mid-’60s, Lawrence’s roles grew smaller — though often more interesting. He worked for John Huston in “The Kremlin Letter,” performing his lines in Russian. He made a comedy, “Frasier — The Sensuous Lion,” and showed up with Sean Connery in “Diamonds Are Forever” as one of the Slumber Inc. assassins who fling Plenty O’Toole off a hotel balcony into the pool. In that scene, Connery turns to Lawrence afterward and says, “Good aim.” Lawrence, a wry look splitting his battered old puss, responds, “I didn’t know there was a pool down there.”
Lana Wood, who played O’Toole, says today: “I didn’t think Marc was so scary; I thought he was sweet. He was very concerned for my safety, very careful with me. You say he was 60 years old then? Well, I only weighed 103 pounds so I wasn’t much for him to lift. I remember they cleared the set because I only had on panties, and we went in two or three takes. I dropped one floor into a mattress and they threw the dummy.”
Lawrence considers “Diamonds Are Forever” for a moment, but is more interested in talking about “Gotti.”
“Did you see `Gotti’?” he asks. “The schmucks cut half my scene and gave it to Armand Assante. That whole part about loyalty. I like Armand; he’s a good actor, a nice guy. But it was more interesting for the Gambino character to say those lines.”
The tough guy’s agitated.
He still cares.
He’ll nail ’em harder next time.
