Lee Marvin property suit

It must be a very long time since so many Americans, women especially, have followed a court case with such palpitation of the heart and purse as they have in waiting for the outcome of the case of Michelle Triola Marvin versus Lee Marvin.

So much gossip, so much wild legal speculation, so many high hopes and low fears have been roused by this case that I think I ought to start to say as simply and accurately as possible what it was all about, what was the suit that Miss Marvin brought. 

Now you see at the beginning we have a little trouble. 'Miss' Marvin would suggest a legal relationship with Mr Marvin. I won't call her 'Ms' Marvin because I object to the Ms usage on three grounds. First it sounds like the buzz of an insect, secondly if anything it is the abbreviation for 'manuscript' and thirdly, if a woman (married or single) achieves any professional independence of her own she has the right to the honourable title of Miss which has nothing to do with marriage or the lack of it. 

I think I shall call Michelle Triola Marvin simply Michelle as one of the two contending parties in the case. The other, of course, is no one but the actor, Lee Marvin, known to us all before this case as a gritty upholder of the law, sometimes in, for instance, 'Bad Day at Black Rock' as a very mean man biding his time, but never as an injured party. Well, as Sergeant Busfuz said, 'These are the facts and circumstances of the case detailed by me.' 

Michelle Triola, who is now 45, was a youngster when she moved from Chicago to Los Angeles shortly after the end of the Second World War. Once out of high school, she started singing in nightclubs, became a featured dancer at shows in Las Vegas, had a brief marriage with an actor, went to Europe, sang in nightclubs for pretty good fees and went back to Hollywood in 1964 and there and then she met Mr Marvin and they lived together from December of that year until June of 1970. 

Then he left her and married an old high school sweetheart. For a little time she went on singing and while she was with Mr Marvin cut a record but she had no time to promote it, because by now, she says, she had all but abandoned her career and given her life and time to Mr Marvin wherever he was making a picture or wherever he wasn't. 

A few months before they parted in the spring of 1970, she legally changed her name by adding Marvin to Michelle Triola. They were never married but she swore in the trial that at a very early stage in their living together he'd said to her, 'What I have is yours and what you have is mine.' I isolate that simple sentence from the huge transcript of an 11-week trial because it reduces her case to its legal nub in California more than anywhere. 

California is one of the south-western states that inherited much of its law from the Spanish and one element of Spanish California law, still extant and binding, is what is known as the community property law. Now this law is not much known about abroad but it's quickly and painfully learned by, say, an English or French movie actor, or a foreigner of any trade who marries in California, or marries somewhere else and become a permanent resident of California – of course it applies to people born or ever resident in California. 

No bachelor whoever fantasises about conjugal happiness with some nubile Hollywood actress should ever envy her husband. If they get a divorce, he delivers over to this wife exactly half of all his property, house, furnishings, income, the lot. If he marries a new houri and divorces her, he then has to give her exactly half of what he has left. There are much-married actors who are generally thought of as carefree millionaires who today are living on one-eighth or one-sixteenth of what they have owned and earned. 

In other words, the California community property law is implicit in the marriage contract. When Mr Marvin said, if he did, 'What I have is yours and what you have is mine', though it might sound very gallant, even poetic elsewhere, in California it's simply the repetition of a literal fact that applies to every married person. Half the man's property in the moment of marriage belongs to his wife. And half her property belongs to him. But, you'll say, they were not married. That's right, but it was Michelle's contention that she had been for six years a wife in all but name. She hoped. Her whole suit was a dogmatic declaration of her belief that they had a contract equally as binding as a marriage contract. And since it happened in California, she sued him for exactly one half of the $3.6 million he'd earned while they were living together. She deserved, she said, a property settlement comparable to that any California wife would get the moment the marriage was dissolved. 

Well, the question before the judge was whether the law said she deserved it. Put very simply, she was asserting a new view of contract which I don't imagine would have been tolerated 10, 20 years ago. But since today living together outside wedlock has shed the stigma it's had for centuries, there must be hundreds of thousands of American couples who followed this case with the concentration of ferrets, especially the disillusioned couples – the women panting in hope and the men in fear. There are, in fact, over a thousand similar suits pending in California alone. 

When the trial started, its possible outcome was generally debated more than the rights or wrongs of the case. I'm thinking now of lawyers, not of the rest of us who thought the suit either vindictive or quixotic or a brave blow for women's rights, apart from the millions of newspaper readers who merely lapped up the juices of their imaginations. 

What many lawyers, and the advocates of women's rights, debated was whether Michelle's contention about having been the party to a solemn contract would come to stand up in the law at a time when old laws about the marriage state are being challenged and new laws are being proposed. All across the country there are wives who contend that a housewife's work, which runs to 10 or 12 hours a day if she has small children, ought to be legally recompensed at a going rate – so much an hour, so much a week, so much a year – and these contentions are before the courts and they're being maintained by women who are not intimidated by the stamina of ancient laws. 

A lot of evangelists in the cause of equal rights for men and women, are, I must say, stymied when they come to look at the California community property law. What could be more equal than a law which makes the marriage certificate itself say 'What I have is yours and what you have is mine'. I'm sure that if Michelle had got what she wanted there would have been a landslide move in other states to adopt the California law. As it is, California was a key state in which to test Michelle's contention and she lost – that's to say, lost the main point. I hasten to report that she says she won and so does Mr Marvin. What did they win or lose? 

Well, the judge hewed to the law of contract. 'To accede,' he said, 'to such a contention would mean that the court recognised each unmarried person living together to be automatically entitled to half of the property bought with the earnings of the other non-marital partner. It would be tantamount,' he said, 'to recognising common law marriage which the state of California abolished in 1895.' And as for Mr Marvin's heroic declaration, assuming he made it, that 'What I have is yours and what you have is mine', the judge, who had more than a touch of the wryness common to Western judges, said that, 'under the circumstances of swearing fidelity to an alliance not bound by a contract, it could be put down to the sort of,' he said, 'hyperbole typical of people who live and work in the field of entertainment.' 

So, he threw out Michelle's suit for half of the $3.6 million Mr Marvin earned during the years of their unmarried bliss, but he threw her a bone. And it's one dignified by a legal doctrine that goes back in English law at least to the fifteenth century – the law of equity. He thought she ought to have some balm to soften the wound and he awarded her $104,000 which is $1,696,000 less than she asked; $104,000, representing a thousand dollars a week (£500) for two years to help her retrain herself for a career so that, as he put it, 'she may return from her status of a companion of a motion picture star to a separate calling, an independent but perhaps a more prosaic existence.' 

The judge called this award justified by the legal principle of what is known as 'equitable remedy' and I'd better say at once that while there will be rejoicing among many similar disillusioned women, there will be loud and contemptuous protests from many lawyers who maintain that the law of equity had nothing to do with the case. And among those who think it did, I hope there are many honest ones who will cool their clients' ardour for litigation by pointing out that in an 11-week trial which was nine years in the making Michelle's legal fees are likely to be considerably more than the soothing balm that the judge applied. 

Now the law of equity is so ancient, so enormously complicated, so barnacled with sore points that no layman should touch it, but I am intrigued by two early definitions of it. In 1525, during the reign of Henry VIII, it was laid down that 'a man shall have remedy in Chancery for covenant made without specialty, if the party have sufficient witness to prove the covenant and yet he is without remedy as the common law'. Maybe Michelle, in the nine years of her cogitating had dug deeper and gone back to the reign of Edward IV where, no later than 1480, there is a seeming defence of her contention. Five hundred years ago, Chancellor Stillington may have had Michelle in mind for he said, 'He that is damaged by the non-performance of a promise shall have his remedy here.' 

Well, the judge seemed to say, 'Maybe. It was a promise all right but not a promise given on paper in a marriage contract.' The little bone he tossed her, even though he called it an 'equitable remedy' should, I think, give pause to the millions of the emancipated, swinging couples who swear to love eternal and disdain to anything so square and bourgeois as a piece of paper.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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