The Sons of Lee Marvin - Mythology

Mythology

The society's members perpetuate the joke in the media. Tom Waits described it to Rolling Stone in 1986 as "somewhere between the Elks Club and the Academy Awards", and claimed to have met Jarmusch at an annual meeting of the New York chapter. When asked about the society by friend and collaborator Luc Sante in a 1989 interview, Jarmusch commented "I'm not at liberty to divulge information about the organization, other than to tell you that it does exist. I can identify three other members of the organization: Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Richard Boes ... You have to have a facial structure such that you could be related to, or be a son of, Lee Marvin. There are no women, obviously, in the organization. We have communiques and secret meetings. Other than that, I can't talk about it." Jarmusch revealed in a 1992 interview that the real son of Lee Marvin, Christopher, had objected to the existence of the organization in an encounter with Waits at a bar:

Six months ago Tom Waits was in a bar in somewhere like Sonoma County in Northern California, and the bartender said, ”You’re Tom Waits, right? A guy over there wants to talk to you.”

Tom went over to this dark corner booth and the guy sitting there said, ”Sit down, I want to talk to you.”

So Tom started getting a little aggressive: ”What the fuck do you want to talk to me about? I don’t know you.”

And the guy said, ”What is this bullshit about the Sons of Lee Marvin?”

Tom said, ”Well, it’s a secret organization and I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

The guy said, ”I don’t like it.”

Tom said, ”What’s it to you?”

The guy said, ”I’m Lee Marvin’s son”—and he really was. He thought it was insulting, but it’s not, it’s completely out of respect for Lee Marvin.

— Jim Jarmusch, in interview with Film Comment, June 1992