Law: The Paladin of Paramours

He aims to make it as costly to shed a lover as a spouse

Gazing down from the ceiling of the art-and antique-filled office in Los Angeles' Century City is an oversized, backlighted color transparency of a Botticelli Venus. Sitting below the goddess of love in a thronelike chair, once owned by Rudolph Valentino, is Marvin Mitchelson, a divorce lawyer who has made millions off love gone wrong in Hollywood. Since the mid-1960s, Mitchelson, 50, has piled up a long list of financially rewarding victories in celebrity divorce battles, sometimes representing big- name clients (Rhonda Fleming, Connie Stevens, Red Buttons) but more often fighting for the showfolks' spouses. Among them: the wives of Rod Steiger, Alan Jay Lerner, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Richard Harris and Tony Curtis, who has had the misfortune of losing child-custody cases to not one but two Mitchelson-represented spouses.

Next week a Los Angeles jury will begin hearing another Mitchelson case: the long pending "divorce" suit against Actor Lee Marvin by his former live-in girlfriend, Michelle Triola Marvin. The case, Mitchelson happily admits, is one "I'd been waiting for," and it has already had wide repercussions.

Though Michelle legally took Marvin's last name, the two were never married. After meeting on the set of Ship of Fools in 1964, they embarked on a six-year relationship that ended in 1970, when Marvin moved out and married Pamela Feeley, his high school sweetheart. Michelle, now 46, says that when she and Marvin split, he began paying her a stipend of $800 a month. But Marvin, 54, cut her off after a year, and she went to Mitchelson. He filed suit on her behalf, demanding full payment of what Michelle said Lee had promised her: 50% of the $3.6 million that Marvin accumulated mostly from movies, including Cat Ballou and The Dirty Dozen, while they were living together.

Two California lower courts rejected the suit, ruling that such agreements are not enforceable if the relationship is "meretricious," in other words money for sex. In fact, the first judge got up and left the bench while Mitchelson was still making his case. Mitchelson announced that he was delighted; now he could make new law for the whole state by taking his case to higher courts on appeal.

He succeeded. In December 1976 the state supreme court decided that Michelle did indeed have the right to sue. Noting "radically" changed social mores "in regard to cohabitation," it ruled that the law should not "impose a standard based on alleged moral considerations that have apparently been so widely abandoned by so many." As long as sex was not the basis of the agreement, said the court, unmarried couples could expressly agree to share their property or even imply such an agreement by their conduct toward each other.

At the trial, Mitchelson will attempt to emphasize that the Marvin-Triola relationship was a marriage in all but name. He will argue that Michelle agreed to give up a promising singing career to care for Marvin in return for half of his earnings. His brief never mentions the bedroom but rather speaks in terms of "housekeeper, cook, confidante" and "joint bank accounts."