Whippet-thin, moustachioed and with a gimlet gaze peering out from behind his rimless spectacles, Timothee Chalamet ricochets round the table-tennis table with the electrifying energy, focus and skill of a born athlete.
Poised on the balls of his feet, staring with intent at the net, he looks like a man who has been batting a ball backwards and forwards for most of his adult life.
That’s probably because he has.
When Marty Supreme was released in UK cinemas on Boxing Day, it marked the culmination of a project that began in 2018 and is being tipped to not only smash the box office but earn its star his first best actor Oscar.
Co-starring Gwyneth Paltrow as the lead character’s older lover, the £50 million movie has already taken in excess of £9 million and tells the story of Marty Mauser, a highly-strung table tennis genius, a scoundrel and a narcissist who has the feline grace of Gene Kelly with a bat in his hand.
Driven by a need to escape his down-at-heel life, living poor in New York, he says: ‘It’s every man for himself where I come from.’
In truth, the inspiration for the film’s lead character – 1950s table-tennis champ Marty Reisman – was every bit as remarkable, self-centred and sublimely talented. And also – by his own admission – an inveterate hustler, and ‘the most charismatic son of a bitch who ever stepped on a table’.
Yet Marty Reisman’s actual life story far exceeds anything the film’s director Josh Safdie could dream up.
Actor Timothee Chalamet, and Kylie Jenner attend the premiere of “Marty Supreme” in Los Angeles, California
Marty Supreme featured co-star Gwyneth Paltrow as the lead character’s older lover
The real Marty Supreme won and lost three fortunes. He smuggled gold bullion in his vest. He made tens of thousands of dollars from conning people in table tennis matches.
He had two nervous breakdowns, a daughter who ended up estranged and in the clutches of a cult, and a host of famous friends including the legendary British newspaper editor Harold Evans and actress Susan Sarandon.
His protege and great friend Jimmy Pelletier told The Mail on Sunday last week that Reisman, who died in 2012 aged 82, would have been ‘blown away with people talking about him again. He would have loved it. It’s great that Timothee Chalamet is doing for Marty what he did for Bob Dylan [depicting him in 2024 hit A Complete Unknown].’
A flamboyant showman, Reisman favoured beautifully cut trousers and flowing silk shirts, berets and fedoras, and aviator sunglasses. His slim physique and razor wit earned him the nickname ‘the Needle’.
One signature move was to measure the height of the net with a $100 bill before a game began.
His most famous trick was to split a cigarette in half using the velocity of a table tennis ball. He would – for a bet – play sitting down, or blindfolded, or using the bottom of a coke bottle or a frying pan as a bat.
But he wasn’t just some low-life showman. Many consider him one of the best ever players. He won 22 major titles from 1946 to 2002, including two US Opens and a British Open.
His final title was clinched at the age of 67 in one of sport’s most remarkable comebacks.
Marty Reisman, holder of 18 International and US National table tennis titles, and author of the 1974 book ‘The Money Player’
Martin Reisman was born in a tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on the first of February 1930 to Jewish couple Sarah and Morris. His father owned a fleet of taxis which he lost in games of poker and craps. Marty once described him as a ‘compulsive loser’.
An anxious child, Martin had a nervous breakdown aged nine and was committed for a month to a psychiatric institution. Despite his poor eyesight, table tennis soothed him and by the time he was 13, he was the city junior champion.
The sport, he declared, ‘so engrossed me, so filled my days that I did not have time to worry’.
He started hustling for money at a Manhattan table tennis club which was a former prohibition-era speakeasy with bullet holes in the wall. He would lure challengers by purposely losing the first few games. He’d then suggest a doubling of the stakes before revealing his true skill and beating his hapless opponents.
Here, teenaged Reisman learned the game from the best – and the most disreputable. One character in particular shaped him – a notorious predator who’d win young boys lunch money then offer them credit with a final ‘double or nothing’ match. The penalty for losing the match was that the youngster would have to sleep with him.
Recalling his own encounter with this loathsome man, Reisman said: ‘When I decided to make my living playing table tennis, I also decided there were certain things I would never do.’
Around the same time he came across ten times men’s singles champion Dick Miles with whom he had a Borg-McEnroe style rivalry in the years to come.
From the start, Reisman had a confidence which landed him in trouble. Aged 15, playing at a tournament in Detroit, he placed a $500 bet on himself with a man he thought was a bookie. In fact he was the head of the US Table Tennis Association, who arranged for Reisman to be ejected by police.
The real Marty Supreme won and lost three fortunes. He smuggled gold bullion in his vest. He made tens of thousands of dollars from conning people in table tennis matches
Undeterred, the teenager found a place on a three-man exhibition team and toured England. Once there he illicitly flogged silk stockings he’d brought from the US to the luxury-deprived women of post-war Britain.
Realising there was money to be made from smuggling, Reisman upped the stakes a few years later, swapping hosiery for gold when he and another player became the opening act for the basketball exhibition team the Harlem Globetrotters and toured the world with them. They took advantage of an arrangement with the military whereby Reisman could fly on their transport (and not be searched) in return for exhibition matches at military bases.
They would use different sized frying pans to make a rally sound like Mary Had A Little Lamb and play with five balls at once, hit shots behind their backs and use the soles of their shoes as bats.
This was the classic hardbat era, when everyone used the standard hardwood paddles covered with a thin layer of pimpled rubber, and rallies would go on … and on. In Safdie’s film, Chalamet’s recreation of the epic rallies is mesmerising – due in no small part to the fact that he began training for the role in 2018 after Safdie had approached him on hearing the hype around the actor.
‘I didn’t know anything about the guy. Some agent told me he was the next big superstar. And you hear that a lot from agents,’ Safdie said. ‘But you got the sense that he saw it. And he had a vision for it. He had this energy to him. He was Timmy Supreme.’
Chalamet took a table tennis table with him to the sets of the other movies he has made between 2018 and 2024, including Wonka, Dune 2, The French Dispatch and A Complete Unknown. And he used the ‘downtime’ of Covid and the 2023 Hollywood actors’ strike to perfect his skills.
Other scenes in the movie are pure fiction, such as the older movie star lover, Kay Stone, played by Paltrow. She told Vanity Fair magazine that when she met Chalamet (30 to her 53) and realised they were going to have to record sex scenes, she said to him: ‘Okay, great. I’m 109 years old. You’re 14.’
Table tennis legend Marty Reisman attends SPiN New York’s 2010 World Champions
Reisman’s friend Pelletier was less amused by the fictional sub plot, telling The Mail on Sunday: ‘His life was so incredible that you don’t need to do what they have done and add in stories.’
Reisman was in fact married twice, the first time to his childhood sweetheart Geri. After the war, when international competition resumed, Reisman played for the US. He and Miles led the US team in 1948, and won bronze at the world championship when Marty was just 18. The following year at the British Open at Wembley Stadium he beat Hungarian legend Victor Barna.
In 1952, Reisman was full of confidence when he flew to India for the world championships. But – as the movie relates – disaster awaited. Unknown Japanese player Hiroji Satoh had covered one side of his bat with smooth foam rubber. The effect completely rattled Reisman. The ball behaved in ‘eerie’ ways.
He had learned to anticipate the ball’s spin, velocity and trajectory in part by the sound it made coming off the hard paddle. The foam on Satoh’s bat changed all of that.
He lost the match but simply refused to change how he played. He described the sponge paddle as a ‘fraud and deception’, saying he would have no part of it. In his view, it reduced a sport to the status of a mere game. He won two US singles titles in 1958 and 1960 but then left tournaments behind.
Reisman had his second nervous breakdown in 1958, aged 28, at the peak of his hustling.
In his 1974 autobiography, The Money Player, he bragged of making around 25 trips smuggling gold bars out of Asia by stuffing the bullion into the pockets of a muslin vest. He earned $1,000-$2,000 a time and used the funds to finance ‘all sorts of money exchanges and black-market activities’.
On his final mission, when he disembarked at Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport, he weighed in at a coltish 135lb. When he got back on the plane an hour later he tipped the scales at 156lb, some 21lb of gold weighing down his undergarments.
Marty Reisman was national junior champion of the USA during 1945-46 (file photo)
The 1958 breakdown coincided with the collapse of his marriage, which had produced a daughter, Deborah, known as Debby. He was notoriously private about his personal life but it is fair to assume his daughter’s unhappy childhood and period in a cult must have either contributed to the failure of the union, or been a product of it.
In the 2014 documentary Fact Or Fiction: The Life And Times Of A Ping Pong Hustler, he said of his daughter: ‘She was pretty much the victim of a bad marriage and the relationship between my wife and me.
Debby was going on ten or 11 years old when she came into contact with a group near her school. They lured her into their orbit. I didn’t hear a word from her for nine years. I thought she was dead. I didn’t fulfil needs that a father should have.’
Instead, Reisman was trying out his first – and only – regular job in 1958 selling shoes at a department store for $50 a week. He lasted four weeks before he was fired.
‘I had to be at work at precisely the hour I was used to going to bed: 9am,’ he complained.
Reisman returned to his roots and the same year bought a table tennis club for $6,000, turning it into an all-night neighbourhood hangout where regulars included actor Dustin Hoffman and the writer Kurt Vonnegut.
He found happiness with his second wife Yoshiko, who was devoted to him. She would wipe down the table before he played competition matches, then mop his brow afterwards.
Few people knew much about his daughter Debby – except that in his words, ‘she had a difficult escape from the group’. Jimmy Pelletier confirmed Debby was in the cult ‘until she was 18 or 19’.
Marty Reisman and Miles led the US team in 1948, and won bronze at the world championship when Marty was just 18 (file photo)
Now 64, she lives in the suburbs of Seattle. She’s preferred not to talk about her suddenly-famous father, although she did post on his Facebook page to note that her mother was not Yoshiko.
Reisman’s friends are all sure of one thing – he would have loved the film being made.
According to friend and table tennis champion-turned-writer Matthew Syed: ‘A few people have said he would have been upset by his portrayal in Marty Supreme and the narcissistic character that emerges across the 150 minutes of action.
‘I can say quite emphatically: He wouldn’t have cared one jot. He would have watched and laughed, then walked down to East 57th for another game, another duel, another bet.’
