Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  She’d gotten a copy of the play that would be the guild’s next production, Rebound by Donald Ogden Stewart. She had read it and given it to her mother, and both agreed that the part of Johnnie Cole would be just perfect for the reluctant Robert. “The trick was how to get him to try for it,” Annette remembered. “That night, we waited until Jack was out of the house, and Mother said, ‘Bob, there’s a reading at the playhouse. Can you drive us down?’ And Bob said, ‘Sure, I’ll take you down.’ That got him into the playhouse they used, inside the old Union Pacific Depot. Bob walked us in, and we sat him down on the aisle, and I sat behind him. And they came to the role that Mom and I thought belonged to Bob. And the secretary called, ‘Is there anybody wants to read for the part of Johnnie Cole?’ When she said that, I heard Bob take a breath. He stopped breathing. You see, Bob and I had ESP since we were born. I kid you not. Mother had it, too. Before either of us would say anything, the other would know what it was. And he knew what I was thinking when the secretary spoke. And the dame looked around and said it again, ‘Is there anybody wants to read for this part?’ And Bob sat there frozen, not making a sound. And then I took my right thumb and pushed it against his back real hard until he jumped from the seat and they all looked up at him from the director’s table. And they saw him and they got him to read the part and the rest is history. I like to say to people that right here on this hand is the thumb that made a star!”

  Elias and his wife and assistant, Oranne Truitt Day, saw the attractive, broad-shouldered young man lurch into view, and one or the other called for him to come down. Casting a withering look at his sister, Robert walked to the director’s table and introduced himself, took up the pages they wanted to hear, glanced at the words, and then barely took another look—the photographic recall that would one day wow them on assorted movie sets—as he began reciting/acting in a resonant baritone voice. The two at the director’s table looked at each other, whispered for a moment, then Mr. Day told Robert when to show up for the first rehearsal.

  The guild’s players were local people of all ages and backgrounds. Most were amateurs on a lark, though there were some who had professional aspirations and dreamed of a future on the stage, even a few who nurtured fantasies of breaking into the movies that were made practically in their backyard (though even in Long Beach everyone thought of Hollywood as an unreal and unreachable place and much farther away than the hour-long ride on the Red Car). Robert was among those actors in the group who had no aspirations beyond having a merry time. But with his previous attempts at self-expression confined to the writing pad and the recesses of his mind, this initial participation in a group artistic effort would prove to be a revealing and liberating experience. “One of the most enjoyable and satisfying encounters of my life,” he would write of it some years later, in a brief memoir prepared for the Los Angeles Parole Board apropos a felony conviction. “For the first time I had the acquaintance of young people who shared my ideas and reflections, and though most of us were threadbare poor, we enjoyed the counsel of our mentors and forgot our fears of the future.”

  Margie Reagan, then forty years old and a participant in guild productions since 1930, would remember Bob Mitchum exuding something like star power from his first day as an actor at the Long Beach Depot Theater, an enormous attractiveness that was not confined to the stage. “Everybody wanted to be around him. Especially the girls—the actresses and script girls. They were crazy about him, and he sometimes took his pick after the show. One wink from Bob and that was it. He had that look. They never turned him down.”

  As he did in so many creative endeavors, Robert took to acting with a natural, instinctive ability. Almost at once Elias Day let it be known that in Mitchum he believed he had found a raw talent with enormous potential, and he lavished on the young man a great deal of individual attention, something, in his stay at the guild, he would do with only one other new performer, an actress named Laraine Johnson. (Renaming herself Laraine Day in his honor, she would become a leading movie star of the 1940s and eventually a Mitchum costar; Johnson/Day knew Robert from the guild though they did not work together on the stage; she would recall him as being “very odd.”) But if Day had his favorites, no one in the company was neglected. The small, intense man worked closely with each cast member, advising and guiding them through even the briefest walk-ons. “He wanted everybody to be as good as they could be,” said Margie Reagan. “He really helped you. There were directors who might just take you through it and try and make it smooth. But Elias Day was really interested in making you act. He would talk to you about the character you were playing and what the motivation was so you could understand why you said what you said. Sometimes he almost went too far, yelling if he got upset, and stopping you to fix something even when you were in final rehearsal. He was almost more of a great coach than a great director. But he was wonderful.”

  Rebound, a Broadway hit in 1929, was a Molnarian romantic comedy with a few somber thought pills scattered among the bons mots. Mitchum’s was a supporting part—Annette had not wanted to push things too far—though playwright Stewart would call it the most difficult part in the play. The character Johnnie Coles is an urbane gigolo who attempts to seduce the married heroine. There were a few good lines, some titillating stage business, and a brief emotional breakdown scene. A very nice showcase for any twenty year old’s acting debut. The production opened on the night of August 11, 1937, to an audience of locals, guild subscribers, the players’ family members, and the Long Beach newspaper critics. Mitchum walked onto the stage so assured and effective it was as though he had roamed the boards for years. But the whole company was good that opening night, a couple of missed cues and such but otherwise a thoroughly professional-looking, sophisticated job. The local reviews were uniformly positive, and the Press-Telegram’s Jane Ahlswede made special mention of the performance by the “outstanding . . . Bob Mitchum.”

  Annette had been right. Brother Bob was a natural. Tremendous presence, everyone who was there said so. Robert took the plaudits, smirked, and went on his way. He wasn’t the sort to run through the streets declaring he’d found his calling in life. It had been fun; it had put him into close contact with many friendly and attractive women. Perhaps he would do it again sometime, if he felt like it.

  That second appearance on stage came in the following spring of 1938. By then Elias Day was dead. His widow, Oranne, opted to continue with the guild; and a friend from the New York stage, Larry Johns, had come west to help her, bringing with him a license to produce the first regional theater version of Kaufman-Ferber’s Broadway hit, Stage Door. Robert dropped by the Depot and met with the new director, and Larry Johns cast him in the small but showy role of Keith, an egotistical playwright. Johns, like Day before him, recognized Mitchum’s ability at once. After the first read-through he knew that the young man had what it took to become a first-rate actor. “He was just born to it,” said the director. Margie Reagan recalled, “Bob became one of Mr. Johns’s pets. He saw in Bob something special and wanted to bring out his talent.” Oranne Day shared in the excitement over Mitchum’s potential. Her own production of the high school comedy Life Begins at Sixteen, performed twice in May 1938, would be Robert’s first opportunity to play a leading role. Pleased with her faith in him, Bob invited Mrs. Day to come and meet the family for dinner at the bungalow on Wisconsin Street. When she arrived at the appointed time, Bob was nowhere to be seen. Admitted to the house, she waited while one by one the other members of the household drifted through to the kitchen, took their food and ate it anywhere, then wandered off again. One boy, she would remember, came along carrying a half-dozen snakes on his person (presumably Jack, lately an amateur herpetologist). No one asked who she was or who had invited her. It was a clan of eccentrics straight out of You Can’t Take It with You, Oranne told them back at the guild. And Robert never did show up.

  In July he took another featured role—in hindsight the most significant role of his brief career in the th
eater: Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest, the gangster character that had made Humphrey Bogart famous a few years back. For the first time Mitchum performed a part that anticipated his cinematic persona to come: a gun-toting tough guy, laconic, cynical, deadpan funny. Robert’s friend Anthony Caruso, by then trying to build his own career as an actor working with the Federal Theater Company in Hollywood, was visiting his family in Long Beach. The Petrified Forest was being performed that weekend and Caruso went. There on stage in a major part, to Caruso’s amusement, was his beach rat pal Bob Mitchum. “I thought, God, this kid is great! He gave a performance as Mantee that was absolutely fantastic.”

  Day and Johns were generously eager to shepherd Robert to the next level of what they believed could be a marvelous acting career. They invited Hollywood talent agents and other industry folk to the shows, and any who actually showed up they tried to put in touch with their boy. But Mitchum resisted these favors, didn’t really want to be an actor, he complained. If anything—and he wasn’t sure there was anything—he wanted to write. As if trying to prove his lack of dedication, he skipped out on some performances, once calling the theater shortly before the curtain went up to say he had taken a trip up to the mountains and couldn’t make it back. “He never explained or apologized to Mr. Johns,” said Margie Reagan. “Apologizing was hardly Bob’s way.”

  Still, his work in the theater had been inspirational. Reading play scripts, taking them apart and seeing how they were put together, he became intrigued by the form and began to write his own pieces for the stage. Oranne Day was encouraging here, too, and got him to submit to the Players Guild some one-act plays, among them a fantasy for children called Smiler’s Dragon, presented at the Depot in a single performance on February 28, 1939. He worked on full-length works as well, including Fellow Traveler, which he sent to agents and theater companies around the country, without any takers, though he would claim to have received a long letter of praise and encouragement from Eugene O’Neill no less. Through the years Mitchum would occasionally make reference to this unknown work, his most elaborate written creation, recalling it with pride or, depending on the hour of the night, ridicule (e.g., “just a piece of shit written by a left-handed retarded child in crayon”).

  Sister Annette (now devoted to resuming her career after her marriage to the navy man dissolved) began getting work as a singer and piano player in Long Beach and then in some of the better nightspots in LA, and Bob happily volunteered to become Annie’s creative consultant and “special lyric” writer. Annette liked to do more than merely tinkle the keys and sing the latest hits. She wanted to give her audience a textured act that mingled music with intimate conversation, verse, anecdote. Robert first provided her with an opening recitative, some clever and charming lines with which to greet the crowd. He soon began crafting whole songs and spoken or sung verses for her to perform. It was material of the sort that was then properly labeled “sophisticated,” full of high-priced vocabulary, inside cracks, and a knowing attitude toward things like sex. He was so fertile with this stuff that he had new material for her every night. Robert hung out at the clubs all night, at the bar, or back in the dressing room with his sister. At the end of her last show, they would repair to an all-night coffee shop where they would sit and schmooze with the other cabaret and club performers, singers and musicians and comedians who appeared on the boulevards and in side street dives and hot spots throughout Los Angeles. Before long he was writing material for some of them as well, his clients including such denizens of the nightclub as Belle Barth and a transvestite performer named Rae Bourbon. For ten or twenty dollars per piece, he would write them a song, or satiric new lyrics to a hit tune, or sentimental interlude patter, whatever was needed. Much of it was risque stuff, packed with off-color implications and double entendres, going as far as the law or a club’s management would allow. Mitchum would laughingly recall, “Some were so blue I blush to remember ‘em.”

  On one occasion Robert composed a serious dramatic oration, a commissioned piece for the vaudeville comedian Benny Rubin. Titled “The Refugee,” it was a florid plea for universal brotherhood, with the climactic declamation, “Hear me, brother, hear me say, I was born a refugee!” Rubin performed it in blackface to an accompanying symphonic arrangement of “America the Beautiful,” in an all-star benefit show at Earl Carroll’s theater-restaurant in Hollywood. After fifty years in showbiz, Rubin would remember it as his “biggest success. With the finish, cheering shrilled over the heavy applause and I took many bows.” Mitchum took fifty bucks.

  It all flowed with ease from the young man’s pen, and he could sit in a booth and scribble a job from start to finish while surrounded by people yakking and drinking their coffee. Perhaps a hundred or more pieces were created in this way, written, handed over, and forgotten. Sixty years later the remnants of Mitchum’s “cabaret” work would be preserved mostly in the remarkable memory of Robert’s sister, still able to recite by heart examples of his witty and erudite compositions, full as they are of intricate and unexpected rhymes and wordplay that would not have shamed a Coward or Porter—all the more amazing in that they were the work of a twenty-one-year-old sometime stevedore.

  Tony Caruso had an apartment in a run-down building on Highland Avenue just above Hollywood Boulevard. He rented the top floor, three bedrooms and a bath. “I was the fair-haired boy in the Federal Theater. I was trying to get into the movies, work on radio, anything. But there wasn’t much money around, so I rented space in the apartment to anybody that needed a place to sleep. And I would get enough guys in there, charge ‘em ten bucks a month or so, and then I didn’t have to pay any rent myself. We called it El Rancho Broke-O ‘cause everybody was broke.

  “One day Bob showed up in town and asked if I could give him a bunk. So I became his landlady and found a bed for him and he moved in for a month or two; I don’t know how long he stayed. Every time I saw Bob he was up to something different, and this time he was gonna be a writer. And he tried. I’d be in the room with him while he was trying to work something out, scripts or stories he was hoping he could sell somewhere. Radio was big then, and he thought that he might write for some of the radio shows or somethin’. He was trying to find a way to make a buck in show business. We all were. But none of us knew how. We didn’t know shit from Shinola.”

  El Rancho Broke-O: It was like a very poor man’s Garden of Allah, an affable roost and halfway house for aspiring or out-of-work movie actors and other Hollywood characters. Tenants floating in and out included Don De-Fore, future film and television star, and Pierce Lyden, perennial bad guy in low budget Westerns. Mitchum would sit among them with his steel Underwood and try and type out something he could sell, pulp stories for the magazines or some dialogue sample that might get him an interview at one of the radio stations or movie studios. He would often wander down the block to Rose’s Bookstore, a hangout for local writers. He’d sit in the back room with the scenarists and pulp hacks drinking jug wine, and he’d hope for some practical advice; but all he ever heard were obscene cracks about venal publishers and moronic producers. One of the writers he met was a rising star of private eye fiction, Raymond Chandler, author of The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. “I wasn’t sure what to make of him,” Mitchum would recall. “I thought he affected a British accent, and he was always wearing white gloves . . . a nice guy, but distant, suspicious of everybody.”

  As Caruso remembered it, the El Rancho gang would be off looking for work during the day and then at night roam down Hollywood Boulevard and hit the joints. They’d go see Wingy Manone in some joint. The Nat “King” Cole Trio played on Vine Street and you could go in there and listen for twenty-five cents a drink. And not everybody always paid for their drinks. Mitchum loved the music and he made the rounds every night. He was a devotee of the cool white-and-black small combos and piano players that performed around the boulevard, Cole and Harry the Hipster and Slim “Flat Foot Floogie” Gaillard. He admired the languag
e of the hip musicians, and before long he’d made their jive idioms his own (an everlasting devotion, he would still be speaking that ‘30s and ‘40s jazz slang on his deathbed). “Bob soaked up life in those days, you know?” said Tony Caruso. “He liked everything. He took it all in. He liked to live hard. He liked to drink hard. Women. You name it.”

  One day Mitchum packed up and left El Rancho Broke-O. “The writing didn’t work out, I guess. He didn’t write anything worth a damn. And then he took off and I wished him well. And the next thing I knew about Bob Mitchum he was in a picture.”

  When Annette began getting steady gigs and tired of the long commute from Long Beach, she took an apartment in Los Angeles and Robert moved in for a while. They had such a close relationship—a mutual mind-reading act after all—that as two single people living together in the small apartment, his sister would recall, some people in Hollywood had “weird” ideas about them. Robert was a poor choice of roommate in any case, always avoiding his small share of the chores, never cleaning up whatever mess he left behind him. But he was soon moving along. One of the characters from Annette’s nightclub crowd, celebrity astrologist Carroll Righter, had on occasion paid Bob to punch up his lecture act. Generally impressed by the young man’s talent and his striking physique, Righter offered him a job as his secretary-chauffeur for an upcoming lecture and chart-reading tour of the tony winter resorts of Florida. The salary was not bad, there was a plush Cadillac for the driving, and the trip might allow him a chance to see “his girl,” Dorothy, presumably waiting with eternal patience for his next visit.