Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  “That’s how it can be in this business, Bob,” Hoppy told him. “One day you’re on top and the next you’re in the gutter. And there’s plenty of folks just waitin’ to scrape their boot off on ya.”

  The Leather Burners was memorable among the Cassidys for its bizarre climax, featuring a cattle stampede inside a mine shaft. It was Joseph Henabery’s last picture.

  In six of Mitchum’s seven Hoppys he would be cast as various sorts of desperado; in just one, Bar 20, as an ambivalent good guy, clean-shaved in a three-piece suit, playing leading lady Dustine Farnum’s insufferable fiance. With each succeeding job the Sherman people gave him more screen time, and with each his self-confidence and understanding of the medium would increase. The Hoppys were Mitchum’s film school and a formative and lasting influence on the career to come. The way they made those B Westerns, no frills, no pretense, just-get-it-done, strict egalitarianism—everybody swallowed the same dust, ate the same chow, used the same honey wagon—this would remain in Robert Mitchum’s mind the ideal, the most comfortable and least embarrassing way of making movies, an approach he would try to encourage no matter how far from those innocent and threadbare productions his career would take him. In the decades ahead he would sometimes find himself in rarefied branches of the cinema, in sometimes opulent and spectacular circumstances, earning a paycheck that would cover the budget for an entire season of Hopalong Cassidys, clutching at the world’s most famous women, reciting the words of distinguished authors, and listening to the direction of erudite artists and pretentious fools, and through it all he would act unwaveringly as though he were still making a seven-day oater back in Kernville.

  “I was very pleased to work on the Hoppys,” Mitchum would say. “Supper on the ground, free lunch, a hundred dollars a week, and all the horse manure you could carry home.”

  So now he was in the movie business. If Mitchum felt any great revelation in his first experience as a film actor, felt any profound sense of his calling in life, he kept it to himself. The workaday atmosphere, the long hours, and his sore ass conspired to eliminate any notions of romance and glamour he could have brought to the job. Rolling around in the dirt in Kernville and soaking with sweat in Lone Pine was not the movie business the ladies in the beauty parlors read about in Photoplay and Modern Screen. He had no illusions about that now. It was just something he could do, maybe better than most of the “mean-faced” cowboys he’d been working with, but that wasn’t saying much. He wasn’t looking for more. You got to work in the fresh air, it took you out of the house, and it sure as hell beat selling shoes. Fifty years later, when asked what he liked about the acting business, he would give pretty much the same answer.

  He returned to Los Angeles after his initial sojourn in Hopalong country. The bills had not stopped coming while he was away, and even with Pop Sherman’s dough in his pocket, things were still very tight around the two households. Paul Wilkins wanted to talk about a game plan for the actor’s career, but Mitchum told him that right now he wanted to do anything that paid. He couldn’t think about the proper “buildup” with milk and diapers to be paid for. Wilkins sent him to interviews and casting calls all over town. Sources list Mitchum appearing in a lost Max Factor-produced short subject about makeup techniques, and he took a featured part in another short, one produced by Walter Wanger for the California Board of Health. Titled The Silent Enemy, it dealt with the delicate topic of venereal disease. No, this was not the Hollywood they read about in Modern Screen. It was nearly the end of summer before Wilkins got him another job in a real movie, a quickie musical called Follow the Band, a nine-day wonder at Universal. This would be Mitchum’s first job behind the walls of a big studio. Eddie Quillan was top-billed as a shoeless hick who discovers the ecstatic pleasures of swing music. It was a glorified vaudeville show really, featuring an assortment of minor big bands and nightclub acts like Hilo Hattie. Mitchum’s small role as Quillan’s pal Tate Winters garnered his first mention in a movie review when the picture eventually crawled into release. Variety listed him among those providing “standard support.” Mitchum had made a stronger impression on his castmates with his raunchy stories and uninhibited style. Frank “Junior” Coghlan recalled the morning Mitchum came to work boasting of terrifying a cute waitress, proposing to “hang her from a chandelier and go up on her!”

  Wilkins at last found a job for Mitchum with some prestige, a bit in an A picture and at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the most distinguished of all Hollywood studios. The Human Comedy was one of Metro’s big pictures for the year, Academy Award-type stuff. A tragicomic look at home front life in a small town, sticky humanism from the pen of William Saroyan, the film was being directed by Clarence Brown—no less than Garbo’s favorite director—and starred Mickey Rooney, Frank Morgan, and Van Johnson, with enough supporting parts to populate two or three small towns. Along with a couple of other new faces, Barry Sullivan and Don DeFore (another former tenant at El Rancho Broke-O), Mitchum played a soldier on leave, flirting with the local girls, among them a young Donna Reed. Shooting was painfully slow and complicated. Clarence Brown and his massive crew took as long with one scene as Selander took to make an entire Hoppy. The lighting for a new camera setup might take half a day while the company sat around and waited. Mitchum’s finished scene, anyway, was a good one, with a brief but charming and sexy appearance. His potential was apparent, but nobody at Metro seemed to notice. Mitchum went back to Bs: the Westerns Beyond the Last Frontier with Eddie Dew and The Lone Star Trail ‘with a thick-around-the-waist Johnny Mack Brown, and an odd campus-set spy film, We’ve Never Been Licked (a title Mitchum savored as a double entendre). The jobs lasted from a day to a week or so and ranged from brief bits to featured parts.

  He got a role as a hoodlum in a Laurel and Hardy picture shooting at Fox. The Dancing Masters was one of the team’s last features. The picture was not very funny, and shooting it was not much fun. Mitchum recalled, “Off camera Oliver Hardy . . . had phlebitis, or something like that, and he was not at all happy. And Stan was sort of dazed and just sat in the corner. . . . It was not my place or privilege to engage in conversations with Mr. Laurel or Mr. Hardy, but they were not antic performers off-stage.”

  Early in 1943, Dorothy learned that she was pregnant again. Deciding they needed more space than the tiny chicken coop provided and wanting to be settled by the time the baby came, Bob went looking for a new place. Brother Jack was away in the service, and the Major was somewhere at sea in the merchant marine. Robert was the only man in the family now, and his mother hoped he would stay within reach. Just down the road, at 1922 North Palm, he found a small, two-bedroom frame house for rent. The owner wanted fifty dollars a month, within their budget but no bargain, with the wood rotting and the paint flaking to the touch and so snug you could touch the back windows from the front door. They took the place. Bob called it his “shanty.” Dorothy, perhaps, would have liked an address farther from the shadow of Bob’s other family—the undercurrents of tension between wife and in-laws continued—but she wanted to go on working for as long as possible. Bob was away long hours some weeks, and it was after all good to have Ann and Annette around to take care of Josh.

  Sister Annette had returned to performing and landed a long-term gig at a small club called the Villa Riviera. While working there one night she met a soldier who, out of the blue, began calling her “Julie.” Always alert to the presence of mystic forces, Annette recalled a numerologist once recommending that she change her name to one with five letters. So she did, calling herself Julie forever after. The soldier who did the renaming promised to come back and marry her—”They all proposed marriage before they shipped out,” she recalled ruefully—but he was killed at sea.

  Having managed to stay out of the service himself, her brother Robert had begun to reap a professional benefit from the war: every studio needed its own platoons of young soldiers for the scores of war movies now in production. In uniform, brawny Bob Mitchum made an imposing-looking fighter for
American victory. Throughout 1943 he moved from one branch of the service to another, battling Japanese or Germans, depending on the day of the week. He played a GI in Cry Havoc (dying in the arms of nurse Ella Raines), a sailor in Minesweeper, and a Canadian version of same in Corvette K-225, a Marine Raider in the brutal Gung Ho!, an Air Corps sergeant in Aerial Gunner, 2. commando in Doughboys in Ireland.

  In the summer Dorothy gave up her office job and stayed home with Josh and the baby on the way. Bob was making enough to take care of the bills and pay many of his mother’s expenses as well. He was gone now more days than not, off at dawn to one studio or another and back very late if at all. On October 16 Dottie gave birth to a second son. They called him Christopher.

  Nineteen forty-three drew to a close. By December he had appeared in nineteen feature films. To the public he was still a face in the crowd. And if any members of an audience had been struck by his screen presence in one of those nineteen films, they had a slim chance of connecting it to a name—he was unlikely to be billed in the posters and seldom mentioned in the more detailed cast list scrolled at the end of a feature. He had garnered no press beyond a few passing mentions by reviewers; and without studio backing an unestablished performer did not get publicity in the fan magazines or the gossip columns. Wilkins certainly did not have the juice to promote that kind of attention for an unknown. But there were those within the movie industry who made it their business to keep an eye open for interesting new faces that wandered onto the screen, no matter how briefly; and by the end of 1943—Mitchum’s first full year in the business—some of these people had begun to take notice of the big, broad-shouldered actor with the smoldering, masculine good looks. William Pine and William Thomas, the low-budget producing team known as “The Two Dollar Bills,” had hired Mitchum for a pair of back-to-back programmers, Aerial Gunner and Minesweeper, paying him seventy-five dollars a day. The team released through Paramount, and when their liaison at the studio got a look at Mitchum in Minesweeper, he was struck at once by the actor’s incipient star quality and advised them to sign him up quick. Thomas didn’t even remember the nobody’s name, but he knew a lucrative-sounding tip when he heard one. By the time the producer found his way to Paul Wilkins, the agent gave him the brush-off, telling Dollar Bill they had better offers in the works, one from Columbia, one of the majors, where Mitchum was working in an execrable Kenny Baker musical, Doughboys in Ireland. Harry Cohn had watched some dailies for Doughboys, noticed the newcomer, and now dangled a studio contract worth $350 per week. Jeff Donnell, the voluptuous leading lady in the film, already under contract at the studio, extolled the virtues of a steady paycheck and the nurturing of a home studio. With his family to think about, she advised that Bob accept the offer. He didn’t. Something better would come along. Or wouldn’t. Donnell told biographer George Eells, “He had this quality—I’m me and this is it. And whatever happens, I don’t give a damn.”

  At Metro, director-producer Mervyn LeRoy was preparing to shoot Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a dramatization of the April 1942 American bombing of the Japanese capital. Set to star Spencer Tracy, Van Johnson, and Robert Walker, it was a gigantic production with a shooting schedule of over three months, a prestigious credit and a potential gravy train for a freelance player like Mitchum. Wilkins nagged LeRoy for a meeting with his boy Bob. LeRoy tested him. He tested him again—Mitchum would claim thirty times. “You’re either the best actor I’ve ever seen or the worst.” Finally he gave in, casting Wilkins’s brawny client for the role of Bob Gray, a real-life character, one of Jimmy Doolittle’s fearless pilots. This gig had big time written all over it, a top-of-the-line MGM movie, with Mitchum working beside Metro’s most distinguished employee, Tracy, and the popular bobby-soxer favorites Johnson and Walker.

  LeRoy wanted authentic backgrounds and lots of military hardware and arranged to shoot much of the film at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, the actual training ground of the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders. The government saw this dramatization of the symbolically important raid—America’s audacious response to Pearl Harbor, dumping a few thousand bombs in the emperor’s front yard—as welcome propaganda for the war effort and offered LeRoy full cooperation. The actual war was ignored for a time in favor of MGM’s imitation mission, and Gen. Hap Arnold and Doolittle himself were assigned to the production as technical advisers. Shooting the aerial scenes, LeRoy got to play with as many as fifty B-29 bombers at a time. While the hapless Arnold stood by, the director, using a radio phone to speak directly to the pilots, would send the great armada circling aimlessly in the skies as he looked for a photogenic cloud formation.

  Bob and much of the cast and crew arrived by train from California and transferred to Egland Field where they were housed in the utilitarian barracks. They took their meals from the mess line, showered communally, shat in the immodest group latrines, and basically enjoyed all the movie actor perks of the average enlisted man. This was Mitchum’s greatest opportunity to date, Paul Wilkins had informed him repeatedly, a shot at a contract with MGM—a studio that made nothing but A pictures—but though his work on film was excellent, he showed no interest in making a similarly good impression off camera. Like the other actors, Robert grew more bored and restless with each passing week they were on location. Great amounts of alcohol were consumed and things got very rowdy at times. There were late night parties, fights, various hijinks, Mitchum earning a reputation for dropping his pants in front of officers and other dignified types. For recreation he began screwing around with the bosomy secretary of a visiting Metro executive. The exec got wind of it, but the secretary wouldn’t reveal her lover’s identity, so the whole company had to stand on the drill field and listen to a lecture about the price of moral turpitude and the desecration of the good name of MGM. The fake soldiers and the real ones clashed, sometimes violently. “Lookit the Hollywood fags!” the actors would hear as they went about the field. One night a brutal fight broke out in the barracks. Mitchum claimed he stepped in to stop a drunken sergeant from abusing Robert Walker. Actor Steve Brodie would recall, “Mitch . . . grabbed the son of a bitch and they went fifty feet to the front doors.” The door burst from its hinges and the pair tumbled down six steps onto the concrete walkway. Mitchum in a fury pulled the sergeant up by his stripes and began pounding him. It took three men to pull them apart.

  The Tokyo company returned to California eventually and resumed filming at the Culver City studio. Mitchum ordinarily took public transportation to work and bummed a ride home at night, but this proved impractical for getting out to Culver on time so he invested a hundred bucks in an ancient Chrysler. He parked it in the studio lot, but one of MGM’s suits was repulsed at the sight of the old rustbucket in among the shining movie star sports cars and executive sedans and had someone track down the owner and order him to park it on the street in the future. Mitchum responded with what would become a characteristic reaction to official disciplinarians, an act of passive-aggressive protest: he left the Chrysler at home and arrived at the studio hours late. LeRoy reamed him out. Mitchum, with seeming indifference, explained the situation. “Oh, Christ. Forget it,” LeRoy said. “Park where you want, just be here on time.”

  Working with Spencer Tracy gave Mitchum his first opportunity to make a close study of one of the certified great actors in the business. A complicated character in real life, a craggy, florid-faced Irishman bloated from drink and tortured by assorted demons, on film Tracy’s characters projected an almost serene dignity and humane, good-humored authority. His acting was scaled for maximum truthfulness, and he achieved the most powerful effects through the most seemingly economical of methods. Tracy was the sort of actor Mitchum could admire without embarrassment, a natural actor without the preening, painted-face vanity of so many other stars. Through the years Mitchum would endorse the simple philosophy of Tracy and Humphrey Bogart, “Learn your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.”

  Mitchum made a more intimate study of another Metro star. Duri
ng the Tokyo filming on the lot, he became friendly with Lucille Ball. They shared a few laughs in the commissary and met up for cocktails after work. The beautiful redheaded actress was unhappy with husband Desi Arnaz’s philandering and liked to give it back to him from time to time. She and Mitchum had a brief fling.

  Fidelity was not one of Robert’s virtues—he would never be particularly good at avoiding pleasure of any sort if it was offered. He was not an aggressive lothario, but his looks and charisma drew women to him without much effort on his part. It had been that way for some time, and things had only gotten easier within the free-spirited Hollywood community. In the studio environment especially he was surrounded by females—starlets, secretaries, wardrobe girls—many of them young, single, and frisky.

  As Wilkins—and presumably Mitchum—had hoped, Metro considered putting the fledgling actor under contract. Trying to gauge his potential, the studio sent him to a session with its revered in-house acting coach, Lillian Burns. She was believed to have near mystical powers when it came to discerning a young performer’s strengths and weaknesses and how to access the one and eliminate the other. Janet Leigh was among the stars who considered Burns a “mentor,” and less talented actresses like Lana Turner were said to have achieved whatever believability they had on screen due to Burns’s tutelage. Burns was shown some of the Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo rushes and then met with Mitchum in her office. She said, “They want me to do some scenes with you. To work with you. I’m not going to do anything with you.”