by Lee Server
Eagerly escaping this misery when shooting concluded for the day, Mitchum would head for the nearest tavern, usually accompanied by a number of his fellow “GIs.” Bearded, faces usually still coated in grime, they made quite a spectacle at whatever bars would have them. The distinguished star of the film, Burgess “Buzz” Meredith, turned out to have a powerful thirst. Meredith didn’t see much in Mitchum’s acting at the time—only realizing how strongly the younger man was coming across when he saw the finished film—but found him to be a very agreeable drinking companion, and they closed down many a bar together. “Bob was a swinger—and I was a swinger in those days—we did a lot of funning around outside the set,” Meredith recalled. The fun ended abruptly when his pregnant wife, Paulette Goddard, lost the baby they had both wanted so much. Meredith always remembered how Mitchum helped him through this crisis, “talked to me and tried to help as best he could and I appreciated his kindness.”
Filming on G.I. Joe continued into the new year: 1945. New sequences were added as they went along. The episodic nature of the script allowed Wellman to improvise whole sequences and to expand the roles of actors whose work pleased him, as in the case of his Sergeant Warnicki, played by ex-boxer Freddie Steele.
Wellman was a colorful dynamo on his sets, twitching and grabbing his arthritic arms, shouting insults, goosing and screaming at the actors and crew members, an ebullient version of Brian Donlevy’s sadistic commandant in Beau Geste, Wild Bill’s 1939 love song to his beloved Foreign Legion. When he took former middleweight boxing champion Freddie Steele through his big scene as dim-witted Sergeant Warnicki gone mad with battle fatigue, Steele felt like he was back in the ring.
“Once we did that scene,” Steele said. “No good. Twice we did it. It stinks. So, we rest and do it again. Wellman says nix. Don’t I understand? We do it again. He blows up and swears. By this time I’m getting tired and I’m getting sore. We do it again. He gets sarcastic. We do it again and he blows his top. ‘You slaphappy so-and-so. Maybe you shouldn’t have had that last fight!’ That’s nothing to say to a fighter, see? If I didn’t have to do the scene again, I’d have socked him one. We did it again and that Wellman kisses me and says, ‘That’s what I wanted.’
“That so-and-so is a wonderful guy. . . .”
Mitchum required none of Wellman’s theatrics to get him through the part of Bill Walker. As with the screen test, the director needed only to give him the encouragement and the space to show what he could do. The result was a performance that was like nothing Mitchum had ever done on film before. His Lieutenant Walker lived and breathed, the humanity and psychic pain of the soldier palpable things, not screenwriters’ constructs. It was a small part—G.I. Joe was an ensemble piece, and not even Meredith’s Ernie Pyle got to dominate the screen for long—but Mitchum’s one good scene was the emotional and philosophical core of the film. In a virtual soliloquy, his worn-down lieutenant struggles with little success to find some meaning in all the death and destruction surrounding him, his face a haunted mask of resignation and despair. An intimate and tender scene, its impact increases in retrospect as it serves as Lieutenant Walker’s last testament. His eventual—it feels inevitable—death in combat occurs offscreen. The body is brought down from the battlefield in the mountains, gracelessly strapped to the back of a mule. Wellman staged a Calvary of shattering sadness: the soldiers of Charlie Company straggling up to pay their last respects to their beloved lieutenant (now a captain), touching his hand or his cheek, muttering their farewells (”I sure am sorry, sir . . .”), the seasoned warriors turned childlike in their bereavement.
The Story of G.I. Joe contains no flag-waving, no self-righteousness. War is presented in humanistic terms as a dangerous and unbearable endeavor that will more than likely destroy you. One by one the characters in G.I. Joe lose their lives or, in the case of Sergeant Warnicki, their minds. Having little connection to the countless propaganda films that preceded it, G.I. Joe was a movie that offered the armed services “no recruitment value.” Young boys would not be rushing to join up upon seeing this one. It was purely and simply an antiwar film, a daring approach by Wellman and Cowan with the war still very much in progress at the time of shooting. It was, though, the film that great numbers of veterans would ultimately say came closest to the truth of their experience in World War II. One of those vets, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, would call it the greatest war film he had ever seen.
No, the real war was not over yet. Wellman’s hundred-plus U.S. Army extras were returned to combat duty. “Oh, those poor guys,” the director would say. “Every one who was in that picture went into the last battle they had—the last one, you know, Okinawa—and most of them never came back.”
Ernie Pyle, too, would die in the Pacific, killed by a sniper, never seeing the film Wild Bill had made for him.
When Mitchum returned to the fold at RKO it was business as usual. He had earned the praise of big names in the business—Mervyn LeRoy, William Well-man. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo had been a huge hit, When Strangers Marry a sleeper of the year, and there was already a good buzz surrounding the unfinished G.I. Joe. But at RKO they continued to see Bob in a Stetson and spurs. Preparations were made for the next Zane Grey Western, Wanderer of the Wasteland, once more assigned to producer Schlom, writer Houston, and director Killy. A winning team—Nevada had been well received by audiences. West of the Pecos, waiting for release, looked good, too. Mitchum might even be better than Tim Holt.
But Wanderer never got made, not with Bob Mitchum.
It wasn’t easy being the only man around Palm Avenue. The women of the two neighboring Mitchum households had become rivals for his attention. Dorothy quite logically believed that his first responsibility was to his wife and kids, but his mother and sister remained a major presence in Bob’s life, and there were lingering resentments if he seemed to favor the bonds of matrimony over those of blood relations, or vice versa. Bob just wanted to bounce his kids on his knees and be left the hell alone. These home front tensions, possible anxieties over the future, plus a great deal of alcohol, all contributed to the unfortunate events of April 6.
Both Dorothy and baby Christopher were ill that night. Dorothy was laid up in bed and relatives had come to help. In the court document he later filed, Mitchum said that he had been out to obtain a prescription for the sick child. “I called my wife . . . and my sister answered the phone. She refused to allow me to talk to my wife, and hung up the receiver. There followed several attempts, all of which had the same result. . . .” Calling one last time, Mitchum said he was coming home and would “demand an accounting.” When Mitchum arrived at the house, two sheriff’s deputies were waiting for him.
“What the hell is this?” Mitchum growled, as their flashlights shone in his face.
“Hold it right there, mister,” said one of the deputies.
“Stand still and keep your hands at your sides,” said the other one.
“We’re investigating a reported disturbance here.”
“You been threatening anybody, fella?”
“This is my place,” Mitchum told them, “and I’m going in to see my wife and kids!” Fucking cops, keeping a man out of his own house!
“You just stay where you are, mister, until we tell you different.”
“How much you had to drink tonight?”
Mitchum hovered before the porch steps, nursing his grievance, while the deputies talked to someone through the screen door. No one wanted to press any charges. It was all a misunderstanding probably. The deputies decided to have a few last words with Mitchum before they went away and led him down to the curb by the squad car. But Bob wasn’t in a mood to hear anymore of their shit, and in a burst of alcohol-fueled impulsivity he now demanded they arrest him. Take it all the way if they dared. Did these dirty cops think they could come up on a man’s own porch and hassle him for no reason? He clawed open the door of the cop car.
“Let’s go downtown right now, motherfuckers!”
Exactl
y who struck the first blow would be a fact lost in the heat of the moment. In some accounts Mitchum would recall that he’d put a fist into one cop’s face and broken his nose, and things turned a little ugly after that. Or else he recollected that it was the deputies who got things rolling—jamming him into the squad car with a hard swing of a billy club to the ribs. He felt an arched bone in his chest crack, and he curled over to protect himself and kicked the guy in the balls at the same time; and maybe then came the nose-breaking punch, and the club came down on his shoulders and his spine, and the other deputy, blood pouring down his chin, stomped him with his boot, hit him with his gun butt until he collapsed, caught between the curb and the open back door of the cop car; and the two men began raining down blows, sticking a gun barrel against his skull while they cuffed him and locked him in the backseat. He was booked at the sheriff’s substation on Fairfax Avenue and taken to a jail cell, where he had a well-earned snooze.
In the morning Mitchum conferred with a studio-sent lawyer. The attorney thought sure they would get a slap on the wrist. Maybe finish up the weekend in jail and pay a small fine. But Judge Cecil Holland wasn’t in a wrist-slapping frame of mind that day. The judge handed him 180 days. “Hundred and eighty . . . no way I can make that,” Mitchum said. In those days of war it was not unusual for the court to offer certain miscreants a patriotic alternative to jail time, and after some consideration this is what Judge Holland did. Mitchum would be allowed to go into the armed services, in return for which his sentence would be rescinded. In Mitchum’s most colorful account of the event, it was the two deputies who had beaten him who took him to the enlistment center, in handcuffs.
One way or another, he was in the army now.
* After several aborted attempts, Frank Ross would make The Robe at Fox in 1953, with Victor Mature in the part of Demetrius.
chapter four
The Man with the
Immoral Face
IT WAS LIFE IMITATING art—he still had some of the G.I. Joe mud in his scalp from Wellman’s Company C. But this time there were no lieutenant’s stripes on his sleeve. He was just another grunt, meat on the hoof for the noble war effort. “I told them I was homosexual and they said, ‘Prove it!’ But I couldn’t find a willing partner. Then they said, ‘Bend over!’ And I said, ‘I can’t—my back.’ And they said, Ah-ha! IA! Infantry!’” At the Los Angeles induction center he was loaded into a bus with a half a hundred other recruits, many of them rosy-cheeked teenagers ten years his junior, and taken to Camp Roberts for basic training. It was round-the-clock commotion. That first night, he crawled from his bunk at three in the morning, looked out the barracks window, and saw a noisy close-order drill in progress. He turned back around to see the platoon sergeant standing in the doorway.
“Leaving or just coming in?”
“What the hell’s the difference?” the sergeant said.
At Camp Roberts they taught him how to salute a superior, how to shoot a rifle, how to clean and assemble the same, how to stab a canvas dummy with a bayonet, and mostly how to walk for miles with a full pack and not be heard to complain about it. Most of it was familiar stuff—he had played similar scenes a dozen times for the cameras. Two weeks after his arrival he was given special leave to return to LA and shoot a day of retakes on G.I. Joe. Even before they learned of this special treatment some of the guys at the camp tried to razz him about his acting career—more of that “Hollywood faggot” stuff he’d gotten while shooting Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo—but most of his barracks mates—unripe kids just torn from their mama’s arms—were respectfully starry-eyed and mainly wanted to know whether he had ever banged any of their favorite actresses. “I worked mostly with donkeys and brood mares,” he would say. “But some of them were pretty damn attractive.”
On May 8 Germany surrendered to the Allied forces now sweeping through their country. The war in Europe was over.
Graduated from boot camp in the summer, Mitchum was transferred to Fort MacArthur. He was made a drill instructor, imparting the freshly received wisdom of his training to even newer recruits. His qualifications, he said, were that mean face Pop Sherman had tagged and the biggest mouth on the base. There was a lot of drilling at MacArthur, where the presiding general thought the best way to keep everybody out of mischief was to have them marching a hot, dusty parade ground as often as possible. Mitchum found that some of the officers didn’t care if you drilled or not as long as you said you did, and many days he let his guys stay in the barracks and sleep late. One day he met a colonel from the Medical Office who told him his talents were being wasted.
“I’m perfectly content, sir,” said Mitchum.
That turned out to be too damn bad. They needed somebody like him in the medical department. Mitchum told them he got queasy at the sight of blood. But the orders were already in the works, and he next found himself in the offices of the Medical Examiner, according to Bob an old Kentucky abortionist in civilian life.
The doctor trained him to assist with physical examinations of the recruits. One of Mitchum’s specialties—as the years grew longer, he would come to claim it as his single mission in the service—was rectal exams; he became the chief of the “keister police,” telling nine hundred men to turn around, bend over, and spread their cheeks. Using a spotlight attached to a metal headband, he made brief but thorough searches for abnormalities, “piles, hemorrhoids, bananas, dope . . . you name it.” There was a science to it, this peering into the void, and even something of an art. “I could diagnose all your ills,” he would say. “I could prognosticate the future.” For years afterwards, he or his brother John would run into veterans of those intimate inspections, fellows gleefully recalling how they had “mooned” Bob back at Fort MacArthur.
And thusly did Mitchum spend some of the final days of the Second World War.
• • •
In July The Story of G.I. Joe was ready for release. Producer Lester Cowan devised a publicity campaign for the picture that began with screenings for influential members of the American military. General Eisenhower was among those who saw the film and was much impressed, calling it the greatest of all war movies, and he was willing to be quoted to that effect. Through his military connections, Cowan arranged for Robert Mitchum to receive a four- to six-week working furlough to promote The Story of G.I. Joe. The army liked the idea of a movie star who was an ordinary dogface, very democratic.
Bob walked out on a long line of bare-assed recruits and caught the next plane to New York.
The reviews for G.I. Joe, when they began appearing, were extraordinary. TIME magazine hailed “a movie without a single false note,” an “enduring memorial” to Ernie Pyle. James Agee in The Nation compared the film to the great and beautiful war poems of Walt Whitman, calling it “a tragic and eternal work of art” and the first triumphant combination of fiction and documentary. And for all the raves, no single aspect of the film received more praise than the performance of Robert Mitchum (though the work of lovable Freddie Steele came in a close second).
The powers that be at RKO might have been slow, but they weren’t stupid. As G.I. Joe broke, they woke up to the fact that they had under seven-year contract not a journeyman B Western star, as they had thought, but the most acclaimed young actor in Hollywood. There was talk of an Academy Award nomination for Mitchum. RKO assigned its own publicity people as consultants to Bob’s cross-country jaunt for Cowan and United Artists, setting up still more interviews and public appearances and reminding everyone along the way about which studio the man would be returning to when he got out of uniform.
They showed him off to the gawkers like a talking horse. At a premiere, fans crowded around for autographs until, as Mitchum remembered it, the “gendarmes” had to be called in to calm things down. Shifty-eyed girl reporters flirted with him, and doughy, cigar-chewing photographers with gravy on their lapels flashed their Speed-Graphics in his face. He went on local radio shows where one confused host told him how proud they all were of what h
e had done in the war and was it difficult playing yourself in a movie? “That guy’s dead, lady,” he explained. Mostly he said to the press what the studio wanted them to hear, but one time at the bar of the 21 Club in Manhattan he told a group of reporters how the army had employed him as a “poop chute inspector,” and the attendant publicist slowly died inside.
The hoopla for the new star continued long after Private Bob had been returned to Fort MacArthur, continuing through the rest of the year, moving from the daily papers and Sunday editions to the monthly movie magazines trumpeting Mitchum’s breakthrough. There were profiles, mentions in the gossip columns, captioned news photos showing him shaking hands with the postmaster general and other magnificos. Fan mail began to arrive at Gower Street in massive quantities, with weekly requests for autographed pictures that soon numbered into the thousands. Most were from females, and most of these were young. While the critics and generals applauded Mitchum for a moving and emotionally incisive performance, the response of this first wave of devoted fans was more primal. There was something about the actor’s brooding, dirty, bearded appearance—he looked far scruffier in G.I. Joe than he had as a lowlife henchman in Border Patrol—that struck like greased lightning in the breasts of the era’s teenage girls. Other teen idols were on the scene—Van Johnson, Robert Walker, Guy Madison—but their appeal was of the boy-next-door, let’s-share-a-milkshake sort. Mitchum’s was plainly more . . . mature. Photoplay magazine reporter Eleanor Harris, investigating this lustful reaction, got the lowdown from heavy-breathing bobby-soxers coming out of a showing of G.I. Joe at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood.
