by Lee Server
“He’s got sex appeal in an evil sort of way,” said one precocious jitterbugger.
Another undone nymphet opined similarly: “He has the most immoral face I have ever seen!”
In August atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After that, what remained of the war was paperwork. On October 12 the U.S. Army released its claim on freshly promoted Private First Class Robert C. D. Mitchum. “I came out of Fort MacArthur,” he recalled, “I had a suit and a bottle of Scotch in my locker, and I put on both of them. The next thing I knew I was in a Marine uniform and we were up to take twelve. . . .” Immediately upon his discharge, Mitchum was rushed to the location for a new film, They Dream of Home, already shooting at the marine base in San Diego.
As head of production at RKO, Charles Koerner had continued to chart a very profitable course for the studio (not to give the man undue credit: during the war years, entertainment-hungry audiences made it difficult for any picture maker to lose money; these circumstances would soon be reversed). Lately many of the studio’s most successful releases (e.g., Notorious, The Spiral Staircase, The Bells of St. Mary’s) were only nominally RKO creations, made through Koerner’s partnership deals with outside independents such as Samuel Goldwyn, Leo McCarey, Frank Capra, and David O. Selznick. They Dream of Home—the title changed during production to Till the End of Time, exploiting a Buddy Kaye/Ted Mossman song adapted from Chopin’s Polonaise in A-flat Major—was developed by Selznick’s Vanguard Films division and Selznick’s top man, Dore Schary; financed by RKO and shot on their facilities; and employed a mixture of DOS and RKO personnel. Top billing went to a pair of Selznick “discoveries,” Dorothy McGuire from the New York stage, and Guy Madison from the U.S. Navy. The timely story line, from a novel by Niven Busch {Duel in the Sun) and scripted by Allen Rivkin, dealt with the readjustment difficulties of servicemen home from the war. Mitchum’s was a supporting part in the story but a good one. RKO was eager to capitalize on the actor’s newfound acclaim and added him to the cast within hours of learning of his imminent discharge.
A limousine was dispatched to take Bob to the U. S. Grant Hotel, where cast and crew were being comforted at a cost of twelve dollars per person, including bountiful meals (it said so right in the initialed agreement with the studio: “no limit to the amount of food any individual consumes”). There he met the director, Edward Dmytryk, one of RKO’s creative stars. At thirty-seven, the Canadian-born Dmytryk had already spent more than two decades in the business, having risen from messenger boy to become Paramount’s most valued film editor and finally a director (after a false start a few years before) in 1939. His early B films, mostly thrillers and horror pictures, showed great talent, and his sensational handling of the lurid Hitler’s Children, released in 1943, gave RKO a box office smash. Elevated to A picture ranks, he made Murder, My Sweet, an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, starring Dick Powell as private eye Philip Marlowe (the role Robert Mitchum would reincarnate thirty years later). It was Dmytryk’s intensely imagined, phantasmagoric Murder, as much or more than any other film, that established the cinematic high style of ‘40s film noir. Dmytryk had also given RKO big profits with the cloying Tender Comrade, about women on the wartime home front, and he seemed a natural for Till the End of Time, one of the first films to deal with the travails of veterans in postwar America.
“I first got to know Bob down there at the location,” Dmytryk, in his ninetieth year, recalled. “We shot at the military base in San Diego and we were staying near the racetrack in Del Mar. The whole crew was staying there and we spent a lot of time together. I saw right away that he was going to be very good. And he had the greatest photographic memory of any actor I ever worked with. If you changed lines, cut out lines, it didn’t matter. He could adjust without hesitation. He was the most cooperative guy I’ve ever known. As I got to know him, though, I found that he held something back. Always kept himself in firm control. I don’t think he ever let go on the picture the way that he could when the cameras weren’t turning. We used to play pool in the evening after dinner, and he would open up then. He did characters, accents. He would turn his cap backwards and do a German character, an Irishman, just perfect and very funny. Off camera he was a very free spirit.”
Dmytryk, like others before him, was struck by the quality of Mitchum’s mind. “It wasn’t what I had been led to expect. I remember one night we’d been out driving, and we drove out to the pier and parked there, shooting the breeze. And we talked. Talked philosophy, talked about the world. It took me by surprise. I thought, ‘Gee, this is a very intelligent guy’ Not just intelligent but articulate, learned. I saw there was a lot more to this guy than people thought there was.”
When filming continued on the RKO lot, other members of the company got to admire Mitchum’s “surprising” characteristics. Actress Jean Porter, playing the spunky girl-next-door with a crush on Guy Madison, was impressed and delighted when Bob whipped up a comic verse on the subject of the production at hand. “He had a typewriter in his dressing room,” she recalled. “He would go in there and type things. And one day he wrote this poem he called ‘Dream,’ so clever and funny. I kept it all this time.” Fifty-five years later the witty ode to the “docile disciples of Schary” sat in a frame in the Encino home of Edward and Jean Dmytryk (director and actress met during the production of Till the End of Time and never parted).
Johnny Sands, the young David Selznick contractee playing Jean Porter’s high school swain, remembered Mitchum as a larger-than-life presence on the lot and the subject of much idle speculation. “The story was that he drank a fifth of vodka and smoked eight ‘pakalolos’* every day,” said Sands. “We’d watch Mitchum come out of his dressing room and walk right up and do the scene. He was absolutely as perfect as you could imagine. And we’re all thinking, Man, he’s gonna slur some words, huh?’ But he was just absolutely fantastic. Shoot the scene, go back to his dressing room, back to his vodka and pakalolo—his grass. Dorothy McGuire would look at him like she was looking at a superstar. All the movies she had starred in! He was not impressed with her. He just did his thing, man, and everybody get the fuck out of my face! Ha!”
• • •
Mitchum’s performance in the film was outstanding. In casting him as the cowboy war hero Bill Tabeshaw, RKO had insightfully found a part that built upon the tough, stoic style of his breakthrough characterization in G.I. Joe while looking ahead to the wry outsider persona with which he was to become so strongly identified. A one-time rodeo rider from Stinking Creek, New Mexico, badly wounded in a Pacific battle—his head trepanned and a silver plate inserted—Tabeshaw floats in and out of his buddy Cliff Harper’s life in Southern California, beset by restlessness and the recurring agonies of his head wound, making plans to buy a chicken ranch one day, blowing the grubstake on Tijuana B-girls and card games the next. With Dmytryk’s discerning cooperation, Mitchum molded and personalized the part, rephrasing Tabeshaw’s dialogue with some of his own favored hep talk and cynical humor and imbuing him with a cool, existentialist aura, creating an original and unpredictable character. Ostensibly in a supporting part, appearing only intermittently, Mitchum’s presence on screen overwhelmed the more modestly gifted star, sunny Guy Madison, as the mopey Cliff Harper. What Mitchum did, said Edward Dmytryk, what all the great movie stars did, was to inject an element of the personal, even the autobiographical, into a performance. “The big stars—and I’ve worked with just about all of them—formed the characters they played at least in part from their own identity.” It was what made “simplistic notions like the ‘auteur theory’ so silly,” the director believed. In a collaborative enterprise like a Hollywood movie, degrees of authorship could be credited to a number of people, “and certainly to a strong actor like Mitchum, making use of his own thoughts and experiences. Oh, I think he knew that character very well. He had talked about his earlier days, how he had drifted around the country, run away from home. He identified with this characte
r, sure.”
Till the End of Time received lukewarm reviews on release, its timely subject matter not carrying much weight with critics, who found it slackly paced and cliched, though Mitchum’s appearance was generally singled out for praise. The verdict seems severe—the film is touching in its warm-spirited treatment of broken and uprooted people trying to cope and has a quiet lyricism in scenes evoking the simple pleasures of life in hometown America—barbecues in the backyard, skating rinks, swing music on the jukebox. Though he had made his name with the baroque Murder, My Sweet, Dmytryk directed here with an open, relaxed style, making effective use of real locations and much natural source music for the soundtrack. The director’s real-life attraction to Jean Porter, playing the cute-as-a-button bobby-soxer, is evident in a pair of adoring sequences, Porter on the ice in a solo skating turn and doing a pull-out-the-stops jitterbug with Guy Madison.
The film’s most memorable scene, leading into a brawling climax, would give Mitchum his best moments. It’s a display of the character’s deadpan decency and has a Capralike power. The scene, as well, serves to further establish a screen persona in the making: a man with a distant, disreputable surface masking reserves of heroic resolve. In a barroom, some sleazy crypto-fascists try to recruit Harper and Tabeshaw into their hate group.
“Of course, we don’t know whether you men are eligible. You see, we have certain restrictions. . . .”
“No Catholics, Jews or Negroes.”
A black soldier playing pinball nearby slinks away, embarrassed. Mitchum takes this in with seemingly sleepy-eyed bemusement. “You know,” he says at last, “we had a friend named Maxie Klein. . . . Maxie was here, he’d probably spit right in your eye.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. . . . But . . . Maxie’s dead in Guadalcanal. So just for him I’m gonna spit in your eye.”
And he does.
Whatever impression Till the End of Time may have made on release was all but erased a few months later with the arrival of Samuel Goldwyn’s similar The Best Years of Our Lives, one of the most acclaimed and awarded films of the decade and an altogether more grandiose look at postwar readjustment.*
Much had changed for Robert Mitchum in the seven months he had been away in the service. He was now famous—not Gable or Cooper famous maybe, but close enough. “I’d played fags and winos and other weird parts until the war,” said the actor, explaining these circumstances with typical selfaggrandizement, “and then suddenly there was this thing for ugly heroes, so I started going around in profile.” He was the new young star in town, the first fresh face of the postwar era. The first big hunk of man since Errol Flynn, said the gossips, or since Sterling Hayden, or John Wayne, or whomever. Famous. Well . . . all it meant as far as Mitchum was concerned was that wherever he went now, he was better than likely to find people staring at him or somebody whispering or giggling behind his back like his fly was open or there was toilet paper trailing from his shoe.
“It was just anathema to him, the attention,” said Julie Mitchum. “The fuss that people made when they saw him now. And the vulgarity of it all. I was coming to meet him one time and he had just arrived ahead of me up the street, and there was a crowd, a mob of people following him. They were screaming and grabbing at him. And one young girl held up her hand, screaming, ‘Look! I’ve got his button!’ She had torn a button right off his new jacket. And it was constantly like that for him now wherever he went.”
The boy who had once dreamed of being invisible now found himself, even standing alone at the dark end of a barroom, feeling the gaze of unseen strangers on the back of his neck. Some were looks of curiosity. Some were of idolatry or lust. Others were poisonous, from belligerent guys with a load on—maybe their chicks had expressed a little too much interest in the big movie star. Though he had yet to so much as kiss a woman’s forehead on screen, the studio had begun pushing him as a sex symbol. Press releases and photo opportunities downplayed the fact that he was long married and the father of two kids and promoted his growing appeal to hep teen females. The studio helped form a young bobby-soxer fan club called “The Mitchum Droolettes.” Now there was a high-class image, he told the publicity department: salivating jailbait. He posed for pictures with some of the handpicked sweater girls, their braces glittering as they gaped at the new screen idol.
RKO produced an official biography composed of facts, half-truths, and some outright fantasies. In this document, Bob was a child vaudeville performer and had sailed to South America on a freighter, graduated from high school and “matriculated at Duke University, Durham, N.C., where he stayed for two years.” While studio publicists seldom needed help in redecorating the truth, some of this embroidery had a familiar ring—wish fulfillment supplied by the subject himself.
“He has no affectations,” it went on, “no foibles. He likes people, is a great kidder, hates pretense of any kind, wears no make-up on the screen; has no desire to own a ranch or work around a house and garden; never rides a horse except for pictures; is not fussy about his food. . . .”
• • •
The studio urged him to raise his public profile, attend more premieres and parties, do interviews with whatever correspondent or columnist wandered onto the lot. From the beginning, Mitchum resisted what he saw as attempts to turn him into another “Hollywood asshole,” another “movie star fruitcake.” He refused to cultivate the sort of good press relations enjoyed by many stars. Journalists complained to the studio that he was foulmouthed and rude. A movie magazine reporter with a questionaire asked the actor what valuables he would grab first in the event of a fire at home. Mitchum said, “My balls.”
“If some reporter asked him a stupid question, he told them it was a stupid question,” said Edward Dmytryk. “You weren’t supposed to do that. You were supposed to put up a front, you know. Smile and tell them how great everything was. But he was a cynic. He couldn’t make himself do that stuff. And he loved to pull the legs of these interviewers, to shock them. One old lady said to him, ‘What is your favorite pastime, Mr. Mitchum?’ I won’t tell you what he answered, but it stopped her dead.”
Colloquies between stars and reporters were generally formal affairs arranged by the studio and were looked at as an adjunct to their publicity department’s own fantasy-spinning. Savvy careerists like Joan Crawford or Cary Grant approached them as public performances even when they took place in their own homes, as opportunities to present a predetermined image of doting mother or grinning poolside playboy. Many columnists and fan mag journalists used to these posed, nearly scripted encounters clearly found Mitchum’s seemingly unguarded authenticity refreshing. Appreciative pieces spoke of his “free style,” his “brilliant sense of independence and individuality,” his “provocative and impudent conversation.” Reporters visiting him at his house would find no servants, stylists, or handlers, only the star, barefoot in jeans and T-shirt, ready to say whatever crossed his mind. Of course, Mitchum as rugged antistar was a marketable image, too, and his behavior before the press might well have contained as much calculation as Crawford’s Mother of the Year act. Nonetheless, there was an unprecedented iconoclasm to many of Mitchum’s remarks in these earliest press pieces. Years before Brando and the age of the Angry Young Actor, Mitchum was going on record disdaining the Hollywood establishment, calling producers liars, and saying of his pictures, as he did to Ruth Waterbury in Photoplay, “The dialogue in most of them is so bad, you have to spit it out like dirt in your teeth.”
In his private life he made no big star friendships, preferring to hang out with old pals like Tony Caruso and low-level industry workers he befriended—gaffers, stuntmen, extras. His few “name” cronies were on the far fringes of stardom, denizens of the night brought together by their taste for booze and other substances, brawling roisterers like Bruce Cabot and J. Carrol “Joe” Naish (the oily character actor, in real life a rabid and surprisingly successful womanizer) and fellow hipster John Ireland (Shelley Winters recalled watching the two you
ng men hilariously smoking a reefer under a table at Lucey’s, a hangout near RKO and Paramount, then Mitchum taking off with Ireland’s steak and twenty of his dollars). Army buddies from the days at Fort MacArthur looked him up when they came through town and were given sleeping space on the living room floor, staying until someone in the family would ask them to move along. With the better part of two households depending on his weekly paycheck, there never seemed anything left for savings or extravagances, and for some time Mitchum’s lifestyle remained modest in the extreme.
Henry Rackin, a production assistant whose father and uncle had worked at RKO, became friendly with Bob shortly after they both got out of the service in 1945. One day on the set of Till the End of Time he found Mitchum contemplating nearby Guy Madison, who was being made much of for his blond, sexy looks. “I’m going to change the title of this picture,” Mitchum growled.
