Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  He had a friend, Robin “Danny” Ford, an itinerant bartender who was trying to make it as a real estate agent. Not everyone liked Ford as Bob did. Tim Wallace considered him “a rat.” But Mitchum felt that if he started avoiding every trouble-prone character he knew, he wouldn’t have any buddies at all. Anyway, he thought he might let Danny find a buyer for the house, get him a little commission, and maybe they could go drive around and look at some other properties for sale. Danny was good company.

  He was hip.

  “Lila Leeds,” said columnist James Bacon, “was one of the most beautiful women who ever landed in Hollywood. She looked like Lana Turner. But cuter.”

  “I thought she was the prettiest damn thing I had ever seen,” said Jack Elam, an accountant who became a most memorable character actor and worked with Lila on his first movie job. “By God, this girl was so pretty you just stood there with your fucking mouth hanging open.”

  She was born Lila Lee Wilkinson in Iola, Kansas, moved to Clovis, New Mexico, when she was twelve, and ran away from home a few years after that. At seventeen, the way she remembered it, working as a dancer in a Saint Louis jive joint, she met some guys from the Stan Kenton band. Lila and a girlfriend went up to their hotel room for a drink. Sprawled all over the beds and the floor, they were passing around hand-rolled cigarettes that burned with a sweet, strange aroma. One of Kenton’s guys showed her how to smoke, to draw it into your lungs and let it out nice and slow. “I felt,” said Lila, “as though I’d been released from my body and was floating in air. It was like there were two of me, one up on the clouds looking down at the me who was on the ground. It was a dizzy feeling, like being filled with air.”

  A couple of months later Lila got sick with some bug and asked her mom to come and get her. They went away from the cold weather and settled in Los Angeles. “I had no trouble landing a good job at one of those glamorized driveins where they almost dress the girl carhops—in shorts and V-necked sweaters. I was a big girl. I already had the measurements.” The former child actor Jackie Coogan approached her on the street one day and told her she should be in the movies. So he got her a job as a hatcheck girl at Ciro’s. The job wasn’t as easy as it looked. In Hollywood they all had such big egos that no one could bear to take a hat check like a normal person. You were supposed to know everybody on sight and remember what hat they were wearing. Famous movie stars were one thing, but every roly-poly old producer wanted the same treatment. When it got busy on the floor she had to come around from behind her counter and help the cigarette girls selling smokes, dolls, toy pandas, and other gimcracks, and that job was worse. “A cigaret girl has no closed season on her,” said Lila. “Every man who enters a nightclub takes it for granted he can make a suggestive remark, a pass, or a proposition.”

  Tired of wrestling with scores of guys each night, she married one of them, an older guy, Little Jack Little, a bandleader and racehorse owner. They eloped to Las Vegas and had some fun for a month. But the marriage didn’t take. He had forgotten to get a divorce from some other wife.

  Lila had to go to court to annul her vows. “You mean,” said Judge Charles Haas, “you were so much in love that you didn’t take the trouble to find out if this man was lying when he said he was divorced?”

  Lila nodded.

  “Then you learned about men from him, didn’t you?” asked the judge.

  Lila nodded. She was not quite nineteen.

  With a hundred dollars in savings in her purse, she decided she’d had enough of hats, toy pandas, and black-and-blue marks on her fanny; and she invested in an acting course at the Bliss-Hayden School of the Theatre in Beverly Hills. Lila worked hard and won a good part in a school production of a farce called Campus Honeymoon. “There were talent scouts from every Hollywood studio in the audience on opening night,” she remembered. “I knew my lines, and I changed sweaters five times in three acts. Next day I had three good offers.”

  Lila signed with MGM. Nine months from the day she hit town, she was standing on a soundstage at Metro. She worked with Red Skelton in The Show Off, and Robert Montgomery directed her in Lady in the Lake, from the Raymond Chandler novel about private eye Philip Marlowe. It was a small part, but it was thrilling to be in the movies, and people at the studio told her she was going to go places she was so pretty and talented. Somebody told her she was going to be the new Lana Turner. “I found out later it didn’t mean a thing,” Lila said. “Few people know for sure if a girl’s been signed up because she can act or because some producer or star has a special interest in her. Either way she rates attention, and the wise guys deliver the attention.” She went to classes for diction, singing, ballet, and fencing. It was just like going to school. She tested for parts every week. Then she got a little role in Green Dolphin Street, starring the old Lana Turner. It should have been her big break, but the television scare had hit the studios, she would say, and Metro was going through their postwar slump and decided not to renew her option. They didn’t even give her billing when Green Dolphin Street came out. It left her shaken up, depressed. She would spend long nights at the bop clubs in Hollywood and on the Strip, chasing her blues away. Lila had always been jazz-happy, and she knew many of the local musicians. She smoked reefers with them in the dressing rooms and in the parking lots, even at the tables if the owners were cool. “I smoked socially . . . the way some people take a drink. Pot doesn’t affect me much—just makes me sleepy and relaxed. I’ve heard of people who go crazy on pot. But, so far as I was concerned, it just relaxed me.” Smoking the stuff was a great comfort after things fell apart at MGM. “It was a mental crutch. A way to forget my troubles.”

  A new agent came along and got her a contract at Warner Bros. But nothing great happened there. Bit parts and “Joe Doakes” two reelers. Lana Turner wasn’t worrying. At Warners they ran a tight ship. When Lila didn’t show up on the set one morning, they suspended her. “I had overslept after a marijuana party,” she said.

  Now it seemed like there was nothing to do but get into trouble. She started seeing her name in the papers for all the wrong reasons. The police were called in to break up a catfight at the Mocambo nightclub between Lila and a platinum-haired model named Kitty Hamilton. The press called it “the battle of the blondes.” Shortly thereafter she figured in a threeway scratch-your-eyes-out brawl with Miss Hamilton again plus actress Cara Williams, this time at Ciro’s. One night she was discovered in a semicoma and rushed to Hollywood Emergency Hospital, treated for an overdose of sleeping pills. “I wasn’t feeling well,” she told a police officer. “I went to the medicine cabinet for some pills. Later I realized I’d taken the wrong bottle from the cabinet.”

  “FILM ACTRESS ON MEND AFTER DRUG ERROR,” said the news item.

  It was the summer of bad breaks. She had met a guy earlier in the year and was that way about him, but one day after an argument he walked out on her. A few weeks later she heard he was marrying another girl. “I was lower than an earthworm,” Lila would recall. She told herself she was going to “make hey-hey while the sun shone—and after it went down, too.” She drank too much and smoked too many reefers. She went away for a week to see her mother in San Antonio. Mom entered the bonds of matrimony for the fourth time, and Lila tried to be happy for her. She went back to LA and heard that Warner Bros, was going to give her another chance, a small part in The House Across the Street. She bucked up. There was even talk of a featured part after that. “According to the grapevine I was set for the biggest role of my career—and then something else happened.”

  “You have to see this chick,” Mitchum’s friend told him. “Bee-yoo-tee-ful, man.”

  Robin Ford had met her at a party in Santa Monica, at Pat Di Cicco’s Ocean House, the old Marion Davies place. They talked over cocktails and it turned out she was looking to get out of her apartment in town, and Ford told her how as a rising young realtor he had insider listings and maybe he could find her something nice. She gave him her number, and then he started calling and aski
ng her out for a date, but she wouldn’t give him a tumble. One evening he and Mitchum were at loose ends, and he decided to see if the kid would come out and play.

  “I’ve got a friend who really wants to meet you, baby,” he said. “You’ll want to meet him, too. I’m telling you. A great actor and a real nice guy. Come out to dinner with us.”

  They picked her up at her apartment on Franklin Avenue in Mitchum’s new green Buick and went to a restaurant in Hollywood. If Ford had thought this was a good way to make time with Lila he was misinformed, as the blonde beauty was digging Bob exclusively. So as soon as they were done eating, Robin made himself scarce. Bob never said a word or made a gesture, but you didn’t remain friends with movie stars by crowding their action.

  Lila liked Bob all right. Compared with all the sleazy Hollywood types she had encountered, all the creeps who couldn’t wait to tell you how privileged you were to be in their presence, Bob Mitchum was a real doll. He downplayed his fame and fortune, didn’t take anything seriously. And Bob played it straight, didn’t try to hand her a line. Instead he told her right out, “I’m married and my wife’s back East with the kids. We’ve had a disagreement, but I hope she comes back.”

  “I liked Bob,” she said, “not because he was a big star but because he was a good guy. I knew a lot of stars, and there had been plenty of them who had wanted to know me who couldn’t get to first base. It wasn’t glamour or reputation that made Bob attractive. It was just that he was a regular fellow.”

  They left the restaurant and went to a couple of places for drinks. Somewhere in the chitchat they confessed to each other that they smoked pot, and Lila would recall that they made an open date to have a reefer party at her house sometime.

  “Bob and I saw quite a bit of each other in the next few weeks,” Lila said. They went to the beach. They went to bars. Smoked tea. Reporters would recall, after the fact, observing the pair together at assorted nightspots, but nothing was ever printed in deference to Mitchum’s marital status. When it came to a man’s private behavior, it was live and let live in those days, unless you crossed the line or got in trouble with the law.

  Leeds found a new place to live in the last weeks of August. An actress she knew from someplace, Ann Staunton, gave her an unofficial sublease on a little cottage on the hillside high above Sunset. The rent was $150 a month. The tiny three-room house was furnished, but Lila didn’t think it looked feminine or hep enough and she brought up a few of her own furnishings as well as clothes, cosmetics, her record player, and some records. A friend hooked her up with a pair of puppies, cute little boxers. She thought they would be good watchdogs up there in the hills at night.

  She could never remember who had introduced her to Vicki Evans, a blonde dancer from Philadelphia come to LA to try and break into pictures. On August 27 she ran into Vicki, and the girl said she’d heard Lila had a new place and was there a chance she could room with her for a little while till she got settled? Lila said, “Sure, kiddo.”

  On August 29 she was with Vicki in a Vine Street cafe when they saw another of her pretty girlfriends, Betty Doss, in the company of a pockmarked man named Rudy. Later that evening Betty called and said she and Rudy wanted to come up for a visit. Lila refused to invite them. She had a bad feeling about the pockmarked guy. She had a feeling he was a cop from the Vice Squad. Lila believed that she received psychic premonitions from time to time, and always regretted that she did not act on them more often.

  On August 31 Robert Mitchum and Robin Ford went house hunting again. He was going to spend all day at it. He needed to have a good prospect he could describe to his wife the next time they spoke. Dottie had called earlier in the week to let him talk to the kids. He told her he was looking for a new place for them. He was on his best behavior, said whatever he could think of, determined to make a good show for her. Didn’t the kids have to come back soon and start school? he asked. But Dorothy wouldn’t commit to anything. There was still a lot of fence-mending to be done, that was clear.

  He and Robin Ford had driven all over the place, from towns in the Valley out to the ocean. It was early evening when they got back to Ford’s place on North Havenhurst. Mitchum called his agent, Phil Berg, and discussed a script they had received. The Korda people in England wanted him to do the lead in a film of Joseph Conrad’s Outcast of the Islands. It would mean working in London and on location in Southeast Asia. Mitchum told Berg he would be eager to read the script. Conrad had long been one of his favorite authors, and he had dreamed of visiting the Orient since he was a kid.

  It was after seven when he and Ford drove up to Bob’s house. Reva Frederick was waiting for him there. She reported the day’s business. At his insistence she had canceled tomorrow’s public relations appearance at City Hall. The studio had arranged for him to meet the mayor and speak to a group of young people about the dangers of juvenile delinquency. Tomorrow was National Youth Day. Bob had said to tell them he had laryngitis. Reva gave him a list of telephone messages. One was from Lila Leeds. He gave her a call. She told him about her new place and how she wanted him to see it. Lila could tell he had been drinking. Not much, but enough to make his voice fuzzy, she would remember. Bob said he would call her later, maybe drop by. Lila told him Vicki Evans was with her, and he said he would bring along Robin Ford. Lila said, “Come after ten o’clock.”

  Mitchum remembered telling her that he would but thinking that he would not, being very tired.

  “Ford and I then went to the kitchen where we drank a fifth of Scotch while talking. My secretary reminded me to get something to eat and left for home.”

  • • •

  At the house on Ridpath Drive, Lila told Vicki they were going to have a party. She phoned a pusher and asked him to bring up five sticks of marijuana. Later she had one of her funny premonitions and remembered asking herself how long it would take her to go into the bathroom and flush the tea down the toilet if a cop ever came to the door.

  As the sun went down that evening, two figures moved out from the undergrowth and the shade trees around the house that clung to the hillside above Ridpath. They slipped around the tangled laurel and cactus and, like a team of professional peeping toms, moved into positions at the bedroom and living room windows. The windows were open, bright lights were on, and the two men could hear and see everything as clearly as if they had sneaked into a stage show. Or at least a burlesque house. The two blonde young ladies inside were getting ready for company. Lila Leeds wore a pair of white shorts and a bra top and an open corduroy tommy coat. The other one had on blue shorts and a loose top. Lila sat her friend down on a chair and stood behind her, putting up her hair. A lit stick of marijuana clung lightly to her cherry-red lips.

  A couple of hours passed. It was getting close to twelve when the phone rang. Lila answered, speaking softly. Then she put down the phone and one of the men at the window heard her say, “It’s the boys. They’re at the bottom of the hill. They’re lost. And they’re loaded.”

  Bob Mitchum drove the big new Buick up Laurel Canyon. The lights of Sunset Boulevard faded behind the woods and the rocks. They rode along, slowing at each crossroad until they found the right one, taking a left and then winding round and continuing to climb as the streets narrowed and became almost vertical. Ford spotted the place. A small, frame bungalow, it was perched on a steep slope above an open two-car garage. The street was bathed in moonlight and silent but for the wafting sound of a Victrola playing Anita O’Day—”Hi Ho Trailus Boot Whip.” An outside light went on, and Lila stood on the landing with her tommy coat hanging open and waited for them as they came up the rough stone staircase. Mitchum was a garish sight in a shiny brown-striped jacket and a red-and-black checked lumberjack shirt. Two frisky boxer puppies were at Lila’s feet and jumped excitedly to greet the newcomers.

  “Watch out, they’re ferocious,” Lila said, and they all laughed.

  Mitchum moved inside, raising his hand to his brow. “Let’s turn the lights down,” he said, “
they’re hurting my eyes.”

  The lights were dimmed. The dogs ran around yipping noisily. They had been acting excited all night, Lila said. She put them in the enclosed porch in the back and shut the door. Mitchum said he thought there was someone at the front window. He went over to the window and looked out but saw nothing. He crossed the room and joined Robin Ford on the davenport. Bob took out a Philip Morris pack and threw it on the coffee table.

  He said, “Let’s get high.”

  Lila shook out the contents of the pack.

  “You’ve got brown ones and white ones, too.”

  Lila lit a stick, then took it from her lips and passed it to Bob. Then she lit another one. Robin Ford fended for himself.

  Vicki Evans leaned nearer. “Gee, what will it do to me,” she joked. “And what happens if I get knocked out?”

  Bob said, “Oh, daddy!”

  But Vicki didn’t take a stick, and Lila would later remember that Vicki hadn’t smoked anything all evening.

  The clock ticked past midnight. It was officially National Youth Day.

  The two men skulking and spying at the windows moved swiftly to the back of the house, around a laundry line and garbage cans, and up to the porch. The screen door wasn’t locked and they stepped inside, where the dogs were waiting for them. The boxers growled, but one of the men took some doggie treats out of his pocket. The puppies happily bit into them and were shoved outside.

  When Lila heard something on the porch she got up to check, but Vicki moved past her, saying, “I’ll take care of them.”

  When Vicki unlocked the kitchen door, the two men charged inside, the one in front grabbing the girl and using her as a shield.

  Lila Leeds gasped.

  Bob Mitchum, holding the stubby remnant of a joint, lurched from the couch and picked up a small table to throw at the intruders. In the same instant the men dropped Vicki Evans to the floor and aimed their revolvers at the actor’s head.