Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  In essence, Mitchum’s attorney had decided to offer no defense and throw him on the mercy of the court.

  Hughes did not want to lose Robert Mitchum’s services if he could help it. He was a big Robert Mitchum fan. Since taking over RKO, Hughes had privately fixated on Mitchum as a kind of fantasy alter ego. He spent many a predawn hour in his personal screening room watching the actor’s pictures, particularly Out of the Past, studying the clinches of Bob and ex-girlfriend Jane Greer with feverish interest. Hughes’s position in life would seem to have placed him beyond envy or hero worship; but to the scrawny, hard-of-hearing, whiny-voiced, and paranoid Texan who felt compelled to offer money, fame, wedding rings, or threats to desired females, Mitchum’s brawn, bourbon voice, imperturbable cool, and natural allure to women represented his ideal masculine image. (Hughes biographer Charles Higham posited the millionaire as an active bisexual; for what it’s worth, both Mitchum and Hughes’s second-favorite male star, Victor Mature, had certain physical characteristics in common with Howard’s favorite female type—dark eyes, thick hair, and a big chest.)

  Regardless of Hughes’s personal enthusiasm, from a business point of view Mitchum was currently RKO’s most valuable asset. The scandal publicity had made him more famous than ever. Aware of Jerry Giesler’s intended trial tactic, Hughes and his new production head, Sid Rogell, now came up with a scheme they hoped—if their star was found guilty—might influence the judge to offer probation or—if it came to a jail term—allow them to have another Mitchum picture to exhibit while he was otherwise engaged. They determined to get a film into production immediately. With only a matter of days to prepare something, various remakes were considered, but Hughes finally settled on a pulp story by Richard Wormser (”The Road to Carmichael’s”) that had once been intended for George Raft. A script was already partially written, and Out of the Past scribe Dan Mainwaring was assigned to finish it in record time. It was a simple cops ‘n’ robbers chase set in rural Mexico. For the female lead the studio quickly negotiated to borrow Lizabeth Scott from Hal Wallis. Hughes personally picked a little-known outsider to direct, Don Siegel. A Warner Bros, staffer for fourteen years, doing montage and second-unit work before directing two features, Siegel had then been fired and found himself unemployed for months, reluctantly returning to second-unit jobs. Years ago he had turned down Howard Hughes’s request that he direct retakes on the Faith Domergue debacle Vendetta (it had already exhausted the talents of Preston Sturges and Max Ophuls), declaring the thing was unfixable. Hughes had appreciated his honesty and now offered him the Mitchum project. It was an assignment with built-in aggravation, Siegel thought—no story, little script, a crazy schedule, and a star who might be headed for prison—but he was grateful to Hughes for a chance to restart his stalled career. Howard himself came up with the title for the picture—The Big Steal.

  January 10. Mitchum, Leeds, and Ford filed into Judge Nye’s courtroom, looking as grimly resigned as if they had already heard a guilty verdict. In a sense they had. They had all agreed to follow Jerry Giesler’s plan of action—inaction better described it—which allowed for an almost certain criminal conviction. Vicki Evans did not appear for her court date. She had been tracked to New York City where her attorney informed the DA’s office that she was without funds to return to Los Angeles but would report to them as soon as possible.

  Det. Sgt. A. M. Barr, the man who had led the raid on Ridpath, approached Mitchum in the courtroom and handed him a thick packet of letters, most of them already opened. They had been addressed to the actor care of the police station, Barr said tonelessly. It was fan mail wishing him good luck.

  The trial began. The defense attorneys spoke. On the charge of conspiracy to possess marijuana, their clients would offer no defense and agreed to waive a jury trial and have their cases decided upon a reading of the testimony by the arresting officers given before the county grand jury. As Giesler had prearranged, the other charge, of possession, was held in abeyance.

  Mitchum sat calmly for the sixty minutes it took Judge Nye to return with a guilty verdict for each of the three defendants. Nye set a court date of February 9 for probation hearing and sentencing.

  In the hallway reporters rushed at the departing criminals. Asked about the unexpected “defense,” Giesler said, “The evidence was in the transcript. Mitchum wouldn’t perjure himself. He would have had to tell the truth.” Giesler had “thrown in the towel,” he said. When asked, Ford’s attorney, Vernon Brumbaugh, echoed by Lila’s Grant Cooper, said he believed probation was definitely possible in a case like this one.

  Prosecutors held their own brief meeting with the press. Deputy DA Adolph Alexander was asked if he expected Mitchum and friends to do jail time. “Mitchum,” he said, “will be treated no better or no worse than any other persons found guilty of narcotics charges.” He then informed them that if Mitchum received probation it would be the first time in local history that a narcotics user got off that easy. “Of course,” he said, “it’s up to the judge whether he gets probation.”

  As Mitchum and Leeds exited the courtroom, they were served with a summons. The pair were being sued by one Nanette Bordeaux, “actress,” for damages done to her house at 8443 Ridpath Drive. Miss Bordeaux alleged that the two, described as trespassers, had carelessly and negligently burned her furniture and walls with cigarettes and, further, had caused her property to be unfairly publicized as a “shack” and a “marijuana den,” when in reality, said the suit, “it was an attractive hillside cottage.”

  Prepared at lightning speed, The Big Steal was ready to begin shooting by the day of the trial. Then came the guilty verdict. Hal Wallis decided it was just too risky putting his valuable property together with a freshly convicted felon and abruptly withdrew Liz Scott from the picture. With the clock ticking, several other stars were contacted, all of them unavailable or reluctant to take the job. Hughes had deemed a shoot-’em-up quickie unworthy of his own carefully nurtured discovery, star of The Outlaw, Jane Russell, whose recent appearance in Paramount’s The Paleface had legitimized her career; but now he changed his mind. Hedda Hopper, in her January 19 column, announced the Russell-Mitchum teaming for The Big Steal and predicted “a box office bombshell.” Then Hughes changed his mind again. It was possible that Hal Wallis knew something after all, Howard thought. If there was a backlash against Mitch um, he didn’t want to taint a second valuable property.

  Rogell and producer Jack Gross warned the dithering Hughes that Mitchum’s sentencing was ticking closer. At last, with a combination of practicality and perverseness, Hughes picked the girl for the part. She was one of the studio’s own contract players, a woman whose talent and beauty he greatly admired but whose ingratitude had turned him against her. Since taking control at RKO he had been determined to wreck her career. She was the perfect actress for this risky project. What did she have to lose?

  “After Out of the Past I felt I was finally getting somewhere,” said Jane Greer. “I had gotten a chance to show what I could do, I thought the studio was behind me, I had a contract for years to come, I was set. Then came the news that Howard had bought the place. A few days after he took over, he sent for me.”

  It was years since they had last seen each other, and Greer had been happily married to businessman and producer Edward Lasker for most of that time. She greeted Hughes as an old but distant friend.

  “I’m so excited for you, Howard,” she said. “It’s a wonderful studio. I think you’ll love it.”

  Hughes, acting not like a friend or employer but like a just-spurned lover, wished only to discuss her private life.

  “You don’t want to stay married,” he told her. “You aren’t happy.”

  “Yes I am, Howard, I’m very happy,” Greer said.

  “No. Deep down you’re not satisfied.”

  “Yes . . . I am.”

  They argued some more along these lines, to no purpose. Then Hughes said, “I’ve decided that you will not be appearing in any more pi
ctures, Bettejane. You will remain under contract to me and continue to be paid every week. But as long as I own the studio you will never work again. What do you think of that?”

  “It means the end of me as a movie star.”

  “Yes, I guess it does.”

  “Well then,” said Greer impassively, “I’ll just have to stick with being a wife and having babies.”

  Hughes’s tiny black eyes glared furiously. It looked like a scene from Out of the Past, with Hughes in the Kirk Douglas role, the powerful man undone by his unpredictable Circe. Jane Greer smiled, said good-bye, and went home.

  “He kept his word. I hadn’t worked in ages. Then Sid Rogell, who was running the studio, came by my house. He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t let Howard know that I came here, you know how he is; but he is going to call you. He wants you to do a picture with Bob Mitchum.’ I said, ‘He wants me to do a picture with Bob?’ Sid said, ‘Yes, yes, he doesn’t have anybody else. Wait for his call. And remember . . . don’t say that I was here. You never saw me!”’

  Moments later the phone rang.

  “Bettejane!”

  “Yes. Is that you, Howard?”

  Sid Rogell, dignified Dore Schary’s successor, crouched behind a big chair.

  “How would you like to do this picture with Mitchum—The Big Steal?”

  “I’d like to very much, Howard. I love Mitchum, and I want him to know how much I’m pulling for him. I know how unhappy he is.”

  Hughes said, “You’re going to have to go into Liz Scott’s clothes, because we don’t have time to wardrobe you.”

  “Well, that’s all right, Howard. I’m about her size.”

  “You start on Tuesday.”

  “OK. I’ll be there.”

  “Oh, there’s something else.”

  “Yes, Howard?”

  “You’re knocked up.”

  “What?”

  “The rabbit died.”

  Greer had gone to the doctor a few days before for a pregnancy test and was still waiting for the results. “Howard found out I was pregnant before I did. He broke the news to me. He had spies everywhere.”

  As part of his appeal for probation from the superior court, Mitchum was required to submit a written autobiographical statement that would include an account of his crime and, presumably, indications of remorse and rehabilitation. It was a revealing and detailed manuscript and, from the rich vocabulary and self-conscious locutions, clearly written by the man himself. Indeed, Mitchum seems to have approached it as something of a showcase for his neglected literary skills. While the typical plea from a felon read like a passage out of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mitchum’s appeared to be in thrall to a bad Victorian doorstopper.

  “Publication of infantile verse and prose,” wrote the actor, “which I composed to delight my mother was climaxed by featured interviews and photographs, which small spotlight on our material impoverishment inspired in me an introspection ever at odds with my desire for expression.”

  And later: “The rumor spread that . . . I was associating with people who indulged in the use of marijuana. This last gossip brought a swelling stream of acquaintances who appeared to accept me as one of their number, although their curious jargon was foreign to me, and their pressing invitations hinted at a social pattern of some mystery. Although progressing famously in my professsion, I was constantly obsessed with the phantom of failure, and in the next two years I several times answered entreaty by sharing a cigaret with one or more of these sycophants.

  “The only effect that I ever noticed from smoking marijuana was a sort of mild sedative,” he continued, “a release of tension. . . . It never made me boisterous or quarrelsome. If anything it calmed me down and reduced my activity.” Mitchum asserted that he had first smoked the weed in Ohio in 1936 and then not again until 1947 and unequivocally declared, “My attitude with respect to the future use of marijuana is that I will not use marijuana at any time whatsoever.”

  Concluding the document with a self-pitying flourish, Mitchum told of his belief that he had already, before and after his conviction, been punished far more than the law itself had envisaged for a first offense. “Time in jail,” he wrote, “would add nothing to the subjective feeling I already have about what I have done.”

  Robin Ford’s probation hearing was scheduled for January 27. On the night of February 26, Ford and a man described only as “a well-known musician” were driving away from a Sunset Strip nightclub when a pair of narcotics officers pulled them over. The cops claimed they discovered a stick of marijuana in Ford’s hip pocket, and he was arrested. A reporter found him nervous and pale-faced, sitting alone in the narcotics squad headquarters at City Hall. Mitchum’s pal said, “Guess I’m just a bad-luck charm for everybody.”

  • • •

  On the last day of January, Robert Mitchum showed up at the office of attorney Leonard Wilson to answer the damage claim of actress Nanette Bordeaux. The LA Mirror was there to give the play-by-play:

  “If the kid’s looking for a screen job, I hope this will get it for her. A publicity stunt? Could be?” shrugged the bobby soxers’ pride. “What do you think?”

  As casual as though he were shoving a movie villain over a cliff, Mitchum and his civil attorney Martin Gang appeared for filing of the deposition this morning. The gist of his statement was that (1) he had only been in Miss Bordeaux’s house once and thus couldn’t have damaged her furniture and (2) he not only couldn’t have but didn’t.

  Having thus deposed, Mitchum made one of his characteristic slump-shouldered exits, to the tune of Gang’s stern warning to the press—”Absolutely no pictures with cigarets!”

  Lila Leeds was nearly twenty-one years old now and she knew she was never going to be the new Lana Turner. For a while after the arrest it had seemed almost fun to get the attention, to see her face in the paper, to have people on the street asking for an autograph, even if there was a shifty look or a raised eyebrow attached to the request. As the months passed, however, it became harder to see any good in it. She wished she was like Bob, with powerful people to look after her, to give the good word to the columnists, keep her name from being buried in the dirt. Lila knew she was washed up in Hollywood. After the guilty verdict she was depressed, scared of going to jail. “I cracked,” Lila said. One night a few days before her sentencing, she met up with a friend from the clubs who promised to give her a new kick, help her forget her troubles. The friend took her to a place in Santa Monica. Five of them came to the party, plus the host, a skinny little man they called “the chef.” They all sat in a circle on the floor while the skinny man laid out what looked like a random collection of trash, a cough medicine bottle, a glass straw, steel wire, a can of petroleum jelly, a hollowed-out orange, other odds and ends. Deftly he assembled a homemade smoker, lit it up, nursed the small blue flame. From an aspirin tin he scraped a black gummy substance onto the tip of the wire, rotated the wire between his fingers, and held the pea-sized black gum over the flame. The stuff looked like a tiny, crackling black marshmallow. The chef told her exactly what to do when he finished cooking the ball and slid it into the bottle.

  “Now,” the chef said.

  Lila lay on her side so she could breathe deeper, emptied her lungs, then sucked on the glass straw with one long drag.

  The Big Steal began shooting on the RKO lot with a cast that included—in addition to Jane Greer—William Bendix, Patric Knowles, John Qualen, and former silent star Ramon Navarro. Most of the interior sequences were completed, and a location trip to Mexico was optimistically scheduled for the weekend following Mitchum’s sentencing.

  On Wednesday, February 9, the crowd outside the courthouse began gathering at dawn. First the contingents of teenagers and other devoted fans, young girls mostly; then the representatives of the press, from crime reporters to gossip columnists and newsreel cameramen; finally the idle curious, passersby, and local workers randomly stopping to see the movie star come to receive justice. Mitchum ar
rived, dazzling in a light gray suit, white shirt, and silver tie, the crowd oohing and ahhing like it was a premiere at the Chinese Theatre. Dorothy did not accompany her husband. Lila Leeds came elegantly attired in her tailored, cream-colored suit and black heels, a small black purse in her left hand. Her mouth was painted a glistening candy-apple red. Her eyes were red, too, and she appeared unsteady. A spokesman told the press she had been ill and in bed for the last eight days.

  Inside the packed eighth-floor courtroom of Judge Clement Nye, counsels Jerry Giesler and Grant Cooper completed the final legal fine-tuning before the punishments could be pronounced. Due to a more recent legal dispute, the sentencing of Robin Ford had been postponed, and the would-be realtor currently languished in a jail cell without bail (the new charges against him would ultimately be dismissed). Judge Nye asked if all concerned parties had read the reports prepared by the probation department. Mitchum’s concluded that the individual was “psychologically ill-equipped for his sudden rise to fame.”

  The judge addressed the actor: “I realize that you are idolized by hundreds of thousands of people. However, you have overlooked the responsibilities that go with such prominence. You have failed to set an example of good citizenship.

  “I am sorry for both of these defendants but respect for law and order must be taken into consideration. This case has attracted attention not only locally but throughout the world and I am treating it the same as I would any other case of a similar nature.”

  Judge Nye sentenced Mitchum and Leeds to a year in the county jail. He then suspended the sentence and placed the pair on probation for a period of two years, sixty days of that to be experienced in the confines of the county jail. The second count of possession was taken off the court calendar, which was understood to mean that it would be dismissed. A recess was called, and as the judge moved out of sight, the crowd moved in. Photographers trampled each other, desperate to shoot the convicts in the throes of anguish, fear, whatever. Fans and spectators jammed into the courtroom, shouted Mitchum’s name, and cried out words of encouragement. A squadron of RKO reps bumped heads in a huddled meeting. Mitchum stood, showing no emotion, bending his head to Jerry Giesler’s whispered wisdom, while Lila Leeds, standing a few feet to his right, mouth hanging slackly, quavered at the onslaught of exploding photo flashes. Asked if he had come prepared to go to jail Mitchum said that he had forgotten to bring a toothbrush. “I travel light, but this is too light.” Then Deputy Sheriffs Walter Horta and Marjorie Kellogg took Mitchum and Leeds into custody, handcuffed them, and led them away from the frenzied audience. The quartet boarded an elevator bound for the jail cells on the top floors of the building. Women’s quarters were on the thirteenth floor. Lila Leeds said, “Lucky thirteen.”