Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  “What . . . what are they for?” Ryan said.

  “Maybe my driver’s license is in the trunk,” Mitchum said, cryptically.

  The cop stood there confused. Then Mitchum abruptly produced the license from his wallet and handed it over. “What have I done?” he asked.

  “You were driving fast.”

  “How fast?”

  “Over seventy.”

  The officer started writing out a citation.

  Mitchum lit up a cigarette, took a few puffs. He said, “Do you have any witnesses, man?”

  Ryan said, “Just you and I, I guess.”

  “In that case I’m leaving,” Mitchum said, got back into the car, waved, said, “By-by,” and roared away.)

  By the time the officer had revved up his motorcycle, the Jag and the movie star had already vanished into the night. He returned to the West Los Angeles Police Station, where desk officer David Sellars was just then answering a call from an irate Mitchum, who was threatening to file a complaint for theft against one of their officers for stealing his driver’s license. Sellars turned the call over to Officer Ryan.

  “I asked him why he fled the scene like that,” said Ryan. “He replied, ‘I wasn’t sure you were a cop, Dad . . . thought you were a bandit, and so I just took off and went home.’”

  Reporters got wind of the incident, and around 3 A.M. they showed up at 1639 Mandeville for a quote. They got one from Dorothy. She said, “He was here about two hours ago but went out with a friend. You can print anything you want, but get off my property.”

  An arrest warrant was issued for speeding, resisting an officer, and evading arrest, the latter two high misdemeanor charges carrying maximum penalties of five years in prison. Still missing in action, Mitchum called the police station in the afternoon and ranted, “What are you guys trying to do? Make a big production out of this? A hundred people a day do the same thing!”

  On December 8 in West Los Angeles Municipal Court, Judge Leo Freund agreed to drop the more serious charges in exchange for guilty pleas to Delaying an Officer in the Discharge of Duty and Speeding in Excess of 70 Miles an Hour, for which the fines were $150 and $50 respectively.

  “Don’t you think you were kind of stupid?” the judge asked.

  Mitchum said yes, he had been stupid.

  The judge nodded sagely. “Your realization is the best punishment for you.”

  Robert could not have agreed more.

  Late in December, after nearly two months without a paycheck and with Christmas expenditures now to be accounted for, Mitchum began to feel the pinch and rendered himself unto RKO once more, saying he was ready to go to work immediately. The studio played it spiteful, taking advantage of a contractual clause allowing them an additional six weeks to prepare a project for the actor’s return without paying him a dime (a bitter victory, since RKO needed Mitchum as much as he needed the five grand a week). From now on, all communications between the star and the studio brass would be made through his agency. Personal allegiances dissolved after Mitchum tried several times to meet or talk to Howard Hughes but could never track him down. Hughes, caught up in legal battles and a difficult attempt to buy out the studio’s stockholders, had become more and more removed from daily production matters. The studio arranged to loan Mitchum to Fox for another Cinemascope epic, Untamed, to be shot in South Africa in June and July. The studio went ahead filming action scenes, second-unit stuff, with a Mitchum double. But the leading lady—Susan Hayward again—was going to be delayed on another picture—The Conquerer, with John Wayne as Genghis Khan—making it impossible to finish Untamed before the end of Bob’s RKO contract, so Mitchum refused to do it. Fox threatened to sue for their huge second-unit expenditures (the Mitchum double would remain in the finished film, though he would end up passing himself off as Tyrone Power instead).

  Mitchum picked up the phone one morning in March and somebody offered him a free ten-day visit to the French Riviera. Because of the caller’s thick accent, Bob couldn’t make out what he was saying and thought he’d won a radio contest, but it turned out it was a representative of the Cannes Film Festival.

  On their first-ever trip to Europe, Bob and Dorothy were flown to Paris, where they spent two days mostly posing for local photographers and ordering room service, and then on to the Mediterranean as special guests of the film fest, a glamorous and sleazy annual gathering of international cineastes where, at that time, appearances by major Hollywood stars were still far from commonplace. Mitchum was the belle of the ball, eliciting screaming pandemonium from press and gawking civilians wherever he went. It was not the balmy Riviera sojourn he had envisioned. The whole town was a mob scene, and the Cannes organizers expected him to pay for his freight in a dawn-to-dawn round of public appearances. He was a “shuddering wreck,” he claimed. “Every one pushes you around. You come down at eight o’clock and . . . they’ve got you visiting some old broken-down maharajah who has a villa overlooking seven thousand other villas overlooking the sea. The only time the photographers and journalists—you don’t know whether they work for a Hollywood peep show or Pravda—will leave you alone is when someone yells, ‘Free lunch!’”

  The adventure reached an appropriately photogenic climax when Mitchum and his wife attended a publicity event at nearby Lerins Island. Dressed like a Saint-Tropez playboy in tan slacks and a florid horizontally striped sport shirt, Mitchum was standing at the edge of a cliff above the sea posing for half a hundred snapping cameras when a lovely and well-endowed red-haired woman in a pink transparent scarf top and tiny grass skirt slipped over to stand next to him. It was already a Cannes tradition, the presence of starlets and would-be starlets looking for publicity, and Mitchum good-naturedly posed with the girl. “What could I do?” he would say later. Suddenly, the girl—Simone Silva was her name—whisked off the pink veil and, as Dorothy Mitchum stood a few feet away in angry disbelief, pressed her massive bare breasts over every part of Robert they could reach. There was a crush of humanity as the photogs went into a feeding frenzy, and three fell off the rocks and into the sea, one suffering a fractured elbow. Saying he had been not quite sure what was going on, Mitchum put his hands over the girl, to cover her nakedness, he would say, though some of the photographs mistakenly made it look like he was “copping a feel.” Within the week the pictures—the more sedate shots the law allowed—had appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. Bob, said the news reports accompanying the torrid photos, was in the doghouse with his wife on account of the incident. There were also quotes from Miss Silva, an aspiring British actress, who explained, “As long as sex is box office and I keep my figure, I’m out to be the sexiest thing on two legs. So I took off the scarf.”

  In May RKO delivered Mitchum to John Wayne’s Batjac Company at Warner Bros., where he was to take the lead in Track of the Cat under the direction of that old star maker Wild Bill Wellman. The cast, in addition to Mitch, included Teresa Wright, Tab Hunter, Diana Lynn, Hedda Hopper’s son William, and Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, playing a mystical hundred-year-old Indian.

  Based on a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, whose The Ox-Bow Incident had provided the text for an earlier and highly acclaimed Wellman movie (a Mitchum favorite; he claimed to watch it every year), Track was a grim tale of the brooding, feuding Bridges family, mountain ranchers haunted literally and symbolically by a murderous panther. The much talented novelist and film writer A. I. Bezzerides {On Dangerous Ground, Kiss Me Deadly) was put to work on the script.

  Bezzerides: “Wellman gave me the book to read and I loved it. I told him, ‘Let me write the script and then we’ll talk and we’ll see what we have to do.’ So I wrote it. He loved it. I had a big drunk scene in there. Wellman and Wayne and all of them were big drinkers, bottles all over the place. And Well-man came in after reading the scene and said, ‘You’re one of us!’ He thought that to write it as I did, I had to drink like they did. And boy, did they drink. I said, ‘Bill, I wrote a scene. I don’t drink.’ Well, that
was the last I heard from him for a while. . . . So then I finished the first draft of the script. And John Wayne called me in—it was his production company—and said how wonderful it was, and if he was younger he’d have liked to play the part. I said, ‘It’s just first draft. It needs cutting.’ He said, ‘I understand.’ But Wellman didn’t want it changed. I said, ‘Bill, it needs cutting. It’ll take a couple weeks.’ He said, ‘No, I like it. Any changes, I’ll do them.’ I said, ‘Don’t you understand? It’s overwritten. The scenes have to be worked on.’ Wellman said, ‘No, it’s perfect.’ He had so fallen in love with the script that he wouldn’t touch a word of it. And he didn’t. And oh my God, that’s going too far. I’m not untouchable. But he wouldn’t listen.”

  Wellman had long nursed an aesthetic fancy, an idea of making a black-and-white movie in color—that is, shooting it with color film but designing it with a palette of nothing but blacks and whites. A film of Clark’s spare, winter-set story of the hunt for a killer black cat seemed the perfect opportunity to attempt this visual experiment. Every element in the production obeyed the severe color scheme, from the clothing and the furniture to the white oleomargarine on the kitchen table, the only exceptions being one yellow shirt and the blood-red mackinaw worn by Mitchum. Wellman’s brilliant cinematographer, Bill Clothier, shared his enthusiasm for the experiment and even more so when they looked at the results. “Never have I seen such beauty, a naked kind of beauty,” Wellman recalled. “Bill and I saw the first print back from the lab. We sat there together, drooling.” Said Clothier, “For the first time, you really noticed people’s features. When I made a close-up of Diana Lynn, you saw the blue eyes and her hair was such and such a color and she had a flush in her cheeks.”

  Jack Warner, financing the picture, was less enthused at first. “I’m spending five hundred thousand dollars more for color and there’s no color in this damn thing!” Wellman sent a message: “If he doesn’t like it he can go shit in his hat.”

  The outdoor scenes demanded deep snow, and Wellman and his assistant director Andrew V. McLaglen went on what became a frantic last-minute hunt for an appropriate location. “Bill and I went all over,” said McLaglen, “up in Truckee and Big Bear and you name it, and we couldn’t find any snow. We finally found what we needed at Mount Rainier and we got the crew and actors up there to do the scenes. We stayed at the base of the mountain, drove up to the base and stayed at the cabins they had there. There was a lot of snow and we were prepared for it. But it was rugged. Very rugged. And on July Fourth, on Mount Rainier, we had a blizzard.”

  Snow roared down, accompanied by whipping winds. They squeezed into the small, primitive cabins and huddled around waiting. And when the weather calmed, they were left with locations newly covered in twenty- and thirty-foot snowdrifts. Everything moved at a snail’s pace, the crew aching, the equipment freezing. Mitchum would forever remember Track of the Cat for the worst, most difficult conditions he ever experienced in making a film—bitterly cold, physically exhausting, all day sinking or falling over into the bottomless drifts.

  Equally chilling was Mitchum’s characterization. Growling brother Curt Bridges, a “cheap dirtymouth bully,” was the most unsympathetic lead role Mitchum had ever attempted. A. I. Bezzerides, watching from the sidelines—still hoping for a chance at that rewrite—was impressed with the star’s uncompromising approach. “Bob Mitchum was fantastic. He carried scenes that needed to be polished, and his performance made some of it work. I got to know him very well and I thought he was a wonderful guy. But cynical . . . God is he cynical.”

  In the end, audiences did not warm up to anything in Track of the Cat. With its talky interior sequences and shallow pretentiousness (the “painter” supposedly stood for all the evil in the world), much of it came across like summer stock O’Neill. Wellman’s subtle approach to the panther attacks, emphasizing the idea of the cat as an abstraction, put a further strain on the moviegoers’ shriveling interest. The director realized in retrospect that he should at least have shown the cat tearing Mitchum to pieces.

  “The audience’s imagination failed to imagine,” said Wellman, “and my arthritis became my black panther; and the son of a bitch has been prowling through my system ever since.”

  But one could not call Track of the Cat a failure, for it contained elements that were unforgettable: Wellman’s drained, bloodless color scheme was eerily, uniquely atmospheric, while the hard-won exterior photography, in Cinema-Scope, of shadowed trees and tiny figures on vast expanses of snow, included some of the most amazing and starkly beautiful images ever shot.

  As the clock ticked on Mitchum’s RKO contract, the studio tried to negotiate an extension that would accommodate Fox’s production of Untamed. He was not interested. Bitterly, the studio tried to squeeze a humiliating last performance out of him, casting him as the Indian brave Colorados, a supporting part in a Ronald Reagan Western, Cattle Queen of Montana. Mitchum replied that he would rather go fishing and then did.

  On August 15, 1954, his ten years as RKO’s favorite horseshit salesman—that sobriquet a studio exec had mockingly awarded him—were over.

  And now, freedom. Or something.

  Mitchum’s departure from the studio, where he was virtually the last remaining major asset, only quickened the spiral into oblivion. Twenty-eight months later there would be no RKO. The company that had created Top Hat, Citizen Kane, The Informer, and Out of the Past ended in a fire sale, its final spawn—a couple of Westerns, a George Gobel comedy, and the like—scattered to other studios for distribution like orphans to foster homes. The lot itself would be bought by the enemy, a pair of television producers (and one-time RKO contract players), Desi Arnaz and (Bob’s old ship in the night) Lucille Ball.

  Mitchum would not encounter Howard Hughes again for many years. They kept in touch, sort of. Every month or so until the billionaire’s strange demise, there would come a call out of the blue, one of Howard’s Mormon minions on the phone, merely wanting to make certain that they had the correct number should Mr. Hughes ever need to reach his friend Robert Mitchum. By the late ‘60s, Hughes had entered the reclusive, druggy, and increasingly deranged last phase of his life. Mitchum had gone to Las Vegas, at the request of Perry Lieber, to the reopening of the Desert Inn, one of the string of casino resorts Hughes had begun buying in the Nevada gaming capital. During the festivities, someone slipped up to Mitchum and whispered in his ear that Mr. Hughes would very much like to meet with him upstairs. He was taken by private elevator to the top floor of the casino, led to the ornate doorway of a corner suite, and told to go inside. Mitchum stood in the empty, gold-embossed living room until one of the bedroom doors opened and Howard Hughes—older, frail of body, but with much the same dark-eyed intensity as in the old days—stepped into the room.

  “Good to see you, Howard,” Mitchum said.

  The Phantom smiled grimly. He said, “Bob, forgive me. I have to go make a phone call, if you don’t mind waiting.”

  Howard Hughes turned and went back into the other room, closing the door behind him.

  Mitchum waited. A couple of minutes maybe. He moved closer to the door behind which Hughes had disappeared. He couldn’t hear anything. After another few minutes he gave the door a knock, then opened it a crack. It was silent as a tomb in there. He opened the door and looked inside. It was an empty, undisturbed bedroom. There was another connecting door. It was locked. He went back into the living room and waited, found the toilet and took a leak, then went back downstairs to the party. He never saw his old boss again.

  * Angel Face was a particular favorite of Parisian cinephiles in the 1950s. Jean Luc Godard came to rank it one of his ten all-time favorite American films.

  chapter nine

  The Story of

  Right Hand/Left Hand

  DEPARTING RKO FOR GOOD in August 1954, Robert Mitchum was among the very last of the important postwar stars of his generation to escape the shackles of the long-term stock contract. Such relationships
had become a remnant of the past. The Hollywood studio system as it had existed for decades was unraveling. The rapid rise of television, the government enforcement of antimonopoly statutes that wrested away the studios’ control of exhibition, the decline of the original tyrant-moguls, and other factors had combined to undermine the studios’ near-feudal control of the American film industry. Increasingly their power would have to be shared among independent producers, talent agencies, and ambitious stars demanding control of their creative and financial destinies. Actors such as James Stewart, Cary Grant, and William Holden now made deals guaranteeing them a sizable share of a film’s profits, while others—Burt Lancaster, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas—were establishing their own production companies, developing their own projects, coming to the studios only for financing and distribution.

  As a sign of his intention to join this elite group, Mitchum rented an office suite at 9200 Sunset Boulevard. When opened for business, it had a staff of two (Reva Frederick and former RKO publicist Gloria Pogue), a well-stocked bar, and a big desk where the boss could sit and make like David Selznick. He had already lined up his first two jobs months in advance of his actual emancipation from RKO, both in projects distinctly un-Hughes-like on the face of it, one to be based on a blockbuster novel, best-seller of the year, while the other offered a daringly unconventional part and a distinguished creative collaborator. The two might make critics and audiences sit up and rethink their notions of a Robert Mitchum movie.

  While still at RKO he had gotten a call from Charles Laughton.