by Lee Server
Mitchum and Sinatra became instant friends. Mitchum greatly admired Sinatra’s musical artistry going in, and Sinatra found Bob’s don’t-give-a-shit manner perfectly compatible. Sinatra was a short fuse with a crazy Napoleon complex, but he was certainly fun—there was always something happening when Frank was around. Mitchum earned the entertainer’s undying admiration by passing on his recipe for a can’t-fail hangover cure. “It’s like mother’s milk,” Mitchum said. A gratified Sinatra took to calling him “Mother” from then on. For years he would send him a greeting card on Mothers’ Day.
Mitchum and Eddie Anhalt became good buddies, too. “Everybody called him Mitch. I only called him Bob, for some reason. We went out just about every night when we were making that picture. Used to go to this place on Sunset Boulevard a lot. I drank martinis. He drank vodka. Sometimes he brought along a sidekick, kind of like Sinatra’s Jilly. Big guy, looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Tim Wallace, perhaps? “Don’t remember his name. He wasn’t illiterate, but he was close. But Bob was a smart guy. And he could write. Wrote some awfully good poetry. He wanted to be a writer at one point, but he probably got a look at some writers, somebody like you or me, and thought, ‘I don’t want to turn out like that,’ so he became an actor.”
One night—it was the night of November 5, midway through filming Not as a Stranger—Anhalt and Mitchum were sitting at the bar in the Villa Capri. They were expecting to be joined by Sinatra and some others from the picture. Mitchum tapped the screenwriter, telling him, “Hey, look, there’s DiMaggio. He looks terrible.” Anhalt looked, agreed. Joe DiMaggio was standing a little farther down the bar and appeared morose. Mitchum said, “Do you know him?” Anhalt said no. Mitchum said, “Let’s ask him if he wants a drink.” Anhalt said, “Yeah, he might appreciate that.” They waved Joe over. Just about then Frank Sinatra and Lee Marvin showed up. Everybody had a drink. Sinatra knew DiMaggio well and got the ex-ballplayer to admit what was bothering him. Of course, everybody knew that DiMaggio’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe had gone south. DiMaggio said that Marilyn had disappeared; she was hiding from him. He needed to talk to her, and he’d been frantically trying to track her down for days. Everyone commiserated. A lot of drinks later, DiMaggio went off to the men’s room and Sinatra said, “You know, we ought to do something for him. He really is in terrible shape. We got to help him get to Marilyn.”
“But she’s hiding out,” somebody said.
Frank said, “I know where she is. We’ll go over there and we’ll tell her that she’s got to talk to him.”
“This didn’t make a lot of sense at first,” said Eddie Anhalt. “But the more we drank, the more it began to seem reasonable. And we got to the point where someone said, ‘What if she won’t open the door?’ And Lee Marvin says, ‘Well, we’ll break it down.’ And DiMaggio says, ‘Break a door down? Who’s gonna do that?’ And Mitchum says, ‘Well, Brod Crawford could do it; he’s strong enough. He’s like a mountain.’ So then the cry went up, ‘Where’s Brod? Let’s get Brod!’ And I said, ‘He hangs out at the Formosa.’ So we decide to go over to the Formosa and see if he’ll come with us to visit Marilyn Monroe. So everybody’s drunk and we all pour out to the parking lot and drive off in this parade of cars. Those were the days when we all had XK 120s. Mitchum had an XK 120.1 had an XK 120. Sinatra had a car with a driver, which was smart. And DiMaggio came along, but he was very quiet and sad and probably very drunk by that time.
“We went over to the Formosa and I went inside with Mitchum. And there was Brod, and we came up to him and we said, ‘Brod, you can knock down a door, can’t you?’ He said, ‘I can do anything!’ And I said, ‘We want you to knock down Marilyn Monroe’s door.’ It all seemed perfectly reasonable by now. So we all went back to our cars and drove off to this address Sinatra told us. Now it was funny how Sinatra knew all this, and later I found out he was balling Marilyn himself, but we didn’t think of that at the time. And we got out. Everybody’s staggering around on the sidewalk trying to stay upright, and we head into the building, Sinatra and his guys, DiMaggio, Mitchum, Lee Marvin, Brod, everybody who was there. And I said, ‘What apartment is she in?’ And Frank said, with great authority, ‘She’s in 3A.’ And we all went upstairs, as many as could manage it. And Brod and some other guys leaned on the door and broke it open and went tumbling inside this apartment. And inside was a little old lady who looked nothing like Marilyn Monroe, and she started screaming. So everybody says, ‘Oh shit! Let’s get outta here!’ They’re knocking each other over to get back out through the doorway. And everybody staggered back out on the street and got back into their cars and drove away. Somebody called the police, of course, and they reported it in the papers, what happened, and this woman said she had seen all these movie stars come breaking into her apartment, and I think maybe everyone thought she made it up, that she had had an attack of dementia.”
It was what came to be known in the annals of showbiz gossip as the “Wrong Door Raid,” after a story appeared nearly a year later in the pages of Confidential magazine—at a time when Robert Mitchum was in the process of suing that same periodical. Two years later the report of the raid became a focal point for a California State Senate investigation into the scandal magazine industry, and Frank Sinatra was subpoenaed. Accused by some of perjury, Sinatra gave obfuscatory and understandably irate testimony and managed to take the investigators down a dead-end street leading nowhere. Details of the legendary evening, and the actual stellar cast of characters involved, remained a mystery for nearly fifty years.
“I guess nobody will mind me telling about it at this point,” said Eddie Anhalt. “Everybody is dead now except for me.”
For all its iconoclasm and presumed authenticity, Not as a Stranger proved to be little more than a bloated, lurid Dr. Kildare episode without the MGM gloss of that old movie series (visually the film looked more like one of the black-and-white TV doctor shows its success would spawn). A majority of reviewers found Robert Mitchum’s Dr. Lucas lacking. His characterization was variously described as “monotonous,” expressionless,” and an exercise in “stunned lethargy.” The Harvard Lampoon cited him for the year’s “Most Cretinous Performance.”
Audiences, lured by the opportunity to see cretinous, stunned lethargy for themselves, made Not as a Stranger the fifth-highest-grossing film of the year and Mitchum’s biggest box office success to date.
Even after what he called “ten weeks of hell,” Stanley Kramer remained Bob’s steadfast—if guarded—admirer. Mitchum, Kramer said, “thinks it’s weakness to care about something or someone, so he pretends that he doesn’t.” He gave to the actor a lavishly Morocco-bound copy of the script as a keepsake and wrote: “To Bob, who possesses within himself the unfortunate power to be whatever he wishes!” Kramer would later offer him the lead opposite Sidney Poitier in his escaped prisoners drama about an angry black man and a racist white man discovering their common humanity, The Defiant Ones. Mitchum, Hollywood’s self-avowed voice of experience on the subject of incarceration down South, turned it down, citing a phony premise—no white and black would ever have been chained up together in that part of the country, Mitchum said. A mangled version of his reponse would be told through the years—that Bob Mitchum refused to be in The Defiant Ones because he didn’t want to work with a Negro.*
John Wayne’s production company, Batjac, in association with Warner Bros., signed Mitchum to star in Blood Alley, a $2 million pulp adventure story about an American soldier of fortune in Red China helping a boatload of refugees escape to Hong Kong. The salary was $150,000 plus a very healthy 16 percent of Batjac’s profits. It would be much the same team that had done Track of the Cat, Wayne and partner Robert Fellows producing, William Wellman directing, Andy McLaglen his assistant director, photography by Bill Clothier. Mitchum’s starting date was January 20.
Having made two pictures back-to-back with barely a day off, he had rented a house in Palm Springs for four weeks and on December 15 headed off for some unint
errupted rest and recreation in the desert resort.
One week into the new year, Wellman and crew arrived to do second-unit filming at locations around San Rafael and Belvedere Island on the north coast of San Francisco Bay, mostly hoping to get a lot of footage of the film’s main prop, a vintage ferryboat, as it plowed around in the fog. Wellman had an idea: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get Bob up here for this and shoot him at the wheel of the boat instead of a double? We could move in closer . . . it would be a helluva lot better. Let’s call Mitchum’s manager and see if he’ll do it. We can’t put him on salary, it’s not in the budget, but tell ‘em we’d like him to do us a favor and come on up. Hell, we’ll give him a limousine and he can go into San Francisco every night and have a good time.”
Reva Frederick took the request and passed it on to Mitchum in Palm Springs. It meant cutting off his R and R by ten days, but Mitchum agreed and a day later climbed into his Jaguar and drove up the coast to the Bermuda Palms Motel in San Rafael. Things did not get off to a great start. On arrival, Mitchum was unhappy with his room and, to make his point, pounded a fist through the adding machine of the company’s one-armed accountant. Given new accommodations, Mitchum was then housed directly over the room occupied by William Wellman. Mitchum had some guests that night, and to Wellman trying to sleep downstairs it sounded like they were playing football with the furniture. “Bob and somebody were up there having a scuffle,” said Andrew McLaglen. “It was a friendly scuffle that turned into kind of a real scuffle, but it was mostly just kidding around. The next morning, Bill was a little grouchy about it, said Mitchum had kept him awake all night. And Bob didn’t seem any the worse for wear—Bob’s an amazing guy because whatever he does the night before, the next day he’s as good as gold.”
They shot on the ferryboat all that morning. At noon a couple of boys from the Coast Guard came by and introduced themselves. They were sent to invite Mitchum to their nearby ship for lunch. Wellman had no objection and Mitchum didn’t mind. He went off to be guest of honor on the Coast Guard vessel and returned in the afternoon, climbing back on board the old ferry. “I wouldn’t say that Bob was drunk, but he’d had a couple,” said McLaglen. “The production manager, Nate Edwards, and the transportation man, George Coleman, were having a little conference, just going over the logistics for what they needed to do that afternoon. Bob ambled over to them and just sort of stood there listening. They saw him listening and they stepped away from him. With that, Mitchum came forward and grabbed hold of Coleman, sort of yanked him around—and that got turned into a lot of horseshit in the papers about Bob shoving George into the water, but it never happened, I was standing right next to them. And Bob said, ‘Don’t walk away from me like that! I’m a partner in this picture.’ Which he was—he was getting a percentage. He said, ‘I can listen to whatever I want to listen to.’ And he shouted at Nate Edwards, ‘Nate, I’ve known you a long time. “Where do you get off acting like that?’ Somehow . . . Bob doesn’t get steamed up easy, but for some reason he got steamed up over this.”
When neither man reacted, Mitchum turned in Bill Wellman’s direction, as if determined to find an opponent. Wellman hadn’t said a word to him, but he went toward him anyway.
Mitchum said, “Well . . . I certainly couldn’t hit an arthritic old man like you.”
“He didn’t mean anything by it,” said McLaglen. “He was just running off at the mouth. Bill was, what, fifty-nine then, but he was a feisty little guy. He didn’t mean anything against Bill at all. But he said some things that he shouldn’t have said and . . . one thing led to another. Bill, I think, had Nate Edwards get Duke’s partner, Bob Fellows, on the phone; and Fellows said, ‘How’s it going?’ and Bill must have said, ‘Tell you what, I’m not too happy with Mitchum.’ He was angry at him for what he said for a lot of reasons. He was angry, thinking, I made this guy a star. . . . But I do not think what happened was all Wellman’s doing at all. I think Fellows had something in mind, and he picked up on an opportunity. If you really want to know what I think, I think Bob Fellows all of a sudden said, ‘Boy, here’s a chance to get Duke to do this part, and we’ll save the percentage and we’ll have a John Wayne picture.’ And Fellows said, ‘Let me talk to Jack Warner about this. We’ll get him fired.’ And that’s exactly what they did.”
John Wayne, the man drafted to be the star of Blood Alley, did not want to be the star of Blood Alley. He was at that moment in New York on his honeymoon. When he got word of the flare-up in San Rafael, he called McLaglen and told him, “Andy, whatever you do, make sure that Bob doesn’t get fired!” But it was already too late. Jack Warner had signed off on Fellows’s request. Mitchum was history. Fellows penned a circumspect press release—”Robert Mitchum has been fired after delaying production and refusing to apologize for creating disagreements among the production staff. . . .” Delaying production? Mitchum had come to work ten days ahead of schedule—and for free! The press release brought reporters rushing up to San Rafael for the story—major movie stars did not get canned every day. The Fellows/Wellman camp heated up the story, as if fearing their abrupt action might be considered frivolous. Someone heard someone say Mitchum was “on dope . . . always walking about six inches off the ground. He punched a guy, one of the drivers, knocked him into the bay, damn near killed him.”
Mitchum held a very impromptu press conference in his motel room, sitting in bed in blue-and-white-striped boxer shorts and clasping a bottle of red wine. He told the gathering of journalists that the trouble had all started when he’d tried to help some of his fellow workers who had been deprived of much needed supplies, such as shaving cream and razor blades. “It was all,” he said, “a result of my championing of the little guy. I always have and I always will establish myself as a human arbitrator, but don’t get the idea that I’m a hero. It’s just that lots of little people have spoken up for me. I want them treated right.” Mitchum then said that he was “very, very tired” and wearily raised the bottle to his lips.
In the morning came the headlines: “MITCHUM FIRED FOR PUSHING AID INTO FRISCO BAY“ . . .”BOB MITCHUM FIRED FOR DUNKING FILM MANAGER“ . . .”MITCHUM LOSES STAR ROLE IN FILM FOR HORSEPLAY“ . . .”PRODUCERS HUNT SEDATE SUB FOR GAY BOB MITCHUM.” The papers had printed whatever the hell they felt like, describing in detail “Bad boy Mitchum’s dunking of a 250-pound co-worker in the icy waters of San Francisco Bay” and the man’s near drowning, and the fierce scolding Wellman had given Mitchum in front of the crew and costar Lauren Bacall, who wasn’t even in California at the time.
“The next morning Bob came around,” said Andy McLaglen. “And I’ll always remember, Bob came in all shaved, blue suit and white shirt and tie, looked like a million bucks. I was very impressed with him. And he came over to me, said, ‘G’bye, Andrew,’ gave everybody a little salute, and then went over to Bill and said, ‘Good-bye, Bill. Be seeing you.’ And with that, with his head up, you know, he turned and went on his way.”
Pilar Wayne, a fiery Peruvian and the Duke’s new bride, would hold a lasting grudge against Mitchum for causing the premature termination of her honeymoon. It would be some time before her husband could persuade her to forget about it and invite Bob and Dorothy to one of their parties. That time had finally come, and as the Mitchums arrived at the Waynes’ Encino home for what was a gala event, Pilar dutifully came out to greet them, letting bygones be bygones. According to the Duke’s daughter Aissa, the first thing Mitchum did when he came through the doorway was peer down her mother’s low-cut gown and mutter, “Boy, do you need a new bra.”
All her stored up anti-Mitchum fury returning in a flash, Pilar cried, “Leave here! This instant!” and chased them out of the house.
An astonished John Wayne joined his wife at the front door just in time to see the couple scurrying to their car. “When my mother told him why the Mitchums had gone,” Aissa recalled, “my father was careful not to crack the thinnest smile.”
A few days after the Blood Alley firing, h
aving had his sudden availability so well publicized in the press, Mitchum was offered the lead in Man with the Gun, the premiere producing effort of Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., and the directorial debut of Orson Welles’s former longtime right-hand man, Richard Wilson (this would be the third of four Mitchum features in a row helmed by first-timers). The others in the cast included Jan Sterling, Karen Sharpe, and Henry Hull. Following in the bootsteps of The Gunfighter and High Noon, Man with the Gun was another heavy-handed, psychologically oriented oater about glum, tortured Westerners who never get to leave their backlot towns. Mitchum’s long-faced peacemaker, Clint Tollinger, spends much screen time trying to get information about his abandoned daughter from his ex-wife, now a madame at the local whorehouse. It was a long ride from Hoppy Serves a Writ. When Tollinger finds out that the girl is dead, he goes berserk and nearly burns down the town he’s been hired to protect, one of the movie’s two memorable sequences (the other: classic bad guy Leo Gordon’s amazingly mean-spirited shooting of a little boy’s puppy).
With Mitchum’s trouble-making image freshly on everyone’s mind, there was a sense of anticlimax to his display of nothing but efficient and amiable professionalism. Karen Sharpe, a young and lovely actress playing the film’s spunky ingenue role, recalled, “Jan Sterling and I would get together in the dressing room and talk about him and wonder what sort of colorful things he was going to do. But he was so tame on our movie. And we’d say, ‘Oh, he’s nothing like his image!’ He was such a sweetheart. And he was so wonderful to me. I was just starting out, and he took such good care to make sure I had the right angle and gave me time for my lines. So generous.” Said director Wilson, “Mitch never gave anyone a bad moment. He was never late for work, and he stuck right to his knitting. He worked very hard to bring the picture through on schedule.” Mitchum was almost too cooperative. For the saloon fire sequence, where his character was to be seen coming out with one of the villains slung over his shoulder, Mitchum refused to let them use a stunt double. Reluctantly Wilson went along, then crossed signals kept Mitchum inside the burning building too long, and by the time he came running out—carrying a stuntman—his shirt and pants were scorched and smoking, and the stuntman wasn’t feeling too good either.
