Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  After more than two months in Greece, the company moved to London, shooting interior scenes at MGM’s Elstree Studio. Mitchum was lodged in a suite at the Hotel Savoy and settled into a comfortable routine, returned to the city by five in the afternoon to host a daily “happy hour” in his rooms. Ken Annakin, a talented English writer and director (he’d entered the movie business during the war, after retiring from the RAF with a case of amnesia; his later credits included Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines), had a script he wanted to shoot, The Gold Lovers, and very much hoped to interest Mitchum in starring in it. “A great adventure story of a plane crashing in Ethiopia,” said Annakin. “Hidden gold in the desert, a story of greed, adventure, a love story. Three people with their eye on the gold, even in the most dangerous circumstances. I’d gotten the script to him—I think I had given it to his representative. And I was going up to talk to him about it when he was staying in the Savoy. And I saw that it was going to be difficult to have a talk about the film under these circumstances. The suite was filled with people. Everybody in London seemed to come there, especially the ladies. Lots of actresses from around London, and some of them were quite well known. There was drinking and a little of the other stuff—white stuff—passing around. The ladies were all over the room, and there was Mitchum overseeing it all. I can remember him sitting in a great armchair by the window with the Thames behind him and looking like he was the Sultan of Borneo holding court.

  “I tried talking with him but he was terribly busy with all of these social activities, and finally the only time I could attract his attention and be alone with him was when he went to the toilet. And so we went into the toilet and we start to discuss what I had come to talk to him about, and we talked before he was using it and gradually it got to where he was using it. But once I had his undivided attention there, he was right on the ball, he knew everything about the screenplay and what was involved. He was sharp, even if he was having a few drinks and a little of the other stuff. And I realized that underneath this freewheeling character was a very keen professional. And indeed he thought it was a wonderful story and thought we could make a great film. But he said he had to do this one and then the next one. And we had other meetings and talked about making it, but it just became one of those that slipped through the cracks. And eventually it became just a memory to me. But I would meet up with Mitchum years later at various functions, until his dying day, and he would always say, ‘Ken, that’s the picture we should have made. It would have been great.’ One of those ‘regret’ stories.”

  At Elstree, Robert Aldrich continued to struggle with The Angry Hills. His star had continued to be a disappointment. “I have seen Mr. Mitchum be too excellent too often to doubt for one minute that he is an extremely accomplished and gifted artist,” Aldrich said. “And since the performance that I was able to extract from Mitchum was neither sensitive nor accomplished nor in any regard gifted, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that my failure to connect with him is a liability that I alone, and not the actor, must assume.”

  The director put together what he hoped was at least a moderately coherent and exciting adventure story, clocking in at just under two hours. Producer Stross thanked him, showed him to the exit, and cut out thirty minutes. “He understood that Metro was buying film by the yard then, and Mitchum was reasonably hot. So they thought as long as it was an hour and a half with Mitchum and some Greek scenery it would work. Obviously, it didn’t.”

  The Wonderful Country was a magnificent novel by artist and writer Tom Lea. It was the story of Martin Brady, a pistolero, an assassin for a Mexican governor, caught between two worlds, Mexico and his homeland across the Rio Grande, a man whose sojourn in a Texas border town leads him to question his past life of violence and irresponsibility. It would be the source for one of Mitchum’s greatest and most underrated films (with The Purple Plain, one of director Robert Parrish’s two masterworks), a contemplative, melancholic, and lyrical Western, beautifully shot, with a richly romantic central performance, certainly the most poetic and tender of Mitchum’s assorted portrayals of alienated adventurers.

  Author Tom Lea had befriended then film editor Robert Parrish during the shooting of another Lea novel, The Brave Bulls. “He was a good friend, and I knew him all the time I was writing Wonderful Country,” he recalled. “And Parrish said I would love to make that as a movie, so we shook hands on it and we were gonna be kind of partners. We thought the perfect guy for the part would be Henry Fonda, but he wasn’t interested at all. And then we went to see Gregory Peck, and he had just married a very nice French girl and he wasn’t interested. And Bob had done a picture with Mitchum before, and Mitchum said he was interested. And Mitchum had a very sharp lawyer, and finally he took the whole thing over. And it might interest you to know that the only pay I ever got for the use of my novel was what I made acting a bit part in the movie. And I decided to make that my last experience with Hollywood. The hell with this! I thought. But I got to like Mitchum. And Bob Parrish was a fine man. I always thought he didn’t get to rise to the front ranks in Hollywood because he was just too nice a gent.”

  Lea wrote a screenplay that made the mistake of being reasonably like the novel he was adapting. United Artists wanted more scenes for leading lady Julie London. So Bob Parrish got another author friend of his, Robert Ardrey, to write a revised script. With DRM producing the picture, Mitchum took an active part in the casting, hiring old friends like Anthony Caruso, Charles McGraw, and “Bad Chuck” Roberson as his stunt double and stunt coordinator (Roberson would double just about every rider in the picture). Caruso: “Bob’s company was doing that one and he just threw me the script and said, ‘What part do you want? Pick one.’ So I read it and said, ‘I think I’d like to do that Mexican rancher.’ And Bob said, ‘You got it.’” Among the story’s unusual elements was the presence of an all-black cavalry regiment, and for the part of the regiment’s sergeant Mitchum suggested they hire the legendary black baseball player Leroy “Satchel” Paige. The fifty-something Paige was currently signed with the Miami Marlins but was at that moment doing time in a Florida jail. A judge agreed to release him to the production.

  The entire film would be made in Mexico—Mitchum’s fourth time working in that country—in and around the mining town of Durango. Durango had been attracting Hollywood Westerns for only a couple of years at this point. It was a real cowboy town, no frills, tough, could be dangerous, and people still rode horses because they had to. The roads were cobblestone or dirt trails and there was one hotel, the Mexico Courts, which leaned more than the Tower of Pisa and where the smell of backed-up toilets permeated the west wing. “It was a town, in those days,” said Anthony Caruso, “full of bars and hookers and that’s about it.”

  Mitchum arrived early, working with Parrish on various preproduction matters, then spent a couple of days in the courtyard of the motel, sipping tequila and greeting the members of the company as they straggled in from the States. Charles McGraw arrived, leaving his usual trail of anarchy behind him. Boarding the flight to Mexico City he’d managed to pick a fight with a sickly man breathing from an oxygen tank—a “Denver lunger” in McGraw’s sympathetic description. The actor arrived in Durango unconscious. Julie London came with her boyfriend (eventually, husband) “Route 66” songwriter Bobby Troupe. London got the prized corner suite with the large windows that gave relief from the choking stink when the toilets got too unbearable. “Satchel Paige got to Durango with a very beautiful young girl in tow, a teenager,” said Kathie Parrish. “People thought maybe it was his daughter.”

  “Who do we have here, Leroy?” said Mitchum.

  “This is my child’s baby-sitter,” said Paige.

  Mitchum paused a beat. “But your child’s not here.”

  Paige said, “How about that!”

  “He was a character, Satchel Paige,” said Mrs. Parrish. “He was cooler than Mitchum!”

  Tom Lea came down from El Paso, bringing along a vintage
sombrero his father had gotten from a Mexican during the revolution. “I used to carry that thing around for some reason,” said Lea. “Mitchum liked its history and decided to wear it in the film. But he always felt kind of funny in that big Mexican hat, and he was always trying to crease it and bring the wings forward so it looked more like a cowboy hat.”

  Lea was put back to work on the screenplay. Mitchum liked to confer with the writer about the man he was playing. “I would talk to Mitchum about the character, and he would ask questions. I told him that this was a man who had gone after his father’s killer and now he was trying to be like his father, and he was very interested in that. But he fell right into the part, and he was working on his Spanish-Mexican accent and he did quite a job. And I think he liked to try and identify with the character a bit. He had that black stallion he rode in the picture, and Mitchum would say, ‘That horse won’t let nobody ride him but me.’ And any kid stable hand could ride that horse he had. But I think he might have believed it when he said it.”

  Lea found himself unexpectedly working in front of the camera, too. “Bob Parrish wanted to get me some money out of the thing, and he said the only way he could do it was to put me in the picture. And I said all right. So I played the part of the town barber who gives Mitchum a bath and a shave. And a Mexican barber showed me what to do, how to hold the scissors. For the bathtub scene, the guy playing the doctor”—Charles McGraw—”wanted us to play a gag on Mitchum. I was supposed to throw a bucket of lukewarm water over him in the tub. And instead we got a bucket of water that was almost ice. Bob wasn’t wearing anything and I poured this ice water right on his balls. He screamed and the rest of us nearly died laughing. And he thought it was funny, too, after he got over the shock of it. Then it took many tries to get that scene right afterward because every time we’d start it again we’d all start breaking up thinking on Bob’s reaction.

  “The most amazing thing about Bob Mitchum was, he’d be up all night, doing God knows what, and at 5 A.M. the bus would load up to go to the location and he’d be on the bus, fresh as a ten-year-old girl.”

  The nightlife in Durango certainly took its toll on some bodies. Mitchum and Chuck Roberson were knocking back the tequilas in a cantina one weekend when a fiery argument broke out between two Mexicans. Mitchum tried to catch the gist of the contretemps with his limited Spanish and offered Roberson a halting translation. It seemed that one man had gotten another man’s sister pregnant, one man wanted the other man to marry the sister, and one man told the other man to go and stick his head up his sister’s ass.

  The tall hombre drew a pistol and shot the short man in the face and then ran out the door, but the short man with the bullet in his face ran after him. Mitchum and Roberson were remarking on the wonder of this when the short man staggered back into the bar.

  Roberson wrote: “There was a small hole in his forehead and a trickle of blood ran down between his eyes and to the end of his nose. He was glaring right at Mitch with the wild eyes of a wounded animal. Mitchum gasped at him and then the man’s eyes rolled back and he crashed to the floor.

  “I thought for a minute Mitch might have a heart attack. He yelled something in Spanish to the bartender, checked the man’s pulse, dropped the hand, and stood back horrified.

  “He’s dead. . . . Stone, cold dead.”

  Roberson couldn’t believe somebody could run so fast with a bullet through his skull, and the hombre wasn’t even a stuntman.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Mitchum.

  Roberson recommended they wait around for the police. Everyone knew who they were, and it wouldn’t look right just to take off into the night. Mitchum looked in a state of shock, according to Bad Chuck, and couldn’t take his eyes off the body. They gave their account to the police when they arrived, and then, said Roberson, “We high-tailed it back to the hotel and pretty much stuck around there from then on.”

  Another day, another adventure: Mitchum and Roberson obtained a bottle of homemade pulque from a peasant they met while riding along the river. After consuming the beerlike beverage made from cactus (Mitchum on pulque: “Drain the sap out of the cactus, let it be for a minute. Viscous. Limpid. Full of gnats. Ferments in the warmth of the stomach. Smells like baby vomit”), both experienced a horrifying hangover that kept even Mitchum in bed all day and an angry Parrish demanded everyone go on the wagon for the duration. Then food poisoning from a dinner of baked fish put the star—and numerous others—out of commission for three days, and Mitchum went back to drinking tequila with every meal and recommended it to everyone else, “for medicinal purposes.”

  “It was a beautiful picture,” said Kathie Parrish. “Mitchum was terribly good. But he let someone who worked for him take over the picture at the editing stage. She wanted to oversee the cutting of it and she just took it away, wouldn’t let Bob in the cutting room. And it wasn’t ruined but there were all the little things he would have done differently, the pacing, the style, made sharper. And there was nothing Bob could do about it. Mitchum understood what was happening; but you know, with Mitchum, when it came down to the wire of having a conflict, he would back away. And he wouldn’t fight for the picture. Bob—my husband—did an imitation of Mitchum that was just a gesture: putting his hands up. In other words, ‘What can I do?’

  “But he was an absolutely marvelous character. And Bob and Mitch were great together; they were terribly funny and had exactly the same sense of humor. And we stayed friends. And Mitchum came over to the house once after the picture, and he was trying to tell Bob that he liked the picture, that it had been a good experience and it was a good picture. And it was just so difficult for him. He could not say that he was grateful or that he loved you. It embarrassed him to show emotion, affection, even with Dottie. He could come on to girls and all that, but real emotion was difficult. He’d take a drink instead.”

  Tom Lea came out to visit Bob Parrish sometime after the movie had come and gone. “He decided to call up Mitchum and tell him I was in town, and Mitchum said, ‘Well, bring him out.’ And so we went to Bob’s house out in the canyon. I remember it had a screened porch and he had some big macaws he kept there and he was very fond of them. He had taught them to shout obscenities. And Mitchum said, ‘Well, we all got to celebrate.’ And he went into a closet and brought out a bottle of very old bourbon. It had a big green seal on it and it was from the year 1917.1 don’t know where he got that, but it was damn good bourbon, and we had a damn good time drinking it.”

  In April 1959, the Mitchums paid a little under $140,000 for a 280-acre property called Belmont Farms at Trappe, Maryland, on Chesapeake Bay. For some time they had mused about getting away from Hollywood. Even after nearly twenty years in Los Angeles, Dorothy still tended to think of herself as an Easterner, an outsider in Tinseltown, and Bob—an outsider everywhere—had a visceral contempt for what he called “Beverly Hills values.” Both thought the kids ought to get a chance to see what life was like in the real world (well, Chris and Trina; aspiring movie star Jim had decided that unreal Southern California was good enough for him). Making eight pictures in a row in nearly as many countries, Mitchum had proved that you no longer had to live in Burbank to be in the film business.

  “They were burned out on Los Angeles,” said Reva Frederick. “It’s a sprawling city, but it’s really a village. And I think Dorothy in particular may have longed to go back East—back home.”

  They had scoured the East for an appropriate place, starting in Delaware and working their way down. They had gotten as far as Maryland and were flapping around a town called Easton, Mitchum recalled.” I asked this real es-tater what the natives did in these parts. He said, ‘We don’t do nothing but go crabbing and drink.’ I knew he was telling the truth because right after he said that he fell on his ear. Man, was he stoned. I said, ‘This is it! We’ll dig in right here.’”

  It was seventy miles from the Baltimore airport, in Talbot County, a remote and lovely area of old colonial farms
, a few of them gone somewhat to seed since Independence Day. The main house was a three story, 110-year-old mansion, set back far from the road. The rear fronted the Choptank River with a mile of unbroken shoreline. To the nearest town, Easton, it was twelve miles by road, five minutes by boat, and from the house you could see approaching visitors on either side. “I could escape by land or sea,” Mitchum said dreamily.

  There were barns, stables. Most of the farmland was tilled by contract, by tenant farmers who planted and harvested barley, corn, oats, wheat, and rye (“all the fixin’s for making whisky,” said Bob) and kept chickens, horses, hogs, and white-faced Herefords. It was a working farm, not a weekend resort. Not that Mitchum himself planned on doing much in the way of work when he was there. He was an actor, not a gentleman farmer. When he looked around the sprawling place, he saw privacy, seclusion, his own waterfront, room to breathe and fresh air to go with it. He wanted to loaf, go fishing, maybe get back to writing. “If anyone were to come there to visit with me, fine—just going there would be the sign of true friendship,” he said. It was as far away from Hollywood as you could get and still be in the same country.

  They put the Mandeville place on the market and packed their bags. After more than two decades as a resident, he was kissing California good-bye. Came on a freight train, leaving a millionaire of global renown. Was he going to miss the Hollywood life? the columnists asked. “What Hollywood life?” Mitchum said. “I never traveled with the mob. I’ve only been to one movie star’s home, Kirk Douglas’s, and that was for all of ten minutes. All actors are freaks and I guess I’m a freak’s freak. If I walked into a restaurant here people held their breath—they just waited for me to walk up and sock someone.” In Maryland, he said, he was going to be just another citizen, trying to get through the day.