by Lee Server
“Working with Mitchum, though, was a dream. He had this facade he put out—’I don’t know anything; I don’t know what we’re shooting.’ But underneath, he was a man with great discipline. He knew everything. He was a genius! You talk about nuclear physics; he knew about that. Talk about the price of cattle; he could tell you. Nothing he didn’t know. Extraordinary.”
El Dorado was set to have its Spanish premiere during Mitchum’s time in Madrid. In conjunction with the opening, a one-week tribute to the star was arranged. This was something new. A Robert Mitchum Film Festival. It lasted a week, opening with G.I. Joe, followed by screenings of Night of the Hunter, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, The Enemy Below, The Sundowners, Two for the Seesaw, and climaxing with the El Dorado debut. The festival givers wanted Mitchum to attend all the screenings. He told them he had been successful in avoiding seeing most of those pictures up to now and did not intend to spoil his record.
On the locations, Mitchum was graciously permitted to do his dozing and bullshitting inside Yul Brynner’s one-of-a-kind, superdeluxe air-conditioned trailer, which Yul took with him wherever in the world he was filming. Mitchum and Brynner got along fine (it was third-billed Charles Bronson that Mitchum couldn’t stand). “Yul had great respect for Bob, and affection,” said the actor’s son, Rock, hanging out with his father that autumn in Spain. “Found him a wonderful, thoughtful man, very humble, and yet with great pride in his work because he felt that he had always delivered the honest goods.” Until the calming arrival of his wife and daughter, Mitchum and the two Brynners and a floating band of international revelers had an antic time among the bright lights of Madrid. “Bob enjoyed the Spanish red wine, and many other things he got his hands on,” said Buzz Kulik. “I don’t think he was ever a really bad boy with it, but he had his fun. There were always hangers-on trying to tempt him with something. People shoving women at him. Women—well, they didn’t need to be shoved. I remember at one point he had two girls with him; I think they were twins. As I heard it, he was having them both at the same time.”
Rock Brynner: “Identical twins. English girls, living in Madrid. One hung on each arm. Everyone called them ‘the Bookends.’”
He kept his other amusements within reach, too. Veteran character actor Marc Lawrence, working in Europe since the blacklist days, remembered calling on Mitchum during this Iberian sojourn. “I smoked shit with him at the Hilton in Madrid! Yeah. We were all in Spain, and Phil Yordan wanted me to go over and talk him into doing some picture. I go over to the hotel and he doesn’t listen to a word. ‘Fuck the business talk, man,’ he says. ‘Let’s smoke some weed.’ Got me all fucked up. I told Yordan, ‘Hey, I tried.’ He said, ‘What happened?’ I said, ‘I don’t remember!’”
“Bob was such a passive guy for the most part, and had that comic, laconic outlook on life,” said Rock Brynner. “One of the locations for Villa Rides was done just beside this huge open conduit for the city’s sewage. And Bob viewed it and made this observation. He said, ‘I wake up in the morning in my hotel, . . . take a dump, . . . come to work, and right in the middle of a scene I watch my dump go by. I find this very comforting.”
Villa Rides was noisy, colorful, violent, watchable, forgettable. Mitchum had done it all—and done it better—a dozen years before, in Bandido! Sam Peck-inpah, meanwhile, once dismissed, went on to make his own American-mercenaries-in-the-Mexican-Revolution movie: The Wild Bunch. He claimed to have reused many things he wrote originally for the Villa script. The character of Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch would have been not just exciting and perfect casting for Mitchum but a great and defining end-of-the-decade role. Peckinpah’s producers sent the script to him, but Robert opted for Five Card Stud instead—they were both Westerns, weren’t they?—and the part in the epochal Wild Bunch went to Bob’s old friend Bill Holden.
Five Card Stud was a production of Hal B. Wallis, the man who had supervised Little Caesar and Casablanca, still plugging away after a near half century in the business. It was an unofficial remake of one of the producer’s old pictures, a 1950 film noir called Dark City, readjusted to the 1890s frontier. A card cheat is lynched by his fellow poker players and then each man in turn is brutally murdered by a mysterious avenger. The hero part went to Dean Martin. Mitchum accepted a colorful but subsidiary role as Rev. Jonathan Rudd, a gunslinging preacher “elected by God and Mr. Colt.” The director was another Hollywood veteran, Henry White Witch Doctor Hathaway.
Filming got started in the spring of 1968. Hal Wallis didn’t know from these half-assed, runaway, shot-in-Spain, faux spaghetti Westerns. He made American Westerns, and he made them where you were supposed to make them—in Durango, Mexico.
The summit meeting (as Sinatra liked to call these things) of Mitchum and Martin, Hollywood’s two deities of indifference, produced no sparks, on or off the screen. Martin acted his part as if he had memorized the lines phonetically. He retired early, stayed in his room when he wasn’t working. Observers say it was a quiet, uneventful shoot, with the exception of a collapsing camera platform that nearly hammered Mitchum into the earth. Calmly, like Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, he stepped aside just far enough and in time for the thousands of pounds of metal and lumber to miss his head by inches.
Roddy McDowall, another Five Card Stud player, had been talking on the phone to his friend Liz Taylor. Her new picture, Secret Ceremony, shooting in England, needed a big name for a small part; and he suggested Mitchum. Robert was taking some R and R in Mazatlan, on the Pacific Coast, when a phone call from London reached him. It was Ceremony’s director, Joseph Losey, another old pal from the distant days at RKO. Losey talked him into this sort of guest star job, two weeks maximum, for $150,000. Could Bob handle an English accent all right? Like a jaded garage mechanic explaining a range of services, Mitchum listed the various regional British dialects he could offer. Losey said he wanted something that wouldn’t overshadow the ersatz accents of his two other American stars, Taylor and Mia Farrow. He told Mitchum to see if he could come up with an “indifferent” English accent. Mitchum said he didn’t think it would be a problem.
After being blacklisted in Hollywood, Losey had resettled in England, where he slowly established a reputation as a stylish and highbrowed auteur. Secret Ceremony was the latest of his series of opaque, architectonic films following a pattern set by his breakthrough hit, The Servant, and it was the second of his projects as the “house director” for the Burtons, Liz and/or Dick, then at their jet-setting, conspicuously consuming, bad-movie-making height. The film dealt with a wealthy, insane young woman’s enigmatic, disturbing relationship with a prostitute surrogate-mother figure and a stalking, incestuous stepfather. There were echoes of Night of the Hunter in Mitchum’s eventual characterization (as there had been, of course, in his Five Card part)—Albert, the leering, loathesome English professor, a kind of goateed, tweedy Preacher Powell for the Swinging ‘60s. The film was modernist esoterica light years away from his usual genre stuff but Mitchum typically adapted without a hair looking out of place.
Mitchum moved into the Dorchester, where the Burtons were already enthroned on most of one floor (their puppies, due to quarantine, were kept on a yacht on the Thames). Mitchum enjoyed Liz Taylor’s boisterous company, and their scenes together brought out the best of her performance in the mannered film. And he was entirely taken with the wispily beautiful, twenty-one-year-old Mia Farrow, dreamy flower-child daughter of his late drinking buddy and nemesis John Farrow and—though not for long—wife of his pal Frank Sinatra (whose hounding phone calls and cables were a source of aggravation during filming).
But Mitchum seemed to have nothing but disdain for the job at hand and something like outright hostility for his one-time friend Joseph Losey. “From the moment he arrived he was on the defensive,” the director revealed in an interview, “and he was very unpleasant. So it was extremely hard for me to work with him. . . . In some curious way I must have made some mistake with him; I don’t know what it was. But there was n
othing ever that he did with any pleasure.” Losey had been an associate of Charles Laughton’s and had greatly admired the remarkable collaboration between Laughton and Mitchum on The Night of the Hunter. But Losey’s attempt to spark a discussion of the subject with the actor was bluntly rejected. Mitchum was only sarcastic about Laughton, as he was about everything else. Losey thought Mitchum’s attitude was perhaps a defense mechanism, a cover “for intense embarrassment. . . intense sense of failure.” Losey was frustrated and haunted by Mitchum’s inexplicable rejection—they had been friends, had a real rapport once. Mitchum had been engaged by life, spirited. Now, twenty-five years later, there was only a contempt for everything. “He was an extremely secret man. And he was writing poetry, which I found very beautiful, very sensitive. But he’s an adamant, crazy, damned man, and there was no way of having any contact with him.” But for all that, the ugly feelings, the end of communication between them—and in some silly, selfish way making it feel all the worse—Losey didn’t know anyone who could have done a better job, with Mitchum’s exactly right quality of “sensual contemplation.” No British actor he knew of. Maybe Mastroianni could have done it, if he’d had the English, Losey mused pointlessly.
One morning Robert showed up on the doorstep of London residents Bob and Kathie Parrish. He had simply walked out on rehearsals at the art nouveau mansion in Kensington, drifted along the streets, and tracked down his old Wonderful Country friends. “We let him in, it was early in the morning,” said Mrs. Parrish. “He asked for some tequila. In memory of our days in Mexico. He loved the kind with the worm in the bottle! And Mitchum drank some tequila and told us he had snuck out on Losey and Liz Taylor and Mia. They didn’t even know he left. He said they were over there arguing over their motivation for the next scene. They needed to know what was the character’s grandmother’s maiden name. In other words, he was decrying that kind of acting. He drank some more tequila and then decided he better get going; they’d be looking for him. He said, ‘I’il go back and hit my mark.’”
They moved to Holland for a week of shooting at the seaside town of Noordwijk, scenes of Albert the stalker following the two women to a weekend getaway. Richard Burton came along. He recited poetry, got bombed, needled his wife—all very Virginia Woolf. Burton and Mitchum: one might have expected something to blossom there. The Welshman, too, had lost a parent in childhood, had tossed around with relatives, grown up in poverty, a roughneck youth but extremely intelligent, erudite. A secret scribbler. Public roisterer. Burton had once said, “One drinks because life is big and it blinds you. It’s grabbing at you from all directions all the time and you have to tone it down. Poetry and drink are the greatest things on earth.” But neither man seemed to have the energy or inclination to pursue a friendship. Burton, rather treacherously, as Losey’s disappointment with Mitchum grew, even quietly offered to do Robert’s role should the director get rid of the other actor.
There was an incident in the dining room of the Hotel Huis ter Duin one evening, Mitchum giving Mia Farrow an “all-consuming” kiss, according to a news report, and Mia so distracted that her dangling cigarette burned the suit of another diner. The man got to his feet and yelled at Mia, Mitchum took his plate of salad and threw it at the man, the man reached over for his own salad and tossed it, mostly splattering Mia, and waiters rushed in as Mitchum gathered up a fistful of sliced tomatoes and flung them into the air. Someone should have turned a camera on—the morose Secret Ceremony could have used a good food fight.
Mitchum’s contract stipulated such a brief availability, and Losey was so happy to be rid of him, that several of the actor’s scenes were dropped and some revised for Liz Taylor to do instead, including, Mitchum claimed, the film’s risque two-in-a-tub sequence, which he said was originally intended for him to do with Farrow. “They turned it into a lesbian scene,” he said. “And I’m just no good as a lesbian.”
There was one aftereffect of Mitchum’s brief participation in the film. The contracts had been drawn awaiting Mia Farrow’s return to Hollywood to play the lead opposite John Wayne in True Grit. It was to be directed by Henry Hathaway. “Hathaway? Oh no. He’s a screaming, bullying son of a bitch,” Mitchum told her. “Screams all day long. You’ll be miserable.” Wispy Mia promptly cabled Hal Wallis to say she wouldn’t work with Hathaway, to hire Roman Polanski instead. Wallis refused. She cabled back pulling out of the project. She would later say it was the biggest mistake of her career, and Mitchum would later pen an affectionate tribute to Hathaway for one of Roddy McDowall’s celebrity portrait books, ranking the director among those whose “seamless armor shielded a depth of feeling and sensitive appreciation.”
Whatever. Maybe he was thinking of some other guy.
. . .
They found a house in Bel Air, a modest—by Bel Air standards—ivy-covered four-bedroom place with a pool at 268 Saint Pierre Road. Mitchum was awarded the large den as his personal space. Here he put his stereo and a portion of his vast record collection, some books, a couple of photographs that amused him (an out-of-focus candid of him and Sinatra in a dressing room, Mitchum’s white thigh near the lens, distorted, looking like it was springing from his crotch; “I’ve seen some big cocks, but this is ridiculous . . . Love, Francis Albert”). Unlike many stars—he claimed good old Kirk Douglas’s den was the unofficial Kirk Douglas Museum—he neither displayed nor kept any memorabilia to advertise his career. “What am I going to do,” he would say, “hang up a poster from Hoppy Serves a Writ? Anzio? The cleaning lady would laugh at me.” His den was to be the pot-smoking headquarters—exclusively, by edict. The curtains and cushions in every room in the house weren’t going to smell of that stuff in this place. He hid a marijuana plant in the garden and cultivated it with the love and devotion of a mother toward an infant, and it grew to be strong—six feet tall!—and bear much fruit. When it was in full bloom he took Polaroids of it and kept them around and in his wallet, like baby pictures.
It was now being said that Mitchum, having carried his antiestablishment, outsider persona into the Age of Aquarius, had become “in,” a favorite with the teenage crowd. A survey of the nation’s campuses reported that Mitchum was becoming a cult icon, the screen’s new godfather of cool. He couldn’t understand it, Mitchum said. They must have missed his last ten pictures before they took the vote. Anyway, it had to be a short-lived ascendency. It seemed to Mitchum there were pretenders to that throne all over the place now. The underplaying, the deadpan macho schtick, the cynical hipster outsider stance were all the rage in 1968. Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, Bronson. Were they trying to crowd his act? Forget it, fellas. Just my luck I’ll be here till they set fire to my coffin. Anyway, if that was the competition . . . Steve McQueen? A McQueen performance, he believed, just naturally lent itself to monotony. Didn’t bring much brains to the party, that boy. Marvin was the fourth med student from the right, back in Not as a Stranger days, and now he was a star, thanks to Cat Ballou, a part Bob had turned down. Fun guy, Lee, he thought—and they call me a mean drunk. Eastwood Mitchum remembered from the ‘50s, the shy, good-looking young man used to work construction jobs with George Fargo; Gray Cloud used to bring Clint along to the tavern so he could meet a real live movie star. And Bronson? Oh . . . forget about it. None of ‘em was as popular as old Duke Wayne, and he weighed more than his horse these days and was working on one lung.
Speaking of young actors, Jim Mitchum was still trying to become a star. He was somewhere in Hollywood, but his father claimed not to hear from him for months at a time. The boy never came to him for his professional advice, he said, so he shared it with reporters instead: “I guess James is one of the ‘now’ generation. They’re sure they can do it, now. I said, ‘James . . . You’ve got to learn the trade first. Apply yourself.’”
And now there was another performer in the family. Chris Mitchum was at loose ends after graduating from the University of Arizona. His dream of becoming a professional writer remained just a dream. He and wif
e, Cindy, had two kids by this time, a daughter, Carrie, and a newborn son, Christopher Robert Mitchum. It had not been easy taking care of his family, but Chris did not like to go to his father for money. A point of pride, he said. Once, near Christmas, he had had to ask him for a hundred dollars and paid it back as soon as he could, to his father’s evident surprise. He looked for work in various professions, with varying results. Employers discriminated, he said. They heard you were the son of the big movie star, and they couldn’t believe you needed a paycheck. “My kids were starving and I was two months back on the house payments, and they wouldn’t give me a job because they thought I was loaded. . . . It almost forces you to become an actor because you can’t get a job doing anything else.”
Which sounded, after all, just like Papa Bob’s own rationale for remaining an actor.
Christopher made his screen debut with his father in Young Billy Young, his old man’s latest Western. He played the sheriff’s son in a flashback sequence. He fit in perfectly with a supporting cast that also included Dean Martin’s daughter Deana, John Carradine’s son David, and Robert Walker, Jr.
From a novel called Who Rides with Wyatt, about a purported friendship between Sheriff Earp of the title and boy outlaw Billy Clanton, the script by Burt Kennedy had originally been done for John Wayne. When the Duke decided against it, Kennedy wound up making it with producer Max Youngstein and Mitchum, who received a two-hundred-thousand-dollar salary plus 27 percent of the gross. Released in the time of The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Once Upon a Time in the West, Young Billy Young was a decidedly more traditional, modest enterprise (comely leading lady Angie Dickinson’s nude scene excepted). It was Mitchum’s least ambitious horse opera since the Zane Grey programmers at RKO. They shot it under the blue skies of Tucson, exteriors and all interiors, too, on a soundstage that subsequently burned down. Mitchum would sing the film’s theme song over the opening credits (the strange, nearly all-percussion score for the movie supplied by jazz musician Shelly Manne).
